"Wet Hot American Summer," Episode 1.5: a satyr in a loincloth, a gaslighted gay couple, and learning how to use your penis

 

Wet Hot American Summer (2001) was set in a summer camp in Maine in 1981: after all of the kids have left, the counselors hold a talent show and hook up. Two guys fall in love and get married.  I've never seen it, so I don't know if the sequence was performed as a homophobic joke or not. 

Undaunted by the 38% Rotten Tomato rating, Netflix produced two Wet Hot tv series, a prequel and a sequel.  Wet Hot American Summer: 10 Years Later catches up with the original characters and new faces in 1991. I reviewed Episode 1.5, "King of the Camp," where pompous, snarly, mean-tempered new character Deegs (Skyler Gisondo) and Andy (Paul Rudd) compete for the title.

Link to the NSFW version.

Scene 1: The camp is in session, so there are kids as well as counselors.  Andy's friend points out that he was named King of the Camp every year back in the day, but now the honor goes to that mean-tempered kid, Deegs.  At that moment Deegs throws some trash at them, while his friend Seth does a "fucking" gesture.  So he plans to humiliate them with anal sex? 

They argue. "Fuck off!" "Suck my balls."  Dude, you're a 30 year old man telling a kid to suck your balls.  Doesn't that sound a little odd?  

Finally Andy challenges Deegs to a "King of the Camp Duel."

Scene 2: The King of Camp contest begins with drummers, acrobats, a band dressed like road warriors, and fire dancers (both ladies, darn it).  The contestants are in cages, Andy dressed like a Viking and Deegs dressed like a satyr. Whoa, nice muscles, but shoving your hand into your loincloth is a little distracting. Not to worry, Skyler Gisondo was 21 years old.

Scene 3: First contest: bag race. Deegs loses his bull horns but keeps the loincloth.

Scene 4:  Next: get dizzy and race with an egg in a spoon.  

Scene 5:  The guys run across the quad for the next contest.  Skyler bouncing around in that satyr outfit is rather sexy.  Ok, here it is: make up a song about dinosaurs.  Andy gets weepy about their extinction, while Deegs sings "The Dinosaur Stomp."  

Scene 6: Next: hot pepper eating. Whoops, they're tied.

Scene 7: Next: Man on Fire.  The guys are set on fire, and must walk as far as they can before being overcome.  Hopefully they're wearing fireproof outfits? And using stunt doubles?   They both walk about five feet, and collapse at the same time. But Deegs is an inch ahead, so he wins!  He hugs his bud Seth (Joey Bragg), tells Andy to "suck it," and rushes to collect his prizes. 

As the loser, Andy has to endure the walk of shame, being called names and hit and kicked by the campers.  He complains: "This is total bull jizz!  I should have won!" 

There are six other intertwining plotlines:

1. Yaron and his wife want Victor (Ken Marino) to "shove a baby into her with my penis."   His problem is: he's never had sex, because "my dick has two left thumbs."  His bunkmate, Neil, offers to show him how to use it.  First, to increase his confidence, Neil gives him a makeover ("What do you think I've been taking those night classes at Barbizon for?").  Then he plops a mattress down and tells Victor to pretend it's a woman. "Slower...don't look like you're going to throw up...smile at her."  He helps, lying on top and thrusting, until Victor has an orgasm.  Ok, you guys just had a dry hump.

2. Suzie's boyfriend Garth (Jai Courtney) got an acting gig, and is leaving the camp -- and her -- for eight months in Budapest. 

3. A girl tells Coop (Michael Showalter) that she doesn't want him hanging out with Katie anymore, He immediately runs into Katie, who wants to have sex with him.

4. McKinley (Michael Ian Black) discovers that his nanny, Renata, has cut all of his faces out of the couple photos, and plans to "Kill the Baby" at 2:00 pm.  He rushes to tell his husband Ben (Adam Scott.  At that moment, she emerges with a cake.  She was planning a surprise anniversary party for them!  She needed the photos for an anniversary montage, and "Kill the Baby" is the band she hired! Hubbie calls him a "paranoid asshole" and rushes off.  But she confesses that he was right: "I wanted to make you insane, so no one will believe you as I destroy your family."  

5. Mark (Mark Feuerstein, top photo) keeps a journal of the women he's screwed, upsetting his girlfriend.

6. A journalist shows up at Mikey's door to discuss "him." His wife insists that he (Dax Shepard) not talk to anyone, or "he will kill us." Snooping in the bathroom, the journalist finds a photo of the camp from 1921, with "Ronnie Reagan" among the campers.  This is 1991, just after the Reagan administration, but why would Reagan not want people to know he attended the camp?

Beefcake: Only Skyler, but he is extensively on display.

Heterosexism: Four of the seven plotlines involve heterosexual romance.

Gay Characters: McKinley and Ben.

Gay Subtexts: Victor and Neil (Plot #1).  Maybe Deegs and Seth (primary plot).  Neither expresses any interest in women.

My Grade: The contests were very impressive, and some of the plotlines were interesting, even without the back story. A-

There are four penises on display in the version of the review on  Righteous Gemstones Beefcake and Boyfriends.

Ahhhh! The Horrible, Heteronormative, Offensive, Disgusting, No-Good End of the Marvel Cinematic Universe

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a huge series of movies starring Marvel superheroes, who all know each other, interact with each other, and refer to events and situations from previous movies, so you have to watch all of them in order to understand what the heck is going on.  Every origin-story movie involves a superhero meeting, losing, and winning his True Love.

1. Iron-Man, aka Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), head of the giant corporation that provides technological stuff, falls in love with his former assistant Pepper.  They retire, move to a farm, and have a kid.

2. Captain America, aka Steve Rogers (Chris Evans, top photo), a World War II soldier turned into an Axis-fighting machine, falls in love with Peggy, one of the scientists working on him.  He's trapped in an iceberg for 70 years, leaving Peggy to grow old. But when he emerges, he still hangs out with her.  

3. Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) falls in love with Hope, daughter of the scientist who invented his shrinking suit. He has a daughter from another relationship, I think.

4. Hawkeye, aka Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner, left), retired from the superhero business to move to a farm, get married, and have some kids.

5. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt, below), leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy crime-fighting team, falls in love with his coworker Zamora.  

6. The Hulk, aka Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), had a True Love in one move, another in a second, and then fell in love with fellow superhero The Black Widow.

7. Superhero Scarlet Witch, aka Wanda Maximoff, fell in love with  the android Vision (Paul Bettany), but he was killed.

There are lots more, but I'm getting tired. 

After the origin story, the True Loves are barely mentioned, especially in the ensemble movies titled the Avengers.  But apparently they were always there, forming the basic motive for each superhero's life and work, and at the end of the movie series they come roaring back like the Second Coming of Christ.

An ongoing plot arc is an attempt to track down all of the Infinity Stones, like Tolkien's Rings of Power but much more powerful, because an evil demagogue named Thanos wants to use them to wipe out 50% of all sentient life in the universe (that's right, I said the universe).  The team tries to keep him from getting the stones, then tries to stop him, but in Avengers: Infinity War (2018), he succeeds.  Snap!  Half of the sentients in the universe crumble into dust, including a lot of superheroes and their True Loves, but never both.

Imagine the chaos!  We're so interconnected that civilization would definitely collapse.  But here the economies and governments of the world seem fine; survivors are traumatized, but they manage to put up memorials to their lost True Loves and go back to high school classes, museums, pop music, and restaurants. There's actually a scene in a group therapy session, where a guy talks about his first date since the Snap -- with another guy, making him the first and only identifiable gay person in any Marvel Universe movie.

In Avengers: End Game (2020), the surviving superheroes figure out how to go back in time and prevent Thanos from getting the Infinity Stones, thus bringing everyone back.  There are lots of tracking each other down and "we need to work together" scenes, and a long, long, loooo-ng battle.  The Snap is reversed, everyone returns, and the long, long, looo-ng batle continues, involving everyone who has ever appeared in any movie fighting with swords, monsters, and energy blasts. 

I fell asleep.  When I awoke, the battle was over, Thanos was dead, and about 20  superheroes are sitting by a lake, saying "I miss her" about True Loves who died before the Snap or during the battle (a slight exaggeration, but I did count five "I miss her" statements). 

But the movie isn't over: we have another 45 minutes depicting 2,000 other superheroes reuniting with their True Loves and setting up heterosexual nuclear families. Again and again and again!

Just when you think everyone is paired off or missing "her," Captain America has to go back in time to return the Infinity Stones to their proper place, so the whole thing doesn't happen again.  Except he comes back as an old man.  He explains that he decided to stay in 1947, reunite with his True Love, and live the next 80 years with her.  We close to the two in their 1940s Levittown tract house, dancing and gazing into each other's eyes.  

I get it; the sole purpose of being a superhero is to provide men and women with an opportunity to gaze into other's eyes forever.  This is the meaning of life, our sole reason for existing.  Gay people absolutely do not exist. Do you have to rub it in, over and over and over and over and over?

To be fair, Thor doesn't settle down on a farm with his True Love or miss Her.  He joins the Guardians of the Galaxy, fighting intergalactic crime with Peter Quill and Drax the Destroyer (both of whom miss Her).  

The Adam Devine-Zac Efron Bromance: Platonic most of the time, but gay around the edges

 

I swear, up until this moment, I thought it was Zak.

 Zac Efron sprang to fame as Troy Bolton in the Disney mega-hit High School Musical and its sequels (2006, 2007, 2008).  He spent the next ten years trying to move beyond his Disney prettyboy persona, with raunchy comedies and gritty dramas (he even played serial killer Ted Bundy).  And by heavily publicizing a bromance with Adam Devine, the star of the raunchy Workaholics series on Comedy Central.

The bromance probably began, or at least became part of their public personas,  when the Workaholics guys did a cameo for Neighbors (2014), playing stoner frat guys from an earlier generation.  Zac and Seth Rogan, the stars of Neighbors, returned the favor: in a promo video for the Season 4 finale, they apply to become the guys' new cubicle mates. Zac gives Adam a lap dance and gets the job.

In Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (2016), Adam and Zac play gay-subtext brothers who for some reason can't get girlfriends. Can't two of the hottest men on the planet just walk up to anyone they like and ask?   They eventually find some girls who will accept their quirks, but still, their non-fraternal love for each other shines through.  And off camera, after two years of trying, Adam finally got a chance to see Zac's penis.

And the rest of him.

The relationship has cooled since 2020.  After all, Adam is married and expecting a child, so he doesn't have much time for pretending to be in love with Zac.  Or was it all a pretense?

There are nude photos of Zac on the NSFW site. 

Alice and Tommy

Most 1970s comedies involved people who lived in big cities like Minneapolis (Mary Tyler Moore), Indianapolis (One Day at a Time), Chicago (Bob Newhart), and New York (The Jeffersons). .  But not Alice  (1976-85). Linda Lavin played Alice Hyatt, an aspiring singer en route from New Jersey to L.A. to jump-start her career, when her car stalled outside Mel's Diner in "small town" Phoenix (it actually had a sizeable population).

She took a "temporary" waitress job that lasted nine years, and meanwhile bonded with her boss, gruff, beefy Mel (Vic Tayback) and fellow waitresses: gutzy Flo (Polly Holliday), whose risque catchphrase "Kiss mah grits!" became a phenomenon; and mousy Vera (Beth Howland).  Alice also had a cute, wisecracking son, Tommy (Philip McKeon, left). 

Three ladies, a kid, and a bear?  I wasn't impressed.  Besides, Alice ran on Sunday nights, after the oldster-favorites 60 Minutes and All in the Family, opposite Battlestar Galactica or Chips.  I didn't start watching regularly until about 1980, when it was squeezed between One Day at a Time and The Jeffersons. 

It was a pleasant surprise.  The banter between the four regulars was sharp and witty, the plotlines were not terribly heterosexist, and there was ample beefcake: cowboys and muscular truck driver patrons of the diner, the various men dating the regulars, and Tommy's school friends.  Hunky Denny Miller (right) even played a gay character, the school coach: after he comes out, Alice hesitates about allowing Tommy to go on an overnight camping trip with him, but finally relents. Score one for tolerance!

Speaking of Tommy, during the last half of the series, he was 15-19 years old, the prime time for teen idols.  But he didn't get much play in the teen magazines, just a couple of shirtless and swimsuit shots.

This was the era of Scott Baio, Willie Aames, and Billy Warlock, so maybe he lacked the muscles to make a big splash.

There's a Philip McKeon hookup story on Tales of West Hollywood.

Several of the cast members were gay or gay friendly.  Vic Tayback and Polly Holliday were both rumored to be bisexual, and Phil McKeon, who has never married, is rumored to be gay (gay or not, he's even more handsome than when he was playing Tommy).

 His tv mom,  Linda Lavin, has performed with the Orlando, Florida Gay Chorus, and in 2012, she played the mother of a gay son in The Lyons on Broadway.

"Scavengers' Reign": Heterosexual romance and torture porn on a surreal alien world

 

The animated series Scavengers' Reign (2023), on MAX, is being promoted as inventive, original, terrific, gorgeous, basically the best thing that has ever existed in the history of the universe.  It features a spaceship that crashes on a planet infested by surreal creatures, most of which want to eat you, control your mind, or both. Three couples landed in separate regions and have separate adventures:

1. Sam (Bob Stephenson) and Ursula, a male-female couple.

2. Levi and Azi, a lady and her robot.

3. Kamen (Ted Travelstead), who is being controlled by an alien entity as he ruminates excessively over his dead girlfriend, This is really, really annoying: they kiss, hug, gaze into each other's eyes, show off their wedding rings, kiss some more, have cute being-in-love adventures ad nauseam.  Heterosexual romance is the meaning of life, I get it.

Top photo: Someone who appears in an article about the Scavengers' Reign cast, but not in the cast list on IMDB and Wikipedia.  I saved the file as "Okiewerte," but googling that name yields only "Did you mean Okinawa?", so I don't know who he is, or who he plays.

I went through several episodes until I couldn't take it anymore.  Only "Demeter" features someone outside the main six.  Terry, I think (Skyler Gisondo) wakes up in a stasis tube in the crashed ship to find monsters fighting each other.  Once they see him, they attack, so he has to leave the ship: barefoot, with no food, water, or shelter.  He trudges across the alien planet, bloodying his feet, getting attacked, almost dying of thirst.  Finally Kamen (the one with the lost love) finds him and promises to help -- but his alien monster master kills him!  

So you spend half an episode torturing the poor guy, then kill him.  I'm sick.  The only thing worse than torture porn is heterosexist torture porn.

My grade: F-

To get the bad taste of this debacle out of my mouth, I posted a lot of pics of Skyler Gisondo and his buds on the Beefcake and Boyfriends site.

Orphan Black: Male Nudity, Gay Characters, and Clones

Orphan Black (2013-) is a Canadian science fiction series about a con artist named Sarah Manning who discovers that she is a clone, created through Project Leda by an evil corporation called the Dyad Institute.  There are clones scattered all over Canada, Britain, and Finland.  Some are self-aware, some are not.  They have monitors to keep them in line.

Along with some of her fellow clones and allies, Sarah founds the Clone Club and tries to discover the sinister reason for her creation, while trying to avoid capture by the evil Neolutionists and assassination by an anti-clone hate group, the Prolethians.

In case that's not enough mythology for you, there are also Castor clones, with suspect motives, secret government installations in Finland, secret alliances, mistaken identities.  Sarah has a daughter, the only known offspring of a clone, drawing the attention of even more nefarious corporations, mad scientists, and clone liberation groups.

Oh, and Sarah has taken the identity of her clone Beth, a police officer, so there are police cases to deal with, plus druggie ex-boyfriends and miscellaneous scalawags.

 Felix (Jordan Gavaris, left), Sarah's foster brother, is a street kid, hustler, wannabe artist, and gay.  He doesn't have a lot of romantic interaction, although he does date the transman clone Tony (Tatiana Manslany).

There is also a lesbian clone, Cosima (also Tatiana Manslany -- these are clones, so one actor plays several characters).  A graduate student at the University of Minnesota, she dates several women through the course of the series.







Or you can just watch for for the beefcake.  Orphan Black pushes up the nudity factor, in male clones, allies, and kid brothers.

1. Ari Millen (top photo) as the evil Prolethian Mark Rollins and several other clones.

2. Jordan Gavaris

3. Dylan Bruce as Paul Dierden.  When Sarah takes on Beth's identity, she has to deal with Paul, Beth's boyfriend and monitor.

4. Kevin Hanchard as Art Bell, Beth's police partner.

5. Michael Mando (left) as Vic, Sarah's drug-dealing ex-boyfriend.

6. Josh Vokey as Cosima's classmate at the University of Minnesota, who eventually joins the Scoobies.

7. Kristian Bruun as Donnie, husband of the clone Allison (Tatiana Manslany).

8. Justin Chatwin as Donnie's drug supplier.

9. Michiel Huisman as Cal, Sarah's ex-boyfriend and the father of her daughter.

10. Daniel Kash as Tomas.  It would take too long to explain.

In the U.S., Orphan Black airs on BBC America.

Eerie, Indiana: Omri Katz, Paranormal Investigator

Israeli actor Omri Katz played J.R.'s son on Dallas (seen here hugging his gay-vague nanny, played by Christopher Atkins), and a scientist's son zapped into a world of sentient dinosaurs in Adventures in Dinosaur City.  But he's probably most famous for the gay-vague classic Eerie Indiana (1991-92).

It lasted for only 17 episodes (plus an eight-episode spin-off starring Daniel Clark), but it is still remembered and discussed by fans.  One of the first of the teen-paranormal series of the 1990s, it drew on Twin Peaks (1990-1991) to depict a small town with an overarching mystery to be solved, with minor mysteries along the way.

Marshall Teller (Omri) moves with his parents to a small town in Indiana where weird things happen.  Tupperware containers keep you alive forever. Time stops.  ATMs aren't what they seem. There's a tornado every year on the same date.

A world full of bizarre events, where everyone has a secret agenda and nothing is what it seems?  That's the life of every kid, of course, but it also reflects the journey of gay boys as they try to negotiate the mine-field of adult heterosexism, the constant "What girl do you like?" and "You'll meet a girl someday."

Marshall pairs up with local kid Simon Holmes (11-year old Justin Shenkarow) to investigate. They are often assisted by mysterious grayhaired boy, who has no name and no memory of his past, but calls himself Dash X (16-year old Jason Marsden, right).  But more often he has a hidden agenda of his own.

There were few girl-crazy plotlines -- neither Simon nor Dash X so much as glances at a girl -- but there's lots of captures and daring rescues.  However, Marshall remains just a close friend with Simon, while he is quite obviously attracted to the infuriating, mysterious, powerful yet somehow vulnerable Dash X.  If they had more time, the two might have fallen in love.  Unfortunately, the series ended before they could unravel the mystery or develop the homoromance, leaving viewers with more questions than answers

After the excellent "things are not what they seem" Pleasantville (1993), the Halloween comedy Hocus Pocus (1993), and a tv movie, Omri Katz moved to Israel, where he appeared occasionally in short films (which sometimes feature nudity), including the gay-themed Journey into Night (2002).  He now works as a hairdresser in Los Angeles.

Justin Shenkarow remains an actor and producer with credits in Home Improvement, Picket Fences, W.I.T.C.H., and Aliens in America.  

I was promised hand-holding: A review of "Drunken History," Episode 3.13, "Space"

 

Drunk History (2013-2019) is a comedy series in which drunken comedians describe historical events to a narrator, who responds approvingly with smiles and laughter. Meanwhile they are acted out by guest stars (with the comedian providing the voices).  

Episode 3.15 has three segments: Carl Sagan falling in love with Ann Druyan, Wernher von Braun inventing rockets, and two Russian cosmonauts becoming the first humans in space. Jeffrey James Lippold (left) plays a Nazi soldier (bulge pics on the NSFW Site).

Plus the IMDB photos for the episode show  these guys hugging and holding hands. The one in front is Mark Gagliardi, who is listed only once, playing John F. Kennedy in Episode 3.13, "Space."  The other guy must be Nathan Fillion, playing Wernher von Braun.  So the two hooked up?

  I'll skip over the Carl Sagan hetero-romance and go straight to Werner. He grows up in Prussia and becomes a mild-mannered rocket scientist, looking at "heavenly bodies" and hoping to one day get there with his buds.

The juxtaposition of "heavenly bodies" and same-sex pals counts as a subtle queer code.

After the War, the Americans grab him, forgive his war crimes, and tell him to invent some more rockets.  But he takes time off to promote the space race, culminating in putting a man on the moon in 1969

Nice phallic rocket, but John F. Kennedy does not appear in the episode.

Further research reveals that the photo is from another episode.  Mark Gagliardi, uncredited, is holding hands with Derek Waters.  That's homoerotic, but I was promised Kennedy and Von Braun as Cold War boyfriends.

The third segment, about Russian cosmonauts going into space, had better deliver some gay subtexts.  Since it stars Adam Devine, I put the review on Righteous Gemstones Beefcake and Boyfriends

(I also threw in some nude photos of Nathan Fillion, so I don't confuse him with Derek Walters again)