Paxton Booth: The "Coop and Cam" brother likes girls' clothes, unicorns, and cock sparring, but does he like guys? With Gavin d*ck

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"In the Hand of Dante": Film noir about an original Dante manuscript, set in a 1950s-era 2001. And it gets more confusing. And homophobic

I love the Divine Comedy, at least the Inferno, where Virgil guides Dante through the stages of hell.  He puts the sodomites in the Seventh Circle, where fire rains down on those who "do violence against nature," but at least it permitted me to
mention LGBT people in an Italian class in the 1980s, when otherwise the rule was "Don't mention them, they don't exist."  

So I'm going to watch the new movie In the Hands of Dante, about the discovery of an original Divine Comedy manuscript.  Maybe there will be gay characters, probably not, but I'll still get to hear that beginning phrase again: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura (at the midpoint of life's journey, I found myself lost in a dark forest).

We've all been there.

Scene 1: Dante climbs a rocky cliff.  Meanwhile, sometime in the 1940s or 1950s, an obnoxious novelist (Oscar Isaacs) complains to his friend that his books are too brilliant to be edited. "I'd rather the stableboy f*ck my wife than see my work edited." Heterosexual identity established immediately after his obnoxiousness.

Oscar Isaacs' backside

"So, what's your book about?"

"It's a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. I've been working on it for ten years." 

Friend squeezes his shoulder.  "You're still hot after ten years."  Wait -- are you flirting with him?

" By the way, who is Dante?"  Say what?  Who doesn't know Dante?

"An old dead guy.  But he got trapped in the cage of rhyme and meter.  I'm breaking out, so my translation will be far superior to the original."  The greatest work in Italian literature?  You planning to improve on "Hamlet" next?

Scene 2:  Newark, 1969.  A young boy enters a middle-class house and tells his Uncle, "I just killed some kid."  He explains that the boy (Gavin Weingarten) had a big knife, and asked if he wanted to die.  He tried to defend himself, they struggled, and he managed to stab Knife Boy.  

Since he doesn't know who the boy was, and no one saw them, Uncle says that he should forget about it.  But don't make "malarkey" a habit in the future.  Are you going to grow up to be Our Hero? But you're way too young. That would make the "I'm a better writer than Dante" conversation sometime in the 2000s, and it was obviously in the 1950s.  Maybe Uncle is Our Hero?

Scene 3: Bora Bora, seaside, 2001. Our Hero on a hammock, writing in his notebook about "creamy white gardenia blossoms" and "faded petroglyphs."  So you must be the Boy who killed someone, now middle aged, but it's a parallel world with the look and feel of the 1950s: no computers or cell phones, men wear hats and smoke constantly, writers use pencils. 

Our Hero tells us that the Nine Heavens of the Paradiso is a bad translation; It's really Nine Skies.  The last and rarest of them is the Sky of Illimitibleness.  Or you could say "Endless," if you weren't a pretentious jerk.

Cut to the Young Dante sitting under a tree, looking at the Illimitible Sky.  

Scene 4:  New York, 2001, "That time when the daylight sky was an oppressive, low-lying glare of white, and the dark of night was..."  So, summer.  Is this one of your stories, or really happening in-universe?    A greasy-haired guy named Louie (Gerard Butler, but blond and greasy) saunters into a closed bar and orders a Dewars and water.  He criticizes the bartender's moustache: "You see a guy with a moustache, he's either a cop or a (homophobic slur)."

I expected L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle, the love that moves the sun and the stars, and I'm getting Charles Bukowski, homophobia, and a parallel world where the 1950s never ended. 

"By the way, you ever take it up the ass?" Louie asks.  "Might make a man out of you."  But then he calls him a c*cksucker.  Twice.  Are you homophobic or not, buddy?  

He criticizes the Bartender and his wife for being excessively ugly, and threatens his nine-year old daughter.

Next topic of conversation: the Bartender's Uncle, "a real fuckup," who opened the bar, but pissed his money away gambling.  Wait, is that the Uncle from 1969?  So the Bartender is Our Hero?  But he's supposed to be in Bora Bora, writing pretentious crap.  And the Uncle was elderly in 1969. No way he's alive in 2001.  

Unc owes the gang a lot of money, so his nephew the Bartender is going to provide it.  Louie takes tonight's proceeds, $1,200, then orders the Bartender to go down on him.  But he shoots him as soon as he gets on his knees.

What does this have to do with Dante?

More after the break.  Caution: It gets more confusing, but there are cocks.

The Amazing Digital Circus: Gay, trans, ace, and nonbinary humans trapped in a sinister video game. With some voice artist dicks

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Ryan Buggle: The youngest LGBT character on tv, star of a gay play on Broadway. But is he gay/bi in real life? With Drayer and Meloni dick

 

I've never seen any of the 586 episodes of Law and Order: SVU (1999-) , because who cares about the Crime of the Week?  So I had no idea that it was so soap-opera like. It took a lot of plot arcs to for Noah Porter-Benson (Ryan Buggle) to get around to coming out as the youngest LGBTQ character on tv. And a lot of trauma:

Bon in 2013, after Mom Elle is  raped by sex trafficker Johnny Drake.

She keeps the baby while working for pimp Little Tino, but when she overdoses, he sells little Noah to a child pornographer couple.

After detective Olivia (Mariska Hartigay) arrests them and rescues Noah, he is placed in several abusive foster homes.

Mom Elle turns up and tries to get custody, but she is murdered.

Olivia decides to foster Noah, but when she pulls him out of the way of a speeding car, he is bruised, and CPS thinks that she is abusive.

He is kidnapped, nearly kidnapped, and hospitalized with life threatening diseases (twice).

His biological father shows up for a custody battle, and is murdered.  I'm looking at you, Olivia.

Finally, a queer code: In 2019, ADA Stone (Philip Winchester, left) decides that Noah needs a "father figure,' and teaches him to play baseball.  

After a few episodes, he gets tired of baseball and says that he would rather take ballet lessons.  This was Ryan's idea.  He tells Dance Magazine: "Dancing is my favorite thing, so I wrote a script over the summer and gave it to the writers, and they were happy to do it."

Although Noah mentions his ballet lessons and his competitive dance team on occasion, and has a plotline where Olivia hangs up on him when he announces that he got the lead in The Nutcracker (not because she disapproves), it's mostly back to trauma, diseases, an unspecified "family emergency," vaping, and getting to know Olivia's estranged brother Simon (Michael Weston), who dies of an overdose. How many parental figures have died on you, buddy?

On January 11, 2022, Olivia finds Noah in his friend Hudson's house, wearing a dog collar, eating dog food, and barking on command.  At first he claims that it was just kids being kids, but then he admits that Hudson was making fun of a nonbinary friend, using homophobic slurs.  So he defended them, and told Hudson that he was bi: "There's no shame in being true to yourself."  The bully didn't respond well.

Olivia praises him for standing up to Hudson.  

He explains: "Well, it's my truth.  I just haven't told anybody before."

Olivia: "Well, thank you for telling me." And they go on with their day. (Yes, she comes down on the  bully.)

The episode received nearly universal praise (excluding the usual homophobes), and got Ryan a dozen interviews in everything from Cliche Magazine to The Today Show.  He was twelve years old, but Noah was nine, thus becoming the youngest self-identified LGBTQ character on televsion..  The runner up is Jude on The Fosters, who says that he is "not into labels" at age twelve, and "gay" at age thirteen.  

As far as I can tell, Noah's bi identity never comes up again.  He  bonds with his half-brother Connor (real-life buddy Tre Ryder), gets a potential father figure in Olivia's ex Stabler (Christopher Meloni, left, who played Lee Tergersen's boyfriend in Oz), and continues to suffer from soap opera traumas.  But there's always the future; Ryan hints that there are some "exciting plotlines ahead" for his character.

Ryan Buggle is now sixteen years old, with biceps.  I'm going to check the usual: any (other) LGBT roles?  Gay or bi in real life?    

More after the break