Shayne Topp: Nickelodeon teen, Barry's buddy, bodybuilder, sketch comedian who pretends to be gay and have a massive d*ck. We'll see.

 

The Goldbergs (2017-23) was a nostalgic look at showrunner Adam F. Goldberg's childhood experiences in the 1980s, with Sean Giambrone (here being murdered in the shower) as a stand-in for Adam.  I wasn't a fan: most of the experiences involved attempts to meet, impress, or win The Girl of His Dreams.  But it aired in the same block with Speechless and Modern Family, in the days before we went to all-streaming services, so we had no choice but to watch.  

I liked Adam's older brother Barry (Troy Gentile), a muscular wrestler, and in Season 2, the gay-vague hippie-chill Matt (Shayne Topp), who struggles become his friend and join the Jenkintown Posse.  As far as I remember, he never displayed any heterosexual interest, and he had a queer-coded attraction to Barry.

Plus he was exceptionally cute,  and at 5'7", he was a member of the Short Guy Brigade.  Who could ask for anything more of actor Shayne Topp?

How about a muscular physique?

And other parts of interest.

Into tie-up games.

And a reader.

Born in 1991 in Florida, Shayne played the unrequited crush of a Yu'pik girl in Dear Lemon Lima (2009).  He was a regular in the teen variety show So Random (2011-12), and appeared in episodes of ICarly, Henry Danger, Sam & Cat, and Fred: The Show.  He also did some fashion and n*de modeling. But he is best known as a sketch comedian.

More after the break. Caution: Explicit.

Gemstones Episode 2.1 Continued: Keefe's kiss, Kelvin's boner, and a thug with broken thumbs. With Jonah Hauer-King and some boners

Previous: Episode 2.1: Junior likes dicks, Kelvin likes pecs, and f*k yeah, we got both!

In the last scene, Keefe is excluded from Sunday dinner with the family.  Now we see what he missed:

Judy and BJ accused of betraying the family because they got married at Disney World (by Prince Eric, the "hottest guy in the Disney catalog").

There's also a jab at Kelvin's muscle obsession. But it’s not just homoerotic desire.  Heterosexual desire is also incompatible with the family: when Jesse disses Judy for not being a mother, she argues that she's trying to keep her body "foine" to incite BJ's desire.  Nope, they need to have a family. 

Left and below: Jonah Hauer-King, who played Prince Eric in the Litle Mermaid movie.

More Disruptions: We cut to Eli playing croquet, gazing at women's butts, and flirting with a lady.  Suddenly Junior, his friend from his wrestling days, appears amid sinister music!   Eli ignores him and drives away.  A homoerotic disruption of Eli's heterosexual dalliance, parallel to the God Squad disrupting the nuclear family procession earlier. 

Next, the Jesse-Amber plot, a new Christian-themed resort, Zion's Landing, proposed by their megachurch pastor chums, Lyle and Lindy Lissons.  Jesse doesn't have any money of his own, so he'll have to convince Eli to invest.  He's got a job at the church; he should get a salary.  Daddy Eli is super over-controlling, like his daddy was, and like Kelvin will be with his homoerotic Band of Brothers.

My Mans:  The family flies to Florida to inspect the site of the Lyssons' proposed resort.   When they return, Keefe and the God Squad meet them at their private airfield.  The family is shocked: didn't they know about the God Squad? 

"Uh-oh, my mans!" Kelvin exclaims, rushing forward to tell Keefe "You are looking great!"  In Southern Coastal grammar, "mans" is singular, "mens" plural.  He means Keefe.

Keefe tries to move in for a kiss, but Kelvin blocks him with an awkward hug.  He tries again, and Kelvin blocks him again. Finally he makes a blatant "enough!" gesture and backs off.  Judy finds this little dance hilarious.   It reflects the couple's conflict this season: Keefe wants to join the family as Kelvin's partner, the equivalent of BJ, sitting at the dinner table being criticized, while Kelvin isn't sure that same-sex romance is even possible.  His muscle cult is about desire: no love allowed. 

We cut to Eli in his office, watching a tv news show: Thaniel Block being interviewed about the "salacious scandal" story that took down Pastor Butterfield.  How famous was this guy?  I thought he was just the anonymous pastor of a satellite church.  They preach "sex only between married heterosexual partners, or you're going to hell," but privately they do everything under the sun.  Who will he target next?   Maybe Kelvin-- "Secretly gay youth minister holds wild orgies with his stable of muscle boys."  Ulp.   

Damn, we got old: Later, Eli is standing at the docks, worrying, when Junior approaches him and grabs him from behind, another homoerotic intrusion into his heteronormative life.  Junior complains that Eli forgot that he existed. 

Then: "We got old.  I look like a piece of shit, but damn!  You look sturdy!  Still got that mass going on!"  He grabs Eli's butt to check. Sort of presumptuous, dude, thinking that your ex will still be into you after fifty years. 

Eli thinks that Junior plans to blackmail him over revealing their days as loan enforcers (and lovers?), but he claims that he's just there for nostalgia, looking up an old friend.  "Why you all nervous, Eli?  Why are you bein' all weird?"  In this series, "weird" usually refers to sexual frustration.

Junior tries to hug him again, but Eli pushes him away.  On a scale of 1 to 100, how certain are you that these guys spent the psychedelic 1970s enjoying free love?  

As Eli walks away, Junior guilts him into a dinner invitation.

Sticky Stephens:  Nuclear families are  eating at Sticky Stephens, a parody of the Sticky Fingers Restaurant in Charleston that closed down in 2020.  Both sound dirty. The 1972 Rolling Stones album of that name  depicted a pair of jeans with an enormous bulge, leaving no question about why the fingers are sticky.

Junior points out a kissing couple: "Damn, look at that piece of tail he's with!" Ok, so he's bi.  Everybody watches as the man, Randall (Rene Rivera), lifts his girl onto the counter so they can have sex right in the restaurant!  Why doesn't someone on staff intervene? Eli yells at him to "tone down romance," and Randall yells "Suck my dick, Grandpa." But the couple leaves.

Over dinner, Junior reveals that he's now a wrestling promoter: "I got a stable full of fellas I keep working."  Tell me more, tell me more.  What do they do besides wrestling? Stripping?  Sex work?

"I wonder what my Daddy would think about you and me being reunited," Junior says.  Eli answers: "He put us together, so he would think he did a pretty good job."  Except they were separated for a lifetime.  That's not a great job of matchmaking.

Junior says that his Daddy just disappeared one day, setting up a major mystery of the Season: Did Eli murder Glendon Marsh?

Proper erections after the break.  Warning: explicit

Daniel DeSanto: The gay kid in the Midnight Society, a Mean Girl, a Sicilian assassin, a short guy with a big dick. Who cares if he's straight?

 

Submitted for your approval: Nickelodeon's Are You Afraid of the Dark (1992-1996), an anthology of ghost and horror stories told by -- and evaluated by -- a group of teenagers called the Midnight Society.  

It aired at 5:30 pm on weeknights and 9:30 pm on Saturday night, so I didn't watch often, but I recall a few episodes. 

"The Tale of the Water Demon": Tony Sampson steals a gold watch, which draws the wrath of the water demon and threatens his gay-subtext buddy, Charlie Hofheimer

"The Tale of the Zombie Dice":  Jay Baruchel (top photo) fights a video arcade owner who is shrinking teens and selling them as pets.

"The Tale of the Phantom Cab": While lost in the woods, Jacob Tremblay (no relation to Jason Tremblay) and his brother stumble upon a monstrous being who keeps teenagers captive unless they can solve a riddle.

And I recall three of the teen actors who appeared in the frame sections, squabbling, flirting, forming alliances:

Bookish intellectual Gary (Ross Hull, left), the leader.

Frank (Jason Alisharan) the leather-jacket bad boy

Prank-loving, irreverent Tucker (Daniel DeSanto, right), Frank's younger brother, who joins the Midnight Society in Season 3, and stays through the series finale.  He becomes the leader of the Midnight Society in the revival series (1999-2000).

You're probably expecting a profile of Ross Hull, who is gay in real life, and rather built; but Gary turned me off by crushing on Sam (a girl) and eventually dating her.  

Frank competed for Sam's affections, too. 

But Tucker never expressed any heterosexual interest; indeed, he seemed to have a "he's arrogant!" love-hate attraction to Frank. 

He pushes to get his friend Stig (Codie Wilbie) to be admitted to the group in Season 6.  In the revival series, he and his friend Quinn (Kareem Blackwell) found the new Midnight Society together.    

Plus his stories are about friendships that are threatened, or grow stronger, through paranormal peril.  A lot of gay coding for Nickelodeon in the 1990s.

I didn't follow any of Daniel's post-Dark works. Somehow I had the impression that he played Elaine's boyfriend Jake on Seinfeld (a recovering alcohol, he goes off the wagon due to Jerry's negligence, and seeks revenge,)  But the episode aired in 1991, when Daniel was 11 years old.  Jake was actually played by David Naughton. 

When I was reviewing an episode of 100 Things to Do Before High School for my profile of Max Ehrich, I thought I saw him playing Mr. Roberts, the guidance counselor, but that's Jack De Sena

Our Daniel, a Toronto native, was a busy child and teen actor, specializing in horror for obvious reasons:

Gabe, who visits Egypt with his uncle and uncovers a mummy's curse in two episodes of Goosebumps (1995).

Theo in two episodes of The New Ghostwriter Mysteries (1997): he helps the gang and the ghost foil a corrupt cop, and later, thieves who target seemingly worthless items.

Zeke, a teenage theater employee who helps Taylor Handley foil The Phantom of the Megaplex (2000).  

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

"Rock Paper Scissors": Paper meets the Girl, Rock proves that he's a Dave. With two gay characters, four Danny dicks, and Mickey from "Seinfeld"

"Rock Paper Scissors" is a game where players turn their hands into the objects, hoping that theirs will cover, crush or otherwise defeat their opponents.  

Here Kramer and his gay-subtext buddy Mickey (Michael Richards, Danny Woodburn) play on an episode of Seinfeld.

Want to see Danny's dick? 

I feel bad about the misdirection, so I put a really Danny dick on top:  Danny Hobson, who hopes to Win the Girl on Naked Attraction (2017).  Plus some explicit photos after the break.

When Paramount Plus recommended a tv series called Rock Paper Scissors, I figured it was for preschoolers, like Bananas in Pajamas.  But the fan wiki states that there are two walk-on gay characters, Hipponoid Commander (Episodes 1.1) and Dave (Episode 1.14), and Common Sense Media (the homophobic one) says that it is "completely inappropriate," with "strong LGBT undertones."  Can't let gay kids know that they exist!  So we'll check it out.

Episode 1.1, "Paper's Big Lie"

Intellectual Paper (Thomas Lennon), trying to invent something, is annoyed by the loud ninja practice of his roommates, athletic Rock (Ron Funches) and hipster Scissors (Carlos Alarazqui).  There's a knock on the door: it's their new neighbor, a female Pencil.

Cliche shot of Pencil walking in slow motion, her long hair blowing in the wind, while Paper gushes in "girl of my dreams" ecstasy.

She works for a high-tech company, so he pretends that he has a high-tech job, too.  His brain objects: "You work at a crappy store that sells technology."  But his nether parts outrank his brain.

Even when Pencil asks for a tour: Paper puts up a poorly drawn sign and claims that she can't go inside because they're working on a top-secret device that will produce unlimited food out of nothing. 

The human boss yells: "I don't pay you to talk to girls, I pay you to unravel the pile of wires in the back room."

This makes Pencil a bit suspicious, but not the President of the United States: she saw the sign and figured that Paper must be super-smart.  The world needs his help. Lady is not too bright, is she?

Problem: The Hipponoids, "the most dangerous species in the galaxy," have the Earth surrounded.  The  Commander (Darin de Paul) explains that their planet is low on food, so Earth must hand over its supply. 

Perfect!  Pencil announces that Paper can make a device that will produce unlimited food, with no raw materials needed.

Paper's brain begs him to admit that he knows nothing about technology, but no, he thinks he can still find a way to fix this and Win the Girl.

In the workshop, Pencil praises Paper's tech expertise while building the device herself.  She seems to be just as invested as Paper in keeping up the Big Lie.  There must be some "Boy of My Dreams" going on.

When they show the device to the Hipponoid Comander, Paper tries to take credit, but accidentally breaks it.  He lies about that, too.

New plan: he'll bring his ninja roommates Rock and Scissors to the ship, and they'll knock out the aliens before they can invade the planet.

That doesn't work.  Finally Paper decides to come clean: "I was just trying to impress someone that I like, and the lie got out of control."

The Commander is sympathetic: back on the home world, he was an office drone, but he lied that he was  a great warrior to impress his crush.   Then he had to join the space force, and somehow he rose up in the ranks to become commander.

"There he is -- handsome, huh?"  The crush looks rather goofy, but Paper agrees.

"I've had to keep up this lie for 50 years!"  You'd better seal the deal soon, buddy. "And I can't invade Earth because then he'll find out that I lied, and never speak to me again."

Paper and the Commander find a solution that permits them to retain both lies: they pretend to use hand-to-hand combat to decide the fate of the Earth.  Paper wins, but "Your Commander is so tough that he 'accidentally' destroyed the device."

Whoops, Rock just fixed it. 

Gay Representation: The Commander as a muscular being fights stereotypes, and Paper responds nonchalantly to his crush on a male.  The writers could easily given him a crush on a female warrior, so this is a positive step.  But how about a scene where the Commander actually interacts with the crush? B

Episode 1.14, "The Character Quiz"

The guys' favorite tv show is The Gang's All Here, with 27 people living under one roof.  They take a quiz to see which character they are.  Paper and Scissors got Stephernie, so they are invited to the Stephernie Party next door (hosted by this muscular mouse).  Rock wants to be Dave, "kind, stylish, and made of granite," but he gets Creepo the Stinkboy.

"That can't be right!  I know who I am!"

At the Stephernie party: one of the guests brought the wrong kind of pizza, so is obviously just a wannabe, not a real Stephernie.  Each guest is quizzed about details that only a true fan would know, like her last name.  

More after the break. Caution: Explicit.

Weird Science, the movie and tv show: three gay-subtext couples, two gay-vague guys, and a lot of bulges and butts. Plus Lee's dick.

Weird Science (1985) is a John Hughes brat pack comedy with a paranormal twist. Nerds Gary and Wyatt's (Anthony Michael Hall, Ilan-Mitchell Smith) are discouraged because the Girls of Their Dreams are dating a pair of belligerent, obnoxious preppies (Robert Downey Jr., Robert Rusler), and won't give them a chance (maybe they're not into three-ways?  Try asking them out separately).  So they use a computer to create their perfect dream girl, Lisa: she is not only hot but super-smart, plus she has magical powers.

I forget most of the plot after 40 years, but wikipedia has helpfully filled in the details, Instead of having sex with them, Lisa conjures them a car, gets them fake ids, and hosts a wild party, where she thwarts their adversaries and their bullying older brother, military-school graduate Chet (Bill Paxton, butt right).

She also summons a pack of rabid bikers to kidnap the Girls, so Gary and Wyatt can mount a daring rescue and win them.

It was cheesy stuff, and entirely heteronormative.  There was a scattering of the incessant homophobia that one sees in every John Hughes movie, but spewed by the evil Chet, not by one of the good guys.  That was a big win in the era.  

Plus some strong gay subtexts between Gary and Wyatt and the prettyboy preppies Ian and Max.  And quite a surprising amount of beefcake, including Ilan Mitchell-Smith's bulge and Bill Paxton's butt.

I wanted to do a "any gay roles/are they gay in real life" profile of one of the guys, but I can't find anything suitable.

Don't pay attention to the femme-half shirt and girly underwear.  Ilan-Mitchell Smith, now a history professor, is straight in real life.

Anthony Michael Hall, the darling of the Brat Pack, appeared in Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Johnny B Goode, and as an adult The Dead Zone and Awkward.  Straight characters, with maybe one exception, and straight in real life.

Brat Packer Robert Downey Jr. appeared in Back to School, The Pick-Up Artist, Johnny B. Goode, became famous for Chaplin (playing the silent-era comedian), and went on to play Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes.  More straight characters, with maybe one exception, and....well, you get the idea.

At least we know that Robert Rusler (butt left) is a gay ally: he befriended his Nightmare on Elm Street 2 co-star Mark Patton, and took him to some of the gay bars in West Hollywood (no, we never met).  But his tv work, in The Outsiders, Babylon 5, Snoops, Murder She Wrote, Bones, Ray Donovan...as far as I can tell, all heteronormative.  And...straight in real life.

Let's try the Weird Science TV Series.

It aired on the USA Network from 1994 to 1998. I watched on occasion, usually while on the treadmill at the gym. Gary and Wyatt are now played by Michael Manasseri and John Mallory Asher. Lisa characterizes herself as a "magic genie," and Wyatt's parents are absent, leaving his older brother Chet (Lee Tergesen) to look after/bully them.  

The "winning the Girl of Our Dreams" plotline appeared in just the first two or three episodes; later Lisa turns the boys into girls, clones them,  turns them into rock stars, traps them in a horror movie, traps them in The Twilight Zone, transports them to the Old West, and brings a video game villain to life. 

More after the break

Gemstones Episode 2.1: Junior likes dicks, Kelvin likes pecs, and f**k, yeah! We got both.

Previous: Gemstones Season 1 finale: Judy and Kelvin begin to heal, and Scotty joins the family

Righteous Gemstones Season 2 is my favorite.  Season 1 muddled the Gideon-Scotty plotline, Season 3 had some infuriating queerbaiting, and Season 4 was rushed and muddled, but Season 2 did the Kelvin/Keefe and Junior/Eli romances exactly right.   

Title: "I Speak in the Tongues of Men and Angels."  I Corinthians 13.1: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." Charity means "love," of course.  We'll see who is lacking.

Memphis Soul Stew: Memphis, 1968. Teenage Eli Gemstone, the Maniac K*d (Jake Kelley), is playing a heel, a pro wrestling villain: "from the wrong side of the tracks, a newcomer to the League, all muscle, all attitude."  He fights dirty, pretending to reconcile with opponent Kyle Hawk, then throwing him out of the ring.  

As he fights, his manager Glendon Marsh (Wayne Duvall) cheers. Glendon's teenage son Junior (Tommy Nelson) watches, sometimes happy but usually disturbed.  Is he jealous of the attention Eli is getting?  Is he a rebellious teenager during the era of the Generation Gap?.

Nice Cock:  In the locker room, Glendon offers Eli "some bonus pay on the South Side," while Junior looks on, smoking a cigarette, still either jealous or angry. As they leave, they pass a naked guy. "That's a nice cock, Ernie," Glendon says.  Junior is so busy looking that he trips, and then looks back again.  The teenager is definitely into cocks and butts.

The Loan Enforcer: Glendon is a loan shark as well as a wrestling manager: the job involves beating up a deadbeat.  Eli and Junior both go, squabbling over who's the boss.  

"Kill 'em!" we hear.  Psych!  It's the tv.  We meet a slovenly, drunken, foul-mouthed, abusive jackass of a husband.  While Junor subdues his wife and son, Eli punches him a few times and asks for the money, and when he doesn't have it, breaks his thumbs. Junior laughs "derangedly" (according to the subtitles).

Afterwards Glendon drops Eli off, hands him some money, and tells him, "Buy yourself something nice." This is a feminizing statement. 

As Eli drives off on his motorcycle, we hear Buck Owens' "Tall Dark Stranger":

 They say a tall dark stranger is a demon, and  that a devil rides closely by his side.

 So if Junior is the demon, Eli must be the devil riding beside him.  How long will they ride together?

Abusive Daddies all the way down:  Eli drives to the Gemstone residence (it's not a stage name, apparently), where his abusive dad chastises him for being late for dinner. So they're eating after Eli's wrestling match?  Like at 11 or 12 pm?   There's also a mousy, skittish mom and a little sister, May-May (important in Season 3). 

Ordered to say grace, Eli jokes: "Good food, good meat, good God, let's eat," which makes May-May laugh.  Dad slaps him.  End of flashback.

We're fine with the f*ggots:  In 2022, elderly Eli Gemstone is a megachurch pastor and televangelist.  He and the satellite church ministers are discussing the case of Pastor Butterfield (Victor Williams), caught videotaping his wife and another woman having sex in a dance club restroom, while they were all high on Molly ("we thought they were Sweetarts").  The story made the front page of The New York Times, thanks to reporter Thaniel Block (Jason Schwartzman), who has made a career of publicizing ministerial sex scandals.  Eli wants to be lenient, but the others object.  (Left: random pecs)

A Spanish speaking pastor explains: "My church is ok with the maricones (roughly f*ggots), but we're not ready for swinging and tropus."     Pastor Diane translates: "His church is really cool with the gays and the queers, but not so much about the swingers and the thruples."  They fire Pastor Butterfield; he tries to commit suicide.  

Left: God Squad pecs

Tell the girls:  A young man rides a motorcycle to the Gemstone Compound, doing crazy stunts (this will be important later), while the background song advises:

Tell the girls that I am back in town.  They'd better beware

They may run, and they may hide.

I'll follow, and I'll be there.

A stalker?  At least we know that he's not the closeted gay minister.  He turns out to be Eli's grandson Gideon, back from a job as a stuntman to assist with the Gemstone ministry.  He's going to move into the house that Eli built for his abusive dad.

In other news, Gideon's younger brother Abraham has been masturbating, and leaving "semen loads" all over the house, like in the freezer next to the Dreamsicles.  

Left: Selfie. Not Gideon or Abraham

We cut to a church service with Eli Gemstone, Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin, announcing the start of their streaming service, GODD.  We see Jesse's wife Amber, their sons, and Judy's husband BJ in the audience.  No partner for Kelvin. He must be single

F*ck, yeah:  After the service, the family drives in a caravan to Jason's Steak House.  They get out of their cars in slow motion and walk past the al fresco area, heterosexual couples reveling in their nuclear family conformity, the "job, house, wife, progeny" litany of my youth made visible. The background song brags about their heteronormative success:

Turn your head when I walk by -- I got the world at my feet.
All I want out of every day, is to wake up every morning
Sun is shining, smiling, and we've covered every room 

 Wait -- where's Kelvin?

Suddenly the record scratches off. Two vans pull up with a flexing muscle Christ and the logo "Strength above All Else." Twelve muscle men emerge, wearing identical canvas gis: the God Squad! Biceps and pecs, abs, bulging flexing intruding on the smug primness of the nuclear families. Wait -- where are the bulges.  They wear cargo pants that don't show anything.

There is no romance here.  There is no heterosexual desire.  It is raw homoerotic power. The song changes to:

Fuck, yeah!  Fuck, yeah!  Fuck, yeah!

More after the break

Noah Matthews Matofsky: Head Lost Boy, model, disability advocate, Oscar Wilde fan, boyfriend. With bonus n*de Matthews and Captain Hook's hook

  

Peter Pan & Wendy (2023) omits the most egregious heterosexualization of recent Peter Pan movies by skipping the usual Peter-Wendy romance, and by  making Captain Hook (Jude Law, below) gay.  Well, he's usually gay-coded, but his time around he mentions a childhood  boyfriend  -- Peter himself (Alexander Molony), who refused to leave Never-Never Land and grow up, while Hook choose an adult career as a pirate.

I got the same rhetoric when I was a kid: "When you grow up, you will drop your same-sex loves  to devote your life to what really matters, finding and winning the Girl of Your Dreams."  I turned 14, 15, 16, 17 and the joy I felt in masculine smiles never vanished, but my boyfriends began to treat me as a mere chum, someone to discuss girls with. They were Captain Hook leaving Neverland, but I remained, refusing to "grow up."    

Some of the other male actors were of interest, including Joshua Pickering (Wendy's brother John Darling), a cute member of the Short Guys Brigade.  And Noah Matthews,  who plays the gay-coded Slightly: the leader of the Lost Boys, the only one who remembers anything of his life before Neverland, and the most musical.

"But your son said the sleepover was 'clothing optional.'" 

 Sorry, that's another Noah.  Slightly was played by Noah Matthews Matofsky, the first actor with a visible disability to star in a Disney movie, a leap forward in disability representation.  Especially since the character Slightly is not disabled. Noah was cast because the casting director, and then director David Lowery, loved his audition (they also bonded over a comparison of the Lost Boys and Lord of the Flies).

This was the 16-year old's first on-screen acting job, and rather daunting -- he had to spend six months in Canada during the COVID pandemic, spend hours filming in the hot sun, and still do his schoolwork.  But he loved the challenge, and there were perks -- the Lost Boys shared an apartment with a pool on the roof, so after the shooting and schoolwork, they had pool parties.  Tell me more.  

And Michael Darling (the one with the teddy bear) was played by Jacobi Jupe, brother of Noah's crush Noah Jupe (left). It's not everyday that you get to hear all of the gossip about your crush from your roommate.

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

Max Ehrich: Disney Channel dancer, Dome hacker, gay soap opera teen -- wait, is that a different actor? At least the d*ck is really his

When Max Ehrich (try to type that without adding an "l") appeared on the celebrity penis website, I did some preliminary research, and found that he is gay in real life, dating Connor Paolo, and he played a gay teen on The Young and the Restless.  

So this will be my third profile of a gay soap opera teen.   

Max played Fenmore Baldwin, son of Michael Baldwin and Lauren Fenmore, born in 2006, but turned into a teenager when he took over the role (2012-15).  

Most of his plotline involved drugs:  becoming addicted, stealing drugs from the hospital and spending a month in prison, overdosing and going to rehab.  He was blackmailed into spiking the punch at a party, so everyone would lose consciousness, and Detective Mark Harding (Chris McKenna) could murder Austin, who was having an affair with his niece Summer, and frame her.  

Also Fen is crushing on Summer, so she talks him into a variety of misdeeds, including cyberbullying  Jamie Vernon (not for being gay).  Then, when she starts crushing on Jamie, Fen frames him for theft, is accused of pushing him off the roof, and bullies him into a suicide attempt.

Next Fen's drug dealer, Carmine (Marco Dapper, left), who also happens to be having an affair with his mother, is murdered, and Fen thinks that he did it...

Wait, back up: a crush on Summer?  What happened?  Where is the gay plotline? 

Maybe they meant some other project.  Max begins his career as a Nickelodeon-Disney Channel boy, playing a dancer in High School Musical 3 and Shake It Up, Carly's boyfriend in an episode of ICarly, and CJ's older brother, who gets two girlfriends, in nine episodes of 100 Things to Do Before High School.

In Under the Dome (2013-15), an impenetrable alien dome is lowered over a stereotypic small town. Among the stranded visitors are a lesbian couple, a murderer, and  in Season 2, computer hacker Hunter May (Max).  He gets a girlfriend.

American Princess (2019-20): a mis-titled comedy featuring a girl who abandons her wealthy lifestyle to work at a Renaissance faire.  Max plays her boyfriend. 

Southern Gospel (2023): A "rock n roll star" realizes his childhood dream of becoming a preacher.  Ugh.

It's based on the real-life  Dr. Gary Smith,  who founded the City of Life Church in Kissimmee, Florida. Ugh. 

A Cowboy Christmas Romance (2023): A standard Christmas romcom: lady with a high-pressure career in the Big City spends the holidays in a small town, where she finds love with a cowboy (Adam Senn).  

I don't know which of these guys, if either, is Adam, but Max plays her brother.  The plot synopses on Wikipedia and Decider don't state whether he is gay or not, but presumably not, or there would be massive headlines eveywhere. 

More after the break