"Black Doves": A very important seedy-looking guy, a deep cover spy, Santa Claus, and a gay hitman. With six bonus butts

 

Netflix thinks that I'm going to "love!" the spy series Black Doves, and I'm too occupied with breakfast to scroll down, so let's have a look.  It will be a reprieve from endless Christmas romcoms, anyhow.

Scene 1: No such luck.  Santa Claus stumbles through a bar, singing "The guys of the NYPD Choir were singing 'Galway Bay'".  Huh?  Heavily intoxicated, he stumbles out into the street, and...um...out of the show. 

A seedy looking guy (Andrew Koji) scopes out the bar -- The Coal House, a famous pub on the Strand in London -- and tries  to call Maggie.  She's out, so he calls a black-haired woman to complain that he's in trouble.  

Left: Andrew Koji's butt

The black haried woman patches him through to Philip. (Thomas Coombes). 

Seedy Looking Guy asks: "Did you talk to anyone?"  Philip says no; then he's strangled to death.  The black-haired woman is stabbed.  

Seedy Looking Guy calls someone else and starts to tell them "I..." -- probably "love you," before he is shot.  Way to kill off all of the introduced characters!  Now who's the focus, Santa Claus?

Scene 2: Rome.  A new seedy-looking guy sits at a bar, smoking. Mrs. Reed calls.  He ignores her, but she keeps calling until he answers. He says "Ok, I understand."  I don't.

Scene 3: Maybe London.  An old lady with a dog...wait, not a focus character. A nuclear family Mom gets her sons and daughter ready for the Christmas pageant. There's a son and a daughter running up the stairs while squealing in delight and another son in the back yard, but when they appear again, there's only two.  Big continuity error, guys, but they turn out to be just props to demonstrate her nuclear family-ness.  

Then she goes into the study, where her husband (Andrew Buchan),the Minister of Defense, is negotiating with the Saudis and worried about the death of the Chinese ambassador.  The coroner says it was a drug overdose, but you never know. I'm not sure what the Saudis have to do with it.

Scene 4: A swanky party.  Mom greets some people, announces that this party is her light when things seem dark outside.  Then an Elderly Woman pulls her aside and announces that Jason Davies, a Justice Department official whom she was having an affair with, was murdered. 

She flashes back to kissing Jason and playing with his lips -- it's the Seedy Looking Guy from the first scene -- then assures the elderly woman that she wasn't working an angle. It was a real romance.  

"Maggie Jones, who worked in a shop,  and tabloid reporter Phillip Bray were also murdered."  What about the black haired woman?  She can't be Maggie, since Seedy Looking Guy told her "I can't reach Maggie."  

Elderly Woman wants to know if he said anything during their last meeting that might have gotten him murdered, or if he was trying to find out Mom's true identity as a Black Dove.  

Back story: Mom -- finally named Helen -- has been doing deep cover for ten years, courting and marrying the Minister of Defense and feeding them government secrets.  She's in too deep to back out now, and besides, the Minister is on the road to Downing Street! 

Elderly Woman tells her to keep quiet, don't call attention to herself, and especially don't investigate your boyfriend's murder.

Scene 5: The Elderly Woman approaches the Second Seedy-Looking Guy, now named Sam (Ben Whishaw)

He's retired; he hasn't had a hitman assignment for seven years; but the Elderly Woman insists: find out if someone is planning to murder Helen due to her association with Seedy-Looking Guy, and if so, kill them.  

Later, Sam is drinking in a bar when a guy approaches him.  They chat, and Sam invites him up to his hotel room.  Say what?  

Cut to Helen disobeying orders and going to the Seedy-Looking Guy's apartment.  She snoops around, cuddles with his coat, destroys a bug, tries to open a secret panel....

Wait -- what about the guy Sam invited to his room?

Screwing after the break

Marcus Hodson: Shape-shifting demon or hyper-masculine Midlands model? With nude merman bonus

On Dead Hot (2024), Marcus Hodson plays a shape-shifting demon, a hermetic Magus who travels between esoteric realms through the Eye of Horus bar and its mysterious Red Phone.  I wanted to know if he plays other mysterious Pucks or Lords of Misreason, but his IMDB listing is rather basic  Five roles, all 2022-2024: 

You Like That, a short about a gay American student in Edinburgh.

The Stand-up Sketch Show, where comedians perform "a surreal reconstruction of their own material."  Marcus is a background player in five episodes.

An episode of Domino Day, about a young witch "haunted by her need to feed on others." In Episode 2, Marcus plays a hookup who smooches with her and is eaten.

Gentleman in Moscow is about a Russian aristocrat placed under house arrest in a hotel for the rest of his life after the 1917 revolution.  He befriends a little girl who also lives in the hotel; Marcus plays her piano teacher.

He also plays one of the mermen in The Little Mermaid.

Only one other paranormal show, and he doesn't even play a supernatural being?

Not many biographical details available. A 2021 article in Pause magazine states that he is 25 years old, from Manchester but living in London. He began modeling at age 18, then started university, but left to go pro.

In spite of the paucity of biographical details, Marcus has a very active social media presence, with hundreds of posts about travel, food, and beefcake. Here he is in Greece

In Rome

On the beach.  Does Marcus have a palsy disorder in his left hand, or is he displaying some magickal gestures?

More after the break

"The Holiday Exchange": Immensely wealthy A-gays look for love at Christmas. Watch with your grandmother

  

It's not even Halloween yet, but the romcoms are started.  

Darn, they all have such interchangeable titles that I forgot which one I'm reviewing. Oh, right, The Holiday Exchange, on Amazon Prime.  

The icon shows a woman torn between two men, and the blurb is about a guy going on a "holiday exchange" that he found on a gay app, so I suspect some "mistaken for gay" jokes as the guy finds the Girl of His Dreams.

Scene 1: A guy wearing an eye mask and a frilly shirt wakes up -- gay. Close-up of a photo of him and his boyfriend -- gay.  He knocks it over, drinks some booze, and shaves and applies femme moisterizer products -- gay. 

A guy texts: "Wilde, call me back," but he ignores it.  Moisturizer guy is named Wilde, like Oscar?  Gay. He's played by Taylor Frey, top photo, who also wrote the screenplay.

Knock on the door: It's femme fashion designer Chase, Colton Tran, and a woman, with ideas for his wedding outfit: "Your Mom told us that your Big Day was coming."

"Nope, you misunderstood, I'm not getting married, I'm selling my company."

"Oh, well, we have ideas for that, too."

Wilde goes annoyingly over the top complementing Fashion Designer Chase; he is an angel, a shining light, goodness personified; he has created everlasting happiness for literally thousands of people by...um...designing their clothes. 

Back story: Wilde just dumped his boyfriend, Sean.

Scene 2:  An idyllic village, over the top idyllic, Currier & Ives idyllic. 

George tells his business partner Oliver, Rick Cosnett, how they met, confesses to drinking too much, and then lays on the over-effusive praise.  

Oliver is also an angel, goodness personified, spearheading drives that raise billions for charity. He's single-handedly wiped out world hunger.  Don't introduce Oliver to Chase the Fashion Designer, or they'll cancel each other out.  

His problems: he is too busy with his day job as a divorce lawyer, his numerous charities, and taking over Dad's business when he retires to get a boyfriend. Coworker George is in favor of being single. This must be the "mistaken for gay" guy.

Wait -- they specifically state that they live in Los Angeles.  The establishing shot was a New England Currier & Ives village. What the fudge?

Out in the elegant party, Saintly Oliver talks to James, who works in his company.  They hedge around the discussion of why their last date was so awful. So Saintly Oliver and Moisturizer Wilde are both gay?  Who's going to hook up with the lady in the middle of the icon?  

No,  James "can't" get together during the holidays: he'll be seeing family, driving up the coast. Dude's not into you. 

I'm watching with subtitles, so I can't hear the accents, but these people are saying "Happy Christmas" to each other.  Could they live in Britain, but be having an elegant party in L.A.?

More after the break.

"Decline and Fall": Theology student sent down for immorality in 1930s Oxford, with Oxfordian dicks and bums

 

After Brideshead Revisited appeared on television in 1982, everyone thought that Evelyn Waugh was a gay writer, and started buying up the original novel from 1945, as well as his other novels, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies.  Turns out that he was straight-ish, regretted the gay romances of his Oxford years, and thought of same-sex love as decadent and immoral, or at best adolescent experimentation that you give up once you are old enough for the "real love" of a woman.   So I don't expect the  2017 BBC adaption of his Decline and Fall, streaming on Amazon Prime, to have any gay characters. 

Or maybe not.  Waugh derived the title and central theme from The Decline and Fall of the West, by Otto Spengler, which theorizes that societies inevitably decline into moral decadence.  Including LGBT people.  So maybe there will be some homophobia.

Scene 1: The Bollinger Club at Scone College, Oxford -- har, har -- is trashing their common room.  Meanwhile, quiet theology student Paul Pennyfeather  (Jack Whitehall, top photo) is sitting quietly with his friend Potts (Matthew Beard, left), who wants to go to a church tomorrow and "make some rubbings."  He means rubbings of tombstones, but...har, har.  Paul refuses, whereupon the friend says "I'll make some rubbings for you."  I'll bet you will...

On his way home, Paul runs afoul of the Bollinger Club, who strip him naked and force him to run across the quad.  Although he is not responsible, he is expelled from Oxford for "moral malfeasance."  

Scene 2: Generally men sent down for moral failings become schoolmasters, and there's a position available in Llanaba, Wales, to teach English, French, German, Latin, and coach cricket.  Paul doesn't speak German, but the job agent tells him to fake it.

Scene 3: Paul arrives at Llanaba, finds his way to the school, which is actually quite ornate, and is introduced to Captain Grimes (Douglas Hodge),  just as he is disciplining a student for whistling.  The other students were whistling, too, but "it makes no difference."  He gets 100 lines, and next time a beating. 

Then the Headmaster  and his daughters, whom Paul snubs.  Not into girls, are you?  He's in charge of the fifth form (15-16 year olds), games, carpentry,  and fire drill, and he'll be giving Best-Chedwyth organ lessons.  "But I don't play the organ."  "You do now."

Scene 4: The shabby Fifth Form classroom.  Headmaster advises Paul not to mention why he was sent down, and rushes away.. The students make fun of "Good morning" and role call, lock his desk drawer, and give him trick chalk. 

Scene 5: After the first class debacle, he rushes to the common room, and meets the hard-drinking Prendergast:  "You'll hate it here.  I do.  We all do."  Then to his room to unpack his stuff and be depressed.

Cut to dinner: teachers have to eat with their students. Paul is still depressed, the students still disrespectful, the food greenish slop.  

Afterwards, Captain Grimes escorts him to the pub. They discuss the Headmaster's two daughters; Grimes is engaged to "the haybale," leaving "the male one" for Paul.

About the Fifth Formers: Don't try to teach them anything, just keep them quiet and beat them.  Grimes isn't cut out for teaching; he keeps getting sacked at private schools for "doing things," but fortunately he's a public school alumnus so he always gets another job. In Britain, "public schools" are like the private schools in America.  

During the War, he "did something" that almost resulted in a firing squad, but because he was a public school alumnus, they just transfered him to Ireland, where you can "do things" without penalty.  Same-sex acts?  But they wouldn't get you a death sentence in Britain at the time

The leering Philbrick (Stephen Graham, left) approaches and asks if either of them would fancy a woman tonight. You got any men? They refuse.  Grimes says that he doesn't really fancy women.

More after the break

Dead Boy Detectives: Ghost buddies, one gay, one bi, solve afterlife mysteries. With Luke Gage and WW1 soldier bonus

 

A growling, snarling World War I soldier -- played by Chris Pereira -- chases two teenage ghosts through the British Museum.  The intellectual Edwin surmises that his gas mask is cursed: they'll have to destroy it to restore him to wholeness, so he can go on to the afterlife.  They'll need the Minor Arcana, Volume 4, but the athletic Charles can't find it in his magic bookbag.  

With the ghost-monster in hot pursuit, they run through a mirror, but end up in a hotel, not back in the office.  Edwin explains that it's hard to locate the right mirror-dimension when you're being chased by a gas mask monster.  

Flashback to the Dead Boy Detectives office a few days ago: A World War I nurse explains that she's been hanging aroud the British Museum long after her death to help the many lost souls from her era enter the afterlife.  But one has been cursed and turned into a monster.  She hires the boys to help him.

Left: Chris's butt

Back in the present, the boys rush through the hotel, find another mirror, and end up in their office.  The monster follows!   Charles manages to tear his gas mask off -- the snarling monster underneath spews blood all over and tries to stab him. Meanwhile Edwin finds the right book, says the incantation, and the gas mask bursts into flames.  Back in human form, the ghost is calm, but confused.  The boys tell him that he 's dead, still fighting a war that ended over 100 years ago. 

Left: Chris's cock.  I know he only appears in this episode, but where else are you going to see it?

Uh-oh, Death is coming to guide him to the afterlife.  The boys have to hide, or she'll take them, too!

That's a lot of world-building in five minutes, but it comes while the boys are being chased, assaulted, threatened, and zapped about, so it goes down easily.  

The Dead Boy Detectives, a paranormal take on the common British "boy detective" genre, appeared in a number of comics and limited edition graphic novels during the 1990s and 2000s, all taking place in Neil Gaiman's Sandman universe.  Edwin, the intellectual one, died in 1916, when some boarding school bullies tried to scare him by pretending to offer him as a sacrifice to Satan.  The spell worked, and he was sent to hell.  

He stayed until 1989, when some of the residents of hell escaped and laid waste to a boarding school. The athletic Charles was killed in the ruckus.  He would be going to the Sandman-world version of Heaven, but he decided to wait and hang out with his new ghost-buddy.  Now they are detectives, helping lost souls with unfinished business, lost memories, or curses that prevent them from moving on. They must keep a low profile and not perform much magic, to avoid detection from Death and an afterlife "Missing Souls" bureacracy.

Spoiler alert: In the comics, Edwin is gay, and Charles is bisexual.  They don't date each other, however: who said any two random gay/queer dudes must automatically be into each other? 

I watched the first episode of the tv series to see if the pair, now played by the considerably older George Rexstrew and Jayden Revri, were heterosexualized.

The answer after the break

Max Brumberg: Slovakian flute crafter, drag theologian, Russian-Austrian-Uzbek actor. With bonus Uzbek dicks

 

I don't know what led me to the 2021 movie Play it Cool, with someone named Reggiemolo (Alex Jason Lee King) on a cross-country trip where he's mistaken for a criminal and meets The Girl -- the trailer shows them kissing a thousand times, so it's definitely a "no way!"  But far down the cast list was a cute guy named Max Brumbaugh.

The name resonated because when I was a kid, there was an abandoned "haunted house" on my grandfather's property that belonged to the Brumbaugh family.  So I decided to research him.

Rather a difficult task.  First, his last name isn't Brumbaugh, it's Brunberg.  No, it's Brumberg, with an "m," and there are a lot of Max Brumbergs out there. 

1. Max Brumberg who makes flutes in the traditional manner, with traditional materials.  He makes Slovakian fujaras, Moldavian kavals, overtone flutes, double flutes, and many other types, out of his store in Sainte-Croix-Vallée-Français.

Another Max Brumberg is Max Brumberg-Kraus, he/him or they/them, the co-founder of the House of Larva Drag Co-operative.  They perform as drag persona Çicada L’Amour, produce both small acts and full-length queer peformance art, and belong to ARC community: "a creative collaboration for theopoetics."

They graduated from the United Theological Seminary in 2020 with a  M.A. in theology and the arts, and research interests in queer temporality, queer and feminist theology, cosmology, mythopoetics, ancient tragedy, midrash, embodiment, and reception theory.   They're the author of The(y)-ology: Mythopoetics for Gay/Trans Liberation.

Then there's the grad student at the Institute of Russian History in Moscow, and his aroused cucumber.

From Linkedin, IMDB, and an article in Voyager, I've pieced together the life of Max Brumberg, actor.  Of Uzbek and Russian Jewish ancestry.

Top photo: Uzbek guy

Fluent in English, French, German, and Russian.  Not Uzbek?

 Grew up in Vienna got a M.S. in real estate from Newcastle University in Britain, and took a job in Real Estate Structured Finance Sales, traveling between Vienna, Belgrade, and Bucharest while acting in commercials and doing stand-up comedy. 

Left: Tajik guy from Russia

While he was working as a manager at Saxon Bank in Zurich, Max realized that "something was missing...there was a void in my life." So he moved to L.A. and enrolled at the Stella Adler School of Acting. 

So far he has only six acting credits on the IMDB:

More after the break

Lucien Laviscourt: Shirtless in soaps, romcoms, Shakespeare, Archie comics. With a j/o video

 

In 2020, during the COVID lockdown, everybody watched the Netflix series Emily in Paris, because they couldn't get to the real Paris. Surprise -- it's still streaming, with Season 4 coming up. The hapless social media content creator and her friends are still falling in love at the drop of a script, with Lucas Bravo, Charles Martins, Kevin Diaz, Paul Forman, and most recently Lucien Laviscount.

The British actor -- I know, I thought he was French, too -- has 43 credits listed on the IMDB, beginning with Clocking Off, 2002.

The interconnected lives of Manchester mill workers.  I wonder if they do a Full Monty.

Soap stud roles followed: 13 episodes of Grange Hill, 34 episodes of  Coronation Street, 18 episodes of Waterloo Road.  Plus guest spots on Life Bites, Father & Son, New Tricks, Shameless, Mount Pleasant...well, the list goes on and on.

I might want to see Still Star-Crossed, set in Verona shortly after the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, with new Montague-Capulet lovers investigating political machinations. Lucien plays Romeo in a flashback.

Plus a lot of modeling, here for Tommy Hilfinger.  I guess they're supposed to be very close teammates, not boyfriends.  But you never know.

The Bye-Bye Man, 2017, is Lucien's first starring role: "three friends stumble upon the horrific origins of a mysterious figure they discover is the root cause of the evil behind unspeakable acts."  

 Got all that? A bit overblown, with way too many adjectives, but I gather that we're working down from unspeakable acts caused by an evil caused by a mysterious figure who has horrific origins. 

Ulp. All you really need to know is it's all straight people, and Lucien shows his butt.

Another starring role in Snatch, 2017-2018, about...well, the IMDB description is suffering from adjective overload, but it's about con artists who get in over their heads.  The guys, Lucien and Rupert Grint, have a gay-subtext buddy-bond that gets ruined when they both fall in love with The Girl.

Katy Keene, 2020-21, was an ill-fated attempt to hit Riverdale gold by shoving minor Archie Comics characters like Alexander Cabot III into modern-day New York.   

More Lucien after the break

Dan Cudmore: Colossus, Felix, fitness model, and the God of War. Plus his colossal Colossus cock

Canadian actor Dan Cudmore has 51 credits on the IMDB, including Peter Rasputin, aka Colossus, in the X-Men franchise, Felix in the Twilight franchise, Jackhammer in Arrow, Gridlock in The Flash, and Behemoth Thing in Superman & Lois.

He specializes in superheroes and supervillains like Colossus, but he's done other projects.  I first saw him in Magicians, as the God of War.  Apprised that a gay-stereotype god called the Nameless is looking for something the other gods stole from him, he responds "I don't know what it is, but you have my permission to search my ball sack with your tongue."  Sure, that sounds fun, I'd be happy to....oh, wait, you're being homophobic.

I know he's just playing a character, but still, the homophobic quip left a bad taste in my mouth, so to speak.

His other projects include comedies like Fresh Off the Boat, romcoms like All of My Heart (as the romantic lead's friend who devotes his life to getting him laid), and horror like Rites of Passage, which appears to have a gay subtext -- not his. 

Also 14 stunt credits including Psych, The Predator, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

He played a stunt cock at least once.

Some fitness modeling from early in his career

More Daniel after the break

Industry: 5 butts, 4 cocks, and 3 chests of the top money-makers at a banking CPS somethings in London

 

Industry is being pushed on MAX as the greatest television series of all time; it has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes; and there's at least one gay character.  Should be an obvious must-watch, right?  

Maybe not.  I've tried getting into it twice, and get immensely bored after five minutes.  It's about money.  The inter-office squabbles of guys in suits making money by making money for other guys in suits, and trying to position into positions of higher power so they can make more money by making more money. 

 Shape without form, shade without colour, 

 Paralysed force, gesture without motion

It's not only boring, it's depressing.  You're in friggin' London. Go to the British Museum and see some art.  

Can we skip the money and just look at some naked guys?

1. David Jonsson, top photo, plays Gus Sackey, the main gay character. He majored in humanities before he sold his soul to Mammon.  Apparently he's closeted, not fitting in to the heterosexist money culture.  According to the Wikipedia, he's "assigned to the Investment Banking Division, IBD, and then the CPS desk.  I don't know what that is, either.

2. Will Tudor as Theo Tuck, the other gay character, an Eton graduate consigned to a lowly position as research analyst.

Guys, seriously, the British Museum has the Rosetta Stone.

3. Harry Lawley as Robert, from a working-class Welsh background, so he doesn't fit in with the upper-class Oxcam graduates working the money angle. There also might be some prejudice against the Welsh. He's on the CPS desk.

And it's open till 20:30 on Fridays

4. Ben Lloyd-Hughes as Greg, VP at the CPS desk.  Ok, I looked it up: CPS means Cross Product Sales, where you try to sell your bank customers things they don't need, like Wells Fargo:  "Oh, you want to open a checking account?  How about an auto loan and a credit card?"

How about the Victoria and Albert Museum?

5.Derek Riddell, here getting sexed up in The Book Club, as Clement, the CPS vice manager.

The St. Paul's Cathedral Choir is performing on Friday night.

More money-making cocks after the break

Fifteen glorious Gavins and magnificent muscle Munns from Australia, Ireland, Scotland, Ohio, and Hollywood

I already posted a photo collection of Gavin Munn's hunky father, brother, and cousins. These are additional Gavins and Munns, civilians and actors, who may or may not be relations.  Probably not, but who cares?  Beefcake is beefcake.

 1. Gavin Leatherwood, who you may recall as Sabrina's witch-boyfriend on The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.  Here he investigates The Sex Lives of College Girls

2-3.  Father and son Munns from Northern Ireland.

4. Jonathan Gavin in Puberty Blues, an Australian comedy-drama about being pubescent in the 1970s.

5-6. Two Gavins from from County Down, Ireland. 

7.Darren Munn in Drink Me, 2015, about a gay couple with a sexy secret: they're vampires!

 8. A muscle Munn from Scotland

More Munns after the break