Balkan Beefcake: Twelve Serbian studs, hung Herzegovians, and Croatian cocks


ILGA Europe ranks all 49 European countries on LGBT equality, and the Balkan states do surprisingly well: Montenegro scores 61%, higher than the Netherlands, and Croatia  51%, higher than Switzerland. Bosnia and Herzegovina 39.5%, and Serbia 35%, score higher than Italy.   



Of course, legal equality does not necessarily translate into gay-friendliness for the traveler. Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, has only one gay-specific bar.  Guys meet through private parties and the internet.




Sex god from Sarajevo










Mostar, two hours by train south of Sarajevo, near the Adriatic Sea, is famous for its old Turkish quarter, as well as the Museum of War and Genocide Victims.  Ok...well, there are three gay-friendly bars.







Nijvice, Croatia, a resort town near the Italian border.  But you have to go through Slovenia to get there, so it takes about three hours.

More Balkan beefcake after the break





"It's Always Sunny," Episode 7.10: Mac gets fat, Charlie refuses sex, and Michael O'Hearn flexes. With bonus Sunny butts


Looking for Michael O'Hearn muscle, I found an appearance in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Episode 7.10 (2011).  It's been on for like a century, so you've probably seen it: four sociopathic pals and their anti-father figure run a sleazy, always-deserted bar in Philadelphia, where they argue, fight, scheme against each other, and work together on elaborate money-making scams



Dennis (Glen Howerton, right), the bartender, prides himself on his attractiveness. .

His sister Dee (Kaitlyn Olson), the bar's waitress, fancies herself an actress.

Mac (Rob McElhenney, left), the bouncer, is obsessed with muscles, and rather homophobic.  He gets a lot of "is he or isn't he?" jokes, until he finally comes out, then goes back in, and comes out again.

Frank (Danny DeVito, the moon), Dennis and Dee's rich con-artist sort-of-father, bankrolls the schemes.

He and Charlie (Charlie Day, center), the bar's janitor, live together, share a bed, and get a lot of "are they or aren't they?" jokes, but it's also hinted that Frank is Charlie's biological father, not his boyfriend.

None of the cast is homophobic in real life. In 2018, they all appeared on a Paddy's Pub float at the LA Pride Parade, giving Mac a chance to show off his new ripped bod.

Scene 1: Mac is in a Catholic confession booth (where you confess your sins to the priest, who gives you a penance to perform).  His confession: he's fat. Not a sin, dude.

Scene 2: Next Mac asks the priest to have God smite his enemies...um, friends...well, friends who want to destroy him.  Not what confession is for, dude. He explains: they became wildly successful, which made them monsters (um...they've been monsters since Season 1), which made them want Mac to be fat. Confused?

Flashback:  Frank, the anti-father, returns from a trip to sell illegal fireworks in North Carolina to find the bar packed.  What happened?  Mac thinks that they just "tipped": if you make the right decisions long enough, eventually things tip in your favor.  Charlie thinks it's his cleaning, Dee her jokes, Dennis his hotness.  They don't know which it is, so they have to continue doing everything.


Scene 3: In
bed that night, Charlie just wants to go to sleep so he can work tomorrow, but Frank wants to blow up a lamb with his remaining fireworks.  They argue until Charlie makes a barrier between them, so they can't have sex, which hurts Frank's feelings.  Mac calls and invites them to go on a rager, but they can't because they're fighting.

Left: Frank, Danny DeVito.

Scene 4: The next day, Dennis won't come out of the bathroom, so Charlie has to bartend, which he's not qualified for. Meanwhile, Dee tries to be funny, ignoring customers' orders to tell lame half-jokes and berating them when they don't laugh, and Mac comes late in after a rager involving three bottles of champaign and a stray dog. Everything is in chaos. 

They all go into the bathroom to see what's wrong with Dennis: he found a couple of gray hairs and tried to eradicate them, ending with a terrible haircut.  He's afraid to be seen in public. 

Scene 5: After bartending all night, Charlie is exhausted; plus he hasn't had time to clean. Frank has come up with a new prank: four stop signs at an intersection, so no one can move, har har. Charlie points out that he built a four-way stop, actually making the neighborhood safer. "Ok, then, why don't we go around and hit people with sticks?"  Charlie doesn't want to do that, either.  Not the best ideas for Date Night, buddy.


Scene 6:
Mac is planning places to avoid when he sails around the world with the profits from their new successful bar.  He'll avoid Africa -- too poor, the Middle East -- too hot, and well, everywhere.  Meanwhile, Dennis applied a chemical peel to his face, and now looks disfigured, so he can't be the attractive bartender anymore.

Left: Dennis, Glenn Howerton

Dee suggests hiring  replacements, or avatars, to do all the dirty work, so they can concentrate on being attractive, funny, and successful.  Of course the avatars have to look like the gang.


More sunny after the break

Gemstones Episode 3.3: Baby Billy sings forever, Kelvin can't say the word, BJ poses nude, and I'm depressed

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Spring break in Iceland: A hookup with a Nordic god



Augustana, Junior Year

Augustana was a small college, so there weren't many choices for Modern Language Majors: Spanish, French, German, Swedish, Latin, Greek, and occasionally Russian. We had to "become fluent" in two languages and "competent" in a third, so I chose Spanish and French, which I studied in high school, and German, because I spent the fall quarter of my sophomore year in Regensburg. 

We also had to participate in at least one language club, but the Spanish, French, and German clubs were kind of boring, with bake sales, foreign-language films, and field trips to the Goethe Institut or the Alliance Française in Chicago.

Everybody joined the Scandinavian Club -- they had an endowment from a wealthy alumnus, and paid most of the way for members to go on annual field trips to Scandinavia!  A different country every year, alternating between Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland.

In my junior year, it was Iceland.  I would have preferred Norway, but I wasn't about to turn down ten days in the land of the Old Norse sagas and Nordic hunks.

There were 12 of us, eight boys and four girls, plus two chaperones. We stayed in a youth hostel, four to a room, but everyone got a single bed, so there wasn't any late-night fondling, just a couple of less-than-spectacular sausage sightings.

No one came out willingly in the 1970s, so if any of the other guys were gay, they didn't let on.


Iceland was interesting, but not quite interesting enough for six days.  After you see the National Museum and the  Árbæjarsafn, an open-air museum of Icelandic history, there's nothing but glaciers, geysers, rocks, and scraggly mountains.  I've never found natural wonders as interesting as museums.








We never made it to Akureyri, famous for its annual strongman contest.
One day we took a bus to Hveragerði, about 45 minutes from Reykjavik, to visit Reykjadalur, "Steam Valley,"  an unearthly-looking region of volcanic boulders, spurts of steam, rocks, waterfalls, pools of water, and hot springs with wooden footpaths around.

Our guide told us that some intrepid souls jumped into the hot springs, but you had to be careful -- in some of them, the temperature got up to 80 degrees (175 fahrenheit), and would scald you.

None of us was brave enough.  Besides, it was cloudy and damp, with a cold wind blowing -- who wanted to strip?

When it came time to get back on the bus, we discovered that Erik was missing!



He was a junior Scandinavian Studies major, short, slim, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, with a round handsome face.  We had known each other since high school, but we didn't interact much: he was a fratboy, several levels above me on the social scale.

We went up and down the paths, calling his name.  No answer.

He couldn't have fallen into a crevice.  It was all open -- we would see him.

Could he have wandered off the path, into the wilderness of volcanic rocks?

We searched for 45 minutes.  Then, just as our chaperone suggested we drive back to town and stop at the police station, Erik appeared -- on a path we had just searched!

Seeing our anxious and angry faces, he said "What?  Chill out -- I was just looking at something.  We're only in Iceland once, right?"

He didn't believe that he had been gone over 45 minutes: "I guess I lost track of time.  Sorry."

More after the break

Jason Schwartzman: Lots of quirky guys winning the Girl of Their Dreams, with two gay/bi roles and one penis




Jason Schwartzman broke into film with Rushmore, 1998, which I didn't see: the plot synopsis sounded decidedly creepy, not to mention obsessively heterosexist.  A 15 year old boy tries to get with one of high school teachers, but she refuses to sexually assault him, so he fixes her up with his older buddy and finds an age-appropriate girlfriend.  Shudder.

He played a few more disaffected, deviant, and dangerous teenagers, in  Freaks and Geeks, Slackers, and Spun, then moved on to some well-received independents, such as I Heart Huckabees and The Grand Budapest Hotel





Looking through the list on the IMDB, I realize that out of Jason's 87 movies and tv shows, I've seen four: 

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, 2010:  An adaption of the graphic novel, with Scott (Michael Cera, who I watched to see) trying to win the Girl of His Dreams by clobbering her evil exes.  One is a girl; plus Scott has a gay roommate, played by Kieran Culkin. Jason plays one of the exes, Gideon G-Man Graves.



Wet Hot American Summer, 10 Years Later,
2017, reunites the gang from the movie and add some new characters, such as Deegs, "the new Andy" (Skyler Gisondo, who I watched to see). Jason plays Greg, the head boys' counselor at the summer camp.














In The Righteous Gemstones Season 2, Jason plays Thaniel, a sleazy journalist digging up dirt about "sexual impropriety" among clergy.  He is especially interested in taking down Eli Gemstone, the most famous televangelist and mega-church pastor in the world. Eli's children, hoping to talk him into backing off, go to his cabin, and find him shot to death!  "Who killed Thaniel?" is one of the main mysteries of the season.

Jason plays a gay guy in Asteroid City, 2023: Augie Steenbeck, a World War II photojournalist who stars in the play based on the movie we're watching, and dates the playwright, I think. It's all very confusing, and not really worth it: the two are on stage for only about 30 seconds, and vanish after a single, so-distant-that-you-can-barely-see it kiss.

More Jason after the break

Brad Hallowell: A decade of dicks. The rest is silence.

 As Janet Weiss said in Rocky Horror, "I don't like men with too many muscles." Greek gods are nice to look at, and fun to do stuff with, but cuddling with a marble slab afterwards?   So when I stumbled onto a nude photo of Brad Hallowell while  researching something else, I thought "Nearly a perfect body.  Why haven't I heard of this guy before?" 

Maybe because he's nearly anonymous.  No Instagram, X, Facebook, or TikTok page, an IMDB biography with just his home town and date of birth -- Waterville, Maine, February 13, 1981.  Seven movies listed on IMDB, all between 2006 and 2016.  Most directed by Todd Verow, most featuring frontal nudity.  A decade of dicks, and then silence.



Vacationland
, 2006: A high school senior ditches his girlfriend for a same-sex romance. Brad is 25 years old.





Hooks to the Left
, 2006. An "experimental" film, shot with a cell phone camera, about the adventures of a hustler named Nail.





Between Something and Nothin
g, 2008.  An art student gets a girlfriend and pursues a hustler.







The rest of the decade after the break

Gemstones Episode 3.2: Kelvin's butt buddies, gay Percy, two toxic families, and some military dicks


Previous: Episode 3.1, Continued: Kelvin withholds sex, Judy cheats and Jesse fights, with some random butts

Episode 3.2 introduces Eli's estranged brother-in-law Peter Montgomery, his sons, and a disturbing super-macho mirror of Kelvin's God Squad.

Title: "But Esau Ran to Meet Him," from Genesis 33.4.  Jacob has tricked his father Isaac into giving him the inheritance.  Esau is furious and vows to kill him, so he flees.  When he returns after 20 years, Esau behaves as if he is happy to see him, but....

Stephen's abusive wife:  Stephen, who was fired as Judy's guitarist after her brothers discovered their affair, is trying to tell his wife Kristy that he was "laid off," not fired.  She doesn't buy it.  It's a highly abusive relationship: she calls him "an unemployed, cokehead piece of shit who sulks all day."  He screams "Fuck you!", and she hits him with a glass blender.  Shattered glass all over his face and head, in front of the kids!  Whoa, scary.  The Gemstones and their partners argue, but they never use abusive language or physical violence.  Except for the time that Amber shot Jesse in the butt. 

Later, Judy meets Stephen at Spanky's Cafe, a real restaurant in North Charleston, and offers him $10,000 to leave her alone: "I don't want to see you no' mo'."  But he still wants her.  Judy points out that he's married, but it doesn't matter: "I'd leave my family in a second if I could have you.  I'd murder them." Say what?  This guy is a psycho. Of course, he should leave his abusive wife, but murder her...and the kids?


Kelvin's Butt Buddies: 
Jesse and Amber's adult son Gideon, who moved to California to become a stuntman, is back, lying on the veranda in a bathrobe, smoking a cigarette, holding a box of Lucky Charms cereal, and sulking.  The background song by Buddy Knox tells us: "I think I'm going to kill myself."  He injured his neck, and may never do stunt work, tumbling, or martial arts again.  At least he's displaying a nice chest.

Background alert: Skyler Gisondo injured his neck in real life in 2022, when his hair stylist gave him a "little neck massage."  They wrote his injury into the script.

In a much, much nicer parallel to the Stephen-Kristy confrontation, Gideon's parents order him to stop feeling sorry for himself, get off his butt, and go to work for the church.  But he doesn't want to preach.  Ok, so he can become Eli's driver. Remember that the long-term driver, Walker, was fired.

We cut to Gideon on his first assignment, driving Eli and the siblings to see if May-May's kids are ok.  They are living with her estranged husband, Peter Montgomery, and his militia, the Brotherhood of Tomorrow's Fires: they expect end of civilization, like Eli's Y2K scare back in 1999.   Eli calles them preppers: "They want to make sure they don't run out of toilet paper."

Usually Evangelicals believe in the Rapture, when Jesus zaps everyone who is saved to Heaven, leaving the unsaved to suffer through seven years of the dystopian Tribulation before being sent to hell.  To this day, I will not let anyone stamp my hand for re-entry into an event, because  the Mark of the Beast was drummed into my head.  But Eli and Peter apparently have a different belief system.

On the way to the compound, at the defunct Boy Scout Camp Wooden Feather, the siblings discuss their cousins, Karl and Chuck.  Kelvin says that he always found them "kind of dumb and strange."  But you haven't seen them since 2000, when you were ten or eleven.  How much do you remember?

Judy: "That's why I'm surprised you weren't butt buddies with them."  

He gets annoyed, not because she alludes to him being gay but because she implied that he's also "dumb and strange," and therefore perfect for the Montgomerys.


Not the God Squad: 
Bizarre signs like "Now we will see" greet the family, along with multiple armed guards.  They pass Jacob (Stephen Louis Grush) cutting up a deer.  Kelvin smiles at him -- think he's hot, buddy?.  Then a military-style obstacle course;  guys practicing martial arts; a guy taking a shower outdoors (no beefcake); and finally the mess hall, where about thirty militia men are having lunch.

Wait -- no women and children?  The actual far-right militia movement has many female participants, but this is a male-only space, like Kelvin's God Squad in Season 2, but with scruffy guys in military fatigues instead of flexing musclemen.  It is dedicated to phileo instead of eros, buddy-bonding instead of homoerotic desire. An article on Doomsday Preppers notes that these male-only groups "cultivate a dangerous vision of apocalyptic manhood that consummates a fantasy of national virility in the demise of feminine society."  Women are weak and fragile, their civilization doomed. Only the "manly love of comrades" can survive the Apocalypse. 

May-May's son Chuck ushers Eli and the siblings in. They are greeted by Cousin Karl (Robert Oberst), who is delighted to see them; and Uncle Peter (Steve Zahn, below), who is not.  It's time for church, so get out!  No, the siblings offer to help lead the service: Jesse will preach, Judy will sing, and Kelvin will  perform some "feats of strength" for the kids -- the only time he references his muscles during the season.  No kids around, but maybe the militia guys would like to see some masculine beauty.   


Uncle Peter rejects the siblings' offer.  They are "phony fakers," entertainers, interested in making money rather than saving souls. 









More military guys after the break

Robert Oberst and the World's Strongest Men. Yes, some of them are naked



Robert Oberst, whose motto is "Strong and Pretty," grew up in Aptos, California, graduated from Western Oregon University in 2008 with a degree in history.  He moved to San Francisco, and like most history majors, found work as a bouncer in gay bars.  

But soon he discovered that being huge was good for more than attracting guys: he began competing on the strongman circuit, and racking up awards:

First place, San Francisco Fit Exp, 2012.
Third place, America's Strongest Man, 2012. Second place, 2013 and 2014
Third place, All-Amerca Strong Man Challenge, 2013.
And it goes on like that.  Meanwhile, he sold "Strong and Pretty" products and appeared as himself in two tv series dedicated to the strongest men in the world.


In 2022, after placing in nearly 20 competitions, Robert retired from strength competitions, just in time to break into an acting career.  He stars in Season 3 of The Righteous Gemstones as Chuck Montgomery, one of the backwoods cousins of the mega-rich Judy, Jesse, and Kelvin Gemstone.  



Strongman contests differ from bodybuilding in their emphasis on strength rather than definition, so bulk is fine.  Many strongmen find that a belly is an asset, as we see with Tom Stoltzman, World's Strongest Man in 2021 and 2022.










Bodybuilders are drawn from the elite class, who can afford to spend thousands of dollars on protein supplements and fancy gym equipment.  Strongmen are drawn from the working class, so their feats of strength often involve everyday objects: lifting boulders, logs, and tires; pulling or flipping over cars; tossing beer kegs.  Here Oleg Novikov, the World's Strongest Man in 2020, lifts a barbell made of tires.

Robert Oberst specialized in the log lift: in 2015 he broke the American log lift record of 211 kg -- 465 pounds.



Strength competitions are super-macho, drawing a lot of heterosexual alpha males.  Although Robert likes to hint that he is gay, he has never made a public statement. Besides, I think he might have a wife.

In fact only one professional strongman is out as gay: Rob Kearney, who coincidentally broke Robert Oberst's log-lift record in 2020.




Nude strongman bonus after the break

Joel Rush's Hot/Hung Photos, Part 1: Why does everybody else in his movies get naked?

 


It's difficult to research Joel Rush: no instagram or personal website, only a minimal Facebook page, a Twitter page that hasn't been updated since 2012, a wikipedia page that just tells us that he was born in Logansport, Indiana on August 26, 1981, worked as a software salesman in Tampa, did some modeling, and broke into acting after being runner-up on the reality show True Beauty in 2009.  

He's been in several gay-themed movies, including Eating Out: Drama Camp, Eating Out: The Open Weekend, and Love or Whatever, but I can't tell if he's gay in real life. True Beauty judged your inner beauty; it didn't hook you up with a romantic partner.



I noticed something else unusual about Joel: he's been in a number of movies and tv shows where other guys got naked, but he did not.

In Eating Out: Drama Camp, we see Aaron Milo's cock and Ronnie Krell's butt, but Joel just takes his shirt off.








In Eating Out: Open Weekend, we see Michael Vera's butt and Alvaro Orlando's dick, but no Joel.










In Love or Whatever, Corey, played by Tyler Poelle, is distraught when his boyfriend John, played by David Page, dumps him.  They get naked, but new romance Joel Rush does not.









We do get a butt  in the anthology series Femme Fatales, but Jon Fleming gives us the Full Monte.









More Joel after the break. Caution: Explicit

Workaholics Episode 7.3: Blake sucks a...Adam sucks...well, there's lots of gay sex jokes, and everybody loses their pants

 


I haven't reviewed an episode of Workaholics for awhile, and Episode 7.3, "Monstalibooyah," is notable for its nonstop beefcake and huge number of queer codes.

Scene 1: The guys are spending the day at their company's time share condo, only 11 blocks from the beach!  They plan a crazy party, but Adam cautions, no naked Twister: "Sex Twister makes my dick blister."  He offers to show them, but then Ders wants to show them a scar on his dick, too.  They start working to get semis, then realize what they are doing and change their minds. Is it just me, or is it getting homoerotic in here?

Scene 2: They explore the condo. Ders: "A Fiat!" Adam: "A jacuzzi!" Blake: "Ketchup!"

They reveal their goals for the day. Adam: Get filmed doing something stupid, so he can get on the reality show Kookslams.  Ders' goal: get a hickey so everybody at work will think he got laid. Blake: smoke weed out of a "cock shell."  He means conch shell, of course.  And they all want to watch the sunset together.  Awww...


Scene 3:
  They drive the Fiat to the beach, wearing only jeans, Adam's muscles pouring out, and play a homoerotic game of volleyball, paralleling the iconic scene in Top Gun that had a generation of gay kids figuring it out.  Wait -- their opponents are little girls.

Suddenly they are distracted by three bikini babes walking toward them in slow motion. Ders calls dibs on one who looks like she gives good "hick jobs."  Or you could have sex with her.


They ask the girls' plans for the evening: try to score some Molly and then hang out at the beach club. Why not come back to their place for a crazy party instead?  Just as the girls are considering it, Carson and his sidekick (Steve Talley,  Temple Baker, left) show up to warn them about hooking up with strangers.  They call the guys "chicken donkers," which seems to be a made-up slur.

Ders suggests a game of volleyball: the winner gets the girls.  But Carson and his sidekick are acting more like overprotective brothers than boyfriends. 

Besides, that's sexist: "They're not property!"  Carson throws the guys' volleyball into the ocean. It belongs to the condo; they'll be charged hundreds of dollars!  They rush in to retrieve it, and soon discover why you don't go swimming in jeans.  They have to ditch the jeans, or drown. 


They return to dry land naked, covering their dicks with their hands. Blake finds a "cock shell" to shove his junk into.  Passersby laugh  at their size, but they explain that small dicks are regular-sized now, shrinking due to energy drinks.  

Scene 3: They steal clothes that someone left on the beach: Ders gets a "Paddy's Irish Pub" t-shirt from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia,  Blake a lady's dress, and Adam a dad outfit.  

Sunset is in two hours, and they haven't met any of their goals yet!   Maybe they can get Ders his hickey by bringing the girls some Molly.  Blake and Adam cause a distraction while Ders steals the stash of a drum circle.  

But the drum circle catches on, and chases them!  They hide with a bridal party, putting on their little femme hats as a disguise: "You guys are so pretty!" Adam exclaims. Yeah, they're hot.

Scene 4: The girls said that they were going to hang at the Beach Club, so the guys sneak in, disguise themselves as staff, and shove shrimp down their pants, presuming that in fancy clubs, "shrimpermen" distribute shrimp one at a time. They approach the girls, announce that they have scored some Molly, and invite them back to the condo to suck on Ders' neck.  But Carson and his sidekick appear and order them to leave the girls alone.  Then the Drum Circle dudes, wanting to clobber the guys for stealing their Molly!   

Steve Talley bonus after the break