Dylan Minnette and Braeden LeMasters: Let the Right One In

17-year old Dylan Minnette may be best known for his role as Kenny in Let Me In (2010), the American remake of Let the Right One In (2008).  He played the leader of a group of bullies who take a violent and arguably homoerotic interest in the androgynous young Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee), pushing him into the romance with a female vampire.

In the original novel and the Swedish version, the vampire is actually a castrated boy living as a girl, but Let Me In  heterosexualizes the romance by making her biologically female.  All that's left is the throwaway line "I'm not a girl," which mystifies Owen.

Pictured: Jimmy "Jax" Pinchak as another of the bullies terrorizing Owen.

The "bad guy" role was a change of pace for Dylan, who carefully establishes on the DVD commentary that he and Kodi were friends off camera.  Previously he was cast in "nicer" roles in such vehicles as The Year without a Santa Claus and Snow Buddies.

Several tv series with gay characters, including starring roles on Saving Grace, Awake, and a gay-themed episode of Law and Order: SVU. 

Dylan is best friends with 17-year old Braeden LeMasters (second from left), who played in the gay-themed Six Feet Under and in the gay-positive Easy A (2010) with Dan Byrd.  

Both are rumored to be gay in real life, but with so many heterosexual allies around, who knows?

Their band, the Feaver, also includes Zack Mendenhall on bass and Cole Preston on drums.  They've played at some prestigious venues, including the Chicago House of Blues, the Viper Room, and the Whiskey A-Go-Go (at an all ages event).  Their songs, including "The Formula," "Old School Man," and "In the City," are often not heterosexist.

Sea Hunt

You may remember Lloyd Bridges as the feisty octogenarian personal trainer Izzy Mandelbaum on Seinfeld, (1998), or airport supervisor Steve McCroskey in Airplane (1980).   Or for his roles in Blown Away, Hot Shots, Weekend Warriors, East of Eden, The Fifth Musketeer, How the West was Won, Roots, and 200 other movies and tv series.  But for the first generation of Boomer kids, he was Mike Nelson on Sea Hunt.

Produced by Ivan Tors, who also gave us the beefcake-heavy Flipper, Sea Hunt (1958) was about a scuba diver who traveled around, fighting Cooperstowne, rescuing people, exploring underwater caves, and instructing the public on diving safety.

Lloyd Bridges was an unlikely star, in his 40s with no previous scuba diving experience, and currently being subjected to Hollywood blacklisting for his participation in the Actors Lab, an alleged communist organization.  But the veteran of 20 years of action-adventure movies rose to the role, took scuba diving lessons, and ended up doing most of his own stunt work.

And all of his shirtless and semi-nude shots, displaying a massive chest on screen, in magazines, and in a long-running comic book series.

Going against the tradition of 1960s detective-adventure boyfriends (Hawaiian Eye, 77 Sunset Strip), Mike Nelson usually worked alone, but occasionally he had a buddy to dive with, and he rescued men as often as women.  Many future stars appeared on the show, including Leonard Nimoy (Star Trek), Larry Hagman (I Dream of Jeannie), and Lloyd's sons, Beau and Jeff (left).

True Jackson: The First Gay Character on Children's TV

Gay-coded adult men have been commonplace in children's television for many years, their gay-coded traits signifying laughable inferiority-- think of Mr. Moseby, the persnickety hotel manager on The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, or Mr. Bickles, the drama teacher who keeps getting his dreams crushed on Fairly Oddparents.  

But those characters were carefully heterosexualized, both by giving them fruitless attempts to gain the attention of "the ladies," and through the complete inability of any other character, juvenile or adult, to recognize even the most blatant gay stereotype.

Nickelodeon's True Jackson, VP (2008-2011) may have been the first juvenile program where the gay-coded adult was surrounded by characters who knew.  It was about a 15-year old girl (Keke Palmer, left) who becomes the vice president of the fashion company Mad Style.  She and her best friends, Lulu (Ashley Argota) and Ryan (Matt Shively, below), bring youthful joie de vivre to the struggling company.  The receptionist Oscar (Ron Butler, right), feminine, fabulously-dressed, and sarcastic, becomes True's confidant and gay bff.

Almost all gay male characters in comedies are extremely feminine receptionists, secretaries, hairstylists, or wedding planners, so Oscar would be nothing special.  Except he's in a teencom.  And no one ever asks about girlfriends, or suggests that he is inept at attracting "the ladies."  Everybody knows that he's gay.

He gets no heterosexual plotlines, and only one heterosexual statement: asked to comment on male attractiveness, he responds "How should I know?  I'm a dude."

The fan boards went wild with speculation.  Was the character "supposed to be gay"?  Was the actor gay?  Most said things like "Get real!  This is a kid's show!"

I didn't see any other gay texts or subtexts, not even a lesbian subtext between True and Lulu.  All other primary relationships were male-female, and plots returned obsessively to the hetero-romantic entanglements of the teens.  True dates Jimmy (Robbie Amell, top photo, later on Struck by Lightning), Lulu dates Mikey J (Trevor Brown); Ryan has a series of crushes before settling down with a girlfriend of his own.

But through it all Oscar sits at his receptionist desk, watching, commenting on the action, saying "We exist here, too."

See also: Some Assembly Required  and 10 Teen Hunks of Disney Summer Movies.

Struck by Lightning: A Big, Scary Gay Scandal

23-year old Chris Colfer, the gay actor who plays the uber-feminine Kurt on Glee, made waves in January 2013 when he wrote, produced, and starred in the black comedy Struck By Lightning.  He plays high schooler Carson Phillips, who doesn't display any romantic or erotic interest in anyone but is probably supposed to be gay.

Carson aspires to go to Northwestern University, major in journalism, and become an editor at The New Yorker (how's that for a specific goal?).

The best way to get into Northwestern?  Submit a literary magazine that he edited.
The best way to get good submissions?  Blackmail students into submitting.

I'm not sure that's logical, but there's scandal aplenty to draw from.

1. Claire (Sarah Hyland) is having sex with the brother of her boyfriend (Robbie Amell, below, previously of True Jackson VP), who also happens to be the coach.

2. Rich kid Nicholas (Carter Jenkins of Aliens in the Attic, top photo) is secretly gay, and involved with drama club queen Scott (Graham Rogers).
3. Dwayne (Matt Prokop) smokes pot.
4. Foreign-exchange student Emilio (Robert Aguirre) is really from San Diego.

Plus there's a nude photo, a Goth girl into S&M, a baby born out of wedlock, and addiction to prescription drugs.  Eventually the entire student body hates Carson.

To make matters worse,  Carson's application was "lost in the mail," so he doesn't get into Northwestern, and will have to attend community college (he didn't have a safety school?).  But it wasn't really lost in the mail, his crazy mother destroyed it so his dreams wouldn't be realized.

But it's all irrelevant anyway, since Carson is dead.  He's struck by lightning in the first scene.  All of his morally suspect skullduggery was futile.

But everyone in the school, including the kids who hate him, comes to the funeral.  Apparently he touched their lives. . .um. . .somehow.

I don't quite understand what the movie is getting at.  Is it the moral of The Simpsons: "Never try"?  Is it "Don't make your goals so darn specific?"  Is it revealing the sordid underbelly of a "perfect" high school?

And Chris Colfer wins the Uncle Tom Award for his depiction of being gay as a big, scary scandal.  Some 43 years after Stonewall. (At least Carson doesn't blackmail the gay kid).

Teen Beach Movie: Not Your Grandfather's Homoeroticism

Teen Beach Movie premiered with frenetic hoopla on the Disney Channel last month, and has been repeated many times since.  It reprises the premise of Pleasantville (1998), with Tobey Maguire as a teen who gets trapped in a 1950s sitcom.  Here the teenage Brady (Ross Lynch, #4 on my list of Unexpected Disney Channel Teen Hunks)  and his girlfriend McKenzie (Maia Mitchell) are trapped in the 1960s beach movie Wet Side Story.  

After becoming acclimatized to beach movie conventions, like you go in the water but never get wet, and you randomly break into choreographed song and dance routines, they draw the attention of the stars, Tanner (the bulgeworthy Garrett Clayton, Disney's Next Big Thing) and his girlfriend, thus upsetting the plot and jeopardizing their chances of getting home.

Meanwhile, there's a bitter -- yes, bitter -- conflict between the surfers and the bikers, and two villains, one flamboyantly gay-coded, build a diabolically fiendish Weather Machine to drive the teens away from the beach.

Back in the real world, McKenzie's evil aunt hatches a dastardly plot to send her to college. The horror!

Throughout, I was wondering:

1. Do we really need a parody of beach movies, a genre that ended in 1967, enjoyed by the grandparents of today's teenagers?

2. I'm all for sending girls a message of empowerment, but should that message really be "Don't go to college!  Stay on the beach and become a surf bum!"

3. In the original beach movies, Frankie Avalon, Jody McCrea, John Ashley, Tommy Kirk, Duane Hickman, and the rest of the guys wore swimsuits throughout.  Biceps and bulges were emphasized.  Why does Brady never once take his shirt off?  Tanner hangs around with his shirt unbuttoned.  The other stars remain fully clothed.

4. Why do all the songs sound like they came from the soundtrack of Grease?

5. A gay-coded villain?  Really?

6. The original beach movies were overbrimming with gay subtexts.  Frankie is torn between the wild homoerotic freedom of the surf and conventional wife-kids-house-job with Annette.  Here McKenzie is torn between the wild heterosexual freedom of the surf and college, while endless songs extol boys liking girls and encourage every boy to find a girl.

The only gay subtexts I could find were:
1. The gay villain.
2. Both of the male leads are extremely feminine.  Disney seems to have hired them explicitly because of their outrageous swishiness.
3. Butchy (John DeLuca), the leader of the bikers, doesn't express any heterosexual interest, and he has a homoerotic moment with Tanner when they decide to work together to save their friends.

David DeCoteau's Talking Dogs and Homoerotic Hunks

You probably know David DeCoteau from a practically endless number of horror movies in which heavily muscled guys lather up their pecs in the shower or lie next to each other in their underwear, while discussing their respective girlfriends.  That is, movies aimed squarely at an audience of gay men that pretend that gay people do not exist.  Kind of fun, in a pre-Stonewall closet way.

But David DeCoteau has just started producing and directing kids' movies.  I haven't seen any of them -- I don't think I actually want to -- but no doubt they are set in the same world, gay-free but overbrimming with muscle hunks.

1. Christmas Spirit (2011). A teenager who's lost the Christmas Spirit gets it back with the help of an angel. With Jason Brooks, Aaron Jagger, and Bryan Craig.

2. A Halloween Puppy (2012): A boy accidentally turns his mother's model-boyfriend into a puppy.  With Lucas Adams, Evan Crooks, and Ryan Greco (top left)


3.  A Talking Cat? (2013).  A single mom and a single dad, both with teenage male models in the family, fall in love, thanks to a talking cat.  With Justin Cone and Daniel Dannas (left).

4. An Easter Bunny Puppy (2013). A talking dog belonging to a boy with a male-model brother buries Easter eggs.  With Strider Ellis, Jason Faunt, Renton Pexa, Chris Petrovski (left), and August Roads.

5. A Talking Pony? (2013). More of the same, with a pony belonging to a male model. With Jason Faunt (left), Dillon Olny, and James Lastovic.

6. My Stepbrother is a Vampire? (2013).  A single mom and a single dad, one with a teenage daughter and the other with a teenage vampire-male model, fall in love. With Jud Birza, Seth Austin, Nick Galarza, and Cody Beverstock (top right).

Where does DeCoteau find them all?  And more to the point, why does he bother to fill his movies with them, even children's movies where the cast rarely unbuttons a button?