Baylen Bielitz: The kid version of the gay superhero Wiccan visits Oz and The Secret Garden, buddies with Jett Kyte, crushes on Spider-Man.

 

I've been researching the actors who played Billy and Tommy, sons of the Scarlet Witch Wanda Maximoff in Marvel comics and tv shows.   They grow up to be superheroes Wiccan (gay) and Speed (bi), so did the casting agents make sure that the actors playing them were gay/bi, too?  

Teenagers: Joe Locke and Ruaridh Mollica (below).  Both gay.

Tweens: Julian Hillard and Jett Kyte (left). Both probably gay.

Kids: Baylen Bielitz (right) and Gavin Borders. 

 

Left: Ruaridh in action. Don't worry, he's with a dude.

I doubt that the casting agents were specifically looking for gay actors to play the preteen Billy and Tommy. They might not even be aware that LGBT kids exist.  But they if they were looking for resemblance to the older actors, they might ping on a gay vibe, or ask if Mom and Dad would object to their kid playing gay.  We'll start with Baylen Bielitz, five-year old Billy (the future Wiccan) on Wandavision.

Baylen was born in Southington, about 20 miles from Hartford, Connecticut, in May 2014.  He expressed an interest in acting and dancing when he was five years old, so his parents entered him into a local acting competition.  He won and got an agent, who started sending out video audition tapes (this was during the pandemic).  

 On his sixth birthday in May 2020, Baylen posts "It's my b-day, dance with me," noting that he always was inspired by Derek Hough.

Actor/dancer/choreographer Derek Hough, is straight, but he has played gay characters and fought for LGBT representation on Dancing with the Stars. He performed in the first male-male duo on the show, in December 2024.

A few days later, Bay got word that he had been cast as Billy Maximoff.  Directly from kindergarten to the Marvel Cinematic Universe!  In the summer of 2020, he and his mom drove to Atlanta to film his scenes. 

I doubt that he knew the entire biography of Wiccan when he auditioned, but he does now.

Other on-screen roles came quickly.

2021:

He appears in The Gilmore Girls on stage and in several tv commercials.

Plus he gets to pose (or photoshop-pose) with Tom Holland's Spider-Man (n*de photo of Tom Holland after the break).

 2022:

He plays Younger Boy to Lucas Luchsinger's Older Boy in A Better Half (2022), a short about a man confronting his demons.

In an episode of Evil, about a team of Catholic exorcists, Bay and Robbie Crandall play brothers who are being bedeviled by a demon.  Or is it their mom, trying to push up the subscribers to her social media channel?  

The Noel Diary stars Justin Hartley as Jake Turner, a driven big city corporate type who returns to his small home town for Christmas and...well, it's the plot of every Christmas romcom ever.  Bay plays his younger brother in a flashback sequence.

More after the break. Caution: Explicit.

Bentley Storteboom: Dutch, 25 years old, or gay? Or all of the above? With KJ Apa's dick, Karl Urban's butt, and Gavin Munn

 

When I saw this photo of someone named Bentley Storteboom (censored for reasons that will become apparent), I concluded that he was obviously Dutch, about 25 years old, and gay.  Turns out that I was wrong about two of the three conclusions.

1. Is he Dutch?   Storteboom means "Fallen Tree" in Frisian, spoken by 400,000 people in the northern regions of the Netherlands, like these shirtless guys watching ice skating in 20 degree weather (-10 C). 

No, he's Canadian.

2. Is he 25?

No, according to the IMDB, as of this writing he's 13 1/2! 

  

He may look 25 in the top photo, but here he looks like 16-year old Gavin Munn of The Righteous Gemstones.

Bentley was born in August 2012, in Maple Ridge, a suburb of Vancouver.  According to his mom, “He wasn’t your typical boy that wanted to play soccer or sports,” but he was interested in movies and the theater, and started asking about how kids got on tv.  His parents had no experience in performing arts, and had no idea.  Kudos for not trying to push him into sports, Mom and Dad.  My parents never let up.  "You're a boy!  Boys like sports!  Try out for football!"

They did some research, enrolled Bentley in the LeClerc School of Acting, and found him an agent, and he started auditioning at age six.  Soon he was appearing in commercials, and got the starring role in the student film Small Boy (2020): "After getting left out during a hide and seek game, a small boy realizes what he wants is different than what he was seeking from others."  So, different from the others?  Gotcha. 

That fall he won two Joey Awards (for Canadian youth): best actor in a commercial and best actor in a student film. 

In 2020 he won an iconic role in the series finale of Supernatural (2020).  As Dean is dying, he tells his gay-subtext partner Sam that he must "carry on."  The time for the "manly love of comrades" is over; it's time to accept his heterosexual destiny.  A few years later, Dean looks down from heaven and sees that Sam has acquiesced: he's got a wife and kid (Bentley). And the kicker: they're playing ball!  Bentley might not be "like the other boys," but his son is.  We hear the Kansas song:

Carry on, my wayward son. There'll be peace when you are done.
Lay your weary head to rest.  Don't you cry no more.

Funny, I feel like crying at this negation of the gay experience. 

Episodes of Nancy Drew (2021) and YoShowBiz (2021) followed, but Bentley's big break  (at age eight) came with what the local papers breathlessly praised as "a recurring role on a hit tv show!"  It was Riverdale (2017-2023), the campy, over-the-top, NSFW adaption of the Archie comics world. 

Left: KJ Apa, formerly Archie.

Bentley played Dagwood, one of the twin children of Betty's older sister Polly and Cheryl's brother Jason (Trevor Stines, left), in Seasons 5 and 6 (2021-22).  Who names their kid Dagwood?  He gets the worst of both families: the Blossom curse that kills all firstborn children (he manages to live), and the darkness that plagues the Cooper family, which turns him into a bully.  According to Bentley's Mom, this was a lot of fun for the "gentle child" who sometimes got bullied himself.  Gay kids are often bullied, Mom.  

More after the break

Alkaio Thiele: A Waverly Place wizard, a gay boy, Spiderman, and the Devil. With some Greek dicks and photos that tell you if he is....

The Disney Channel teencom Wizards of Waverly Place (2007-12) about a family of wizards, gave us a bear dad (David DeLuise), hunky sons Justin (David Henrie, left) and Max (Jake T. Austin), some hunky friends (Dan Benson, Gregg Sulkin), a bisexual daughter, and a huge number of gay subtexts (in spite of the heteronormative erasure in the scripts) .  

The sequel, Wizards Beyond Waverly Place (2024-26), features eldest son Justin as a middle school vice principal, charged by the Wizard Council with protecting the Chosen One, while raising his newly-wizardized sons, Roman  (Alkaio Thiele, right) and Milo (Max Matenko).

Alkaio Thiele, 15 as of this writing, plays son Roman with the standard teencom hetero-horniness, but checking his Instagram and Facebook pages, I see hints of gay potential.

1. An interest in muscular physiques.  He posts lots of photos of muscular co-stars, and at least three where he is wearing a muscle suit.

2. A drag piece where he  is playing himself and his mother at the same time.

Wait -- that's his actual mother.  I checked her Instagram and Facebook pages: masculine presentation, she/her pronouns, married to a man, two children.  Previously a nurse, now Alkaio's manager.  Kudos on your gender fluidity, Mom!  

What are they up to?  It looks like she is removing a hair net from his head.

3. This photo. No comment.

Alkaio grew up (rather, is growing up) in Castro Valley, near Hayward in the East Bay, 27 miles from the gay neighborhood of Castro Street in San Francisco.  

He is of Greek ancestry.  Alkaios, "Strength," was the son of Perseus and Andromeda, an ancestor of Hercules.

Left: a random Greek guy.

 Alkaio began his career in musical theater, playing:

The Artful Dodger in Oliver!

Peter in Peter Pan and Wendy

Sam, a preteen with a girlfriend, in Love Actually Live.

Applegate, the Devil in disguise, in Damn Yankees.

Harold Hill in The Music Man

Two gay-subtext roles.  Not bad.

More after the break

Noah Matthews Matofsky: Head Lost Boy, model, disability advocate, Oscar Wilde fan, boyfriend. With bonus n*de Matthews and Captain Hook's hook

  

Peter Pan & Wendy (2023) omits the most egregious heterosexualization of recent Peter Pan movies by skipping the usual Peter-Wendy romance, and by  making Captain Hook (Jude Law, below) gay.  Well, he's usually gay-coded, but his time around he mentions a childhood  boyfriend  -- Peter himself (Alexander Molony), who refused to leave Never-Never Land and grow up, while Hook choose an adult career as a pirate.

I got the same rhetoric when I was a kid: "When you grow up, you will drop your same-sex loves  to devote your life to what really matters, finding and winning the Girl of Your Dreams."  I turned 14, 15, 16, 17 and the joy I felt in masculine smiles never vanished, but my boyfriends began to treat me as a mere chum, someone to discuss girls with. They were Captain Hook leaving Neverland, but I remained, refusing to "grow up."    

Some of the other male actors were of interest, including Joshua Pickering (Wendy's brother John Darling), a cute member of the Short Guys Brigade.  And Noah Matthews,  who plays the gay-coded Slightly: the leader of the Lost Boys, the only one who remembers anything of his life before Neverland, and the most musical.

"But your son said the sleepover was 'clothing optional.'" 

 Sorry, that's another Noah.  Slightly was played by Noah Matthews Matofsky, the first actor with a visible disability to star in a Disney movie, a leap forward in disability representation.  Especially since the character Slightly is not disabled. Noah was cast because the casting director, and then director David Lowery, loved his audition (they also bonded over a comparison of the Lost Boys and Lord of the Flies).

This was the 16-year old's first on-screen acting job, and rather daunting -- he had to spend six months in Canada during the COVID pandemic, spend hours filming in the hot sun, and still do his schoolwork.  But he loved the challenge, and there were perks -- the Lost Boys shared an apartment with a pool on the roof, so after the shooting and schoolwork, they had pool parties.  Tell me more.  

And Michael Darling (the one with the teddy bear) was played by Jacobi Jupe, brother of Noah's crush Noah Jupe (left). It's not everyday that you get to hear all of the gossip about your crush from your roommate.

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

"Christmas on Repeat": A "Groundhog Day" romcom with Matthew Lawrence, Peter Pan, a bodybuilder, and some cocks

 

After successfully finding a gay romance tucked into the final scene of Falling for Christmas, I decided to check out some other recent Christmas movies to see if a gay character snuck in under the noses of the homophobes.  First up,  Christmas on Repeat, because it features one of those day-keeps-repeating plotlines, and Matthew Lawrence (sigh), one of the trio of muscle-hunk brothers who brightened the 2000s.  

Scene 1: The day before Christmas. Andrea spent the night in her office, because she's a workaholic, but not to worry, her assistant got presents for her husband and kids, and arranged for bonuses for the office staff.  On her way out, her boss, Nick (Matthew Lawrence, sigh) stops her: they have to shoot a commercial tomorrow -- on Christmas Day -- and the guy in charge of the account is taking Christmas off, so... No fair!  Why don't you do it?

She calls her husband, John (Gary Poux), to say she's on the way home.  He is upset, because that means she will want to cook breakfast  and she's an awful cook.  Wait, how is she going to fall in love with the Boss?  Maybe she's just the conduit, and the Boss will fall in love with someone else.

She mentions that she has to work tomororw, but he's not upset: she "has to work" every Christmas. 

Scene 2: She stops to buy some groceries -- the supermarket parking lot is empty on Christmas Eve?  And the donation-collecting Santa Claus knows her name.  Creepy.  He points out that there will be a shooting star tomorrow night with "off the charts" magic.

Scene 3: At home, she greets her teenage children. Lexi, who looks like a 30-year old supermodel, has a new dance routine -- this is depressing, as Andrea and her husband used to dance, before she got too busy. 

And Matt (JJ Whyte) is there; he was going to stay overnight with his friend Ryder, but changed his mind.  Tell me more about your "friend," dude.

Back story: Daughter from Andrea's first marriage, Son from this one.  I guess they want to explain why Lexi is so melanin-deprived.  Or they could have found a 30-year old African-American supermodel.

Scene 4: Andrea works on her laptop until late, and goes to bed after Hubbie is already asleep.  Don't worry, I won't say anything about the cock she's missing out on.

Scene 5: Christmas day.  She commits the following crimes:

1. She doesn't know her son Matt's friends

2. She is unaware that he has stopped being interested in basketball

3. She tries to make pancakes, but sets the kitchen on fire.  Not being able to cook is apparently a major sin in this world.  Maybe this movie is pushing the nuclear family myth, where Dad works and Mom stays home to cook. 

4. At the comemrcial shoot, she doesn't prevent the  "Clean, Green, and Prestine (sic)" actress from sninping at director Paul (Terry Woodberry).  

Director Paul yells at the actress, she quits, and then he quits.  And gets heterosexualized by mentioning his wife.  Darn.  

But at least we have another cock, after the break