Lenny Rush: Doctor Who's buddy, the Artful Dodger's boyfriend. a gay-vague vampire. With a lot of acting awards and co-star d*cks

In the 2023-24 season of Doctor Who, Episodes 1.7 and 1.8, the time-and-space zapping Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and his latest companion Ruby Sunday visit UNIT, the time-and-space anomaly-investigation agency, to solve two mysteries:

1. Why does an elderly woman pop up in various guises in all of their recent adventures?

2. Ruby's mother left her on a church doorstep on Christmas Day.  They want to go back in time to discover who she is, but the Doctor can't use his regular time-traveling power, for reasons, so they use one of UNIT's experimental devices.

Things go terribly wrong, of course, and they release Sutekh, the Great Beast, the Abomination, the Destroyer, the Bringer of Death, the One Who Waits...who actually looks rather like a giant dog.  He intends to destroy all life in the universe.  Well, it's better than yet another visit from the Dahh-leks.

UNIT is staffed primarily by the Doctor's retired companions, all ladies, but there are a few hunks wandering around: 

Tachia Newall (top photo) as Col. Chidozie, who gets sanded to death by the Giant Dog

Alexander Devrient as Col. Ibrahaim, whose muscles are praised by the Doctor (bisexual this season): "You've been working out!"

 Aneurin Barnard (butt in candlelight, left) as Roger ap Gwillam, who will become the most evil Prime Minister in the history of Britain.  

And a cute kid: Lenny Rush as12-year old super-genius Morris Gibbons, who runs the time-travel device, fights the Giant Dog, gets dusted and resurrected, and after the Dog's demise, invites everyone out to a pizza party.

Lenny was originally cast in Episode 1.1, as one of the sentient babies running an orbiting space nursery, but he was so great that they decided to cut his scene and cast him in this much bigger role.

As of this writing, Lenny is 16 years old and looks a bit younger, so I won't be searching for beefcake or n*de photos.  I'll post some of his co-stars instead.

But at  3'2" he's a perfect addition to the Short Guy Brigade, so I'm going to research the other usual questions of a profile:

1. Has he played any gay characters?

Lenny has 14 acting credits listed on the IMDB, beginning with 4 episodes of the animated Apple Tree House (2018-19) and 7 episodes of The Dumping Ground (2021-22), about children "dumped" in a foster home.

There were two lesbians in The Dumping Ground, but no gay boys.

Dodger (2022-23) featured the Victorian-era pickpocket Artful Dodger (Billy Jenkins, left) and his mentor Fagin (Christopher Eccleston) before their adventures in Dickens' Oliver Twist.  Lenny (right) played Morgan the Crossing Sweeper, the Dodger's gay-subtext boyfriend.

His most significant work to date is in Am I Being Unreasonable (2022-25), a Britcom about a disagreeable lady hiding a dark secret.  Lenny won a BAFTA Best Male Actor award for playing her son, who is also hiding a dark secret (Dustin Demri-Burns played her boyfriend).

More after the break

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