Max Ehrich: Disney Channel dancer, Dome hacker, gay soap opera teen -- wait, is that a different actor? At least the d*ck is really his

When Max Ehrich (try to type that without adding an "l") appeared on the celebrity penis website, I did some preliminary research, and found that he is gay in real life, dating Connor Paolo, and he played a gay teen on The Young and the Restless.  

So this will be my third profile of a gay soap opera teen.   

Max played Fenmore Baldwin, son of Michael Baldwin and Lauren Fenmore, born in 2006, but turned into a teenager when he took over the role (2012-15).  

Most of his plotline involved drugs:  becoming addicted, stealing drugs from the hospital and spending a month in prison, overdosing and going to rehab.  He was blackmailed into spiking the punch at a party, so everyone would lose consciousness, and Detective Mark Harding (Chris McKenna) could murder Austin, who was having an affair with his niece Summer, and frame her.  

Also Fen is crushing on Summer, so she talks him into a variety of misdeeds, including cyberbullying  Jamie Vernon (not for being gay).  Then, when she starts crushing on Jamie, Fen frames him for theft, is accused of pushing him off the roof, and bullies him into a suicide attempt.

Next Fen's drug dealer, Carmine (Marco Dapper, left), who also happens to be having an affair with his mother, is murdered, and Fen thinks that he did it...

Wait, back up: a crush on Summer?  What happened?  Where is the gay plotline? 

Maybe they meant some other project.  Max begins his career as a Nickelodeon-Disney Channel boy, playing a dancer in High School Musical 3 and Shake It Up, Carly's boyfriend in an episode of ICarly, and CJ's older brother, who gets two girlfriends, in nine episodes of 100 Things to Do Before High School.

In Under the Dome (2013-15), an impenetrable alien dome is lowered over a stereotypic small town. Among the stranded visitors are a lesbian couple, a murderer, and  in Season 2, computer hacker Hunter May (Max).  He gets a girlfriend.

American Princess (2019-20): a mis-titled comedy featuring a girl who abandons her wealthy lifestyle to work at a Renaissance faire.  Max plays her boyfriend. 

Southern Gospel (2023): A "rock n roll star" realizes his childhood dream of becoming a preacher.  Ugh.

It's based on the real-life  Dr. Gary Smith,  who founded the City of Life Church in Kissimmee, Florida. Ugh. 

A Cowboy Christmas Romance (2023): A standard Christmas romcom: lady with a high-pressure career in the Big City spends the holidays in a small town, where she finds love with a cowboy (Adam Senn).  

I don't know which of these guys, if either, is Adam, but Max plays her brother.  The plot synopses on Wikipedia and Decider don't state whether he is gay or not, but presumably not, or there would be massive headlines eveywhere. 

More after the break

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 (left) as Col. Chidozie, who gets sanded to death by the Giant Dog

Alexander Devrient as Col. Ibrahaim, whose muscles are praised by the Doctor (gay 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.

More after the break

The New Doctor Who, Season 2: The gay doctor fights robots and cartoon characters, and gets a girlfriend. With bonus Groff and Projectionist penises

The latest Doctor Who, that  time-and-space faring adventurer from the planet Gallifrey (played by Ncuti Gatwa), is the first to be black, and although there have been bisexual hints in the past, the first to be gay.  In Episode 1.6, he even gets a boyfriend, an interdimensional bounty hunter named Rogue (Jonathhan Groff, left).

At least, he was gay in the first season. 

I watched the first two episodes of Season 2, and I am sorry to report that the gay guy has turned straight.

In Episode 2.1, "The Robot Revolution," the teenage Belinda Chandra receives a gift from her sort-of boyfriend: a star.  It seems that you can "buy" a star and get a certificate stating that it's yours.  They break up soon after.  

17 years pass, and one night gigantic robots arrive to force Belinda to become the queen of "her" planet.  Apparently the certificate was a binding contract.

Left: Robert Strange plays the head robot.

To complicate things, the robots have taken control of the world.  Humans are forced into smiling servitude.  

The Doctor, stranded on the planet for the last six months, is starting a revolt with a squad of hunky humans, including Caleb Hughes and Max Parker, left.  

Soon into the revolt, the Doctor's girlfriend is killed.  Grieving, he explains that when he first arrived on the planet, she took him in and explained the situation.  "She took care of me.  She was wonderful."   The other freedom fighters tell him to buck up, they have a world to save.

The robots announce that Belinda is to marry the great AI Generator, who turns out to be the ex-boyfriend (Jonny Green, left), merged with a machine.  Belinda dumped him due to his controlling behavior, and this is the only way he could think of to get back together again. Maybe send her flowers?

So this was all about heterosexual romance?  They had an episode with an astronaut and his husband.  Two of the Doctor's companions have been lesbians.  How the mighty have fallen.

The Doctor and Belinda save the day.  Belinda asks to be taken home, but his space-and-time ship, the TARDIS, refuses to go to the day she left.  Maybe the next day?

In Episode 1.2, "Lux," some people are watching a movie in 1952 Miami.  Before the main feature, there's a cartoon featuring Mr. Ring-a-Ding, whose catchphrase is "Don't make me laugh!"  While he is busily romancing Sally Sunshine (yes, another hetero-romance), he jumps off the screen to scream at the audience.

Enter the Doctor and Belinda, taking a detour on the way home.  They notice that the theater door is chained, as if there's a wild beast inside.  

More after the break

Dan Shor: Tron, Star Trek, an Excellent Adventure, the South Pacific, and the Butt that Changed the World.

Sometime during the days of Blockbuster Video, we rented Strange Behavior (1981), mainly because the cover blurb said something about Galesburg, Illinois, which is near the Quad Cities. 

We weren't aware that it was written by a gay man (Bill Condon), it stars a gay man (Dan Shor), and it features something that would change movies forever.

It's got a silly plot about a crazed college professor named Dr. Le Sange (Dr. Blood), who mind-controls the town teenagers into blood-crazed monsters.

No Galesburg sites are appear mentioned; Apparently they just picked a random town in the Midwest so there would be cornfields and stereotyped farm folk. It was actually filmed in New Zealand.

The focus character is named Pete Brady, which no doubt caused a lot of eye-rolls and derisive laughs in 1981: Viewers would instantly think of the kid from The Brady Bunch (Christopher Knight, who grew up into a muscle hunk.)

This photo teases a gay-subtext buddy bond between focus character Pete Brady (har har) and Oliver (Marc McClure), but the movie is actually heteronormative, with boy-girl romance all the way down.  

I'd rather date Marc McClure, loveable nerd Jimmy Olsen in Superman (1978).

 And Dan Shor, the guy who plays Pete, is not handsome. He's got a long face, a Romanesque nose, and a lantern jaw.

But none of that is important.

What's important is a scene early in the movie where Pete Brady (har har) and his father (not Mike Brady, darn it) have just gotten up in the morning.  Pete approaches him to discuss something.  Naked.  He then moves toward the shower.  We get an extended shot of his butt.

 

It wasn't the first nude butt on film, but it was the first extended butt shot that wasn't for a comedic purpose.

There is no other nudity, male or female, in the film, not even a shirtless shot.  What was the directorial decision to film Dan Shor nude?

In an interview, Dan said that it was a political act, an acknowledgement of gay potential in the homophobic 1980s. It disrupted the heterosexual male gaze and paved the way for movies to present images of male beauty.

"And it sealed my popularity in West Hollywood," Dan joked.  Or maybe he wasn't joking.

Born in New York in 1956, Dan Shor studied acting in England, then moved to Hollywood, where he landed small parts in some serious, "artistic" movies: Young Studs in an adaption of James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan (1979).

Enoch Emery in an adaption of Flannery O'Conner's Wise Blood (1979).

Eric in the After-School Special The Boy Who Drank Too Much (1980), starring Scott Baio as an alcoholic teenager named Buff Saunders (Buff?).

More after the break

Maxwell Jenkins: The "Lost in Space" guy all grown up, hanging with Kevin Bacon, doing acrobatics, and showing his abs

 

I was surprised to discover that Kevin Bacon's son on The Bondsman (2025) is played by Maxwell Jenkins, Will Robinson on the Lost in Space reboot, all grown up and rather buffed.

Wait -- how did that happen.  Isn't he a little kid?

Time for a profile.

Born in 2005, Max and his sister Samantha grew up performing in the Midnight Circus with their parents, Jeffrey and Julie Jenkins.  A 2017 newspaper article states that they had raised $900,000 for the Chicago Parks

Max still performs on occasion, but his first love is the theater.  He began appearing on camera in the tv series tv series Betrayal (2013-14), about a woman cheating on her husband.  Probably playing her young son.

Then came guest spots on Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, Sensate, Joe Bell, and Family Man.

And Lost in Space (2018-21), a dramatic take on the 1960s camp classic, with many colonists, not just the Robinsons, zapped onto a weird alien planet -- or two or three, as the series progressed.

I didn't actually care for it -- too much angst and agony, and not enough beefcake.

Although Toby Stephens, who played Will's dad John Robinson, has displayed his cock and butt elsewhere.

More after the break

Moises Arias: Rico on "Hannah Montana," grows up to play gay characters and show his bum, but is he actually gay? With a hung O'Hearn

 

In 2006, the Disney channel premiered Hannah Montana, about a teenage girl who is secretly a pop star (just go with it).  Hannah was surrounded by a coterie of hunks and hunkoids, including her father Robby (Billy Ray Cyrus), her brother Jackson (Jason Earle), her buddy Oliver (Mitchell Musso), her crush Jake (Cody Linley) -- and Rico Suave (Moises Arias), the billionaire's son, schemer, and prankster who ran Rico's Surf Shop and various other business enterprises.  

Rico's love/hate relationship with Jackson, his employee and classmate, eventually turned to love: they became best friends.  Maybe they were dating in real life, too.  Or maybe Moises was dating Ryan Ochoa, or Jaiden Smith, Will Smith's nonbinary and probably pansexual child.

By the time the series ended in 2011, Moises had become the best and brightest of the Short Guy Brigade: 5'1", muscular, cute, and "obviously" gay.

After Hannah, Moises concentrated on movies and tv shows with gay subtext buddy-bonds or even LGBTQ characters:

In The Kings of Summer (2013), two teenage boys, including Gabriel Basso (left), and their nonbinary, agendered friend Biaggio (Moises) decide to spend the summer together in the wilderness. 

I didn't see Ender's Game (2013), since it was based on a book by homophobic Orson Scott Card, but the plot synopsis suggests a love-hate relationship between far-future space captain Bonzo Madrid (Moises) and Ender (Asa Butterfield).

The Land (2016) features four teenage boys who want to be skateboard champs.

In Ben-Hur (2016), Moises plays Dismas, a Jewish zealot who tries to kill Pontius Pilate from Ben-Hur's balcony.  The guards arrest Ben-Hur, of course, but he loves Dismas too much to betray him.

In Five Feet Apart (2019), he plays a gay disabled guy who lives in a cystic fibrosis ward and facilitates his buddy's heterosexual romance.

He lives in a post-Apocalyptic vault-community and buddy-bonds with a boy in Fallout (2024).

More Moises after the break

Michael Seater: The "Life with Derek" guy grows up, gets a boyfriend, and displays a Derek dick

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