"Shrinking": A bizarre shrink, the male gaze, sentient water, and an invisible gay friend. With Segal and Tanner dick

 

I heard that Tim Baltz, who played BJ on The Righteous Gemstones, starred in a sitcom about an inept Shrink, so when we got Apple Plus, I clicked on Shrinking, Episode 1.

Scene 1: Husband and wife, Liz, in bed.  Hey, that's not Tim Baltz.  It might be Ted McGinley, who I last saw on "Married..with Children."   He tells her it's her turn to handle it.  They argue, but she goes -- not to take care of a new baby, har har, but to yell at the next door neighbor.  

He is fully clothed, wiggling his fingers in a bizarre way while two bikini babes frolick in the pool. Heterosexual male gaze, anyone? 

Liz tells him that it's 3:00 am, and he should turn the music off.  But he and the bikini babes are partying with adderall and opioids.  So why aren't you nekkid in the pool with them?

"What about Alice?"  Must be Bizarre Guy's wife.

Scene 2:  Bizarre Guy gets up, goes to his kitchen - full of booze bottles, with a painting of a bikini babe on the wall (ok, ok, you're straight, I get it), and gets yelled at by his sister or daughter. She turns up a photo of Bizarre Guy hugging two women.

Left: I didn't realize it until I checked the IMDB, but Bizarre Guy is played by Jason Segal, and he's the focus character!  I don't know why they decided to fool viewers into thinking that Liz and her husband were the focus characters.  Malicious editors?

He gets into his car, but it's out of gas, so he rides a bike -- badly.  When bikers zoom past him, he invites them to engage in gay sex as an insult. Bizarre Guy is homophobic. 

He ends up at the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Center, where he has an appointment with his shrink, Tim Baltz.

Wait -- Bizarre Guy is the shrink!  But those bizarre finger movements, like he has some kind of psychotic disorder. The doctor is crazier than his patients!

Scene 3:  Bizarre Guy holds his head under the water faucet, then returns to his patients: 

"I hate my mother"

"The barista made me spell 'Dan'"

"I always go out with superficial girls!"

Left: Jason Segal's butt.

"My boyfriend made me go back to fetch my sunglasses, but they were right on my head the whole time.  Then he called me stupid, but he said I had great tits, so he loves me." Great Tits is displaying them very brazenly for the aesthetic pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer.

Bizarre Guy blows up: they've been through this again and again.  If your boyfriend calls you stupid, he doesn't love you.  Besides, he's not that great: "His muscles are too big, and his shirts are too tight. Nobody likes that!"

Forget that gay men exist,  Bizarre Guy?  Or maybe gay men don't exist in this universe, except in slurs.  But obviously Great Tits likes it. 

Left: Big muscles, tight shirt.  Any questions?

"Just leave him!" Bizarre Guy yells.

"Ok."  She goes home to pack her stuff.  That was easy.

Scene 4: Sister/Daughter from Scene 2 is singing a silly song to the water she's pouring (yes, to the water) while old guy Harrison Ford rolls his eyes.  "It's too much water."  She must be volunteering in a nursing home, with Harrison Ford as the cantankerous geezer.  

No, it's the break room at the Cognitive Center.  Sister/Daughter is a fellow shrink, pouring her own water due to her "character quirk" of being health conscious. And thinking that water is sentient.

Bizarre Guy bursts in and confesses that he just told a patient what to do.  They are upset: this is against the rules of shrinking.

"We all know what they should do.  Why not just tell them?"  

"They have to figure it out for themselves."

After they criticize him some more, Bizarre Guy agrees to shrink patients "by the book" from now on.

Scene 5: Bizarre Guy is on his way out, when Sister/Daughter stops to flirt with him.  Ok, not his Sister/Daughter, his Flirtatious Coworker.  But why do the two characters look identical?  .

After flirting, she gives him a referral: young soldier, just back from overseas, keeps assaulting people, and his parents are worried.  What about the victims and the police?  

More after the break. Caution: Explicit.

Jacob Tremblay: Gay sea monster, gay-subtext Miracle, heterosexist Good Boy, Boyfriend. With Brady Noon and n*de dudes

 

You probably saw Luca (2021), the Disney/Pixar animated movie about the friendship between the closeted sea monster boy (Jacob Tremblay) and a human boy named Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer). And you were probably upset when director Enrico Casarosa vehemently denied the possibility of a gay reading of the couple.  "They're kids!  They're much too young to be gay!"   

Got it, Enrico. All boys are born heterosexual, Gay is something that happens in adulthood, after you've tried heterosexual stuff and decided that it is not right for you. Gay is who you invite to your bed,, heterosexual is the Eternal Feminine that draws us to the City of God. 

Yeah, I was unhappy, too.  

But it wasn't the fault of the actors.  I heard that Jack Dylan Grazer and Jason Maybaum (general voices) are gay.  Let's see if Luca himself, Jacob Tremblay, is involve din any gay-friendly projects.

He has 43 acting credits on the IMDB, most long before Luca.  I've never heard of most of them, but there seem to be some interesting gay subtexts here and there:

Gord's Brother (2015): The human Gord and his monster brother (Jack Irvine, Raphael Alejandro) searach for the legendary City of Monsters.  Jacob plays the Young Gord.

Wonder (2017): "The incredibly inspiring and heartwarming story" of a boy with facial differences who goes to school.  How to come up with a title that gives you absolutely no clue to what the movie is about.  

There's a girl -- there's always a girl -- but he makes a male friend (Noah Jupe), too.  

Good Boys (2019): Three six-grade boys skip school to go on an "epic adventure" involving two of them (Jacob, Brady Noon, center, recent photo) trying to win the Girls of Their Dreams (of course).  The third (Keith L. Williams) is a bullying victim who doesn't try to win a girl.  Hey, in a raunchy "coming of age" comedy, I'll take any gay hints I can get.  

Will Forte plays one of the dads.

Left: As of this writing, Brady Noon is 19.  Maybe I'll profile him next.

More Jacob after the break

Matthew Underwood: The "Zoey 101" It-Boy Logan plays himself again and again...and again, posts dick pics. With bonus Noah Beck

 

The internet was all agog over pictures of Matthew Underwood's penis.  I wasn't impressed.  First, the guy doens't even show his face.  Second, he rubs me the wrong way.  I can't quite remember how.

Oh, yeah.  It's that annoying smugness.  It's one thing to be heterosexual -- lots of guys are.  It's another to brag about it.  "I'm so entirely heterosexual, I'm the most heterosexual of all heterosexuals, I can heterosexualize anywhere, anytime.  Every girl wants to be with me, and every guy wants to be me."

It's not just his character: this photo came directly from Matt's Instagram, posted in 2025.

Born in "The Sunshsine State of Florida" in 1990, Matt began acting at the age of eight, and appeared on screen in some guest spots before hitting paydirt in Zoey 101 (2005-08).

Zoey (Jamie Lynn Spears) and her brother Dustin (Paul Butcher) are students at the prestigious Pacific Coast Academy, filmed on location in Malibu instead of on a sound stage.  Her coterie includes:

1. Logan (Matthew Underwood),  the fabulously wealthy son of a famous actor, an it-boy who is basking in the absurdly exaggerated longing of every girl who sees him.  Eventually he settles down with the nerd Quinn (see, looks aren't everything).

2. Chase (Sean Flynn, left), in love with Zoey but trapped in the "friend zone."  Eventually, she realizes that she is in love with him, but then she leaves him again.

2. Michael (Christopher Massey, right), mostly in charge of advising Chase to admit his feelings, although he eventually gets a girlfriend of his own.

Matt reveals that just after Zoey, when he was 19, he was sexually harassed and then assaulted by his agent. The trauma prompted him to move away from Los Angeles and retire from acting.

He returned in 2017 to direct and star in two tv pilots with Sean Flynn, playing themselves: The Magic Studio, about kids who find magic rings, and The Golden Stars, about missing award statues. 

And some shorts: Time Hoppers (2018), Matt and Sebastian Cabanas in silly costumes.

The Alien (2019): Matt (playing himself) and some girls meet a classic grey.

The Unicorn Sisters (2019): Matt helps some grieving girls write poetry. 

Kind of full of yourself, aren't you, Matt?

He appears with some girls in Remi (2021) and with the entire Zoey gang in the Jamie Spears music video Follow Me (2020).

Noah Beck plays an alternative Logan.  No, I don't think that the penis is real.

Matt returned to the Zoey universe in Zoey 102 (2023): A struggling 32 year old film producer, Zoey is asked to be maid of honor at Quinn and Logan's wedding.  It took them 14 years to get married?  She also resolves her feelings for Chase.  After 14 years, he's moved on, girlfriend.

Matt's social media is mostly generic, landscapes, weird jokes, boating, pictures taken with the Zoey gang. He is currently single, his last heterosexual relationship (that he told fans about) in 2015. 

Ready for the cock pics?  #1: Impressive size, but the physique is nondescript, and dude doesn't even show his face.

#2: Full arousal.  This must be from a different session, since he's wearing pants.

3. I censored a silly emoji.

Not bad, but I'd rather see Noah Beck's abs.

See also:  Shane Harper: the "Good Luck Charlie" and "God's Not Dead" guy shows his dick surprisingly often

Nathan Kress, Freddie from ICarly, grown up. Is he still homophobic? Is he still shy about showing his dick?

"Malibu Rescue": Ricardo Hurtado hits the beach for a retro 1980s nerd-jock battle, with bonus lifeguard photos

Overcompensating: Gay college boy wants a hetero bang to prove his worth. With no plot twists but a lot of cute guys.

Ready for another eight-episode autobiographical comedy about the young adult years of a queer comedian?  Ok, let's look at Overcompensating (2025), on Amazon Prime. Episode 1, "Lucky"

Prelude: The preteen Benny pauses and gawks at Brendan Fraser's underwear scene in George of the Jungle (1997, but he's watching a DVD later).  His sleepover friends don't like it, so he pretends that he doesn't either, and switches to Britney Spears singing "Lucky."  A hot lady!  They're all thrilled!

Scene 1: The college freshman Benny, who looks way too old for 18, awakens to athletic trophies and his Mom calling him "My perfect boy."  She means heterosexual, har har.    He climbs out of bed (nice beefcake), announces "I'm Benny, and I love pussy," does push-ups.  Benito Skinner was born in 1993, so this must be around 2011.  

Flashback: football game, prom king, and kissing his boyfriend (Lukas Gage, left who played gay guys in Companion, Dead Boy Detectives, Love Victor, Euphoria, and...well, everything)

Dad (Kyle McLachlan, who played a gay guy in Girls) bursts in wanting to toss a football around. 

Scene 2: Establishing shot of Yates College, no doubt a combination of Yale and Bates, but actually filmed at the University of Toronto.  The show is inspired by Benito's years at Georgetown University.  

Mom and Dad drop Benny off at the same moment that Carmen's parents drop her off. (Carmen is played by queer comedian, Wally Baram).  Her boyfriend  texts: "Sorry about last night. Fell asleep."  She meets giggly, vivacious blond Roommate, who enlists a random hot dad to help them carry their new vanity up to their room. Flirting with men to get what you want?  Carmen is shocked!

Scene 3: Still saying goodbye.  Benny's sister Grace appears with her boyfriend Peter (Adam DiMarco), who does that annoying faux-punch greeting and brags about his summer internship at Hawksworth Financial.  Big deal, I was an intern at Concordia Publishing House.  Grace is upset that Benny will be at the same college, and majoring in business.  He has absolutely no interest in business (secret: no one does.  You major in it to make money.)

"Dad forced me!"

"Only because you never make a choice of your own!"

Cut to Mom in Bennny's dorm room, complaining that she didn't meet his roommate. "He rows crew, so he has crazy hours."  Um...the semester hasn't started yet.  

Hug, hug, whimper, out.  My parents just dropped me off on the curb and said "Bye! See you at Thanksgiving! Or maybe Christmas.  Or...well, we'll call you."

The moment she leaves, Benny grabs his backpack and hustles out of there!  

He passes the table for the LGBT student organization, and stares longingly at the swishy leader (Owen Thiele), but is drawn away by the football of the jock Gabe (Corteon Moore, left, Ellis on From). 

Gabe and his buds note that they are on the football team, and therefore excused from attending all classes permanently.

A girl asks him to take a photo, and the guys howl and congratulate him.  "A hot chick has agreed to have s*x with you!"  Dude, why are you still closeted?  You're at an Ivy League college in 2011!  They have a gay group!  When I was in college, you would be expelled if they found out you were gay. 

He continues to stare longingly at the gay group.  The guys smile and wave, and offer him a free condom. The jocks say that it's ok to take a condom from the gays, since he'll need it for s*x with the hot chick tonight.

Head Gay Owen gives him directions to Freshman Orientation.  Darn, I thought he bolted out for some interesting reason, like that wasn't really his dorm room.  He didn't get the housing deposit in on time, so he'll have to sleep in the library...nope, he was just late.

Scene 4: Benny arrives at Freshman Orientation, ten people cross-legged on the ground, and sits next to Carmen from Scene 2.  Others include Chris (Elias Azimi) and Dean (Charlie Henry Larsen), with the goofy Kevin (Tommy Do) as moderator, almog with the bubbly Courtney and the dour Michelle. 

Whoa, here comes the Boy of His Dreams, walking in slow motion across the quad.  Dream Boy Miles is played by Rish Shah, who played a gay guy in "Torch Song Trilogy" but a straight guy in "Ms. Marvel".

"In college you can be whoever you want to be, so everybody tell the person next to you who you want to be."

Instead, Benny and Carmen give their back stories.  "I'm from Idaho."

"Idaho?  Does anyone actually live in Idaho?"  Bigot.  "Do they have, like, movie theaters? How many of your cousins have you hooked up with?"  That's Kentucky.

But she invites him to a pregame in her dorm room: "A night we won't remember with friends we won't. forgive."

More after the break

Daryl Sabara: Juni grows up, fights cannibals, bikers, and Satanists, and shows his dick, but I'm still depressed

Spy K*ds (2001) stars gay actor Antonio Banderas (left) and Carla Gugino as a husband and wife spy team.  Well, actually, their son and daughter, Juni and Carmen (Daryl Sabara, Alexa Vega), who get swept up in an age-appropriate diabolical plot involving tv host Fegan Floop (Alan Cummings, who is bisexual in real life).   

Although everyone is ostensibly heterosexual, some reviews call the film a queer classic due to the extremely hot Dad -- and Mom, apparently, which led to the "queer awakening" of an entire generation of lesbians; the shy, bullied, gay-coded Juni; the kick-ass Carmen; and the gay-coded villain who turns out to be not all that villainous.

The Banderas dick is just to draw your attention.  This profile features the shy, bullied, gay-coded Daryl Sabara.

There were 3 sequels:

The Island of Lost Dreams (2002) strands Juni and Carmen on a Jules Verne/Dr. Moreau "mysterious island," where they run afoul of a mad scientist creating animal hybrids.  Carmen gets a boyfriend, but Juni remains gay-coded.

I didn't see Game Over (2003) where Juni must venture into a video game to save his sister, but the queer coding ends with him meeting The Girl.  He also meets two guys, video game teammates Ryan Pinkston and Bobby Edner.

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

The 2011 All the Time in the World minimized Juni and Carmen in favor of a new sibling team.  The brother is played by Mason Cook, who would go on to Speechless.

During the Spy franchise, Daryl Sabara appeared in the usual one-shot tv spots: Will and Grace, Fatherhood, House, American Dragon: Jake Long, and so on.

He has a starring role in the animated lion-drama Father of the Pride (2004-05) as Hunter, a shy, anxiety-ridden Lord of the Rings nerd. That is, basically Juni as a lion.  In one episode, his grandfather Sarmoti thinks that he is gay, or as the fan wiki says, "homosexual; but this is absolutely not true."  Rather homophobic, aren't you, fan wiki?

Then things start to go downhill.  In a 2006 episode of Criminal Minds,  Daryl plays a teenager who charges men to watch him do bondage videos.  So he has an OnlyFans site?  The agents convince him that what he is doing constitutes prostitution, and will put him in danger from internet predators.  It is all presented as extremely sleazy, and one can't help but conclude that being gay is always seedy and sordid.  

Normal Adolescent Behavior (2007) is an anti-hookup cautionary tale,with no gay content: three girls and three guys in a friendship group pair off randomly.  Daryl appears as Nathan, who crushes on the mother of one of the girls. Ugh.

Raviv Ullman, formerly Phil of the Future, plays one of the guys in the friendship group.

Next Daryl played Tim Scottson in 7 episodes of Weeds (2005-12), about suburban marijuana growers. He shot his stepmother Nancy Botwin because he assumed that she was responsible for his father's death, but she recovered and hired him as her assistant.

Worst. Prom. Ever. (2011) has Daryl planning the perfect prom for his girlfriend, but when her two friends tag along, things go crazy, with a car crash, armed thugs, Satanists, and an amorous lady biker.

In The Green Inferno (2013), some student activists go to the Peruvian jungle for ecological stuff, and are captured by a cannibal tribe.  

A cannibal tribe?  I thought the "spear-throwing savages" trope went out with Johnny Quest. But at least the guy dragging Daryl toward the cooking pot has nice abs and a basket.

Daryl gets a girlfriend and displays his dick before being eaten.

More Daryl dick after the break

Hank Greenspan: Femme boy plays only straight characters, but is he gay in real life? With bonus Brandon butt and Carlos cock

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Allan Hyde: Roman-era vampire boy with one dude-on-dude kiss and a lot of frontal nudity on Danish tv

 

We're watching True Blood (2008-2014), about vampires coming "out of the coffin" in contemporary Louisiana.  They have a very bureaucratic organization: focus character Sookie is dating Civil War-era vampire Bill, who has to kowtow to the Sheriff of Area 5, Viking-era vampire Eric, who has to kowtow to the much more important Sheriff of Area 9, Dallas, Roman Empire era Godric (Allan Hyde).

Godric turned Eric, back in the day, and since vampires have a permanent erotic bond with their makers, the two lived as lovers for many years.  In the present day, he is a pacifist, pushing for human-vampire equality, and tired of eternal life after 2,000 years, ready to "meet the sun."

Allan Hyde was born in Copenhagen, with an English father and a Danish mother, so most of his 41 acting credits on the IMDB have been in Denmark:

6 episodes of 2900 Happiness, about rich people with scandals.

24 episodes of Juleønsket, about a girl and Christmas magic.

5 episodes of Gidseltagningen, about people being held hostage on the subway.  He really has a lot of range.

You and Me Forever, 2012, centers on a girl-power friendship, but it gives Allan's character a fyr på fyr kiss.  That's dude-on-dude.

This one is on Amazon Prime.

In Sommerin 92, 2015, the Danish football team is competing for the European championship, and Allan is showing his dick.  Not for the last time.

Allan wrote, directed, and starred in Cold Hawaii, 2020, which is not set in Hawaii, but in a Danish seaside community of that name, where two heterosexual couples decide to swap partners and spend 8 episodes getting around to it.

More nudity after the break

Jeff East: Tom Sawyer's boyfriend, Disney teen, young Superman, naked fratboy, Pumpkinhead prey.

If you were young in the 1970s, Sunday night meant either church or The Wonderful World of Disney, countless movies set in the wilderness chopped up into 40-minute segments.  It was dreadful, but at least you got to see a cadre of teenagers personally selected by Walt or Roy Disney to represent "youthful masculinity":  Tommy Kirk, Kurt Russell, Tim Considine, James MacArthur.  

And if you could tell your fundamentalist, "movies are sinful" parents that you were going to the library downtown and sneak into a matinee, you could see Jeff East and Johnny Whitaker playng boyfriends.

Born in 1957 in Kansas City, Jeff had virtually no acting experience when he was chosen from among 1,000 hopefuls in open auditions to play Huckleberry Finn in Tom Sawyer (1973), with Johnny Whitaker as Tom.

They appeared together again in Huckleberry Finn (1974), with a romance that would be impossibly overt today.

Plus they both showed bare chests and bare butts, which would never be permitted today.  

Jeff went on three Wonderful World of Disney movies about big animals.  Disney loved animal stars.

Return of the Big Cat (1974): he has to save his sister from a cougar.

The Flight of the Grey Wolf (1975): he tries to re-introduce a wolf into the wild.  Nobody flies.

The Ghost of Cypress Swamp (1977): he has to save his dog from a panther, and runs afoul of a crazy guy.

This was the era of the big name teen idols like Shawn Cassidy, and a guy who fought panthers couldn't compete.  Jeff got very little attention in the teen magazines.

Jeff moved on to his first "adult" role as a college student who participates in a deadly hazing in The Hazing (1977),  also released as The Case of the Campus Corpse to make it seem like a comedy.  

Again he takes everything off -- he spends about half the movie in nothing but a revealing jockstrap.

Displaying his butt again.

And he has a painfully intense, gay-subtext romance with his costar, fellow college student Charles Martin Smith.

 

Charles Martin Smith's butt in Never Cry Wolf (1983), about a government researcher living with wolves.  

What's with these guys and their wildlife?

More butts after the break

The Binge: Skyler Gisondo's chest, two queer codes, some random naked guys, and a lot of queerbaiting

A review of The Binge (2020) praised the "strong friendship" between the central pair. Strong friendship means gay subtext, right?

So I sat through 20 minutes of a bad 1980s teen nerd comedy until the heteronormativity became overwhelming, then fast-forwarded to places where guys interacted without half-naked girls around.  Strong friendship means gay subtext, right? 

Not so much. Two queer codes, two queerbait characters, and 3,041 exclamations of "girls are the meaning of life!"

The premise: a new Prohibition.  All alcohol and narcotics are banned in the U.S., except one day a year you can have all you want.  This is ridiculous: The logistics of producing and distributing all of that booze would be a nightmare, and narcotics -- usually understood as opiates and opioids -- are very dangerous.  Combine them with booze, and you will die.  And what about the use of opioids as painkillers?  Anyhow, most abused drugs are stimulants like cocaine or hallucinogens like Ecstasy, and have little addiction potential.

The guys: Griffin (Skyler Gisondo. top photo) and Hags (Dexter Darden, right. not what it looks like),  high school seniors, are eligible for their first Binge.  They want to go to a big binge party, because the Girls of Their Dreams will be there, and they can ask them to the prom and then to get married. (To stir things up, Griffin's girl happens to be the daughter of the over-protective Evil Principal).

Most of the movie involves their misadventures in attempting to get there.  Griffin gets his eyebrow shaved off.  They try to resurrect an injured cow, and get squirted with milk (presented as disgusting, although you pour it on your cereal every morning).  There's a ludicrously stupid song-and-dance number that goes on forever and ever.  

The queer codes: The Evil Principal (Vince Vaughn, left), explaining the horrible things that happen to teens who binge, discusses a girl who "found herself on a private plane with twelve Saudi princes, never to be seen again."  Griffin asks Hags if he wants to end up that way: "On a private plane?  Absolutely!", implying that he wouldn't mind being the sex companion for a group of Saudi princes.  But then they begin discussing the Girls of their Dreams.

Near the end of the movie, the guys have broken up.  In a climactic scene, they cross a crowded dance floor to embrace.  That's an "affirming our love" moment.  But then they ask their girls to the prom.

Queerbait #1: They catch a ride with Pompano Mike (Tony Cavalero), who is driving a busload of half-naked girls to the party, but doesn't express any heterosexual desire of his own.

Queerbait #2: Andrew (Eduardo Franco), who acts like a stoner even in the absence of marijuana, doesn't express any heterosexual interest; he tags along on the guys' quest just because he is an outcast at the high school, and wants friends.  Besides, another of Eduardo Franco's characters, Argyle, had a gay-subtext romance with Will Byers in Stranger Things

In a climactic scene, Andrew is arm wrestling with, I think Seb (Esteban Benito).  I was fast forwarding, so I don't know the back story.  He says "I love you!," and Seb responds "I love you. too."  Andrew is elated: "I've been waiting all my life for..."  Psych!  Seb was just trying to distract Andrew so he could win!  That sounds like a gay exchange.

Disillusionment and dicks after the break. Caution: arousal.