20 Musclemen who guided me through the Age of Innocence, from Bomba the Jungle Boy to the American Psycho

Link to the n*de photos

This is a nostalgic journey through the musclemen who gave me my first hints that gay people existed, and guided me from junior high through college and to West Hollywood. They provided a joy that transcended aesthetic pleasure, telling gay kids that we belonged.  We were welcome. 

Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide.

In your most need I'll be by your side.

1. Johnny Sheffield played Bomba the Jungle Boy on Tarzan Theater every Saturday afternoon when there wasn't a game.  I never actually made it through a whole movie -- they were dreadfully heterosexist.  But there was always time for those gleaming black-and-white muscles, especially when he was tied up.

2. Bruce Lee.  He died in 1973, but his movies were playing constantly on Kung Fu Theater, and everybody's older brother had his beefcake poster on his bedroom wall.

3. Michael Forest played a god of masculine beauty (literally the God Apollo) on an episode of Star Trek which I saw sometime in the 1970s.

4. Denny Miller. Moments of gay promise as a surfer and a jungle man on Gilligan's Island.

5, David Naughton.  The cutest guy of the Disco Era showed us his stuff in American Werewolf in London (1981).  Plus he also gave us a strong gay subtext in spite of the 1980s homophobia.

6. Yukio Mishima.  It wasn't hard to find gay-themed books in the early 1980s.  Just look for "evil" or "hidden" in the title.  So I found Confessions of a Mask, with Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima's obsession with male muscles and death.  

7. Arnold Schwarzenegger.  The 1980s start and end with Arnold, who single-handedly brought bodybuilding into the mainstream and made it respectable.

8.  Sylvester Stallone gave him a little help with his grunting, sweat-soaked Rambo and Rocky.  We saw his stuff  in The Italian Stallion, a recast of his early adult movie.  

9. John Amos.  Gordy the Weatherman on Mary Tyler Moore, a warrior in a Conan rip-off that we all saw, and my gym buddy.

10. Lou Ferrigno, who played a muscular green Hulk against Bill Bixby's David Banner, dropped by often when I was working at Muscle & Fitness.  Did I mention our hookup?

More after the break

Zackary Arthur: The gay teen with the murderous Chuckie doll bulks up, shows his physique, and dates...with a potential p*nis and a Man in Full

 

Link to the n*de photos.

Zackary Arthur is best known for Chucky (2021-24), where he plays the gay teen who inherits the murderous doll, but he has had a long career before, with several gay and gay-adjacent roles.

He was born in Los Angeles in 2006, the son of writer/casting agent Marci Richmond, who obligingly put him and his brother Aidan in her 2016 movie, Pals. 

His screen debut was actually two years before, in Transparent (2014- 19).  Jeffrey Tambor, a cisgender straight guy, plays a college professor who, late in life, begins transitioning with the name Maura.  Her ex-wife,  grown children, and rabbi have mixed reactions. 

 

Zack plays Zack Pfifferman, son of Maura's daughter and her husband Len (Ron Huebel, showing his stuff on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends), whom she leaves for a lady.  Apparently there are trans, lesbian, bi, and nonbinary characters, but gay men are scarce.

While on Trans, Zack starred in:

Don't Come Back from the Moon (2017): Dads suddenly abandoning their kids

Mom and Dad (2017): A plague causes parents to attack their kids

These Things Take Time (2018), a short about a boy with a crush on his teacher.  A male teacher, for a change.  It was repeated in the anthology The American Boys (2020), with several guys experiencing "a s*xual awakening," saying "I think I'm gay," and doing gay bedroom stuff.  It's on Amazon Prime, but behind a paywall. 

In Mississippi Requiem (2018), an anthology of Faulkner stories, Zack plays Young Quentin. Ugh, is he the one who is in love with his sister, also named Quentin, and does things to himself at Harvard?  I hope I got that right; I couldn't understand a word of The Sound and the Fury:  

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting.

Hint: He's describing a golf game. 

But I do have a story about William Faulkner and his boyfriend (Sherwood Anderson's son) painting a guy's p*nis green. 

Next came Chucky (2021-24), with Zack as Jake Wheeler, Devon Sawa as his abusive dad, and  Bjorgvin Arnarson as a true crime podcaster and eventually Jake's boyfriend: they go on a date in Season 1, and get intimate in Season 3. They don't die, exactly, but their souls are transferred into puppets in the cliffhanger that turned out to be the series finale.

During Chucky, Zack starred in  Hero Dog (2021), Secret Agent Dingledorf (2021), and Jill (2022), "a modern fairy tale about how distrust in the collective society divides a family and how Jill many years later learns about what there is left to trust."

I don't know what that means, either, and there are no plot synopses online, but there are hippies, nekkid ladies,  Garrett Wareing, and Tom Pelphrey (n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

More after the break

"Breaking Fast": Gay Muslim gets dumped, finds a new boyfriend, shows his d*ck. But are any of the actors actually gay and Muslim?

 

Link to the n*de photos

In the short Breaking Fast (2015), it's Eid-al-Fitr, the last night of Ramadan, and Mo (Ryan Shrime) runs into Cal (probably gay bodybuilder Tom Berklund).  They discuss the suicide of Cal's boyfriend.  

That's all I can gather from Tom Berklund's demo reel: the movie is not available to stream, and the trailer is stuck behind paywalls and Trojan-infested websites.  But a review says that Mo is a gorgeous Superman-obsessed doctor dealing with tragedy (because all short films are about dealing with tragedy, right?), and the guys fall in love.

We don't have a lot of actors who are gay, out, and Muslim, so I thought I would check Ryan Shrime out.

Ryan's  Instagram starts off with three photo dumps of Christmas decorations. Dude is Christian

Then he visits Portugal and Israel with his travel buddy, a miniature Jesus.  Dude is Christian and wacko.

Next there are about 3,000 photos hugging and kissing ladies and playing with kids.  Dude is straight.

Why are you playing a gay Muslim, buddy?  Are you the only Arab-American actor willing to do it?  

Sigh.  Let's check for gay roles and nude photos anyway.  

Ryan got his degree from Harvard, then studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.  

Theatrical credits: Macbeth, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, The Engine of Our Ruin, The Ants

Nothing overtly gay themed there.

He founded the Middle Eastern Comedy Festival and the New York Arab American Comedy Festival

61 acting credits on the IMDB: The Mindy Project, Sam & Kat, Revenge, Grey's Anatomy, Madame Secretary, On My Block, and a lot that I don't recognize.  He complains on Threads that casting agents constantly tell him, "You're so great! I'm just looking for the right role for you," then offer yet another terrorist role.

He is known for playing:

Lance Chambers on a 2015 episode of Gray's Anatomy: Meredith returns to Seattle to announce Derek's death (Patrick Dempsey) and gives birth; Amelia deals with her grief; April decides to stay in a war-torn country, upsetting Jackson (Jesse Williams); Ben and Bailey argue over an end-of-life decision. Oh, and Richard proposes to Catherine.  Lance is not mentioned in the plot synopses.  Would there even be room for him?

Ramjin Azizi on a 2017 episode of Madame Secretary, starring Tea Leoni as the Secretary of State: Blake comes out as bisexual, Stevie (a boy) misses a meeting with the Harvard Dean of Admissions when Jason gets sick, and Henry goes to Israel to retrieve the bio weapon, but ISIS agents steal it. Ramjin isn't mentioned in any of the plot synopses, but I'm guessing that he's not a terrorist.

Ryan is also known as the producer of Woe (2020): A brother and sister stumble upon their father's secret after his death. A review says that it's impenetrably art-noveau.  Well, the guy graduated from Harvard.  What do you expect?

At least he shows his d*ck (on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).  Or is that misleading, too?

In 2020, writer/director Mike Mosallam released a feature-length Breaking Fast, with the parts recast.  It's not available to stream, either, but a review gives us a few more details:  Mo (Haaz Sleiman) got dumped by his boyfriend (Patrick Sabongui) on the first night of Ramadan, and is now emotionally closed off.  Until he meets Cal (Michael Cassidy), who is grieving over his dead boyfriend.  The two bond during the three nights of Eid al-Fitr.

Any actual gay Muslim guys here?

More after the break

Dashiell Messick: A homophobic tv mom, a gay brother, a pretty princess outfit, and a hunky male au pair, all before his 12th birthday

Link to the n*de photos

I don't usually profile preteen actors, because they won't have played any gay characters yet, and it's impossible to tell whether the buddy-bonding in their private lives is romantic or platonic.  But Dasheill Messick, age 11, played the son of gay dads and has made some explicitly femme fashion choices.  That's enough for a profile of Dashiell and his twin brother Fox. 

 

Plus there are some cute adults in their lives, like their Argentine au pair  (top photo and right), and their hot dad (below).

Mom Kacy Andrews , the CEO of Bigfoot Entertainment, has documented the twins' career since their gestation.  She is infertile (and an advocate of infertility awareness), so a friend of 25 years, her soul mate and part of her chosen family, offered to become her surrogate.   They only implanted one frozen embryo, but on December 5, 2014, twins came out!  

The two began appearing in tv commercials at the age of two months, and in 2016 won the role of Tommy Fuller Jr. on the Full House sequel Fuller House (2016-20).  They appeared in 75 episodes, moving from baby to toddler.

Tommy Jr. is the son of focus character DJ and her deceased husband.  He has two brothers, Jackson (Michael Campion, left) and Max (Elias Harger, middle).

I profiled the grown-up Elias, and decided that he is probably gay, but there were no gay regular characters on the show.  Showrunner Candace Cameron Bure is vociferously homophobic, and insisted that her show be "family friendly", that is, heterosexual only.  hey did manage to cast trans actor Miss Benny (then presenting as male) as a gay high schooler in two episodes, but cautioned that Candace would try to fire her. So don't speak to any of the Fuller adults, don't look directly at Candace, and prepare for a firestorm of hate from her homophobic core fans. Gee, I think I'd give that role a miss.

Tommy's main plot arc involves getting therapy for being a "late talker,"  reflecting the twins' real-life speech delay.

While starring on Fuller House, the twins, alone or together, had other acting gigs:

The music video Sunrise Sunset (2018) with the song from Fiddler on the Roof covered by Juan Pablo di Pace.  He's straight but played a gay guy in The Mattachine Family.   Elias Harger, Adam Hagenbuch, and Michael Campion from Fuller House also appeared, presumably growing older to the lyrics.

Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly fly the years
One season following another
Laden with happiness and tears

An episode of Grey's Anatomy (2019) as a child whose mom overdoses and abandons him.  A bystander brings him to the hospital, where the doctors advise keeping him away from mom until she gets help.

Two episodes of the DIY show Home & Family (2019), with Mark Steins as the co-host.

An episode of  Danger Force (2020), starring Cooper Barnes as a wacky superhero.  His Danger Force of teen superheroes kidnap a toddler, thinking that he is a baby-faced supervillain.  Eventually they track down his dads and return him.

More after the break