"Pretty Dudes": Gay Asian erasure, Spiderman, a car hookup, and hamburger sex. All in11 minutes. With some pretty nude dudes

 I wanted to know how Carlin James, who is apparently straight, got cast on  Pretty Dudes, a webseries about a group of  gay guys sharing a house in West Hollywood and negotiating life, love, sex, and race.  He appears as CJ in four episodes.

Now the craziness begins. Amazon Prime lists 21 episodes, the IMDB 29, and Wikipedia 39, with different numbering and chronological order. Some titles appear in just one list. Some have been repackaged into other projects. You'll need an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of them all. 

But unless the titles have changed, only one of Carlin's episodes is streaming on Amazon Prime: 1.9, "All American Type."

Above photo: A show about gay guys, and the actors; nude photos are stuck behind paywalls.  So I just googled "Gay Asian actor"

Scene 1:  Hustler Jay (Tae Song) and photographer Zario (Brian Michael Nunez) are playing video games when a shirtless Spiderman approaches, announcing that he has super powers now, and can protect the queens.  How special, girlfriend.

Scene 2: Flashback to the day before. We hear Elijah (Carlin James) saying: "This is going to taste so good in my mouth.  I can't wait to shove it in there."  Psych!  He's talking about a hamburger.  Not a hot dog?

Gregory  (Leo Lam, left) enters from the kitchen and, annoyed, tells him to just eat it, but he continues making sexy sounds.  Wait --according to his page on the IMDB, Carlin plays CJ, but according to the tv series page...heck with it. 

Scene 3: Reality tv confessional room.  Model Sunji  (Yoshi Sudarno, left) confesses that he doesn't understand photographer Zario because he doesn't act gay.  But he'snot normal, so Sunji just tries to be a good friend.

Cut to photographer Zario getting ready for his first job "since the breakup," filming a podcast hosted by artist Kito (Chance Calloway). 

In 2024, Chance published Anatomical Iconography, featuring the Pretty Dudes paying homage to classic male nude art.  It sells for $43 on Amazon.  I had no idea the show as so popular.  How do fans figure out the episode confusion?

Scene 4: Model Sunji cooking shirtless.  He sees a spider and freaks out. 

More after the break

Q-Force: Swishy queen secret agents save the world from Kazakh spies, with bonus Kazakh cocks

I heard that Q-Force, the animated series on Netflix, was horribly homophobic, brashly portraying screaming-queen stereotypes from 50 years ago, girlfriend. So I waited to review an episode until I was in a good mood.  The homophobia would still be annoying, but at least I wouldn't be tempted to smash my tv set.

Wait -- a positive review pointed out that the showrunner, most of the writers, and all of the voice artists playing queer characters are themselves queer. I picked up my jaw from the floor, forced myself to stop yelling "What the f*k," and continued reading: queer people use homophobic stereotypes as a Trojan Horse: the homophobes tune in to get their stereotypes confirmed -- "I told you them nancy boys all think they're girls!" -- but instead get humanized -- "Hey, that nancy boy is a good fighter!"  

Ok, let's take a look:

Scene 1:  2011.  A muscular,  limp-wristed, screaming-queen secret agent is killing people ("Bye, bitch!"), disarming bombs, and throwing rainbow-colored grenades.  The crowd watching cheers. "Best of the best!  He'll be fighting the Taliban!"  

Switch to the secret agent graduation ceremony.  Limp-Wristed Muscle Guy, Steve Maryweather (Sean Hayes), is the valedictorian.  He comes out as gay during his speech ("I want to thank the Marky Mark videos for making me gay." ) I hate it when people say that seeing a hot guy turned them gay.  It convinces homophobes that we all started out straight, but then something "went wrong,," and, of course, if you turned gay, you can turn "back to straight" through conversion therapy.

Everyone recoils in disgust at the gayness revelation, and the headmaster quickly names the straight guy Buck (David Harbour) valedictorian.  Agent Mary was expecting a plum assignment tracking down terrorists or drug lords, but because he is gay, he is assigned to the backwater agency branch in West Hollywood.

Why ON EARTH would anyone name a character Agent Mary, evoking an ancient slur that makes older gay men cringe?

Left: David Harbour's butt

Scene 2:  2021, 10 years later. Agent Mary gets up and exercises, while listening to news stories about all the terrorist activity he could be fighting.  Agent Buck calls to be homophobic.  After 10 years?  Why do you keep harassing the poor guy?

Girlfriend goes to work at the West Hollywood Agency, which is staffed by two butch lesbians and a drag queen.  Role call: butch bodybuilder Agent Deb has designed a flying car; dour Agent Stat has located the Malaysian airplane that went missing several years ago; and drag queen Twink shows off his "old lady" disguse.

In spite of all their expertise, they never get a case, so they all go home, depressed. Agent Deb is quitting the agency to work at Pep Boys.

Scene 3: Agent Mary in his underwear, preening before a mirror. He finds a gray hair!  Ahh, he's old, and he hasn't saved the world yet!  He calls the Deputy Director and asks for a case, but she says that she's powerless. 

A humorous scene with Agent Mary and the naked male-female couple who are staying at his Air B&B.  He maintains his cover by pretending to be an interior designer, but he complains about the homophobia that has kept him from getting...um...an interior design job for ten years.  "Is there a lot of anti-LGBTQ prejudice in the world of West Hollywood interior design?"    

The agents decide to go rogue and find their own cases.  Agent Twink reveals that last night, during her drag act, she met a guy with a briefcase chained to his wrist and a Kazakh tattoo that said "Anarchy will grow from the blood of the uninitiated."   Sounds suspicious! They look up his profile on Grindr.

Cole butt and Kazakh cock after the break. Warning: Explicit

Lee Doud: "I'm Fine," random nude dudes, and anti-Asian prejudice in the gay community

 Lee Doud starred in the Doku series I'm Fine, about some twenty-ish friends looking for love in West Hollywood. I lived in West Hollywood for twelve years, sigh.

He also appeared in Good Trouble, Lucifer, and SWAT, and wrote/produced the documentary series OUTLOUD: Raising Voices   

In 2018, Lee  published The Gay Community's Fear and Loathing of Asian Men Must End" in The Advocate, about his experience as a mixed-race Asian/white guy in Hollywood ("you'll get more roles if you downplay the Asian part) and in the gay community ("So, which half of you is white, har har")..  Guys think that he is Hispanic, and actually lose interest when he tells them that he is part-Asian.  Hookup app profiles regularly say "No Asians.  Not racist, just a preference."

Um...it's a preference because they think that all Asian men have traits that they find undesirable, like being femme,anal bottoms, or having small dicks.  On the flip side, some guys like those traits, and fetishize Asian men. That's the definition of racism.

So let's take a look at some photos that highlight Lee's physique.  

Morning mimosas

Halloween at the Pailhouse.  I miss West Hollywood.

Working out on a pole.

More Lee after the break

Andrew Matarazzo: Gay icon, geographer, werewolf hunter, wacky model. Even his butt pics are a little wacky.

 

I've had some beefcake and nude photos of Andrew Matarazzo in my files for a long time, without knowing who he is or what he's been in.  

When you're hung, what's the difference?

Finally I got around to checking him out on the IMDB: 27 acting credits, including the gay themed Geography Club and West Hollywood Motel, plus guest spots on Girls, Royal Pains, Speechless, Jane the Virgin, and Solar Opposites. 

 He had a seven episode story arc on Teen Wolf as Gabe, a student at Beacon Hills who plays on the lacrosse team and turns out to be a Hunter. His character didn't have much time for relationships, but he did have a gay-subtext buddy bond with Nolan, played by Froy Guttierez.

Andrew appears to be gay in real life, although there weren't any shot of boyfriends on his social media.

Just some nudes and fashion modeling.

More nudes and fashions after the break

"This F*king Town": This f*king gay-free Hollywood. But I included some celebs that I hooked up with...I mean met.

  

Whilc looking at Tony Cavalero's work on the IMDB,  I found This Fucking Town, a TV short about "actors looking for love and work in L.A."   When I lived in West Hollywood, about half my friends were "actors looking for love and work" so I tried to check it out.  But it didn't seem to exist.  Tubi and Roku advertised it, but "content isn't available."  A rave revew made it sound like an entire web series, not just a short, but the links provided led to "content unavailable."

Finally I found it as a movie on Amazon Prime, and rented it out of sheer frustration. It starts out ok, with Mark (Michael Mark Friedman) flexing and Jeremy (Gregory Holt, left) dancing in his underwear, displaying a sizeable bulge. They meet up.  Heading to a party, Jeremy is worried meeting someone new: they always dump him the moment they discover that he has a huge penis.  Really?  

At the party, Jeremy runs into his ex, Caitlin, who thinks all actors are pathetic losers.  She took a witchcraft class and put a spell on him, to ensure that he will never find work (conicidentally, Tony's wife Annie is a magick practitioner).  

Jeremy sneers that her new guy, Brett (Tony Cavalero), is an actor, too, but Caitlin counters that he's a personal trainer.  "So you hold people's feet while they do sit-ups!".  Brett calls him a "dick." and stomps off.

That's all for Tony Cavalero: one word.  

Then the movie turns into a soap opera about heterosexual relationships, with six lengthy kissing scenes amid discussions of auditions and roles.  No more beefcake, and no LGBT people exist. Ugh!

But there are some celebrity bulges and butts after the break.

A date with Kris (who may not be Jeremy Renner's boyfriend) leads to Christopher Atkins' dick

When I was living in West Hollywood in the mid-1990s, my friend Infinite Chazz began dating Kris, a 19-year old baby-faced ginger boy who had been in Los Angeles less than a year, but had already been in some movies and tv shows.

I'm not implying that he was Kristoffer Winters, who would go on to play Zilbor in Dude, Where's My Car (2000) and Clayton Gallagher in Shameless (2011-2012), and who is reputedly the boyfriend of  Jeremy Renner.

This Kris, whoever he was, soon broke up with Infinite Chazz, but we all stayed friends, as one does in gay communities. 

Kris had just landed his first starring role, in what turned out to be a very bad Smokey and the Bandits rip-off called Smoke n Lightnin, about two auto mechanics named, naturally, Smoke and Lightnin (no g), who get involved in a caper involving car chases and girls.

"It's not exactly King Lear," he admitted, "But it could lead to bigger things.  And you'll never guess who my costar is -- Christopher Atkins!  I had such a crush on him when I was a kid!"

We all had a crush on Christopher Atkins when he played a boy growing up on a desert island in The Blue Lagoon (1980) -- a thoroughly heterosexist movie famous for several nude frontal shots of the tanned young actor.

More movies with frontal nudity followed, notably A Night in Heaven (1983), about a male stripper, plus a story arc on Dallas (1983-84).

Christopher's star had waned a bit -- now he appeared mostly in sleazy, low-budget productions like Mortuary Academy and Bandit Goes Country. -- and Smoke and Lightnin.  But what actor wouldn't jump at the chance to work with such an iconic star?

And maybe get a glimpse of the most famous penis of the decade.

It was a low budget movie -- three weeks of shooting at a real auto repair shop in the San Fernando Valley and a house in Mission Viejo, and then off to Florida for two weeks of shooting the Miami locations and car-chase stunts.

One day Kris invited me out to lunch, and to meet Christopher.  I was sort of disappointed -- I didn't expect the lithe, tanned teenager of Blue Lagoon, but the cragginess, long hair, and moustache was a bit too redneck.  If I saw Christopher walking toward me on a dark street, I'd be worried about a gay-bashing.

But he turned out to be very friendly, very gay-positive.  He knew about Infinite Chazz -- even about the nickname "Infinite" -- and asked about the date of Christopher Street West, our Pride Festival, as if he intended to come.

More after the break