"The Kids Are Alright," eight years later. Have any of the family's eight sons muscled up? Are any gay? Any adults with n*de photos?

  

In 2018, I had already switched to streaming, but if you were watching network tv, you may have caught The Kids Are Alright , tucked between The Connors and Black-ish on Tuesday nights.  It was one of those "Looking back on my childhood" tv shows, like The Wonder Years and The Goldbergs.  In this case, Tim Doyle looks back on his Irish-American family in the 1970s with eight children, all sons.

Eight sons!  And Michael Cutlitz as the hot and extremely prolific dad!  If I knew it existed, I would have been there!  

No doubt they expected the show to last for several years, with cute kids changing into teenage hunkoids and adult musclemen before our eyes.

No gay characters, of course, but  Tim Doyle is the producer responsible for allowing Ellen to say "Yep, I'm gay" in 1997 (and threatening to quit when the skittish suits said "no"), and put a gay teenager into the Irish-Catholic Real O'Neals (2016-18), so he included some queer coding for two of the boys.  

Apparently viewers found this too skittish, when they could see actual, out gay characters on Modern Family, Riverdale, Will & Grace, and lots of other shows.  And they didn't want to wait around several years for the boys to grow into hunks.  Viewers dipped to 3 million per episode, compared to 9 million for The Conners and 5 for Black-Ish, so after 22 episodes The Kids tanked.

But let's see if any of the guys have turned on the hunkitude, or come out, during the last eight years.

First son Lawrence (Sam Straley) trained to be a priest, but left to help "save the world." And date girls.  

Sam is best known for The Dropout, Welcome to Flatch, and Waiting for the Light to Change.  I don't see any gay content in his work, but he's not married to a lady, so there's real life gay potential.

Second son Eddie (Caleb Foote) has a girlfriend, and disturbs his parents by being s*xually active. 

Caleb Foote is best known as straight Agent Randolph on NCIS: Origins.  He's got a wife.

Third son Francis (Sawyer Barth) is queer-coded.  He joins a church boxing tournament to impress his dad, but can't take it, so Timmy (below) takes over; and "secretly" designs a set for the musical Timmy is starring in. 

Today Sawyer identifies as queer, and uses they/them pronouns.  They and Dylan Pitanza run the Utopia for Losers, a "punk and grunge" company dedicated to performing overlooked plays: so far,  Mud, Pounding Nails into the Floor, and Reasons to be Pretty.

And Crush, written by Christopher Paul Richards (below), with Dylan and a girl on a disastrous first date. I don't know why the promo shows two guys getting intimate.

Fourth son Joey (Christopher Paul Richards) has a plotline about wanting to see "a woman's complete anatomy," but he is "unnerved" by the idea that a girl might be into him, and he's got a three-episode buddy-bond with Davey  (Thomas Barbusca, not shown).

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

Mason McNulty: Kayden's buddy plays a box of candy, a duplicated boy, and Billy the Kid, but is he really gay? With McNulty butts and dicks

 

During the last six months or so, Kayden Koshelev has stopped posting about Alkaio Thiele on his social media, and started chumming up with a guy named Mason McNulty.  A new boyfriend?

Time to do some research.

Mason was born in Southern California in 2005, and began his career at age three months, as a model for ad for the State of Utah.  His on-screen credits begin in 2011, when he voiced Toothbrush on an episode of South Park, and go on to Modern Family, Glee, Teen Wolf, Danger Force, and Pen15.

His "best known for" projects on the IMDB include:

Schooled (2018-20), a spin-off of The Goldbergs, set ten years later, when minor character Lainey Lewis returns to become a music teacher at the William Penn Academy.  The shy, sensitive, gay-coded Toby (Mason) goes out for football, although he isn't very good; the coach tries to steer him into playing Pokemon instead; he dresses as a box of candy in the Halloween parade; he sings in the school choir.  The fan wiki doesn't mention an interest in girls.

And Assimilate (2019).  A teenage girl, her boyfriend (Joel Courtney, left), and her little brother Joey (Mason) fight "doubles" that are replacing their family and friends. And everybody else in the world, leaving only a few scattered survivors left.  As far as I can tell, Joey doesn't express any heterosexual interest.

So far, so good.  But once Mason moves into teenage and adult roles, it's "girls! girls! girls!"    Connor on Love XO, Adrian in Class of 1970, Andreas in After Them. Sam in Deadly Fiance. 

Even in Gacy: Serial Killer Next Door (2024), in which a fictional next door neighbor suspects that Gacy is a serial killer, and is constantly dismissed by the adults.  Most of Gacy's victims are gay, but as far as I can tell, Bobby (Mason) is straight. 

Mason's most recent project is Billy the Kid: Blood and Legend (2026): Sheriff Pat Garrett (Costas Mandylor) hunts his former friend, the legendary outlaw Billy the Kid (Mason).  They "are locked in a deadly game where survival and justice are measured in bullets."  What the heck does that mean?  I'm not into Westerns, but you can tell by the poster that there's a Woman of His Dreams.

In addition to acting, Mason is a singer/songwriter.  I checked two of his music videos: 

"Dust" is about losing the Girl of Your Dreams.

"Lessons of Love" shows two girls rejecting him, explaining what he's doing wrong, and finally agreeing to dates.  The first involves dancing, and the second running hand in hand through grass. 

Dude is straight.

Not to worry, Kayden seems to have moved on to a new guy Elohim Nycalove, who looks like Janet Jackson (I checked: he/him pronouns).  Your parents knew that Elohim is a plural noun, right?

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit

Justin Ellings: Kyle from the awful clown episode of "Modern Family" plays Corey Haim and Sean Giambrone, shows his physique and his d*ck

 

In Modern Family Episode 11.1 (2019), high school vice principal Cam invites a group of "wayward teens" to his house to gain their trust by being the "cool mentor."  Things go wrong when his beloved, awful clown figurine goes missing, and he accuses them of stealing it, horrifying the viewers and his husband Mitchell with his increasingly vituperative insults: "You're trash! You're garbage!  Everyone has given up on you!"   Finally Mitchell can't stand it anymore, and announces that they are innocent: he threw out the figurine because it was incredibly ugly.  

Then Cam comes clean -- the kids are actually the high school drama club, playing wayward teens to force Mitchell to confess.  

I'm not happy with the plotline.  Seeing Cam lash out was rough.  And why would  you destroy something that your husband valued?  Something that was on prominent display in the living room?  But it was worth it to see drama club member Kyle, played by Justin Ellings.

19 years old when he filmed the episode.

A Short Guy, 5'6"  Forget the five feet; tell me more about the six inches. 

Endless beefcake photos on his Instagram and Facebook pages. 

Including one where he squirts.

Interestingly, Justin's official website shows a map of his location (so you can stalk him?).  He's on Cahuenga just north of Lexington, near my old gym in West Hollywood.  Cue the nostalgic reminiscences of my years in the gay mecca.

Justin grew up in Milwaukee, where he starred in The Music Man (2011) and The Sound of Music (2012) at the Skylight Opera Theatre Center.  He graduated from Arrowhead High School at age 16, then moved to L.A. to pursue his acting career.

His first major acting role was on the Nickelodeon teencom Sam & Cat (2013): he played Jarvis, one of the kids that the former ICarly star and her girlfriend babysit.  According to the fan wiki, Jarvis is gay.

I doubt that a Nickelodeon show would have a canonical gay character, but even if it was subtext, it's a great beginning.  Unfortunately, Justin's characters in other tv programs, on Girl Meets World (2015). Game Shakers (2017), American Housewife (2018), and Wandavision (2021), don't appear in the plot synopses. 

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Justin is primarily interested in stunt work.  He has 33 stunting credits listed on the IMDB, including episodes of The Middle, Young Sheldon, 13 Reasons Why (where he was presumably Miles Heizer's butt double), 9-1-1, Stranger Things, and The Fabelmans.

 He was Sean Giambrone's stunt double on 19 episodes of The Goldbergs.

More after the break. Caution: Explicit

Shayne Topp: Nickelodeon teen, Barry's buddy, bodybuilder, sketch comedian who pretends to be gay and have a massive d*ck. We'll see.

 

The Goldbergs (2017-23) was a nostalgic look at showrunner Adam F. Goldberg's childhood experiences in the 1980s, with Sean Giambrone (here being murdered in the shower) as a stand-in for Adam.  I wasn't a fan: most of the experiences involved attempts to meet, impress, or win The Girl of His Dreams.  But it aired in the same block with Speechless and Modern Family, in the days before we went to all-streaming services, so we had no choice but to watch.  

I liked Adam's older brother Barry (Troy Gentile), a muscular wrestler, and in Season 2, the gay-vague hippie-chill Matt (Shayne Topp), who struggles become his friend and join the Jenkintown Posse.  As far as I remember, he never displayed any heterosexual interest, and he had a queer-coded attraction to Barry.

Plus he was exceptionally cute,  and at 5'7", he was a member of the Short Guy Brigade.  Who could ask for anything more of actor Shayne Topp?

How about a muscular physique?

And other parts of interest.

Into tie-up games.

And a reader.

Born in 1991 in Florida, Shayne played the unrequited crush of a Yu'pik girl in Dear Lemon Lima (2009).  He was a regular in the teen variety show So Random (2011-12), and appeared in episodes of ICarly, Henry Danger, Sam & Cat, and Fred: The Show.  He also did some fashion and n*de modeling. But he is best known as a sketch comedian.

More after the break. Caution: Explicit.