Peter Barton's Powers

When I met Peter Barton, he was guest starring in some tv shows, doing live theater, and calling his agent every day, trying to transition to a macho 1980s leading man.  But just a few years before, he had been a soft, androgynous teen idol.

Born in 1956, the former medical student started his acting career in 1979, as the teenage son on the short-lived sitcom Shirley!  Only 13 episodes were filmed, but that was enough for the teen magazines to adulate Peter as the Next Big Thing.  He was handsome, muscular but not a bodybuilder, and just androgynous enough to meet the gender-bending expectations of the era of Culture Club and ABBA.

Dozens of shirtless, speedo, and semi-nude shots followed, plus a starring role in Hell Night (1981) with Vincent Van Patten, in Leadfoot with Philip Mckeon, and in a movie-of-the-week, The First Time (1982).  Peter also appeared in a tight swimsuit in an episode of Battle of the Network Stars.  Many gay boys found in him a kindred spirit, gazing at his movies or swimsuit spreads and thinking "He's one of us."

Then his big break came: The Powers of Matthew Star, one of the many kid-friendly sci-fi series in the 1982-83 season (others included  Voyagers!, The Greatest American Hero, and Knight Rider).  Strangely, it aired just before the drag queen-friendly Madame's Place.

The plot was similar to Shazam!, which aired on Saturday mornings a few years before: teenager with superpowers lives with an older man.  In this case, Matthew, or E'Hawke (Peter Barton) was a prince from a planet orbiting Tau Ceti, hiding out on Earth from enemies who wanted him dead.  He went to Crestridge High School and lived with his guardian, Walter, or D'hai (Louis Gossett Jr.), who was working undercover as a science teacher.

I watched occasionally, but it was a little too "Saturday morning tv" to draw a big audience.  Besides, Matthew had a girlfriend, there was no homoerotic buddy-bonding, and there was not enough beefcake.  Most gay kids quickly changed the channel to The Dukes of Hazzard on CBS.  Powers was cancelled after only 22 episodes.

Peter's teen idol fame ended shortly thereafter, as more muscular actors like Willie Aames and Scott Baio rose to the limelight.

In 1988, he got his big break, a starring role on The Young and the Restless.  Other soaps followed, plus the detective series Burke's Law.

Today Peter lives in upstate New York with his daughter.  He has never married.

See also: My Celebrity Dates, Hookups, and Sausage Sightings

The Top 16 Hunks of "The Greenhouse"/"Greenhouse Academy"

Greenhouse Academy, now in its third season on Netflix,  is a reboot of The Greenhouse (Ha-Hamana, 2012-2016) is about a brother and a sister, children of a famous astronaut, who enroll in an exclusive private school with a secret.

The original series was Israeli, and Greenhouse Academy is still filmed in Israel, with lots of Israeli actors, and characters with Israeli names.  But it's set in the United States.  Cop-out!

I read that Alex (Finn Roberts, left) is the son of Carter and Ryan. Cool, two dads!  But it turns out that Ryan is a woman. Cop out #2!

No out gay characters in either of the two series.  Cop out #3!

Well, at least there's beefcake.

Other than The Secret, the drama is based on competition between the Eagles and the Ravens, rival sports teams/dorm groups (basically Slytherin and Griffindor).


Eagle/Slytherin boys:

1. -2. Alfie Reshef (Yadin Goldman), central character, who joins the Eagles to embrace the Dark Side, while his sister joins the Ravens.  In Academy, he becomes Alex (Finn Roberts, top photo)

3. -4.Daniel Goren (Daniel Litman, left), head Eagle, dating the principal's daughter. Sort of evil.  In Academy, he becomes Daniel Hayward (Chris O'Neill).  Fans were shipping him and Parker, but a ship is not good enough in 2019; where are the actual gay students?

5-6. Ron Ashkenazi  (Tamir Ginzberg), Daniel's bff.  Mean, aggressive, rude.  In Academy, he becomes Parker Grant (B. J. Mitchell, left).

Raven/Gryffindor boys:

7-8.  Iftach Har Lev (Lee B.), head Raven, "it's just a game" nice guy.  In Academy, he becomes soft, sensitive aspiring musician Leo Cruz (Dallas Hart, left), who is dating someone with the unlikely name of Aspen.

9-10. Mati Spivak (Lior Shabtay), computer nerd and mama's boy (see how the Ravens are open to all...um...types?).  In Academy, he becomes Max Miller (Benjamin Papac).
















Others:

11-12. Louis Klein (Raffi Tavor), head of the Greenhouse Academy, becomes Louis Osmond (Parker Stevenson).  In case you need reminding, the former Hardy Boy is famous for his super-sized penis, which he always carefully hid from view, lest he frighten the horses.

13-14. Robbie Klein (Asaf Kleinberger), his grown-up son, becomes Jason Osmond (Yiftach Mizrahi)

15-16. Guri (Daniel Reshef), the siblings' father, becomes Carter Woods (Ishai Golan).

So much beefcake in the two shows -- which will you stream?

"Assimilate": You Will Like Girls. Resistance is Futile

The promo for Assimilate (2019) shows two very cute guys making a web series about their horrible small town in Missouri because they need money to get out. 

Gay guys can relate.

The townspeople start acting strangely.  Sounds like a sort of Invasion of the Body Snatchers thing.  A little boy appears in a second story window.One of the boys says "We save Joey, then we save our parents, and then we get out!"

Could they be a gay couple?

It's worth a look.

First scene:  the guys are Zach (Joel Courtney, top photo) and Randy (Calum Worthy).  They  begin their web series.

They mention the captain of the football team, but not the girl he's with.

The priest of the local church (or a Protestant minister who wears a clerical collar) tells them about a production of Jesus Christ, Superstar.  "There will be girls!" he squeals in heterosexist glee.

"We're definitely not going to that!"  they agree.  Obviously not interested in girls.

They tell their friend Kayla  about their project, and she says "You can both get rich and date starlets."

They look at each other umcomfortably.

Gay guys in a town where everyone is pushing the "girls! girls! girls!" brainwashing all the time.  No wonder they want to escape.

Whoops. She leaves.  Randy tells Zack: "Dude, you have to ask her out."

Ok, so Zack is straight.  Their discomfort at the "girls! girls! girls!" rhetoric was just a tease.

But do they at least have a gay-subtext buddy bond, where they rescue each other from the horrors ahead, and walk off into the sunset together?

Fast forward to last scene. Zack and Kayla are saving the kid.  They have been the central pair all along, Randy having vanished as soon as his usefulness for the gay tease ended. 

Or maybe it's not a gay tease at all.  Maybe the pod people are a metaphor for heterosexist brainwashing, how gay boys are being pressured every moment of every day to like girls, talk about girls, desire girls, claim that girls are   the meaning of life. Resistance is futile.

10 Forgotten Musclemen of Movie Serials

Between 1936 and 1955, you didn't just go to a movie; you went to a whole evening's entertainment, with cartoons, newsreels, two features, and a serial -- a cliffhanging, 12-15 chapter adventure, Western, or science fiction series designed to fill the seats week after week as audiences wondered "How will the hero get out of this jam?"

Three main studios, Columbia, Republic, and Universal, churned out dozens of serials every year, so they needed lots of action heroes.  Some became famous later, in feature films and on tv, and others faded away quickly, but they all offered buddy-bonding and occasional glimpses of biceps and bulges.  Here are the top 10 musclemen of the movie serials:

1. Buster Crabbe may have died in 1983, but his fame -- and exceptional physique -- live on. He was a beefcake staple for 30 years, playing Tarzan and Tarzan clones (1933), cowboys Red Barry and Billy the Kid, and futuristic space heroes Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  Lots of scripts called for him to get his shirt ripped off.

2. Herman Brix competed in the Olympics as Bruce Bennett, then gave Buster Crabbe some competition with the serials The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935) and Tarzan and the Green Goddess (1938).  He also stripped down to play Kioga in Hawk of the Wilderness (1938).

3. Former college athlete Charles Starrett was best known for the Durango Kid series, but he also got torn out of his clothes in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), to be tortured and turned into a zombie (left).

4. Gordon Jones (left) died in 1963, so he isn't well known to the Boomer generation, but in his day he was a well known face and physique.  Catch his exposed biceps in an early version of The Green Hornet in the 1941 serial.

5. Kane Richmond played the adult mentor/boyfriend to teenage Frankie Darro in a series of 1930s "Thrill-o-Ramas," plus some Charlie Chan mysteries, Westerns, and beefcake-heavy boxing movies.   His main serial was the superheroic Spy Smasher (1942).  He retired to open a hair salon.

6. The rugged Tom Tyler had a long career in Westerns, but flexed his muscles as two comic superheroes brought to life in movie serials: The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941) and The Phanton (1943)

7. Gerald Mohr played a pulp detective named The Lone Wolf (1946, 1947) and narrated the first season of The Lone Ranger series on tv (1949-50). 

8. Speaking of The Lone Ranger, before Clayton Moore became identified with the Masked Man (1949-1957), he had a long career in movies and serials, mostly Westerns, naturally.

9. Kirk Alyn never disrobed on camera, but his muscular frame was displayed in a Superman costume in the only serials about the original superhero, Superman (1948) and Atom Man v. Superman (1950).

10. Jock Mahoney played a rather long-in-the-tooth Tarzan in Tarzan Goes to India (1962), but he also starred in some serials, such as Cody of the Pony Express (1950) and Roar of the Iron Horse (1951).  

"Another Life": 3 Shirtless Men and 3,300 Women in Bikinis

I've completely run out of tv programs to watch on Netflix, when I get an email: "We added a program you might like, Another Life."  

So I start watching.   Juliet from Lost, or someone who looks like her -- a middle-aged woman with scraggly blond hair -- is standing on the bridge of a spaceship, wearing black bikini underwear, talking to a fully-clothed man.

Definite sign of trouble.

Juliet (Kalee Sackhoff, who is only 39 but looks over 60) wears that bikini underwear a lot during the first episode; plus, we see Alyssa Milano, or someone who looks like her, reading a magazine with her breasts showing, talking to a fully-clothed guy who looks like Hurley from Lost.

Trouble with a capital T, which rhymes with B, which stands for Boobs.

I'm not going to watch this hetero male gaze monstrosity, but I'll fast forward in case a guy takes his shirt off, or -- dare I hope?  -- a gay character shows up.

Episode #1: Across the Universe.  Nope.  An alien artifact lands on Earth, and renowned elderly astronomer Juliet is assigned to go find its homeworld and make first contact.  She leaves her young trophy husband, Erik (Justin Chatwin, top photo) at home to research the artifact further.

By the way, the fully-clothed guy is actually a hologram, William (Samuel Anderson, left), who is in love with her, naturally.

Her crew consists of three or four black bikini underwear clad women, including Alyssa  and a butch blonde with a man's haircut.  Maybe a lesbian?

Hurley is actually Bernie (A. J. Rivera), the ship's chef and morale officer-type.

There are a couple of other guys in the background.

Episode #2: Through the Valley of Shadows.  Nope.  They wear space suits and walk around in tunnels on an alien planet that's not the right one.

Episode #3:  Nervous Breakdown.  Nope.  The ship is damaged, so they bicker, the  men fully clothed, the ladies in boobalicious black tank tops performing random calisthenics.

To alleviate the boredom, here's a photo of Alex Ozeroff, who plays crewman Oliver.  He has also appeared in the Canadian sci-fi series Freakish, about high school students dealing with radioactive mutants.  Not zombies?

Ok, back to the boobs.

Episode #4: Guilt Trip.   Finally!  One of the guys appears shirtless amid the ladies in black bikini underwear when they're roused in the middle of the night by Juliet's bad dreams.

I think he's Jake Abel, playing Sasha, the diplomatic liaison on the ship, whatever that is.

Episode #5: A Mind of Its Own.  Nope. They find a second artifact, with all the men in orange spacesuits and the women in boobalicious tank tops.  The men stay fully clothed even when having sex with boobalicious ladies.

Episode #6: I Think We're Alone Now.  Nope.  The ship is in trouble again, and there are women displaying their breasts.  I wonder why director Mairzee Almas thought it was a good idea to zoom in for closeups of breasts during moments of crisis.

By the way, Greg Hovanissian plays Beauchamp McCarry, Juliet's second-in-command who doesn't appear in many scenes, and never takes his shirt off. But he seems to have nice abs. You can see more of them in Cupid, a short about Cupid in a sleeveless vest and wings shooting love-arrows at people.

Episode #7: Living the Dream.  A shocking development! A guy has his shirt off (actually, he's completely naked) in a room full of space suits.  I think he's Erik, Juliet's husband who stayed back on Earth.

Episode #8: How the Light Gets Lost.

There's a disco party on the ship, with a lot more crew members than have ever appeared before dancing and hooking up.  Young, innocent, virginal Charlie Brown (I can't figure out which character he actually is) takes off his shirt while bumping foreheads with Alyssa.

Later, he stumbles on Alyssa and another guy drinking peach vodka (I can' figure out who he is, either, but he's sort of shirtless, bearded, with a hairy chest).  They have  a three way!  With same-sex kissing and everything! So there's at least a few bisexuals aboard.

But that's all you get.

Episode #9: Heart and Soul.  The battle for control of the ship comes to a head.  No nudity, boy or girl.

Episode #10: Hello.  They reach their destination and are "staggered" by what they see on the planet: a cave and a green limber-limbed alien.  They realize that the alien artifact is not a gesture of friendship, but a precursor to invasion and Season 2.  There's some kissing and death.  And boobs.

Aren't you glad I went through on fast-forward, so you won't have to?

See also: Lost

"Butcher's Block": Creepypasta Cannibals and a Naked Killer

Channel Zero spins a tv series out of a creepypasta (an online story that pretends to recount an urban legend, but has actually been invented by the author.  If it works, people will "remember" other examples, and a real urban legend will be born,).

For Butcher's Block, they took a very intriguing creepypasta about staircases in the woods.  Regular staircases, like someone grabbed one from your house and plopped it down in the wilderness.  A park ranger seems them so frequently that they seem ordinary, although he's afraid to approach or touch them.

From that intriguing opening, they spun off a crazy story about cannibalism.

Two girls in their twenties, Zoe and Alice, move to the city, both to get away from their crazy mother (who did something horrible one night) and to hide from their creditors (Dave from Collections keeps calling).



They rent a room in a creepy old house from Louise, a retired journalist whose hobby is taxidermy (because it's creepy, I guess). Alice gets a job as a social worker, Zoe sits around semi-lucid from schizophrenia medication. And the weirdness begins:

1. The Crazy Scissors Lady ("Do you have any scissors?  I need to cut off my bandages.") warns them to stay away from the run-down Butcher's Block neighborhood, where people always disappear.
2. Alice has to go to Butcher's Block for her job.  The first family she is assigned to help, a mother and daughter, disappear in the middle of the interview.  Alice tracks the Missing Girl to an overgrown park, where:
3. She sees a gigantic, ornate staircase.   A dwarfish creature climbs down and chases her with a knife.

Louise reveals more details about the park.  It used to be the private residence of the Peach Family, whose meat-packing business was the sole employer of Butcher's Block (get it?).  One night in the 1950s, the whole family vanished.  Rescue workers found something in the basement so horrifying that they burned the house to the ground.

Louise helpfully shows Alice a photo of the family on the eve of their disappearance: Patriarch Joseph; his elderly mother; the oldest son Robert (Andreas Apergis, left), whose wife is about to give birth; Aldous ("the bachelor," Louise says with disapproval -- hey, lady, you're not married, either); and some miscellaneous kids.

The photo comes in handy, as Peach Patriarch Joseph starts hanging around, asking Alice (or Zoe -- I can't tell them apart) if she believes in a higher power (turns out he was quite the fundamentalist in life).  He offers to cure them both of their schizophrenia with homemade lobotomies.

Meanwhile Robert, dancing around like the Riddler, tazes the Crazy Scissors Lady, so Officer Luke (Brandon Scott, left) arrests him.  While in lockup, he kills and eats his cellmate.

But the police chief, who happens to be Officer Luke's father, lets him go!  (Robert doesn't actually have any mind-control powers; Dad just made a deal with the Peaches).

When Robert kills someone else, Officer Luke has had enough, and shoots him.

Wait -- the Peaches aren't ghosts?  No, but they're not living in ordinary time, either.  They made a deal with their god (spoiler alert: not exactly a benign god) to allow them to live on in their summer house at the top of the staircase., whence they send the dwarfish creatures or Robert down to kidnap people to eat.

The two teenage daughters of the family were murdered before they moved to Summerland, so the Peaches are very interested in having Zoe and Alice join them as substitutes.  All they have to do is climb the staircase and eat some people.

All that from a staircase in the woods?

There are a lot of disgusting scenes involving bloody this or that, and a lot of boring scenes of heart-to-hearts between Alice and Zoe, made even more boring by the fact that you can't tell them apart.  They could be identical twins (after Zoe is "cured," she dresses in bright colors, which help a little.)  I fast-forwarded, looking for gay characters or beefcake.
.
Homophobia:  Officer Luke checks up on Robert in the lock-up and recoils in disgust.  Robert is reclining naked on the floor, giving his cellmate a blow job!  Wait -- no, he's pulling out his cellmate's intestines.  But for a moment you think Officer Luke is recoiling in disgust over a same-sex act.

Gay Characters:  Dad tells Officer Luke "You were always a sensitive boy."  And he never expresses any heterosexual interest, never mentions a wife or girlfriend.  The last scene shows a creepy family at dinner:  Officer Luke, Louise (the retired journalist), Izzy (the girl who disappeared), and Zoe or Alice (I can't tell them apart), but there's no indication that any of them are romantic partners.

Aldous Peach ("The Bachelor).  At least, Louise seems to think so.

Actually, no one expresses any heterosexual interest except for Alice's comic-relief coworker (Aaron Merke), who admits to being sweet on her.

Beefcake: Naked Joseph, if you don't mind the pool of blood.  A couple of cute guys, such as Dave from Collections (Adam Hurtig, top photo).

My grade: D.

See also: No-End House; Candle Cove

The Top 10 Hunks of "Stranger Things," Season 3, Plus Some of the Plot

The tv series Stranger Things, now in its third season, is an homage to 1980s Goonies movies, with monster-fighting kids in stereotypic small-town Indiana. I watched some of the first season, but couldn't figure out what was going on -- it was a mishmash of psychic powers, alternate worlds, missing children, and parents with histrionic backstories.

So I am starting Season 3, Episode 1 fresh,  mostly looking for gay characters and beefcake, but also trying, once again, to figure out the painfully interrelated characters and endless back stories in this monsterized Peyton Place.

Prelude: A top-secret underground lab in the old Soviet Union, where scientists are trying to break on through to the other side.  When they finally manage to blast a crack in the wall, something slithery and horrible comes out and kills them, then goes back in.  The experiment was a failure.  "You have one year!" Colonel Klink growls.

1. In stereotypic small-town Indiana, Sheriff Hopper (David Harbour, top photo) is annoyed about his daughter and another girl kissing.

A lesbian couple!  Score! When they pull back, I find that they're not lesbians after all, but it's still cool that they're so gender-atypical.  The more masculine one is the girl, El (Millie Bobby Brown), and the more feminine one is:

2. Mike (Finn Wolfhard).

Great name, although he looks less like a Wolf Hard than anyone I can imagine.

Sheriff Harper doesn't want his masculine daughter having sex with a feminine boy, or anyone, for that matter, so he asks advice of Joyce (Wynona Ryder), his old girlfriend, who runs a local drug store that has fallen on bad times since the opening of the mall.

Joyce suggests a heart-to-heart talk; but when the Sheriff tries the talk, the teens laugh at him, so he drags Mike out to his truck and threatens to kill him.

3. Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) is at the new mall with his girlfriend Max and another feminine boy, Will (who looks like Mike's brother but isn't).  Finally Mike and El show up, apologizing for being late -- the sex took longer than they expected.

They are sneaked into the movie Day of the Dead by:

4. Steve (Joe Keery), the ex-boyfriend of Nancy (Mike's older sister), who works at a horrible ice cream place in the mall.

Afterwards Steve tries to pick up every female customer in sight, but usually fails.  His coworker Robin is keeping a tally (spoiler alert: Robin turns out to be a lesbian.)

By the way, Nancy (Steve's ex, Mike's older sister) is now dating:

5. Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), the older  brother of the androgynous Will, who was waiting at the mall with Lucas and Max.

Both Jonathan and Will, by the way, are sons of Joyce, the ex-girlfriend of Sheriff Hopper who works at the drugstore downtown.

Jonathan sneaks Nancy (Mike's older sister) out of the bedroom, and she goes to work at a horrible job bringing hamburgers to the local newspaper staff and having them make fun of her ideas.

Turns out that Mom Joyce is aware of Jonathan's sexploits, and fully approves.  His heterosexuality established, she turns her attention to:

6. Will (Noah Schnapp). the androgynous boy who looks like Mike's brother but isn't.  "You'll meet a girl someday, yada yada yada."

 "I'm not gonna fall in love!" he exclaims.  So he's either asexual/ aromantic, or he means "with a girl," and he's gay.

Spoiler alert: later on, during a fight, Mike exclaims that Will doesn't like girls, and he gets all upset.  But he doesn't express any interest in boys or girls this season.  Maybe the writers are ok with lesbians but skittish about gay men.

After Joyce's "what girl do you like?" interrogation, Will meets up with his friends (El, Mike, Max, and Lucas), where they use El's magical powers to arrange a welcome-home surprise party for:






7. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), who has been away at summer camp. He got a girlfriend there, so instead of doing something fun, he insists that they all trek to a mountaintop to install a makeshift radio tower, so he can call her via short wave (what, no telephones in Utah?)

There's no answer.  They hang out all afternoon, abandoning him one by one, until he's all alone.  Then finally he gets a message -- but it's in Russian!

Call back to the first scene.  He's getting transmissions from the Soviet lab where they had "one year" to break through to wherever the slithery thing is from.

8. That night, Joyce, having rejected Sheriff Hopper's dinner invitation, is eating microwaved lasagna and peas and watching Cheers.  All of a sudden Sean Astin is sitting next to her, laughing at Cheers and asking whether  Sam and Diane (the "will they or won't they" couple) will ever get together.  Apparently this is a metaphor for Joyce, who has been rejecting Sheriff Hopper for quite some time.  But I have no idea what Sean Astin was doing there.

9. Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery), the older brother of Max (one of Mike's friends, the girl who is dating Caleb) works as a lifeguard, where lots of middle-aged women are lusting after him.

He tries to pick up Karen Wheeler, the mother of Nancy and Mike.  Initially she resists, probably due to his horrible 1980s double-entendre talk: "I could give you a...private lesson...I know some...moves...the breast stroke...."  But then she agrees. That night she gets dolled up, and leaves her husband and youngest child asleep on the couch to head out for her hookup.

On the way to the hookup, Billy hits something slithery that drags him into an old abandoned iron mill.  Call back to the Russian blasting experiment?

That's all for this episode, but see how nicely everyone is interconnected?

10. To get to 10, I had to go to Episode 2, where Grigori (Andrey Ivchenko) shows up, a Russian agent assigned to beat up Sheriff Hopper and otherwise cause mischief.

I don't think I'll be watching.

My grade: B for the gender-atypical and queer characters, D for the plot.

"Roswell, New Mexico": At Least the Gay Guys Kiss

The poster of the new tv series Roswell, New Mexico shows a man and a woman in a heterosexual embrace, and the promo shows four hetero lip-locks!

I'd be noping out of the room, but I heard that there was a gay male relationship, as rare as hen's teeth on tv, so I stuck it out, watching one episode and fast-forwarding through the rest, looking for gay romance.

The story involves three alien children who survived the spaceship crash at Roswell in 1947, were in stasis pods until 1997, and then emerged in the shape of human 7-year olds.  They had various traumatic experiences in high school (2004-2008), revealed in flashback:

1. Max (Nathan Parsons) killed a man who was attacking his sister.  The trio buried the body, and kept the awful secret.

2. Isobel (Lily Cowles) started a romance with Rosa, then for no apparent reason killed her and two other girls.  The trio made it it look like a car accident.

3. Michael (Michael Vlamis) started a romance with Alex (Tyler Blackburn), but Alex's homophobic father Jesse caught them together and attacked.  Jesse was not only homophobic but alienophobic, involved with a top-secret government alien-hunting project.

After high school the trio apparently just sat around for 10 years, waiting for the plot to start up again.

It starts when their high school classmate Liz Ortega (Jeanine Mason), a failed biochemist and Rosa's sister, returns to town.  She learns the truth about the aliens, and starts sniffing around about Rosa's death.

She starts dating Kyle (Michael Trevino), her high school boyfriend, who is investigating aliens on his own.

At that moment, Wyatt (Dylan McTee), whose sister died in the "crash" with Rosa, decides to start killing people, either in revenge or to keep them quiet about a secret of his own.

Oh, you're wondering about the three aliens:

1. Max, now the town deputy sheriff, starts dating his coworker Jenna.

2. Isobel is now "happily married" to Noah (Karam Oberoi), who unbeknownst to her, is also a survivor of the spaceship crash.  He lived for many years in Isobel's body (why she was dating Rosa -- it was all entirely heterosexual!).  Then he took over a male body (top photo).  Nice choice!

3. Michael, now a drifter, reunites with Alex, who discovers the truth and breaks up with him for his own protection.  Not dissuaded, Michael starts a relationship with Maria.  Then Alex returns and wants to be "friends."

Gulp.

 Well, maybe they will end up together in the next season.  If there is one.  The reviewers are panning the series for being derivative, convoluted, and silly, and for skimming over the interesting parallels:
Homophobia and alienophobia.
The government tracking down both spaceship aliens and undocumented aliens.

Beefcake: Not a lot.  Occasionally a guy will rip his shirt off.

Heterosexism:  Between two and four scenes of men and women kissing or having sex with each other per episode.  But at least Michael and Alex get a scene together in most episodes, too.

What's Gay About "The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle"?

Who wouldn't want to read a novel called The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle?  (Only 7 in the British edition; in America we rate a half more).

Especially when reviews call it Agatha Christie combined with (insert science fiction great here).

I've been binge-reading it on airplanes for the past few days.  I usually read faster, but in this case I often  have to read the same passage over several times, consult my list of characters, and cross-reference the various plot twists. But here's the basics:

In a bucolic Britain between the Wars, Lord and Lady Hardcastle hold a weekend party and their country estate, Blackheath.  Their young-teen daughter Evelyn is supposed to be watching her younger brother.  But she lets him go off by himself,  and groundskeeper Charlie Carver (who is the boy's biological father) and another person lure him to the lake and murder him. (That's not at all what happened).

Lord and Lady Hardcastle can't forgive Evelyn for "causing" her brother's murder, so they ship her off to Paris (That's not at all what happened, either).

19 years later, it's still a bucolic Britain between the Wars.  Blackheath has fallen into disrepair. The Hardcastles, nearly broke after years of being blackmailed for various misdeeds, invite everyone who was at the original party to return for a masquerade.  To find out who the second person was?  To celebrate Evelyn's forced engagement to an odious banker, which will solve their financial woes? To confront their blackmailers? (Actually Lord and Lady Hardcastle and Evelyn all have different motives).

The guests spend the day hunting, getting drunk, growling at each other, mistreating the servants, exchanging secret notes, going on clandestine meetings, tearing pages out of diaries, eavesdropping on secret plans, taking things from secret hiding places, being assaulted by mysterious assailants, and having dinner. It's like Agatha Christie on speed.   At 11:00 pm sharp, during the masquerade, Evelyn is murdered.  Or commits suicide.  Or both.  Aiden's job is to find out whodunnit.  

To make things more interesting, he must sleuth while reliving the day over and over, bouncing from body to body:

First he is the doctor who has a mysterious locked trunk and a Bible full of cryptic underlining.

Then he's the butler who has been mysteriously assaulted by the estate artist, and is under heavy sedation, but sees various people coming into his room and making cryptic remarks.

Then he's the odious banker who is engaged to Evelyn, and whose servant happens to be the illegitimate son of Lord Hardcastle, and has a hidden agenda of his own.

Next a shy socialite

And the police constable who is dating the shy socialite's sister.

Eight in all.

When Aiden is in a body, he is privy to few of his host's memories, so he has no special knowledge that will help him unravel clues.  But the host keeps trying to regain control.  The worst of all possible possessions.  

Did I mention that he's in all of these bodies at the same time?  So he can consult with his selves in other hosts, who are also working to solve the mystery.

If he is murdered or falls asleep, he returns to the butler.  If he goes through all eight hosts without finding out who is planning to murder Evelyn, everything resets, and he starts over.  Apparently he's done this thousands of times already.  

Other than the various hosts, Aiden's main ally is Anna, who is also reliving the day over and over (and who has a hidden agenda of her own).  

A mysterious man in a Plague Doctor costume occasionally pops in with a cryptic remark.

A mysterious man in a Footman uniform keeps hunting down the hosts and killing them

  (None of these people are what they seem).

This is all very complex, requiring a lot from the reader.  Eventually one wonders why.  The mystery is complicated enough as it is, with two illegitimate sons and a daughter, two dead boys, endless red herrings. and secrets that are never revealed.  Why have Aiden bouncing from body to body in what feels like a giant video game?

Gay characters:   The odious banker is gay.  We learn this through rumor and innuendo (but this is Britain between the Wars, so one can't expect Out and Proud).  Many of the male characters don't express any heterosexual interest.

Evelyn states that someone has abducted a "dear friend" name Felicity, and will harm her unless she commits suicide.  She's lying, but for a good portion of the book, we believe the Evelyn has a lesbian lover. And maybe she does, just not a kidnapped one.

Gay subtexts:  Aiden describes some of the male characters as "handsome." But his same-sex friendships almost always end in betrayal.

Heterosexism: Men are generally odious thugs, while women are generally good, kind, and nurturing.  Aiden bonds with Evelyn, and then with Anna.   A man and a woman walk off into the sunset together.

Beefcake: The odious banker is so bloated that he can barely move. Aiden mentions the physiques of some of his hosts, and the penis of one.

Bottom line: The book is not nearly gay enough.

By the way, the top photo is not what it seems.  It's another Stuart Turton.  Here's the one who wrote the book. He's heterosexual.