Harris Dickinson: Grindr hookup, rent boy, male model, wrestler, heterosexual. Don't forget: he's heterosexual.

 For movie night last Friday, we saw See How They Run (2022), a whodunit about a murder that takes place during the West End run of Agatha Christie's The Mouse Trap.  Harris Dickinson played Richard Attenborough, the lead (spoiler alert: he didn't do it).  Checking him out on Google, I found a lot of articles emphasizing that, in spite of his numerous gay roles, he's STRAIGHT.  No, he doesn't think that playing gay is a threat to his masculinity, he says, "sitting in a very normal meeting room in a very normal London office block."  Ulp...let's check out some of these gay roles.

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Beach Rats (2017): a Brooklyn boy has a girlfriend, but at night he hooks up with older men.  Why older?  Sounds like the long-outdated slur that older gay men recruit boys into their "deviant lifestyle."   When his friends find out, he claims that he's just trying to extort drugs from them, but they don't believe him, so he beats up his gay friend, leaves him for dead, and deletes all of his gay stuff.  OMG, that sounds horrifying.

Postcards from London (2018). The trailer shows a young man looking uncomfortable as an old perv gropes (close up of a wrinkled hand squeezing him through his clothes).  More old guys recruiting boys?  He's coerced into providing a specialized sort of sexual service, recreating classic paintings by Titian, Caravaggio, and so on. Except he faints during each display.  Doesn't sound as bad as Beach Rats, but still, manipulation, coercion, innocence corrupted by gay guys.  Plus there's a girl.

Trust (2018): A tv series about the kidnapping of J. Paul Getty III, 16-year old heir to the Getty Empire.  I thought he was gay.  He's been straightened here, although the butler Khan is "ambiguously gay."

The King's Man (2020): A review in Southern Gay News said that watching this was "like being slapped in the face nonstop for 130 minutes." Fetishization of violence, characters dispatched with glee, rampant homophobia,  a drooling bi predator, horrendous gay panic.  Harris plays Conrad, son of the Duke of Oxford, in 1914 Russia, who is trying to kill Rasputin in the most homophobic way he can think of.

Triangle of Sadness (2022).  Harris plays a male model on a cruise that turns deadly.  I think all of the characters here are straight.

See How They Run (2022).  Harris' character is straight, but there's an original character, a feminine gay stereotype who introduces his young, hot boyfriend as his nephew.  Another old perv!  He's never identified as gay: you have to go by femme and innuendo.  Of course, people were closeted in the real 1950s, but this 1950s is racism free, so why can't it be homophobia-free, too?

The Iron Claw (2023): A biopic of the Von Erich brothers, professional wrestlers in the 1980s, played by Harris, Zac Efron, and Jeremy Allen White.  I think this one is Zac.  World of Reel called it "The most depressing film of the year...all about death, curses, and family."  Wait -- family is depressing?  Have they been to a Thanksgiving Dinner at my parents' house?  "Devastating, gruelling, and heartbreaking." 

I'm not even going to check to see if any of the Von Erichs were gay.

A Murder at the End of the World (2023). A tv series about an amateur sleuth trying to solve a murder in Iceland.  Hey, Reyjkavik is a bustling metropolis of 300,000 people!  Harris plays Bill, who Wikipedia calls her ex-partner (business partner?), but Autostraddle calls her ex-boyfriend.  So, if Bill is straight, why is he in bed with a man?  They look alike; maybe they're brothers?  Wait -- is that a nightgown or a t-shirt?  Maybe a trans woman?

See also: Nude photos of Harris Dickinson