Pablo Castelblanco: The OCD guy from "Happy's Place" beefcakes, plays gay, but closets his Insta. With Steve Howey and Pablo p*nis

  

Link to the n*de photos

I was running low on tv series to review, so I clicked on Happy's Place on Netflix, in spite of the annoyingly manipulative title.

Making your way through the world today takes everything you got

Taking a break from all your worries sure would mean a lot

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name...

Whoops, wrong sitcom. 

Sometimes it feels like a big ol' fight

To get through the day and sleep on through the night

You can't complain because no one's here to hear it

But here you'll surely find a place that will lift your spirits...

Happy's Place (2024-) currently airing on NBC, stars Reba McIntyre as a woman (not named Happy) who inherits a Tennessee bar from her father.  Her co-owner is a much younger half sister that she never knew about.

I watched Episode 1.7, "Ho-Ho Howey," because of guest star Steve Howey, who played Reba's son-in-law on her earlier series (Reba, 2001-07),  and has played gay characters (and shown his stuff) often in movies and on tv.

His stuff is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

I wasn't impressed.  An old-fashioned sitcom plotline with jokes requiring your familiarity with the earlier Reba.  It reminded me of the Saturday-night shows that the old folks used to watch while we were out at the clubs.  

And only one cute guy in the regular cast. 

  

Not Tokala Black Elk as the sardonic bartender.  The n*de photo on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends must be of a different Tokala Black Elk; the guy behind the bar was grizzled, gaunt, and craggy.

The cute guy was Steve (Pablo Castelblanco, top photo), the bar's full-time  accountant, shy, awkward, germaphobic, suffering from OCD.  Could I hope that he was gay?

To explore further, I watched Episode 1.17, "The Doctor is Out": Steve has improved so much, moving from a giant bottle to a small bottle of hand sanitizer, able to handle someone else's pencil, that he gives up therapy.  But then he starts using Reba as a substitute therapist, and reverts, rearranging the spices in the kitchen.

Steve  doesn't express any heteros*xual interest in either episode, nor is a girlfriend mentioned in the Seasons 1-2 episode synopses.  Could a character in a sitcom for old people, set in Knoxville, Tennessee, starring a lady who tells us to seek out God's help for our problems, be canonically gay?  

Reba is an outspoken gay ally, so maybe...

I read two interviews, one from just last month.  Pablo Castelblanco says only that Happy's Place is the best gig he's ever had, he hopes it runs for years, and in future episodes he would like to explore Steve's "love life." 

That's a little vague, buddy.  Do you expect him to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend?  Which will the writers permit?

The articles also mention that Pablo is gay in real life.

Pablo Castelblanco, aka Pablo Esteban, grew up in Colombia, doing the usual school plays and watching Reba's earlier show.   His parents planned on him becoming an accountant, but he thought of engineering -- or acting. He studied at El Bosque University in Bogota and then the AMDA College of the Performing Arts in Los Angeles, where he appeared in Sálvese Quien Pueda, Yerma, Stage Door, Metamorphoses, and The Diary of Anna Frank.  

Pablo's first on-screen role was Tristan St. Pierre in a 2016 episode of Scream Queens: he writes lesbian fan fiction about the Chanels  (the It-Girls of the school), and is finally invited to join them, becoming the first male member.  According to the fan wiki, he is "homos*xual." 

A good start, buddy.

Then came some artsy shorts (Sedation, Admission, There's No Such Thing as a Dragon) and guest spots on some comedies (Dear White People, New Girl), and in 2022, a starring role on Alaska Daily: Hilary Swank plays a journalist seeking a "fresh start" in Anchorage after a career crash. She ends up investigating the murders of several Native women.  Philip Lewitski (left) played her photographer colleague Miles.

Pablo played another reporter, Gabriel Martin, aka Gabriel Tovar,  The show is no longer available on Hulu, and he's not mentioned in the plot synopses, so I can't tell if he is gay or not. 

More after the break

Aaron Collict: "N*ked Attraction" contestant, modelwith a degree in math, Albanian teen, Afghan daddy, caveman with a d*ck.

  

Link to the n*de photos

One of my first beefcake images was in a kids' book about the Stone Age: the Lake Dwellers of neolithic Switzerland, around 3000 BC, n*ked as they hauled in their nets. 

I've read a lot about prehistory since, and visited some Neolithic sites, so I don't have much patience for the portrayal of the wacky caveman Robin in the British Ghosts.  He says he lived around the time of Stonehenge, 3000-2500 BCE, the Neolitic Era, with permanent villages and domesticated plants and animals.  But he acts like a nomadic hunter-gatherer of the Mesolithic Era.   

But in this case I'll excuse the reverse anachronism. In Episode 4.5, Robin flashes back to the day of his death.  He and two companions were attacked by a bear; he climbed a tree to escape, but was hit by lightning.

 Check out the chest of the caveman in the foreground.  Massive, and accentuated by the costume design. 

 He's worth a bit of research

Robin has two caveman companions in this episode. 

Dan King has only one acting credit, no photos, and a very common name.  There are many actor Dan Kings out there, as well as several p*rn stars.  A dead end.  So I'm going to go with Aaron Collict.

Aaron Collict has the chest for the job, but research is made difficult by his lack of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok pages.  At least he has several resumes posted online.  And a lot of n*de photos.

He's a model, actor, and personal trainer, with the tagline: "H*ng human being with a passion for endorphins."  Sorry, I meant "hungry."

He received a B.Sci. in Mathematics from the University of East Anglia in 2007, and has worked as an operations manager and film producer.  Currently he is a salesperson for Steady Solar, a solar-power company.

After modeling and doing commercials for Slater's Menswear, Hot Tub Barn, Oriel Mobile Valeting, and The Cutting Room, Aaron moved into tv with two reality programs:

More after the break. Caution: Explicit.

Topper Guild: The youtube star breaks into tv. With Kaido Roberts, muscle men, Nick d*ck, and Topper doing stuff.

 This post was completely innocent, but it got one of those idiotic "sensitive content" tags for no reason.  So I added some n*de photos and s*xual content, and moved the whole thing to RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

Link to the "sensitive content."

Daniel DiMaggio: The queerbaiting son on "American Houswife" grows up to play Count Chocula and post selfies

 

Link to the NSFW version

You may be familiar with Daniel DiMaggio, no relation to Joe DiMaggio, as Oliver Otto on American Housewife (2016-21).  I never heard of it, but I wouldn't have watched anyway.  Who wants to watch a sicom about June Cleaver or Donna Reed?  

It starred Katy Mixon as Katie Otto, a housewife who, although not pretentious herself, is immersed in the ultra-pretentious world of ladies who lunch in Westport, Connecticut, along with her husband (Diedrich Bader), two daughters, and son Oliver (Daniel). 

She has a lesbian best friend, and there's a gay character (Jake Choi) in Season 5, so there's a bit of representation.  The main problem fans had was queerbaiting Oliver.  

He is presented as gay, with everything from pictures of muscular men on his bedroom wall to an interest in ballet to a boyfriend, the wealthy, femme Cooper (Logan Bell).  Everyone thinks they are boyfriends, including Cooper, who is upset every time Oliver claims that they are not dating.  But then he backs off and gets a girlfriend.  

Logan Bell (the femme one) is gay in real life, and states that he played Cooper as gay.  So why five seasons of "crumbs" that led nowhere?  Fans were irate when the showrunners were too cowardly to let Oliver come out.

Daniel already has two strikes against him (baseball metaphor, har har) for five years of queerbaiting.  Let's check on his other projects.

He was born in 2003 in Los Angeles, and began acting at age nine in the short Geisho (2010): a man (Horatio Sanz) wants to become the world's first male geisha.  Kind of gender-fluid.

Next, a 2013 episode of Burn Notice, which, I discovered today, is not about a hospital burn unit, in spite of the misleading title.  It's about a spy who was "burned" (fired). How the heck are potential viewers supposed to know that?   Daniel plays the young version of focus character Michael (Jeffrey Donovan). 

More after the break