Deli Boys, Episode 2.1: The guys are back, with more wacky drug deals, Andrew Rannells as a squeaky-clean gay DA, and Pakistani d*cks

  

Link to the n*de dudes

The second season of Deli Boys just dropped on Hulu.  I reviewed an episode of the first season, and gave it a B: not enough beefcake, but some gay characters, including Brian George, whom men of a certain age remember as Babu on Seinfeld, as the season's Big Bad.

The Premise: After their father is murdered, Pakistani-American brothers, the hardworking Mir (Asif Ali) and the screw-up Raj (Saagar Shaikh), inherit his deli and DarCo, a company that produces and sells achar (a pickle relish).   Soon they discover that they are actually transporting cocaine to drug dealers in the West Philly market.   Two of Dad's consiglieres, Aunt Lucky and Ahmad (Brian George), show them the ropes of their new business -- until Ahmad, betrays them in a ploy to gain control.  Oh, and he's the one who murdered their Dad.

Scene 1:  DarCo is now the Number #1 cocaine distributor in Philly, grossing $2 million per quarter, but with fame comes notoriety: Every criminal is trying to "jack their sh*t"  So the guys and Aunt Lucky go to Max Sugar's casino to ask for his help in laundering their drug money.

Max (Fred Armisen) resists the idea... whoops, he catches someone cheating with weighted dice, so he goes down to the floor and forces the guy to eat them.  Dude is dangerous!

Back to business: he is extremely attracted to Aunt Lucky, and agrees to discuss the matter further, over dinner tonight.

Left: Not Fred Armisen.

Scene 2: DA Andrew Chadwater (gay actor Andrew Rannells) is running for mayor on a platform of cracking down on "dealers, sickos, and crooks," with the campaign slogan "Say 'heck, no' to drugs."  Sounds like Nancy Regan's "Just Say No" campaign in the 1980s. 

At headquarters, he gets the intel on the latest fad, where you mix cocaine with ices.  His assistant points out that his ex-husband was a cocaine addict, so he has a personal stake in the issue.

"We're not talking about Craig" Chadwater exclaims.  "Did he call?"

"No."

More after the break

Azriel Dalman: Young Percy Jackson, Mr. Martin, and Garrett Graham celebrates Pride, tells gay kids "It gets better." With n*de costars

Link to the n*de costars

In August 2024, 10 year old actor/model Azriel Dalman posted a photo wearing a Pride shirt on his social media.  A fan wrote that he shouldn't post anything "political" or "controversial," or people wouldn't want him in their projects.  He responded with a photo standing beneath a giant Pride flag, and wrote that if you think supporting LGBTQ people is political or controversial, he doesn't want to be in your project. 

 He (or his Mom) continued, thanking Disney and Hallmark for producing inclusive shows, and telling queer kids "You matter!" and "Things will get better!"

Being pro-gay hasn't hurt the career of the Vancouver boy.  Born in December 2013, he already has 57 on-screen acting credits, plus modeling and theater.  I'm not going to go through all of them looking for gay content, just the ones that stand out.

2021:

Foragers, the pilot for a post-Apocalyptic tv series.  Azi plays the child version of Malakai (gay actor Kaden Connors, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).  No information on whether his character is gay.

2022:

Moonfall: Aliens knock the moon out of orbit!  Azi plays the child version of Sonny (Charlie Plummer), the gay-coded teenage son of the focus astronaut. 

2023:

In Percy Jackson and the Olympians, on the Disney Channel (2023-24), demigod Percy (Walker Scobell, left), modern-day son of the God Poseidon, fights monsters and tries to prevent a war among the gods, with the help of his Camp Halfblood buddies.  He's straight, but there are LGBT characters throughout, including Nico, son of Hades, who has a crush on Percy, and the god Ganymede.

I have an idea that Walker Scobell is gay, but a brief internet search doesn't reveal anything.  

Azi plays Young Percy. Fun fact: he has brown eyes, but when he auditioned, he wore blue contact lenses to look more like Scobell.  His resume now states that he can put the lenses in and take them out "all by himself."  

2024:

Azi stars in Miracle on 34th Street at the Arts Club.

And appears in an episode of Shogun, starring Cosmo Jarvis  (n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) as a British sailor shipwrecked in Tokugawa Japan. He plays the grandson in a fantasy sequence.  

He models an androgynous outfit at the International Kids Runway.  A fan writes: "things got better."  Did he lose a job because of his commitment to LGBTQ rights?.

He appears in three episodes of Holidazed, about families interacting on a cul-de-sac at Christmastime. In one family, Ted (Osric Chau, left) just got engaged to his boyfriend Marcus (Shawn Ahmad).  Then his old-fashioned, traditional Grandma comes for a visit, and he isn't out to her!

2025:

Azi has a recurring role in Good American Family, about the life of Natalie Grace, a woman with dwarfism who was adopted by "a good American" family but abandoned three years later, when they suspected that she was really an adult. He and Saul Thomson play her adopted brother Ethan, whom she tries to kill. No indication of gay content.

In the short Our Monsters, two boys (Azi, Xander Wilson) team up to fight the monster in the closet.  I couldn't find a clip to see if there is gay content, but Azi tells us that Xander is "so cute we could just die."  

Is that "we" Azi using they/them pronouns, or Mom and Azi together?  Either way, the boy is definitely demonstrating an interest in boys 

More after the break

Give Me a Prehistoric Man

Modern man is not for me, 

The movie star and dapper Da

Give me a healthy Joe from ages ago --

A prehistoric man.

-- On The Town

When I was about eight years old, my Grandma Davis came to visit, and took us to the store to pick out any toy we wanted. My brother Kenny asked for a bicycle, and I asked for a Cave Man Toy Set.

"Are you sure you don't want a bicycle, too?"  Grandma asked in surprise.

Certainly not.  What fun could you possibly have with a bicycle?

But just look at Cave Man Toy Set: hard-muscled guys in loincloths throwing spears and rocks at gigantic dinosaurs!  (This was before toymakers realized that dinosaurs and prehistoric humans didn't coexist).

My boyfriend Bill agreed with my decision.  We spent many hours with that Toy Set, imagining jungle explorations, nick-of-time rescues from warring tribes or brontosauri, and "my hero" hugs.

Cave men were more fun than other action figures.  Our church taught that the world was created about 6,000 years ago, so evolution was a lie, there was no prehistory, and there had never been any cave men. So in addition to the beefcake, you had the thrill of blasphemy.

My Grandma Davis wasn't entirely opposed to the idea of prehistory.  One day in her attic I found this Van Loon Story of Mankind, published in 1926, with some muscular cave men on the cover.

It looks like a children's book, but in 1926, she was 23, and she and her husband wouldn't adopt my dad and his sisters for over a decade, so I don't know who it was for.

Most museums had exhibits featuring full-sized statues of prehistoric bodybuilders.  In the Putnam Museum in Davenport, they were wearing loincloths, but in the Museum of Natural History in Chicago, they were naked!

You almost never saw or heard of a cave woman.  I got the distinct impression that our ancestors were all male, roaming around n*ked in hunter-gatherer bands.

Maybe this was before Adam and Eve, so women hadn't been created yet.

See also: Andrew Keegan: From "Teenage Caveman" and "The Broken Hearts Club" to...well, he got to kiss Dean Cain

12 n*de dudes from the Isle of Man. Plus bondage, boggarts, fun runs, and a gay god

"Journey to the Beginning of Time": Four boys fight dinosaurs in the early years of their lives, before Jules Verne, Sinbad, and "What girl do you like?"

Alley Oop: The Time-Traveling Cave Man

Björn Mosten: His "Love and Anarchy" n*de hugeness made him a star, but he's also played a gay boarding school bully and Oddgeir's buddy.

  

Link to the n*de photos

In the Swedish comedy Kärlek och anarki (Love and Anarchy, 2020-22), middle aged publishing house consultant Sofia (Ida Engvoll) and young IT guy Max (Björn Mosten) fight a "dare war,"  trying to one-up each other with increasingly drastic dares:

Dress like pop singer Cyndi Lauper.

Walk backwards for a day.

Get too drunk

Mimic people

Walk into a restaurant and pretend that you work there.

Dribble

Do everything as fast as you can

And:  Get n*de in front of your family.

Uncensored on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.  Hint: Our buy is huge.

Frontside and back.

This was the 23-year old actor's only n*de scene in the series (he takes off his shirt a few times), but it was enough to seal his popularity among gay men in Sweden and abroad.

His cuteness and his acting ability too, of course.

The cover story of Kupe tells us that he is "An Overnight Star."  

Björn wasn't planning to become a star.  He was a small town boy, from Dvärsätt in central Sweden (the nearest big city is Trondheim, Norway, three hours away).  In the summer of 2019, he was just finishing up his degree in engineering at Uppsala University, and enrolled in the master's program in Computer and Information Engineering.  Lisa Langseth was casting an IT guy for her new comedy drama.  He had done some modeling, so why not audition?

After Love and Anarchy, Bjorn starred in the theatrical play Jakten (2022), at the Stockholms Stadsteaterat.  

It means "The Hunt," as in "Witch Hunt": a grade school teacher (Henrik Norlén) is falsely accused of assaulting a child in his class.  Bjorn plays Marcus, his teenage son.

Next came the tv series Ondskan ("Evil," 2023): Erik (Isac Calmroth) is expelled from public school due to being a violent thug, enrolls in an exclusive private school, becomes a bullying victim, and commences an affair with the lunch lady. 

More after the break