The shirtless parking valets: A shock of joy on "Suburgatory" on the night before Thanksgiving. With Mohr and Parker backsides and a lot of bare chests

 

Link to the n*de dudes

When I was growing up, you almost never saw a bare chest on tv.  On the rare occasions when it happened -- Denny Miller surfs to Gilligan's Island,  Ponch and Jon hit the beach on CHIPS, Kevin poses for an art class on Mr. Belvedere -- you felt an intense, palpable joy.  Not desire so much as understanding.  This is it, what we were made for. Beauty.  Truth.  The Eternal Masculine. 

With the advent of cable and then streaming tv, nearly every actor took off his shirt frequently, and some even put their junk on display.  And of course we can go online and see 100 n*de men before breakfast. When you see it all the time, that shock of joy vanishes.  

But it returned on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011, the night before Thanksgiving, when Suburgatory aired Episode 1.8, "Thanksgiving."

Suburgatory (2011-14) starred Jeremy Sisto (left, showing his sausage) as George Altman, an architect who moves his teenage daughter Tessa (Jane Levy) from Manhattan to Chatswin, Connecticut.  She is not pleased, but she tries to find some semblance of cool amid the Mean Girls, Dumb Jocks, and Ladies Who Lunch.

It was not our favorite show -- mostly women in the cast, a lot of heterosexism, and some low-key gay stereotyping -- but it aired between The Middle and Modern Family, so we had no choice.

George's backside is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

In Episode 1.8, it's Thanksgiving in Chatswin, and Tessa is upset because Dad George has rejected their traditional Manhattan activities for dinner with the ultra-rich Dallas Royce.  In the B Plot, Tessa's friend Lisa is upset because her middle-class Mom, Sheila Shay, insists that she wear a "Puritan dress" to their Thanksgiving Dinner.

 When Tessa and Dad George arrive at the Royce mansion, they see shirtless valets parking the guests' cars.  

Whoa, that shock of joy came rushing back!  

Maybe because it was so unexpected.  Who hires shirtless valets?  Especially at Thanksgiving, when it's in the 30s and 40s out?  And there are twelve people at that party. Why do they need four valets?  

Director Alex Hardcastle was not even trying to be realistic. He presented us with a vision of masculine beauty to counterbalance the feminine vibe of the rest of the episode (spoiler alert: Tessa's friend Lisa spends about ten minutes of air time n*ked, in protest of that Puritan dress). 

The first Indian Valet vanishes immediately, but when George's friend Noah hands his car keys to the second, we get a bare chest and shoulders close-up.  He looks like a college athlete.

He disappears, but as Noah walks toward the door, we see the two Pilgrim valets, one extremely muscular, the other a rather thin twink.  No closeups, but they are visible for several seconds, organizing the various parking slips.

Later we get quick glimpses of the two Indian Valets at the Royce table,  so they must be Royce relatives co-opted for the job.  The Pilgrim Valets are visible at the middle class Shay table, so presumably they were hired. 

But who are the actors?  In 2011 I let the scene slip into memory, but last night I saw it again during a rewatch.  With 15 years of experience on this website, RG Beefcake and Boyfriends, and Tales of West Hollywood, I am equipped to research their other acting roles,  look for n*de photos, and check their social media to see if they are gay. 

More after the break.

My Boyfriend and My Satanist Ex-Boyfriend at Thanksgiving Dinner: A Kelvin/Keefe Adventure

 "Mama!" Keefe exclaimed.  "Why on Earth did you invite my ex-boyfriend to Thanksgiving Dinner, when you knew that Kelvin was coming?"

She frowned.  "Well, why not?  Daedalus came to every Thanksgiving and Christmas for five years.  And your nephew Austin's piano recitals. Jimmy called him 'Uncle Daedus.'" He's part of the family.  Just because you broke up for some crazy reason doesn't mean we have to break up with him, too."

"I found God, Mama! Isn't that what you wanted for me?"

"All I ever wanted was for you to be happy.  And you were happy with Daedalus.  A lot happier than you seem now, when every word I say makes you uncomfortable or angry, and the wonderful Reverend Gemstone treats you like his personal servant.  Now, does this casserole get onion rings on top, or not?"

The rest of the story, with n*de photos and explicit s*x scenes, is on Righteous Gemstones Beefcake and Boyfriends

Airplane!: Convincing Bob that "Surely you can't be serious!" is funny

For Thanksgiving this year, Bob cooked a turkey -- but I couldn't get him out of bed until 9:00, so the turkey went into the oven at 11:00, and we didn't eat until 6:00 pm.  We passed the time by watching "Thanksgiving" movies, such as Airplane! (1980).

A parody of 1970s disaster movies like the Airport series (1970, 1976, 1977, 1979), it holds up surprisingly well -- for me, anyway.  Probably because there is a real plot, with characterization and suspense: when the cockpit crew and many of the passengers are disabled with food poisoning, traumatized pilot Ted Striker (Robert Hays), who hasn't been able to fly since the War, is forced to land the plane.

Many of the jokes still made me laugh, although Bob was annoyed by my habit of laughing before the punchline: 

"Surely you can't be serious!"

"I am serious, and don't call me Shirley!"

"The hospital called."

"The hospital!  What is it?"

"It's a big building with patients in it, but that's not important now."

Other jokes were still funny to me, but I had to explain them to Bob, who wasn't born yet in 1980:

The stewardess gives a passenger a second cup of coffee, and his wife muses "He never asks for a second cup of coffee at home": a popular tv commercial.

Robert Stack as Captain Rex Kramer: a parody of his 1970s tough-guy roles.

An elderly white woman can "speak jive" to communicate with black passengers: she was Barbera Billingsley, the button-down conservative Mom on Leave It to Beaver.  Interestingly the team of Abrams, Zucker, and Zuker was also responsible for Kentucky Fried Movie, a sketch-parody movie starring both Wally and the Beaver.

Bob had never hears of any o fhtem.

Other jokes made him glare at me and say "You liked this?"

Racist jokes are everywhere.

1. The two black guys speaking jive, with subtitles translating into English.

2.  A isolated African tribe who "have never seen white people before" are instinctively good at basketball.

3. Striker's life history is so boring that everyone he tells it to tries to kill themselves: a Japanese guy commits seppuku, and an Indian guy tries self-immolation.

4. We could do without Captain Oveur's pedophilia jokes: "Billy, have you ever seen a grown man naked?  Do you like gladiator movies?"

5. Striker sees his future girlfriend Elaine for the first time in a sleazy bar during the War.  He is so oeverwhelmed by her beauty that he thinks he is dreaming, and asks the guy sitting next to him to "pinch me."  The guy glares and moves away. thinking that he is gay.

6.  We were torn about the character of Johnny, who seems to be an assistant ("How about some coffee?"  "No, thank you"), but is listed in the credits as Air Traffic Controller Johnny Henshaw-Jacobs.  Sometimes he evokes gay stereotypes: he criticizes a woman's outfit, respnds to "What do you make of this?" with "Oh, I could make a lovely hat," and calls his Auntie Em during the crisis like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.  

But at other times he comes across as just wacko.  While the plane is landing, he umplugs the lights on the runway, then says "Just kidding" and laughs maniacally.

Compared to the uber-swishy gay characters of other movies of the era, such as Lamar in Revenge of the Nerds (1984), we see a much more nuanced performance.  We wondered if the actor tweaked his performance to cut down on the swish: Stephen Stucker was something of an activist.  He was one of the first performers to publicly announce that he had been diagnosed with AIDS, a  few months before his death in 1986.

Verdict:  Me, A-.  Bob: C.  I guess you had to be there. 

"Ginny and Georgia, Season 2": 22 Dads, Moms, Gram-Grams, Pop-Pops, Aunties, Love Interests, Siblings, and Gay Guys at 3 Thanksgivings

 

Ginny and Georgia, a comedy series on Netflix, is about a mother-daughter team, like The Gilmore Girls.   I reviewed the first episode in March 2021, but I don't remember anything about it.  No doubt the three gay characters listed in its Wikipedia page had not yet appeared.  So I'll give Season 2, Episode 1 a shot.

By the way, the Wikipedia page was terrible, fraught with grammatical errors and overuse of the cliched term "love interest."  I fixed a little of it, but then gave up.  I have other things to do today.

Scene 1: Ginny and Georgia, Mom and Daughter, dancing in slow motion, experiencing that intense sort of ecstatsy that you see only on tv commercials when someone has achieved everlasting happiness by purchasing their brand of toothpaste or dishwashing liquid.  Daughter explains that when she was growing up, they were soul mates, so deeply in love that they didn't need anyone else.

Switch to Daughter as a teenager, no longer in love with Mom.  She's reading the Parable of the Sower, when Mom, who looks like she is around 15, comes into her room. "What the heck is this trash that you're reading?  I'm so stupid that I don't know what 'parable' or 'sower' mean."  

"It's about the demise of civilization through facist capitalism." 

 "Oh, I don't know what any of those words mean, so let's make out  We haven't had sex in ages."   Smothering Mother jumps into bed with Daughter/Lover but calling herself "Mommy" turns the girl off.  She refuses sex, so Smothering Mother ttries smothering her with a pillow. 

Scene 2:  Daughter/Lover wakes up.  It was all a nightmare, a metaphor for Mom's smothering. I may have exaggerated the incest subtext -- a little.  But it's still very obvious, and very creepy.

Her hunky Dad (Nathan Mitchell, left) bursts into her room, calls her "Gummy Bear," and asks if she's ok.  So she's left her smothering Mom for Dad.

Scene 3: A prim Southern Belle who looks like Melanie from Gone with the Wind, opens the door and yells "Welcome back, bitches!" to an elderly heterosexual couple.  A blond woman with a man's haircut  admonishes her to not call "Nanna and Pappy" bitches. So, a lesbian couple?

The elderly Nanna and Pappy enter, hug the couple, and ask Football Fan (Chris Kenopic), a middle-aged man, if he's ready for the Pats to lose.  The New England Patriots, so this is the Northeast.  I thought it was the South due to the Southern belle and the Mom named Georgia. Plus Nanna brought "whoopie pies," a Southern dish. 

Nanna asks Man's Haircut where Marcus is.  So both of the woman have heterosexual partners, and they're all living together?  "He'll be down in a bit."

Scene 4: Marcus (Felix Mallard), a rebellious teenager, is in his room, smoking and drawing bugs on the wall.  Southern Belle bursts in to tell him that Nanna and Pappy have arrived.  

"Too bad -- I'm not doing Thanksgiving this year, because it is a celebration of Native American genocide."

Ok, I'm completely lost.  How are these people related?  Wikipedia to the rescue: Southern Belle, who is "openly lesbian" is Marcus's sister, although she looks about 30 years older.  They are children of Man's Haircut, even though she looks younger than them, and Patriots Fan. 

Marcus wants to know if Southern Belle has talked to "her," because she hasn't been to school in a week, and she's stolen his bike.  Oh, great, not another person to fit into this extended family tree.

More note-taking after the break

10 Reasons Why Thanksgiving is the Gayest Holiday

If you're not from the U.S. you might not be familiar with Thanksgiving, a holiday celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November (it's also celebrated on different dates in Canada, Liberia, and Grenada).

It's my favorite holiday.  And the gayest:

1. It's in November, so it's cold outside, and dark at night like it's supposed to be.  No one is forcing you to go out and "enjoy the outdoors."

2. There are no tv commercials depicting heterosexual couples giving each other gifts or watching in rapt joy as their children unwrap gifts.

3. There's no religious significance, so you won't feel guilty if you accidentally say "Happy Thanksgiving!" to someone who is Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Wiccan, or atheist.  Although sometimes vegans will lecture you.


4. Gay men spend many extra hours at the gym in anticipation of over-indulging on Thanksgiving.  As a result, at Thanksgiving they're more buffed than at any other time of the year.

5. Everyone gets to demonstrate their culinary skill.


6. You only get Thursday and maybe Friday off work, so there's no time to take a plane ride 2000 miles to the place you grew up.  Thus, "home" is no longer in the past, it's the place you are today, and "family" is what you make of it.

This Advocate cover shows Howard Cruse's character Wendel being served Thanksgiving dinner in bed.  But why is the kid wearing a mask?  Is he the famous Thanksgiving character, Zorro?

7. If you do go home to visit extended family, Thanksgiving dinner is the traditional time for making Big Announcements, like "Guess what?  I'm gay."

8. Most of the bars, clubs, and bathhouses have special Thanksgiving Day events, so you don't have to waste all Thanksgiving afternoon watching football.






9. The origin story, about 17th century Pilgrims and Indians coming together to share a meal, is an imperialist myth, masking a history of conquest and genocide.  But it does lend itself to some interesting ideas for homoerotic revisions (picture from Crow821 on deviantart.com).

10. Gay people have a lot to be thankful for.  They grew up in a culture where they told, over and over, that "discovering the opposite sex" was inevitable and universal, that no gay people existed except for grotesque monsters.  And they survived.