Lord of the Flies (2026) channels "Lost" and "Hanging Rock," with gay-subtext Jack and Ralph, gay Simon, and n*de Samoan dudes

 

Link to the n*de photos

I took journalism and creative writing in high school, so I was spared most of novels generally assigned in English class. But the journalism teacher assigned Lord of the Flies (1954). I don't know why; it's not about journalists, it's about the viciousness of the human animal.  During the War, a planeful of British middle-school boys crashes on a desert island.  They quickly devolve into savagery, worship a pig's head ("The Lord of the Flies"), and divide into warring tribes led by "let's try to remain calm" Ralph and "kill them all!" Jack.

I found a gay subtext in the soft, femme Jack's interest in Ralph (before they split into good/evil camps), so I'm interested in whether it continues in the 2026 tv miniseries (streaming on Netflix in the U.S.)

Scene 1: Piggy (David McKenna) awakens in the jungle in a scene reminiscent of Jack in Lost.  He wanders around, picks some mangos, and finally, sees another boy, who mysteriously doesn't want to talk. So he's a ghost?  

But Piggy insists.  He's Ralph  (Winston Sawyers), who doesn't remember how they got there, and hasn't seen any houses or people. 

They find a stream, so they can drink.  Ralph has a swim, but Piggy doesn't want to.  

Scene 2: At the beach, they find a conch shell, and blow it to summon any others.   A third boy approaches, with pigment around his eye, either a bruise or a visual difference.  And another and another, until 30 boys have arrived, both 10-12 year old Big-uns and 5-6 year old Little-uns.   We get face shots of most of them.  How does a plane crash deposit the survivors in widely different locations, alive?

Suddenly we hear ethereal music, the screen is bathed in sunlight, and we get a vision of kids wearing strange hats and long black robes.  They look like they're from Hogwarts. So there's already a society of wizards on the island?  I don't recall that from the book.

More face shots.  Turns out that they are a choir, dressed in the uniforms of Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury. Somehow they managed to be ejected from the plane with no scrapes or bruises, and all together.  I'm disappointed.  How is this scene not an intentional misdirection?

Suddenly choirboy Simon (Ike Talbut) faints.  Leader Jack (Lox Pratt) orders the others to "let him be.  Simon's always throwing a faint."

Piggy suggests that the next course of action should be to find out where they are, and what happened to the grownups.  Ralph overrules him: the first thing to do is elect a chief.  Head Choirboy Jack wants the job. 

All of the choirboys vote for him, after he glares menacingly, but the other boys all vote for Ralph, who wins.  Jack glares menacingly again, and suggests that he should be the leader of the hunting team.  Lox Pratt is  gazing menacingly in almost all of his Instagram photos.  He's also playing Draco in the new "Harry Potter" series.

Scene 3:  A team consisting of Jack, Piggy, Fainting Simon, and Chief Ralph hike out to see where they are (they have no reason to believe that it's a desert island; there could be a native village just down the beach).  

They find the body of the pilot, already covered with flies, and conclude that all of the grownups on the plane are dead, as they weren't in "the passenger tube" (the fuselage).

Should they bury him?  No, Jack says: he made a mistake, and stranded all of us here.  He should pay for his crime.  So they push him into the ocean instead.

Scene 4:  Shots of the boys investigating local bugs and amphibians.  A close-up face shot of a boy watching them. Maybe Roger (Thomas Connor)?   It lasts for an uncomfortably long time.  What is the point of this?  Is he an outsider, someone who was already on the island?  A malevolent force?

Chief Ralph and his team return to tell everyone the bad news: they're on an island with no human habitation, and the grownups are all dead, so they're on their own.  

"Ok, we'll go off and hunt some wild boars for dinner."  Jack tries to lead his hunters away, but Chief Ralph says "Please don't go until we have a plan."

"I like it when you say 'please.'"  Dude wants to be in charge of Ralph.  That's a queer code.

 Piggy suggests that they need three things: a signal fire, shelter, and a latrine, in three different locations.  One of the little ones interrupts to say that they also need to take care of the Beast that's been hovering about.

Long, slow shots of plants, animals, and rocks that look like beasts.

The boy continues to stare for an endless facial shot.  I'm fast-forwarding. 

More after the break

The top 18 gay-positive tv comedies: aliens, vampires, a Christian pastor, a ghost, a teenager named after meat, and a hunky Phung

Link to the n*de photos

When I was a kid, my parents permitted only comedy television, and it is still my preferred genre.  Who wants to watch a detective who doesn't play by the rules solve yet another murder, or some doctors trying to cure the disease of the week?  Give me classic sitcoms, adult animation, parodies, satires, and contemporary dramedies with season-long plot arcs.    

These are my 18 favorite television series with gay characters or subtexts, at least those that I've reviewed here or on the G-rated site. 

Only from 2016-2026.  If I went earlier, the list would include: Absolutely Fabulous, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,  It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Modern Family, The Real O'Neals, Red Dwarf, Roseanne, Schitt's Creek, Ugly Betty, The War at Home...

Kim's Convenience (2016).  Korean-Canadian family in Toronto, with no gay characters until the daughter finally comes out as bi, but there's a lot of  buddy-bonding and beefcake. Simu Liu (left) takes off his shirt a lot, and buddy Andrew Phung goes on to play a chunk in the gay-friendly Running the Burbs

Big Mouth (2017).  Animated middle schoolers negotiate puberty, with the help of individually-assigned hormone monsters and other supernatural beings.  The gay guy, Matthew (Andrew Rannells),  eventually gets his own plotlines, coming out to his parents, dating the bi guy, and learning about texting.

The Other Two (2019). A young teen achieves sudden fame, which disconcerts the Other Two, his sister and brother (who is gay). By the third season, they've all become successful, but there are still a lot of gay-romance plotlines and bare butts.

What We Do in the Shadows (2019).  Vampire roommates on Staten Island have more and more overtly gay plotlines as the series progresses. With out actor Harvey Guillén as their increasingly out assistant.

The Righteous Gemstones (2019) An absurdly wealthy family of Southern preachers negotiate threats.  I'm not sure I should include this one since, in retrospect, it was a little annoying.  Endless queer codes involving Gideon, Eli, and Pontius, with no resolution, just "crumbs."  And it took forever for Kelvin and Keefe to become canon.  They should have kissed at the end of Season 1.  

Solar Opposites (2020).  Aliens crash-land on Earth, try to adjust to human life, become boyfriends and finally marry.  Plus a spin-off episode with Kieran Culkin and Skyler Gisondo in a strong gay subtext human-alien romance.

Ghosts (American Version).  (2021). A houseful of wacky ghosts, including a hunky stock broker who died without his pants, and a Revolutionary War soldier who comes out and nearly marries the guy he accidentally killed.  Other gay characters appear on occasion.

The Great North (2021). A quirky family in a small town in Alaska, with a gay son who gets a boyfriend, and eventually a horny lesbian aunt.

Run the Burbs (2022): A queer daughter, a gay jerk, and a hot Phung.  What else do you need?

Jackson Robert Scott: It prey, Locke boy, gay superhero, muscleman...and a fundamentalist hippie? With some backsides and d*cks

 

Link to the n*de dudes

Jackson Robert Scott appeared on the teen idol site with the notice that he played Georgie in It (2017), a movie based on the 1986 Stephen King novel about an transdimensional being who usually manifests as Pennywise the Clown.  I never read the novel or saw any of the movies, but I heard that one of the "losers" who combat "It" has been subjected to homophobic fanboy howls of "he can't be gay!  He's just a teenager!"  Presumably Jackson played the gay one.

Nope, that's Richie Tozer (Finn Wolfhard).  Georgie is the younger brother of focus "loser" Bill Denbrough, who gets sucked down into a storm sewer in It's first appearance. 

Left: Bill is played by Jaeden Martel as a teenager, James McAvoy as an adult (n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

Finn Wolfhard is too famous for a profile, and it looks like Jackson is working his way to becoming a bonafide muscleman, so I'll continue.

Jackson was born in 2008 in Phoenix, Arizona, and in 2014 started training at at CGTV , a young actors' "incubator" featuring acting lessons with celebrity coaches and connections to media professionals.  He started doing commercials almost immediately, and broke into on-screen acting in 2015, playing a boy kidnapped by a psycho on an episode of Criminal Minds.

2017 was Jackson's annus miribilis.  He played Georgie in It.

Bodie, the son in the family investigating paranormal gateways, in the pilot of Locke & Key.

The young Troy Otto, who will grow up to run a ranch with his brothers in the zombie Apocalypse series  Fear the Walking Dead.

The grown-up Troy (Daniel Sharman, left) is queer-coded, and has a nearly-canonical romance with the probably bi Nick (Frank Dillane, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyyfriends) .

The short Skin (2018) won an Oscar: In a working-class town, a black man smiles at a white boy (Jackson), and his father objects to the interracial fraternization, resulting in a race war.

But The Prodigy (2019) was rated "one of the worst horror movies of the year": is the cute kid/killer (Jackson) possessed by a supernatural entity, or just bad?

After more horror in It Chapter 2 (2019), Jackson took a reprieve with Gossamer Folds (2020): In 1986, Tate (Jackson) moves to a new town and befriends Girl Next Door Gossamer (Alexandra Gray), who isblack and trans.  I don't think they fall in love: Alexandra Gray was 30 years old, not the best choice for a preteen.  In the trailer, Tate looks up the word "f*ggot" in the dictionary, so maybe he's coming out.  

Timothy Richardson played the Handsome Man (n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).  Don't be shy, spoon with him.

Next Jackson returned to Bodie (actually spelled Bode) in the supernatural horror/fantasy Locke and Key (2020).  He's got a gay uncle (Aaron Ashmore), and his hetero-horny older brother is played by gay actor Connor Jessup.  

And four episodes of Wandavision (2021), as the body reference for Billy Maximoff (Julian Hilliard), son of the witch-turned-1950s housewife Wanda Maximoff.

More after the break

Evan Jachelski: Rooster Spooner, angel, pizza boy, jock with a c*ck. Plus Andrew Santino and some Polish dudes

Link to the n*de photos

 In the season finale of Rooster, acerbic college writer-in-residence Greg  (Steve Carell) tells his students about the movie It's a Wonderful Life (1946), where Clarence the Angel convinces a down-and-out dude not to off himself.  They're confused by the line: "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings."  What if you're in an arcade, with bells ringing all the time?  You'd have a surplus of angels.

The guys decide to make some wings to wear at Greg's end-of-semester party.  Spooner shows off his while shirtless.  Hot twink physique with some delt and bicep development.

Spooner has been basically a background player, a member of gay-subtext Tommy's friend group with a salacious name.  His scenes consist mostly of buddy-bonding with George or J.D.  But that unexpected shirtless shot was stunning, in a series that has been skimpy with beefcake, so I wanted to do a profile of actor Evan Jachelski.

Evan was born in September 2003, and grew up in Hanover, Pennsylvania, a rural community about an hour north of Baltimore.  He is close enough to his Polish heritage to know some slang terms: badooshk, asshole; kutas, d*ck; chuj, d*ck; palka, big d*ck.

Apparently he needs to describe his d*ck quite often (Polish guys on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

He attended South West High School, where he played football, and trained with the Baltimore Improv Group. 

He graduated in 2022, and moved to Los Angeles to become an actor, starting with commercials for Peloton exercise equipment (playing a buffed sufer) and Reebok shoes. 

In a 2023 episode of Dave: the mild-mannered wannabe rapper (Dave Burd) returns to Philadelphia to look up the childhood Girl of His Dreams, who stuck him in the friend zone.  He's homophobic, referring to the jock who won her as a c*cksucker, but also into guys at least according to some photos that show him doing kinky gay stuff.   

Evan played "Matt's Replacement," presumably someone who took over for Dave's roommate / manager, Matt (Andrew Santino, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends). But I couldn't find him in the episode.  Maybe he wasn't blond.

More after the break