Cal Tolentino: Bodybuilder dates "Best Medicine's" Liam, rooms with Martin Herlihy, kisses a ninja. With two Cal d*cks.

 

Link to the n*de photos

I've been watching Best Medicine (2026) on Netflix: Josh Charles plays a gruff physician in a small town in Maine, where there are a surprising number of diseases with weird symptoms.  Turning blue?  Suddenly seeing birds?  I like the gay characters fully integrated into the community, like sarcastic teenager Liam (Josh Hoon Lee).  

In most episodes, Liam hangs out with two girls, Harley and Amelia.  But in Episode 1.9, at a high school "sleep-in," Amelia is replaced by Kyle (Cal Tolentino), joining them for a giant-sized Connect Four and a "Skeeter" game.   

In Episode 1.13, Kyle appears as the third of the rude teenagers again, protesting the plan to bring a salmon farm to the city, which would destroy the ecosystem. They're arrested for trespassing, which they find thrilling.  Later, they sit together at the wedding of gay couple Greg and George.

I couldn't figure out why the showrunners replaced the girl in the trio with a boy, except to imply that Kyle was dating one of the other two.  In my headcanon, he's dating Liam.

When I started researching the actor to see if he is gay in real life, I got a surprise:

The dude is built.

Cal grew up in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, about an hour west of Philadelphia.  He competed on American Ninja Warrior Junior, a reality show where you race through a multilevel obstacle course, beginning at age 11, then switched to the teen version, where he was a national finalist three times.  But he really wanted to be an actor, so the minute he got his driver's license at age 16, he started training at Playhouse West.  Also he changed his name from Caleb Plohoros to Cal Tolentino. From Greek to Italian?

While training, Cal was in three plays: A South Philly Christmas, Meisner, and Savannah. 

He broke into on-screen acting in 2025, with four short and a tv spot:

Hundred Dollar Brawler, about boxing. Cal plays the Hype Guy.

Guardians of the Outward Plain: A boy and his lion pal try to make human connections. Cal plays a Mechanic.

Godhead, not to be confused with the other 2025 Godhead short: A man searching for his lost brother stumbles into a sinister drug den. There are four characters other than addicts: Adam, Judas (Cal), and a Preacher (Sullivan Vaughan, backside on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

My Teenage Great Grandma, a vertical-format drama streaming on NetShort. A scientist dies in 1945 and re-animates as a teenager in 2025. Sounds wacky.  Cal's character appears halfway down the cast list.

Plus Cal and Peyton Carson wrote, directed, and starred in 4 AM: After a "rowdy Memorial Day Weekend," two guys try to go back to life as usual, but a text message results "in a painful test of trust." It's not available to stream, and I can't tell from the description and photos if they're buddies or boyfriends.

In 2026, Cal appeared in two episodes of Good Luck, Baby Girl, a short-form vertical series streaming on TikTok and Instagram.  It's about three girls trying to make it in L.A.

Two episodes of Best Medicine.

More after the break

Carlin James: The third thug, a gay three-way, a queer romance, and Pretty Dudes

 

  Link to the NSFW version.

In Episode 4.5 of Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad spin-off starring Bob Odenkirk as a sleazy lawyer, a flashback to 2003 shows the young Saul/Jimmy McGill working in a cell phone store.  He starts a side-business selling stolen burner phones (popular with drug dealers, gang members, cheating husbands, and so on). 

While scoping out customers at the Dog House sleazoid-favored hot dog stand, he approaches teen thugs Peewee, Skipper, and Scooter. They don't need any phones, but they'll wait until he's done for the evening and beat him up his profits. Jimmy kicks himself for not being able to foresee that the interaction would go bad.

In the next episode, Jimmy approaches the guys at their laudromat-hangout and offers to give them a cut if they let him sell without harassment: a more reliable dividend stream than robbing him just once.  They decide that they prefer robbery, and chase him -- into a trap!

Jimmy's allies, Huell Babineaux and Man Mountain, tie them up, gag them, and hang them upside down in a piñata warehouse.  They begin smashing the piñatas with baseball bats, while Jimmy asks the teen thugs if they prefer to be smashed to death quickly or slowly.  

The thugs are so terrified that they promise not to bother Jimmy anymore, and to tell all the other thugs to leave him alone.  He calls off the smashing, but his goons pretend not to hear him until the bat comes withn inches of Peewee's face.  "You get one warning," he tells them as they whimper.  "And that was it." 

Other than the gay-subtext potential of the three guys hanging out without chatting up girls, I was interested in this scene because I have posts on two of the actors: Tommy Nelson, left, and Cory Chapman, center.  

Both would go on to roles in The Righteous Gemstones, but in different seasons, and both have a substantial amount of gay and gay-subtext work.  

So what about the third thug, Scooter?  

He's played by Carlin James, a Filipino-American actor from Long Beach.  His on-screen career begins in 2009-11, playing college students in dramatic shorts and guys who get killed in thrillers.

His first mainstream role was in a 2016 episode of  How to Get Away with Murder: he plays Martin, one of the guys that main character Connor, played by Jack Falahee, invites home for a three-way.

More Carlin after the break

Rex Smith: Not Gay, in Spite of the Outfits

When I was in college (1978-82), I still read teen magazines; they were the only place to get beefcake images in the small-town Midwest.  And this was the image I saw most often: Rex Smith, a gleaming, smooth chest in a brown leather vest and highly bulgeworthy leather pants.

Tiger Beat is not good at background information on its fave raves, so I learned nothing else about him.  Although I assumed that such a flamboyantly feminine guy in a leather catsuit must be gay.

Turns out Rex Smith was a pop star in the midst of a 10-album career, with several charting singles, including "You Take My Breath Away" and "Never Gonna Give You Up." I often heard those songs playing in the distance, along with a steady diet of Neil Diamond, But I didn't make the connection.  At the time, I was busy listening for Gay Subtext songs like "Physical" and "I'm Coming Out."

His Broadway career began with the role of Danny Zuko in Grease in 1978, and went on to The Pirates of Penzance, The Human Comedy, Sunset Boulevard, and Annie Get Your Gun.

He has done some work on television, including some tv-movies about finding love, a two-year run on on the soap As the World Turns, and Street Hawk (1985), a Knight Rider clone about a cop crippled in an accident who gets a super-motorcycle.

And the movie version of Pirates of Penzance, for which he wore another pair of extraordinarily tight leather pants and buddy-bonded with Kevin Kline.

Currently Rex and his son Brandon are starring in the reality webseries Smith & Smith Unlimited, about father-son Hollywood producers.  You can see a clip on his official website.

Apparently not gay, and maybe even homophobic.  The entire country of the Philippines was up in arms when singer and gay icon Charice Pempengco was rehearsing for a corporate event in Cebu, and Rex , also performing at the venue, stormed in, told her to "stop doing what you're doing," and allegedly used a homophobic slur.

See also: Rod and Al Stewart: Coming Out in the Year of the Cat.

10 Gay Movies I Loved

Ok, here's my list of 10 gay movies that did it right: coming out is not necessarily traumatic, gay and transgender are two different things, gay communities exist, heterosexuals are not necessarily homophobic, and no one converts in the end.  Many of them offer the flip side to the 10 gay movies I hated.

The rules: the movies had to have identifiable gay/lesbian, bisexual, or trangender characters in starring roles -- not just gay-vague characters or subtexts; they had to be released after 1993 -- no classics, like Making Love or Maurice; and  the gay characters can't die at the end.



It's not the 1950s Anymore

1. Beautiful Thing (1996).  Flip side of Get Real: high schooler Jamie (Glen Berry) falls in love with his chum Ste (Scott Neal).  Mom thinks he's a little young, but is otherwise ok with it.  There's a gay community: they read The Gay Times and go to the gay bar.

2. A Lone Star State of Mind (2002). Flip side of Sordid Lives. Texas redneck Earl (Joshua Jackson, last seen in Cruel Intentions) and gay cowboy Jimbo (Matthew Davis, right) go on the run when Earl's fiancee's cousin accidentally robs a drug courier.  Everybody finds somebody to dance with.

3. Latter Days (2003). Flip side of Cruel Intentions. L.A. partyboy Christian (Wes Ramsey) makes a bet with his friend that he can seduce naive Mormon missionary Aaron (Steve Sandvoss), only to fall in love with him.

Gay Men Want Men

4. Patrick Age 1.5 (2008).  Flip side of The Object of My Affection. Gay couple in Sweden (Torkel Petersson, Gustav Skarsgard) adopt what they think is a baby, but he turns out to be a homophobic 15-year old juvenile delinquent.

5. Eating Out (2004).  Flip side of The Opposite of Sex. Two college roommates, one straight and the other gay (Jim Verraros, left, and Scott Lunsford), hatch a wild scheme to land their respective crushes.

6. Paranorman (2012). A kid's animated comedy about zombies -- with a twist.  The zombies turn out to be friendly.  Oh, and incidentally, the teenage hunk who drives the paranormal investigators around is gay.







Gay and Transgender are Two Different Things

7. Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994).  Flip side to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Drag performers, the gay Tick (Hugo Weaving) and Adam (Guy Pearce) and the transwoman Bernadette (Terence Stamp), take a road trip across Australia, where Tick reunites with the son he didn't know he had, and Bernadette finds love with an outback bloke (Bill Hunter).

8. The Blossoming of Maximo Olivares (2005).  Maxi, a feminine gay kid in the Philippines (Nathan Lopez), is perfectly integrated into his family and community.  He gets a crush on a hunky cop Victor (J. R. Valentin), who befriends him, but doesn't take advantage of the situation.

You Can't Switch Teams

9. But I'm a Cheerleader (1999). High school girl (Natasha Lyonne) is accidentally sent to a gay re-education camp run by ex-gay Mike (drag queen RuPaul), where she realizes that she's a lesbian and starts a revolt.

10. Rolling Kansas (2003).  Three stoners (including Sam Huntington, left) go on a road trip in search of a secret government marijuana field in Kansas, and along the way the ever-smiling Kevin (Charlie Finn) announces that he's gay.  His friends aren't traumatized, and he spends the rest of the movie asking out various cops and stoners.

Gary Daniels: Man-Mountain with Gay Subtexts

During the brawny Old West of the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was squaring off against the Evil Empire and Jerry Falwell was squaring off against the gays, we needed lots of man-mountains:

Buffed shirtless guys who could storm through the jungles of Southeast Asia to rescue kidnapped buddies,  get revenge on murdered wives or girlfriends, or take out entire enemy armies with their bare hands.

Unfortunately, after the first hundred buffed guys with martial arts training hit Hollywood, the market became highly competitive, and besides, 25-year old kickboxer Gary Daniels was British, unlikely to be cast in a movie promoting American Exceptionalism.

So he went to the Philippines instead.  After a buddy-bonding Indiana Jones rip-off, The Secret of King Mahis Island (1988), he was cast as a man-mountain who ignores his wife and gets nude with his buddy prior to taking out the evil Vietnamese army in Final Reprisal (1988).  Some rather explicit gay subtexts.

By the 1990s, Gary had managed to break into American film, playing kickboxer managers, villains, and opponents in the Big Match, fighting to rescue his kidnapped brother (in American Streetfighter), fighting to rescue his buddy (in Firepower), fighting to get revenge on his brother (Hawk's Vengeance).

Gary's characters had little time for women: the target audience of heterosexual male teenagers wanted to see muscles, fights, and explosions, and couldn't care less about a fade-out kiss.  The result was a lot of gay subtexts.

During the 2000s, as Gary got older, he began playing more fully-clothed roles, as attorneys, detectives, and military officers who oversee the punching and kicking, but don't indulge personally.  His most memorable recent role is The Expendables (2010), in which a group of aging man-mountains is hired to take out a Latin American dictator.

Two of them, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jet Li, reveal that they are a gay couple in The Expendables 2 (2012).  Or maybe they're just joking.  Either way, they're acknowledging the homoerotics behind the man-mountain genre.

Don Stroud: Robert Conrad's Buddy

My church taught that going to a movie was the worst sin imaginable -- God would strike you dead if you even set foot in a theater.  So my brother and I saw almost none during our childhood, only when an oblivious babysitting uncle took us or when a sleepover involved a movie as entertainment.  In high school, my friend Darry and I occasionally took the bus downtown to "study at the library," and went to a matinee at the Fort Armstrong Theater.

We always looked for "good" movies.  We couldn't exactly articulate what "good" meant, but posters with two guys together always caught our eye.  Especially if the two guys were muscular and shirtless.  A surprising number starred Don Stroud:

1975: Murf the Surf.  A surfer (Don) and his buddy Allan (real life buddy Robert Conrad) plot a jewel heist. They like girls, but they also like each other.  A lot

1977: Sudden Death, with Robert Conrad.  Buddies who like girls go to the Philippines to investigate a series of murders by an evil sugar company, and end up rescuing each other with their shirts off.  This is the first R-rated movie I ever saw.

1978: The Buddy Holly Story.  The rock and roll legend (Gary Busey) and his gay-vague best buddy, drummer Jesse (Don).

1979: Search and Destroy, with Perry King (then known for playing gay and gay-vague characters).  Buddies investigate a murder.

Don Stroud got his start as a world-class surfer hired as Troy Donahue's stunt double on Hawaiian Eye; he would return to surfing later as the Big Kahuna in the recasts of the Gidget series (1985, 1988).

During the 1980s and 1990s he moved into television, appearing in over 175 episodes of a huge number of tv series, including Chips, Knight Rider, The Powers of Matthew Star, and The A-Team.  Most recently he played the evil sheriff  most recently in Django Unchained (2012).

Always a beefcake star, Don took off his shirt in most performances, and appeared nude in Playgirl in 1973.

He had many gay friends and moved in the same circles as Robert Conrad, Robert Wagner, and Nick Adams, yet oddly he was never the subject of any gay rumors.

Married three times, he has retired to his native Hawaii.

The Blossoming of Maximo Olivares

The Philippines has produced a surprising number of gay-themed films, perhaps more than any other country outside the U.S.  The Internet Movie Database lists over 100, dating back to 1954.  Many are available in the U.S.: Macho Dancer (1988), Sibak (1994), Burlesk King (1999), The Blossoming of Maximo Olivares (2005), and Twilight Dancers (2006).

Maximo Olivares transcends the Euro-American model of gay teen movies, in which: 1. The teen believes that there are no other gay people in the universe; 2. Everyone is horrifically homophobic; 3. Everyone is horribly depressed.










Maxi (Nathan Lopez) is a 12-year old gay boy living in the slums of Manila with his father and brothers, who are thieves.  He actually behaves more like the Filipino third gender, bakla or "ladyboy": he has feminine mannerisms, wears makeup and jewelry, takes on feminine-coded jobs like cooking and childcare, and calls himself a "girl."  But who cares how he's defined when his family and friends are perfectly accepting, and Maxi is perfectly at home in his world?

When Maxi gets s a crush on Victor (J.R. Valentin), the police officer assigned to investigate his father, Victor responds as any adult would to a flirtatious 12-year old: he is flattered by the attention, and tries to nurture and big-brother the boy, but he resists or ignores Maxi's attempts to frame himself as a "girlfriend."

But then Maxi begins showing up at work, causing teasing and taunts from Victor's fellow officers, and Maxi's Dad (Ping Medina) thinks that Victor has been sleeping with him, so Victor backs off.  Maxi is devastated.

Events take a tragic turn when Victor's boss kills Maxi's Dad.  Later Victor tries to renew the friendship, but Maxi ignores him and walks off alone.

Nathan Lopez, who is actually heterosexual in real life, also played a gay teen in the Filipino soap opera Sana Maulit Muli (2007), and currently stars in the soap Be Careful with My Heart.  JR Valentin got his start as a model, and was named winner of the Bodyshots modeling competition in 2000.   He has appeared in several movies and tv programs in the Philippines.

The Blossoming of Maximo Olivares is #8 on my list of 10 Gay Movies I Loved.