Jay R. Ferguson: The "obviously gay" teen idol of the 1990s moves on to play a 1960s sleazoid and the dad of two gay sons. With Jay and Carter c*ocks

 

Link to the Jay and Carter c*ocks

In the early 1990s, I was living in West Hollywood, and completely immersed in the LGBT community.  Media from the Straight World was suspect, if not homophobic than heteronormative, presenting men and women gazing at each other as the meaning of life.  So we chose our television programs carefully. On Monday nights, it was Fresh Prince of Bel Air (Carleton, sigh!), Blossom (Joey Lawrence, sigh!), and Designing Women (drag queen inspiration Suzanne Sugarbaker).  Certainly not Evening Shade (1990-94), with Burt Reynolds as a football coach (ugh!) in a small town (ugh!) in Arkansas (ugh!).

So when this photo of a shirtless, partying young man began appearing on all of the gay celebrity websites, we had no idea who he was. 

The photos kept coming.  We discovered that he was Jay R. Ferguson, who played Taylor, son of Burt Reynolds' character Wood.  Wood?  Really?

 Generally he was swishing it up, as in this iconic photo: apparently saying "Hey, Girl!" in a classic twink outfit, a short top. a bare midriff, and jeans with a club bulge.  Obviously gay!  

In the days when television was entirely heterosexist or homophobic,when even the most flamboyant actor stayed in the closet or saw his career fade away, seeing "one of us" was amazing.  

Unfortunately, the only way to conduct research was to buy a teen magazine -- and the Different Light bookstore on Santa Monica did not stock Tiger Beat.  

The show ended, the photo stream ended, and we forgot about the obviously-gay Jay.  .

For thirty years.

Until 2025, when The Real O'Neils (2016-2018) appeared on Hulu:  a conservative Irish-Catholic family having to deal with a number of problems: Dad wants a divorce; the daughter is an atheist; the oldest son (Matthew Shively) has an eating disorder; the youngest son (Noah Galvin) is gay.  

Yeah, I don't like "gay" being portrayed as a problem, either, but I like Noah Galvin.

And the hunky dad is played by...Jay R. Ferguson!

Three questions:

1. What has he been doing in the years since Evening Shade?

2. Any n*de photos?

3. Is he really gay?

1. What has he been doing?

Jay's first project after Evening Shade was Higher Learning (1995), which is not a teen sex comedy: Omar Epps (left) stars as a student experiencing racism at Columbia University.  But Jay did show us his backside (whilewith a girl).

And an under-the-covers e*rection.

Next  Jay moved into teen horror (Campfire Tales, 1997),  sex comedy (Pink as the Day She Was Born, 1997), teen angst (Blue Ridge Falls, 1999), and dark secrets (The In Crowd, 2000), before finding his niche in television:

Glory Days (2001-02).  Oddly, it's not about soldiers, it stars Eddie Cahill as a writer who dished the dirt on residents of his home town, and is surprised when he returns to find that they don't like him.  Jay plays the sheriff.

Judging Amy (2003-4), which is not about a judge named Amy.  A woman has problems with her mother, husband, and child.  Jay plays a doctor.

In a 2005 episode of Medium, Allison realizes that her troubled half-brother Michael (Ryan Hurst) has a "secret."   One assumes that it's being gay, but it's actually that he shares her gift of seeing the future.  Jay plays his buddy.  That's as close to a gay character as he gets.

Surface (2005-2006):  Marine biologist Lake (Lake?): her "will they or won't they?" sparring partner, insurance salesman Rich (Jay), and a teenage boy (Carter Jenkins, left, recent photo) discover a "new and dangerous" species of marine life.  This one actually looks interesting.

By the way, Carter, who went on to star in Shadow Diaries, has an adult video (on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

Harold Monro: Lost Gay Poet

The 1960s was all about heroic fantasy; hippies were all agog over The Lord of the Rings and its precursors and imitators, especially those published in Lin Carter's Adult Fantasy Series: The King of Elfland's Daughter, The Boats of the Glen Carrig, The Wood Beyond the World.  Beyond the Fields We Know.

 But by the disco era, we preferred stories about big, bright spaceships hurling through the galaxy.  So when Elsewhere: Tales of Fantasy appeared in Adam's Bookstore in September 1981, the start of my senior year in college, I bought it for nostalgia only.

The illustrations by Terri Windling involved ample nudity, mostly female, but sometimes you could see the curve of a male backside or the hint of a penis.

The stories were usually heterosexist, but I found something evocative in "Overheard on a Salt Marsh."  It's about a goblin who begs a nymph for her beads.  She refuses.

Then I will howl all night in the reeds,
Lie in the mud and howl for them.

I kept thinking that there was something gay about it, but what?  It's a male goblin encountering a female nymph, complaining that the beads are "better than any man's fair daughter."

Is it his gender-atypical desire for the beads, green glass, stolen out of the moon?

Maybe it's the desire itself, desire with all of the trappings of civilization removed, raw, savage, and terrifying.

I could find out very little about the author, Harold Monro, in those days before the internet.  He was born in 1879, opened the Poetry Bookshop in London in 1912, and managed it for the rest of his life, except for a few years of service in World War I.  He married twice, was plagued by alcoholism and depression, and died in 1932.

But as I read his other poems, I found more hints of an openness to male beauty:

Man Carrying Bale:
And the same watchful sun glowed through his body feeding it with light.
The muscles will relax and tremble.
Earth, you designed your man beautiful both in labour and repose

And same sex desire:

 Children of Love, about Cupid and Jesus meeting:
And now they stand
Watching one another with timid gaze;
Youth has met youth in the wood,
Are you afraid of his arrows, O beautiful dreaming boy?

Then in 2001, a biography of Harold Monro appeared, and I discovered that my impressions were correct. Monro was gay, but closeted, and his earlier biographers either didn't know or didn't want to tell.  Like most gay lives of the past, his was hidden, requiring you to read between the lines.

See also: Golden Cities, Far: In junior high, we write a heroic fantasy novel with absolutely no connection to "The Lord of the Rings"

Manawyddan Son of the Boundless: a gay Theosophist writes about two gods in love

Peter MacNicol: Not a Teen Idol

Peter MacNicol was not related to Jimmy and Kristy McNichol -- notice the name is spelled differently -- but everyone thought he was.  In fact, everyone at Augustana College went to Dragonslayer in 1981 because they  mistakenly believed that Peter was the buffed 21-year old teen idol.

It wasn't good.  Derivative, heterosexist...and sword-and-sorcery heroes are supposed to be man-mountains, like Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Or Jimmy McNichol.  But Peter was skinny!

In Sophie's Choice (1982), he plays a young aspiring writer in the 1950s South, who inexplicably starts a romance with an elderly Jewish lady named Sophie (played by Meryl Streep).  She's a concentration camp survivor who had to make a terrible choice -- I'm not going to tell you what it was -- that renders her forever incapable of falling in love.

But we get to see Peter's physique and backside, and there's a gay subtext with the always flamboyant Kevin Kline.

A couple of dramas followed, which nobody saw, but might have some more gay subtexts -- with Burt Reynolds in Heat (1986) and Tim Guinee in American Blue Note (1989).

Remember in Ghostbusters (1984), Rich Moranis plays a nerd with a crush on Dana, who becomes possessed by the evil spirit?  Ghostbusters II (1989), which nobody saw, had precisely the same plot, with Peter as the nerd with a crush on Dana who's possessed by the evil spirit.

You probably saw him as the nerdy villain Gary Granger, summer camp manager who tried to force Wednesday and Pugsley into conformity in Addams Family Values (1993).

And as Renfield, snively servant of the wisecracking vampire in Mel Brooks' parody Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).

But he didn't really find his niche until he played John Cage, eccentric co-founder of Allie's law firm in Allie McBeal (1997-2002).  The program was generally heterosexist, and occasionally homophobic, but it did give John a gay-subtext friendship with his best bud Richard Fish (Greg Germann). 

He got into a bit of a controversery in 2001, when John romances a woman played by Anne Heche, who had just announced that she had "become" a lesbian.  Would audiences accept a hetero-romance played by a lesbian?

Apparently it wasn't a problem, and later Heche "turned back" to straight.

Since Allie McBeal, Peter has starred in Numb3rs, 24, and Grey's Anatomy, and done a lot of voice work, notably playing X the Eliminator, gay-vague fanboy and wannabe arch-nemesis of Harvey Birdman on Adult Swim.

See also: Jimmy McNichol and the Gay Coach

Yuchi Chiu: The n*ked man on Leighton's couch teaches special education, plays gay guys, likes p*nises. With three examples.

  

Link to the p*nises

We're watching Dark Matter (2024-26), starring Joel Edgerton as Jason, as a struggling physics teacher who is kidnapped and zapped into a parallel world -- by himself! The Parallel World Jason invented a device that can zap you between worlds. He wanted Our Jason's wife and kid (the show is aggressively heteronormative), so he decided to force a switch). 

In Episode 1.4, Imposter Jason visits Leighton (Dayo Okiniyi), who funded the device back home. Here he's a partyboy living on his grandpa's trust fund.  As they talk in his swanky apartment, a n*ked person gets up from the couch and walks toward the bedroom.

"That's a n*ked man!" I exclaimed.  "Leighton is gay!"

"No way -- this series is entirely heteronormative," my partner countered. "It must be a woman." But he rewound the sequence.

"Look -- short hair, no hips."  

"I'm not sure.  They're in the background, and the scene lasts for a second."

I had to agree that it was very subtle, easy to miss if you weren't looking for it, but still, a queer code.

The n*ked man is listed on the IMDB as Yuchi Chiu.

Who has a beautiful physique.

According to his resume, Yuchi was born and raised in L.A., but moved to Chicago for college.  After receiving a B.A. in Communication and Commercial Music from Northwestern in 2015, and a M.A. in Special Education from Dominion in 2017, he became a teacher.

This isn't good: in 2017 Yuchi goes to church to hear one of his special education students sing, and hears Christian rapper Chancer give his testimony.  Sounds like our boy is on the fundamentalist side, which usually means homophobic.

Chance the Rapper's p*nis is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends, in case you're interested.

While teaching, Yuchi starred in the short Audition: a down-and-out violinist (Amy Meek) gets with a conductor (Yuchi) to get a chair in his orchestra.

Rather a heteronormative start to your career, buddy. 

And BJ's Mobile Gift Shop: A young hustler (not that kind of hustler) makes the rounds in Chicago.

He also did some Calvin Klein modeling.

In 2022, Yuchi moved into full-time acting, with guest spots on Chicago Med and Stuck in Reality.

In 2023, the shorts Kairos, which seems to be about a father and daughter, and ba.la, about a competitive swimmer with PTSD.

In 2024, the shorts Parting Piece and The Coder, and N*ked Man on Dark Matter.

His backside, anyway.  His p*nis after the break