The Top Ten Ways to Dispatch the Young Allies

We fight together through stormy weather.
We're out to lick both crooks and spies!
We won't be stopped and we can't be stopped.
We are the Young Allies!

The Young Allies first appeared as a backup feature in Captain America #8 (1941), and soon spun off into their own 20-issue title (1941-1946).  They were extraordinarily popular during World War II, also appearing in in Complete Comics #2 (1943), Kid Komics #2-#10 (1943-1944), Amazing Comics #1 (1944), and, after the War, in Marvel Mystery Comics #75-83 (1946-47).

The group consisted of Bucky and Toro, the teen sidekicks of Captain America and the Human Torch,  plus four heavily stereotyped non-superheroic teenagers: the working-class stiff Knuckles (Percival Aloysius O'Toole), the swishy rich kid Jeff (Jefferson Worthing Sandervilt), the tubby Tubby (Henry Tinkle), and the minstrel-show reject Whitewash Jones.

Although they were out to "lick both crooks and spies," they mostly fought Nazi and Japanese super-villains.  Almost every cover illustration depicted at least two of the four non-superheros tied up and awaiting a horrifying doom, while Bucky or Toro or both rushed in to save the day.

In their regular titles, Bucky and Toro were constantly being rescued by their adult chums, so I guess they wanted to be the heroes for a change.

Of course, any male-male rescue in a world of men rescuing women is going to have a gay subtext.

Here are the ten most creative ways that super-villains conjured up to dispatch the Young Allies:

1, A tank of carbon monoxide. Wouldn't strangling them work just as well?  Notice that Knuckles is helping, so there will be three heroes, and they can pair off nicely at the end of the story.

2. All four face a stabbing machine.  Notice Adolph Hitler behind the Red Skull.  The covers have no connection to the stories inside, so I have no idea why the four are drawn as middle-aged rather than young teens. Maybe some sort of aging gas?

3. Just Jeff and Tubby this time, getting racked on a "Stretcher" machine run by skeletons in green pants.

4. Here Knuckles is helping Toro and Bucky rescue the other three from guillotines, but it actually looks like the evil Nazi cultists are planning to stab them.  Notice that Knuckles barely misses hitting Bucky in the butt.

5. Tubby and Jeff are facing death by giant octopus.

More after the break.

"Bodies": Time travel, a gay couple, social commentary, and a naked guy. What more do you want?

 

Bodies, a tv series on Netflix, has an intriguing premise: the same naked dead guy appears in four time periods, to be investigated by four different cops. I reviewed Episode 1.

London, 2023:  Shahara,  young South Asian woman, goes on a 10k run through town, then does some squishy "she's got a family!" stuff and goes to work -- she's a cop, trying to contain the crowds that are protesting a white supremacist parade.  

She  sees a teenage boy, Syed (Chaneil Kular), lurking with a gun -- and chases him across rooftops into Longharvest Lane -- where there's a naked corpse!  It has mysterious symbol on its wrist, and its eye is gouged out. She calls for backup.

London, 1942.  World War II, with the constant threat of air raids. A debonair detective named Charlie (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, below) double-takes at some ladies to show viewers that he's heterosexual, then goes to work in one of those open-plan, bevel-windowed offfices. We see some ladies oozing over him, then down to business: The Inspector thinks that he's accepting bribes. How else could he afford to "throw cash at every piece of skirt going into this building"?  Aw, I thought he seduced them with his debonair smile and huge penis.  Also he's under suspicion because he's Jewish.Hey, the lady from 2023 was Muslim.  It must be marginalized groups all the way down.  

Charlie twists the interrogation to cast suspicion on the Inspector, then flirt with some more ladies and get instructions from his super-secret spy commander: drive to Longharvest Lane to pick up a body.  He arrives at night, in the rain, and sees the same body that appeared in 2023!

London, 1890: The Gilded Age, but this is in the down-and-out Whitechapel neighborhood (the same place where Jack the Ripper prowled about).  The red-haired Inspector Hillinghead (Kyle Soler, top photo) has to arrest a young boy caught stealing a loaf of bread because he and his mum were starving to death, but after all, the law is the law.  Then all the street lights explode!   He and his assistant continue, look askance at some drag queen prostitutes, and find -- you guessed it -- the same body on Longharvest Lane. 

But this time there's a witness -- a photojournalist named Henry Ashe (George Parker) took some photos.  The Inspector wants them as soon as they've developed.  As he walks away, the Inspector stares, no doubt wondering what he was doing near the Rookery, an infamous gay brothel.

London, 2023: Other cops arrive at the crime scene near the white supremacy parade, and interrogate Shahara about the boy she was chasing -- no doubt he's the killer, right?  Shahara disagrees. Back at the station, they identify him as Syed Tahir, only minor crimes, no hint of radicalization.  His sister wants to know why that makes him a suspect: a) Islamophobia or b.) racism.  

Simultaneously, in 2023 and 1890, the cops watch the autopsy. (Body played by Tom Mothersdale.)  There was no blood at the crime scene, so he was killed elsewhere and brought to Longharvest Lane.  He was shot in the eye, but there's no bullet in his brain. . No DNA, fingerprints, or dental records on file (in 2023). . 

London, 1941:  Charlie finds the body, as he was ordered.  Just then an air raid siren goes off, so he shoves it into his car and drives away toward a shelter. Uh-oh, he's being followed. It's the Inspector who thought he was a spy, demanding a cut of the booty in the boot.  But before Charlie can shoot him, he is disintegrated by a bomb.  And people are milling around, so Charlie can't retrieve the body from the boot.

London, 2023: Shahara rushes to a restaurant just in time for her Dad's birthday dinner. The boss calls to tell her to get back on the case: they need someone to interrogate the suspect's sister, and another Muslim woman has a better chance of gaining rapport.  Besides, if they don't find Syed soon, jittery cops will be shooting every Muslim kid they see. 

The interview: Earlier today Syed called, freaked out, saying that people would think he killed someone, but he didn't.

More time slips after the break

Icarus: The boy who flew too close to the sun

I mentioned before that artists interested in depicting men without women around have only limited mythological and religious themes to choose from, and most involve tragedy.

Take the tragedy of Icarus:
According to Greek mythology, skilled inventor Daedalus and his son Icarus were imprisoned in Crete.  To escape, Daedalus made them wings from bird feathers, held together with wax.  The plan would have worked, except that Icarus flew too close to the sun, so the wax on his wings melted, and he plunged to his death.




In the ancient world, and through the Middle Ages, the story was used to illustrate the folly of over-confidence, trying to do more than you are able.  But more recent artists and writers have a different take: strive to be all that you can.  You may fail, but at least you were able to fly.

Or they just like to portray a muscular nude Athenian youth, before, during, or after his flight.

Daedalus and Icarus (1645), by French painter Charles LeBrun, shows the moment when Daedalus rouses Icarus to try on his wings.

Icarus and Daedalus (1869), by Lord Leighton shows the same scene, but now they're on top of the tower, and a thin swath of fabric keeps Icarus from full nudity.

The Lament for Icarus (1898), by Herbert James Draper, substitutes naked nymphs for the mourning Daedalus, but it has a particularly striking dead hero (modeled by Luigi di Luca)












More Icarus after the break

"Saltburn": Brideshead Revisted for the post-gay generation, with kink and penises

 

Whenever possible, I check out plot synopses, reviews, and trailers before watching a movie. Since Amazon Prime has been pushing Saltburn , I checked the reviews: "a spectacularly crafted masterpiece"; "brilliant"; "sick, savage, and satisfying"; "vibes forward" (I don't know what that means); "a febrile thriller."  Sounds like a mishmash of Brideshead Revisted and The Talented Mr. Ripley, a poor (well, middle class) boy longing for the unstated homoerotic tensions and sybaritic excesses of the Polo Club crowd.  Except set in 2016, not the Georgian Era.

Some of the reviews contained plot synopses, which allowed me to make my decision: don't watch, don't even look at a trailer.  Here's why. 

1.  The focus character, sort of, is decadent Oxford richster Felix, seen here eating a popsicle and reading a Harry Potter book like a modern day Sebastian Flyte.  He's played by Jacob Elordi, a bad boy in Euphoria.

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2, Felix feels sorry for the sob stories of poor-but-honest classmate Oliver (Barry Keoghan, who has received awards and appeared on a list of the greatest living Irish actors),  So "Come out to Brideshead...um, Saltburn with me."

Oliver doesn't want to date Felix, he wants to be him.  So he does something too disgusting to mention here.  Really, really disgusting.   I'm not kink shaming: probably 3/4ths of the population will get physically sick just by reading about it, but if it's your thing, fine.   Why not just give him a blow job?

3, Felix conquered, it's time to coerce Cousin Farleigh(Archie Madkwe) into sex.  Then Felix's sister, with another really, really disgusting kink.  

4. Felix gets tired of the lies, deceptions, and disgusting kink, and orders Oliver to leave Saltburn.  But Cousin Farleigh ends up dead!  Then Felix! Now, of course, Oliver has to stay to find more family members to do disgusting kink with. Then Venetia kills herself!

5. Oliver is running out of family members.  He tries to seduce Mom, but she refuses.  Wait, dude, you forgot Dad and the Butler  Then Dad, tired of the lies, deception, and dead family members, bribes Oliver to leave.  He does.

6, But when Dad dies, Oliver returns, forces Mom to sign Saltburn over to him, and kills her.  Now he is the master of Saltburn, so he dances around naked.  

Actually, this looks sort of interesting, an a post-gay, everybody-does-everybody way.  Maybe I'll watch, but skip over the disgusting kink scenes. Or I'll just fast forward to the last scene with Barry Keoghan dancing naked like a sybaritic sycophant.

See also: Revisiting Brideshead Revisited

Danny Pintauro: Gay Child Star Comes Out, Gets Engaged

We can roughly divide actors coming out into B.E. and A.E., before and after Ellen Degeneres said "Yep, I'm gay" in big red letters on the cover of Time Magazine (April 14, 1997).

B.E.: You may be out to family and friends, but you always pretended to be heterosexual in public.  If you were "accused" of being gay, you would issue an angry denial.  If you were outed by the media, your career was over.

A.E.: You would casually mention being gay in an interview, and continue to work, although you would never again be cast as action-adventure heroes or romantic leads.

Danny Pintauro came just at the end of the B.E. era.

Born in 1976, he was a popular child star of the 1980s, with a three-year run as Paul Ryan on the soap As the World Turns (1982-85), and starring roles in several movies, including the Stephen King thriller Cujo (1983), The Beniker Gang (1985), about five orphans on the run, and Timestalkers (1987), about time travel.

But he became famous for Who's the Boss (1984-92), starring Tony Danza as Tony Micelli, a housekeeper who brings joie de vivre to his uptight employer Angela Bower (Judith Light) and her horny mother (Katherine Helmond). 

Danny played Jonathan, a preteen who exhibits wide-eyed incomprehension to the sexual tension and double-entendre jokes.  As he entered adolescence, Danny's flamboyant femininity made it rather obvious that he was gay, but nevertheless he gamely followed the scripts and made Jonathan girl-crazy.

When Who's the Boss ended, Danny took time off from acting to finish high school and go to college, studying drama at Stanford.  He fully intended to resume his career.  

Then in 1997, the gossip magazine National Enquirer obtained pictures of Danny frolicking with a male friend, and threatened to out him.  Instead, he gave an interview: "I want Enquirer readers to be among the first to know I've 'come out' and am proud to say I'm gay."

Danny has had only three acting roles since, although he has appeared on Tony Danza's talk show and in a number of documentaries.  Former child stars often have trouble finding adult roles, and in 1997 coming out still made homophobic casting directors queasy. 

But on the bright side, Danny is living happily out of the limelight, managing a restaurant in Las Vegas, and engaged to travel agent Wil Tabares.

Who, by the way, is quite a hunk. 

Unexpected Beefcake on "My Name is Earl"

I've been re-watching My Name is Earl (2005-2009), about a lowbrow ne-er-do-well (Jason Lee) trying to reform by going through his list of misdeeds and righting them, one by one. He's assisted by his dimwitted brother Randy (Ethan Suplee) and a series of friends and antagonists.

More gay subtexts than the gay-free Raising Hope, even two gay characters.  But not a lot of beefcake.  Until we got to the Season 2 premiere.

Earl's ex-wife Joy (Jaime Pressley) steals a truck, not realizing that there is a guy locked in the back.  In order to get him out without revealing their identities, Earl and Joy order him to take his shirt off and use it as a blindfold.  Later we see him in his underwear as Joy chases him across a field.

Lots of shots of the guy's muscular physique!

Wondering who he was, I looked him up on the IMDB, and found Josh Wolf (1974-), a comedian who has also appeared on Raising Hope, and as himself on Chelsea Lately and his own talk show on CMT (2015-).

On Shark after Dark, Josh and fellow comedian Courtney Davis tried to survive New York City naked.

He is happy to receive admiration for his chest from gay men, and he tweets:

Do people who think being gay is a choice want to sleep with everyone all of the time but they just choose not to?

I don't know what that means, but it sounds gay positive.

The Top Gay Hunks of "American Horror Story: New York City"

 

American Horror Story, Season 11, is a refreshing change of pace in the long-runnning series.  First, they've covered all of the paranormal bogies, from ghosts to vampires to aliens, so in this season they're sticking close to Earth with an ordinary murder mystery.  It's about a serial killer stalking New York's gay community in the early 1980s: think Cruising, but less homophobic. Second, although  Leather/BDSM is still portrayed as decadent, wild, and violent, sex outside a committed relationship is even more likely to "draw the darkness."   Third, after several seasons with no gay characters, or gay-femme villains, or "gay" guys who only have sex with women, most of the main cast is gay and into men.  Introduced in the first two episodes:

Spoiler alert: I give away some surprises.

1. Patrick (Russell Tovey), a newly-out, divorced, closeted cop who doesn't want to investigate the serial killer for fear of outing himself.  Or he may be the serial killer: he has a secret closet full of leather gear and handkerchiefs of every color, from light blue (oral) to yellow (golden showers).

2. Gino (Joe Mantello, only with a ridiculous tan), his boyfriend,a reporter for a gay newspaper trying to research the story in spite of Patrick's reticence.  He is captured by a serial killer who acts like he's in The Silence of the Lambs. No doubt a red herring.

3. Adam (Charlie Carver), who lost his roommate to the serial killer, and caught a glimpse of a suspect: a muscular guy in a leather outfit (like everyone at the Eagle on a Saturday night?).  He launches his own investigation, and discovers that Theo (#4 below), has photographed him.

4. Theo (Isaac Powell), a photographer who specializes in disturbing scenes , like men in leather (think Mapplethorpe).  By the second episode, he's on the way to pursuing a "normal" relationship with Adam (that is, one modeled after traditional heterosexual courtship, where the first date ends with a kiss rather than a blow job, and you don't see him naked until you have celebrated at least three major holidays together). .     

5. Sam (Zachary Quinto), Theo's  manipulative, cocaine-snorting boyfriend, who may also be the serial killer: he invites random strangers home for BDSM scenes without asking what they're into or giving them a safe word.  Plus the mysterious muscular leatherman that Adam saw is his bodyguard/doorman.

6. Henry (Dennis O'Hare), an elderly, fey Quinton Crisp type who knows something about the serial killer: he 's somehow connected to anal sex, which also "draws the darkness."  Wow, no anal, no BDSM, no sex at all on the first date. My Sunday School teacher was less uptight. 

7. Big Daddy (Matthew William Bishop), the guy Adam saw, Theo photographed, and Sam keeps around for his aesthetic appreciation.   This is Matthew's first screen role; previously he worked in public relations, and was an amateur bodybuilder.  On the show, everyone who sees him is terrified; personally, I would be asking for his phone number.  

See also: Matthew William Bishop: leatherman, muscleman, LGBTQ advocate.

"Solar Opposites": Do Korvo and Terry act like a married couple? Do they say anything? Do they have sex?

Solar Opposites (2020-) is a Hulu animated series about two aliens, their replicants, and their pupa,  who flee from their doomed planet and crash-land on Earth.  During Season 1, showrunner Justin Roiland addressed the question of whether male adults Korvo (Justin Roiland, Dan Stevens, left) and Terry (Thomas Middleditch) were a gay couple.  He said that since their species practices asexual reproduction, they don't have sex, and therefore they can't be gay.  Jerk, thinking that being gay is purely about sex.  What about romantic partnerships? 

Link to NSFW version.

Apparently he changed his mind.  The fan wiki states that Korvo and Terry became a romantic couple between Seasons 1 and 2.  But how romantic are they?  Do they say anything?  Do anything?  Or do you have to just infer from gay subtexts? To check, I reviewed some episodes, either because the premise sounded interesting or because there was a hot guest star.

Episode 2.1: The Solar Opposites discover another refugee group from their home planet, in London!  But it turns out that they have a disturbing hidden agenda.  No indication that Korvo and Terry are romantic partners.  With the voice of Thomas Lennon, the grotesque gay-stereotype cop in Reno 911

Episode 2.2: Korvo hates dinner parties, so he declares them illegal and starts a police force to seek out forbidden dinner party paraphernalia.  Things turn deadly: people are turned into wine.  During the denouement, Korvo and Terry kiss.

Episode 2,3: Yumyulack, the "teenage boy" replicant, invents a ray that gives him a huge penis -- not for sex, for the power that goes with it.  He makes it bigger and bigger, until it threatens to destroy the world.  No indication that Korvo and Terry are a romantic couple.

Episode 3.2  Korvo wants to take up a hobby, but everything he tries, Terry is already doing, and doing better.  In frustration, he goes into a toy train shop.  The manager thinks that he's just pretending to be interested in trains to beat his "alien husband."

Episode 3.3 Terry shows Korvo the joy of standing in line, and introduces him to his "line husband," Linus (Adam Pally).  Line husband and regular husband jealously snipe at each other, until Korvo finally wins Terry's heart. 

Episode 3.8:  The Solar Opposites go on vacation.  First Terry references rimming.  Then, in a resort community, there's a museum depicting uncomfortable memories, including one of Korvo being screwed by a Red Goobler (callback to last season).  He moans that he is "cumming harder than I ever do with Terry."  At the time Terry said that the marital indiscretion didn't bother him, but now he claims that he was just suppressing his feelings.

Episode 4.4: The Solar Opposites can't get a real pet without eating it, so they create a cartoon dinosaur.  Terry mentions getting a blow job from Korvo. With Eugene Cordero.

Episode 4.5: The Solar Opposites try to prevent Yumyulack from discovering that it's his Birth-a-Day, when he will acquire enough power to destroy them all.  With Jerry O'Connell.  No indicaton that Korvo and Terry are a romantic couple.

Results: Five of eight episodes identify Korvo and Terry as a gay couple.  Two use the term "husband," two reference sexual activity, and one shows a kiss.  They aren't exactly "loud and proud," but it's better than a lot of "are they or aren't they" prevarication.

Some butts, a dick, and alien anal on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends