"Justified": Kentucky cowboy has gay-subtext romance with unhinged thug. Plus bonus n*de thugs.

 

Link to the n*de dudes

I was recommended Justified: City Primeval (2023). a "neo-Western crime drama" that shoves countrified U.S. Marshall Raylan (Timothy Olyphant) into Detroit.  But I haven't seen the original Justified (2010-2015), with Raylan as a marshall in Harlan County, Kentucky.  

I don't usually do crime dramas; I like my entertainment light, comedies or science fiction.  Besides, they hardly ever include gay characters.  But my mother was born in Magoffin County, about 100 miles north of Harlan, and I've visited several times, so maybe the original Justified will be good for nostalgia. 

Scene 1: A rooftop-pool party full of guys cruising bikini babes.  Rylan gave Thomas Buckley, who is an old friend (they ate crab cakes in Managua) until 2:15 to leave the state (Florida does have banishment as a judicial sentence, but I don't think Rylan is a judge).  Big Bad refuses to go, so Rylan shoots him. 

Scene 2: As the coroner takes away the body, Rylan's boss wonders about the legality of shooting Thomas Buckely.  "I gave him a chance to leave.  He didn't take it." Rylan has been shooting a lot of guys, but this one was rich and white, so there's going to be scrutiny.

Cut to a Department of Justice Inquest. "Is it true that you shot a rich white man?"  Rylan, who is now named Dan, shrugs. "He drew his gun on me. Self-defense.  Besides, he deserved to die.  He was evil."

Dan's punishment: Being re-assigned to the wilderness of Eastern Kentucky. "But I'm from there!  I finally escaped!  Please, anything but that!"  Dude, why the cowboy hat?  Kentucky is Appalachia,  You want Montana, 150 years ago.

Scene 3: Dan, who is now named Raylan, arrives in Lexington, a big city with glitz and culture rivaling that of...um, Dayton.  But all we see is the inside of the police station.. The Chief, who is an old friend, has Western movie posters all over his office.   He notes that the Love of Raylan's Life also works here.  So this guy is old friends with everybody?  

Raylan is assigned the case of Boyd Crowther, an old friend who has turned evil.  They're trying to get enough evidence to arrest him -- but no shooting! It's a small town.  People talk."

Scene 4: Boyd Crother (Walton Goggins) and his Boyfriend (Ryan O'Nan, left) discuss a Date Night activity. Boyfriend wants to blow a federal building under construction. Boyd dismisses it as unfeasible.  Instead he blows up a church in a black neighborhood -- without even checking to see if it is empty. Boyfriend protests.

Cut to Raylan explainng Boyd's back story to the Chief. Wait -- he's been working on the case for years. Shouldn't he know everything already?  Back when they were coal miners, Boyd was an explosives expert.  He would yell "Fire in the hole!" to warn them of an explosion coming.  Then he got involved with the white supremacy movement.  

Scene 5: Back to Date Night.  The guys are parked on a narrow country bridge (weird pkace to make out). Boyd wonders if Boyfriend chose a federal building because it would rile the feds enough to arrest him.  And why did he protest blowing up the black church. "I don't see any white supremacy tattoos. Are you even a racist?".  Boyfriend tells him to call his buds in Oklahoma to verify his racism.  His goons are calling Boyfriend's references, but Boyd is tired of waiting and shoots him.  I hate it when Date Night ends like that.

When Boyd calls headquarters (a trailer full of redneck dudes), they say that the references checked out; Boyfriend is a big racist.  "So, how was Date Night?" "Um...er...um...we broke up."   "Was it because he wasn't racist enough, or was his dick too big?"  "Um...er...a little of both."

Scene 6: Raylan wakes up (chest shot) and goes to court to gaze at the typing hands of the Love of His Life, working as a court reporter. She pauses to touch her hair.  Whoa, that's one of his fetishes!  But before he can orgasm, he's called to investigate Boyfriend's body. The police have already found a cap that goes to the rocket launcher used to blow up the black church!  

Cut to the site of the bombed church. A lady pulls her man out of the way of the police.  75% of black parents instruct their kids on how to avoid being killed by the police when they're stopped for "driving while black."  

Detective Gutterson (Jacob Pitts) has already interviewed the eyewitnesses: they said that it was two white guys.  One of them yelled "fire in the hole"  Uh-oh, it was Boyd!

More Boyd after the break

Carter Ryan: Canadian soap boy likes farm equipment, works out, hugs Jaiven and other hot guys. WIth Carter and Kevin d*cks

Link to the n*de dudes 

The teen idol site has numerous photos of Carter Ryan, aka Carter Ryan Evancic and another guy, visible in the background of this photo, and elsewhere hugging, swimming, working out, hugging, and hugging.  Surely they're boyfriends.  But first, to make sure that Carter is actually an actor, I'm checking out his IMDB biography.

Whew, it's long and overblown with superlatives.  The greatest actor of our generation was born in 2006 to Dorlyn and Carol Evancic.  Don't get excited -- Dorlyn is just a guy with a girl's name.   His older sister inspired him to start acting at the age of eight months.  Really? 

At the age of eight, Carter booked the Lead in a Feature Film (Mom's capitalization, not mine), playing the son of "supermodel/actress Rachel Hunt" in Her Infidelity (2015).

Wait -- is Rachel the extremely famous actress, or the character?

She's the actress.  In Her Infidelity (2015), Rachel plays a bored housewife who has an affair with a hunky teacher (Grayson Chitty), but he turns out to be a psycho.  Presumably Carter plays her son.

 

Getting through the descriptions of Carter's wonderfulness is quite a slog. Here's another photo of Carter and his boyfriend to combat the boredom.  

After Her Infidelity, the great actor (according to his Mom) appeared in:

An episode of Impastor (2015) as Young Buddy.  The grown-up Buddy, on the run from a loan shark, steals a man's identity and takes over as the new gay pastor of a small-town church.  This may be a problem, since he's not really qualified to be a leader in the local gay community. Besides, he's got a tattoo of a n*ked lady on his hand. 

An episode of Travelers (2016), with Will and Grace star Eric McCormack playing a straight guy who sends his consciousness back in time.  Carter's character is not mentioned in the plot synopsis.

Two episodes of The Man in the High Castle (2015-16), a dystopian series where Germany won World War II. Carter plays the son of a lady dating American resistance fighter Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank).

Rupert Everett as resistance fighter Frank Frink is n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

But Carter is best known as Cody Stanton in the Canadian soap When Calls the Heart (2015-19) and the spin-off When Hope Calls (2021).

The Hoping Heart or The Calling Hope or whatever is set in a small town in Alberta in the 1910s.  Cody is homeless and hungry until he is adopted by Abigal Stanton, who runs the local cafe. His plotlines involve dealing with his sister's illness, dealing with his own illness, having trouble at school, and gay-subtext buddy-bonding with Robert Wolfe (Jaiven Natt).

Hey, Jaiven is the boyfriend! 

Off-camera, Carter buddy-bonded with several male cast members.  Here he wishes happy birthday to Daniel Issing, whom I assumed was a father figure on the show. But the actor is Kevin McGarry, who plays town constable Nathan Grant, with no particular connection to Cody.  Apparently Carter just likes hunky guys.

And who the heck is Daniel Issing?    

More after the break

Leonard Berstein, Aaron the Rabbi's Son, and a poem about masks on the verge of coming out

  

Link to the n*de photos

Sorry for two autobiographical stories in a row, but I'm trying to build up my Fiction/Travel Index, and there aren't many tv programs around in the summertime to review.

When I was a kid, my church had no problem with classical music, but my parents hated "that longhair stuff," so there was none in the house.  My first exposure to Bach, Berlioz, Beethoven, and Mozart came through a series of Young People's Concerts which appeared occasionally on Sunday afternoons, hosted by famous composer Leonard Bernstein.

Later, when I joined the school orchestra, I learned more about Leonard Bernstein.

I saw his gay symbolism-heavy musicals, On the Town (1949), starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, and West Side Story (1961), starring gay actor George Chakiris and assorted high-stepping hunks.

And his Symphony #3, Kaddish, named after the Jewish prayer for the dead.

He appeared on tv, conducting Gershwin, Mahler, and Beethoven.

No one ever mentioned that he was gay, of course, and his works revealed nothing, except maybe the Serenade for Solo Violin, Strings, Harp, and Percussion, after Plato's Symposium (1954).  The Symposium contains Plato's famous defense of same-sex love.

In the spring of my senior year, Aaron, the rabbi's son who was gay (but didn't know it yet), invited me to a performance of Bernstein's Mass, a musical theater piece based on the Latin Mass.  

"Wait -- isn't Bernstein Jewish?"

He nodded.  "That's what makes it interesting."

Nazarenes weren't supposed to associate with Catholics, or have anything to do with Catholic music, so of course I wanted to go.

There are three acts.

Act 1: Devotion and Celebration.  The celebrant invites the congregants to worship.  They begin authentically, but then doubt creeps in.  Nazarenes were told that it was a sin to doubt the existence of God, the inerrancy of the Bible, or the fundamental beliefs like the Virgin Birth: the Devil's primary temptation was not to do bad things, but to doubt. But here it is celebrated as part of the worship experience.  How can God be with us when there is so much suffering in the world?

Originally the congregants mentioned war, but in more recent versions, they mention racism and homophobia.

Act 2:  Crisis and Collapse: The anxieties and doubts of the congregants take their toll on the celebrant, who has a spiritual collapse, breaks the sacred objects, and screams in rage against God.

What  I say -- I don't feel.
What I feel -- I can't show.
What I show -- isn't real.
What is real?  Oh Lord, I don't know.

Suddenly I realized that he was mirroring the interrogation that I received constantly from parents, friends, teachers, my brother, the preacher at church,  "What girl do you like?  What girl?  What girl?  What girl?" 

Every boy has discovered girls at your age.  Every boy has experienced True Love, that fills "the hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame."  If you haven't, you must pretend.  Smile, grin, flirt, talk about how much you long for feminine smiles, every day, every hour, for the rest of your life.

In the third act, Resolution, a boy emerges from the congregation and sings "I will lift up my eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help," offering hope in the midst of despair.  The celebrant is restored, and the Mass continues.

But I wasn't paying attention.

More after the break

Akuma Kun: The Chosen One and his half-demon sidekick roam a soggy, decaying world. Are they boyfriends, buddies, or too-soon-to-tell?

 

Akuma Kun (2023), on Netflix, drew my interest because of its excellent animation, all soggy, decaying opulence, and because of its blatant buddy bond between the two paranormal investigators.  Most of the anime we see on streaming services expect you to have known and loved the characters throughout your life, after buying the hundreds of manga, video games, comic strips, and tie-in toys and going to fan conventions to meet the stars of the live-action movies, but I'm going in fresh, with no research.  Episode 1.1: "Demons."

Scene 1:  A shabby office full of old furniture, books, papers, and weird bricabrac.  A big-headed boy named Mephisto complains that a lanky, gray-haired boy summoned him to deal with a toilet clog, and then ate all of his ramen! 

"It would have gotten soggy just sitting there, so I ate it," the boy responds, his nose stuck in a book. 

"If you want me to come over, why don't you call me on the telephone instead using a summoniing spell?"

"You come faster this way."

"But I'm half human, half demon, so I never cross over properly."  So Mephisto has been roped into becoming the Boy's servant, like a genie in a bottle?

 

The Boy is named Ichiro Umoregi, and titled Akuma Kun.  Akuma is translated "Demon," but it refers to any type of supernatural being, and Kun is a diminuitive used for close friends and little boys, so "Little Demon."  He is actually an adult -- everyone in this anime is drawn as a child.  He is voiced by Yuki Kaji, top photo in Japanese, Michael Johnston, left, in English, and Aidan Vallejo, below, in Spanish.  Both Michael and Aidan are gay.

Scene 2: Night.  A young college student walks down a dark, deserted street.  Suddenly a shadowy monster with glowing red eyes attacks!

Cut to a young woman named Hina walking toward the Millenarianism Research Institute.  So a cult?  Up a flight of wooden stairs to a courtyard with scary, ornate doors beyond.   She enters a drawing room cluttered with creepy skeletons and skull candleholders. Mephisto enters from the kitchen, exclaims "We have a client!  We can pay the rent!", and changes into a purple suit with a top hat and magician's cane. 

So they live together?  Then why does the Boy need to summon Mephisto?

Hina's case:  Two of her college classmates died two nights ago, at exactly 2:23 am.  And she discovered that three other people in the Kamichoufu Sector also died at the same moment.  Also, she's been plagued by nightmares.

Scene 3: They arrive at Hina's house to conduct some research.  The Boy immediately goes to her bedroom, angering her mother: "You can't just barge into a lady's room!  It's rude!"  

"Is this how your partner usually behaves?" Hina asks.

"He is a once-in-10,000 years genius, but he's sort of lacking in social skills." I'd put him on the autism spectrum.  The English, French, and Spanish voice actors speak in a monotone.

Mom recovers from her shock and brings them tea, but the Boy demands hotcakes ( hottokēki), not pancakes (pankēki).  He needs the sugar to get his brain cells active.  "Ok...um...I'll make you some hotcakes, I guess."  Ok, a little research.  Hotcakes are thicker than Western pancakes, with a custard-like texture.

Scene 4: The Boy rates the hotcakes the 18th best that he's had.    

Mom is a professor of European history.  The Boy has read her book, Lives and Sins of Kings, and found her interpretation of the Medieval monarchy "banal."  Way to insult your hostess, kid.

Hina tells them that the murdered people were all college students, but some went to other universities, and one had just graduated.

While Mephisto tries to discuss payment with Hina, the Boy looks under the bed  and sees a red-eyed monster.  No one else can see it.  He draws a mysterious Eye in the Pyramid on a scrap of paper and tells her to keep it close.  They'll be back tomorrow.

Scene 5: That night, while Hina is asleep, a red-eyed monster sneaks out from under the bed, but she holds up the Eye, and it vanishes.

Scene 6: Kamichoufou Odeon Cinema, a run-down theater near the Boy's office.  Hina tells him about the monster.  He suggests that someone is trying to keep them from investigating the case.

When he pinppoints the locations of the deaths on a map, it creates a pentagram.  So someone is trying to protect the person or thing in the center.  Hina recognizes the building: it's the home of her college friend Ichika. 

As they approach the house, Hina reveals that her friend didn't know any of the murder victims, except as faces in the cafeteria.  She belonged to a club with a "seedy" reputation. And she hasn't come to class in weeks.

The Boy suddenly decides not to go in. "Come by the Research Institute tomorrow."

That night the red-eyed monster appears again, but Hina has laminated the Eye and tied it to her wrist, so it can't attack. She doesn't even wake up.

More after the break