"We Bury the Dead": Tasmanian zombies, oppressive heterosexism, and Brenton Thwaites' junk. What else do you need? Gay people? Tasmania?

 

This week's Movie Night movie was We Bury the Dead (2025), for some reason, I guess because there are zombies in it.  But the heteronormativity is so thick and heavy, you can actually feel it, like an oppressive fog.

Link to the n*de photos

The premise: An experimental weapon backfires, zapping the entire island of Tasmania just as everyone is sitting down to breakfast.  Every being with a brain dies instantly, 500,000 people plus all the cows, horses, pets, and birds.  

A few days later, hundreds of volunteers come in from Australia to help the army clear out the dead.  The men in line, such as David Genat (left), all tell the registration officer, "I need to find my wife," and women, "I need to find my husband!"  Sometimes they're looking for their kids, instead. 

Ava (Daisy Ridley) is looking for her husband: he was at a conference in Woodbridge, in the southern part of the island.  Unfortunately, she is assigned to a sector in the north, 200 miles away.

Scene after scene of breaking into homes, close ups of photos of smiling nuclear families, bodies of husbands, wives, and kids at the breakfast table, doing cozy family things, kids next to teddy bears.  Over and over and over.  It's smiling nuclear families everywhere.  I wanted to yell "Gay people exist!" 

Left: Gender-polarized pink and blue body bags.  

Ava is desperate to get to Woodbridge to see if her husband re-animated due to unfinished business.  A volunteer named Clay (Brenton Thwaites) offers to help her.

They steal a motorcycle and zoom through the restricted areas, past a lot of wrecked cars -- for some reason, the cars didn't crash when the drivers dropped dead, they just sort of stoppeed. 

   At the ruins of Hobart, smoke from the many fires is so thick that they have to find gas masks.  I guess a lot of people were cooking over open fires at the moment they died?   

Then they break into a diner -- it's only been a few days, so most of the food in the freezer is still good -- and have a heart-to-heart. 

Brenton Thwaites' backside is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

Ava: She can't get pregnant, which caused tension.  Then she had an affair, which caused more. Hubbie was thinking of divorce when he headed to the conference.

Clay: His girlfriend and child want nothing to do with him.  He thought that he could impress them with his patriotism by volunteering for the clean-up, but they told him to "f*k off."  

It is unclear why Clay is helping.  Maybe he wants to get with Ava, or maybe he's bonding with her due to their shared marital problems.

I forgot -- some of the dead come back as tooth-clicking zombies.  Mostly they just stare. Some attack (racism alert: most of the violent ones are black).  Some just have unfinished business, like a nuclear family father wants to bury his wife and kids before he finally crosses over. 

More after the break. 

Here the Whole Time: Brazilian "Heartstopper," with chub Felipe and athletic Caio trying to figure it out. Plus a hunky bully and dad

Quinze Dias (15 Days), or Here the Whole Time in English, is the Brazilian answer to Heartstopper.  The guys even met Kit and Joe when they visited London for the premier of Heartstopper Forever.

Chubby femme boy Felipe (Miguel Lallo) hasn't been in his apartment building's pool since he was bullied as a kid.  He's still being bullied by the same four guys, on the street and in class, so he's looking forward to a 15-day holiday, where he can stay in his room and imagine himself as the heroine in old movies.

Nope, not gonna happen. The next door neighbors are going out of town, so their son Caio (Diego Lira) must stay with Felipe and his mum.  They are homophobic -- "Miguel doesn't even try to hide it!" -- but there's no other option.

This is the worst!  Miguel tells his therapist that they used to be friends, until he stopped going to the pool.  Caio grew up to be...ugh...straight, and athletic.  He hangs out with jocks, plays soccer, and knows nothing about movie musicals.  How can he stand sharing his apartment with someone so crass for 15 whole days?

After an incident involving paint in the pool, Caio defends Miguel from the bullies (including João Pedro Chaseliov, top photo). At the community center, he is ok with taking dancing lessons -- and dancing with Caio.  He's even ok with watching a movie musical.

Maybe they could be friends after all.

When Caio invites him to a movie with his friend Beca -- "You'll love her!" -- Miguel imagines a wafer-thin supermodel girlfriend.  Surprise -- she's chubby, and a lesbian!  

Big reveal: Caio is gay!  "You didn't know?  Everybody knows."

"He can't be gay!" Miguel exclaims. "He's masculine!  He plays soccer!  He doesn't know who Lady Gaga is."

The therapist asks if Miguel is going to treat Caio differently, now that he knows that he's gay. 

"No...but...things are going to be awkward now."  Because athletic, masculine guys don't fall for chubby femme boys.  Miguel stalks Caio's social media, and finds that he has "liked" 30 boys, all of them athletic and masculine.

After another bully-rescue, the guys have a rooftop heart-to-heart.  Caio reveals that he not out to his parents because they're homophobic.  He wants to run away, find a gay mecca somewhere, maybe in São Paulo, but Miguel advises that you can't run away from your problems.

First kiss (actually second, third, and fourth kisses).

More after the break.  Caution: A bedroom scene.

Rick Gomez: What has Endless Mike of "Pete & Pete" been doing lately? Is Steve Zahn his boyfriend? Is he really endless? With Rick d*ck

Link to the n*de photos

Remember this?

Hey smiin' strange
You're lookin' happily deranged
Can you settle to shoot me?
Or have you picked your target yet

It's the theme to The Adventures of Pete and Pete (1991-95), the first of the Nickelodeon "adults are insane" teencoms.  Two brothers, both named Pete, negotiate the weirdness of the city of Wellsville, where no one is really well. 

A bowling ball has mystical powers.

A garage band vanishes overnight.

Little Pete accidentally erases baseball from existence.

I liked Rick Gomez as Endless Mike, who knows more about the town's weirdness than he lets on.  He sometimes bullies and humiliates Big Pete, and sometimes acts as his ally and protector. You might even find a gay subtext in their interaction.

No one ever explains why his name is Endless.  Maybe the teenage boy is a manifestation of a transdimensional being who exists beyond time and space as we perceive it.

Or maybe he's endless in the beneath the belt region (example on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

When Pete & Pete ended, I moved on to other things, and thought about Endless Mike rarely, if at all.  And the years passed.

Recently we started watching Silo (2023-), a dystopian science fiction series where 10,000 people, all of surviving humanity (that they know of) live in a huge underground helix.  They can't go outside, or ever open the single door, because the air is poisonous (or so they are told). 

And there in the cast list was Rick Gomez!

He plays Patrick Kennedy, a maintenance worker with a dead wife (of course) who sells strictly-forbidden relics from the Before Time.  He starts to suspect that they are being lied to (they are, sort of), and joins the Resistance. 

Right: Steve Zahn plays Solo, who survived a rebellion in his own silo, where everyone went outside and died.  They buddy bond in Season 3.

A few years have passed, but you can still see that insoucient, all-knowing smile.  

I wanted to check what Rick has been doing since 1995, whether he is actually gay in real life, and if he is really endless.

Searching for "Rick Gomez," "actor," and "n*de" yields a lot of photos of Rick kissing guys (top photo) and showing his backside (on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends), but it turns out to be a Google Images misdirection.  The gay/backside actor is Ricardo Gomez.

Our Rick starred in five tv series between Pete & Pete and Silo.

1. Hitz (1997), about workers at a record company (remember records?)

2. Band of Brothers (2001), about World War II soldiers. Rick plays George Luz, who does some buddy-bonding during the War, but then returns to Rhode Island for the married-with-children bit.

Not much of gay interest so far.

More after the break

Ben Lewis Doherty: Doc Martin's Plus One, a gay journalist, and the son of a gay gangster. All by age ten. With Smith and Pelphrey p*nis

 

Link to the n*de photos

 I've been watching Best Medicine (2026), about a curmudgeonly doctor in small-town Maine, where there are at least three gay characters: Greg and George, who run the only restaurant in town; and sarcastic high school student Liam.  But could there be four?  How about 10-year old Peter Cronk, played by Ben Lewis Doherty? 

Kids are usually presented as straight by default, to promote the myth that boys are born longing for feminine smiles, and "turn" gay as as teenagers or adults.  But you never know.

Peter appeared in eight episodes in Season 1, and displays queer codes in most:.  

Episode 5:  He wants to stay after class to help teacher Louisa, and the other kids make fun of him, thinking that he has a crush on her.  He denies it: he's actually interested in the astronomy presentation she's preparing. A denial of hetero interest.

Later he tries to "fit in" by putting a whole apple in his mouth, and can't get it back out again.  Doc Martin cuts it out, and tells him don't bother trying to fit in, just be yourself. The oral stuff and the "be yourself."

Episode 7: On Halloween, the townsfolk put on a haunted house called the Blood Factory.  Peter hates it: he gets so scared that he wets his bed.  Doc Martin suggests that he face his fears, so he dresses as a vampire. And bonds with a buddy.

Episode 8: Peter is rather swishy as he criticizes Elaine's true crime podcast. (Femme behavior).  

Afterwards, her cameraman Al (Carter Shimp, right) calls her his girlfriend, and she shoots him down: "We're frisky friends, that's all."  Hurt, he quits.

 "What's a frisky friend?" Peter asks.  Lack of awareness of hetero-romance terminology.

Episode 10: Trying to spend time with Doc Martin, Peter comes in every day with invented symptoms, and invites himself along on his birdwatching date with Louisa.  Are you looking for a father figure, or do you have a little crush on the Doc? 

Later, he complains of a stomach ache, but Doc Martin thinks he's faking -- until the pain spreads to his shoulder, and his spleen ruptures!  Tense scenes in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

Episode 12: Peter asks Doc Martin to come to his school presentation on Norway, since his mom works and his dad doesn't care about him. Doc Martin says he's too busy, but shows up anyway.  Peter is overjoyed, and hugs him.  More crush potential.

Episode 13: Peter is the ring bearer at the wedding of Greg and George. The teenagers attend the weddding, but he's the only child, suggesting a special affinity with the gay guys.

 At the reception, he sits at Doc Martin's table as if he's the Doc's Plus One.  

It's probably not canonical, but it's enough to check out the other work of the 11-year old actor.

Ben Lewis Doherty lives in Massachusetts, where he began modeling and acting at age six.  His first on-screen role was in the short Weighted (2020): Macauley (Hudson Koonce) longs for the times when he lifted weights with his dad, before MS took its toll, so he strives for one last bench press.  Ben plays the young Macauley, and the cast includes bodybuilders George Sandalakis (left), Ismail Bronson, and David Arquilla (top photo).

Nice company for your first acting role, kid.

Next Ben appeared in Haze (2024): Joe, a young journalist (Cole Dolman),  returns home after rehab, uncovers the secrets of the town's psychiatric center, and gets a boyfriend (Brian J. Smith, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).  Ben plays the young Joe.

A gay character, already!  Things are looking good for you, buddy.  Plus you're already buddying up to hot guys like Cameron Matheson.

More after the break.