In the Hand of Dante: Film noir about an original Dante manuscript, set in a 1950s-era 2001. And it gets more confusing. And homophobic

I love the Divine Comedy, at least the Inferno, where Virgil guides Dante through the stages of hell.  He puts the sodomites in the Seventh Circle, where fire rains down on those who "do violence against nature," but at least it permitted me to
mention LGBT people in an Italian class in the 1980s, when otherwise the rule was "Don't mention them, they don't exist."  

So I'm going to watch the new movie In the Hands of Dante, about the discovery of an original Divine Comedy manuscript.  Maybe there will be gay characters, probably not, but I'll still get to hear that beginning phrase again: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura (at the midpoint of life's journey, I found myself lost in a dark forest).

We've all been there.

Scene 1: Dante climbs a rocky cliff.  Meanwhile, sometime in the 1940s or 1950s, an obnoxious novelist (Oscar Isaacs) complains to his friend that his books are too brilliant to be edited. "I'd rather the stableboy f*ck my wife than see my work edited." Heterosexual identity established immediately after his obnoxiousness.

Oscar Isaacs' backside

"So, what's your book about?"

"It's a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. I've been working on it for ten years." 

Friend squeezes his shoulder.  "You're still hot after ten years."  Wait -- are you flirting with him?

" By the way, who is Dante?"  Say what?  Who doesn't know Dante?

"An old dead guy.  But he got trapped in the cage of rhyme and meter.  I'm breaking out, so my translation will be far superior to the original."  The greatest work in Italian literature?  You planning to improve on "Hamlet" next?

Scene 2:  Newark, 1969.  A young boy enters a middle-class house and tells his Uncle, "I just killed some kid."  He explains that the boy (Gavin Weingarten) had a big knife, and asked if he wanted to die.  He tried to defend himself, they struggled, and he managed to stab Knife Boy.  

Since he doesn't know who the boy was, and no one saw them, Uncle says that he should forget about it.  But don't make "malarkey" a habit in the future.  Are you going to grow up to be Our Hero? But you're way too young. That would make the "I'm a better writer than Dante" conversation sometime in the 2000s, and it was obviously in the 1950s.  Maybe Uncle is Our Hero?

Scene 3: Bora Bora, seaside, 2001. Our Hero on a hammock, writing in his notebook about "creamy white gardenia blossoms" and "faded petroglyphs."  So you must be the Boy who killed someone, now middle aged, but it's a parallel world with the look and feel of the 1950s: no computers or cell phones, men wear hats and smoke constantly, writers use pencils. 

Our Hero tells us that the Nine Heavens of the Paradiso is a bad translation; It's really Nine Skies.  The last and rarest of them is the Sky of Illimitibleness.  Or you could say "Endless," if you weren't a pretentious jerk.

Cut to the Young Dante sitting under a tree, looking at the Illimitible Sky.  

Scene 4:  New York, 2001, "That time when the daylight sky was an oppressive, low-lying glare of white, and the dark of night was..."  So, summer.  Is this one of your stories, or really happening in-universe?    A greasy-haired guy named Louie (Gerard Butler, but blond and greasy) saunters into a closed bar and orders a Dewars and water.  He criticizes the bartender's moustache: "You see a guy with a moustache, he's either a cop or a (homophobic slur)."

I expected L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle, the love that moves the sun and the stars, and I'm getting Charles Bukowski, homophobia, and a parallel world where the 1950s never ended. 

"By the way, you ever take it up the ass?" Louie asks.  "Might make a man out of you."  But then he calls him a c*cksucker.  Twice.  Are you homophobic or not, buddy?  

He criticizes the Bartender and his wife for being excessively ugly, and threatens his nine-year old daughter.

Next topic of conversation: the Bartender's Uncle, "a real fuckup," who opened the bar, but pissed his money away gambling.  Wait, is that the Uncle from 1969?  So the Bartender is Our Hero?  But he's supposed to be in Bora Bora, writing pretentious crap.  And the Uncle was elderly in 1969. No way he's alive in 2001.  

Unc owes the gang a lot of money, so his nephew the Bartender is going to provide it.  Louie takes tonight's proceeds, $1,200, then orders the Bartender to go down on him.  But he shoots him as soon as he gets on his knees.

What does this have to do with Dante?

More after the break.  Caution: It gets more confusing, but there are cocks.

Andrew Santino: "Aren't gay guys hilarious? But have you heard what they do in bed?"

Today I started a review of Royal Crackers, an animated series on MAX about a family running a cracker empire.  As usual, I checked to see if any of the actors have beefcake photos or are gay.

Andrew Santino, who plays the washed-up rock star son: About a dozen beefcake photos.

Including a group rear.  Notice that the guy on the left has a cock hanging down.

And a frontal with a sock.

Gay: he's on a list of gay male celebrities, but there are also clips saying "Andrew responds to gay rumors," "I'm not gay no more," "Andrew finds out that he's gay,"  "Andrew's gay lover," "Andrew fails the gay test."

Well, which is it?  Is he gay, ex-gay, straight, bi, pan, straight but pretending to be gay as a joke?

Who is this guy, anyway?'

He appears in Game Over, Man and Adam Devine's House Party, and later interviews Adam on the Whiskey Ginger podcast: "What was your worst review?"

Adam: "I don't really get bad reviews, but sometimes they devote three paragraphs to my dick and only two lines to my acting."

More Andrew after the break. No more Adam, though.

Finn Bennett: Unexpected beefcake in "Backrooms" leads down a rabbit hole of gay teases. With some nude Finns and Whishaw butt

Last weekend we saw Backrooms (2026), which  is not about the backrooms of gay bars where you get down with dudes. Based on a creepypasta, it stars Chiwetel Ejofor as Clark, a struggling furniture store owner and failed architect, who stumbles onto an Upside Down: endless yellow-walled office rooms, most empty, some with piles of melting chairs, bloody clothes, a Christmas tree, a mannikin equipped with a recording in Urdu...and misshapen, half-melted humanoids.

Clark recruits his employee Kat and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), who filmed one of his commercials, to explore with him.  When he knocks on their door, Bobby answers shirtless.

As we have seen with the shirtless parking valets on Suburgatory, unexpected beefcake still has power. .  This screenshot doesn't capture the sudden joy of recognition.  I went home and looked up Finn Bennett.

Preliminary research yielded this photo on his Instagram, with the comment "I'm just a boy who likes to have fun."  I can see that.  

And a Google AI statement that he played a character "implied to be homosexual" in Domina.  

That's enough to start a profile.

I was expecting a recent university graduate with some theatrical experience and a few minor on-screen roles, but it turns out that Finn won the Trophée Chopard at Cannes in 2025, and was named a Star of Tomorrow by Screen International.  

He has his own wikipedia page, and so do his parents:

Ronan Bennett, famous novelist and screenwriter.

Georgina Henry, famous journalist, who died in 2014

Finn was born in December 1999 in Hackney, a rough but rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of East London.  He took acting classes at Stagecoach Performing Arts in Islington, and appeared in a 2013 episode of Top Boy, his dad's show about drugs and gangs in East London.  I know the area very well.

After taking his A-levels in maths, Finn applied to Queen's University, Belfast.  In Britain you have to apply to a field of study, so he found anthropology near the top of the list and figured "that's good enough.  I'll study that."  But then he decided to forego uni altogether in pursuit of an acting career, and worked in pubs and as a landscaper while awaiting his big break.  I'll check the highlights for gay characters:

Four episodes of Liar (2017-20), about a teacher who accuses the guy she went on a date with (Ioan Gruffud) of rape.  He plays Ewen, one of her students.

Left: is that his ear or his dick?

Four episodes of National Treasure: Kiri (2018): A black girl is murdered just as she is about to be adopted by a white family.  He plays Simon, the family's teenage son, a suspect (spoiler alert: he didn't do it).

Hope Gap (2019): A husband and wife announce to their adult son (Josh O'Connell) that they're divorcing.  According to the AI, Mom encounters a young man who has just lost his boyfriend, but I don't know if he is Finn's character.

Finn's big break came with the ancient Roman drama Domina (2021): Livia Drusilla struggles to acquire power, eventually becoming the wife of Gaius (Augustus Caesar).   Marcellus (Finn) is forced to marry Gauis' daughter Julia.  Sorry, AI, he's not just "implied," he has an explicitly sexual realtionship with his slave Aprio (Pedro Leandro).  

The show was criticized for making the only gay character creepy, violent, and "deeply unpleasant." 

More after the break

18 teen idols who grew up to appear nude on screen or post dick pics for fans. Caution: some are homophobic

You crushed on him when you were a kid or a young teen, when you dreamed of nothing more intimate than touching his hand. Then you grew up and moved on to other loves and more erotic fantasies, and he grew up and moved on...to what?   Does he have boyfriends and lovers?  Is he straight but an ally?  Or has he sunk into the slough of homophobic hatred? And, just as important, will he give his old and new fans a glimpse of his beneath-the-belt gifts?

Here are 18 child and teen stars whose grown-up cocks have appeared online, in movies, in photos or videos uploaded for fans, or occasionally through leaks.  I'll also accept photos/videos that may or may not be "really" him, if the face and physique are close enough.  Even a well done artist's interpretation is fine. After all, seeing a cock is always better than not seeing a cock.      

 1. Michael Seater (top photo). The buddy-bonding paranormal investigator went on to "girls! girls! girls!" movies, but is queer in real life and posts several dick pics.

2. Giovanni Ribisi. (left).  He was cute as Phoebe's brother on Friends.  Then he starred in a series of depressing art-house movies, but at least he gets naked on camera.

3. Dan Benson.  Justin's gay-vague buddy on The Wizards of Waverly Place has found a new career, showing his cock and reviewing adult products on OnlyFans.

4. Shane Harper (left)  From Good Luck Charlie to Christian movies, but he shows us his dick anyway.

5. Willie Aames. Scott Baio's buddy (named Buddy) on Charles in Charge swam naked in a Blue Lagoon rip-off called Paradise, before he transformed into the gnarly, dessicated, and fundamentalist Bibleman.

6. Jake Thomas.  Lizzie McGuire's bratty little brother and the snobbish Stickler on Corey in the House has posted a j/o video that never shows his face. 

7. Gavin MacIntosh (left). Connor, the gay kid on The Fosters, grew up to post so many nude photos that it took two profiles to show you the highlights.

8. Drake Bell.  In 2022, the Drake and Josh schemer revealed that sexual abuse from a staff member ruined the show for him and has scarred him for life.  I still posted the photos from the j/o videos he made a couple years ago, but they make me sad.  Maybe you'd rather see his costar Josh Peck's butt.

9. Atticus Mitchell.  My Babysitter's a Vampire, Stonewall, "now I can be who I am," but who is he?  He has several nude and j/o photos online, but he still won't come out.

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit

Proud: A young male model in Poland is gay, sleazy, frequently naked, and not at all proud.

The first episode of the TV series Proud has dropped on HBO MAX: "After a tragedy, a carefree young man must grow up or lose what he has left."  Nothing in the premise or episode synopsis suggests that he is a gay carefree young man, but dropping a show called Proud during Pride Month is a dirty trick if it's gay-free.  So we'll give it a try.   

Scene 1: Shaky hand-held camera follows the back of a Carefree Young Man's head as he walks past blurry people in a room.  They seem to be models waiting for an audition. The casting agent wants them all in underwear.   The Young Man sneaks into the bathroom, takes cocaine, does some push-ups, and heads for his audition.  

Wait -- they said underwear.  He strips, completely nude, explaining "I don't do underwear."

One of the casting agents says it's fine, "The kid's a free spirit."  You just like his cock, buddy.   He starts choking, so the young man gives him Heimlich. 

Scene 2: A blurry club, very dark, very red, very crowded.  Looks like mostly men.  The Young Man does cocaine, is absorbed by gyrating body parts, then follows a group of guys through the kitchen and into the dark room.  Ok, he's gay. And this must be Europe, where every bar has a dark room.  They don't usually put them next to the kitchen,though. 

The dark room is even darker and blurrier than the main club, but I think I see some kissing and rimming. 

Whoops, a girl bursts in and opens the curtains: "Party's over!  Get out!"  

Ulp, this isn't a dark room.  The Young Man invited four guys to an orgy at his sister's apartment!  Does the apartment open directly onto the kitchn of a gay club, or do we have to deal with inept editing as well as inept cinematography?

"I thought you weren't coming back until Monday," the Young Man says in a blurry, drug-addled voice.

"It is Monday, you idiot!"

"Dang, I have a very important meeting today!"

Scene 3:  After kicking the guys out, the Young Man -- Filip -- goes to the kitchen and asks Sis why she's so upset.  "We had an agreement -- no partying in the house! Plus you haven't taken out the trash or done the laundry.  Those are your two jobs!"

"I know.  I've been busy."

She wants him out.  She can't take his lack of responsibility, not doing any chores, always being drunk and high, strange men coming in and out all the time, with her child in the house. The child looks like she's about a year old. 

"But I'm broke."

"Then sell your motorcycle!" 

They argue for awhile.  Sister yells: "You think life is all fun and games, but today is the day you grow up.  Move out by this evening!"  This isn't carefree, it's pathological!

Scene 3: The naked Filip is getting dressed. We may get a brief cock shot, but it's too blurry to see anything.  A guy bangs on the door, asking for his money.  A lady walking down the hall says that she's walking Filip's dog, and he owes 50 zloty ($13) for dog food.  

The guy takes the dog.  Filip yells down after him, but he says "I want my money today!"

Filip pours some vodka into a coke bottle and jumps into a taxi to head to his very important meeting.  But he turns around to sell his motorcycle.

Scene 4: Two guys pick up the motorcycle, insisting that they'll only pay half of what it's worth. Hey, he has four of them!  And he's broke?  Maybe it's the cocaine.  The guy from his very important meeting calls, angry: "Where the hell are you?"

Left: The IMDB lists only Ignacy Liss, who plays Filip, but I found Mateusz Wieclawik in the closing credits.  I don't know who he plays; no one in the show has hair like that.

Filip takes a taxi downtown.  His agent meets him: "You're 45 minutes late!  Everyone is freaking out!  I'm tired of making excuses for you!"  Sort of a jerk, aren't you, Filip Baby?

Uh-oh, the guy he owes money to is there.  Filip pays with the motorcycle money, gets his dog back, and asks if he has any more cocaine.

On to the meeting!  They rush him into makeup, complaining that he reeks of alcohol and "things go better when the models actually show up." 

The makeup lady just got engaged, and her teenage daughter shows up and announces "I'm meeting someone."  This upsets her.  Must be a subplot brewing.

Scene 5: It's one of those daytime talk shows, show, just finishing a segment with an expert on marital conflicts.  Next up: the hosts will show you how to be chic on the beach. They approach the four models.

"Filip  is presenting a beautiful red brief cut."   

Uh-oh, Filip is high: he begins giggling, then throws up, then collapses -- on live tv!  They quickly cut to commercial. 

More after the break.  Spoiler alert: He lives.

The Theater of Dicks: Nick Rutherford and Beck Bennett envision the terror of the penis

 

The Theater of Dicks, on Instagram, consists of 107 photographs with absurdly huge penises painted in.  The authors, Nick Rutherford and Beck Bennett, explain: "We're just two loveless assholes chasing a dream, who have kinda gotten misguided and found themselves making an instagram full of dicks."

You might recognize Nick Rutherford from Saturday Night Live and Adam Devine's House Party.

Beck Bennett has been his comedy partner since college.  They have worked together on a number of projects, including the short film "Is My Roommate Gay?" (he denies it), and Saturday Night Live.   Here we see him nude in Beside Still Waters (2013).

They are both married to women, but Nick's social media is loaded down with images suggesting that he is attracted to men.  Maybe as a joke.

Some of the dicks in The Theater of Dicks are merely absurdly exaggerated version of their own erect cocks.

More after the break

Unchosen: A mysterious stranger seduces a gay fundamentalist and his wife. Plus murder, Nazarene triggers, and Asa's dick

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Nick Stahl: A career of playing scarred, traumatized teens, with being gay as one of the traumas. Plus zombies, DeKay dick, and a glory hole

 In the summer of 2001, everybody in the East Village was talking about Bully, starring 22-year old Nick Stahl.  The South Florida teenager beats his friend Marty (Brad Renfro) until he is unconscious, sexually assaults him, and humiliates him by forcing him to become an entertainer in a gay bar. They even make a porn video to sell at adult bookstores.

 Bobby also rapes Marty's girlfriend Ali, while forcing her to watch gay porn, and when his own girlfriend Lisa announces that she is pregnant with Marty's child, watch out!  The three friends set out to murder him, with the help of Ali's new sex buddy (Michael Pitt).

It was not a pretty movie -- girl parts outnumber boy parts ten to one, and the gay world is portrayed as unfailingly sordid and decadent.  Nevertheless, every gay magazine -- In Touch, XY, The Advocate -- gave it a favorable review as a cautionary tale about the effects of internalized homophobia.  If only Bobby had the guts to come out...

Nick was born in Harlingen, Texas, in 1979 (Texas...ugh!), moved to L.A. in 1992, and was cast in a few small roles before his big break, playing opposite the then-famous Mel Gibson in The Man Without a Face (1993).  The Man and the boy are both gay in the original novel by Isabelle Holland, but straight in the movie.

My Son is Innocent (1996), Eye of God (1997), Promised Land (1997), and Disturbing Behavior (1998) cast Nick as scarred, traumatized, victimized, violent teenagers, leading to Bully.  Afterwards he did a horror movie (Taboo, 2002) and a true crime (Bookies, 2003), but found himself being schtupped by manipulative older women ( In the Bedroom), having sex with men but denying being gay (Twist), or raping and murdering young girls (Sin City). Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) must have come as a welcome relief.

In the Terminator mythos, John Connor manages to save the human world after it is destroyed by a sentient internet, so Arnold Schwarzenegger is sent back in time (naked) to kill him.  In T3, he returns (naked) as an ally, to protect young adult John and his future wife Kate (who is unfortunately engaged to someone else). 

Nick was the second actor to play John Connor.  There have been several others, including Thomas Dekker (left) and Christian Bale.

Carnivale (2023-25) features paranormal beings working in a carnival during the Dust Bowl of Depression-era Oklahoma.  Nick plays Ben Hawkins, a farmer, chain gang fugitive, and healer who joins the carnival and eventually becomes an Avatar of Light.  He's heterosexual, but one of his girlfriends, Sofie, is a lesbian.

Tim DeKay (left) plays Jonesy, who runs the ferris wheel, and Michael J. Anderson, the backwards-talking dwarf on Twin Peaks, his boss, Samson.

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

Aaron Moody: Who has the monster cock, the Nip/Tuck fratboy or the Swindon reserve goal keeper? With two butts and a lot of monster cocks

 

I swear, I did it right this time.  Searching for short videos on the nude celebrity site, I found Aaron Moody displaying an enormous cock.  So big that it was rather shocking, and I've seen a lot of them.

I've been fooled before with videos of non-actors, so I immediately checked the IMDB, and found that Aaron Moody had six acting roles.  His professional resume listed several more.

Ok, we were good to go on a profile.

Aaron was born on December 18, 1979 in Grants Pass, Oregon, in the far south of the state, near the California border.  As a teenager he had starring roles in The Tell Tale Heart, Philadelphia Here I Come, and Twelfth Night.  After graduating from high school in 1998, he moved to Los Angeles, took acting lessons, and started auditioning.

In 2000 his commercial for the Volkswagon Cabrio won a Cleo Award, and hit #48 on the Cosmo list of "Sexiest Stuff Ever."  The guy and his girlfriend drive their Cabrio through the darkness to a house party, where everyone is impressed.

Aaron's tv debut came the same year, on an episode of Crime Strike: a recreation of real-life events where "heroic citizens" used guns to defend themselves against aggressors. Sounds like a validation of the Tough on Crime Movement, which gave the U.S. the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Next came a short, The Truth about Beef Jerky (2002): Count Nugent (a parody of singer Ted Nugent) lures a group of hippies with the promise of a music festival, but he and his right-wing pals are really going to kill the "deviants" and turn them into beef jerky.  

The short is available for streaming on Youtube: Aaron plays the hackey-sack playing Paul, who is eviscerated by Count Nugent's arrows.  

Filmmaker Fritz Junker was definitely on the side of the hippies: "I spent six months researching Nugent's lifestyle. He's a total and complete lunatic."

Aaron's next major on-screen role came in a 2005 episode of the plastic-surgery show Nip/Tuck: Christian is called in to perform emergency surgery on a fraternity hazing ritual gone wrong: Alex (Aaron) and another pledge had their cheeks super-glued to the butt of Derek (Adam Henderschott). 

I went through the entire episode on fast-forward, to see if Aaron returns.  Later Christian (Julian McMahon, top photo) shows his butt, savagely criticizes a guy for being bisexual, says that his girlfriend is "my property" (she agrees), and tells us that "the traditional ways are the best: marriage should consist of one man and one woman."  Holy cow, the guy is a sexist, homophobic bigot. Apparently the show was well known for its homophobia.

In 2006 Aaron played a dialogue replacement actor in John Tucker Must Die and a reporter in Love, Hollywood Style: "four intertwining stories filled with fantasy, set in the entertainment industry on Valentine's Day."  I haven't found a plot synopsis online.

Next came two plays: 

The Speed of Darkness: Two Vietnam veterans have a terrible secret that could destroy their lives (no, it's not being gay).

Thursday: A drama about a lady who lost her leg in the London bombing.

And two short films:

Chope (2007): A young man deals with the death of his mother.

Cessation (2009): Matt (Ben Shields) thinks that he met the Girl of His Dreams, but she turns into a monster.

And "loop group" for Adventures in Appletown (2009), starring Cole and Dylan Sprouse from The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.

The monster cock after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

Elias Harger: the "Fuller House" femme boy, victim of ghosts and maniacal mothers, grows up to date a Jewish champion. With hung Hagenbuch and some twinks

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