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

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

Bryce Gheisar: "Wonder" bully, Nickelodeon astronaut, cursed boy's boyfriend, gay Iranian-American Baha'i bodybuilder

Discouraged over the low pageview count of my profile of Nolan Gould -- it was friggin' Nolan Gould!  With a friggin' hard-on!  -- I wanted a sure-fire thousand-page view draw.  Former teen stars always draw the most interest, so I checked on the teen idol site, and found Bryce Gheisar, with over 1,000 photos! 

No idea who he is.  From the name and general appearance, I'm guessing Turkish.  Probably a singer, since singers tend to draw more fan attention than actors.

I usually profile only actors, but he's got a cute face, a very muscular physique....

And he is obviously gay, with lots of photos of hugging, cuddling, and sleeping with guys.

A basic internet search reveals that Bryce was born in 2004 in Plano, Texas (a suburb of Dallas), not Turkey.  His father owned a fitness gym and is now a realtor, his mother runs a chimpanzee refuge, and his older brother is a gymnast.  

They are Iranian-American, and adherents of Bah'ai, a religion founded in Iran in 1844 by the Prophet Bahá’u’lláh.  It teaches the essential unity of all religions and all people. 

Bryce is an actor, best known as Ethan in A Dog's Purpose and Julian in Wonder.

And I haven't even checked the IMDB or his social media yet. Dude is famous.

He bursts onto the screen in 2017, singing the theme song to the new Duck Tales and starring in three movies.

In A Dog's Purpose (2017), a dog is reincarnated several times over five decades, always ending up with Ethan (Bryce as a kid, KJ Apa as a teen, Dennis Quaid as an adult).

Left: Former Archie Andrews KJ Apa in the shower.

In Wonder (2017),  Auggie (Jacob Tremblay), who has a facial anomaly, attends public school, gets a gay-subtext boyfriend  (Noah Jupe), and draws the wrath of bully Julian (Bryce), who eventually has a change of heart and apologizes.  Owen Wilson (left) plays Auggie's Dad.

Bryce reprised the role of Julian in White Bird: A Wonder Story (2024): his grandmother tells him a story about hiding from the Nazis during World War II, and falling in love (with a boy, of course), thus convincing him to try to be a better person. "Heterosexual romance exists, so stop your bullying!"  Auggie does not appear.

Later Bryce starred in The Astronauts, on Nickleodeon (2021-22): Five kids sneak into a spaceship, and it blasts off!  Grround Control can communicate with them, but otherwise they are on their own, with an AI that can't be trusted. Athletic Elliot (Bryce, right) and science nerd Will (Ben Daon, center) compete to become group leader.  No heterosexual romances are mentioned in the episode synopses, so there are probably some gay subtexts.

In Season 2 of the new Are You Afraid of the Dark (2022), Bryce plays Luke McCoy, a high school wrestler and skateboarder.  His best friend Connor (Parker Queenan) is captured by the Shadowman, and Luke enlists the Midnight Society to help rescue him. According to the fan wiki, "it is heavily implied" that the two have romantic feelings for each other.  Don't beat around the bush: they're canon.

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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