Ilia Bolshaya: Collegiate swimmer with a 3.97 GPA and a huge sausage. With n*de swimmers and why gay men don't major in science

  

Link to the n*de dudes

The n*de celebrity subreddit posted a photo of Ilia, who is walking into the room swinging his stuff.  I figured he was an actor, but research reveals that he was a college swimmer.  Quite a prestigious one, with a lot of awards.

But the subreddit took him down right away, so they don't consider him celebrity enough.

I'm torn.  Are a lot of swimming awards enough?

I was convinced by learning that fraternity initiations at his college often involve stripping the guy, so there are a number of n*de photos around (on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends). 

 But I'll compromise by changing Ilia's last name (Bolshaya means "huge" in Russian, as in большая сосиска, "big sausage").  

I'll also omit the names of his colleges, so he can't be tracked down easily (searching for "Ilia" and "swimmer" doesn't do it).

Ilia is originally from Moscow.  As a teenager, he competed in swimming events across Europe, including this one in Regensburg, where I spent a quarter abroad during my sophomore year. 

He graduated from a gymnasium (high school) in 2016, and enrolled in college in the U.S., where he majored in biology.

He was on the swim team, of course.  His favorite dish was sushi, and his favorite non-swimming activity was reading.

 

He joined a fraternity where they typically strip candidates.

In 2020, Ilia received his B.S. in Biology, with a 3.97 GPA, and went to graduate school in Biomedical Engineering.  As of the summer of 2025, he is a Ph.D. candidate, researching the intersection of pharmacogenomics, artificial intelligence, and mathematical modeling.  He also has an internship in quantitative pharmacology, and five publications.

More after the break  

Ryan Masson: Gay actor with one gay role, then "girls! girls! girls!" all the way down. With his junk and bonus n*de dudes

 

Link to the n*de dudes

In The Last of Us, Episode 2.4 (2025), some 20 years into the zombie Apocalypse, the Washington Liberation Front ("Wolves') and a death cult called the Seraphites are battling for control of zombie-ravaged Seattle.  Wolf Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) captures  Seraphite Malcolm (Ryan Masson) and tortures him into revealing the location of cult's headquarters.  

It's a brutal scene.  Malcolm is all bloody, so I'm not going to show his face.  But I was interested in his cute little d*k.  Maybe we could take a look at Ryan Masson in more aesthetically pleasing roles.

Ryan grew up in Memphis.  He became interested in acting through watching old movies with his grandfather, novelist John Fergus Ryan.

 He played Puck in his middle-school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and a dandy in A Christmas Carol. although he didn't know what a dandy was.  By high school, he knew, and shied away from the theater, thinking it too "feminine."

At the College of Charleston, Ryan majored in biology and minored in French, planning to go to some isolated locale to researched endangered species.  But the acting bug won out over his fear of being "called gay": he starred in Romeo and Juliet (as Romeo) and Child's Play (about a Catholic school where some of the boys are demon-possessed).  

During his senior year, Ryan starred in the weekly webseries Dank Shadows (2011), a parody of the 1960s Gothic soap opera.  His Marolyn Foddard was a reflection of the vampire, werewolf, and Frankenstein-bedevilled heiress Carolyn Stoddard. 

After graduation, Ryan moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts, where he received a MFA in acting in 2015.  

He went home for four episodes of  Feral (2016), which is not about werewolves: it's an angst-drama about LGBTQ friends, like Looking but set in Memphis.   He plays the boyfriend of focus character Billy (Jordan Nichols), who suffers from depression.  I guess he wasn't worried about being "called gay" anymore.

His next starring role was Involution (2018), a Russian movie where "the Earth has been sent out of control, affected by a cruel and inhuman mechanism that turns back Darwin's Theory of Evolution."  I don't know what that means, but Ryan's character gets a girlfriend.

A comedic role, sort of, in the "Thelma and Louise" episode of Good Girls (2019), about three suburban housewives who commit crimes.  One of their husbands is interested in killing crime boss Rio (Manny Montana), so he hires professional assassins PJ and Tobin (Ryan, Travis Mills).  They turn out to be "not what he expected."  

I'll have to check the episode to see if they are a gay couple.

Nope, they talk about doing stuff with girls.

On RG Beefcake and Boyfriends: when I went through the cast list of Good Girls to see if any of the male actors had n*de photos, I found one of Zack Robidas, who does not appear on the show.

More after the break

Alexi Kapishnikov: two acting roles, commercials, modeling, a polar plunge....and n*de photos? In Russia?

Link to the n*de dudes

I'm not into the tattoos, but I'm into this guy's washboard abs and enormous c*ck.

His name is Aleksey or Alexi Kapishnikov, and his n*de photos are making the rounds of internet celebrity sites.  There are also some more ex*plicit shots from a gay Slovenian website called Trezubec (now down).

He has only two acting credits on the IMDB.

1. Anton, a lawyer, in an episode of the Russian tv series Triada (Triptych, 2019-21): Tolya suddenly has three pregnant women on his hands, his wife, his mistress, and a one-night stand.

There's a Tryptych tv series on Netflix, but it must be a different one: it begins with a woman entering a building, shooting a lot of people, then taking a hostage to the roof and making them both plunge to  their deaths.

2. The Russian movie Liza (2023) has Topol (Alexi) mourning his dead wife and trying to save the life of the dying daughter of his best friend.  Yuck.

But I'm not giving up on Aleksei.  For one thing, I love the Russian language.  I remember the first time I encountered the Cyrillic alphabet, in a book in the children's room of the Rock Island Public Library.  It was so captivating that I made a photocopy to take home, even though I wouldn't actually study Russian until college.

There  must be more information on Alexi out there somewhere.

The Smart Models Club just gives his measurements: Height 183 cm, bust 100 cm, waist 82 cm, shoe size 43.

Kinolift, a Russian modeling agency, says that he's 35 years old, lives in Moscow, can speak English with a dictionary, and graduated from ASU (Altai State University?) in 2012.

And some other acting roles: "Bullet -- glamourous specials, " 2019, and commercials for Whiskas and Samsung Gear Sport 3.

His Instagram, under the name Lesha Kapishnik, has a lot of modeling photos, and some photos of friends and family.  

More after the break

Studs from the Steppes: Twelve Mongolian musclemen, Uzbek boyfriends, and Kyrgyz cocks

  

Link to the cocks

When I was in about sixth grade, I bought an atlas of world history in the gift shop of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. One of the maps showed the Khanate of the Golden Horde covering most of Eurasia, from Mongolia to Poland.  Who wouldn't be fascinated by that?

Later I read The Empire of the Steppes, with Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, and Tamerlane shaping world history, and did a research project on gay personal ads in Central Asia.  I got my M.A. from Indiana University, where you can study Central Asian languages, but I decided on Mandarin instead.  I don't want to actually visit these places: endless steppes sound a little boring, and they have some of the most homophobic governments on the planet.  But a quick look at some Central Asian hunks might be fun.

1. Mongolian wrestler, top photo.

 Mongolia is not all nomads living in yurts. Check out the skyline of modern UlaanBataar.  

2. Ulaanbataar fitness trainer.

3. Kazakh guy from Almaty. previously Alma-Ata, previously the capital.

4-7. Shirtless dinner in Koshetau, Kazakhstan

More after the break

Max Brumberg: Slovakian flute crafter, drag theologian, Russian-Austrian-Uzbek actor. With Uzbek dicks.

   Link to the Uzbek dicks

I don't know what led me to the 2021 movie Play it Cool, with someone named Reggiemolo (Alex Jason Lee King) on a cross-country trip where he's mistaken for a criminal and meets The Girl -- the trailer shows them kissing a thousand times, so it's definitely a "no way!"  But far down the cast list was a cute guy named Max Brumbaugh.

The name resonated because when I was a kid, there was a "haunted house" on my grandfather's property that belonged to the Brumbaugh family.  So I decided to research him.

Rather a difficult task.  First, his last name isn't Brumbaugh, it's Brunberg.  No, it's Brumberg, with an "m," and there are a lot of Max Brumbergs out there. 

1. Max Brumberg who makes flutes in the traditional manner, with traditional materials: "Each one is produced on an individual basis, just as in nature each branch grows as a perfect individual, it acquires its own voice by the craft of my hand."  He makes Slovakian fujaras, Moldavian kavals, overtone flutes, double flutes, and many other types, out of his store in Sainte-Croix-Vallée-Français, about two hours north of Montpellier.

Another Max Brumberg is Max Brumberg-Kraus, he/him or they/them.  They are the co-founder of the House of Larva Drag Co-operative, performing as drag persona Çicada L’Amour, producing both small acts and full-length queer peformance art, and a member of the ARC community: "a creative collaboration for theopoetics."

They graduated from the United Theological Seminary in 2020 with a M.A. in theology and the arts, and research interests in queer temporality, queer and feminist theology, cosmology, mythopoetics, ancient tragedy, midrash, embodiment, and reception theory.   They're the author of The(y)-ology: Mythopoetics for Gay/Trans Liberation.

Then there's the grad student at the Institute of Russian History in Moscow, and his aroused cucumber.

From Linkedin, IMDB, and an article in Voyager, I've pieced together the life of Max Brumberg, actor.  Of Uzbek and Russian Jewish ancestry.

Top photo: Uzbek guy

Fluent in English, French, German, and Russian.  Not Uzbek?

 Grew up in Vienna got a M.S. in real estate from Newcastle University in Britain and took a job in Real Estate Structured Finance Sales, traveling between Vienna, Belgrade, and Bucharest while acting in commercials and doing stand-up comedy. 

While he was working as a manager at Saxon Bank in Zurich, Max realized that "something was missing...there was a void in my life." So he moved to L.A. and enrolled at the Stella Adler School of Acting. 

So far he has only six acting credits on the IMDB:

More after the break

Searching for Beefcake in Shakespeare's Hamlet

Hamlet (1603) is one of my favorite Shakespearean plays.  It's heavy-laden with gay subtexts, from the tortured Hamlet's buddy-bond with Horatio to the  backstage chumminess of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Many contemporary versions, parodies, and pastiches have a queer mentality, too.  Remember Mary Anne on Gilligan's Island as a drag-king Laertes listening to his father pontificate?

But I never thought of watching it for the beefcake, until I saw this still of Filip Adeyev in a Russian version of the tragedy.

Aranui High School often wins out over other productions in New Zealand's National Festival of Shakespeare in Schools.  In 2006 they gave Hamlet a Maori context, with Te Awhiroa Kuka-Sweet as the Prince of Denmark.

In 2014, Hiraeth Artistic Productions in London mounted an all-male Hamlet set in a Liverpool prison, with both buddy-bonding and multiple shirtless shots.

The Theatre de Vanves in Paris went even farther, with Hamlet (Robin Causse) completely nude throughout (the other players wore clothes).

Earlier this year, chestworthy actor and reality-tv star Tom Sandoval appeared on the Bravo talk show Watch What Happens Live to perform the "To be or not to be" soliloquy with his shirt off.  Presumably the intended audience wouldn't pay attention any other way.

"Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest": Russian Witch Steals Children

The puppy-dog-cute 17-year old Oleg Chugunov (left) stole the show as the naive assistant to loose-canon police detective in Major Grom: Plague Doctor.   So naturally I wanted to know if he starred in any other project available with English subtitles, and if there were any hints of gay identity (they would have to be hints, to accommodate the restrictive Russian media laws). 

Here's one hint: queer-coded purple glasses.

And another: a starring role in Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest (2020), a horror movie about the mythical witch who kidnaps children.  A review stated that there was a gay subtext. So I ordered it on Vudu.

Scene 1: A dark street in an urban neighborhood.  Egor (Oleg), a young teen, walking alone.  Suddenly a woman approaches and tells him that he's dead.  Surprise!  It was a dream.  He awakens in a sunlit room with his mother at the door.  She criticizes him for reading fairy tales and doing origami (a sensitive, artistic kid -- gay coded!).

He goes down to breakfast.  Dad (Alexey Rozin) asks him to help install a nanny cam.  They argue about "respecting your mother."  But she's his stepmother! Uh-oh, in fairytales stepmothers are always evil.

On the way out, Egor smiles at the baby in its crib.

Mom tries to make breakfast, flubs it, and breaks down: "Alexey, I can't take it anymore!"  Take what?  Egor's resentment?

Scene 2:  Young teen girl on the way home from school.  Uh-oh, love interest!  Bullies attack.  Egor intervenes and gets beat up.   She walks away.  He runs after her, overcome by hetero-horniness: "Hey, you're the Girl of My Dreams! What's your name?"  "Dashka or Dania."  But her stern, scary mother calls her away.  "I thought we agreed: no boyfriends!"

She goes into the house.  Egor stays behind, overcome by emotion.  Dania, Dania, Dania.  Say it loud and there's music playing.  Say it soft and it's almost like praying.  I'll never stop saying Dania.  Do I even need to bother with the rest of this?  But I'm sticking it out, looking for that darn promised gay subtext.

Scene 3:  At home, Egor looks at a lot of photos of Dania on his phone and gushes about how beautiful she is.  He is interrupted by a weird noise:  the new, scary nanny is vacuumming the kitchen floor, as if she doesn't know how modern appliances work.  She criticizes him for spying on people: "You'll grow out of it.  If you grow up, that is," she says, reaching out to him with sharp claws.

Scene 4: Late night.  Egor goes into the baby's room, watching himself on the nanny cam.  Wait -- someone is sitting in the chair, but only visible on the nanny cam!  A lady with claws and a bird-face!  He runs away in a panic.  The door opens -- he throws a basketball to defend himself -- and hits Stepmother!

Scene 5:  Dad reviews the nanny cam, and doesn't see any mysterious bird-woman.   "Look, I understand your anxiety, but your Mom is dead.  It's time to forget her, pretend she never existed.  You have a new mother now."  Harsh!  

Scene 6:  Anton (Antyon Zhigulin), one of the bullies, is working at the supermarket.  He sees Dania and is so awestricken that he drops a box of tomatoes.  Wow, the Girl of His Dreams, too!  Girlfriend has to swat them away like flies!   His mother, the manager of the store, yells at him for wasting produce: you're useless, you're an idiot, I curse the day you were born...and by the way, don't come home until after 10:00 pm because I'm expecting company.  Two abusive mothers!  Are there any nice women in this movie?

Later, Egor tries to get with Dania, but she rejects him.  Angry, unaware that "no" means "no," he snipes: "If you were nicer, maybe you'd have friends."  

Suddenly the bullies attack.  Egor and Dania run away, into the dark forest right next to the playground.  The bullies follow.  Supermarket Boy Anton trips over some wires, and is grabbed by a scary guy with a knife: "Get out!  If I see you again, I'll cut your head off!"  A deranged hermit living in the woods?  Maybe he's gay-coded.

Meanwhile, Egor and Dania seek refuge in an abandoned building.  It contains a gigantic furnace, which, Dania says, was used to burn people alive during the Stalin regime.  Their souls are still nearby: they call your name, and when you turn around, they steal your face!  (this will become important later).

Suddenly Egor has a video sent to his phone of the nanny cam, with the baby replaced by a doll.  They rush back to his apartment.  The baby is fine.  

But in the morning, the nursery is empty!  Plus Dad and Stepmother are unaware that the baby ever existed; they think the room is empty because they're redecorating.  When he insists that they've forgotten his baby sister, Dad assaults Egor and locks him in his room as punishment.  Egor calls Dania.

Scene 8: Dania getting ready to meet Egor.  Mom intervenes: "You're too beautiful.  Boys are going to try to seduce you,  That's what happened to me, and I got pregnant, and my life ended  in tragedy.  Do you want to have a daughter that you'll hate as much as I hate you?  Forget this Egor and practice your piano!"  Three abusive mothers, maybe four!  What's going on in this town?

Ahh -- the piano teacher is the scary nanny!  She makes Dania practice harder and harder, until she collapses!

Meanwhile, the other bullies tell Supermarket Boy Anton that Scary Guy (Igor Khripunov) has a cabin full of vintage World War II weapons.  He decides to break in and steal some.  

Dad wonders if he was too hard on Egor, beating him up for inventing an imaginary sister.  "You did the right thing, dear," Stepmother cackles.  "Children must know their place."  I'm still waiting for the gay subtext.  Maybe Supermarket Boy Anton has a crush on Egor?

Scene 9:   Egor escapes from his room and tracks down Dania, who acts like she's in a trance.  She keeps saying "She'll come back."  

Supermarket Boy Anton and another bully grab them and take them to Scary Guy's cabin.  They have to go inside and do some recon, in preparation for the weapons theft.  Still waiting.  Why Anton an abusive back story if he's not going to turn into an ally?   In the cabin, Egor hears a baby crying, and there are photos of the Scary Nanny, plus Egor, Dania, and Anton, and lots of other kids.  We've got a perv stalker on our hands, guys! But he stalks boys and girls both, so he's not gay-coded. 

Egor calls them into the cabin to look; the other bully vanishes, so it's just Supermarket Boy Anton.  Whoops, Scary Guy comes back!  They hide; he finds them and attacks; they overpower him and tie him up

Time for some explanations:  Scary Nanny is Scary Guy's wife, who died after their daughter disappeared.  There's always a dead wife in the back story, but I didn't expect it here.  I thought Scary Guy would be gay.  She's been kidnapping kids, who disappear, and every trace that they ever existed vanishes, and people's memories are wiped.  That's what the photos are for -- when one goes blank, it means a child has disappeared.

But who would steal children and erase their existence?  Daria googles it: Baba Yaga, a Slavic witch who occupies the region between the living and the dead.  

Scene 10: Egor and Daria set out to find Baba Yaga and get his baby sister back.  Supermarket Boy Anton wants to join the team.   Egor rejects him: "We don't need you."  Too much competition, dude?  Daria feels sorry for him and lets him join.

I'll stop the scene-by-scene recap there.

Beefcake: No.

Other Sights: A housing development in Russia.

Child Abuse: Always caused by a witch's spell. 

Gay Subtexts: Egor and Supermarket Boy Anton interact only through Daria, whom they are both in love with.  During the climactic battle, Baba Yaga tries to distract Egor by telling him "Your friends have forgotten you," and flashing an image of Daria and Anton cuddling.  Interesting that she doesn't say "your girlfriend" has abandoned you.

Anton and Scary Guy seem to develop some affection for each other.  They rescue each other, and hug, and in the last scene Scary Guy takes Anton's hand and leads him away.  But they have more of a father-son vibe. 

LGBT Inclusion: Casey Mongillo, who voices Egor in the English-language version, is nonbinary.  Plus Aleks Le, who voices Mikha (Anton), tweets that he can't wait for more LGBTQ inclusive plotlines.  Don't tell anyone in Moscow.

Horror:  Very effective scares and plot twists.

My Grade: B

"Shadow and Bone": The Chosen One in a Central European Alternate World, with Queer Characters

 Shadow and Bone, a Netflix fantasy series, throws you into the deep end of a complex mythology from the get-go.  You have to pay close attention -- no fiddling with cell phones -- and even then you have the impression that you're missing a lot.  So I might not have this right:

It's either our world after an catastrophic event or a close parallel world (towns named Novokribirsk and Novyi Zem).  Technology and costumes are early 19th century: guns but no electricity.  Ravka (Russia) has been separated from the rest of Europe by the Fold, a 20-30 mile expanse of utter darkness inhabited by monsters.  Most people go all the way around, through Fjerda (Scandinavia), even though it takes months, because going through is treacherous, a virtual death sentence.

Ravka is a terrible place, cold, barren, with constant food shortages.  It seems to consist entirely of soldiers and cartographers living in yurts.  Central character Alina (Jessie Mei Lin). a cartographer, is an orphan and a Shu (East Asian), so everyone hates her except for her best friend/boyfriend and fellow orphan Mal, a soldier (Archie Renaux, top photo).  

Some of the soldiers are Grisha, whom everyone hates because one of their kind created the Fold (but none of them can destroy it except for the Sun Summoner, who is probably just a myth).  There are also inferi (a singular and plural noun), and other types/jobs that I don't understand.

Mal and Alina are assigned to an expedition that must cross the Fold in a flying ship.  They are cautioned to keep quiet and use no light, but one of the soldiers panics and lights a lamp.  The monsters attack, killing them all, except for Alexei (Antonin Masek, the one in the towel), who runs away.  

Even Mal and Alina are killed!  Wait, I thought they were main characters!  Just before she dies, Alina lets out a bright burst of light.

Meanwhile, on the other side, in Ketterdam (Germany), we meet crime boss with a heart of gold Kaz (Freddie Carter, right) and his assistants, artful dodger Jesper (Kit Young) and Inej (Amita Suman), whom he is purchasing from a brothel for mysterious reasons.  They are competing with evil rival crime boss Pekka (Dean Lennox Kelly), and must find a way to cross the Fold for a big score.

Surprise!  Alexei makes it to the other side.  So does the flying ship, with Alina and Mal injured but not dead.  Alina is tested and told that she is the legendary Sun Summoner who will destroy the Fold (didn't see that one coming, did you?).  All she needs is some training in the Little Palace.  

Problem: you'd think that the Chosen One would be lauded, but everyone wants to either force her to use her powers for their internecine squabbles, or kill her outright. On the way to the Little Palace, Fjerdans (Scandinavians) attack with both guns and magic.  Most of the guards are killed, but General Kirigan (Ben Barnes) comes to the rescue, using magic to chop a Fjerdan to bits from 50 feet away.

Meanwhile, evil crime boss Pekka kidnaps Alexei and tortures him to find out how he crossed the Fold on foot without getting eaten.  He doesn't know.  So Pekka kills him (darn, he was cute!) and sets out to grab Alina (not Mal?).  

Meanwhile, Kaz, Jesper, and Inej search for Arken (Howard Charles), who is transporting people safely across the Fold for economic and sexual exploitation. How does he do it? And Inej has problems of her own: her owner at the brothel assigns her to kill a rival, who turns out to be...wait for it...Arken! 

Beefcake: Only Mal.

Other sights: Ravka is all wasteland, but Ketterdam is a quaint 19th century German city.

Gay Representation:  The brothels feature both "girls and boys" (presumably adult men and women).

Gay Characters: Maybe Mal?  He and Alina describe each other as "best friends," but there's a recurring motif of them holding hands, and they scream each other's names and rush after each other a lot.  But when a woman invites Mal for "a tumble," he refuses.  Because he's not into women, or because he's being faithful to his "best friend "?

Kaj and Jesper ?  They are quite chummy for employer and employee, and never display any heterosexual interest. Not even with Inej.

Note: I read online that Jesper is gay, and has some same-sex kissing later on in the series.  Plus there are minor queer characters throughout.

The Top 10 Hunks of "Stranger Things," Season 3, Plus Some of the Plot

The tv series Stranger Things, now in its third season, is an homage to 1980s Goonies movies, with monster-fighting kids in stereotypic small-town Indiana. I watched some of the first season, but couldn't figure out what was going on -- it was a mishmash of psychic powers, alternate worlds, missing children, and parents with histrionic backstories.

So I am starting Season 3, Episode 1 fresh,  mostly looking for gay characters and beefcake, but also trying, once again, to figure out the painfully interrelated characters and endless back stories in this monsterized Peyton Place.

Prelude: A top-secret underground lab in the old Soviet Union, where scientists are trying to break on through to the other side.  When they finally manage to blast a crack in the wall, something slithery and horrible comes out and kills them, then goes back in.  The experiment was a failure.  "You have one year!" Colonel Klink growls.

1. In stereotypic small-town Indiana, Sheriff Hopper (David Harbour, top photo) is annoyed about his daughter and another girl kissing.

A lesbian couple!  Score! When they pull back, I find that they're not lesbians after all, but it's still cool that they're so gender-atypical.  The more masculine one is the girl, El (Millie Bobby Brown), and the more feminine one is:

2. Mike (Finn Wolfhard).

Great name, although he looks less like a Wolf Hard than anyone I can imagine.

Sheriff Harper doesn't want his masculine daughter having sex with a feminine boy, or anyone, for that matter, so he asks advice of Joyce (Wynona Ryder), his old girlfriend, who runs a local drug store that has fallen on bad times since the opening of the mall.

Joyce suggests a heart-to-heart talk; but when the Sheriff tries the talk, the teens laugh at him, so he drags Mike out to his truck and threatens to kill him.

3. Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) is at the new mall with his girlfriend Max and another feminine boy, Will (who looks like Mike's brother but isn't).  Finally Mike and El show up, apologizing for being late -- the sex took longer than they expected.

They are sneaked into the movie Day of the Dead by:

4. Steve (Joe Keery), the ex-boyfriend of Nancy (Mike's older sister), who works at a horrible ice cream place in the mall.

Afterwards Steve tries to pick up every female customer in sight, but usually fails.  His coworker Robin is keeping a tally (spoiler alert: Robin turns out to be a lesbian.)

By the way, Nancy (Steve's ex, Mike's older sister) is now dating:

5. Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), the older  brother of the androgynous Will, who was waiting at the mall with Lucas and Max.

Both Jonathan and Will, by the way, are sons of Joyce, the ex-girlfriend of Sheriff Hopper who works at the drugstore downtown.

Jonathan sneaks Nancy (Mike's older sister) out of the bedroom, and she goes to work at a horrible job bringing hamburgers to the local newspaper staff and having them make fun of her ideas.

Turns out that Mom Joyce is aware of Jonathan's sexploits, and fully approves.  His heterosexuality established, she turns her attention to:

6. Will (Noah Schnapp). the androgynous boy who looks like Mike's brother but isn't.  "You'll meet a girl someday, yada yada yada."

 "I'm not gonna fall in love!" he exclaims.  So he's either asexual/ aromantic, or he means "with a girl," and he's gay.

Spoiler alert: later on, during a fight, Mike exclaims that Will doesn't like girls, and he gets all upset.  But he doesn't express any interest in boys or girls this season.  Maybe the writers are ok with lesbians but skittish about gay men.

After Joyce's "what girl do you like?" interrogation, Will meets up with his friends (El, Mike, Max, and Lucas), where they use El's magical powers to arrange a welcome-home surprise party for:






7. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), who has been away at summer camp. He got a girlfriend there, so instead of doing something fun, he insists that they all trek to a mountaintop to install a makeshift radio tower, so he can call her via short wave (what, no telephones in Utah?)

There's no answer.  They hang out all afternoon, abandoning him one by one, until he's all alone.  Then finally he gets a message -- but it's in Russian!

Call back to the first scene.  He's getting transmissions from the Soviet lab where they had "one year" to break through to wherever the slithery thing is from.

8. That night, Joyce, having rejected Sheriff Hopper's dinner invitation, is eating microwaved lasagna and peas and watching Cheers.  All of a sudden Sean Astin is sitting next to her, laughing at Cheers and asking whether  Sam and Diane (the "will they or won't they" couple) will ever get together.  Apparently this is a metaphor for Joyce, who has been rejecting Sheriff Hopper for quite some time.  But I have no idea what Sean Astin was doing there.

9. Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery), the older brother of Max (one of Mike's friends, the girl who is dating Caleb) works as a lifeguard, where lots of middle-aged women are lusting after him.

He tries to pick up Karen Wheeler, the mother of Nancy and Mike.  Initially she resists, probably due to his horrible 1980s double-entendre talk: "I could give you a...private lesson...I know some...moves...the breast stroke...."  But then she agrees. That night she gets dolled up, and leaves her husband and youngest child asleep on the couch to head out for her hookup.

On the way to the hookup, Billy hits something slithery that drags him into an old abandoned iron mill.  Call back to the Russian blasting experiment?

That's all for this episode, but see how nicely everyone is interconnected?

10. To get to 10, I had to go to Episode 2, where Grigori (Andrey Ivchenko) shows up, a Russian agent assigned to beat up Sheriff Hopper and otherwise cause mischief.

I don't think I'll be watching.

My grade: B for the gender-atypical and queer characters, D for the plot.