Johnny Berchtold: I have good news and bad news. The good news is his d*ck

 Link to the n*de dudes

I researched Johnny Berchtold, who plays the gay-vague or maybe canonically gay college student Richard Beck on Season 3 of Reacher.   

I have good news and bad news.

The good news: He is huge.

 

The bad news: The d*ck pic is from the movie A Hard Problem (2021).  Johnny plays a guy who tries to reconnect with his sister and recruits The Girl to help him clean out his deceased mother's house. Heteronormativity all the way down.

The good news:  In addition to Reacher, Johnny has a gay-vague role in  The Passenger (2023). Violent loose-cannon Benson (Kyle Gallner) decides to "fix" beset-upon fast-food worker  Randy (Johnny), killing his bullies, helping him stand up to his overbearing mother, and so on.

The script was heteronormative, but queer director Carter Smith had the actors push up the homoeroticism until they are almost a gay couple.  (Spoiler: one dies at the end).

The bad news: I couldn't find any other gay or gay-vague roles.

In Tiny Pretty Things (2023), his character is married to Claire (Katherine Hahn of Agatha All Along).

In spite of the whimsical pun-title, Dog Gone (2023) is about a dying guy and his dog, who is also dying.  He's probably straight, but I'm not sure: the plot synopsis was so disturbing that I just skimmed through.

In Gaslight (2021), which is about Watergate, not Victorian England, Johnny plays Jay Jennings, the estranged son of Martha Mitchell (wife of Attorney General John Mitchell).  He is married to a woman.

In spite of the whimsical title,  Life as a Mermaid (2016-2018) is a live-action drama about two mermaid sisters living among humans.  Johnny plays the Barnacle King, sort of a nerdish character with disgusting barnacles attached to his face.  He has a male sidekick, but I couldn't stomach watching long enough to determine if he is gay or gay-vague.

Fun fact: Life as a Mermaid is also a documentary about transgender people in Borneo.

The good news: Johnny is way into horror.  His instagram is full of photos of him in bloody and monster makeup, and getting Chucky as a roommate.  

More after the break

Gemstones Episode 2.9, Continued: A Perfect Christian, the Lion King, n*de twinks, and lovers in old photographs

  Link to the n*de dudes

Keefe stands alone: Keefe sits next to Kelvin on the way to the Zion's Landing Resort ground-breaking party.  He stands next to BJ while the siblings perform.  But afterwards, he goes off to make new friends: he tries to impress them by doing the Worm, and is upset when he fails.  

Why doesn't he interact with Kelvin, or anyone in the family?  It's as if they told him "You can come, but don't be seen with us.  We don't want people thinking that you and Kelvin are together." 

Baby Billy Returns: As Tiffany sits in a cabana, Baby Billy appears!  He tells her "I'm back for good,"  Judy isn't having it "You've got a lot of nerve coming here after what you did!" 

He ignores Judy and asks Tiffany to take him back.  She refuses to answer, saying that she has to go to the bathroom.

Keefe and the Perfect Christian: Meanwhile, Keefe and Joe Jonas, the world's most perfect Christian, head to the same porta-potty.  They are so busy gazing at the guy who just exited that they both reach for the handle at the same time, and clasp hands.  It is accidental, but still a strangely erotic moment.  

Tiffany pushes them aside and rushes into the porta-potty.  Joe Jonas and Keefe continue to flirt as she goes into labor.   Don't they, like, have to go?

The Lion King: Later, a crowd has gathered around the porta-potty.  Didn't anyone fetch a doctor? 

Baby Billy rushes up and asks Keefe, Pontius, and Abraham if they've seen Tiffany.  They point. She said she was going to the bathroom, you dolt! Why did it take you so long to figure it out?

Tiffany emerges, stating that she had her baby: it fell into the toilet.Gross callback to the "toilet baby" discussion.  Baby Billy reaches down and pulls the baby out.  Then, in a scene reflecting Simba's birth in The Lion King, he holds it over his head for the crowd to see.  Everyone applauds. 

Lyle's Revenge: Eli gets a phone call: Junior has used his underworld connections to trace the origin of the weapons the Cycle Ninjas used. They were sold to some boys in a gang in Texas -- where Lyle Lissons is from!  Don't jump to conclusions, Eli -- Texas is a big state.

On the beach, Jesse, still unaware of Lyle's involvement, is handing over the investment money.  Suddenly a woman appears, yelling at Lyle about the disappearance of her husband: "He was working with you, to get information on the Butterfields!  He told me all about it!"  

Finally Jesse starts to figure it out.  He confronts Lyle, who admits to sending the Cycle Ninjas to kill Eli --  he thought he was "doing you a solid," freeing up some money so Jesse could invest.  Besides, hasn't he often wished that his father would hurry up and die?  No, of course not.  But, now, worried that he might tell, Lyle attacks. They fight, and Jesse hits and kills him with a rock from the David and Goliath slingshot he used to threaten Junior. 

He rushes to his family -- um, hang on for a moment. Check out Kelvin's ultra-femme outfit and mannerisms.  He's really come out loud and proud.  He was the macho Messiah of the Musclemen an episode ago, and now he's my Aunt Sadie. 

And why isn't Keefe there?  He's at the porta-potties, of course, but there isn't even a chair that he vacated.

Jesse announces that he's murdered someone.  The family follows him to the beach, but Lyle is alive, and Lindsey is armed!  She shoots BJ in the femoral artery, and forces the others to swim out into the ocean.  BJ will bleed out in 2-4 minutes unless he gets first aid.  He's doomed!

More after the break

The Action-Adventure "Hazel"

Amazon Prime is streaming a lot of old sitcoms from the 1960s: The Andy Griffith Show, Bewitched, The Lucy Show, Dennis the Menace.  I can't wait for them to get around to Hazel (1961-66), with Shirley Booth as the maid for a middle-class family.  Not because I loved it.  Because it gives me a visceral sense of foreboding and dread, as if something is not right.  And I want to find out why.

I was only five years old when the program ended, so I don't recall more than a few snippets of episodes.  Maybe the premise itself is not right?  

.In the 1960s, middle-class households did not have live-in servants.  Single fathers might have a nanny.  Hazel is a bizarre throwback to an earlier generation.  

There are two types of servants on tv: heartwarming nannies who bring joie de vivre to sullen children (like Fran on The Nanny and "Charles in Charge"); and sarcastic maids who skewer their boss's pretentions (like Florence on The Jeffersons).  But Hazel is neither.  

Accoding to the episode synopses, Hazel doesn't behave like a servant at all: she gets a job at a department store; she publishes a cookbook and goes on tour; a talent scout hears her musical group perform; she takes a job as a spokesperson for a cake mix.  When does she have time for cleaning the house?  Why does she stay a maid, instead of embarking on a career as an actress or singer?

Hazel actually works for two families.  During the first four seasons, lawyer George Baxter (Don DeFore), his wife Dorothy (an interior designer), and their son Harold (Bobby Buntrock).

I tried to research whether Don DeFore was gay, but only discovered that he was married several times and a staunch Republican who worked on the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964 ("In your gut you know he's nuts.")

Bobby Buntrock retired from acting after Hazel, and died in an auto accident in 1974, at the age of 21. I couldn't find out if he was gay, either.

 In the last season, the network wanted to appeal to a younger audience, so they axed George and Dorothy, sending them off to Iraq (without informing the actors), and gave Hazel and Harold to a younger family: George's brother, real estate agent Steve Baxter (Ray Fulmer), his wife Barbara, and their young daughter Susie.  

Harold was now a teenager, so he started getting "teenage" plotlines about jobs, girls, and the generation gap, and he got a new best friend, Jeff (Pat Cardi).

Ray Fulmer has only a few acting credits on IMDB, notably a 17-episode arc on the soap opera Somerset and the 1963 movie Wild is My Love, about three college boys who fall for a stripper. 

None of this sounds very appealing, but it doesn't explain the visceral dread.  Granted, the snippets of episodes that I remember would be very scary for a five-year old: 

1. Some poisonous mushrooms accidentally ended up in the supermarket.  Some worried-looking government guys complain that not all of the packages have been returned; one is missing.  Whoever bought it doesn't listen to the radio or read the newspaper.  Cut to Hazel, turning off the radio and throwing out the newspaper as she prepares the mushrooms that will kill everyone.

2. Hazel is tied to a conveyor belt that will carry her through a claw machine to her death.  Her hunky, much younger boyfriend arrives in the nick of time, stops the machine, and unties her.  They hug.

But I have found neither of those scenes in the episode synopses, or in the complete acting credits of Shirley Boothe (in case I made a mistake). Hazel has a boyfriend in only four episodes, and it's the middle aged Mitch (Dub Taylor), not the young hunk of my memory.

Maybe that's the reason behind my dread.  I was peering into another universe, where Hazel was an action/adventure series, not an outdated sitcom about a maid.

Mark Patton: Freddy Krueger's boyfriend, George Clooney's buddy, artist, scream queen. With his backside and bulge, and Clooney's d*ck

  

Link to the n*de dudes

I wanted to do a profile of Mark Patton, the Scream Queen who hooked up with Ricky Schroder in 1988, at least according to my friend in West Hollywood, Zach the Photographer.

He's called the Scream Queen because of Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985), where he plays a gay-vague teenager beset-upon by the nightmare psycho-killer Freddy Krueger.

Plus continuing the tradition of Nightmare hunks like Johnny Depp (left), he shows some butt and bulges.

Mark thought that Nightmare would be his "big break" into mainstream movies.  He was wrong. 

Previously he had played a gay boy in the 1950s (actually a  transgender woman before transitioning), Chuck Connor's son, and the brother of a cloned girl, all roles with gay potential.

He assumed that his Nightmare character was gay, too, but costar Robert Rusler (left) said "Hell, no!  And if you know what's good for you, you won't mentions gays to David [writer David Chaskin], ever!  He'll have you fired and on the first bus back to Missouri!"

I found the movie homophobic, even for the homophobic 1980s.  There are lots of "fag" slurs. The evil gym coach (Marshall Bell) dies when nightmare killer Freddy Krueger assaults him from behind in the shower, the homophobe's fear of what a gay predator might do.  The boy's "deviant impulses" are cured through the love of a woman.  

In a recent interview, David Chaskin admitted that he put gay codes into the script deliberately, but his goal was homophobic, to point out that gay people are monsters.  Still, the movie has been reclaimed as a queer classic, a gay teenager struggling to come out in a homophobic society that thinks gay people are monsters. 

After Nightmare, Mark found himself at the mercy of agents who tried to de-gay him.  They went through his closet to eliminate "gay" outfits, told him to avoid West Hollywood, and forbade him from being interviewed in The Advocate.

Mark managed a role as straight teenager in a CBS Schoolbreak Special (1986), and the buddy of the guy (George Clooney, right) who is having an affair with his mother on an episode of Hotel (1986).

In 1987, he was cast as a gay teenager, but told that he had to be closeted in real life, so he walked, and became an interior designer.

He lost his first partner, Timothy Murphy, to AIDS in 1988.  According to the story told by Zach the Photographer, he hooked up with Ricky Schroder later that year.

In 2000 while in the hospital for bronchitis, he was diagnosed as HIV positive himself.  

More after the break

Ryan Potter: N*de and gay adult pics of the Supah Ninja, Beast Boy, Hiro Hamada, mystic, gamer, and bisexual buddy

Link to the n*de photos

Ryan Potter is best known as Gar Logan, aka Beast Boy, in the DC Comics Universe series Titans (2018-23).

These aren't the Teen Titans from your Daddy's comics collection.  The original Robin the Boy Wonder is still around, but the team also includes two of his successors, Jason Todd and Tim Drake, as well as Connor Kent, the clone of Superman and Lex Luthor.

Plus there are gay and trans characters, and a lot of backsides on display, including Ryan's.

Ryan was born in 1995, and spent his first seven years in Tokyo before relocating to Los Angeles.  He started his acting career in Supah Ninjas (2011-13), spelled wrong on purpose, playing a shy, quiet student who discovers that he is...um...a super Ninja.  His best friend and the Girl of His Dreams join the team, tutored by his grandfather, George Takei.

More movies about shy, quiet students who learn martial arts followed, plus some Disney teencoms and a lot of animated series about martial arts.

In the various Big Hero 6 movies  and tv programs (Baymax and..., Big Chibi 6, Baymax Dreams, Big Hero 6: The Series, Baymax!), Ryan plays Hiro Hamada, a teenage robotics genius who creates a snowman-like inflatable robot named Baymax.  He and his friends and the Girl of His Dreams form the superhero team Big Hero 6.

One of the versions has a gay character named Mbita, and  another has Brooks Wheelan as Fred, "team mascot at SFIT."

The animated Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous (2020-22) follows teens at a summer camp on Isla Nubar who get stuck when the dinosaurs take over.  There are two lesbian teens among them, but Ryan's character is straight.

That's a lot of straight guys, but in his private life Ryan is a gay ally:

He was the youngest celebrity to speak out on the No H8 campaign in 2012, favoring the legalization of same-sex marriage

In 2021, he tweeted that his Titans character, Gar, was bisexual.

In 2022, he came out as bisexual himself.

More after the break

"Howl" for Ricky Schroder, with Ricky's d*ck

  

Link to Ricky's d*ck and backside

I saw the cutest guy of my generation destroyed by madness, ranting hysterical n*ked...

Who played a "poor little rich boy" on Silver Spoons (1982-87) on my dream Saturday night, immersed in the buddy-bonding of Bosom Buddies, Jennifer Slept Here, and Mama's Family.

Whose boyfriend, Alfonso Ribeiro, went on to display his muscles and bulge on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

Who became a teen idol without taking off his shirt, who made gay boys sigh just with his dreamy eyes and smile

Who graduated to play a young soldier (Too Young The Hero, 1988), a cowboy (Lonesome Dove, 1989), and the juvenile brother of Brad Pitt (Across the Tracks, 1990), all men who knew the manly love of comrades

 Who hooked up with Mark Patton the Scream Queen but then threw himself into the closet of wives and sons and locker room homophobia

Who buddy-bonded with Dermont Mulroney in There Goes My Baby (1994), before they were both shipped off to Vietnam, one to die and the other to open a surf shop and cry over his lost love

Who forgot the endless summers of our youth

Seeing, touching, and tasting c ocks and endless balls.

Who crashed into movies and tv shows that no one saw, harsh, gritty, repellant, "make America great again" vehicles.

Who played a detective on NYPD Blue (1998-2001), with a woman's body below his gyrating backside

More after the break

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

 Link to Shane showing his stuff

I wanted to research Shane Harper, the extremely attractive drug dealer  Junior on Hightown (2020-21).  He's distraught over his girlfriend's death, so he makes some homophobic comments to two leather daddies, hoping that they will kill him.  They just beat him up; he dies of a drug overdose later.

Shane only has six photos on his Instagram, and two on his X, including this one.  He is getting a spray-on tan, with the caption:: "this is probably the only n*de photo I'll ever post."

Don't believe him.  He posts a lot.

So who is this guy?

According to the IMDB, he was born in San Diego, and began dancing, singing, and acting in community productions at the age of nine.   He played dancers in Re-Animated, High School Musical 2, Dance Revolution, and Dancing on Sunset.

Then he bounced arund the Disney Channel for a few years, guest starring in Zoey 101 and  Wizards of Waverly Place, and starring in Good Luck, Charlie as Teddy's boyfriend (Teddy is a girl; so is Charlie)

He released an album in 2011,  so I check out the heterosexism: the number of songs that shout "girl! girl! girl!," thus proclaiming that every relationship is heterosexual and invalidating the desires and relationships of LGBT fans.

Not much heterosexism.   But then look what happens:

God's Not Dead, 2014, starrs right-wing nutjob Kevin Sorbo as an evil college professor who forces his students to submit signed statements affirming that "God is dead."  This is utterly ridiculous. College professors don't force students to accept any point of view. They aren't allowed to.

Besides, The Death of God  (1961) was a book complaining that modern society had lost its sense of transcendence, the magical in everyday life.  The author didn't mean that the actual Supreme Being was dead.  And it was 50 years ago.  Why are fundamentalists still upset about it?

Shane plays the student who bravely challenges the evil prof and ends up proving that God is, in fact, still alive.

He returns in God's Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness (2018), in which a Christian pastor is tormented, and his church burned down, by an army of atheists and liberals.  No philosophy professors?  

OMG, that is jaw-droppingly idiotic. 

More after the break

Reacher, Episode 3.1: The man-mountain bonds with a college boy with a drug-dealer dad, and there are plot twists and d*cks

Link to the n*de dudes

I see that Reacher is in its third season on Amazon Prime. "When retired Military Police Officer Jack Reacher is arrested for a murder he did not commit, he finds himself in the middle of a deadly conspiracy full of dirty cops, shady businessmen, and scheming politicians."

What's the big deal?  "Crime he did not commit" has been a cliche since "The Fugitive" in 1963, and every single movie and tv show has dirty cops.  No way would I consider watching something so trite and......

...um...

...boring....um....

I mean, I can't wait to start watching.  I'm reviewing Episode 3.1, "Persuader"

Recap: Reacher (Alan Ritchson) travels from town to town, helping people with their problems, mostly requiring him to shoot machine guns, kick guys in the balls, and throw them off balconies into trash piles, then take a Trailways bus somewhere else.

Scene 1: Establishing shots of Havenhurst University in Abbotsville, Maine.  Not real places, but they could mean Bowdoin College, the safety school for lots of valedictorians.  Reacher pulls up to the Vinyl Vault downtown, grimaces, and brings his record collection in to sell.

While he's bickering with the shopkeeper, Steve (David Daniel Stewart) drives up in his pick-up truck.  Suspicious, Reacher watches as he deliberately plows into the car, pushes it into a telephone pole, kills the driver, and drags the whimpering college student Richard Beck (Johnny Berthold, below) from the back seat into his truck.

Reacher intervenes and shoots out the tires.  Steve opens fire, but Reacher shoots him in the arm and retrieves the whimpering Richard, loads him into his van, shoots a cop ("I didn't know -- I thought he was pulling a gun"), and zooms away, with more cops in hot pursuit.  The campus police?  Can they even make arrests?

Scene 2: A well choreographed chase, with a lot of sudden turns and smashed cars -- the staging must have cost a fortune.  They stop so Reacher can steal a new car.   He tells Richard to call for a ride; "tell them you're in shock and can't remember what I looked like." 

But Richard wants more help; the kidnappers could still be around.  "No.  I'm a drifter who used an unlicensed gun to kill a cop.  I gotta disappear."

"At least take me home. My dad's rich, and can help you disappear."

"Nope."

Bats eyes. "Pretty please?"  Offer to go downtown.

"Well, ok." 

Back story: Richard was kidnapped before, five years ago.  Dad wouldn't pay the ransom until the kidnappers cut off his ear. 

More after the break

Lanigan's Rabbi

 I didn't meet anyone who was Jewish until my junior year in high school, when a rabbi's son named Aaron was in my English class.  He was lean and wiry, with thick black hair and expressive hands, with a preference for lumberjack shirts and a sky-blue yarmulke. He was always surrounded by a crowd of girls who knitted him sweaters and baked him cookies and sighed a lot, but occasionally I managed to push through the crowd to ask him a few questions about kosher laws or Hebrew School or his bar mitzvah, anything I could think of to keep his attention.

At the same time, our English teacher assigned Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev and I read on my own his gay Jewish Romeo-and-Juliet story, The Chosen.

So I must have been very receptive during the spring of 1977, when two tv series with homoerotic Jewish subtexts appeared, Busting Loose and Lanigan's Rabbi.


On Sunday nights, NBC had a recurring series, The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie, with an alternating series of detectives.  My friends and I weren't impressed.  We called McCloud McClod, and Colombo Clod-Dumb-Bo.  But Lanigan's Rabbi became must-see tv, "good beyond hope."

Lanigan (Art Carney, right) was police chief in a small town in California. When he investigated a murder in a synagogue, he had to collaborate with Rabbi Small (Bruce Solomon, left), whose keen mind, trained in Talmudic scholarship, figured out whodunit.  They continued to be thrown into mysteries for three more episodes, with corpses including guest of honor at a Man of the Year celebration, a miserly millionaire, and the guy who accused Lanigan of malpractice.

The stories were by-the-books stuff, not very interesting.
Bruce Solomon, who also played a cop on Mary Hartman, was very attractive, but his shirt never came off.
Art Carney was 58, too old to be of interest.
 And they both had wives.

What was the gay angle?

It was about two men from different worlds finding common ground, mutual admiration, and finally a deeply intimate bond.  Why did the Rabbi keep tagging along on Lanigan's investigations?  Was it the joy of sleuthing?  Or were they in love?

Beefcake and Bulges in Old Swedish Photographs

The Du Gamla website uploads photographs of people who lived in Sweden from the 1850s and 1950s.  Some local celebrities, like Olympic athletes, but mostly regular people with no particular claims to fame.

It's a fascinating compendium of people who were once solid, who ate and drank and planned for the future, who desired and were desired by men or women, or both, and now are long forgotten.

Like Allan Buhne, 1911.  Obviously a wrestler.

I have found no other record of him on the internet except for this, from the records of the Hammarby Idrottsförening (Sports Club) in Stockholm: Allan Buhne came 4th in SM. He worked for almost all his life in Hammarby Wrestling.

It's obvious that he had the same singlet problem that wrestlers have today.

Frithiof Martensson (1888-1956) was a middle weight contender in the wrestling contest at the 1908 Olympics.  Later he became a dental hygienist.

August Bylen, 1871-1954, was a metalsmith and farmer. And, apparently, packing.

Ruben Johansson, 1899 to 1918.  Very cute guy.  He died at age 19, maybe during the worldwide influenza epidemic.

Ragnar Larsson, 1901-1984, a wrestler at the 1924 Olympics.

More after the break.

Zero Day: Monster apocalypse, time travel, or political thriller? With a gay tease, a cute Russian guy, and De Niro's d*ck

Link to the n*de dudes

A tv miniseries, Zero Day (2025) popped up on my Netflix feed with no description.  There have been five previous Day Zeros, about a monster Apocalypse (2011, 2022), a water shortage (2021), a terrorist (2020), and the military draft (2007), so the premise of this one is a gamble.  I'm hoping for the monster Apocalypse.

Scene 1: The elderly George (Robert DeNiro, below) is trying to open the safe in his book-lined office while someone tries to break down the door.  He smashes a photo of him with his best bud in 1975, then tries again, but it's too late: the door opens.

Three Days Earlier:  George awakens in a double bed (must have a dead wife), takes his Lipitor, swims laps, goes jogging through the woods with his dog.  His jacket says that he's the President of the U.S. -- so where are his security guards?

Scene 2: In the kitchen, his boyfriend, Hector (Geoffrey Cantor), is making breakfast.  They discuss the bird feeder situation.  An assistant brings his morning newspaper and briefings -- the former First Lady is being confirmed as an Appellate Judge. So they're divorced.

"When does my wife land?" he asks.  So they're not divorced? Former -- he's the ex-President.  They discuss the catering for Saturday's Big Event.  I imagine that he has Big Events every day, being the ex-President and all.

He hasn't heard from Alex, but they assume she'll be coming.  Girlfriend or daughter?

"And send this morning's visitor to the guest cabin."

Scene 3: A limo drops off a young lady, presumably "this morning's visitor," at the rustic, book-lined guest cabin.  She is not happy to be there.  She examines the photos and memorabilia, and a bookcase full of handwritten journals: Campaign 2004, U.S. Invasion of Iraq, NYC Transit Strike 2005.

George enters and explains that he's using the journals to write his autobiography, which will be done soon.  Sorry it's so late. 

She's excited: he is the last president in modern history to get bipartisan support (you got that right), so this book could have a big impact in today's contentious political climate (the current President will probably ban it).

Next George points out the photo of him with his childhood boyfriend Jon Flanagan.  They served in the army together, and then he was killed in Greenpoint picking up a bottle of milk.  Lift with your legs, not with your back. Oh, wait -- he was murdered while trying to buy the milk. Weird way to phrae it.  

This inspired George to go to law school, become a prosecutor, put bad guys away, and eventually run for President.

Next question: "Why did you decide not to run for re-election? The real reason, not 'Our son just died,' the bogus reason  you gave the press."  

George doesn't like this -- would you?  --  and kicks her out.

Scene 4: On the way home, the Visitor is complaining to her boss, when the cell phone blanks out with a message: "This will happen again!"  Then their car crashes into a train and bursts into flame.

George watches Wolf Blitzer on tv: multiple outages affecting power grids, transportation systems, and communications, resulting in train derailments, airplane crashes, life support systems shut down.  It's called Zero Day.  Is this a post-Apocalyptic series?  Will George and his staff be eating canned beans in a bunker?

Scene 5: Russian Consulate. A cute guy (Nikita Bogolyubov, who is fluent in English, Russian, and Weirdo) says "I'll take care of it," and grabs a gun from his desk, giving us an eyeful of the bulge in his Calvin Kleins. 

Meanwhile, in Washington DC, the Speaker of the House (Matthew Modine, left) makes a gung-ho speech about America's vulnerability.  Time to get tough and crack some heads.  And deport all the immigrants?  

And back home, George watches a video of a man telling his son to "wave to Mommy" during his first subway ride. Ulp -- I knew where this is going. I'm fast forwarding past the son's death.  His Ex-Wife, the former First Lady, arrives, and they continue to watch.

Scene 6: Zero Day 1.  George gets up, takes his Lipitor, swims his laps, jogs with his dog.  We'd better see some societal breakdown today, or I'm leaving.  

Back home, tv reports of massive casualties and search-and-rescue efforts. George tells his boyfriend, Hector, that the dog found something scary in the woods, maybe a corpse.

He gets a special intelligence briefing -- no idea about the perp -- and Roger Carlson (Jesse Plemons) visits. They hug.

The White House wants George to visit some of the sites, shake hands with first responders, and so on.  "Nope, I'm retired."  

"But we need you. Everyone is scared. Right now the American people need to know that the country will be ok."  Is he talking about the cyber-attack, or the 2024 election?

Talked into it, they drive into Manhattan to the site of a train collison.  A police barricade with a crowd behind it carrying "Have you seen me?" fliers, yelling "F*king socialist traitors!" and "Wake up, sheeple!  This is all fake!"  He shakes hands with some firefighters.

The crowd gets angry with each other and starts fighting, but George calms them down. "We're Americans! We're supposed to be standing up for each other?"  Huh? Have you ever looked at the comments on any internet post? "You spelled this actor's name wrong -- I hope you and everyone you know dies a slow, painful death!" 

More after the break

David Pevsner: Quasi-homophobic roles, older gay guy roles, gay theater, lots of Pevsner p enis pics. Did I mention that he's gay?

Link to the Pevsner p enis

A photo of someone named David Pevsner popped up on my "n*de celebrity" feed.  I never heard of him, but when I checked the IMDB, I found 57 acting credits, with a lot of gay-themed projects.  

A promising start.  Until you start checking the synopses.

A bartender in a gay bar in a 2000 episode of NYPD Blue: the detectives, including the homophobic Rick Schroeder, deal with the case of a man who rents a hotel room to meet guys on the downlow.  He is stabbed 47 times, and his p enis removed.  So, like "Cruising", with some gay panic shite?

A casting agent in The Fluffer (2001): a young man employed as a fluffer (keeping the adult actors interested) falls for "a gay-for-pay p*rn star whose hedonistic lifestyle may lead them both to destruction."  Yuck, more gay-as-sleaze homophobia.  I'll be he gets redeemed through a heterosexual romance.

"Man in Hospital" in Adam & Steve (2005):  Adam and his girlfriend are at a pub, when he sees a male dancer, Steve, and decides to hook up.  Years later, he meets Steve again, now a psychiatrist, and they start a new relationship.  Meanwhile, the ex-girlfriend starts dating Steve's roommate.  It's on Pluto only, so I can't get to it, but according to the reviews, there's some homophobic hate crime, people being horrified at seeing a gay couple (in 2005 New York), stereotyping, gross-out humor, and a whimpering dog.   

A gay pe dophile child abductor in a 2006 episode of Criminal Minds (with Daryl Sabara as a teen with a precursor of a gay OnlyFans page).

A lot of gay roles, but not positive ones.  I don't know if this guy is gay or a blistering homophobe, or both.

A starring role in The Real Life (2007), about a life coach (David) who gets his own reality tv show, and becomes "addicted to fame."  Not available to stream anywhere.

Lez Be Friends (2007), two episodes of a tv pilot repackaged as a movie: A lesbian must pretend to be straight so her lesbian-phobic landlord will allow her and her gay bff to move in with a gay guy.  So the dude is fine with gay men, but not lesbians?  Or does he think that gay people all hook up with each other?.   That's the premise of Three's Company.   The first episode sets up the premise, and the second is about a crab infestation.  David plays Duke, not one of the roommates.  Not available to stream.

A p*rnography professor in P*rnography: A Thriller (2009).

Role Play (2010): A recently outed soap star begins a relationship with a "recently divorced gay marriage activist," and there's something about fame. At least nobody dies. David plays Alex, the resort owner.

The IMDB goes on like that, with minor quasi-homophobic roles in gay-themed movies and tv shows. I'm going to move up to the tv series where David has more substantial roles.

Tardust in 10 episodes of We're Alive: A Story of Survival, a podcast about a zombie apocalypse. 

The Host in 7 episodes of Disorganized Zone, a Twilight zone parody.

27 episodes of Old Dogs & New Tricks (2011-20), a webseries about four middle-aged gay men living in "youth-obsessed West Hollywood": Leon Acord as a talent agent, Curt Bonem as singer who peaked in the 1980s, David as an actor who peaked in the 1990s, and Jeffrey Patrick Olson as a personal trainer

Scrooge in Scrooge & Marley (2012), a gay retake of Dickens' Christmas Carol.  The "bah! humbug!" dude is mourning his dead partner (Tim Kazurinski), learns the Spirit of Christmas, and helps his nephew get a boyfriend.  And the ghosts are rather...um, festive.  

It's on Tubi. Maybe I'll review it next Christmas.

  

More after the break.