Showing posts with label heteronormativity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heteronormativity. Show all posts

Hunter Revealed: Does Fred Dryer, the epitome of 1980s macho muscle, have gay photos in his past?


Hunter
(1984-91) starred Fred Dryer as Rick Hunter, a "renegade cop who bends the rules and takes justice into his own hands" (that's like every cop on tv).  He is partnered with the "stunning"  Sgt. McCall (Stefanie Kramer) for cases involving serial killers, gangs, drug dealers, and guys who murder their wives.  Just the thing for the the 1980s, when the rhetoric changed from "let's rehabilitate them" to "lock'em up."  

We didn't watch in West Hollywood, of course.  After Moonlighting, Remington Steele, The Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and Cheers, who wants to see yet another "will they or won't they?" straight-subtext couple? Besides, it aired on Saturday night, for old people moaning about how great life was in the old days, then on Monday opposite Murphy Brown and Designing Women.  Which would you watch?





But we knew about Fred Dryer: 6'6" (enough about the six foot, let's hear about the six inches), brawny, hirsute, with muscles that hardened on the street, not in some sissy gym.  

He grew up in Hawthorne, California, was a football star at Lawndale High and San Diego State, then played for the New York Giants and Los Angeles Rams in a career that lasted for 13 years (1969-81) and won him 104 sacks, 1 pro-bowl, and 1 all-bowl.

Ok, we didn't know all of those details -- I don't even know what a sack is.






We may have seen Dryer when he switched from football to acting, guesting as hunks on Laverne and Shirley (1980),  Lou Grant (1981), CHIPS (1982), and  Hart to Hart (1984).




 Not to mention  four episodes of Chips (1982-87), playing focus character Sam Malone's former teammate on the Boston Red Sox, now a flashy, hetero-horny sports reporter.
















We may even have tuned in to Hunter on occasion, or to Land's End (1995-96), about another renegade cop with a "stunning" partner, just to catch a glimps of Dryer's incredible bulge.

Dryer never played a gay character or expressed the tiniest feminine-coded interest, on screen or in real life.  He scowled and smirked through the world, never doubting for a moment that there were buddies to watch the game with and babes to kiss in the moonlight, that no man in human history had ever wanted to kiss a man.  

Until the nude photo appeared on some of the protypical 1990s nude celebrity websites.










It showed someone who looked like a young Dryer in an early 1960s haircut, showing off his physique and his dick.  Black and white, like  Physique Pictorial and other early gay-coded physique magazines, which just started publishing nudes in 1964. When Dryer was 18 years old.

We were entranced.  The icon of heteronormativity had a gay past.  Or a gay-for-pay past.  

Nitpickers pointed out that this guy doesn't look 18, and his hairstyle is appropriate for the 1950s, not the shaggy hippie 1960s, but tiny details couldn't get in the way of a good story: Fred Dryer was, or had been, one of us.

More after the break

Ryan Masson: Gay actor with one gay role and then "girls! girls! girls!" all the way down. With his d*ck and a bonus Zack Robidas

 


In The Last of Us, Episode 2.4 (2025), some 20 years into the zombie Apocalypse, the Washington Liberation Front ("Wolves') and a death cult called the Seraphites are battling for control of zombie-ravaged Seattle.  Wolf Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) captures  Seraphite Malcolm (Ryan Masson) and tortures him into revealing the location of cult's headquarters.  



It's a brutal scene.  Malcolm is all bloody, so I'm not going to show his face.  But I was interested in his cute little cock.  Maybe we could take a look at Ryan Masson in more aesthetically pleasing roles.










Ryan grew up in Memphis.  He became interested in acting through watching old movies with his grandfather, novelist John Fergus Ryan.

 He played Puck in his middle-school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and a dandy in A Christmas Carol. although he didn't know what a dandy was.  By high school, he knew, and shied away from the theater, thinking it too "feminine."

At the College of Charleston, Ryan majored in biology and minored in French, planning to go to some isolated locale to researched endangered species.  But the acting bug won out over his fear of being "called gay": he starred in Romeo and Juliet (as Romeo) and Child's Play (about a Catholic school where some of the boys are demon-possessed).  

During his senior year, Ryan starred in the weekly webseries Dank Shadows (2011), a parody of the 1960s Gothic soap opera.  His Marolyn Foddard was a reflection of the vampire, werewolf, and Frankenstein-bedevilled heiress Carolyn Stoddard. 


After graduation, Ryan moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts, where he received a MFA in acting in 2015.  

He went home for four episodes of  Feral (2016), which is not about werewolves: it's an angst-drama about LGBTQ friends, like Looking but set in Memphis.   He plays the boyfriend of focus character Billy (Jordan Nichols), who suffers from depression.  I guess he wasn't worried about being "called gay" anymore.

His next starring role was Involution (2018), a Russian movie where "the Earth has been sent out of control, affected by a cruel and inhuman mechanism that turns back Darwin's Theory of Evolution."  I don't know what that means, but Ryan's character gets a girlfriend.


A comedic role, sort of, in the "Thelma and Louise" episode of Good Girls (2019), about three suburban housewives who commit crimes.  One of their husbands is interested in killing crime boss Rio (Manny Montana, top photo), so he hires professional assassins PJ and Tobin (Ryan, Travis Mills).  They turn out to be "not what he expected."  

I'll have to check the episode to see if they are a gay couple.

Nope, they talk about "getting all freaky" with chicks.


Left: When I went through the cast list of Good Girls to see if any of the male actors had n*de photos, this popped up.  It's Zack Robidas, who does not appear on the show.


More after the break

Luke Benward: Fried worms, Disney movies, Christian music, gay friends, a j/o video, and a n*de Cameron Monaghan


How to Eat Fried Worms (Thomas Rockwell, 1973) is one of the classic novels of my childhood: Billy brags that he can eat anything, so when his friend Alan offers him $50 to eat a worm a day for 15 days...  He can prepare them any way he wants, but Alan will provide the worms. The parents are in on the scheme, there is no bullying involved, each of the boys has a buddy-bonding best friend, and the only girl is Billy's sister.  No one wins the Girl of His Dreams.

 Remembering the buddy-bonds and the absence of the heterosexist trajectory, I eagerly tuned in to the Disney Channel version (2006).  But now Billy (Luke Benward) is confronted by a gang of  bullies led by Joe (Adam Hicks), he fors a group of friend instead of a special buddy, and there is a Girl of His Dreams.  

A rather disappointing start to Luke Benward's career.  Let's see if he has redeemed himself since with some gay roles.


According to the IMDB, Luke was born in 1995 in Franklin, Tennesse.  

He first appeared on screen playing Mel Gibson's son in We Were Soldiers (2002).  

The infamous homophobe Mel Gibson?  That's even worse. 

After roles in the revamped Family Affair (2002) and Because of Winn-Dixie (2005), Luke hit Disney gold with Fried Worms (2006).  

His Disney stardom assured, he continued with Mostly Ghostly (2007): A shy boy (Sterling Beaumon) encounters a a ghost boy (Luke) and his sister, who has a crush on him.  He must figure out how they died before it's too late, and win the Girl of His Dreams. 



Left: Luke and Sterling Beamon strangling Miles Heizer.  Neither has actually worked with Miles Heizer.  Maybe they're friends?



Minutemen
(2008): A teen nerd (Luke), his buddy, and the Girl Next Door become time travelers, allowing him to best the obnoxious jock who is dating the Girl of His Dreams. Guess who he ends up with.

Dog Gone (2008): A boy (Luke) rescues a dog from bumbling thieves, bests the school bully (Cameron Monaghan, left),  and wins the Girl of His Dreams.

Things are not looking good for you, Luke Baby.

Let's skip past Girl v Monster and Zombies and Cheerleaders to Luke's first major tv role in Good Luck Charlie (2013).  Charlie is a girl, not a boy, and she doesn't bring good luck; she's the subject of a video diary filmed by her father.  Luke plays Beau Landry, an employee at Bob's Bugs Be Gone who meets, falls in love with, and eventually becomes the boyfriend of Teddy (another girl.  What's with this show?).


Ok, what about Ravenswood (2013-14), a teen mystery series featuring dark secrets in a small town?  Luke plays Dillon Sanders, who is dating focus character Olivia but is secretly plotting to prevent her from discovering the dark secrets.  Oh, and he kills her father.  That sort of ends the relationship.

Cloud 9 (2014): A snowboarder and her obnoxious boyfriend are trained by snowboarding great Will Cloud (Luke).  The boyfriend gets dumped, and...well you know the rest.

Measure of a Man (2018): Dude gets a girlfriend.

Life of the Party (2018): Middle-aged Deanna, newly dumped by her husband, returns to college, and has s*x with a fratboy (Luke), who becomes obsessed with her.  Guess what?  He's the son of the woman Deanna was dumped for. 

I'm tired of this.  Let's see what else Luke has been up to.

He's done some music, such as the theme song for Cloud 9, and he has appeared in the music videos of several other artists, including Martina McBride and Jason Aldean.  


Wait -- he's the son of Christian country-western singer Aaron Benward, shown here with his boyfriend...um, I mean singing partner Scott Reeves -- and the grandson of Christian music producer Jeoffrey Benward.  They have won Dove Awards, and Jeoffrey was inducted into Christian Music Hall of Fame.  Why didn't anyone tell me this before?  Luke Baby is too fundamentalist to play a gay character, and if he's gay in real life, he's got to be extremely closeted.

According to the  Who's Dated Who website, Luke has been in several relationships with women, and is currently dating Ariel Winter (Alex Dumphy on Modern Family).  You know there were gay characters on that show, right?

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.



"Sinners": Twin brothers fight vampires and klansmen in the Mississippi Delta. With Jordan junk and O'Connell cock


For movie night this weekend, we actually went to a movie in a theater, for a change: Sinners (2025), about twin brothers fighting vampires in the Mississippi Delta in 1932.

The first hour is quite naturalistic: Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan in a dual role) return to the Deep Delta from their gangster career in Chicago with a lot of money and Irish booze, buy the old abandoned mill from a klansman who says he's not a klansman, and organize a juke party. We get the sense of the vast emptiness of the cotton fields, and the terror of everyday life for African-Americans in the Jim Crow South.  




You had to be very careful; glance at or speak to a white woman, accidentally bump into a white man, and you would be attacked.  Gay people live with a similar fear -- hold hands with your boyfriend or display a Pride flag, and you could get attacked or killed.  But at least heteronormativity ensures that most gay people are assumed straight, and can keep hidden in the riskiest situations.  Most African-Americans could not.

Left: Michael B. Jordan

The brothers pick up Preacher Boy (Miles Caton), who is torn between the church and the guitar (which his Preacher father calls Satanic).  After he agrees to perform tonight, they split up.  

Stack and Preacher Boy go to town, where they recurit another performer, the elderly, alcoholic Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo).


They hire shopkeeper Bo Chow (Yao) to make up signs and fry the catfish.

Left: Malaysian actor Yao received a MFA from Yale University in 2023.  He played a gay character in #LookatMe (2022).







They pull Cornbread (Omar Miller) from the cotton fields to act as bouncer.

The brothers are so intimate that I was sure that one or both would be gay, but heteronormativity is running rampant.  Both of them, and Preacher Boy, get girlfriends, whom they have s*x with, one after the other.

1. Stack with his ex-girlfriend Mary, who is an octaroon (one-eighth black), so Jim Crow laws still apply to her.

2. Smoke with his estranged wife Annie (Wummi Musaku).  She's rather old , so I thought she was his mother until they started doing things.  

She's also quite butch, so I figured that the actress must be a lesbian. LezWatch says that she is cisgender, unspecified sexual identity, but she has played at least three queer characters.

3. Preacher Boy with Pearline, a married singer.  Fortunately, her husband isn't around. 


It keeps going like that.  Bo Chow has a wife (we learn their favorite s*xual activity).  Cornbread has a pregnant wife.  Delroy Slim isn't married, but discusses the hetero exploits of his youth.

Left: Michael A. Newcomer, who plays a bartender in a white joint, is gay in real life.  






Vampires after the break

Jake Short: Disney's ANT Farm genius plays a lot of girl-crazy teenagers, but his recent social media posts reveal...


Jake Short was born in 1997 in Indianapolis.  After some early roles, he became teencom-famous in ANT Farm (2011-14), a Disney Channel sitcom about a middle school for gifted students (ANT stands for Advanced Natural Talents).  His Fletcher Quinby is an artistic genius, and of course heterosexual, with two girlfriends before the series ends.






This led directly to Mighty Meds (2013-15) with comic book fanboys Oliver and Kaz (Jake, Bradley Steven Perry) discovering a hospital for superheroes, and eventually acquiring superpowers of their own. They have a gay-subtext romance, although each dates girls.








Jeffrey James Lippold, left, played The Crusher in 15 episodes.

In the spin-off Lab Rats: Elite Force (2016-17), they team up with superheroes Bree and Chase.

We can say that the adult Jake appeared in All Night (2018), a tv series about high schoolers locked in the school overnight for a bacchanal involving s*x and other illicit activity.


And Man of the House (2018), about two divorced sisters who move in together, and their son has to learn "what manhood means when he's entirely surrounded by females."  Just grow a pair and make them a lesbian couple.

The First Team (2020), only lasted for six episode, but it's from the BBC, so that may not indicate a failure.  It follows three players in a British Premiere League Football Team (the most prestigious).


In Supercool (2021), Neil (Jake) wishes to be cool enough to talk to the Girl of His Dreams, and the wish comes true, straining the relationship with his bff (Miles G; Harvey).

There's nothing s*xual going on in this scene.







S*x Appeal
(2022) is about a girl who wants to do it a lot of times, so she'll be ready for her long-distance boyfriend, played by Jake.

And that's about it. Not much since 2022.  Jake has been playing golf, running a podcast....

More after the break

Corey Sevier: Dog's best friend, Greek god, Yoga mogul, and shirtless Christmas romcoms. And maybe Peter Brady


You might remember Canadian actor Corey Sevier from the 1997-98 reboot of Lassie.  I never saw it, or the original (1954-74): the melancholy "lost dog" intro is depressing, and who wants to watch a "dog in peril" series?  

I didn't see Summer of the Monkeys (1998), either.  A guy on the Canadian prairie in 1910 adopts four monkeys so he'll have enough money to buy a horse?  Sorry, I went to see Star Trek: Insurrection instead.

Corey's next role of note was Black Sash (2003): a disgraced ex-cop runs a martial arts dojo for teens.  It only lasted for seven episodes.







And North Shore (2004-2005), a Fox sleaze soap opera about women walking around in bikinis at a hotel in Hawaii.  There were some cute guys, too, but this shot will give you an idea of what you had to endure to see them. 

An annoyingly heterosexist entry into young adulthood.





Some minor "show your pecs" roles followed, like Aquaman (2006), with Justin Hartley as the teenager with superpowers, and Surf School (2006), which gives teens who have no surfing experience a week to learn what they need to win the championship.  Say what?







In this shot from Gospel of Deceit (2006), it looks like Corey is in bed with a guy, but the plot synopsis on the IMDB says that a preacher's wife (Alexandra Paul) is having an affair with handyman Cory.

I checked the original movie: It's Alexandra Paul, who uses she/her pronouns.  Lady definitely has a masculine gender presentation: triceps, no breasts, a man's haircut.




The first movie with Corey that I actually saw was The Immortals (2011): I was drawn in by the Greek gods, everyone from Zeus (Luke Evans) to Poseidon (Kellan Lutz).  Corey played Apollo.  Of course, the story was ridiculous, with no connection to any Greek myth.

Left: Matthew G. Taylor as the King's Guard

The IMDB says that Corey is known for Conduct Unbecoming (2011): a soldier is charged with killing civilians in Afghanistan. Of course I wouldn't see that.

In Awaken (2012), Corey meets the Girl of His Deams.  The only problem: she's dead.





And The Northlander (2016), which sounds like Mad Max: crazy-looking people travel through a post-Apocalyptic desert in search of something or other.

Two episodes of Psych: 

Brody, a contestant on a dating game

The model Bryan Frou, who might be gay. A Corey first!

More after the break

Workaholics Episode 4.13: "Do you think the guys having sex upstairs might be gay?" With bonus bear cocks


Workaholics 
Episode 4.13, "Friendship Anniversary," is an excellent illustration of heteronormativity, the assertion that heterosexual desire, behavior, and identity are universal human experience, and LGBT people do not exist, or at least there are none here.   

You ask a new male acquaintance if he has a girlfriend, forgetting that he could be gay or bi.

The teacher tells the class, "If you boys got your minds off girls, you'd get better grades," forgetting that some of them might have their mind on boys.

TV viewers insist that a same-sex pair cannot be gay unless they actually say so on screen.  Otherwise everything they say and do is what heterosexuals say and do. "So they hold hands. Can't a straight guy hold his buddy's hand?"

On to the show. 

The Dude Husbands: After a scene where the guys, Anders, Blake, and Adam, play American Gladiator,  they discover that they have been living together for seven years, so they are "common law husbands."  To celebrate their anniversary, Blake gives them homemade gifts: seashells on Ders' headphones and macaroni on Adam's weight belt, ruining them!  Ders serves horrible Norwegian food hidden in a bait-and-switch KFC box.  They argue, have a food fight, destroy each other's stuff, and criticize Adam's weight: "You're a chubby bitch, as fat as John Candy and not half as cool."  Finally they break up. Everyone leaves the house.

Blake's Night:  Crashing with his work friend, Jillian, Blake has a fun evening planned: beer, listening to the Yin Yang Twins (a rap duo), and "artsin' and craftin'"  But she's engrossed in a dog show on tv (that she is betting a lot of money on).  He makes her a "thanks for letting me stay here" gift, arts-and-crafting her favorite dress, ruining it. Plus he makes fajitas with sour cream, enraging her (that's a little harsh, girl)

Jillian puts him to bed in the bathtub, and when he casually mentions that she is acting crazy, goes ballistic: "We leave the shower on and the lights off."  


Ders' Night:
Apparently he has no credit cards to get a hotel room, and no friends, so Ders tries to sleep in the back seat of his car.  He hears some teens drinking beer at the play station in the park -- after hours!  He tells them to scram, but they just make fun of him, so he gives them an ultimatum: they have to be gone by the time he finishes taking a dump, or he's calling the cops. 

Once he gets into the porta-a-potty, the teenagers knock it over, dousing him with a flood of blue toilet water



Adam's Night:
He goes to a bar to drink and look for friends who won't reject him for being overweight.  It turns out to be a gay bear bar (no one says so, but watch your heteronormativity; how do you know it's not?). He comes on too loud and too strong for the first guys he approaches: "50 beers for my new friends, who I love now!"  When Trevor (Stephen Kramer Glickman) calls him a "rowdy little bear cub," he insists on a full-body bear hug, and accepts an invitation home. Heteronormativity: Adam has no idea that these guys are gay, or that he has agreed to a hook-up.


At home, they go right to bed.  When Trevor presses his hard cock against him, Adam thinks that it's just morning wood, and congratulates the guy for being so virile.  Trevor is about to go downtown, when Adam reveals that he just broke up with a partner of seven years, like a few hours ago.  A rebound hookup would be a bad idea; Trevor announces that he's going to masturbate in the bathroom instead. Heteronormativity again: a guy climbs in bed with you naked and presses his hard cock against you, but same-sex desire does not exist, so you must find a heterosexual explanation.

The guys start texting but change their minds, look for texts from their partners, and are miserable. 


The Rat Catchers: 
The next day, they have cordoned off their cubicle, and aren't speaking to each other, except to brag about how great their nights alone were and criticize their performance as husbands.  They decide to go back to the house, split up the security deposit, and part forever.

Except the house is overrrun with rats.  They have to get rid of them, or they won't get the security deposit back.  They try various gross and unhygeniec strategies which allow each to use his skills: Anders' organizational ability, Blake's arts-and-crafting, and Adam's muscles.  Afterwards, although they are splattered with rat blood and will probably die of rabies, they realize that they enjoyed the adventure, and decide to stay dude husbands. 

More after the break