"The Front Runner," homophobia, and angst in the gay bookstore in Hell-fer-Sartain

When I was in college in the early 1980s, you couldn't do a keyword search for "gay fiction," and get 1,000 hits.  I sometimes found fiction with gay characters or gay themes by accident.  Death in Venice and Billy Budd were assigned by professors who didn't mention the gay content, and vociferously denied it when I asked. 

Left: The Death in Venice ballet.

A carefully-worded inquiry to my artistic, sophisticated friend Aaron led me to Samuel Delaney's Neveryon.  

Fred the Ministerial Student, my first boyfriend, told me about The City and the Pillar.

But usually I just scanned the shelves in the library stacks, looking for titles that evoked evil: A Thirsty Evil, The Young and the Evil 

Or loneliness: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Well of Loneliness.

Or the need to be somewhere else: Other Voices, Other Rooms, Another Country

It was easy, but rather depressing.  I wondered if this was what gay life was like: tawdry, empty, despairing, doomed?  

 

After receiving my M.A., I spent a horrible, soul-destroying year teaching Bonehead English in Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas.  There was a gay neighborhood in Houston, but it was 17 miles away, which meant two hours in the worst traffic I have ever seen, there and back, probably a flat tire from the endless construction. and guys who were so deeply closeted that they had a wife back home and wouldn't tell you their real name.

 

The one bright spot was the Wilde n Stein Bookstore on Westheimer. It sold honest to goodness gay books.  I couldn't afford many, but those few opened up a whole world of gay history and culture: 

Hidden from History

The Celluloid Closet

Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality

Byron and Greek Love

The fiction, not so much.  Sure, they had open, overt gay characters and contemporary settings, but:  Dancer from the Dance, The Beautiful Room is Empty, The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up, Dance on My Grave, Nocturnes for the King of Naples...

They still had key words about death, darkness, sadness, and evil, and they still painted gay life as tawdry, empty, and doomed.

The worst offender was The Front Runner, by Patricia Nell Warren. I bought the second edition, printed in 1978, with the beefcake drawing of a muscle daddy horrified by the idea of being gay as he gazed at a skinny blond twink.  

 I don't remember much about the plot, just a feeling of palpable disgust at four scenes that traumatized me for life.   

1. Muscle Daddy Harlan, fired from his job as athletic director at a major university, goes to work at a gay-friendly college in upstate New York founded by a guy who brags about how he and his lover fool the straights: the lover pretends to be a woman, dressing in drag and flaunting around.  "Have another cocktail -- darling!"  "Fooled them all the time."  Thhe partner wasn't transgender, or even a drag queen; he simply had to pretend to be a woman.  Two men together can never survive in the straight world. They must be male and female. Yuck.

More after the break

Baylen Bielitz: The kid version of the gay superhero Wiccan visits Oz and The Secret Garden, buddies with Jett Kyte, crushes on Spider-Man.

  

Link to the n*de dudes

I've been researching the actors who played Billy and Tommy, sons of the Scarlet Witch Wanda Maximoff in Marvel comics and tv shows.   They grow up to be superheroes Wiccan (gay) and Speed (bi), so did the casting agents make sure that the actors playing them were gay/bi, too?  

Teenagers: Joe Locke and Ruaridh Mollica (below).  Both gay.

Tweens: Julian Hillard and Jett Kyte (left). Both probably gay.

Kids: Baylen Bielitz (right) and Gavin Borders. 

(Ruaridh in action on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends)

I doubt that the casting agents were specifically looking for gay actors to play the preteen Billy and Tommy. They might not even be aware that LGBT kids exist.  But they if they were looking for resemblance to the older actors, they might ping on a gay vibe, or ask if Mom and Dad would object to their kid playing gay.  We'll start with Baylen Bielitz, five-year old Billy (the future Wiccan) on Wandavision.

Baylen was born in Southington, about 20 miles from Hartford, Connecticut, in May 2014.  He expressed an interest in acting and dancing when he was five years old, so his parents entered him into a local acting competition.  He won and got an agent, who started sending out video audition tapes (this was during the pandemic).  

 On his sixth birthday in May 2020, Baylen posts "It's my b-day, dance with me," noting that he always was inspired by Derek Hough.

Actor/dancer/choreographer Derek Hough, is straight, but he has played gay characters and fought for LGBT representation on Dancing with the Stars. He performed in the first male-male duo on the show, in December 2024.

A few days later, Bay got word that he had been cast as  Billy Maximoff.  Directly from kindergarten to the Marvel Cinematic Universe!  In the summer of 2020, he and his mom drove to Atlanta to film his scenes. 

I doubt that he knew the entire biography of Wiccan when he auditioned, but he does now.

Other on-screen roles came quickly.

2021:

He appears in The Gilmore Girls on stage and in several tv commercials.

Plus he gets to pose (or photoshop-pose) with Tom Holland's Spider-Man (n*de photo of Tom Holland on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

 2022:

He plays Younger Boy to Lucas Luchsinger's Older Boy in A Better Half (2022), a short about a man confronting his demons. 

Left: Lucas is now in college.  Most recently he starred in Antigone.

In an episode of Evil, about a team of Catholic exorcists, Bay and Robbie Crandall play brothers who are being bedeviled by a demon.  Or is it their mom, trying to push up the subscribers to her social media channel?  

The Noel Diary stars Justin Hartley as Jake Turner, a driven big city corporate type who returns to his small home town for Christmas and...well, it's the plot of every Christmas romcom ever.  Bay plays his younger brother in a flashback sequence.

More after the break. .

Deciphering the hyperbolic gush of "Seraphim," about black gay men falling in love and dying. With awful grammar, purple rain, and n*de dudes.

Link to the n*de dudes

The trailer of Seraphim: The Motion Picture (2024 or 2026) shows two African-American men, named Angel and Druid, so you think there will be paranormal content.  We see them knocking on each other's door, kissing, hugging, dancing, having s*x, displaying their bottoms, gazing into each other's eyes, singing while having s*x, and singing while having a b*ndage scene.  Then one is shot and killed by a snarling cop, and the other experiences grief.

So, gay life ends in tragedy.  A bit old-fashioned, marred by internalized homophobia, but totally comprehensible. But check out the plot synopsis: a labyrinth of obscure references and pretentious, hyperbolic, overpraising gush set amid the annoying overuse of all-caps and quotation marks. 

Let's go through it beat by beat. I'm fixing the ALLCAP and quotation mark mishegas. and the misuse of commas, for, everything.

" From the creators of the critically acclaimed, socially-conscious album Seraphim..."

Seraphim is a concert album with themes of racial injustice and homophobia, written, performed, and produced by Marck Angel.  I never heard of him, but according to his bio, he is an acclaimed actor, singer, dancer, songwriter, record producer, director, novelist, painter, architect, marine biologist, neurosurgeon, theologian, and Greek god, able to walk on water and leap tall buildings in a single bound. 

"...based on the award-winning short film Justice..."

There are many, many short films by that name: a girl seeks revenge for her sister's murder; a famous lawyer prepares for a case; a woman is accused of murder; the mind of a troubled young man in prison.

"...comes Seraphim: The Motion Picture , starring Pop/R&B sensation, Marck Angel ("Finding Me", "Christopher Street")..."

I figured that since Marck is the greatest everything in the world, his two songs would be going super-platinum and stay on the Billboard #1 list for 345 weeks, but I can't find them.

I found two songs named after Christopher Street, the heart of New York's gay village and the name of an influential gay magazine.  

The first is from Wonderful Town (1953), a musical about two sisters (variously played by Rosalind Russell, Carol Channing, Nancy Walker, and Brooke Shields), who move from Ohio to New York to pursue their dreams. One falls in love, and the other gets a newspaper reporter job.   There are gay subtexts throughout, including the irony of their tour of  Greenwich Village:

Here you see Christopher Street,
Typical spot in Greenwich Village.
Ain't it quaint?  Ain't it sweet? 
Pleasant and peaceful on Christopher Street

The second is called "Christopher Street," by Yarn (2014), a North Carolina based band that frequently plays at gay venues:

I hear the sound of the street shuffle all damn night
And I see the colors from the street lights
Oh and the queens they come walking this way
Lord I'm counting on better days

Sounds homophobic. 

More about Marck Angel.  The acclaimed actor has three other credits on the IMDB:

Cocktails (2014), about the owners of a gay club.

Finding Me (2013-15), a tv series about a gay black man trying to find himself.

Deckalogue: A Finding Me Story (2017).

Plus F*ckme, not listed on the IMDB, appears amid the 23 posters for Seraphim on Marck's Instagram.  Sorry, 28.  They just keep going. 

"...web-series heartthrob Donta Hensley (Honest Men, Davenport Diaries)..."

Honest Men is a 17-episode tv series about "honest conversations" between men, their sons, and "the boy next door."  There's also strangling, bedroom stuff, and a guy squeezing his pecs while his buddy is going downtown (example on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

Davenport Diaries is a 16-episode tv series with no plot synopsis, but it looks like a soap opera.

"....and up and coming stage/film prodigy Donnie E. Thomas (Love and Therapy)."

Donnie E. Thomas has no other screen credits.  There is no Love and Therapy movie or tv show, but there's a S*x, Love, & Therapy movie from 2014, starring Patrick Breul (n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) as a marriage counselor who promotes the benefits of falling in love before you fall into bed -- until he hires a s*x-crazy female assistant.

Whew, we made it through the first sentence.  More after the break.

"This Love Doesn't Have Long Beans." But does it have any d*cks? Thai BL with cooking and evil schemes. Plus Japanese and Himalayan dudes

Link to the n*de dudes

I 'm seeing more and more Thai BL series on Netflix.   I like the universe where everybody is gay or bi, and the settings are  sometimes interesting, but the multisyllabic names make research difficult. Try typing "Sailub Hemmawich Kwanamphaiphan" and "gay" into your search engine. And when you do, they never have n*de photos available; I have to make do with random n*de dudes.  I think this one is Japanese, not Thai.  But who can resist a show called This Love Doesn't have Long Beans?

I checked: Long beans, fak yao, are legumes, denser and less juicy than Western green beans, and they grow up to three feet long.  No proverb that I could find.  

Scene 1:  Influencer Prawan is reviewing the No Long Beans Basil House. He only reviews restaurants that specialize in basil stir fry, pad krapao.  This one is unique because they don't include long beans, a traditional ingredient in the dish.  

He praises the atmosphere, the plating, and the food, loudly, annoying the other customers, until Chef Oab, the "Hellfire Chef," asks him to leave.  Then he hates everything, insults Chef Oab, and tries to fight him.  Waiters hold him back.

"You think because you're a great chef, and incredibly handsome, that you can push people around! Well, I'll get even.  I'll leave a bad review, and none of my 13 followers will come to your restaurant."

Scene 2: Shirtless musclemen posing for the camera.  Influencer Prawan bursts in late, and then won't take off his shirt.  "It's a commercial for a weight loss clinic.  We asked for a model with a six pack." "Well..um...I can act."  The director kicks him out.

Next he gets a text from the electric company: he has to pay his bill today, or they're cutting off his power.  But he only has 99 baht (about $3.00) in his bank account.   What can he do?

How about ask his agent for a loan?  No way -- he got Prawan that modeling job, and he was kicked off the set for not being in shape.  "You promised that you'd be in model shape by the beginning of the year!  

Prawan begs for another chance.  His influencer career isn't working out -- no one is paying him to review restaurants.  Maybe if you expanded beyond pad krapao?   

"Just get me one more job."  

"No, you're hopeless."

Scene 3: Back home, Prawan is inundated by bills from creditors and disconnect notices. He goes to his friend JJ's house and announces that he's staying there.

"Only for one night.  After that, you go home."

"But my power's been cut off.  I can't go home."

"I've paid your electric bill."

"Oh...well, they've turned off the water, too..." Har-har.

Scene 3: Chef Oab reviewing a commercial for his restaurant.  First, as one of the celebrity judges on Kitchen Fire Thailand (logo in English), he screams that the pork is undercooked, and tastes awful. Cut to praising how he selects the ingredients for the world's best pad krapao.  Most important: no long beans. Shouldn't that be a matter of taste?  

He's not going to use the commercial.

"But why?  We can make any changes you want."

"Because I'm closing the restaurant.  I've lost my passion."  

"Is it because of your ex girlfriend?"   Cut to him and his girlfriend hugging, gazing at each other, tasting food, and opening their restaurant, with "no long beans" because she is allergic to them.  

"Yes, and also I need money.  I'll sell to the first person who meets my offer."

More after the break