"Men": Naked men and paranormal peril in a quaint English village. What could go wrong? You'd be surprised.

 

Browsing for a movie to watch this week, we found Men (2022) on HBO MAX.  Imagining musclemen lounging by the pool, and maybe the old porn magazine Advocate Men, we eagerly clicked "play."  Without any prior research...

The Landlord:  Young, extremely successful business person Harper Marlowe drives 4 1/2 hours from London to a village in Herefordshire, where she will be renting a huge mansion from landlord Geoffrey, who has bad teeth (an important character trait).  He is shocked that Harper can't play the piano, and upset that she reserved the mansion as "Mrs.," but there's no husband with her.

The Screaming Being:  Harper takes a walk through the woods, and finds a huge tunnel going nowhere.  Suddenly a being appears at the other end, and runs toward her, screaming in anger or terror.  She runs,

The Naked Man: On the way back, she walks through an abandoned village.  There's a naked man following her: a mid-40s bear type with a hairy chest, a little belly, and a nice cock.

She runs back to her mansion, but the Naked Man follows.  He peers in the windows, pulls apples from the tree, and shoves his hand through the mail slot, trying to get in.  He appears unable to speak.  He is not threatening, just curious, as if he's never seen a house -- or a human being -- before.

Harper calls the police.  They arrive, handcuff the guy, and lead him off.

 The Green Man:  Harper takes another walk, and stumbles across an old church.  Strangely, the altar contains a stone carving of the Green Man on one side, and on the other a man giving birth. 

The Green Man, a face covered with leaves, is often found carved into the stones of old English churches.  He is thought to be a pagan fertility symbol.

The man giving birth turns out to be Sheela na Gig, a woman with masculine features but an exceptionally large birthing part, a common "grotesque" in English churches. 

The Back Story:  Harper kneels, starts sobbing, and flashes to her back story.

In an elegant apartment near the Tower Bridge in London, Harper tells her husband (Paapa Essideu) that she wants a divorce.  He begs, pleads, yells, and threatens suicide.  Finally he punches her, and she kicks him out.  A few moments later, he comes plummeting past the window.  Apparently he broke into the apartment upstairs, and either jumped or tried to climb down to her balcony, and slipped.  Either way, he glares at her accusingly as he falls.

The Mentally Disabled Boy:  Outside the church, Harper encounters a person wearing a creepy Marilyn Monroe mask.  The mask comes off -- it's a mentally disabled boy, asking her to play hide and seek. She refuses, so he calls her nasty names.

 More after the break

Angel Mock Curiel: LGBTQ and Latinx roles culminate in Lil Pappi on "Pose." Not much after except nude modeling and Denver.

It's the late 1980s in Manhattan, the era of Reaganomics, Tough on Crime, and the AIDS crisis.  It's cold outside.  Especially if you're poor, a racial minority, and femme, trans, or gay: "the world hates you.  When you die, it breathes a sigh of relief."

All you have is a "house," a family of choice with a "mother" and her children.  And ballroom.

 Pose (2018-21) is set in the ballroom subculture, where African-American and Latinx trans women, drag queens, and occasionally gay men "posed,"modeled, house against house in the quest for realness.  Some brought home gigantic trophies, and became legends. 

Li'l Papi (Angel Bismark Curiel) was living on the streets, surving through drug sales and hustling  (he preferred women, but accepted male clients).  After stumbling upon the ballroom subculture, he was entranced, and petitioned Blanca of House Evangelista to "adopt" him, even though he wasn't gay or trans.  She agreed, with the rule that he stop dealing, and pose occasionally as a muscleman. 

In Season 2, Li'l Papi starts dating Angel (Indya Moore), a sex worker whose previous plot arc involved an affair with a married man (Evan Peters).  After various arguments and breakup-reconciliations, they get married.  He opens a talent agency specializing in LGBTQ models, with Angel as his top client.  They have a happy ending (sort of), a welcome relief in a show that too often emphasized people being rejected by family, murdered, or dying of AIDS.

 This was Angel's first exposure to trans people.  In an interview with Attitude, he notes that he grew up in a "very cis, very heteronormative, very rough" Afro-Dominican community in Little Liberty, Miami.  He was bullied for being short and artistic, and for having asthma, and escaped into the world of the theater.  At the Miami Arts Charter School, he performed in The Rose Tattoo, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Jesus Hopping the A Train,and upon graduating in 2013, he enrolled at Pace University in New York as a drama major.

He dropped out in 2015 due to inancial problems, was homeless for awhile, survived anyway he could (he doesn't specify, but I imagine that hustling was one of his survival jobs), and finally found a job in a hotel.  But he still auditioned, and in 2016 landed his first on-screen role in America Adrift.  He played a middle-class teenager on Long Island who drifts into heroin addiction and drug dealing.

And loses his clothes.

Davi Santos, who is gay in real life, played his older brother, giving Angel his first close contact with LGBTQ people.  

Next came the short Louie's Brother Peter (2017).  Peter (Andrew McLarty) has Asperger's Syndrome, but that doesn't stop him from helping his brother with the drug deliveries.  Angel plays Zeke, one of their customers.

Andew McLarty is gay in real life.  .

Night Comes On (2018) is a "slow, painful, grim" indie drama about an African-American, lesbian girl nameed Angel, who is released from juvenile detention at age 18 with no money and no place to stay.  She gets a girlfriend, tries to find social connections, and seeks out her father to punish him murdering her mother.  Dad is played by John Earl Jelks, who often plays gay characters

You're pushing up the LGBTQ representation, Angel buddy

Our Angel played a store clerk. 

Monsters and Men (2018) is not about James Whale and the Frankenstein movie - that's Gods and Monsters.  It's about an incident where six police officers corner a black man and "accidentally" kill him during an arrest.

You're pushing up the Black/Latinx representation, too.

When Angel saw the casting call for L'il Pappi, he thought, "That's me!  Those are my experiences!"  He got the part, and since he had so little exposure to trans people, tried to educate himself, hang out with them, ask about their lives -- and he ended up in a relationship with producer/writer Janet Mock, an African-American transwoman -- while she was still married to her husband.  She is the one who suggested expanding Papi's role by giving him a romance with Angel Evangelista.

Pose turned out to be the high point of Angel's acting career.  He was starring in a popular tv series, but more importantly, he  had found a community.  

More after the break

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