Jacob Tremblay: Gay sea monster, gay subtext Miracle, heterosexist Good Boy, Boyfriend. With Brady Noon and n*de dudes

  

Link to the n*de dudes

You probably saw Luca (2021), the Disney/Pixar animated movie about the friendship between two closeted sea monster boys (Jacob Tremblay, Jack Dylan Grazer). And you were probably upset when director Enrico Casarosa vehemently denied the possibility of a gay reading of the couple.  "They're kids!  They're much too young to be gay!"   

Got it, Enrico. All boys are born heterosexual,  Gay is something that happens in adulthood.  Gay about who you invite into your bed.  Heterosexual is the Eternal Feminine that draws us to the City of God. 

Yeah, I was unhappy, too.  

But it wasn't the fault of the actors.  I heard that Jack Dylan Grazer and Jason Maybaum (general voices) are gay.  Let's see if Luca himself, Jacob Tremblay, is involved in any gay-friendly projects.

He has 43 acting credits on the IMDB, most long before Luca.  I've never heard of most of them, but there seem to be some interesting gay subtexts here and there:

Gord's Brother (2015): The human Gord and his monster brother (Jack Irvine, Raphael Alejandro) searach for the legendary City of Monsters.  Jacob plays the Young Gord.

Wonder (2017): "The incredibly inspiring and heartwarming story" of a boy with facial differences who goes to school.  How to come up with a title that gives you absolutely no clue to what the movie is about.  

There's a girl -- there's always a girl -- but he makes a male friend (Noah Jupe), too.  

Good Boys (2019): Three six-grade boys skip school to go on an "epic adventure" involving two of them (Jacob, Brady Noon) trying to win the Girls of Their Dreams (of course).  The third (Keith L. Williams) is a bullying victim who doesn't try to win a girl.  Hey, in a raunchy, heterosexist  "coming of age" comedy, I'll take any gay hints I can get.  

Will Forte plays one of the dads.

More Brady Noon and maybe some Jacob on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

More after the break

Topkapi: A jewel-encrusted daggar, gay subtexts, and technicolor Turkey

In the early 1960s, before Google Maps, if you wanted to see southern Europe, you got on a plane for an expensive, once-in-a-lifetime trip, or you went to the movies.  Dozens of films had plots about glamorous, attractive people (except for an occasional comic relief lout) doing something or other that required them to drive mopeds through quaint hillside villages in Sicily or rush at breakneck speed through the Parthenon, giving viewers a bright technicolor Cook's Tour.  Usually you saw France, Italy, or Greece, but in Topkapi (1964) you got to see Istanbul.

Glamorous jewel thief Elizabeth Lipp (Melina Mercouri) invites us to tour the  Topkapi, the palace complex of the Ottomans during the height of their empire, now open to the public.  Many tourists are drawn to the Treasury, with its displays of Turkish opulence, especially the emerald encrusted daggar of Sultan Mahmud (1730-54).  It was actually crafted as a gift for Nadir Shah of Iran, but never delivered, but she tells us that it was a gift from his lover. And she plans to steal it.

The caper requires her to assemble a band of experts:

1. The dashing, cosmopolitan Walter (Maximilian Schell, right)

2. Mechanics expert Cedric (Robert Morley)

3. Acrobat Giulio (Gilles Segal, left)

4. Muscle Hans (Jesse Hahn)

5. Stooge Arthur (Peter Ustinov), who will take the fall for them.

Beefcake: Hundreds of shirtless hunks engaging in Turkish oil wrestling.

Hans, Giulio, and Walter all have their shirts off (Giulio is ripped!).

Buddy bonding: Walter and Giulio (they definitely look like they are going to kiss), Arthur and a burly Greek cook (Akim Tamiroff) who becomes his confidant:

Cook;  You foreign, no?
Arthur:  No, I'm English.
Cook: (Puts his arm around him).  Everybody out there -- Russian spies.  I kill.  I get medal.
Arthur: (Suspecting that he is a spy.) Are you here officially?
Cook: Fishily?  No, I give  English friend good meat.
Arthur:  Good meat, I understand.  (Cook kisses him.)  Well, I thought I understood.

There are complications, some humorous, some suspenseful, and of course they don't get away with it.  But not to worry, they are soon out of prison and on their way to a new caper: stealing  the crown jewels in the Kremlin!

No sex, no romance, no violence,some buddy-bonding, lots of oiled-up Turkish guys, and location shots in Greece and Istanbul.

Not a bad way to spend two hours.

Jason Hervey: Did the "Wonder Years" big brother hook up with guys in West Hollywood? How big was he? With n*de photos

In West Hollywood in the early 1990s, if we were home on Tuesday or Wednesday nights, we watched Who's the Boss (Tony Danza, sigh), Roseanne, and Doogie Howser (Max Casella, sigh), but certainly not that show that bounced around between them, The Wonder Years (1988-93).  Who wanted to watch some dumb kid in the 1960s trying to win the Girl of His Dreams?  And with the most gravelly, unpleasantly off-key theme song imaginable:

What would you do if I sang out tune?
Would you stand up and walk out on me?

Yes, and I'd change the channel.

The dumb kid, Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) got so much teen idol adulation.    At 5'4", Jason Hervey was a member of the Short Guys Brigade, and so supremely cute that we were tempted to watch the show just to see him smile.  

Or on the off-chance that he would take his shirt off.

Born in 1972 in Los Angeles, Jason began his acting career at age 7, with a guest spot on the medical drama Trapper John, MD.   He went on to The Buddy System (promoting a romance between Richard Dreyfuss and Susan Sarandon), Meatballs II (with a pre-Pee Wee Paul Reubens), The Rating Game (with a pre-Always Sunny Danny DeVito), and Back to the Future (with Michael J. Fox).

He played Charlie (the one in the chicken suit), a friend of "What you talkin' about?" Gary Coleman in nine episodes of Diffrent Strokes (1985-86), and Curtis Spicoli in four episodes of the Fast Times at Ridgemont High adaption (1986)

The Wonder Years brought Jason some teen idol fame (not much), and made him a recognizable face, at least in West Hollywood, where according to rumor he was a regular at Mickey's, the twink bar.  

More after the break. 

Peter McEnery: The First Gay Teenager

In Victim (1961), 21-year old Peter McEnery played the first explicitly identified gay teenager in film, a working class boy named Boy who commits suicide in prison.  His affluent, middle-aged lover, Melville Farr (gay actor Dirk Bogarde), tries to uncover the blackmail ring responsible for his death.  Portraying gay men as victims rather than monsters was revolutionary, and paved the way for the decriminalization of same-sex acts in Britain in 1967.

Peter moved directly from an amazingly courageous role to Disney, becoming an Adventure Boy with the two usual attributes: a muscular physique and heterosexual obsession.

In 1964, he starred in The Moon-Spinners as Mark Camford, a young banker who gets involved with spies in Crete, and in the process falls for vacationing British girl Nikki (regular Disney star Hayley Mills).  No buddy-bonding, but quite a lot of shirtless scenes, and more suspense than one usually gets from Disney.

In 1966, he played the titular role in The Fighting Prince of Donegal: Red Hugh, the 16th century Irish prince who started a rebellion against the oppressive English.  Hugh falls for a girl (Susan Hampshire), but also buddy-bonds with an older man.

Maybe the parallels with Victim were too great, or maybe Disney was being extra-cautious after the accidental outing of Tommy Kirk.  For whatever reason, Peter never worked for Disney again.  Instead, he continued his career of gay-vague and not-so-gay vague characters.

In I Killed Rasputin (1967), Peter played Prince Felix Yusopov, who was bisexual in real life, the lover of Grand Prince Dmitri Pavlovich (and enjoyed dressing in drag).  The movie tries to closet him, and all but eliminates Dmitri, but still Peter manages to imbue his character with a homoerotic passion (and he dances with a man).

Other sexually adventurous movies followed, but the most famous is Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970), based on the play by gay writer Joe Orton.  Mr. Sloane (Peter) is a male prostitute who moves in with a closeted gay man (Harry Andrews) and ends up the unwilling boy-toy of both him and his sister.

I haven't seen any of Peter's later works, mostly British television and tv movies, but some of them look interesting, and with ample buddy-bonding potential: The Cat and the Canary (which has a "gay" keyword on the Internet Movie Database); a version of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream; and Clayhanger, from a series of novels by reputedly gay author Arnold Bennett.

I have not been able to discover his real-life sexual identity, only that he was married to Julie Peasgood for a time, and has a daughter.  But with all of his gay-vague and gay roles, who cares?

See also: Fighting Prince of Donegal.