Thomas Kuc: The gay-vague Gameshaker goes to the head of the class, hides under the bed, visits a bathhouse. With two dick pics to compare

If you were a teenager in 2015, you probably saw the Nickelodeon teencom Game Shakers (2015-19), about two girls who start a video game company with the help of billionaire rapper Double G.  They bring in his son Triple G (Benjamin Flores), because they have to, and Hudson (Thomas Kuc), because he's cute.  But dumb: he wears his underwear over his pants, and tries to hide behind a pencil. 

In one episode, Hudson and Triple G dress as girls to meet girls, but otherwise no hetero-horniness is mentioned in the episode synopses.  They spend a lot of time dealing with threats to their relationship, so there is probably a gay-subtext romance going on (or text, although the Google AI insists that they're just friends).

Benjamin Flores Jr. is probably gay, but I want to profile Thomas Kuc because he's more muscular, and because I'm interested in languages: he's fluent in English, Spanish, and Polish, with some knowledge of Portuguese and Mandarin, an unusual combination.  

Thomas was born in Brazil in 2002, presumably to Polish parents, and then moved to Los Angeles.  As a child he was a competitive gymnast, and appeared in some commercials and the soap General Hospital.

He broke into movies with The Diabolical (2015).  His character, Danny, is not mentioned in the plot synopsis, but presumably he's a friend of the beset-upon woman's son Jacob.

Next came 61 episodes of Game Shakers, plus playing Hudson on a  2017 episode of Henry Danger: the Game Shakers help the superhero-in-training protect Double G's worldwide charity concert.

Head of the Class (1986-91) featured a class of high school overachievers being taught how to relax and live a little by their laid-back teacher.  My favorite was Brian Robbins (left)  as the leather-clad bad boy Eric, although Tony O'Dell, the conservative Republican, turned out to be gay in real life.    

 The revamped version on MAX (2021) brought in a new crowd of geniuses, including business tycoon Luke (former Prince of Peoria Gavin Lewis) and drama major Miles (Adrian Matthew Escalona), who is gay. Thomas played Ryan in two episodes, but he's not mentioned in the episode synopses, and the series has been removed from MAX.  Most likely he played a random student.

Thomas's other work is aggressively heteronormative:

He played the Boyfriend of singer Anna Duboc in Promises to Keep (2021).

Her Toxic Boyfriend in First Love (2023).

A female artist's ex-husband in They Met (2025).

More after the break. We'll get to the n*de photos, I promise.

"High Tide": Two guys discover the unrelenting agony of gay life. In Provincetown. With a heck of a lot of nudity

 

I don't usually watch gay-specific movies: they're too angsty, presenting coming out as an unbearable trauma and life after coming out as endless heartache, loneliness, and emptiness.   But High Tide (2024) is set in the gay resort of Provincetown, and it has a lot of n*de photos.  Who can be depressed, lonely, and empty while looking at cocks?  But I'll check out the trailer first, to make sure.

Scene 1: Lourenço (Marco Pigossi) runs onto a deserted beach, takes off his clothes, and jumps into the ocean.  Then, clothed again, he sits on the deserted boardwalk, staring into space, depressed.

Left: Lourenço as a tiny speck in the vast ocean.  The insignificance of human life...

Scene 2: He asks an older guy, "Have you heard from Joe?" 

 The older guy is irate: "You left him!"  So you should never hear from him or about him again?  But in gay communities, ex-lovers are our closest friends. 

Then: "True love is something else!"

 

Lourenço starts to cry.

Scene 3: He sits despondent on the boardwalk again, then meets a cute guy, Maurice (James Bland).  No one has been named Maurice since Samantha's father on "Bewitched."  It must be a homage to the early gay novel by E.M. Forster.  

They splash about on the beach, then sit down with a lady whose boobs are hanging out.  

Lady: "So you're Brazilian.  What do you do?" 

"I clean houses."

Montage of our boy cleaning houses.  This is portrayed as the ultimate in humiliation. 

Left: more beach bunnies.  Seriously, what is there to be depressed about?

Scene 4: Establishing shot of Provincetown, as Lourenço explains that he's here on a tourist visa, so technically he can't work, but he has to, because he needs the money...

The older guy tells him, "You're young and handsome.  You can do anything."

Scene 5: Lourenço and Maurice head to the bedroom and kiss (that's all we see in the trailer).  A review gushes: "Sexy, sad, and just the ticket."

More after the break

Jonny Gray: Researching the "Max and Shred" skater and Boots boyfriend. With Jake's junk, Daniel's dick, and a bonus Priestley butt

 

 I have so many guys waiting to be profiled that I forget who some of them are.  Today I looked in a folder entitled "Johnny Gray,", with a lot of screen shots, probably taken from the IMDB or his Instagram before I moved on to other tasks. They haven't even been adjusted (converted to .jpgs, cropped, reduced,  brightened, desaturated).  

Problem: I have no idea who Johnny Gray is.  

But he's obviously gay (this photo is entitled "JohnnyBoyfriend"), and probably an actor, so I don't mind conducting the research.  

The research sent me down quite an internet rabbit hole. Various configurations of John/Johnny and Gray/Grey yielded:

A famous brand of guitars.

A runner who won at the Olympics four times and holds the record for the 600 meter sprint.

A rugby player who received the Sir Willie Purves Quaitch Award in 2014.

The author of the gender-polarized and heteronormative best-seller Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

A Wall Street broker, played by Mickey Roarke, who gets involved in heterosexual BDSM games in 9 1/2 Weeks.

A "secretly gay" 18th century gentleman, played by Oscar Kennedy and David Berry (left), in the tv series Outlander.

Returning to the folder for clues, I found photos of two n*de guys.  Maybe boyfriends or co-stars?

1. Brazilian actor Daniel Rangel, who appears mostly in telenovelas like Novo Mundo (2017) and Amor Perfeito (2023-205).

2.  Jake Goodman, left, best known for the Disney Channel teencom Max & Shred (2014-16):  he plays the superego in the gay-subtext buddy bond, science nerd Shred, who must mentor a professional skateboarder, the indefatigable id Max (Jonny Gray).  

Found him. 

Our Jonny Gray was born in 1999, and grew up in a suburb of London, Ontario   His on-screen career began in 2012, when he reported on the King's Cup Elephant Polo Tournament in Hua Hin, Thailand.

It's to support elephant conservation, but it still looks strange.

Next came Disney stardom with Max & Shred, and three Bruno & Boots movies: Go Jump in the Pool (2016), This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall (2017), and The Wizzle War (2018).

Based on the Macdonald Hall book series by Gordon Korman, the movies feature two students at an exclusive private school near Toronto.  Jonny changes from superego to id as the impulsive "let's put an iguana in the headmaster's bed" Bruno, who buddy-bonds with the wet-blanket "but I have to write a report on thumbtacks" Boots (Callan Potter).  

The book series seems to push up the gay subtext and eliminate the hetero-romance.  I'm not sure about the movies.

More after the break

Gemstones Episode 3.1: Kelvin collects cocks, the Simpkins smirk, and Dusty Daniels flirts. With a Brazilian beefcake bonus.

Previous: Season 2 Finale: The Godfather, Butch and Sundance, random nude dudes, and "My love for you will never die"

The Season 2 finale of The Righteous Gemstones  aired in February 2022.  Season 3 premieres in June 2023, sixteen months later, but the timeline in the Gemstone universe doesn't fit.  Plus personalities and back stories are different.  As with Season 2, it will be more profitable -- and more fun -- to enter fresh, pretending that we have never seen or heard of these people before.

Title: "For I Know the Plans I Have for You."  Jeremiah 29:11: "For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." I hope so, because word on the street is that this season gets very dark.

Rogers County Fair, 2000:  The teenage Jesse Gemstone is announcing a demolition derby featuring his monster truck, the Redeemer, while his parents, megachurch pastor Eli Gemstone and his wife Aimee-Leigh, argue: the Redeemer is putting butts in seats, but is this really appropriate for a Christian ministry?   What are we going to do next, sell beer?  At that moment, a muscle hunk comes by selling beer!

Eli and Aimee-Leigh's three kids look very young, but according to the fan wiki, Jesse is 19, Judy is 15, and Kelvin is 9 or 10.

While Aimee-Leigh is off smoking a cigarette, May-May, a shabbily-dressed middle-aged woman, approaches, furious: "You pretend to be all sweet and caring, but I know the truth -- what you done to my family."  She attacks; Aimee-Leigh runs through the crowd, screaming for help, but May-May catches up and hits her with a wrench. As she lies bleeding on the ground, a car hits -- May-May! 

Eli Retires: Present day. Time to introduce the main conflicts of the season.  First up: the now-elderly Eli is hanging out with his Mason-like Cape and Pistol Society. They ask how he's enjoying his retirement.  Actually, he's only semi-retired: he's writing another autobiography and taking speaking engagements, but his kids are running the church. Gulp!  His friend: "You scared your kids are gonna blow it?"  

Cut to Zion's Landing, the Gemstones' Christian-themed resort. The 42-year old Jesse and his crew confront Eli's driver.  In joke: his name is Walker!  He squealed to the press about the dwindling membership and donations since the kids took over, so they beat him up and fire him. Pretending to have never seen these characters before, I am shocked.  Christian ministers are often shady and hypocritical, but violent? What if someone sees?

A Cold Fish Kiss: Eli's second child, Judy, is now a famous singer.  She has just returned from a tour, and her husband BJ wants to snuggle, but she yells at him for pressuring her, gives him a "cold fish kiss," and runs out again.  Uh-oh, marital trouble.

Smut Busters: The primary conflict, judging from the amount of air time it gets: someone named Keefe is showing the youngest son, 32 or 33 -year old Kelvin, a giant novelty dildio.  He exclaims with glee, "That is gonna hurt!"  So he's abottom, and Keefe is his boyfriend, showing him their new toy.

We pan out to see kids examining a pile of s ex toys, mostly dildos and butt plugs of various sizes and shapes, intended for gay men.  Notice the "Size Queen" dildo. 

Psych!  Kelvin and Keefe are actually youth ministers, running an anti-sex toy project.  I guess: notice the t-shirts, with the name "Smut Busters" over a splatter of...jizz?   They buy out the inventory of local adult stores, to force them into bankruptcy.  Wait -- anyone know basic economics?  

The youth group kids, also in Smut Busters t-shirts, are just examining the latest haul.  Do they take the kids to the adult stores?  They wouldn't be allowed inside.  Besides,  "exposing children to sex" is a misdemeanor.  

They ask the kids and adult volunteer Taryn to join them in the Smut Buster chant: "No smut (touch nipples),  no lust (feminine hip wiggle), no coconuts (hands to waist, grimace)." No one joins in.  

After extensive research, I conclude that "coconuts" doesn't have a symbolic meaning, except maybe to evoke testicles.  It was chosen for  its near-rhyme. The chant reflects the playground phrase "no butts, no cuts, no coconuts" (no cutting in line), and its variation, "No ifs, no buts, no coconuts" (no disagreeing).

Left: coconuts

Pretending to have never seen these characters before,  I conclude that they are a gay couple: notice how Kelvin plays with Keefe's nipple, an intimacy that platonic pals would not enjoy, how Keefe gets all bitchy around Taryn, and how most of the sex toys they buy are for gay men.  They can't conceive of something used by straight men as erotic: "There's a naked lady on the box.  Keefe, I said sexy, not disgusting!" 

So the main conflicts of the season will involve the transition of power, marital problems, and coming out. 

The Primitive Tribe: At church, the siblings are bragging about their missionary trip, where they brought Lasik Surgery to an isolated tribe in the Amazon.  They are completely clueless; surgery to correct astigmatism must be the most trivial of the group's medical needs.  Plus the depiction of a "primitive tribe" veers uncomfortably close to racism.

Left: An Amazonian.

More after the break

"Bad Ideas with Adam Devine": When you need to f*k the Sadness in a hurry. With bonus buddy bulges and butts

Sometimes you need to f*k the Sadness in a hurry, and your best bet is Adam Devine.  Not (just) because of his hotness, because his stuff is always upbeat, with no hatred, no tragedy, no angst, not a lot of heteronormative mishegas, just whimsical problems, humorous braggadoccio, and homoerotic bonds. 

But you don't have time for a whole movie, or an episode of  Workaholicsor   The Righteous Gemstones. What do you do?

The reality series Bad Ideas with Adam Devine, streaming on Roku, is a perfect solution. In each episode, Adam. "the world's greatest movie star, the world's greatest lover, the guy who clearly writes his own intros," teams up with one of his comedian buddies to do something dangerous:

1. Compete in the World's Hottest Pepper Eating Contest, in the Bahamas. With Thomas Middleditch from Solar Opposites

2. Compete in a demolition derby, the Night of Destruction, at Perris Auto Speedway, near Riverside, California. With Blake Anderson from Workaholics

Blake bulging as a cop-stripper

3. Become stunt performers in a Western movie (after seven minutes of training). With Rebel Wilson from Pitch Perfect

4. Drive an ice cream truck up highway P3 in Peru, called "the Death Road" for its hairpin turns and 1000 foot drops. With Anders Holm from Workaholics

More after the break