A Haunting in Venice": A locked room mystery in a decaying palazzo, with some cute guys, some d*cks, and a drag queen

 

Link to the n*de dudes

A Haunting in Venice (2023), on Hulu, is supposedly based on Agatha Christie's 1969 novel The Halloween Party, but the only connections are some character names, a Halloween party, and Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh), the retired Belgian detective who uses his "little gray brain cells" to solve intricate murders.

Scene 1: Establishing shots of Venice, 1947, still recovering from the deprivation and death of World War II.  Gondoliers, nuns, soldiers crosing the Ponte dei Conzafelzi. people with their ration coupons picking up bread. 

 Poirot inspects his garden, then receives his pastries and eggs.  As a crowd of potential clients rush him. "Please, Poirot!"  His bodyguard, Vitale (Riccardo Scamarcio, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) decks an especially persistent one (Amir El-Masry, left and below), then throws him off the bridge.

While Poirot is at breakfast, Bodyguard Vitale announces a lady visitor, and presents an apple.  Poirot knows exactly who it is: his old friend and apple lover Agatha Christie...um, I mean Ariadne Oliver, the world's most popular mystery writer, with 27 out of her last 30 books bestsellers.  The last three were duds, so she needs something new, fresh, and exciting.  How about Joyce Reynolds, the famous psychic? Oliver can't figure out her tricks, so could Poirot use his little grey brain cells?  She'll be at a Halloween party tonight.

Scene 2: It's an orphans' Halloween party at the gloomy, labyrinthine  Palazzo de Lagrime de Giovani (the Tears of Youth).

First, a magic lantern show about how this very palazzo was once an orphanage, but when the plague came, the children were locked inside to starve.  They still haunt the place, and want to get revenge on doctors and nurses.  

Next it's time for games and snacks, and we meet more characters.  A creepy young boy would rather read than join the others.  He checks on his Dad (Jamie Dornan, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends), who is having an anxiety attack, and suggests that they leave.  No, they promised Rowena.

Rowena is the Hitchcockian blond movie star who owns the house.  Her Daughter Alicia  jumped from an upper window several years ago, and drowned.   She has been moping around ever since, but thought that hosting a children's party would lift her spirits. It hasn't.

Important detail: She's broke.  She wants to sell the palazzo, but because it's rundown and haunted, no one will buy it at any price.

More after the break

Shane Gray: Stunt performer, pole vaulter, boy scout, man's man, with a potential p*enis and some locker room hijinks

Link to the potential p*enis and locker room hijinks

I was running low on Righteous Gemstones cast members to profile, so I checked the stunt performers for Episode 4.1, and found Shane Gray.

He was fun to research because there are a lot of Shane Grays in the world -- an African musician, an Arkansas "husband and father," a baseball player, someone who is recently deceased and extensively mourned on Facebook,  plus the fictional Shane Gray of Camp Rock, played by Joe Jonas.

Our Shane Gray is a "Stunt Man, Stunt Rigger, Action Actor, Eagle Scout."  

He has a very brief Facebook page, some newspaper articles about his boy scouting and pole vaulting, and a Youtube Channel with some audition videos.  Here he auditions for the role of Monkey D. Luffy at the Universal Fan Fest 2025.

He attended Thousand Oaks High School, where he was a pole vaulter (on the right) and had an entry in the Westlake Village Student Art Show.  He graduated in 2022.

He works with his father,  Jason Gray, another "husband and father" who runs his own rigging company and has 200 stunt jobs listed on the IMDB. 

In-your-face heteronormativity?  That explains why I didn't profile Jason.  Plus he has no beefcake photos.  Shane does.

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The IMDB lists five stunt jobs for Shane.

He was a stunt rigger for the music video Die for You, by The Weekend (2021).

Fire safety in an episode of American Horror Story (2022): he gets set on fire.

Utility stunts in Fade to Black (upcoming), a horror movie starring John Carroll Lynch, Thomas Barbusca, Gavin Leatherwood, and Scott Evans.

Utility stunts in The Wolf and the Lamb (upcoming), a Western starring Zach McGowan (left), Eric Nelsen, Mike Manning, and Elias Kacavas

Stunt performer in The Righteous Gemstones Episode 4.1 (2025)

N*de photos after the break

Aidan Micho: Unexpected beefcake in "Minimum Wage" leads to comedian brothers, a pizza place upstate, b*ndage, and a 12-incher

  

Link to the n*de photos

Minimum Wage (2026) just dropped on Netflix, a mockumentary about quirky teenage employees at a pizza place in central New York.  The surprisingly hunky Randall Park (below) plays company CEO, who drops in to inform the the workers that he's planning to shut down their branch for under-performance, but changes his mind when they help restore his joie de vivre.  

 I was surprised that teenagers working part-time minimum wage jobs love the pizza place so much that they are devastated by the threat of closure.  Couldn't they get new jobs elsewhere?  And why doesn't the title have something t to do with pizza, to go along with premise: "Money doesn't buy happiness, but it buys pizza, which is almost the same thing."  Agreed.

No gay characters are immediately obvious; there are several mentions of girlfriends or the desire for girlfriends in the first episode.  But some of the guys are cute, such as  Randall Park, and Tommy Armstrong (on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) as an indie musician, and there's a shot of unexpected beefcake.

I love it when guys take their shirts off for no reason but to give viewers something to gawk at.

Here it was Aidan (Aidan Micho), pranked by his coworkers into thinking that if you spend ten minutes in the freezer, your p*nis will grow two inches. When he asks "How long?", they just make numbers up.  That's mean -- and dangerous -- but the reference to Aidan's junk is a plus.  And no one said he had to be shirtless.

Question #1: Is the character Aiden gay?  

He wears a bracelet and an ostentatious ring, and sometimes flashes a limp wrist. When the drama club visits, Aidan becomes defensive about his knowledge of classic musicals: "It's not weird."  Does he mean "It doesn't make me gay?"

He tries to find some adult performers for the female manager's birthday party, and approaches two EMT guys outside a club. "Fun, an EMT theme!  How much do you guys cost?"  "Free, depending on your insurance." 

"Great, my friend is gonna die.  Come to 605 Water Street in ten minutes."  

When he worries about losing his hair, he notes that both of his dads have full heads of hair. "My surrogate mother must be bald!"  Har-har.

They're not going to make a guy with gay dads gay himself. 

Oh, well, at least he takes off his shirt again when they buy a hot tub, and cuddles with Hyde Healy (top photo).

Sorry Hyde, you're short, but not attractive enough for a profile.

But Aidan? 

Question #2: Has Aidan played any gay characters elsewhere?

Filmmaker and comedian Aidan Micho has 120,000 followers on Instagram and 51,000  on Tiktok, with 1.1 million likes. He and his brother Ryan have 616,000 Youtube subscribers for their comedy shorts.

They grew up in Baldwin, New York --- upstate, about a 20 minute drive from Syracuse - graduated from high school in 2019 and 2021, and attended Syracuse University.

Most of Aidan's on-screen roles have ben walk ons:

Banana Split (2018), about two girls chasing the same boy.  Dylan Sprouse appears.Aidan plays Locker Student.

Dylan's d*ck is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends, in case you haven't seen it lately.

Miguel Wants to Fight (2023): Miguel (Tyler Dean Flores) is moving to the big city, where he'll have to fight, so he asks his three friends to help him prepare.  Aidan plays a Bully's Friend.

Prom Dates (2024): Two girls break up with their romantic partners just before the big prom.  Now they need new dates in a hurry!  I seem to recall hearing that one of girls is a lesbian. Aidan plays "Cargo Shorts Bro"

More after the break

My 16 favorite Gemstone d*cks, displayed on the show or off

The Righteous Gemstones was unique in its enthusiastic portrayal of men's frontsides, in nearly every episode. Plus a number of the actors who didn't get a chance to show their stuff on the show have obligingly posted pictures on the internet.  Here are my favorites, some huge, some not, but all a pleasure to watch.

Link to the uncensored list

1. Stephen Schneider (left) as Stephen had an affair with Judy Gemstone in Season 3.  Her husband BJ burst into his house, and fought him to reclaim his manhood. The actor was offered a prosthetic, but he wanted to perform with au naturel.  I can see why.

2. Blair Jackson played the boyfriend of Dot Nancy, whom Kelvin Gemstone is trying to draw away from Satan, in Season 1.  Off-camera, he has shown us his stuff.

3. Walton Goggins.  In our first view of the elderly grifter Baby Billy, he stands up in his bathtub to reveal superheroic proportions.  It re-appeared so often in Season 4 that even gay male viewers got tired of it.

4. Stephen Dorf,  who played the nasty, homophobic, and probably gay megachurch pastor Vance Simkins, goes big in a movie from 2005.. 

5. Jak Kriskowski appeared in a scene where Pontius enrolls in military school.  His scene was cut, but Jak joined the army in real life, and has given us a peek..

6, Kelton Dumont, as wild child Pontius Gemstone, was caught with girlfriend and jumped up and tried to hide it. After a lot of photo manipulation, you still can't see much, but I found a few other possibilities.

7. Adam Devine: To our disappointment, Kelvin Gemstone showed his backside quite often, but never his front. Probably because the dude is canonically small, and the actor is obviously not. We've seen it several times in his movies.

8. Cullen Moss as the security guard hot for Gideon's boyfriend Scotty.  He is on display in a 2021 movie.

More after the break.