"The Waterfront": "Succession" in North Carolina, with fishing, drug deals, homophobia, Weary backside and Daedalus d*ck

Link to the n*de dudes

I thought The Waterfront, on Netflix, would be a film noir homage, like On the Waterfront, but it's actually about about a family that  runs a North Carolina fishing empire. But it stars Jake Weary, who played a gay guy on Animal Kingdom, so I'll give it a try, starting with Episode 1.1, "Almost Ok."

Scene 1: A boat at night in dark, choppy water.  The Captain tells his crew, Troy and Curtis (Matt Davis), to open the hatch and prepare to transfer the shipment.  

Uh-oh, men with guns approach, knock them out, wrap them in fishing nets, and dump them into the ocean.  I'm guessing that these guys are not focus characters.

Scene 2: Establishing shot of an elegant North Carolina coastal community.  Cane Buckley (Jake Weary), son of fishing magnate Harlan Buckley, is in the bathroom keeps texting Troy and Curtis, the guys who were murdered last night, but they don't answer.  He becomes more and more upset.

He goes downstairs to kiss his bikini-clad wife, greet his preteen daughter, grab coffee, and leave.  Heterosexual identity established at Minute 4.

He drives to the beach and stares in shock at his boat, floundered, with the sheriff and DEA officers investigating.

DEA Agent Sanchez (Gerardo Celasco) tells a Background Player Cop that the boat has been cleared out -- no contraband. The crew is missing, presumed drowned. 

Scene 3:  The Big City.  Cane's Dad Harlan (Holt McCallaney, top photo) grunts, climbs out of bed, groans, and falls to the floor.  He calls to his Side Piece that he's having heart attack: "Call an ambulance and my wife."

Side Piece meets the Wife and the hospital and apologizes for almost killing him.  "It's ok, I got this.  You go home and put on a bra."

Turns out that it was a malfunction in his electronic defibrillator; he'll be fine.   They discuss the floundered boat, and wonder where their son Cane is.

Scene 4: He's at the Carter County Courthouse (no such place, but there's a Carteret County on the coast, near Wilmington), asking the clerk to make Curtis, the drowned guy, the owner of the boat -- "And predate it!" She agrees to help because they're cousins, and family help each other.  Also he promises to fix her $12,000 in credit card debt. 

Next stop: The restaurant where Mom works. Wait -- Dad is a seafood magnate, and she works in a restaurant?  They discuss Dad's emergency and the cargo that was stolen from the boat.  

Cane: "This is the end of our seafood empire!"

Mom: "Don't be so dramatic!  And don't tell your sister.  She can't know!"

Cane: "No problem.  I hate her anyway."

Scene 5: Cane's Sister, cheering on the Havenport High School 2023 Swim Team championships, swimming in the ocean, not a pool. Her Ex-Husband  (Joshua Mikel, Daedalus on The Righteous Gemstones) appears and  yells that she can't visit her son without court permission.   She grumbles but leaves. 

The son, Diller (Diller?) is played by Brady Hepner, who may be gay in real life: he says that the universe is conspiring to make him happy -- while hugging a guy.

Scene 6: On the docks, Cane and his Sister are interviewed by DEA Agent Sanchez.  "Not my boat, I sold it to Drowned Guy Curtis three months ago."

"Ok, then. Bye."  That was easy.

Sister wants to know he didn't tell her about Drowned Guy Curtis buying his boat.

"Because I hate you.  I don't tell you anything. Bye."

At the fish factory, the foreman wants to discuss the drop in orders, but Kane ignores him and rushes into his office -- where Dad decks him!  "What the hell have you done? Don't get up -- I'll just hit you again."

"It was just one drug run, Dad. No big deal. t $10 million in cocaine and opiates. We had to pay off our debts!  We're a second away from losing this place!"

Dad orders him to go to Hoyt, the Bad Dude he hired to handle the drug run, and tell him it's over. 

More after the break

Blake McIver: The "musical" kid from "Full House" grows up, sings, snoots, shops, and shows us what's under Superman's cape

  

Link to the n*de photos

Full House (1987-95) was a TGIF sitcom set in an annoyingly gay-free San Francisco.  The premise: sportscaster Danny (Bob Saget) loses his wife (don't worry, it's a 1980s death, with no grief).  He can't take care of his three daughters on his own, so his friends Joey and Jesse (Dave Coulier, John Stamos) move in to help. 

I didn't watch -- in West Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s, who was home on a Friday night?  But I recognize the iconic Full House house, 1709 Broderick Street, about two miles from the Castro, and I know that Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson, who played Danny's infant daughter Michelle, became pop culture icons, starring in a string of movies before starting their own fashion company.  

If you watched, you may have noticed Blake McIver Ewing, who played Derek, Michelle's "musical" friend and fellow thespian, during Seasons 6-8.  From the clips I watched while researching this profile, I gather that he is quite femme.  A contemporary blogger references "the blinding supernova of Derek's undeniable gayness," but on the show itself no one ever suspects.  Michelle's friend Lisa even asks him to the Big Valentine's Day Dance. 

The grown-up Blake's primary interest is music -- his IMDB biography effuses over its "wonderful power to be cohesive, moving, influential, emotive, subdued, deferential, caustic, achingly beautiful, full of character, simplistic, complex and/or virtually any other adjective one can think of."  Like overwritten?   He has 44 music credits and 15 composing credits on the IMDB, and nine songs available on Apple Music, including the gay anthems "It Gets Better" and "This is Who We Are."

He was recently cast in The Boy from Oz, a musical about the life of bisexual singer/songwriter Peter Allen.

But Blake also has 31 acting credits, beginning with the six-year old Ned, played as a grownup by Gabriel Olds, in Calendar Girl (1993) -- which everybody in West Hollywood went to because of the opportunity to gawk at the backsides of Gabriel and Jason Priestley, but not Jerry O'Connell, darn it.

Other than Derek, Blake is best known for playing Waldo Aloysius Johnston II in the Little Rascals movie (1994).  He sabotages the Big Go-Kart Race and steals the girlfriend of preteen Lothario Alfalfa (future homophobe Bug Hall).  Don't worry, she dumps him and returns to Alfalfa after discovering that he is a jerk.

More after the break

Ted Prior: Man-mountain hero of the macho 1980s, Chippendale dancer, Playgirl model. Any gay content?

Link to the n*de photos

N*de photos of this guy have been sitting in my "to profile" file since March, and since I have some free time today (and my pageviews are down by about 70%)," I'll give him a try.

His name is Ted Prior.  He was active primarily during the 1980s Reagan-Bush era  man-mountain craze, when Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and a dozen lesser lights -- Chuck Norris, Reb Brown, Steven Seagal, Michael Pare -- stormed into POW camps and drug lord lairs, got tortured while shirtless, single-handedly defeated entire armies, and won The Girl, thus demonstrating the 

"supremacy" of white heterosexual  America.

Born in New Jersey in 1959 and raised in Baltimore, Ted originally planned to become a professional bodybuilder -- he states that he won Teenage Mr. Maryland and "ten other awards" before he turned 19.  He moved to Los Angeles, in fact, so he could train at Gold's Gym.

But he worked in theater, too, and once he hit L.A., a walk-on as a bodybuilder in an episode of The Incredible Hulk (1981) convinced him to try his hand at acting. His first starring roles were in  Sledgehammer (1983) and Killzone (1985), written and directed by his older brother David.

Most of Ted's work for the next twenty years would come from David's production company, Action International Pictures: Operation Warzone (1988), Jungle Assault (1989), The Final Sanction (1990), Raw Justice (1994).

Ted's most famous film, Deadly Prey (1987) is a sort of The Most Dangerous Game. People are being kidnapped and taken to a secret jungle enclave, where the evil Colonel Hogan (David Campbell) has his mercenaries hunt them down.  Vietnam Vet Mike (Ted) is grabbed while taking out the garbage, brought to the enclave, stripped, greased, gawked at, and forced to run naked through the jungle.  Uh-oh, they kidnapped the wrong guy.

He is shirtless throughout: a major draw of the film, as you can see from the VHS tape cover.

In November 2024, the Lyric Hyperion Theater in Silverlake, the second gay neighborhood in Los Angeles, held a "Deadly Prey" day, and promised Ted Prior "in the flesh," har har.

More after the break

John Stamos: From a gay-free San Francisco to a steamy shower scene (or two).

Gay boys all but ignored 20-year old John Stamos when he was playing streetwise Blackie on General Hospital (1983-84).  Not many watched soap operas, and his pleasantly slender physique seemed bit too androgynous as Nautilus-toned man-mountains came into style. Besides, he had a girlfriend.

Some started to notice when John starred as aspiring rock star Gino Minnelli on Dreams (1984-85), which aired after Charles in Charge on Wednesday nights.  It offered lots of shirtless shots -- by this time John had joined a gym -- plus buddy-bonding episodes like "Friends" and "Boys are the Best."  But it only lasted for 12 episodes.

After 25 episodes of You Again? (1986-87), playing Jack Klugman's estranged teenage son -- which was switched around so often that no one saw it -- John finally found television fame in Full House (1987-95) on the TGIF ("Thank God it's Friday") block of kid-friendly Friday-night shows. 

He played Uncle Jesse, who moved in with his brother-in-law Danny (Bob Saget) and another male friend, Dave (Joey Gladstone), to help raise Danny's three daughters after his wife died.  

Alternative families are a standby on tv, but aside from the basic non-heteronormative family structure -- and John's smile -- there was little to like.

He rarely took off a shirt -- when he did, the moments were mostly cute rather than hot. Only one episode showed him in a swimsuit.

 Nor did the friendships result in much buddy-bonding.  The guys all got girlfriends, and the daughters got boyfriends, and gay people were not mentioned, ever, even though the show was set in gay mecca San Francisco.  

More after the break

Luke Benward: Fried worms, Disney movies, Christian music, gay friends, an adult video, and a n*de Cameron Monaghan.

Link to the n*de Benward and Cameron

How to Eat Fried Worms (Thomas Rockwell, 1973) is one of the classic novels of my childhood: Billy brags that he can eat anything, so when his friend Alan offers him $50 to eat a worm a day for 15 days....  He can prepare them any way he wants, but Alan will provide the worms. The parents are in on the scheme, there is no bullying involved, each of the boys has a buddy-bonding best friend, and the only girl is Billy's sister.  No one wins the Girl of His Dreams.

 Remembering the buddy-bonds and the absence of the heterosexist trajectory, I eagerly tuned in to the Disney Channel version (2006).  But now Billy (Luke Benward) is confronted by a gang of  bullies led by Joe (Adam Hicks), he joins a group of friend instead of a special buddy, and there is a Girl of His Dreams.  

A rather disappointing start to Luke Benward's career.  Let's see if he has redeemed himself since with some gay roles.

According to the IMDB, Luke was born in 1995 in Franklin, Tennesse.  

He first appeared on screen playing Mel Gibson's son in We Were Soldiers (2002).  

The infamous homophobe Mel Gibson?  That's even worse. 

After roles in the revamped Family Affair (2002) and Because of Winn-Dixie (2005), Luke hit Disney gold with Fried Worms (2006).  

His Disney stardom assured, he continued with Mostly Ghostly (2007): A shy boy (Sterling Beaumon) encounters a ghost boy (Luke) and his sister, who has a crush on him.  He must figure out how they died before it's too late, and win the Girl of His Dreams. 

Left: Luke and Sterling Beamon strangling Miles Heizer.  Neither has actually worked with Miles Heizer.  Maybe they're friends?

Minutemen (2008): A teen nerd (Luke), his buddy, and the Girl Next Door become time travelers, allowing him to best the obnoxious jock who is dating the Girl of His Dreams. Guess who he ends up with.

Dog Gone (2008): A boy (Luke) rescues a dog from bumbling thieves, bests the school bully (Cameron Monaghan, on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends),  and wins the Girl of His Dreams.

Things are not looking good for you, Luke Baby.

Let's skip past Girl v Monster and Zombies and Cheerleaders to Luke's first major tv role in Good Luck Charlie (2013).  Charlie is a girl, not a boy, and she doesn't bring good luck; she is merely the subject of a video diary filmed by her father.  Luke plays Beau Landry, an employee at Bob's Bugs Be Gone who meets, falls in love with, and eventually becomes the boyfriend of Teddy (another girl.  What's with this show?).

Ok, what about Ravenswood (2013-14), a teen mystery series featuring dark secrets in a small town?  Luke plays Dillon Sanders, who is dating focus character Olivia but is secretly plotting to prevent her from discovering the dark secrets.  Oh, and he kills her father.  That sort of ends the relationship.

Cloud 9 (2014): A snowboarder and her obnoxious boyfriend are trained by snowboarding great Will Cloud (Luke).  The boyfriend gets dumped, and...well you know the rest.

Measure of a Man (2018): Dude gets a girlfriend.

Life of the Party (2018): Middle-aged Deanna, dumped by her husband, returns to college, and has s*x with a fratboy (Luke), who becomes obsessed with her.  Guess what?  He's the son of the woman Deanna was dumped for. 

I'm tired of this.  Let's see what else Luke has been up to.

He's done some music, such as the theme song for Cloud 9, and he has appeared in the music videos of several other artists, including Martina McBride and Jason Aldean.  

Wait -- he's the son of Christian country-western singer Aaron Benward, shown here with his boyfriend...um, I mean singing partner Scott Reeves -- and the grandson of Christian music producer Jeoffrey Benward.  They have won Dove Awards, and Jeoffrey was inducted into Christian Music Hall of Fame.  Why didn't anyone tell me this before?  Luke Baby is too fundamentalist to play a gay character, and if he's gay in real life, he's got to be extremely closeted.

According to the Who's Dated Who website, Luke has been in relationships with several women, and is currently dating Ariel Winter (Alex Dumphy on Modern Family).  You know there were gay characters on that show, right?

Luke's Instagram is confusing: Very few photos of Ariel or any girlfriend, a lot of guy-hugging, almost as if he's trying to fool you into thinking that he's gay.  Won't work, dude. 

Plus he's buddies with the gay Miles Heizer, and that adult video (on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) looks a lot like it's aimed at a guy...

See also:Shane Harper: the "Good Luck Charlie" and "God's Not Dead" guy shows his stuff surprisingly often

Miles Heizer: Gay and nearly-gay roles, a real-life girlfriend and several boyfriends, plus Guy's Bar

"Blue Ridge" Episode 1.3: A wrestling promoter is murdered at a high school in the Hills. With lots of beefy suspects and Michael O'Hearn

Riley Polanski: From Xanadu to Silverlake, with n*de photos and a bonus Michael J. Fox

Link to the n*de dudes

Riley Polanski was born in Pomona, California in 2000, and started acting when he was 10 years old: the Western 6- Guns (2010),  starring 1980s staples Barry Van Dyke and Greg Evigan; Airline Disaster (2011), starring former Family Ties cast members Meredith Baxter-Birney and Scott Valentine; Baseball, Dennis, & the French (2011). 

The first celebrity I met when I moved to Los Angeles was Michael J. Fox, who played Alex on "Family Ties."  We just had lunch, but I told my friends that it was a date. 

When he was a teenager, Riley had to put his career on hold due to "family illness." 

He still performed, in Mulan at the Claremont United Methodist Church (2015) and Xanadu at Claremont High School (2017), and he won second place at the California State Thesbian Festival.

He graduated from Claremont High in 2018 and enrolled in Pasadena City College.  During the next two years, Riley worked as a production assistant on You're the Worst, with Stephen Schneider, and did a lot of acting, primarily in student films:

Worthless Words (USC): "A world where your words are controlled."

The Cup (St. Mary's University MFA): Two aspiring actors encounter a 1920s flapper.

Paz (Chapman University MFA): A troubled girl finds strength in a spiritual connection.

Alice In/Somnia (2020): a girl in a surreal waiting room has to deal with bureacracy.

We also see a selfie, taken with a camera rather than a cell phone.

 After receiving his A.A. from Pasadena City College in 2020, Riley enrolled in Arizona State University, but after a year he dropped out and returned to Los Angeles. 

He moved to the Silverlake, a gay neighborhood for older guys (as opposed to the twinks of West Hollywood), edited a magazine about the neighborhood, and worked at the Little Pine Restaurant and Starbucks.

His last film credit is in Ashes (2022): "an unlikely human connection complicates a soldier's understanding of freedom." Riley offers Levi Bernhart (left) a cigarette.

In 2024 Riley starts a musical group which specializes in Shadow Pop. He has nine songs available on Spotify, some with 22,000 streams.  I watched two of his music videos.

The full profile, with n*de photos, is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

See also: My Date with Michael J. Fox. Plus Marcus and the Scary Bulgarian Bodybuilder.

My date with Michael J. Fox. With Marcus and the Scary Bulgarian Bodybuilder

Link to the n*de dudes.

Friday, July 5th:  Two days after I arrive in West Hollywood from my horrible year in Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas, I am sitting in the human resources department at Paramount Studios, waiting to interview for a job as an administrative assistant, when Marcus comes in to drop something off.  He's my age, African-American, with very light skin, freckles, and a hairy chest.  I get his phone number.

You're probably wondering how I got a job interview two days after arriving, when one of those days was a federal holiday.  I had been applying for jobs for weeks, using my friend Tom's address and telephone number.

Saturday, July 6th: Our date, an inside tour of Paramount Studios (yes, we see more stuff), followed by cruising at the Gold Coast and dinner at the French Quarter in West Hollywood.  He came to Los Angeles to become an actor five years ago, and has had some guest spots in tv shows and movies.

"Do you know anyone famous?" I ask with tourist zeal.

"Nobody really famous.  I mean, some guys on tv.  Robin Williams.  Tom Hulce.  I know Michael J. Fox from acting class."

I'm not impressed.  I've barely heard of Michael J. Fox -- he plays Alex P. Keaton, Reagan-loving son of liberal hippie parents on the sitcom Family Ties (1982-1989),  But I've only seen the show a few times.

Back to the Future, which will propel Michael to fame, premiered on July 3rd, but I haven't heard of it.

Marcus and I don't have any romantic sparks, so no more dating.  But we stay friends (that's how you made friends in West Hollywood).

Wednesday, July 10th: I start working at Muscle and Fitness, two days a week as a "contributing editor," aka gopher.  

Wednesday, July 17th: I meet Ivo, a stringer for the magazine, about 30 years old, a Bulgarian bodybuilder, with short brown hair, a boyish open face, massive shoulders, and slates for abs.

Saturday, July 20th: My first date with Ivo.  I'm curious about Back to the Future, the new time travel comedy starring Michael J. Fox.

"No way, man!" Ivo exclaims.  "That Mike Fox thinks he's a big deal, but he's terrible under the covers.  They should call him Princess Teeny-Tiny!"

Weird coincidence!  I think.  I've been in town less than a month, and already I've met two people who know Michael J. Fox, and one of them is his ex-boyfriend!

Sunday, July 21st: I have brunch with Marcus at the French Quarter, and tell him about my date.

"Strange," he says.  "I'm completely out to Mike, and he's never said anything about being gay.  Sounds like Ivo is one of these celebrity name-droppers who claims to have been with everyone from Harrison Ford to Arnold Schwarzeneggar."

"But he wasn't bragging.  He got upset.  He said Michael was bad in bed and should be called Princess Teeny-Tiny."

Marcus laughs.  "Well, I don't have any information on Mike beneath the belt.  But tell you what -- he's in London right now.  When he gets back, we'll all get together, and you can ask him yourself."

Ask Michael J. Fox about his size?  I don't think so!  But it would be fun to meet him.

Left: This is Bulgarian bodybuilder Radoslav Angelov, not Ivo.

I date Ivo three or four more times, but his stories become more and more bizarre.

His father was the Bulgarian ambassador; he used to hang out at the White House.  

He has a degree in economics from Harvard, but turned down a professorship because he wanted to be a writer. When he returned to Bulgaria to help his cousin, he was arrested and imprisoned for six months. He has a book on his experiences coming out next year.  

Paramount is producing his screenplay about a college student who discovers that he is half-alien.  Scott Baio will be the star. They dated for awhile.

Saturday, August 3rd:  Marcus and I see Back to the Future.  I'm not impressed with the heteronormative plotline.  But -- Michael is back in town.  Could we schedule that lunch for next Saturday?

Monday, August 5th: Ivo has me over for dinner.  While he is chopping celery, I tell him about the lunch.  He freezes, and his face turns bright red.  "Can't you ever talk about anything but Michael J. Fox?  Day after day, hour after hour, nothing but Michael J. Fox!  And now you have a date with him!"

I try to remember when I last mentioned him. "No, no, it's just a lunch.  Marcus is coming, too."

"Bah!  If you love him so much, why don't you move in with him?"

"It's just..."

"F** Mike Fox, always stealing everybody's boyfriends!  Well, let me tell you what happened to the last guy Mike Fox stole from me!"  He stabs the air with his knife.

I am shocked -- and terrified.  Ivo is twice as strong as me, and carrying a weapon. "Fox sounds like a real jerk!" I tell him.  "I'm definitely cancelling that lunch!  Um...you know what?  I forgot to bring in the dessert -- there's a peach pie in the car.   I'll just go get it." 

 I clatter out the door and down the stairs.  

Thursday, August 8th: He comes into the editorial office at Muscle and Fitness to drop off a story, and pretends not to know me.

Saturday, August 10th: The promised lunch with Marcus and Michael.

The full story, with n*de photos and ex*plicit situations, is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

See also: Hung Harvey: I hook up with the boyfriend of Sabrina the Teenage Witch

A date with Kris (who may not be Jeremy Renner's boyfriend) leads to Christopher Atkins' dick

Riley Polanski: From "Xanadu" to "Ashes," with bonus Michael J. Fox

Gemstones Episode 4.3: Keefe does stuff with the Devil. So does Eli. With a pole dancer's d* ck and the Groundskeeper's backside

Link to the d*cks 

Previous: Gemstones Episode 4.2, Continued: Pontius' private parts, Gideon's b*utt buddy, and JR's junk.  Plus Karen from "Will and Grace" sings

Title: "To Grieve Like the Rest of Men Who Have No Hope," 1 Thessalonians 4.13.  Paul is telling his followers not to grieve "like men who have no hope," since they will see their loved ones again in heaven.

The Intruder: 2002.  During a thunderstorm, an intruder breaks into the house, smashes a photo of Eli and Aimee-Leigh and some other memorabilia, and takes the gold-plated Bible from the Civil War.  Close up of a destroyed framed magazine cover promising "Hot Gossip" and featuring Brendan Fraser.

The intruder continues into the playroom and smashes a photo of the siblings and Kelvin's army men.  There's a muscle man in skimpy underwear, denoting that Kelvin is gay.

He lifts up the bed to find a hiding 12-year old Kelvin, who screams.  Notice the enclosed space. They will appear often in the episode, giving the viewer a sense of disquiet. The family is trapped.

Night Sweats: Kelvin awakens screaming from a nightmare.   Keefe notes that his nocturnal terrors and night sweats are getting worse, and uses a towel to daub him, but Kelvin insists that it was just a nightmare, and goes back to sleep. I'm worried about the night sweats, but surely they don't mean that Kelvin is sick.  

Doing Stuff with the Devil, Part 1: Kelvin hates storms; it's like the Devil is doing his business on you.  Keefe agrees, with a amazing monologue about the Devil pouring down his TT on people, who think it's a wine cooler or kombucha, and drink it.   He looks out into the storm and says "Your hot sorcery p* can't hurt us in here. Begone, Devil"  but the Dark Lord is already inside: Keefe has a no-hands org*asm. 

More after the break

Is the gay ghost couple on Disney's "Ghost and Molly McGee" enough? With Vincent Rodriguez III

I try to review all of the Disney Channel shows for LGBTQ representation, but I skipped over The Ghost and Molly McPhee (2021, 2023, 2024) because it was reminiscent of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1968-70),  about a middle-aged widow who falls in love with the ghost of a sea captain.  Who wants to watch a show about a ghost-human hetero-romance?

I didn't even realize that the actual title is The Ghost and Molly McGee. 

But it turns out that the ghost and Molly are just friends.  And there's a ghost gay couple.

The premise: when 13-year old Molly McGee moves into a haunted house, grumpy ghost Scratch (Dana Snyder) is assigned to haunt her, but he accidentally binds their souls together for all eternity.  After some initial fussing, they become best friends, and Scratch rebels against the ghost mandate to make human lives miserable, causing friction with the Ghost Council.

Researching this show is difficult, since the voice actors have extremely common names.  Google lists over 20 Dana Schneiders and Snyders: the senior vice president at a realty company, the senior talent acquisition partner at a university, a jeweler, a "producer and creative with a passion for visual storytelling," a rugby coach, a wife and mom, an opthamologist. I think this is the right one.

The plotlines involve both Other Realm and standard middle-school problems.  Molly has a best friend, a Mean Girl frenemy, a bratty little brother, and a boyfriend (Alan Lee), who happens to be an anti-ghost paranormal researcher. 

Another extremely common name. Facebook lists over 50 Alan Lees, including a hospital president, a Cajun Zen Monk, a magician, the director of a choral music society, and a lot of "husband and fathers."  

More after the break. 

Alfie Williams: A missing p* enis, a youthful scoundrel, a zombie fighter. Is he or his character gay? Or both? With Chi d*ck update

 Link to the n*de dudes

I was checking my Instagram yesterday, when it recommended that I follow someone named Alfie Williams.  Never heard of him.  This is the first time Instagram has recommended someone other than a fitness trainer or bodybuilder.  I figured it must be either because he plays a gay character or he is gay in real life.

In the small photo on my cell phone, Alfie looked like a guy in his 20s, but when I checked his Instagram on my laptop, he turned out to be a young teenager.  14 in 2025.

So, an out-and-proud 14 year old, or playing an out-and-proud 14 year old?

Turns out that research wasn't at all difficult; there are a lot of interviews and articles about Alfie.

He was born in 2011 in Gateshead, across the river from shipping and partying center Newcastle-upon-Tyne in northern England.  His father is Alfie Dobson, an actor and bodybuilder with nine credits listed on the IMDB.

Alfie Jr. broke into acting with the short film Phallacy (2021): a 12-year old boy wakes up to find his p* enis missing. Doctors say there is nothing they can do (transmen get a working p* enis from their vaginal tissue, but the boy doesn't have anything to work with). Don't worry, when you grow up, you'll find a lot of things to do in the bedroom that don’t require one.

  Sounds like a lot of LGBTQ symbolism and hegemonic masculinity going on.  An inclusive start to your career, Alf.

Next came Ghost Theo, a resident of the Land of the Dead in Episode 3.5 of the dark fantasy His Dark Materials (2022).  He only has one line.

An unspecified character in BBC Radio 4's adaption of the soap opera Our Friends in the North, about four Newcastle blokes whose lives intersect from 1964 to 2022.

Young John Henry Sayers in A New Breed of Criminal (2023).  The adult John Henry Sayers (played by Alfie's Dad) and his brother Stephen (Steve Wraith) were real-life gangsters who ran the city of Newcastle in the 1990s. 

But it is Alfie's starring role in 28 Years Later (2025) that prompted the flood of interviews and articles.

I saw the original 28 Days Later (2002), where bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) gets into an auto accident, and wakes up from a coma "28 days later" to discover that he's a survivor of a zombie apocalypse.  He meets two other survivors, Mark and Selena, but one is immediately killed.  The other announces that just because they're the last two people left on Earth, they're not going to f*ck; but they do.  They fall in love, adopt a survivor girl, and escape to an idyllic rural future together.  

Guess which is killed, and which falls in love.  

Right.  Offensively blatant erasure of gay potential in order to promote the myth of universal heterosexual desire and practice for the 10 millionth time. 

In 28 Years Later, 12-year old Spike (Alfie) is living with his parents in a survivor community on Lindisfarne, a tidal island that was home to a famous Medieval monastery and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) takes him to the mainland for a coming-of-age ritual, and they are separated for some reason.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson's d*ck is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

More after the break

"And Just Like That": Carrie's return has elitism, bisexuals, d*cks, musems, marital spats, s'mores, and shoes. Lots of shoes.

Link to the n*de dudes

I never watched the original S*ex and the City series when it first aired on HBO (1998-2004), although I knew about Mr. Big (Chris Noth), for obvious reasons.  Who wants to watch four super-entitled New York-centric ladies having lunch? The only episode I watched featured Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) investigating bisexuals for her newspaper column.  

Her conclusion: they are all gay, and fooling themselves.  Bisexuals don't exist. 

So much for bi representation. 

Researching this review, I discovered that Carrie has a stereotypic gay best friend with the incredible name Stanford Blatch (why, was Bruce Van Swishington taken?).  

Having never watched the original, I've never been interested in the 2021-25 sequel, And Just Like That (presumably the title means that 20 years have passed "just like that"). But I've seen n*de guys parading around on occasion, and the plot synopses mention several LGBTQ characters.  We'll see if the portrayals are cringy.

I'll identify the five main ladies by their careers.  From left to right, Filmmaker Lisa, Art Dealer Charlotte, Columnist Carrie, Realtor Seema, Lawyer Miranda. 

Episode 3.5, "Under the Table," has three main plot threads.

The Charlotte/Lisa Plot:

Scene 1: The Guggenheim.  I love that museum.  Wait -- they didn't visit, they're just walking past. Art Dealer Charlotte's boyfriend Harry (Evan Handler) reveals that he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, but they found it early, so he has a 98% chance of full recovery. 

In other news, they're going glamping (glamor camping) with the kids at Governors Island this weekend.

Scene 2:  Nuclear family breakfast in a huge, super-elegant kitchen. Filmmaker Lisa won't be back from filming her documentary until late Friday, so she tells her husband, Herbert Wexley (wow, what unrealistic entitled name), to take their children to Governors Island for glamping with Charlotte and her boyfriend. 

Husband is played by Chris Jackson

Wait -- this is the first he's heard of it. "No, I've told you several times." "No you haven't."

 

"Sorry, I can't do it.  I have a photo shoot for my campaign."  He has to pretend to be a "regular guy," eat one of those...um...frankfurter sausage things...and ride on the...you know, the poor people train...the subway.  

"You can do the 'regular guy' shoot on Monday, " Filmmaker Lisa commands. "This weekend we're going glamping with the Goldblatts."

Scene 3: Art Dealer Charlotte is trying to cook, but she's too distracted.  Her friend Anthony (Mario Cantone) asks if she's ok. 

Her children, a girl and a nonbinary person, ask if they can skip glamping.  "No, you're going" It's important because her boyfriend has prostate cancer, but he doesn't want them knowing that.

Scene 4: Governors Island (no apostrophe), just south of Manhattan, with views of the skyline.   The nonbinary child notes that there's a spa and go-karts. 

Art Dealer Charlotte's boyfriend complains about the mosquitos. 

 Filmmaker Lisa bursts in, and her husband criticizes her for being late. "Well, four hours ago, I was in Atlanta."  Then they bicker because one of them told the other to buy chocolate to make s'mores.  This couple is on the outs.

Scene 5: A tent big enough for three beds and a living room set. The boyfriend and the kids are lounging around, playing on their cell phones, when Art Dealer Charlotte bursts in and complains that they should be doing outdoor activities. They refuse. My parents used to say that on family vacations.  "You shouldn't be lounging around the cabin reading comic books.  Go enjoy the outdoors."  How does one "enjoy" the outdoors?  It's a place you go through on the way to enjoying things.

Meanwhile, Filmmaker Lisa and her husband bicker. She takes a photo of him and their kids.  When he looks at it, he accidentally scrolls to the last one she took: a selfie with her editor Marion (Mehcad Brooks).

"Are you having an affair with Michael B. Handsome?  Talk about getting your chocolate in Atlanta!"

"No, it's just a work crush."

He continues to growl, so Lisa stomps off, and runs into Charlotte at the pier.  They complain about their partners, and decide to ditch them and take a spa day. 

Cut to the spa. Close up of ladies in bikinis.  They're really pushing the heterosexual male gaze. 

Carrie/Miranda and Seema after the break