"In the Hand of Dante": Film noir about an original Dante manuscript, set in a 1950s-era 2001. And it gets more confusing. And homophobic.

 Link to the n*de dudes

I love the Divine Comedy, at least the Inferno, where Virgil guides Dante through the stages of hell.  He puts the sodomites in the Seventh Circle, where fire rains down on those who "do violence against nature," but at least it permitted me to mention LGBT people in an Italian class in the 1980s, when otherwise the rule was "Don't mention them, they don't exist."  

So I'm going to watch the new movie In the Hands of Dante, about the discovery of an original Divine Comedy manuscript.  Maybe there will be gay characters, probably not, but I'll still get to hear that beginning phrase again: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura (at the midpoint of life's journey, I found myself lost in a dark forest).

We've all been there.

Scene 1: Dante climbs a rocky cliff.  Meanwhile, sometime in the 1940s or 1950s, an obnoxious novelist (Oscar Isaacs) complains to his friend that his books can't be edited. "I'd rather the stableboy f*ck my wife than see my work edited." Heterosexual identity established immediately after his obnoxiousness.

Oscar Isaacs' backside is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

"So, what's your book about?"

"It's a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. I've been working on it for ten years." 

Friend squeezes his shoulder.  "You're still hot after ten years."  Wait -- are you flirting with him?

" By the way, who is Dante?"  Say what?  Who doesn't know Dante?

"An old dead guy.  But he got trapped in the cage of rhyme and meter.  I'm breaking out, so my translation will be far superior to the original."  The greatest work in Italian literature?  You planning to improve on "Hamlet" next?

Scene 2:  Newark, 1969.  A young boy enters a middle-class house and tells his Uncle, "I just killed some kid."  He explains that the boy (Gavin Weingarten) had a big knife, and asked if he wanted to die.  He tried to defend himself, they struggled, and he managed to stab Knife Boy.  

Since he doesn't know who the boy was, and no one saw them, Uncle says that he should forget about it.  But don't make "malarkey" a habit in the future.  Are you going to grow up to be Our Hero? But you're way too young. That would make the "I'm a better writer than Dante" conversation sometime in the 2000s, and it was obviously in the 1950s.  Maybe Uncle is Our Hero?

Scene 3: Bora Bora, seaside, 2001. Our Hero on a hammock, writing in his notebook about "creamy white gardenia blossoms" and "faded petroglyphs."  So you must be the Boy who killed someone, now middle aged, but it's a parallel world with the look and feel of the 1950s: no computers or cell phones, men wear hats and smoke constantly, writers use pencils. 

Our Hero tells us that the Nine Heavens of the Paradiso is a bad translation; It's really Nine Skies.  The last and rarest of them is the Sky of Illimitibleness.  Or you could say "Endless," if you weren't a pretentious jerk.

Cut to the Young Dante sitting under a tree, looking at the Illimitible Sky.  

Scene 4:  New York, 2001, "That time when the daylight sky was an oppressive, low-lying glare of white, and the dark of night was..."  So, summer.  Is this one of your stories, or really happening in-universe?    A greasy-haired guy named Louie (Gerard Butler, but blond and greasy) saunters into a closed bar and orders a Dewars and water.  He criticizes the bartender's moustache: "You see a guy with a moustache, he's either a cop or a (homophobic slur)."

I expected L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle, the love that moves the sun and the stars, and I'm getting Charles Bukowski, homophobia, and a parallel world where the 1950s never ended. 

"By the way, you ever take it up the *ss?" Louie asks.  "Might make a man out of you."  But then he calls him a c*cksucker.  Twice.  Are you homophobic or not, buddy?  

He criticizes the Bartender and his wife for being excessively ugly, and threatens his nine-year old daughter.

Next topic of conversation: the Bartender's Uncle, "a real fuckup," who opened the bar, but pissed his money away gambling.  Wait, is that the Uncle from 1969?  So the Bartender is Our Hero?  But he's supposed to be in Bora Bora, writing pretentious crap.  And the Uncle was elderly in 1969. No way he's alive in 2001.  

Unc owes the gang a lot of money, so his nephew the Bartender is going to provide it.  Louie takes tonight's proceeds, $1,200, then orders the Bartender to go downtown.  But he shoots him as soon as he gets on his knees.

What does this have to do with Dante?

Scene 4: Our Hero crying as he looks at the picture of a little girl.  Is this the Bartender's daughter, who was just threatened?

 He tells us that a young adult lady called him Nick, and then "Daddy."  So you were dating the Bartender's daughter -- but she was nine years old in 2001.  Have we jumped ahead to 2026?  Or is she a different person, and you were looking at a photo of the bartender's daughter to confuse viewers?  He kisses her goodbye as she is crying.  I'm crying, too, in  frustration over this nonsensical plot.

 Cut to the EMTs taking her body away. 

Cut to Our Hero, drunk and injured (a bloody bandage on his leg), climbing the rocks of Bora Bora.  He falls into the water, delighted: "I feel nothing of these open rocks."

More after the break.  Caution: It gets even more confusing, but there are d*cks

The Amazing Digital Circus: Gay, trans, ace, and nonbinary humans trapped in a sinister video game. With some voice artist d*cks

 

Link to the n*de dudes

The Amazing Digital Circus is an adult animated series where humans are zapped into a virtual reality pocket universe that looks like a 1990s circus-themed video game.  They forget their names and their human lives, except for a few random details.  Every day a crazy AI named Caine sends them out on "adventures," some frightening (explore a haunted mansion), some just soul-destroying (work a shift in a fast-food restaurant).  

Showrunner Gooseworx notes a debt to the Harlan Ellison story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,"where a sentient computer kills almost all humans, leaving a few alive to torture forever.  But here Caine does not intend to torture the "players," unless he gets angry: most of the time he is honestly trying to provide them with fun and excitement, but he has no idea what humans like. 

The result is terror, pain, and a lot of existential angst.  What are we doing here?  How can you find meaning when you are "just a sort of thing in a dream," or in this case a video game?  

When the angst becomes too great for the characters to maintain consciousness, lucidity, or body shape, they are "abstracted," reduced to a monstrous formation of eyes and spikes, and sent to the Cellar. 

The main players are:

Focus character Pomni, a court jester, a supermarket accountant in her old life. She tries to keep the others coherent while searching for an escape.

Pomni is voiced by Lizzie Freeman (cishet).

Jax, a tall, purple anthropomorphic bunny.  As a human, he was 22 years old, living with his abusive mother.  One day she insulted him for 40 minutes, then tried to hug him; he pushed her away and ran, and ended up at the Circus.  He is condescending, sarcastic, sometimes cruel, and claims to not care about anyone or anything -- except for his abstracted chum that the others are not supposed to ever mention.  Their human form came out as transgender and began using she/her pronouns.

Jax is voiced by Michael Kovach, left (ace, heteroromantic).  In the live action shows, he is played by actor/model Izatillo Ishonov (gay), top photo.

Ragatha, a Raggedy Ann doll with a missing eye.  In her human life, she had a wealthy farming family and an abusive mother.  She tries to be optimistic and friendly to everyone.

Ratha is voiced by Amanda Huffman (nonbinary).

Kinger, a chess piece with a purple robe and wobbly eyes.  A computer programmer in his old life, he was the first to enter the Circus, and is now unstable and prone to amnesia.  He spends most of his time hiding in a pillow fort.

Kinger is voiced by Sean Chiplock (cishet).  In the live shows, he is voiced by Ben Bishop (gay, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

Gangle, four red ribbons arranged in a humanoid form, with a tragedy or comedy mask (but the comedy keeps breaking). As a human, she was shift supervisor at a fast-food restaurant.  One night she was hit by a truck, and awoke in the Circus. She is timid and self-conscious.

Gangle is voiced by Marisa Lenti (agender, ace).

Zooble, a constantly changing assemblage of random parts resembling a ZoLo toy. As a human, they were a nonbinary tattoo artist, and worked at a LGBTQ-friendly bar.  They often rebel against the AI Caine, and refuse to go on adventures, causing him to send them to therapy (with Caine playing the psychiatrist).

Zooble is voiced by Ashley Nichols (nonbinary).

More after the break.  

80 Years of Archie Beefcake, Part 2: The Comics

Archie Andrews was introduced in Pep Comics 22 (December 1941), and practically invented the image of the American teenager, with countless thousands of comic book stories, plus cartoons, tv series, radio series, movies, and songs.  Preteens look to Archie for a glimpse of their future, and adults, for a nostalgic look at their past.  And gay boys can find in Archie Comics more shirtless and swimsuit-clad hunks than anywhere else on the comic rack.

Archie and his pals change year by year to keep up with contemporaryh fashions, slang, and pop culture, and so has the beefcake.  In swimsuit and locker-room shots, the guys  become more or less buffed, defined, depending on the interest of the comic artist and the changing expectations of masculine beauty.

1948.

Archie is thin, even underdeveloped, with little attention to realism in his arms and shoulders.  In the 1940s, svelte men like Cary Grant were iconic.

1959.

Archie and Jughead appear in the Dan Montana house style, with some indication of pecs and maybe a line down the stomach to indicate abs.

1973.

When I was reading Archie comics as a kid, there was a lot more attention to the detail of pecs, shoulders, and biceps, particularly in the "muscle bound" Big Moose.

1989

The guy's got a chest and well defined abs, in keeping with the muscleman craze defined by Schwarzenneger and Stallone.

More after the break

Ryan Buggle: The youngest LGBT character on tv, star of a gay play on Broadway. But is he gay/bi in real life? With Drayer and Meloni d*ck

  

Link to the n*de dudes

I've never seen any of the 586 episodes of Law and Order: SVU (1999-) , because who cares about the Crime of the Week?  So I had no idea that it was so soap-opera like. It took a lot of plot arcs to for Noah Porter-Benson (Ryan Buggle) to get around to coming out as the youngest LGBTQ character on tv. And a lot of trauma:

Bon in 2013, after Mom Elle is assaulted by trafficker Johnny Drake.

She keeps the baby while working for Little Tino, but when she overdoses, he sells little Noah to a p*rnographer couple.

After detective Olivia (Mariska Hartigay) arrests them and rescues Noah, he is placed in several abusive foster homes.

Mom Elle turns up and tries to get custody, but she is murdered.

Olivia decides to foster Noah, but when she pulls him out of the way of a speeding car, he is bruised, and CPS thinks that she is abusive.

He is kidnapped, nearly kidnapped, and hospitalized with life threatening diseases (twice).

His biological father shows up for a custody battle, and is murdered.  I'm looking at you, Olivia.

Finally, a queer code: In 2019, ADA Stone (Philip Winchester, left, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) decides that Noah needs a "father figure," and teaches him to play baseball.  

After a few episodes, he gets tired of baseball and says that he would rather take ballet lessons.  This was Ryan's idea.  He tells Dance Magazine: "Dancing is my favorite thing, so I wrote a script over the summer and gave it to the writers, and they were happy to do it."

Although Noah mentions his ballet lessons and his competitive dance team on occasion, and has a plotline where Olivia hangs up on him when he announces that he got the lead in The Nutcracker (not because she disapproves), it's mostly back to trauma, diseases, an unspecified "family emergency," vaping, and getting to know Olivia's estranged brother Simon (Michael Weston), who dies of an overdose. How many parental figures have died on you, buddy?

On January 11, 2022, Olivia finds Noah in his friend Hudson's house, wearing a dog collar, eating dog food, and barking on command.  At first he claims that it was just kids being kids, but then he admits that Hudson was making fun of a nonbinary friend, using homophobic slurs.  So he defended them, and told Hudson that he was bi: "There's no shame in being true to yourself."  The bully didn't respond well.

Olivia praises him for standing up to Hudson.  

He explains: "Well, it's my truth.  I just haven't told anybody before."

Olivia: "Well, thank you for telling me." And they go on with their day. (Yes, she comes down on the bully.)

The episode received nearly universal praise (excluding the usual homophobes), and got Ryan a dozen interviews in everything from Cliche Magazine to The Today Show.  He was twelve years old, but Noah was nine, thus becoming the youngest self-identified LGBTQ character on televsion..  The runner up is Jude on The Fosters, who says that he is "not into labels" at age twelve, and "gay" at age thirteen.

As far as I can tell, Noah's bi identity never comes up again.  He  bonds with his half-brother Connor (real-life buddy Tre Ryder), gets a potential father figure in Olivia's ex Stabler (Christopher Meloni, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends), and continues to suffer from soap opera traumas.  But there's always the future; Ryan hints that there are some "exciting plotlines ahead" for his character.

Ryan Buggle is now sixteen years old, with biceps.  I'm going to check the usual: any (other) LGBT roles?  Gay or bi in real life?    

More after the break