Cal Tolentino: Bodybuilder dates "Best Medicine's" Liam, rooms with Martin Herlihy, kisses a ninja. With two Cal cocks.

I've been watching Best Medicine (2026) on Netflix: Josh Charles plays a gruff physician in a small town in Maine, where there are a surprising number of diseases with weird symptoms.  Turning blue?  Suddenly seeing birds?  I like the gay characters fully integrated into the community, like sarcastic teenager Liam (Josh Hoon Lee).  

In most episodes, Liam hangs out with two girls, Harley and Amelia.  But in Episode 1.9, at a high school "sleep-in," Amelia is replaced by Kyle (Cal Tolentino), joining them for a giant-sized Connect Four and a "Skeeter" game.   

In Episode 1.13, Kyle appears as the third of the rude teenagers again, protesting the plan to bring a salmon farm to the city, which would destroy the ecosystem. They're arrested for trespassing, which they find thrilling.  Later, they sit together at the wedding of the gay couple Greg and George.

I couldn't figure out why they replaced the teenage girl with a boy, except to imply that Kyle was dating one of them.  In my headcanon, he's dating Liam.

When I started researching Cal to see if he is gay in real life, I got a surprise:

The dude is built.

Cal grew up in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, about an hour west of Philadelphia.  He competed on American Ninja Warrior Junior, a reality show where you race through a multilevel obstacle course, beginning at age 11, then switched to the teen version, where he was a national finalist three times.  But he really wanted to be an actor, so the minute he got his driver's license at age 16, he started training at Playhouse West.  Also he changed his name from Caleb Plohoros to Cal Tolentino. From Greek to Italian?

While training, Cal was in three plays: A South Philly Christmas, Meisner, and Savannah. 

He broke into on-screen acting in 2025, with four short and a tv spot:

Hundred Dollar Brawler, about boxing. Cal plays the Hype Guy.

Guardians of the Outward Plain: A boy and his lion pal try to make human connections. Cal plays a Mechanic.

Godhead, not to be confused with the other 2025 Godhead short: A man searching for his lost brother stumbles into a sinister drug den. There are four characters other than addicts: Adam, Judas (Cal), and a Preacher (Sullivan Vaughan, left).

My Teenage Great Grandma, a vertical-format drama streaming on NetShort. A scientist dies in 1945 and re-animates as a teenager in 2025. Sounds wacky.  Cal's character appears halfway down the cast list.

Plus Cal and Peyton Carson wrote, directed, and starred in 4 AM: After a "rowdy Memorial Day Weekend," two guys try to go back to life as usual, but a text message results "in a painful test of trust." It's not available to stream, and I can't tell from the description and photos if they're buddies or boyfriends.

In 2026, Cal appeared in two episodes of Good Luck, Baby Girl, a short-form vertical series streaming on TikTok and Instagram.  It's about three girls trying to make it in L.A.

Two episodes of Best Medicine.

And the movie Roommates.  This photo is misleading: Cal and Martin Herlihy aren't the stars.  It's a comedy about girls who become roommates in college, and have increasingly dark adventures.   I went through on fast forward, and couldn't find Cal, but his sister posts a clip: he walks down the dorm corridor with his shirt off, and shakes hands with one of the girls while she gazes lustfully.

Aidan Langford plays the high school-aged brother of one of the girls.  He is outed as a prank.  

More after the break.

Benjamin Ainsworth is possessed, kidnaps Dream, dances with a drag queen, rides a dragon. Plus his nose grows. With Champion and Elf cocks.

 

Benjamin Ainsworth (the one with the handbag) was born  in  Nottingham in 2008, and later moved to Lund, near Hull in Yorkshire.  He scored his first professional acting job in 2016, in the musical Priscilla, Queen of the Desert on the Norwegian Epic Cruise Line, six weeks in the Mediterranean and then six more in the Caribbean.  He played Benjy, son of the drag queen Tick. who sings "Say a Little Prayer/Always on My Mind."  

The same year he was cast as "a cheeky schoolboy" in an episode of the soap Emmerdale.

His next major role was the troubled boy Miles in The Haunting of Bly Manor, loosely based on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, with the two troubled children and ghosts bedeviling the nanny.  I stopped watching in the first episode after a particularly nasty trigger (hint: "does the dog die?"), but according to a review there's a lesbian romance "drowned in sad and tired tropes" like Bury Your Gays. Yuck.

Left: Oliver Jackson-Cohen as Peter Quint, who is possessing Miles and forcing him to do bad things.

In  the first season of The Sandman (2022), Roderick Burgess captures the Dream of the Endless and imprisons him naked in a glass jar.  His son Alex (Ben as a boy, Laurie Kyaston as a young adult) has many opportunities to free him, but refuses, worrying that Dream will harm him or his boyfreind (Christopher Colquehon).  

So far one gay and two gay-adjacent roles.  Good job, buddy. 

There have been dozens of movies based on Pinocchio, the 1883 novel by Carlo Colladi. The 2022 version, with Ben as the puppet boy, Tom Hanks as Gepetto, and Joseph Gordon Levitt (left) as Jiminy Crickett, is supposedly a live-action remake of the classic 1940 animated movie, with a lot of queer codes.  But in some versions Pinoke gets a girlfriend, so I wouldn't be surprised if he is changed into a real boy through a glimpse of the Girl of His Dreams.  

The IMDB description of Son of a Critch (2022-26) tells us that "Mark is 11 going on 70," and "tries to make connections with the small group of people in his limited world."  Sounds like he's got that syndrome where you grow old as a child, or maybe he's aging backward, but it's a misdirection: Mark (Benji Boy) is just smart, and his "limited world" is Newfoundland in the 1980s.  He's heterosexual; no gay people are mentioned in the series.   

Ben is posing here with the real-life Mark Critch, who plays his dad, and Colto Gobbo, who plays his older brother.

Everything is Going to Be Great (2025) covers a year in the life of the Smart Family, as they negotiate "over-sized dreams, identity, ghosts, and regional theater."  Trigger alert: this is advertised as a comedy, but Dad (Bryan Cranston of Malcolm in the Middle) dies halfway through.  

He leaves two sons, the athletic Derrick (Jack Champion), who has a girlfriend, and Lester (Ben), who wears flashy outfits, aspires to a career in musical theater, and has conversations with the ghost of gay playwright Noel Coward. Those are sizeable queer codes.  Google AI says that he's "openly gay," but according to the plot synopsis, he gets a girlfriend. 

More after the break. Caution: Explicit.

Update: Alfie Williams and Recker Eans on a double date? With a gay ghost, a drag boy, Jonathan Groff, and Colin's cock

 

 Alfie Williams, the star of 28 Years Later and 28 Years Later: Bone Temple,  always seems to surround himself with LGBTQ people; I get a lot of profile ideas just by checking who he's hanging out with.  His social media has been sort of dry for several months, so I was happy to see this photo posted earlier today (August 2026): Alfie at the new Spider-Man movie with three guys, with the background song "In Bloom," by Nirvana:

He's the one who likes all our pretty songs, and he
Likes to sing along, and he likes to shoot his gun, but he
Knows not what it means.

I have a pretty good idea what it means: Looks like a double date.  But even if it's four buds hanging out, it gives me three new probably-gay guys to research.

Milo Maharlika (far left).

A Hawaiian actor of Filipino ancestry, the 13-year old is best known as Demi Hauntley, an over-zealous 600-year old ghost sent to assist the vampire girl in live-action Vampirina (2025).  Fans say that he's a gay stereotype.

Is that a pink triangle, babe?  Do you even know what it means?

Milo also played Gavrouche in the national tour of Les Miserables, starred in several shorts and the Filipino slasher-comedy Nurse of the Dead, and will be skewered by gay actor Jeff Hilliard in a chicken costume in the upcoming Cluck.  Cameron Cowperthwaite (left) also gets to run around like a chicken with its head cut off.

 

When he's not singing, dancing, and acting, Milo quotes Aristotle, likes Buster Keaton, and has a hot dad.  On the IMDB, his sexual orientation is listed as "straight," but that's probably from his parents.  . 

Alfie Williams, second left.  

The 15-year old actor from Newcastle-upon-Tyne played Spike in the post-Apocalyptic zombie movies 28 Years Later (2025) and 28 Years Later: Bone Temple (2026).  He has two upcoming movies:

The Banquet; A woman's perfect life starts to unravel when her son (Alfie) returns and starts digging up horrifying family secrets.

Left: Corey Mylchreest co-stars, but I think this is Jonathan Groff.

Friend Thing: In 1996 Seattle, a "sensitive" 14-year old boy (Alfie) is torn between his friends and The Girl, before "a family tragedy shifts his perspective."   

Wait -- "sensitive" is code for "gay," and why are there no teenage boys in the cast list for him to be friends with?

Ryder and Recker after the break

Revisiting Brideshead Revisited: Does the groundbreaking portrayal of (temporary) gay love hold up after 40 years? With bonus dicks.

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