Aidan Micho: Unexpected beefcake in "Minimum Wage" leads to comedian brothers, a pizza place upstate, bondage, 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 musican, and there's a shot of unexpected beefcake.

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.

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

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 at 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.  

Aidan Close: Draco Malfoy's son strips down for his senior thesis, plays an incel and a Civil War soldier, wears a butterfly dress

  

Link to the n*de photos

What is Aidan Close wearing?  A Kermit the Frog outfit that's too big, and sliding off him?

Don't you hate it when butterflies eat the back of your dress?

He wore the butterfly dress for the gala performance of  Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway, where he plays Scorpius Malfoy, Draco Malfoy's son.  Emmet Smith, below, plays Albus Potter, Harry's son.

Adrian:  "I'm so happy the Sorting Hat brought us together."  

Question #1: Are they dating?

Probably not.  Neither post many off-stage photos together. 

Question #2: Are they dating in the play?

A review says that their relationship is "intimate, sweet, and safe," but is it a friendship or a romance?

They are good buddies in the original two-part, multiple-hour play, which sends the two Hogwarts boys on a time-travel adventure: Each gets a girlfriend. It's Harry Potter, you can't say the g-word or the t-word.

But in the paired-down, 3 1/2 hour version more often produced, the girls are platonic pals, and the relationship becomes more or less gay-coded, depending on the director's staging.  

Left: A hug.  They may be a different Albus and Scorpious.  

Left: Anthony Boyle, a previous Albus Potter, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

Question #3: Any gay characters?

His theatrical credits include:

Much Ado About Nothing.  There's more or less gay subtext.

Incels and Other Myths, performed at the New York Theater Festival (2023): A teenage boy (Aidan) into online gaming gets pulled into the misogynistic incel subculture. 

More after the break

Earthfasts: Modern day Yorkshire boy and 18th century soldier fall in love. Plus a n*de model, a soap opera teen, Joe Orton, and Doctor Who

I remember reading William Mayne’s Earthfasts (1966) on a summer day in the mid-1970s, sitting a lawnchair in the back yard, the air thick and heavy with the scent of lilacs from our backyard bush, while my brother kept rushing in and out and asking “is that all you’re going to do all summer?” But I couldn’t put the book down.

David (the blond) and Keith, two teenagers in Yorkshire, northern England, are investigating a tapping sound in an old tumulus, when suddenly a boy emerges, costumed as an 18th century redcoat, carrying a candle and a drum. He is Nellie Jack John, a drummer boy in King George’s army, and he entered the tumulus to look for buried treasure “an hour ago,” in 1742!  

I especially remember a scene where they have breakfast: he won't eat Corn Flakes, which he calls "wood chips."

Eventually Nellie Jack John realizes that he has become lost in time, but he reasons that the tumulus might send him home. David, however, is obsessed with keeping the boy in the twentieth century: he grabs him, tries to hug him, tries to talk him into staying. But Nellie Jack John shakes him off, rushes back to the tumulus, and vanishes.

David is disconsolate. He spends hours staring at the candle Nellie Jack John left behind (which burns but doesn’t go out), and says “It’s as if the world has vanished, not the boy. . .nothing in the world is quite touching me."  

Meanwhile, weird things are happening: the earthfasts (standing stones) move by themselves; giants roam the countryside; ghostly soldiers attack passersby. Keith and David theorize that instead of returning to his own time, Nellie Jack “jammed” the time flow so that the past is intermingling with the present. They return to the tumulus to effect a rescue, but this time David vanishes!

Later Keith finds a way to enter the tumulus, find his two friends, and rescue them both from the jammed time stream. Back in 20th century England, Nellie Jack John finally understands that he can never go home. He becomes hysterical with fear and loss and tries to run away several times, but each time David grabs him and holds him tightly like a lover. Eventually he calms down and allows himself to be held. His new situation can’t be helped, after all, and the future might be rather fun. He agrees to go home with David.

There's a remarkably intimate scene near the end of the book (not in the miniseries) where David puts the Nellie Jack John into a hot bath, admires his naked body, and begins scrubbing his back.

I was mesmerized by David’s passion for Nellie Jack John. It begins as suddenly and mysteriously as love at first sight, a passion too profound for words, and compels David to risk everything for a boy he only just met. Nellie Jack John at first wants nothing to do with David, for he represents the loss of his entire world; but finally he acquiesces, allowing himself to be touched, held, and loved.  It was a remarkable evocation of a gay romance.

The Earthfasts tv series (1994) starred Paul Nichols, left, as David.  He moved on to play a troubled teen in the longrunning soap East Enders, then had starring roles in a lot of tv series, including City Central, A Thing Called Love, Harley Street, The Fear, and CSI: UK. 

More after the break