Isaac Ordonez: A sweet, sensitive, queer-coded Pugsley Addams. WIth Chris Pine, Skyler, and some Hispanic dudes

  

Link to nude dudes 

(The Blogger censors don't allow n*de anymore, even when I block out some letters, and I’m tired of thinking of euphemisms, so forget it, I’m saying nude )

The Pugsleys, the younger brother of the Addams Family mythos, usually get poor plotlines and poorer treatment.  They are bullied, tortured, ignored, used as playthings.  In Season 1 of Wednesday, Isaac Ordonez's Pugsley was not much different.

But during the hiatus between Season 1 and Season 2, Isaac grew up, becoming taller, huskier, bringing a dark nervous energy to the newly teenage Pugsley.  He has stepped out of the shadow of his sister to become his own person, with independent interests and goals -- a sweet, sensitive, traumatized soul trying to find emotional connections.  Friends.  A boyfriend.

Born in 2009, Isaac began acting in 2016 as the preternaturally smart Charles Wallace in A Wrinkle in Time, the adaption of the Madeleine L'Engel fantasy.

Chris Pine played his "captured-by-the-darkness" father.

Left: since Isaac is 16 as of this writing, I'm not looking for any nude photos, but he works mostly in media aimed at the Hispanic community, so here's a  guy from Guatemala and his brothers.

Next came some short films

Dia de los Carpas (Day of the Tents): A group of boys help an undocumented girl get to the beach, where she has a magical secret. 

Psycho Sally:  No synopsis online, but there is no character named Sally.

Dispara y Mata (Shoot and Kill): A father tries to get his son (Isaac) to eat by telling him a story of survival in the Colombian jungle. 

More after the break

"Wednesday": Is the New Addams Family TV Series Gay-Friendly?

 

The various renditions of The Addams Family have the reputation of being gay-friendly, but I don't recall a single actual LGBT character, or even any significant gay subtexts: it's heterosexual romance all the way down.  I'm hoping that the new Netflix tv series Wednesday, which places the teenage Wednesday Addams in the Nevermore Academy, a boarding school for vampires, werewolves, and other magical types, will move into uncharted territory with actual gay characters.  I watched the episode with a school dance, to check for same-sex couples dancing, foreground or background.  .

Scene 1:  Wednesday and Thing (her disembodied hand companion) break into the coroner's lab to perform an autopsy on a victim of a monster attack.  About what you would expect: some defensive wounds, almost completely disemboweled.  Whoops, they have to hide as the coroner enters, with the sheriff, to show him that the two toes were removed from the victim's left foot.  By the way, this is Dr. Anwar's last week: he and the Mrs. are going to spend his retirement traveling.   He's doomed.  Nope, I looked it up: he only appears in this one episode.  So the retirement and the "Mrs." reference are irrelevant, except to identify him as heterosexual.

Scene 2: Wednesday's dorm room at the Nevermore Academy.  Her roommate objects to the forensic photos covering the wall.  She notes that the victims all had different body parts surgically removed: a kidney, a gall bladder, a finger. This is not a monster; it's an experienced serial killer!  

Scene 3: Botany class.  Wednesday sits next to Xavier (Percy Hynes White, left), her gay bff or boyfriend.  He encourages her to invite someone to the big dance, the Rav'n (because it's the Nevermore Academy, get it?)   "I'd rather stick needles in my eyes.  I may do that anyway." 

She notices scratch marks on his neck.  He explains that he got them from...um...fencing.

Scene 4: To find out what's going on with Xavier, Wednesday and Thing sneak into his art studio, and find paintings of a sharp-clawed monster.  He must be the murderer! They steal a few -- oh no, he caught them.  The girl has no luck with secret missions!    Fortunately, he assumes that Wednesday came to invite him to the dance, but now she has to go through with it.  Oh, well, she can interrogate him about the murders.  

Scene 5: The Roommate is thrilled that Wednesday is exhibiting heterosexual interest (was there a question?), and starts planning an outfit for her.  While she is shopping, Wednesday runs into her therapist, who asks if she is going to the dance (the heteronormative imperative never stops, does it?)  Then she takes the monster drawings to Galpin, the police detective who does the standard "let the professionals take care of it" routine.  

Scene 6: Roommate and two other girls at a diner.  Lucas Walker (Iman Marson), the mayor's son, drops by to ask her to the dance. 

Meanwhile, Wednesday runs into the Detective's son, Tyler (Hunter Doohan, top photo), whom she has an intense-stare crush on.  He was planning to ask her to the dance, but she's already going with Xavier, which upsets him.  "You keep giving me mixed signals.  I thought we liked each other, but then you pull something like this."  

Scene 7:  In a beekeepers' cabin, Wednesday is showing her evidence to Eugene (Moosa Mustafa), a Spanish-speaking boy who has a crush on her roommate.  Ok, everybody is heterosexual so far.  Eugene mentions his two moms, but a single sentence referring to non-appearing characters is insufficient.  Maybe there will be some same-sex couples at the dance. 

Scene 8: They investigate a mysterious cave and find manacles.  They make plans to skip the dance and stake out the cave tonight.

Scene 9: The DJ at the dance, who has a crush on Wednesday,  knocks on her door: Thing has pushed them together by dropping an invitation in his tip jar. This may be a new character, or it may be Tyler from Scene 6.  There are so many guys with crushes on Wednesday that I can keep track.  Is she like, madeo of video games?  

Thing has also provided an appropriately macabre outfit, so Wednesday quickly changes.  They are just leaving when Eugene (the beekeeping boy) shows up, livid over being dumped for the cave stake out.  Xavier (the monster-drawing boy) is also livid. 

Scene 10: The dance.  Roommate arrives with Lucas, the Mayor's Son.  She accidentally spills punch on his crotch, then kneels to clean it up, so her crush Ajax (Georgie Farmer) sees him and thinks she is giving him a blow job.  

Background characters are all male-female couples.

Still 13 minutes to go, but why continue?  There are no LGBTQ people here.  Not one.  Not even a glimmer of subtext.  

So much for the inclusivity of The Addams Family.

Update:  One of the boys has two mothers, and when Uncle Fester visits, he says that Tyler has "clocked" him, but Wednesday immediately says "Tyler is not intersted in you."  Fester is on the run from the law, so maybe he means "noticed that I'm a fugitive," but Wednesday's comment suggests that romantic interest (he's 18, so ok for an adult to date).  

And that's it.  Miniscule representation.  Heterosexuals all the way down.

Charles Addams/The Addams Family

The 1950s was obsessed with marriage and reproduction. Movies, tv programs, presidential speeches, school textbooks, and Sunday morning sermons all pushed the heterosexual nuclear family with salary-man dad and cake-baking mom as the pinnacle of societal perfection, not only the way everyone should live but the way everyone did live (In the U.S., anyway).  But there were critiques, carefully-worded inquiries about whether everyone in every nuclear family was by definition deliriously happy, and every single person by definition miserable.

Cartoonist Charles Addams offered one of the most popular critiques.  He began publishing macabre cartoons in The New Yorker in the 1930s.  By the late 1940s, most were gently skewing the nuclear family experience.

On Christmas morning, two kids play gleefully with a guillotine.  Or they start a fire in the fireplace in anticipation of Santa Claus's visit.

A boy brings models his scout uniform, while his disgusted parents look on.  "He certainly doesn't take after my family," the mother exclaims.

A woman dressed in a black shroud dissects the mania for civic holidays: "I couldn't make it Friday -- I've so many things to do.  It's the thirteenth, you know."

Addams never intended for his unnamed characters to be taken as a single macabre family, but they appeared together so often, and in so many different contexts, that readers assumed that they were related.  Eventually he gave in and called them the Addams Family.

During the monster mania of the early 1960s, they spun off into a tv series, The Addams Family (1964-66).  Now they had names: Gomez (John Astin), Morticia (Caroline Jones), their children Wednesday and Pugsley, Uncle Fester, Grandmama, their butler Lurch, and "It," a sentient hand. They were not quite as homicidal as their counterparts in the New Yorker cartoons; indeed, many episodes involved them helping neighbors, friends, or strangers with their personal problems. They were as close-knit and supportive, and as aggressive in promoting heterosexual romance, as any sitcom family of the 1960s.  But still, they constantly blurred the boundaries between "normal" and "abnormal," making them a favorite of gay kids who felt "different."

By the way, if you remember the series, you might be interested in seeing Ted Cassidy, who played the Frankenstein-like butler Lurch, in a swimsuit (top photo).  Apparently he was quite a hunk.

T

Jackie Coogan's Boyfriend

When I met Keith Coogan in 2013, nearly the first thing I asked was, "Whose idea was the underwear scene in Toy Soldiers? (1991).

You're making a movie about the boys at an elite boarding school being held hostage by terrorists.  Whose idea was it to have the cast, composed entirely of teenage hunks, in their underwear all the time?

Not that I minded. I especially didn't mind getting an eyeful of Keith's bulge.

Keith insisted that there was no homoerotic intent.  Those scenes took place at night, when they were stripped down for bed.  They got to choose their own underwear, so he wore his regular "tighty whities."

Not that he minds the attention from gay fans: he's been a gay ally his whole life.  He learned all about gay people a long time ago, from his grandfather, Jackie Coogan

Famous to Baby Boomers as Uncle Fester on The Addams Family, Jackie Coogan was one of Hollywood's first child stars, co-starring with Charlie Chaplin in The Kid (1924) at the age of 7.

He went on to play Peck's Bad Boy, Oliver Twist, Toby Tyler, and Huckleberry Finn before moving into a long career as an adult character actor, appearing in everything from College Swing (1938) to Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels (1977).  He had four wives, including World War II pin-up girl Betty Grable.  He struggled with heart and kidney disease through his life, and finally died of heart failure in 1984, at the age of 69.

Daughter Leslie Diane, born in 1953, left home at age 15, and married, had Keith, and divorced within the next year.  Keith grew up in poverty, his mother working odd jobs and getting government assistance; for awhile they lived in a changing room on the tennis court outside the Malibu mansion where Leslie worked as a housekeeper.

Leslie wasn't happy about Keith's decision to become an actor, but she agreed to drive him around for auditions; he began doing commercials at age 5, got his first movie role at age 8, and landed a recurring spot on The Waltons at age 9.

Grandpa Jackie was a constant presence in his life, visiting every summer,  advising him on his acting career ("always know exactly where your money is going"), telling him stories of Old Hollywood.  Raunchy stories about men caught with their pants down in actresses' dressing rooms, all male parties where the guy with the biggest penis won a prize (Ramon Novarro always won.)   One of his favorite stories was about his teenage boyfriend, Junior Durkin: