"How to Get to Heaven from Belfast": Dark secrets, twisting plots, hunky guys, bulges, and d*cks. And the Irish countryside

 Link to the n*de photos

Belfast has the reputation of being cold, dark, and grim.  Its main tourist attractions are the Peace Wall,  dedicated to the memory of the Troubles, and a museum showcasing the Titanic.  Not many people's idea of a proper craic, innit?  But it has a thriving LGBTQ community, with bars, restaurants, saunas, and a community center.

I heard that How to Get to Heaven from Belfast (2026), on Netflix, is a must-see, and I liked Lisa McGee's previous series, Derry Girls, so here we go with Episode 1, "The Wake" (a party held after the funeral, usually with a viewing of the body).

Prologue:  Night, with a view of the city.  Three people with flashlights find their way to isolated cabin, where a teenage girl is sitting in a pit.

Scene 1: 20 Years later: In Belfast, the highly butch Dara explains why she hates her mother in a very tight closeup, so tight that it is painful to watch.  The camera pulls away, and she is telling all this to the server at a coffee shop!

Meanwhile, Soccer Mom Robyn is driving while her two bratty preteens squabble in the back seat. She finds them so annoying that she bangs her head repeatedly against the steering wheel until it's bloody -- no, just a fantasy.

In London, Saoirse (pronounced Sheer-Shah), a writer for a hit tv show about a woman solving murders, is at lunch with two women and a man, who tell her that she should write stories with no murders. "But the name of the show is Murder Code!"  She finds the suggestion ridiculous, and storms off, bringing the man with her.  She wanted to be a playwright, but now she's writing crap.  If the man is actually her boyfriend, heterosexual identity established at Minute 7.

All three get emails from the sister-in-law of their friend Greta: she has died.  They decide to go to her village in Donegal County, Ireland, for the wake.

Scene 2: Butch Dara and gives her sister instructions on how to take care of their super-cranky mother.  She is picked up by Soccer Mom Robyn.  They get all weepy when Greta's favorite song plays on the radio: "Hot in Herre" (2002) by Nelly, whose name is a homophobic slur but is not actually homophobic.

While writer Saoirse flies in from London, she looks at photos of the Dead Friend Greta and her boyfriend on her phone.  Heterosexual identity established at minute 10.  The flight attendant morphs into the girl in the pit,  probably Greta, and asks "Can I tell you a secret?"  They must have killed the guy who kidnapped Greta and put her in the pit.

Scene 3: The two friends pick up Writer Saoirse at the Belfast Airport, and criticize her outfit. They discuss why they want to go to the wake: to assuage their guilt over not contacting their friend for 20 years, and to get a break from their current crises (hating their Mom, kids, and job, respectively).  Then on through the scenic countryside to Donegal (100 miles from Belfast, but in another country). 

Back story: Writer Saiorse is getting married, but not to the guy she had lunch with.  Her fiance is Seb (Tom Basden).  The other two are pushing their way into being bridesmaids.

Scene 4: Uh-oh, at a gas station, they put petrol instead of diesel in the tank, so they stall a few miles from their destination, Knockdara (fictional).  The Recovery Service guy, Liam (Darragh Hand), makes a joke about Belfast people being violent and dangerous, which doesn't sit well with two of them.  He flirts with Writer Saoirse.

The car needs its whole fuel system replaced, so Liam tows them into town, and the flirting continues.

Turns out that he knew their dead friend, Greta!  Her husband, Owen, is his boss!  Well, it's a small town.

Scene 5: The flamboyant desk clerk at the hotel (maybe Owen Mallon, top photo) also knew Greta, and explains how she died: fell down a flight of stairs and broke her neck.

Instead of trying to walk the 2-3 miles to her house, he suggests they spend the night and set out the morning.  They could go to the 1990s-themed disco, "The Naughty Nineties."  It's so popular that teenagers bus in from Letterkenny (I didn't know that was a real place).

Scene 6: In the hotel room, Writer Saiorse checks Dead Friend Greta's Facebook page. It's been taken down.  This disturbs here.  

And Soccer Mom Robyn gets a phone call that consists of eerie static.

They all take showers (no lady parts).  We see a mysterious tattoo on their back, neck, and wrist.

Scene 7: At dinner, they discuss how "you can't go home again."  Time changes you.  The woman who died was not the girl they knew in high school; she was a stranger.

 Writer Saoirse goes outside to smoke and be depressed, and runs into Liam, now a member of the Garda.  He explains that he works for his uncle at the auto shop, and for their friend Greta's husband as a cop.  So, are you also the mayor and town veterinarian?  And the car is ready.

They gaze at each other for a long time.  I don't get it.  There were three women in the car.  How did he decide that he was only interested in Saoirse?  Is it recognizing your soul mate?  

He walks away, then returns to give her a slip of paper.  She thinks it's his phone number, but it's the bill for the car service, har har.

More after the break

Bryce Biederman: Stuntman for the X-Men, b*tt double for a time traveler, Jersey boy with a boyfriend and a d*ck

  

Link to the n*de photos

Sometimes misdirections are deliberate.  The witch jumping into the lake in the first scene of The Way Home is obviously meant to draw in viewers interested in the paranormal.  The cover blurb of Samuel, with what looks like two boys kissing, is an obvious attempt to draw in gay viewers. 

But the photo (on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends)  is just a matter of misinterpretation.  It certainly looks like a teenager (Bryce Biederman) assaulting another boy: notice the masculine face, the short hair, and the shirt and pants.  But I doubted that it was a boy right away.  They're not in the right position, and in movies, men outside of prison are always assaulted by women (and the act is treated as a joke: "Why are you complaining?  You were so lucky!").  

It's a flashback scene in The Housemaid (2025), where focus character Millie kills a fratboy who is assaulting her classmate -- the girl is actually wearing an androgynous school uniform, and her hair is lost in the shadows.  But my belief -- however momentary -- that a gay assault was happening, plus the fratboy's very nice backside,  prompted me to research actor Bryce Biederman.   

Bryce was born in 1990 in Weehawken, New Jersey., across from midtown Manhattan, and now he lives in Garrison, across the river from West Point.  He got a B.A. in Cinematography and Film Production, with a minor in psychology, from American University in 2013, then went to stunt school.

He's had a few acting gigs, such as Coleman Lawson, a coffee shop employee murdered on Gotham (2013),  but  his career is been mostly in stunting.  111 stunting credits listed on the IMDB, too many to investigate for gay content.  The most important are X-Men Apocalypse (2016),  Okja (2017), The Irishman (2018), and West Side Story (2021), where he stunt doubled for John Michael.

 

Gay fans might be more interested in his work on The Time Traveler's Wife (2022) as Theo James' stunt double.  He falls n*de out of a window into heavy traffic.

Don't worry, Theo James shows us his real d*ck and backside in less dangerous scenes (on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

Bryce has provided the action scenes (and occasionally the nude scenes) for may male actors, including Alan Cumming, Bobby Cannavale, Carter Jenkins, Frank Grillo, Hugh Dancy, Jack Huston, Josh Bowman, Peter Scanavino, Ryan Cooper, Ryan Mccartan, John Berenthal...I got tired of listing them all.

More after the break

My Boyfriend and I Play "Fighting Prince of Donegal"

This is the Scholastic Book Club edition of Fighting Prince of Donegal, by Robert T. Reilly.

It may not look like much now, but when I was in fourth grade at Denkmann Elementary School, it appeared among the selections offered by the Scholastic Book Club.  I was entranced.

This was no wimpy fairy-tale prince in love with a princess.  He was a Fighting Prince, strong and powerful.  I had never heard of Donegal, but it was obviously a mystical, distant country with castles on high mountains, outlined against an orange moon.

My boyfriend Bill and I both ordered copies.  They wouldn't arrive for four to six weeks.

We talked about the book every day.  Would the Prince have muscles?  Would he have a best man?  Would he rescue his best man, who would then sigh "My hero?" and melt into his arms?

We made swords out of cardboard and played "Fighting Prince of Donegal."  My brother got to be the villain, who would lock Bill in the dungeon (the lilac bushes outside my house) so I could rescue him.

We often talked about what the Prince looked like.  If you read the ad very carefully, you could see that the book was originally published in 1958 and called Red Hugh, Prince of Donegal.  That meant a red-head.  He must look something like this.

Or, from an adult point of view:

We looked up Donegal in the Golden Book Encyclopedia.  It was a county in Ireland, on the northeast coast.

There was a book in the Denkmann Library called Donegal Stories, but it was all fairy tales, which we  hated.

Would those books ever arrive?

Bill's big brother Tom told us that a couple of years ago, Disney made a movie version of The Fighting Prince of Donegal, starring Peter McEnery.

"Did he rescue a boy or a girl?" I asked expectantly.

More after the break

Cyrus and TJ: Are the "Andi Mack" boyfriends gay in real life? What about Jonah? Or Bowie? With some backsides and d*cks

  

Link to the n*de photos

Andi Mack (2017-19) was the first Disney teencom with an identified gay character: Cyrus (Joshua Rush), originally dating Iris, comes out in Episode 3.11 (2019).  He befriends TJ Kippen (Luke Mullen), a sarcastic, mean-spirited basketball star, teaches him to be nicer, and admits him to the friend group.  Everyone assumes that TJ is straight, so they are just good buddies.

Then, in the last scene of the series finale, Episode 3.20 (2019),  they hold hands.  In close up, partially obscured by the slats of a bench. Can you even tell what they're doing?  It seems rather tepid, but caused widespread celebration in LGBTQ communities as a milestone, the first canonical gay couple in a Disney tv series.

Wait -- Kelvin and Keefe held hands in Righteous Gemstones Episode 2.7, and fans were saying "So what?  Straight guys can hold hands.  It doesn't mean that they're gay."

And if that's all it takes, Craig and Eric of Drake and Josh held hands in 2008.  

But we'll go with "the first," and conduct some research to see if either Cyrus or TJ is gay in real life.  (And look for other gay characters and nude photos, of course).

Joshua Rush (Cyrus) went on to voice the titular character in Where's Waldo (2019-21), based on the book series where you have to find the red-striped guy in a crowd, then got his degree from Penn State and moved into politics.  As of this writing, he is the Communications Director of the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee. In my day you would never dream of limping your wrist like that.

He announced that he was bisexual on social media a few weeks after the hand-holding episode aired.

There's an *xplicit photo on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends..

Luke Mullen: After Andi Mack, Luke played a straight guy in four episodes of the teencom Side Hustle, a fratboy playing volleyball on the beach in the Barbie movie, and other straight or not-identified characters.

Here he prepares to be splattered in an episode of the anthology series American Horror Stories.

More after the break