Christmas on the Square: Be thankful that you haven't seen this movie. With Josh Serrano, Treat Williams, and random nude dudes

Brax Alexander is promoting his 2020 movie, Christmas on the Square.  Usually I stay away from Christmas romcoms that preach how wonderfully fulfilling small towns are, as opposed to those soulless, heartless monstrosities, big cities, because I grew up in a small town.  My parents rhapsodized, almost daily, about my destiny: find The Girl of My Dreams,  get married, go to work in the factory, buy a house, have kids, die.  There were no other options.  

There was no such thing as same-sex desire or romance.  You spent time with boys in order to talk about girls or strategize on how to get girls.  When you found Her, you would abandon male loves, instantly and without hesitation.  They were trivial, steps on the road to the Girl of Your Dreams destiny.

I kept looking for a place where I could escape, where I could go through an entire day without the "What girl?  What girl? What girl?" interrogation.  Where people cared about beauty, wisdom, and love, not just reproduction.  Maybe even recognized the existence of men loving men. 

After college, I lived in West Hollywood, New York, Fort Lauderdale, and Minneapolis: Bookstores, art museums, cathedrals, Ethiopian restaurants, Thai restaurants, stores with rainbow flags in the windows, guys holding hands as they walked down the street: heaven.    

Oh, sorry, you wanted me to review the movie.  

Christmas on the Square was written by gay icon Dolly Parton, and stars gay icon Christine Baranski, plus Josh Segarra (top photo and left), who has played gay characters several time (he even played RuPaul's boyfriend). Furthermore, Dolly promotes the movie in an interview in Pink News, the gay magazine.  Surely this is a gay-positive Christmas romcom.  So here goes:

Scene 1:  A sound-stage town square in the town of Prairie View, with folks making merry.  Some very hot guys rush past, doing a high-step dance number -- but they ruin it by double-taking, en masse, at the hot girl who walks by.  At the end of their dance, they pair off, each guy with a girl.  Yuck!  This is the same brainwashing  I grew up with: "Every boy will fall in love with a girl!  There's no way out, no escape!  You are doomed!" 

A car drives past, with the evil, sunglasses-wearing Christine Baranski.  She sings: "Forget the past, be free at last, gotta get out of this town."  I like her -- she's the voice of thousands of LGBT people growing up in homophobic small towns, longing for a place where they can be free.  Of course, she's the villain. 

Amid the dancing, frolicking characters, the white-haired guy who runs the general store, no doubt Christine's Love Interest (played by Treat Williams, left) sings that "lovers walk in pairs." We only see male-female lovers.

 Focus character Felicity drives up and greets the stereotyped 1950s mailman.  She's the assistant of evil Christine Baranski, who continues to sing: "I know in time I'll lose my mind, if I don't get out of this town."  I had the same thought many times, back in Rock Island amid the "what girl do you like? what girl? what girl? what girl?" interrogation!

I'm getting angry.  They should have a trigger warning for all LGBT people who get trapped into viewing this thing.  I won't last much longer.

Left: Treat Williams' butt.

Christine passes out eviction notices.  She's going to tear down the whole town.  Good! 

 

More nude dudes after the break, if you dare to continue. Caution: Explicit.

Derek Yates: Nude Photos of the Smiley-Emoji and Eggplant Guy

Actor/model Derek Yates has 21 credits listed on IMDB, including cops, paralegals, nurses, a sleazoid, a passenger on the doomed Titanic 666, and Rando the Smiley Emoji guy on How I Met Your Father (Sylvia didn't remember what he looked like, so he came out with a smiley-emoji covering his face and an eggplant covering his crotch).

Derek also claims to have played the Best Friend alongside Adam Devine in Isn't It Romantic.  I don't remember seeing him there, but his face is rather unremarkable.  Fans like him for his comedic talent.

His 840,000 social media followers may be even more interested in his beefcake photos. Thousands of them, so many that I actually got tired of looking. Always shirtless, usually bulging, and quite often nude.

Selfie wearing glasses.

Torso and cock. He didn't shave his chest that day.

Artistic nude

More dicks after the break

Lucifer Episode 5.15: Hetero-horny Miles Burris, gay and bi erasure, three butts, and a random dick

  

Miles Burris' 2023 demo reel shows him in The Righteous Gemstones (as God Squad member Titus), Lucifer, Young Rock, and Teachers, so let's start with Lucifer.  He appears three times in 2021, first in Episode 5.15: "Is This How It's Really Going to End?"  Uh-oh, sounds Apocalyptic.

Scene 1: God is retiring, and the angels have to vote for either Lucifer (Tom Ellis, below) or the Archangel Michael (also Tom Ellis) to take His place. Luce's chances are limited by that war-in-heaven thing, but he argues that his years of penance on Earth have changed him, given him the skills necessary to be successful in the job. He needs his siblings, including Jophiel (Miles Burris, top photo), to campaign for him.  

They meet in a night club of some sort -- all we see is the bottom halves of girls' bodies.  Jophiel gazes goofily at the boobs of the invisible girl bringing them drinks.  He is wearing a suit coat with no shirt, so he can flex his pecs to impress girls.

 Lucifer claims that Michael has been doing a Wormtongue-thing on the Big Guy for milennia, making him think he's losing power in order to grab the Throne for himself.  What is this, Succession?  But Jophiel can't decide -- Luce is a lot of fun, but is he a good administrator?  "Michael's  kind of a dick, but he keeps the trains running,"  

Scene 2: Luce offers a female friend or girlfriend a job as consultant, but she doesn't want to move to heaven in the middle of a school year. "Well, hold off until I can convince my siblings to vote for me."  He calls her the future "Mrs. God," so they're romantic partners.

Scene 3: At a bloody crime scene, Dan (Kevin Alejandro, left) wants to fix up the forensic photographer (a lady) with his old cop partner Carol.  Lesbians?  No: 

"A guy with a girl's name?  I'm out!" she says in disgust.  Hey, just because he has a traditionally feminine name doesn't mean he's a fruit, you homophobe!  

"He's a guy, and a good one," Dan continues.  Do you mean "a good guy," as in "nice," or "good at being a guy," as in "not a fruit"?  

I'm a little impatient today, and we've already seen a ton of heterosexism in the first five minutes.  One more homophobic comment, and I'm out.

Why doesn't Dan want her for himself?  Maybe he's gay, and has a boyfriend waiting at ho,e.

Photographer thanks Dan for the thought, but with all the horrible tragedies she has lived through recently, she's not ready to start dating yet. This must be a regular character. 

Lucifer and Girlfriend enter, and hear about the corpse: Jonathan Donnelly, 53, a medical techician, tied up, forced to drink wine for several hours, and then shot.  His phone reveals a nasty argument with a guy named Mo.  So Lucifer's day job is police detective?  I thought he liked crime.

Scene 4: Girlfriend addresses the cops: she's put in her two-week notice, because she's retiring.  Dan congratulates her, but wonders why she didn't tell him. "You'd be too jealous, since you're secretly in love with me."  The Photographer is irate: "I can't solve crimes without you! Is this really how it's gonna end."  Hey, that's the episode title!  

Girlfriend notes that Lucifer is retiring, too.  "We're going to move to Heaven...um.. I mean Florida...so Luce can run the univers...I mean his Dad's business."   Now Photographer starts screaming in Spanish and threatening to kill them both.  "I'll kill you if you leave me" ?  That's classic toxic relationship. Did this episode come with a trigger warning?   

On to the case: the threatening text was sent by a woman named Odetta.  Hey, she texts using a boy's name, Mo.  Shouldn't Photographer get all disgusted? No, she's still busy being obsessive and creepy.  

Scene 5:  Lucifer and Girlfriend interrogate Odetta, a psychic -- presented as a fraud, of course.  The Dead Guy was her con partner: he would steal valuables from corpses, and Odetta would advertise a psychic ability to find them -- for a substantial fee.  They were very successful, so why murder him?

So who else would want to kill him?  When the families didn't take the bait, Dead Guy fenced the items with someone named TJ.  Check him out. (Left: Jeremiah Birkitt, who plays Lee in some other episodes).

This is a police procedural.  I expected Lucifer -- the actual Devil -- to show off some powers -- at least levitate now and then.  Have an office in Hell with a fiery desk or something.  This guy might as well a regular human "black sheep" of a rich family.  

Scene 6: Dan playing cards with his preteen daughter.  Not gay.  And Jophiel does not appear again. I'm out.

Beefcake: None here.  Acording to the Lucifer Wiki, Luce takes off his shirt a lot, but not here.

Gay Characters: None here. The Photographer may come out as lesbian later.

 According to some very critical articles  in Medium and Bi.org, Luce is outed as bisexual during Season 2, when someone starts killing off a lot of women; Lucifer notices that they are all former sex partners.  When the next victim turns out to be a man, Girlfriend triumphantly exclaims that his theory is wrong.  Men don't have sex with men!  She lives in Los Angeles, but has no idea that gay or bi men exist. 

 Fortunately, when Lucifer explains it to her, she does not seem particularly disgusted; she just didn't know that such things happen. 

In the rest of the series, Lucifer is absurdly hetero-horny.  Depending on the writers' whim, he makes an occasional quip about being bisexual or asserts that he finds men's bodies repulsive. 

My Grade: With heteronormativity, homophobia, no beefcake, and no supernatural powers?  Granted, I only watched half the episode, but D-.

Bonus butts and a dick after the break