Alex Saxon: From fundamentalist college to ace and trans roles to teen angst hunk. With n*de older brother.

 

Link to the n*de dudes

A new Righteous Gemstones character has appeared in the Episode 4.1 cast list, Alex Saxon as "Thaddeus," no doubt a Civil War guy.

According to Alex Saxon's biography on the IMDB, he was born in  1987 in Liberty, Missouri, 15 miles north of Kansas City, began acting in the theater at age 8.

A femme appearance, in the theater, and living in Liberty, Missouri.  I can imagine how terrible the bullying was.

He sang, danced, and sometimes acted in Bye Bye Birdie, Jekyll& Hyde: The Musical, Grease, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and The Breakfast Club Live

After high school, he enrolled at William Jewell College as a pre-med major, but then changed to Psychology and Applied Critical Thought, with a minor in Chemistry.  He graduated magna cum laude in 2009.

The William Jewell College in Liberty is affiliated with the Baptist Church, so I imagine that it's not at all gay friendly. 

Alex hit Los Angeles in 2011, and began acting for the screen:

A vampire guy at the Big Dance in an episode of Awkward (2011).

The Olivia Experiment (2012): A woman suspects that she is asexual, so she accepts a friend's offer of a night with her own boyfriend to find out.  That is wrong on so many levels.  You know whether you're into someone or not without actually having it.  That's like the people who ask "How do you know you don't like going with women unless you've tried it?"  Easy...look at a woman, and ask yourself "Do you want to go with her?"

Alex plays a member of the Asexual Support Group, where Olivia is informed that she's not really asexual, she's just afraid to open up to intimacy.  

Young Paul Holt in Chapman (2013), which seems to be a Western.

Young Henry Bird in The Advocates (2013), which seems to be about lawyers

Chloe in two episodes of Ray Donovan (2013-2015): a "transvestite" hooker who is blackmailing movie star Tommy (Austin Nichols) to get money for "a s*x change."  What is this, 1975?  The vocabulary is all wrong.  Transgender people don't get "s*x changes," they transition.

Coin Heist (2017), about four teens -- "the hacker, the slacker, the athlete, and the perfect student," who scheme to steal from the U.S. Mint.  Alex, with relatively short hair, plays the Slacker, who is the ex-boyfriend of the Perfect Student (a girl, of course) and falls in love with the Hacker (a girl, of course).  Not to worry, the Perfect Student hooks up with the Athlete (a boy, of course), so everything is all tied up into a nice little heteronormative package.

Then it's back to long hair for 28 episodes of the teen angst series The Fosters (2013-18), as Callie's on-off boyfriend

36 episodes of the teen angst series Finding Carter (2014-15) as the on-off boyfriend of Carter's sister.

10 episodes of The Fix (2019) as the stepson of Sevvy Johnson (Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje), an actor accused of murdering two of his girlfriends.  He assaults his father, gets into fights, and does other deviant stuff while dating girls.

62 episodes of Nancy Drew(2019-23), as a drug-addled outsider who becomes one of the teen sleuth's scoobies and dates girls.

An episode of Criminal Minds as Pete Bailey, younger brother of the murdered Deputy Director Doug Bailey (Nicholas D'Agosto).

Noticing a pattern in Alex's screen presence? Long hair, soft, feminine, gay-coded in spite of his characters' endless series of girlfriends.

He doesn't have Instagram, and his X just promotes his tv series, so his personal life is up for speculation.  LezWatch calls him cisgender heterosexual, but that may just be default.

Could he be gay in real life?

More after the break

"Bojack Horseman": Hetero-Romantic Aces, but No Gay Men

Bojack Horseman, the animated tv biz parody about the washed-up star of a 1980s TGIF sitcom, is back for Season 5, and heterosexist as ever.  Bojack is now starring in a bad detective series, Philbert, which surprisingly gets good ratings.  After he complains that a scene involving female nudity is too "male-gazey," his director, Flip (voiced by Rami Malik, left), orders a scene with male nudity "for the ladies."

You can't really blame him for forgetting that gay men exist.  The series itself does, frequently.  We're told frequently that all men desire women, and as proof, we're surrounded by heterosexual couplings.  Bojack is dating/having booty calls with Gina.  Mr. Peanutbutter and Diane get a divorce and start seeing other people.

This looks like two men, but in fact it's Mr. Peanutbutter and his new girlfriend, Pickles.

There are no gay men in Bojack's world.

Remember Todd (Aaron Paul), Bojack's not-gay slacker/housemate whose crazy antics provide the comic relief of the series?  Last season he came out as asexual, not sexually attracted to anyone.

But he's hetero-romantic, attracted to women as romantic partners.  So he  starts dating Yolanda (Natalie Morales), a female hetero-romantic axolotl.

Axolotls are Mexican salamanders.  Apparently "asexual axolotl" is a meme.

So they're a hetero-couple in everything but what they do in bed.

Nothing special about that.  Many of the hetero couples you see on the street are not sexually active.  They are waiting for marriage, or they have incompatible sexual interests, or one or both have low libidos.

Or one or both is gay.  There are plenty of reasons why a gay person would engage in a hetero marriage.

Or one or both is a hetero-romantic ace.

Except in those states where a marriage must be "consummated" to be legal, who's going to ask? Who's going to care?  Hetero-coupling is a social relationship, not a sexual relationship.

Turns out that Yolanda's family will.They are highly sex-positive.  Her father (John Leguizamo) writes erotic novels; her mother (Eva Longoria) is a former porn star; and her twin sister Mindy runs a sex advice column. Her grandmother has left them a family heirloom, a barrel of antique lube worth $100,000.

Yolanda hasn't come out to them as asexual -- would you?  So she asks Todd to pretend that they are sexually active, when the family asks.

They do ask.  They are thrilled that Yolanda has finally found someone to have sex with, and interrogate him on how often he puts his penis inside her.

 He draws some suspicion by his lack of familiarity with heterosexual sex -- he can't even get the phrase "hubba-hubba" right.

Then the family insists that Yolanda "honor them" by spending the night and having sex with Todd in her old room.

They can pretend to do that, right?

But then Yolanda's mother tries to seduce Todd, and when he fails to respond adequately to her naked body ("any normal man would have been aroused," she says, forgetting that gay men exist), she concludes that he is asexual.  That doesn't dissuade her -- she wants to Todd to show her what asexual sex is like.

Yolanda' sister tries to seduce him, too.

Her father doesn't, but when the antique barrel of lube bursts, he asks Todd to plug the hole with his erect penis, which he would have if he was a "normal man," having sex with Yolanda.

For people making their living through sex, they show a surprising lack of awareness of the existence of gay men.

In a later episode, Diane tells Bojack about media normalization, which is sometimes good, as in the case of LGBT people, and sometimes bad.

So no one on the show is homophobic.  They just omit the G from LGBT.

A later episode shows Bojack's therapist, Dr. Endira (Issa Rae) having dinner with her wife, Mary-Beth (Wanda Sykes).

I've forgotten how many lesbian couples there are on the show.  Lots.

But no gay men.

See also: Bojack Horseman: Anthropomorphic Angst.

Archie and Jughead

Though there are lots of hints and signals about same-sex desire in Archie Comics, Archie himself is ludicrously girl-crazy. He is failing French until Veronica helps him “study” by seductively reciting French words  – and then he gets an “A.”  He is an expert artist, but only when he paints girls.  Advised to chose a future career, he selects fashion photography because then he can be surrounded by girls all day.

Archie’s girl craziness rarely receives any criticism from parents or peers, and when someone does complain that he's "too" girl-crazy, he retorts that chasing girls is the only thing worth doing in life.  In “The Andrews Family Tree” (Archie Digest 108) , teenage brain Dilton discovers that all of Archie’s ancestors just missed brilliant scientific discoveries because of their girl-craziness  – they didn’t notice the apple falling because they were busy flirting, for instance. “I feel sorry for your ancestors,” Dilton says, “They were a bunch of losers.”  Archie responds  “And I feel sorry for poor Dilton!  He can’t tell us winners from the losers!”

It seems odd that this acme of girl-craziness has a best friend who "hates" girls. Or at least "hated," from the 1940s through the 1980s, until the character was retconned.  Jughead actually liked girls as friends, but he did not want to date. kiss, or cuddle them.  He was not attracted to women.

Archie and the gang generally accepted this "quirk," but on those rare instances where Jughead seemed to be interested in a girl, they were beside themselves with joy.  In “There’s This Girl, See” (Archie Annual Digest 74) Jughead says that he needs money because “There’s this girl,” and his friends joyfully hug each other and take a collection to finance his date.  When it turns out that the girl merely owes him money, which he needs for a date with a boy, his friends spend a spread panel banging their heads together and kicking themselves in frustration.

Jughead’s most passionate relationship was with his “best pal” Archie, a fact recognized as natural and inevitable by almost all of the other characters. In Archie Double Digest 9, Jughead is so closely attached to Archie that he even tags along on his date with Veronica.  She banishes him, but the softhearted Mr. Lodge intervenes and reunites them

In Archie Andrews Where Are You Digest 66, Archie is dumped by a girl, and his father cheers him up not by introducing him to another girl, but by sending him out on the town with Jughead.

In “Best Friends” (Archie Andrews, Where Are You? 43), Jughead invites Archie to a dance, explaining that “you know I don’t go with girls.” Archie agrees, but at the last minute Jughead receives an invitation to a pizza cook-off that he would rather attend, and gives the tickets to Betty.

When Betty presents herself as a substitute date, Archie is nonplussed.  “[Jughead] stood me up!” he exclaims, treating the snub exactly as if he were expecting a romantic date.  There is no hint that anyone perceives the event as “buddies hanging out”; if we knew nothing about the characters but this single story, we would certainly conclude that Archie considers both Jughead and Betty appropriate romantic partners.

Jughead was also frequently paired with Betty or Veronica, or both,  as a competitor for Archie’s affection. When all three successively try to lure Archie to fates unknown, he balks.  “How much can a man take!” he exclaims.  “Is it my fault I’m so desirable?”  Although this is a satirical story that ended with all of them characters rejecting Archie, the implication is clearly that Jughead, like the girls, has a romantic interest in Archie.

Gradually becoming aware of the existence of gay people, Archie Comics tried -- not always successfully -- to heterosexualize the character of Jughead during the 1990s.  But not to worry, in 2011 they made up for it by introducing a "real" gay character.

Most recently, Jughead has been retconned as asexual, adding to the sexual diversity of Riverdale High.