Stranded on the Isle of Dogs, and Other Hassles, Horrors, and Hookups of My First Visit to England

 

Sorry if you love London, or call it home.  I'm not a big fan, in spite of the architectural marvels and fascinating history.  I always get lost.  It's cold.  The streets are all dirty.  Everyone is rude all the time;  I've never seen anyone in London ever smile.  And the food's not great.

In 1993, my partner Lane was a delegate to the World Congress of GLBT Jews, to be held in London.  He invited me along as his guest.

This isn't him.  I have lots of pictures, but no nudes.  But he was (and still is) a husky, hairy bear with nice arms, like this guy.

I had been to France, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands, and Lane spent a year in Israel, but for some reason neither of us had ever been to Britain.  So we planned lots of sightseeing: The Tower of London, the Sherlock Holmes Museum, Stonehenge, The Rude Man of Cerne Abbas, Canterbury Cathedral.  Not to mention the Gay Village of Soho.

Customs

The problems started the moment I arrived.  At customs I was questioned extensively about my reasons for coming to Britain, who I was staying with, did I know anyone here, and again, why did I come here????  He wouldn't believe that I was a tourist.  No one ever came to Britain as a tourist.  It was a tiny, backwater country with absolutely no sites of historical or artistic interest!  I must be planning something criminal.

I still wonder why he was so suspicious.  Do I have the same name as a terrorist?  Was it my leather jacket?  

The Isle of Dogs

If you were planning a World Congress with delegates from all over the world, most of whom have never been to Britain before, wouldn't you pick a hotel that was centrally located?

Nope: The Royal Britannia Hotel was on the Isle of Dogs, an industrial sleugh on the East End of London, surrounded by the Thames on three sides.  No pubs, no shops, nothing but block after block of dark industrial buildings.  

And no subway.  You could catch a bus into town -- about six miles to the Tower of London -- but it stopped at different places, depending on the whim of the driver, anywhere between six and twelve blocks from the hotel.

So you were standing at a bus stop, and it would drive past you and stop two blocks away.

On Thursday and Friday, while Lane was busy with meetings, I chased after a bus getting into town, visited the Tower, the British Museum, the Sherlock Holmes Museum -- and Clapham Common, because I took the wrong metro and ended up in the far south.  

Saturday was Shabbat, so no meetings were scheduled.  Lane and I returned to London to visit Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, a science fiction bookstore, and  a gay sauna (for a gay conference, there was very little hooking up).  

We missed the last bus, so we had to take a taxi back to the hotel.

On Sunday the buses didn't run, so another taxi into London, where we found almost everything closed, and a taxi back (straining our resources).  

The Gay Jewish Conference

I didn't realize that by signing on as a guest, not a delegate, I was forbidden to go to any of the meetings, or any of the dinners.  

On Thursday night, there was an evening boat tour of the Thames, with box dinner provided.  Except for guests.  I stole one to avoid starving to death.

On Saturday night, they held a dance for conference delegates -- no one else, not even the partners.  I spent the night watching television -- the "Crazy Americans" hour, with four episodes of a tv sitcom that I never heard of (and don't recall the title of; it takes place in an office, but in one episode they're on a life boat for some reason).

On Sunday night they had a dinner -- for delegates only.  I'd have to make do with the hotel restaurant.  Whoops, it was closed on Sundays.  I would have starved to death again, but someone with a car drove into town and brought me (and the other guests) some fish and chips.

Is this any way to run a gay Jewish conference?

At least Lane brought a hookup back from the dance, so I got a little cock action.

It gets better after the break.  Sort of.

"The Seven Dials Mystery": Murder on an English country estate in 1925, with a gay couple, a gay bar, Bluemel's butt, and Bilbo's dick

 

Note: I revised this review based on Episodes 2 and 3.

I've been trying to get into reading mysteries lately, including classic Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and The Seven Dials Mystery (1929): one of her earlier works, while she's still fumbling around to create an ongoing amateur sleuth.  A tv adaption has dropped on Netflix, starring Corey Mylchreest, who is straight but likes to pretend to be gay.  So maybe he'll be pretending here, too.

Prologue: An elderly man walks through Ronda, an Andalusian village about an hour from Malaga., with beautiful establishing shots.  He enters the empty Plaza de Toros and checks his watch, and finds a note (a picture of a clock).  Suddenly a bull rushes out and gores him to death!

Scene 1: Chimneys, a stately country house in Gloucester, 1925.  A party, with everyone wearing masks and being decadent.  Lady Caterham (Helena Bonham Carter) and her daughter Bundle hate the ghastly masks, but they had no choice; it was the idea of Lord and Lady Coote, to whom they are indebted.  Lord Coote wants to meet George Lomax, so they can form a relationship: "His Foreign Office, my steel factories." 

Lol, I can't hear the name Coote without thinking of Cornelius Coot, who founded the city of Duckburg in Disney comics.

Bundle, apparently the focus character, continues to mingle.  She approaches Ronny (gay actor Nabhaan Rizwan, right) and his Boyfriend (Hughie O'Donnell), who explain that their mate Gerry hasn't gotten up before noon all week, so they're going to prank him with seven alarm clocks hidden in various places in his room.

Next, she talks to Gerry (Corey Mylchreest, top photo, butt left).  He gawks with Girl of My Dreams hetero-horniness, and tells Bundle how incredibly gorgeous she is.  Ok, so he won't be pretending to be gay in this one.  She counters that he is incredibly gorgeous as well.  They gaze at each other for about five minutes, then he asks her to dinner, and implies that he's going to propose.  The gazing continues.  I'm fast-forwarding past it.

Scene 2: Cut to the boyfriends giggling as they hide alarm clocks in various places in Gerry's room.  Then to a card game, with Bundle and Boy of Her Dreams Gerry continuing to gaze at each other while the others chitchat. Jimmy (Edward Bluemel, butt left) joins them.

 Then raucous Jazz Age dancing and more gazing.  

The boyfriends are not dancing.  They are engrossed with each other.  I think they're a canonical couple.

Bundle drops Gerry to mingle, then goes out into the garden. 

Scene 3: Morning.  Establishing shot of the country house surrounded by marshland.  Ronny and his Boyfriend complain of being hungover, and fill their plates.  The others arrive, equally hungover.

At 11:15, the alarm clocks go off in Gerry's room.  He's not turning them off, so they send the Butler to wake him.  Then Bundle goes.  She finds that Gerry is...dead!

Cut to the doctor (Tristan Gemmill, left), who finds a sleeping draft next to the bed.  Gerry must have taken a draft to help him sleep, and since he was drunk, the combination was lethal.  

"Impossible!" Bundle exclaims.  "He never used sleeping drafts!"  And she knows what he did before bed because....

"Then maybe it was deliberate?" the doctor suggests.

The Boyfriend: "Well, he was stressed at work.  His boss, George Lomax, was always riding him."

"No way!  Impossible!  He was planning to propose to me."

Next up: a bumbling detective, on his first case, ineptly examines the crime scene while making jokes.  Bundle thinks that it was a murder.  Otherwise be lousy story.

"Wait -- there are seven clocks on the mantle.  I thought you guys hid them?"  The Boyfriends glance at each other in shock.

More after the break

Kelton Dumont's Hot/Hung Photos, Part 3: Birthday biceps, bare bums, bondage, rugger dicks, and Jacob Tremblay

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Alfie Williams: A missing penis, a youthful scoundrel, a zombie fighter. Is he or his character gay? Or both? With Chi dick update

I was checking my Instagram yesterday, when it recommended that I follow someone named Alfie Williams.  Never heard of him.  This is the first time Instagram has recommended someone other than a fitness trainer or bodybuilder.  I figured it must be either because he plays a gay character or he is gay in real life.

In the small photo on my cell phone, Alfie looked like a guy in his 20s, but when I checked his Instagram on my laptop, he turned out to be a young teenager.  14 in 2025.

So, an out-and-proud 14 year old, or playing an out-and-proud 14 year old?

Turns out that research wasn't at all difficult; there are a lot of interviews and articles about Alfie.

He was born in 2011 in Gateshead, across the river from shipping and partying center Newcastle-upon-Tyne in northern England.  His father is Alfie Dobson, an actor and bodybuilder with nine credits listed on the IMDB.

Alfie Jr. broke into acting with the short film Phallacy (2021): a 12-year old boy wakes up to find his penis missing. Doctors say there is nothing they can do (transmen get a working penis from their vaginal tissue, but the boy doesn't have anything to work with). Don't worry, when you grow up, you'll find a lot of things to do in the bedroom that don’t require one .

  Sounds like a lot of LGBTQ symbolism and hegemonic masculinity going on.  An inclusive start to your career, Alf.

Next came Ghost Theo, a resident of the Land of the Dead in Episode 3.5 of the dark fantasy His Dark Materials (2022).  He only has one line.

An unspecified character in BBC Radio 4's adaption of the soap opera Our Friends in the North, about four Newcastle blokes whose lives intersect from 1964 to 2022.

Young John Henry Sayers in A New Breed of Criminal (2023).  The adult John Henry Sayers (played by Alfie's Dad) and his brother Stephen (Steve Wraith) were real-life gangsters who ran the city of Newcastle in the 1990s. 

But it is Alfie's starring role in 28 Years Later (2025) that prompted the flood of interviews and articles.

I saw the original 28 Days Later (2002), where bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) gets into an auto accident, and wakes up from a coma "28 days later" to discover that he's a survivor of a zombie apocalypse.  He meets two other survivors, Mark and Selena, but one is immediately killed.  The other announces that just because they're the last two people left on Earth, they're not going to f*ck; but they do.  They fall in love, adopt a survivor girl, and escape to an idyllic rural future together.  

Guess which is killed, and which falls in love.  

Right.  Offensively blatant erasure of gay potential in order to promote the myth of universal heterosexual desire and practice for the 10 millionth time. 

In 28 Years Later, 12-year old Spike (Alfie) is living with his parents in a survivor community on Lindisfarne, a tidal island that was home to a famous Medieval monastery and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) takes him to the mainland for a coming-of-age ritual, and they are separated for some reason.

Left: Aaron Taylor-Johnson's d*ck.

Later he takes his sick Mum to the mainland to see a doctor (Ralph Fiennes, right), who says that she is dying of brain cancer and must be euthanized. We see it happening.  That settles it: I'm not watching this movie.  F*ck the Sadness.

More after the break

"The Third Day": Jude Law in "The Wicker Man," with scissor goblins, a dead son, Will Rogers, and Dagliesh dick

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