"The Stranger": The one with Kai Alexander, Richard Armitage, Edina from "Absolutely Fabulous," and an alpaca-biter

Link to n*de dudes

My Netflix recommendation for this morning, The Stranger: "When a stranger makes a shocking claim about his wife, family man Adam Price becomes entangled in a mystery as he desperately searches for answers."

First, I hate the phrase "family man."  Why is it that reproducing makes a man noble, laudable, beyond reproach?  All he did was have s*x.

Second, what difference does it make that it's a stranger?  Why is someone automatically sinister, just because you haven't met them?

Third, the title is The Stranger.  That's  been done to death: it's the title of 4 novels, about 20 films, a dozen tv series, four this year alone, and some songs and video games.  Granted, the original novel is also entitled The Stranger, but what does author Harlan Coben know? 

Wait -- Harlan Coben?  This doesn't bode well. The movies based on his novels always posit a gay-free world.

I'm ready to resume my Netflix search, but then I see that one of the stars is the dreamy Jacob Dudman of The A-List.  Besides, we're running out of shows to watch.  So, ok.


Scene 1: Some teenagers conniving around a bonfire, savage like the Lost Boys in Peter Pan.

A n*de guy  (Kai Alexander) runs in terror through an alpaca farm.  Chest and butt shots. Wow!

Ok, you've got my attention.

Dude has 14 acting credits on the IMDB, dating back to 2015. He's also apparently done gay videos (after the break).

Scene 2: Earlier that day, we see Adam the Perfect (Richard Armitage, left) living a Perfect with a capital P heterosexual fantasy life, throwing his job, house, wife, and kids in my face.

Job: lawyer, naturally.

D*ck: Huge.

Wife: Corinne the Good Wife (Dervla Kirwan), who works at a feminine-coded job as a teacher.

Kids: Horndog Son #1 (Jacob Dudman) and Horndog Son #2 (Mischa Handley), both wild about girls, cars, and football (soccer), everything sons are supposed to be, everything I wasn't as a kid, which caused my parents lots of grief.  I'm gritting my teeth.

Left: Misha Handley has only three photos on his Instagram.  The one on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends looks like something, but it is actually innocent: he's trying to put on a leg brace.

In the midst of all this Heterosexual Perfection, the Stranger (Hannah John-Kamen) approaches Adam the Perfect and tells him that Corinne the Good Wife faked her 2017 pregnancy and miscarriage so he wouldn't dump her.   

He does some research, and guess what?  The Stranger is telling the truth. He is devastated.

More after the break.  

Bugs and Porky meet a Drag King: Warner Brothers Comics

When I was a kid in the 1960s, my favorite comic titles were Harvey (gay-vague Casper the Friendly Ghost), Disney, Archie, and the Gold Key jungle adventures.

Comics featuring Warner Brothers cartoon characters Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and Bugs Bunny were low on my list.  Not as low as Woody Woodpecker, but low.

The art was amateurish, with minimal backgrounds, or just blank space.  This is one of the best covers,depicting Bugs opening a door leading to another planet, where a cowboy-rabbit is racing across the desert on a camel.

And instead of the anarchic outsiders of the cartoons, the characters were stable, stolid suburbanites, with houses and jobs and girlfriends. Porky was a single dad, raising his nephew, Cicero, like a Donald Duck knockoff.

But sometimes Bugs and Porky or Bugs and Yosemite Sam teamed up for adventure stories.  Maybe they stumbled upon a haunted inn.  Or they answered a job ad for "undersea explorers"  Or a telegram arrived about "trouble at the ranch."  Buddy-bonding, captures, and nick-of-time rescues followed.

A continuing series had Bugs and Porky working as Indiana Jones-style adventurer-archaeologists, investigating the myth of Pegasus or discovering a lost civilization hidden under the ice of Antartica.  With no girlfriends in sight, and no damsels in distress to be won.

Unfortunately, you couldn't find the adventure stories by looking at the covers -- almost all of them displayed one-shot gags.  And the clerks at the drug store frowned on looking inside.  You had to just buy the issue and take your chances.

Or you could pick up a pile of them at a garage sale, friends' older brothers who were "too old for comics," or a bookstore "$1 bin."  That's how I found "The Kingdom of Nowhere" (Porky Pig 4, 1965),  Porky wins a contest to re-name a Medieval kingdom (he suggests Boovaria).  But he must fight the other winner, the Black Knight.

When I first read the story, I didn't realize that this small, short-haired person was grabbing the king's cape, or that it was supposed to be his queen.  I thought he had a tiny boyfriend grabbing his rump.

When Porky and the Black Knight learn that, as an added bonus, the winner will marry the Princess,  they drop out of the contest and run away.  Porky, because he already has a girlfriend.

But why does the Black Knight run away?  Could it be that he doesn't particularly care for girls?

Later we get an explanation: the Black Knight was really his girlfriend Petunia in drag!  Porky exclaims "No wonder you weren't interested in winning the hand of the princess!"

But this quick-fix doesn't detract from the image of a boy not interested in girls.

And it adds a new question: why, precisely, did Petunia disguise herself as a man?

For that matter, why are Bugs and Porky so comfortable in drag?

"Goosebumps: The Vanishing": Ross from "Friends" as a crazy botanist, some gay teens, a monster, and Sam McCarthy's....

 

Link to the n*de dudes

Goosebumps: The Vanishing has dropped on Hulu, the second season of the Goosebumps series, based on the popular children's books.  I can't tell if it is episodic or not at this point, so I just clicked on Episode 1, which stars David Schwimmer., Ross from Friends, and teen idol Sam McCarthy.

Scene 1: Brooklyn, 1994. Bill Clinton is in the White House, I'm in West Hollywood, Mariah Carey is topping the charts, and Friends premieres on CBS: 

So no one told you life was gonna be this way

Your job's a joke, you're broke, your love life's D.O.A

 Four teens (Sameer, Matty, and two girls) descend into eerie catacombs, until they come to the room where "they conducted medical experiments."  They're doing a "truth or dare" thing where they have to spend the night.

Sameer: "I'm not scared.  I just like to sleep n*de, and it could get a little awkward."  

Uh-oh, Matty's kid  brother Anthony followed them!  Mom's going to be furious.  Matty forces him to leave.

Suddenly a machine switches on, gas squirts out, and Matty's face dissolves.   A gruesome image.

Scene 2: Brooklyn, 2024.  Teen twins Devin and Cece (Sam McCarthy, Jaden Bartels) exit the subway and complain about having to leave their friends in Manhattan to live with Dad, the grown-up Anthony (a craggy, dissolute-looking David Schwimmer). He picks them up in a car.  Are you sure this is Brooklyn?

At home, Dad Anthony yells at neighbor Trey, also called James Junior, for blocking his driveway. "But your mom always let me park there."

"She didn't have a car."

Inside, the living room is crowded with boxes.  Back story: Dad has moved into this house after his mother went into assisted living with dementia, and he's going through her stuff.

In other news, "I've really been looking forward to your aunt's brain surgery."  WTF?  Who looks forward to that?  He means because then they can come live with him.  

Wait -- the twins are living with their aunt, not their father?  What's wrong with him?

The micromanager passes out his extensive list of rules, but emphasizes that the main rule is: "Stay out of the basement." He gives them a tour: he's a botanist, working on a lot of plant types that will revolutionalize the botany world.  Shouldn't you be working in a lab somewhere?   But stay out!

Scene 3: Dinner at Gwendolyn's restaurant.  Gay couples at the tables behind and in front of them. Back story: Cece is starting debate camp tomorrow. She hates it, but you need "a thing" to get into college. 

Next up, Devin: He claims to be ok, given "everything that happened," but he was suspended for getting into a fight.  Nope, not gay.  

CJ drives up on his motorcycle.  Dad introduces him to the twins. Back story: he's working here, at his parents' restaurant, for the summer.  Dad suggests that maybe Devin would like to work there, too.  Playing matchmaker, buddy?  I don't have any hope that he'll be gay, but there may be a gay-subtext buddy-bond between him and Devin.

He has to make a delivery, but the guys are all meeting at the park later. "Y'all should come."  Maybe specify which park, and what time?

Scene 4:  On the way home, Dad sends the twins inside so he can chat with a crying woman in a car. She notes that the father of Trey/JJ, the neighbor who Dad argued with, stopped by the police station to file a harassment complaint. According to the Google AI, harassment consists of repeaed acts that cause the victim to "fear for their safety,"  Telling someone to not block your driveway certainly doesn't count.

The woman promised to talk to Trey/JJ's Dad, but "be careful.  He's big on conspiracy theories." 

In other news, she managed to pull some strings and retrieve his brother's things from the night he and his friends dissolved.  . Moldy clothes with dissolved Matty all over them, from 30 years ago? 

The woman has been thinking a lot about that night, but Dad doesn't want to hear it.  He cuts her off and heads inside.

Scene 5: The twins come downstairs while Dad is arguing with his ex wife on the telephone. Wait -- they were living with their aunt, but she's having brain surgery, so they moved in with Dad.  Why weren't they living with their mother?

Dad assures them that although they hate each other, they both love the twins.  He made burnt waffles, which they reject.  It's the next morning. What happened to meeting the guys in the park later?

Left: This show is a little beefcake-light, so here's a photo of Sameer, one of the melted teen (played by 28 year old Arjun Arthalye).

More Sameer after the break

Call It Thunder: 40 Years of Fleetwood Mac

Fleetwood Mac was big when I was in high school, especially during my junior year, when I discovered what "gay" meant and started dating -- well, double-dating with Verne, the preacher's son.

 I wasn't a fan.  Their songs were all about girls:

"Rhiannon":
Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night
And wouldn't you love to love her?
Takes to the sky like a bird in flight
And who will be her lover?

"Dreams":
Thunder only happens when it's raining
Players only love you when they're playing
Say women they will come and they will go
When the rain washes you clean, you'll know, you'll know



Plus they were heterosexual.  Mick Fleetwood and Lindsey Buckingham were both dating Stevie Nicks.

I only liked guys who liked guys, like Shaun Cassidy.

 Then, in January 1977, "Go Your Own Way" started playing on KSTT Radio.

You can go your own way, go your own way.
You can call it thunder, all the way.

It seemed like they were talking to me personally, telling me that it was ok to break away, follow your own path, and "call it thunder."

I "called it thunder" when I decided to go to college instead of taking a job in the factory, like my parents expected.

When I figured "it" out the summer after my high school graduation: we stop the fight right now, we got to be who we are.

When I rejected the "wife and kids" destiny everyone had plotted out for me, and found the freedom to love.

When I abandoned the Midwest for California.

When I decided to go back to graduate school and get a Ph.D.

You can go your own way, go your own way.
You can call it thunder, all the way.

 Whenever I hear the song today, it sends me back to my junior year at Rocky High, when everything was fresh and new and full of promise, when you could "go your own way" and "call it thunder."

Last night I heard the song at the gym, on the Classic Rock station they play in the free weight room.  I decided to do a blog post on the song that meant so much to me long ago.  So I looked up the lyrics online:

You can go your own way, go your own way.
You can call it another lonely day.

Another lonely day?  WTF?

It's not an anthem to self-awareness at all!  It's about breaking up with a lover, who is now packing up and going away, so it's "another lonely day."






For 40 years, I've been hearing the lyrics wrong.

Well, back to Shaun Cassidy.

Gemstones Episode 2.1 Review, Continued: Keefe kisses, Kelvin erects, and Eli breaks a twink's thumbs

 

Link to the n*de guys

In the last scene, Keefe is excluded from Sunday dinner with the family.  Now we see what he missed:

Judy and BJ accused of betraying the family because they got married at Disney World (by Prince Eric, the "hottest guy in the Disney catalog"), and because they don't have kids.  Judy argues that she's trying to keep her body "foine" to incite BJ's desire.  Nope, they need to make babies. The job/house/wife/ kids litany again.

There's also a jab at Kelvin's muscle obsession. It's not just homoerotic desire: Jesse thinks that desire of any sort is inconsistent with family.  

Left: Jonah Hauer-King, who played Prince Eric in the Litle Mermaid movie.

More Disruptions: We cut to Eli playing croquet, gazing at women, and flirting with a lady.  Suddenly Junior, his friend from his wrestling days, appears amid sinister music!   Eli ignores him and drives away.  A disruption of Eli's heterosexual dalliance, parallel to the God Squad disrupting the nuclear family procession earlier. 

My Mans:  The family flies to Florida to inspect the site of the Lyssons' proposed resort.   When they return, Keefe and the God Squad meet them at their private airfield.  The family is shocked: didn't they know about the God Squad? 

"Uh-oh, my mans!" Kelvin exclaims, rushing forward to tell Keefe "You are looking great!"  In Southern Coastal grammar, "mans" is singular, "mens" plural.  He means Keefe.

Keefe tries to move in for a kiss, but Kelvin blocks him with an awkward hug.  He tries again, and Kelvin blocks him again. Finally he makes a blatant "enough!" gesture and backs off.  Judy finds this little dance hilarious.   It reflects the couple's conflict this season: Keefe wants to join the family as Kelvin's partner, the equivalent of BJ, sitting at the dinner table being criticized, while Kelvin isn't sure that same-sex romance is even possible.  His muscle cult is about desire: no love allowed. 

We cut to Eli in his office, watching a tv news show: Thaniel Block being interviewed about the "salacious scandal" story that took down Pastor Butterfield.  How famous was this guy?  I thought he was just the anonymous pastor of a satellite church.  They preach "s*x only between married heterosexual partners, or you're going to hell," but privately they do everything under the sun.  Who will he target next?   Maybe Kelvin-- "Secretly gay youth minister and his stable of muscle boys."  Ulp.   

More after the break

"English Teacher" Episode 1.8: Birthday party at a leather daddy bar, with Evan deciding between two boyfriends

Link to the n*de photos 

English Teacher, on Hulu, stars Brian Jordan Alvarez as an old-school gay guy in a world that's moved on.  He doesn't understand nonbinary, asexual, pansexual, and the other "queer" identities of his high school students, and expects everybody to be homophobic. And they are, sort of, expressing stereotypes and misinformation but completely nonchalant about the gay teacher in their midst. I reviewed Season 1, Episode 8, the season finale: "Birthday"

Teaser:  Student Eddie (Blaise Reyes, right) reveals to Evan (Brian Jordan Alvarez) that he's gay, but afraid to come out to anyone. Evan is dumfounded: It's 2024, just go out in the hall and say "I'm gay." Talk to one of the 200 out gay students.  Living in a fantasy world, dude?  Over 90% of LGBT students report hearing homophobic slurs at school. over half bullying and harassment, and 12% assault.  

"But not the unspecified queer students -- they're mostly straight.  Find a real gay, queeny."  It's a gay guy giving him this homophobic advice.

Evan doesn't want to go out: Evan's queeny ex-boyfriend Malcolm (Jordan Firstman) -- think Jack to Will on Will and Grace -- is planning a birthday blowout at a "leather daddy bar,"  because he'll be 35, and somebody needs to "s*ck your d*ck."  (that's how the subtitles phrase it).  Evan doesn't want to go, for reasons.  

The parking lot: Tom of Austin, with a gigantic sign. Evan is wearing a ridiculous vinyl shirt and gym shorts, afraid that one of the parents will see him and get upset.  Any parent that sees him in a leather daddy bar will be fine with it.  He's about to call it off and go home, when he's cruised by a muscular hippie -- maybe it will be ok. 

Left: the hippie is not listed on the IMDB

Surprise!  All of his work colleagues are there.

At the bar:   The standard straight-person-at-a-gay-bar things happen.  The Principal (Enrico Colantoni) gets groped repeatedly by a leather guy who won't take "no" for an answer, and tries not to look at the videos on every tv set: "it's two men!"   What did you expect, dude?

It's actually not a leather bar.  Some shirtless daddies around, but also some swishy twinks, and the bartender is a woman wearing cat ears.

The homophobic-ish Coach (Sean Patton) -- the kind who says "you can't help being a swishy queen.  I got your back" -- runs into his old high school teammate, Chuck (David Shae), and is shocked to discover that he is gay, or as he puts it, "I sleep with men."  Running into a gay guy at a gay bar?  Shocking!  

 "Wait -- you weren't gay in high school.  You had a hot girlfriend.  What happened?"

"I was closeted."

"It's hard to believe that a swishy gay guy made the winning touchdown in the big game."

More after the break

Corey Sevier: "Lassie," something about monkeys, a Greek god, a yoga mogul, and a lot of Christmas romcoms. And maybe Peter Brady

 

Link to the n*de photos

You might remember Canadian actor Corey Sevier from the 1997-98 reboot of Lassie.  I never saw it, or the original (1954-74): the melancholy "lost dog" intro is depressing, and who wants to watch a "dog in peril" series?  

I didn't see Summer of the Monkeys (1998), either.  A guy on the Canadian prairie in 1910 adopts four monkeys so he'll have enough money to buy a horse?  Sorry, I went to see Star Trek: Insurrection instead.

Corey's next role of note was Black Sash (2003): a disgraced ex-cop runs a martial arts dojo for teens.  It only lasted for seven episodes.

And North Shore (2004-2005), a Fox sleaze soap opera about women walking around in bikinis at a hotel in Hawaii.  There were some cute guys, too, but this shot will give you an idea of what you had to endure to see them. 

An annoyingly heterosexist entry into young adulthood.

Some minor "show your pecs" roles followed, like Aquaman (2006), with Justin Hartley as the teenager with superpowers, and Surf School (2006), which gives teens who have no surfing experience a week to learn what they need to win the championship.  Say what?

In this shot from Gospel of Deceit (2006), it looks like Corey is in bed with a guy wearing shorts, but the plot synopsis on the IMDB says that a preacher's wife (Alexandra Paul) is having an affair with handyman 

I checked the original movie: It's Alexandra Paul, who uses she/her pronouns.  Lady definitely has a masculine gender presentation: tricepts, no breasts, a man's haircut.

The first movie with Corey that I actually saw was The Immortals (2011): I was drawn in by the Greek gods, everyone from Zeus (Luke Evans) to Poseidon (Kellan Lutz).  Corey played Apollo.  Of course, the story was ridiculous, with no connection to any Greek myth.

Bonus: Matthew G. Taylor as the King's Guard

The IMDB says that Corey is known for Conduct Unbecoming (2011): a soldier is charged with killing civilians in Afghanistan. Of course I wouldn't see that.

In Awaken (2012), Corey meets the Girl of His Deams.  The only problem: she's dead.

And The Northlander (2016), which sounds like Mad Max: crazy-looking people travel through a post-Apocalyptic desert in search of something or other.

Two episodes of Psych: 

Brody, a contestant on a dating game

The model Bryan Frou, who might be gay. A Corey first!

More after the break

Christopher Knight/Peter Brady

I was saddened to hear of the death of Florence Henderson, who played (among other roles) Carol Brady on The Brady Bunch, surrogate mom to millions of Boomers.

Every Brady Boomer had every episode memorized, and had an ongoing series of crushes on one or more of the six Brady kids.

Most gay guys liked Greg (Barry Williams), the oldest boy, and the self-appointed hunk of the group, but he was obnoxiously girl-crazy.  I liked Peter (Christopher Knight), the middle boy, who hardly ever displayed any interest in girls, and had other traits that would get him dubbed "a Fairy" in my junior high.

He liked to sing; he belonged to the Drama Club; he donned a Campfire Bluebird uniform to sell cookies door-to-door.  A great role model for boys growing up in small towns with no interest in girls or sports.

And, as the years passed, Christopher Knight grew hunkier than Barry Williams.  He was displayed in shirtless spreads in Tiger Beat long after the series ended, and was asked to take off his shirt on tv a lot.

Though he's been busy with various Brady spin-offs and sequels, he's had time for a lot of tv appearances, on The Bionic Woman, Chips, Happy Days, The Love Boat, and others.  He starred on Joe's World (1979-80) and the soap Another World (1980-81), and as himself on The Surreal Life and My Fair Brady (2005-2008).







Today Christopher Knight is probably the most gay-friendly of the exceptionally gay-friendly Bunch.   He starred in two of Greg Araki's gay-themed angst movies, Nowhere and The Doom Generation, and played half of a gay couple (with tv brother Barry Williams) a 2006 episode of That 70s Show.  He was interviewed on the gay talk show Queer Edge. 

And he still has an amazing physique.

See also: Barry Williams/Greg Brady.

Corey Sevier: Dog's best friend, Greek god, yoga mogul, and a lot of Christmas romcoms.  With a potential n*de photo of Christopher Knight

Journey to the Beginning of Time

During the 1970s, our local afternoon kid's show, Captain Ernie's Cartoon Showboat, played a serial called Journey to the Beginning of Time, about four boys on a field trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York who find a secret passage leading to a mysterious river. They paddle down the river through different geological eras, rescuing each other from mastodons and dinosaurs, learning to survive in the prehistoric wilderness.  

Finally they pass the Precambrian Era and see the dazzling psychedelic fireworks of the Earth's creation.

The serial made no sense.  The boys' costumes and hair styles changed; they got taller and shorter; the voice-over narration didn't match the action; no one wonders how they're going to get back home again; and where did boys visiting a museum get a boat, anyway?

Still, it became one of the iconic images of my childhood, maybe because it made no sense.  It was a puzzle, a mystery to be unraveled, and that puzzle involved boys facing the world together.

  In a pivotal scene, Doc (Josef Lukas) loses the diary with his scientific notes of the journey, and Jo-Jo (Victor Betral) fights off a dinosaur to retrieve it.  Their subsequent moment of emotional intimacy reverberated through my childhood.

Turns out that in 1966, producer William Cayton took the river sequences from a Czech movie, Cesta do Praveku (1955), then filmed new opening and closing segments in the United States with different boys, figuring that the dumb kids in his target audience would never notice.  

 I noticed, but I didn't care. I was busy watching the boys bonding with each other through science fiction adventure.

Going Dutch: Military sitcom with an Old Soldier, a gay tease, and a muscular private (sigh). With a bonus private's privates

Link to the n*de dudes

In the last few days, I've started a dozen movies and tv shows that seemed promising -- guys gazing at each other on the icon, a trailer with buddy-bonding -- only to start them, and the focus character is kissing a woman by Minute 1.  The constant gay teasing is getting annoying.  Why tailor your project to attract viewers who are going to turn it off in 20 seconds?  

I'm so frustrated that I'm going to review something at random, the first "new!" title that appears on Hulu, Going Dutch: "After an epically unfiltered rant, an arrogant, loudmouth U.S. Army Colonel is reassigned to the Netherlands, where he is punished with a command position at the least important army base in the world. 

An army comedy?  Yuck!  But here goes, Episode 1.1:

Scene 1: USAG Baumholder Command Center.  I don't know what USAG means. Google says a gymnastics association, but that can't be right.   

Two army guys walk down the hall, the Old Guy (Dennis Leary, left) giving the Swishy Guy notes on how to introduce him: "Mention the Rangers, give America an erection."  Google says that the Rangers are an ice hockey team.

Swishy Guy: "I'll mention your Medal of Honor and your tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, and end up with your daughters, so you'll come off as a family man, and everyone will love you."

Old one: "No, don't mention them. I don't want to be beloved. I need to be tough, this close to Russia!"  Dude, you're in the Netherlands.  Russia is five countries and 2500 km away.

Swishy one: "We shouldn't mention how eager you are to start World War III." 

Scene 2: They meet with the Commander, General Davidson, who immediately asks about his daughters. "I hear you're a grandfather now."  Sorry, dude, he wants a family man.

Old Guy doesn't know what he means.  Oh, the baby?  "That's not a human being yet, more of a blob." Maybe stick with starting World War III.

Uh-oh, Old Guy was told that he was going to be the Commander.  Change of plans: he was caught on tape calling General Davidson a bleep, so he's in charge of  USAG Stroopsdorf, a supply center: "The least important army base in the world." 

Scene 3:  They walk through the Stroopsdorf Base: a miniature golf course, an outdoor fitness center. Old Guy is outraged at a "fat hippie on a bike."  Where's the discipline?   He vows to turn "this dump" into a proper combat base. 

Next, a tour of the fromagerie, the bowling alley, and the laundry, the three things Stroopsdorf is known for.

Plus a teen center with a sign "Reading is radical."  There are no teens on the base, so civilians from town use it for pool and video games. Old Guy tries to eject  "a small time gigolo" and a very muscular Private. 

Left: Small Time Gigolo is played by Icelandic actor Arnmundur Ernst Björnsson

Scene 4: The Interim Commander, a blond woman, addresses the troops: they have new headphones to use on the treadmills in the gym. No one mentioned Old Guy's wife. She must be dead, so he and Interim Commander can start a  "will they or won't they" romance.

Nope, she is his estranged daughter!  The Commander didn't mention that little detail.

She cut off all contact with him two years ago, but he didn't notice, because he "was busy saving America."  But working together will be an even worse punishment thatn being assigned to a "Dutch Club Med.

Scene 5: Swishy Guy flirts with Muscular Private as he plays foosball.  Wouldn't you?  Asked "What does your X/O mean?", he responds "I'm the Commander of Hugs and Kisses." Smooth move, dude.  But he impresses Muscular by winning the foosball game, then rushes to the Commanders to note that everyone can hear them arguing.

Muscular Private is played by Dempsey Bryk, who has rather an androgynous presence, but plays a lot of muscular guys (top photo).

Swishy Guy is played by Danny Pudi, who is heterosexual, but played a gay-subtext character on Community.  It's probably the same here: swishy as a gay tease, but soon to be outed as straight.

Interin Commander notes that they are marching in the Tulip Festival tomorrow, the first time they have been invited, so their presence is "crucial to diplomatic relations."  

More after the break

Gemstones Episode 2.1 Review: Junior likes d*cks, Kelvin likes pecs, and f*k yeah, we got both!

 

Link to NSFW review

Season 2 of The Righteous Gemstones began over two years after the Season 1 finale, and the back stories, personalities, and even the genre has changed.  Remember, Danny McBride likes his seasons to be complete stories, with no or few call-backs, so new viewers easily understand what's going on.  In fact, it may be fun for us to start afresh, watch as if we have never seen or heard of these people before.  

Memphis Soul Stew: Memphis, 1968. Teenage Eli Gemstone, the Maniac Kid (Jake Kelley), is playing a heel, a pro wrestling villain: "from the wrong side of the tracks, a newcomer to the League, all muscle, all attitude."  He fights dirty, pretending to reconcile with opponent Kyle Hawk, then throwing him out of the ring.  

As he fights, his manager Glendon Marsh (Wayne Duvall) cheers. Glendon's teenage son Junior (Tommy Nelson) watches, sometimes happy but usually disturbed.  Is he jealous of the attention Eli is getting?  Is he a rebellious teenager during the era of the Generation Gap?.

Junior is gay: In the locker room, Glendon offers Eli "some bonus pay on the South Side," while Junior looks on, smoking a cigarette, still either jealous or angry. As they leave, they pass a n*de guy.  Junior is so busy looking that he trips, and then looks back again.  The boy is definitely into men.

Jim Crow Must Go:  As they drive through a black neighborhood on the South Side of Memphis, near where Martin Luther King, Jr. will be assassinated on April 4th.  Junior looks out at the townsfolk in disgust. 

Suddenly they are surrounded civil rights protestors: "Jim Crow must go!" "We protest injustice."  Junior calls them "bums," which was usually applied to hippies, not African-Americans, leading me to believe that something changed between writing the script and hiring the background actors.  Glendon punches him: "they just want what everybody wants, a piece of the fucking pie."

Ok, Junior is racist, and Glendon is abusive, but why this scene? Hiring background players, costume, and staging must have been very time-consuming, with no payoff: civil rights are never mentioned again.  

The Loan Enforcer: Glendon is a loan shark as well as a wrestling manager: the job involves beating up a deadbeat.  Eli and Junior both go, squabbling over who's the boss.  

"Kill 'em!" we hear.  Psych!  It's the tv.  We meet a slovenly, drunken, foul-mouthed, abusive jackass of a husband.  While Junor subdues his wife and baby, Eli punches him a few times and asks for the money, and when he doesn't have it, breaks his thumbs. Junior laughs "derangedly" (according to the subtitles).

Afterwards Glendon drops Eli off, hands him some money, and tells him, "Buy yourself something nice." This is a feminizing statement. 

As Eli drives off on his motorcycle, we hear Buck Owens' "Tall Dark Stranger":

 They say a tall dark stranger is a demon, and  that a devil rides closely by his side.

 So if Junior is the demon, Eli must be the devil riding beside him.  How long will they ride together?

Abusive Daddies all the way down:  Eli drives to the Gemstone residence (it's not a stage name, apparently), where his abusive dad chastises him for being late for dinner. So they're eating after Eli's wrestling match?  Like at 11 or 12 pm?   There's also a mousy, skittish mom and a little sister, May-May (important in Season 3). 

Ordered to say grace, Eli jokes: "Good food, good meat, good God, let's eat," which makes May-May laugh.  Dad slaps him.  End of flashback.

We're fine with the faggots:  In 2022, elderly Eli Gemstone is a megachurch pastor and televangelist.  He and the satellite church ministers are discussing the case of Pastor Butterfield (Victor Williams), caught with his wife and another woman in a dance club restroom, while they were all high on Molly ("we thought they were Sweetarts").  The story made the front page of The New York Times, thanks to reporter Thaniel Block (Jason Schwartzman), who has made a career of publicizing ministerial  scandals.  Eli wants to be lenient, but the others object.  (Left: random pecs)

A Spanish speaking pastor explains: "My church is ok with the maricones (roughly faggots), but we're not ready for swinging and tropus."     Pastor Diane translates: "His church is really cool with the gays and the queers, but not so much about the swingers and the thruples."  They fire Pastor Butterfield; he tries to commit suicide.

 Why did Pastor Diane translate maricones with two words, gays and queers?  Why queers, doubtless with the old pejorative meaning rather than the contemporary reclamation? I get the impression that the pastors are not really ok with maricones, so any gay ministers might want to stay in the closet, especially with the reporter snooping around.  Since this is the first scene in the present day, it is doubtless setting up one of the main conflicts of the season.  But who is the gay minister  Eli, Junior, or someone not yet introduced?  

Left: God Squad pecs

Tell the girls:  A young man rides a motorcycle to the Gemstone Compound, doing crazy stunts (this will be important later), while the background song advises:

Tell the girls that I am back in town.  They'd better beware

They may run, and they may hide.

I'll follow, and I'll be there.

 At least we know that he's not the closeted gay minister.  He turns out to be Eli's grandson Gideon, back from a job as a stuntman to assist with the Gemstone ministry.  He's going to move into the house that Eli built for his abusive dad.

In other news, Gideon's younger brother Abraham has been leaving "secretions" all over the house, like in the freezer next to the Dreamsicles.  

We cut to a church service with Eli Gemstone and his children, Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin, announcing the start of their streaming service, GODD.  We see Jesse's wife Amber, their kids, and Judy's husband BJ in the audience.  No partner for Kelvin. He must be single

F*k, yeah!  More after the break

Mickey and Goofy, the Gay Couple of "Walt Disney's Comics and Stories." With Christopher Knight bonus

Way to feel old.  I just bought the 75th Anniversary Edition of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, the flagship of the Disney comics empire.

Back in 1991, I bought the 50th Anniversary Edition

And Christopher Knight (Peter Brady) is 67.

When I was a kid, I loved the Disney Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge titles, with the ducks adventuring in exotic locales, in search of the Mines of King Solomon or the lost crown of Genghis Khan.

But I had no use for Walt Disney's Comics and Stories.

There was always a Duck cover, and the first story starred Donald Duck, but it was a slapstick comedy, not an adventure.

Then several stories involving minor Disney characters adapted from movies that came out before I was born:

1. The Little Bad Wolf, a "Casper the Friendly Ghost" who butted heads with his single father, Zeke, aka the Big Bad Wolf from The Three Little Pigs (1933).  Neither father nor son expressed any interest in girls, so that was a glimmer of gay subtext, anyway.  But also:

2. The patois-speaking Indian Little Hiawatha,who apparently starred in some cartoons in the 1930s.  f Offensive even for a 10 year old in 1971

3. Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio (1940).  Who?

4. Scamp, the son of the two dogs who got together in Lady and the Tramp (1955).  He was rascally, adventurous, a gender-stereotyped "boy," with sisters who were gender-stereotyped sissy "girls."  Offensive even for a 10-year old in 1971.

5/ Then a text story, unreadable, just so they could ship the comic books at book rates.

6. But the worst was the last feature, a serial by artist Paul Murray (1911-1989) that paired Mickey Mouse and Goofy.  

They were usually detectives trying to solve a crime with science fiction elements, though there were also outer-space and historical stories.

The problem was, I never could read a serial straight through.  Buying comic books was always a gamble, based on what Schneider's Drug Store stocked, what was left by the time I got there, and how much money I had.  There was never an opportunity to buy the same title several months in a row, so instead I always arrived in media res, or in time for "the ghost was really your disgruntled assistant" Scooby wrap-up.

More after the break

That scene from C*A*U*G*H*T, the Australian hostage comedy. You can't see the television series, but you can see the d*cks

  

Link to the n*de photos

I've been looking at n*de guys in mainstream movies and tv shows for a long time. Accidental displays all the way back to Mark-Paul Goesselaer in Dead Man on Campus (1998), full, open displays on Europhia and The Righteous Gemstones.  But this morning I saw a screenshot so shocking that I couldn't believe it aired on a mainstream television program (after the break).

So I had to research the program: C*A*U*G*H*T, with asterisks, like M*A*S*H,  to distinguish it from the other tv series named Caught that premiered that year.  It is a six episode comedy produced, written, and directed by Kick Gurry (Kick?), which aired on the Stan network in Australia, in September 2023.  It was pulled from international release, so not available in the U.S., but I read an episode guide.

The plot: four Australian soldiers go on a secret mission to the war-torn island of Behati-Prinloo, where they are mistaken for American spies and captured by "freedom fighters."  They release a homemade hostage video that goes viral, resulting the U.S. Secretaryof State, played by Susan Sarandon, negotiating for their release and Sean Penn offering to exchange himself for the guys.

As far as I can tell, all of the characters and actors are heterosexual.  

The four are:

1. Lincoln Younes as Albhanis Mouwad.  The former Home and Away soap star is known for Down Under, Tangle, and Grand Hotel.

2. Kick Gurry (Kick?) as Dylan Fox.  He is best known as Sparky in Speed Racer and Griff in Edge of Tomorrow.  He's rather unattractive, so we'll skip his photo.

3. Ben O'Toole (shouldn't that be Rod O'Toole?) as Rowdy Gaines (Rowdy?).  He is best known as Snapper Webster in Barons (Snapper?).

4. Alexander England as Phil Choi.  He appeared as Mnevis in Gods of Egypt.

More after the break, including that scene