I'm Not Afraid: A gay subtext romance between Miguel and the boy his parents have kidnapped. With cocks, the Nahuatl language, and a shirtless Short Guy.

 

In 2003 I saw Non ho pauro ("I'm Not Scared"), the film version of the novel by Niccolò Ammaniti: Nine-year old Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) befriends a kidnapped boy, and discovers that everyone in his village is responsible.  

Left: Recent photo of Giuseppe.  He may not be the Non ho pauro one.

So I wasn't planning to watch the 2026 Spanish version, No tengo miedo, on Netflix.  How could they expand it into a tv series without a lot of padding?  Besides, I already know the twist ending.  So do you.

Then Yago Sandoval (who plays the kidnapped boy) posts that he and Aldo Navarro (the Michele character) have "Amistad como portal amoroso."  Portal amoroso is used to convey the transcendence, stability, and peace that comes from romantic love.  Is he referring to their own relationshp, or the characters?  There was no significant gay subtext in the 2003 movie, but just in case there is here, let's check out Episode 1.1, "Brujas" (Witches).  

Scene 1: Miguel lies amid dead leaves on the ground.  He has wet his pants.  He asks "Am I dead?"

No, his friends are calling for him.  As he walks through the ruins of an old convent, he stumbles upon a deep pit, and at the bottom a boy, chained up. 

Cut to four kids playing soccer, pretending that they're Mexico vs. Denmark in the 1986 World Cup.  A Bully hits Miguel in the crotch with the ball, then kicks it out into the jungle.  He orders  the Nerd Chuy to retrieve it, "Or I'll kill you."  

Left: The Bully is played by Mauro Guzman, who is quick to point out that he and Bruno Strauss (Chuy) are actually friends.

The Teenage Felix arrives and tells them not to go into the jungle, because a witch lives there who eats children.  Then he grabs his brother, the Bully, and drives him home.

The others ride their bicycles home, discussing why the Bully is so mean and if there really is a kid-eating witch.

Scene 2: Teenage Felix (Cosmo Elio Gonzalez) and the Bully arrive at their run-down, trash-strewn house to see Dad keeled over due to drunkenness and the debilitating disease that they can't afford medication for.  They discuss how horrible their lives are.  Dad would like to shoot himself, but he can't afford a gun, darn.  

As the Bully goes off to fetch some rotten platanos for dinner, Dad asks, "Why don't we have a mansion yet?  You said you have a deal going on that would make us the wealthiest family in the world?"

"I'm working on it!" Felix exclaims.  He must be the kidnapper!

Scene 3:  The kids arrive at Nerd Chuy's house to see his parents arguing with Pino (Luis Alberti, right).  "You can't back out now!" "But I'm scared." "Have faith!"  They're in on the kidnapping, too.

Nerd Chuy stays behind to have dinner, and the two remaining kids, Miguel and his Sister, go home with Pino, their Dad.  I thought he was a single father, but his wife is there, being depressed.  They do Sister's medical treatments, which she hates, and have rice and beans for dinner for the 3,000th time.   Dad Pino promises that soon they'll be able to afford real food, and 20 tv sets so they can watch the game from anywhere in their mansion. 

The kids retreat to their bedroom, where Sister calls him Luis.  Richster Chava appears at the window to invite Miguel/Luis to watch the game in his mansion.

"But you can't go in there without permission!" Sister exclaims.

"Richster Chava can, and his parents are asleep, so they won't know I'm there."  Can't he invite a friend over?  Or are the bourgeoisie not supposed to associate with the proletariat?

Cut to Richster Chava and Miguel/Luis watching the game and being affectionate.  I'd call it a gay-subtext buddy-bond.

Scene 4: In the morning Miguel/Luis is awakened to the poor people arguing with a rich guy.  "Something must have happened!" "We had nothing to with it!" The Nerd  Chuy and his parents have vanished, and his house has been ransacked!  

Richster Chava, Miguel/Luis, and his Sister decide to investigate.  At the house, they find that Nerd Chuy's bicycle is gone.  If he was kidnapped, it would still be there. They conclude that he went to the witch's house to fetch the soccer ball, and got eaten. Then his parents went looking for him, and the witch got them, too.

They run to the jungle to investigate.  Shouldn't you take your bikes?  It was miles away yesterday. 

More after the break

Isaac Ordonez: A sweet, sensitive, queer-coded Pugsley Addams. WIth Chris Pine, Skyler, and some nude Hispanic dudes

 

The Pugsleys, the younger brother of the Addams Family mythos, usually get poor plotlines and poorer treatment.  They are bullied, tortured, ignored, used as playthings.  In Season 1 of Wednesday, Isaac Ordonez's Pugsley was not much different.

But during the hiatus between Season 1 and Season 2, Isaac grew up, becoming taller, huskier, bringing a dark nervous energy to the newly teenage Pugsley.  He has stepped out of the shadow of his sister to become his own person, with independent interests and goals -- a sweet, sensitive, traumatized soul trying to find emotional connection.  Friends.  A boyfriend.

Born in 2009, Isaac began acting in 2016 as the preternaturally smart Charles Wallace in A Wrinkle in Time, the adaption of the Madeleine L'Engel fantasy.

Chris Pine played his "captured-by-the-darkness" father.

Left: since Isaac is 16 as of this writing, I'm not looking for any nude photos, but he works mostly in media aimed at the Hispanic community, so here's a  guy from Puebla, Mexico

Next came some shorts: 

Dia de los Carpas (Day of the Tents): A group of boys help an undocumented girl get to the beach, where she has a magical secret. 

Psycho Sally:  No synopsis online, but there's no one named Sally in the character list.

Dispara y Mata (Shoot and Kill): A father tries to get his son (Isaac) to eat by telling him a story of survival in the Colombian jungle. 

More after the break. Caution: Explicit

Snakes and Ladders: A teacher and her gay son squabble with a chocolate heir, the Spanish counsul, and a closeted hunk. With Roque and Nico dicks

 I've never played the game "Snakes and Ladders" but apparently you move your piece up by landing on ladders and down by landing on snakes.  It's the title of several tv series and movies, most recently the Mexican Serpientes y Escaleras on Netflix. The promo shows a femme guy with orange hair at a party, heading for the bathroom, encountering a conservative guy ("on the right"), and having a conversation with awesome sexual tension. Ok, so let's go, Episode 1.1.

Scene 1: Some kids playing in a school yard.  A boy with blue eyeglasses and a girl get into a tussle, while the playground monitor looks horrified and the narrator tells us that "ethics" means "moral character," following the norms of the society. 

Cut to the Playground Monitor, aka the Prefect  putting on her prim schoolmarm outfit and walking through her mansion to kiss her pink-haired son.  He promises to come to lunch later.  She writes "I Deserve to Be Headmistress" in her notebook (aha, a micro-authority position, like Vice Principal), drives past the Millenium Arches that identify her city as Guadalajara, and arrives at the Colegio Andes (a grade school), only to find her friend Roque (Alfredo Gatica) passing out fliers for her competitor.

The Prefect yells at him. He responds: "She asked.  What could I do?"

N*de photos of Alfredo after the break.

Scene 2: She is called to the Headmistress's office to meet the parents of the blue-eyeglassed boy: Dad is the super-handsome Vicente (Martino Rivas, top photo and left) aka His Excellency Don Vicente Garcia, the Spanish Counsul.  Uh-oh, super-powerful.

The girl's father is dorky-looking Mr. Muriel, aka the Chocolate King, the head of Mexico's biggest chocolate company. 

Mr. and Mrs. Counsul claim that the girl grabbed the boy's testicles, which constitutes sexual assault. 

Chocolate King: "No way!  She's six years old,  too young to know about such things!"

The Prefect was there, but couldn't see well enough to affirm or deny that it happened.

Headmistress adjourns the meeting until tomorrow, and then yells at the Prefect: "You will write a statement indicating that you saw exactly what happened, and it will be what the Counsul wants to hear!"

The kids are still friends, but the parents forbid them from seeing each other again. In other news: Mr. Muriel is the ex-lover of Vicente's wife, and thinks that she came back to rekindle their romance. "No, my husband got a job here.".  Maybe he was better looking in the old days.

Scene 3: The Prefect and her friend discuss whether to say that the daughter did it or not.  The Chocolate King is the most popular parent in the school, but the Spanish Counsul!

At home, her bigoted, abusive ex-husband is visiting. There's a problem with their pink-haired son, Antonio: he's been gambling, and owes a lot of people money -- the Mafia!  She doesn't believe him.  They argue about who is the worse parent.  Then Antonio comes in and asks to borrow a little money. They start yelling at him: "I've raised you under the framework of ethics and morality!"

Uh-oh, the Chocolate King arrives in his limo, so Prefect tells them both to go out smiling, as if they're the perfect family.

Scene 4: The Chocolate King wants the Prefect to say that his daughter didn't do it, so she's not stigmatized as a sex offender at age six. 

When the Prefect balks, he gives the back story: Once he was engaged to Mrs. Garcia.  Then he got another girl pregnant, so he had to marry her instead.  She went to Spain, married Counsul Garcia, and now she's back, trying to prove that her husband has a bigger cock.  

"Here's my card. Call me if you have any wish you want me to fulfill.  And believe me, I can fulfill them all."  Whew, this dude is creepy.

Scene 5: The Prefect consults a Tarot card reader, who says that she's not going to make Headmistress. "But a week ago, they said I would make it.  What happened?"  The cards say: "No matter who you decide on, the other parent will try to destroy you."

Pink-Haired Antonio comes in to ask if she's thought about lending him the money. The Prefect: "I'm tired of trying to make you a good person.  I'm done."

"But I'm in danger."

"Tough. I have my own problems."

Scene 6: The second meeting with the parents, where the Prefect has to tell "what really happened."  Her verdict: it was a minor scuffle.  If the girl did it, she had no malicious intent. So we won't do an expulsion, but we'll transfer the boy to another class.

The Counsul is irate: "This is going to reach the King's ears." He means King Felipe VI of Spain.  Are we going to start a war over a testicle-grab?

The parents storm out.  The Headmistress is irate. 

Outside, the Chocolate King wants to know why the Prefect decided the way she did. "It was the right thing to do."  He promises to help her win over the mothers in her quest to become Headmistress: "I'm popular with the mother. I'm handsome, rich, and widowed."  Handsome?  You're a gargoyle, dude.  He's having a party tonight with a lot of mothers.  Maybe she can come?

More after the break

Ryan Potter: Nude and j/o photos of the Supah Ninjah, Beast Boy, Hiro Hamada, mystic, gamer, and bisexual buddy

 

Ryan Potter is best known as Gar Logan, aka Beast Boy, in the DC Comics Universe series Titans (2018-23).

These aren't the Teen Titans from your Daddy's comics collection.  The original Robin the Boy Wonder is still around, but the team also includes two oof his successors, Jason Todd and Tim Drake, as well as Connor Kent, the clone of Superman and Lex Luthor.

Plus there are gay and trans characters, and quite a lot of backsides on display, including Ryan's.

Born in 1995, Ryan lived in Tokyo for the first seven years of his life, and then moved to Los Angeles.  He started his acting career in Supah Ninjas (2011-13), spelled wrong on purpose, playing a shy, quiet student who discovers that he is...um...a super Ninja.  His best friend and the Girl of His Dreams join the team, tutored by his grandfather, George Takei.

More movies about shy, quiet students who learn martial arts followed, plus some Disney teencoms and a lot of animated series about martial arts.

In the various Big Hero 6 movies  and tv programs (Baymax and..., Big Chibi 6, Baymax Dreams, Big Hero 6: The Series, Baymax!), Ryan plays Hiro Hamada, a teenage robotics genius who creates a snowman-like inflatable robot named Baymax.  He and his friends and the Girl of His Dreams form the superhero team Big Hero 6.

One of the versions has a gay character named Mbita, and  another has Brooks Wheelan as Fred, "team mascot at SFIT."

The animated Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous (2020-22) follows teens at a summer camp on Isla Nubar who get stuck when the dinosaurs take over.  There are two lesbian teens among them, but Ryan's character is straight.

That's a lot of straight guys, but in his private life Ryan is a gay ally:

He was the youngest celebrity to speak out on the No H8 campaign in 2012, favoring the legalization of same-sex marriage

In 2021, he tweeted that his Titans character, Gar, was bisexual.

In 2022, he came out as bisexual himself.

More after the break

Mark Patton: Freddy Krueger's boyfriend, George Clooney's buddy, artist, scream queen. With his butt and bulge and Clooney's dick

I wanted to do a profile of Mark Patton, the Scream Queen who hooked up with Ricky Schroder in 1988, at least according to my friend in West Hollywood, Zach the Photographer.

He's called the Scream Queen because of Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985), where he plays a gay-vague teenager beset-upon by the nightmare psycho-killer Freddy Krueger.

Plus continuing the tradition of Nightmare hunks like Johnny Depp (left), he shows some butt and bulges.

Mark thought that Nightmare would be his "big break" into mainstream movies.  He was mistaken.

Previously he (right) had played a gay boy in the 1950s (actually a  transgender woman before transitioning), Chuck Connor's son, and the brother of a cloned girl, all roles with gay potential.

When he was cast in Nightmare, he assumed that his character was gay,  but his costar Robert Rusler (above) said "Hell, no!  And if you know what's good for you, you won't mentions gays to David [writer David Chaskin], ever!  He'll have you fired and on the first bus back to Missouri!"

I found the movie homophobic, even for the homophobic 1980s.  There are lots of "fag" slurs. The evil gym coach (Marshall Bell) dies when nightmare killer Freddy Krueger assaults him from behind in the shower, the homophobe's fear of what a gay predator might do.  The boy's "deviant impulses" are cured through the love of a woman.  

In a recent interview, David Chaskin admitted that he put gay codes into the script deliberately, but his goal was homophobic, to point out that gay people are monsters.  Still, the movie has been reclaimed as a queer classic, a gay teenager struggling to come out in a homophobic society that thinks gay people are monsters. 

After Nightmare, Mark found himself at the mercy of agents who tried to de-gay him.  They went through his closet to eliminate "gay" outfits, told him to avoid West Hollywood, and forbade him from being interviewed in The Advocate.

Mark managed a role as straight teenager in a CBS Schoolbreak Special (1986), and the buddy of the guy (George Clooney, left) who is having an affair with his mother on an episode of Hotel (1986).

In 1987, he was cast as a gay teenager, but told that he had to be closeted in real life, so he walked, and became an interior designer.

He lost his first partner, Timothy Murphy, to AIDS in 1988.  According to the story told by Zach the Photographer, he hooked up with Ricky Schroder later that year.

In 2000, while hospitalized for bronchitis, he was diagnosed as HIV positive himself.  

More after the break

Nude New Orleans: Eight Cajun cocks and bulging backcity boys for your crewe

 

So many of my recent profiles have been of guys from New Orleans that it seemed apropos to post a photo collection. I've been three times, once for spring break, once for a conference at Tulane University, and once for Halloween, so I've actually met two or three of these guys.  I'm not saying which.

The Halloween visit was my favorite.

This dude is actually from Donaldsonville, about 60 miles west.  Close enough.

I'm interested in the Afro-Caribbean religions, the religions that enslaved West Africans brought with them and kept hidden under their forced Christian practices.  When they were forced into Roman Catholicism, as in New Orleans and Haiti, they found a lot of statues of saints that could be used for venerating their orishas.  The result was what we now call voodoo.

But avoid the tourist-trap voodoo shops.

A cute naked guy, lapsed Pentecostal.

An actor, mostly in local theater, not nearly as big has his photo suggests.

More after the break.  Caution: explicit.