Will Buie Jr.: Another Bunk'd hunk shows his stuff, then turns out to be straight. With queer codes, tall grass, daytime divas, and Jake junk

 

When Will Buie Jr. (right) appeared on the my teen idol feed, I noticed right away that he has a buddy and a nice chest. Two good signs.

The first twenty or so photos in his file show him with buddies.  I like how they are in non-revealing outfits, but Will takes any opportunity to show off his chest. 

And his "Pullin" underwear.   You gonna pull it yourself, or do you need a buddy to pull for you?

But lots of straight guys have buddies, and...um...pull things.  Next I'll check Will's acting career for gay or gay-subtext roles.

His on-screen career begins in 2017, when he was ten years old, with the movies   Gifted and The Last Movie Star, episodes of  Red Blooded, and Modern Family, plus a recurring role in Daytime Divas, about five feuding hosts of a morning talk show.  One of the divas is pansexual, and another has an 8-year old trans daughter,  which is a problem for her transphobic husband. Will plays the girl's brother. 

Queer-adjacent.  A good sign.

 McKinley Freeman (left) plays...um..well, who cares?  He's on the show.

In 2018, Will was cast in Bunk'd, a Disney Channel teencom featuring the counselors at a never-ending summer camp.  He continued for 69 episodes (2018-2024) as Finn Sawyer (Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer, get it?). 

LGBT people appear in only one episode of Bunk'd:  In 2023, Camper Winnie gets a visit from her older brother (Jacob Haran) and his boyfriend (Frankie Rodriguez of Chad Powers).  Each reveals that he intends to propose at the camp, but keep it a secret. 

However, Karan Brar (Ravi) came out as bi 2023, and at least three other cast members are gay or probably gay: Luke Busey (Jake), Kevin Quinn (Xander), and Nate Stone, left (Timmy).    

More after the break

A high school boy gives me his underwear

When I was growing up, we visited my parents' home town in northeastern Indiana about twice a year, at Christmastime and during the summer.  My favorite part of the visit was when Grandma announced "Let's go to Fort Wayne!"

When we were very little, Mom and Dad came, too, and when we were older, my baby sister came with us, but for about five yeares it it was just Kenny and me, fighting over who would get to ride "shotgun" in Grandma's brown Chevy Impala as she drove down country roads through Butler Center and Laotto and Huntertown, and finally  Fort Wayne:

The biggest, brightest, most exciting city in the world.

It was unimaginably huge, bigger than Rock Island, Moline, and Davenport put together, and it had the most fascinating places I had ever seen.  There was always something new: a gigantic County Courthouse; a candy factory much nicer than that scary one in the Willy Wonka movie; a Children's Zoo with its own train; an art museum; the history museum at Old City Hall; Kern's Toy Store; a memorial to Johnny Appleseed.

Somehow Grandma always knew where there were a lot of cute boys:  playing basketball in schoolyards, crowded into booths at the soda shop, building snowmen at Lakeside Park,  running around in groups at street fairs.  Sometimes she let us play with them, while she sat on a bench, reading a magazine.

We usually stopped for lunch at the Famous Coney Island on Main Street: hot dogs with chili, cheese, and onions, and steamed buns.   Plus french fries, onion rings, and root beer floats (vanilla ice cream floating in a gigantic mug of root beer).

And a never-ending supply of cute high school boys in white shirts, black pants, and black bow ties who brought out your orders.

On a cold day just before Christmas in fourth grade, we were having lunch at the Coney Island, and my brother and I were rough-housing, stealing fries off each other's plates, shoving each other, and laughing.  Grandma Davis told us to settle down, so I stopped and picked up my root beer float.

Then Kenny shoved me again.  I dropped the heavy mug onto my chest, drenching my shirt with root beer.  More root beer splashed onto my pants, and the clump of melting ice cream fell right onto my lap.

Gross!  Cold and wet!  I pushed it onto the floor.

Kenny laughed and pointed.  "You peed your pants!"  

"Oh, no, you're soaked!" Grandma Davis exclaimed.  She grabbed some napkins and tried to dab me, but the root beer and ice cream had already soaked in.  "You can't ride all the way back to Garrett like this -- it's freezing out!"

A high school boy came running up: short, compact, muscular, with brown hippie-hair and a bright smile.  He was carrying a little pad and pencil.  I don't remember his name, if I ever knew it, so I'll call him Jim.

"Don't worry, Ma'am, I'll take care of your grandson," he said.  "Come on, champ, let's get you cleaned up."

 He took me by the hand and led me past the staring patrons to a little door marked "Employees Only."  Inside it looked like a kitchen, with tables and chairs and a little refrigerator.  There was a bank of lockers on on side, and a rack with a lot of coats hung up on it.

More after the break

"The Treasure of Foggy Mountain": Enough beefcake and queer codes? With dicks and a random Adam Devine butt

 

Please Don't Destroy is a sketch comedy group consisting of  Ben Marshall (left), Martin Herlihy (right), and John Higgins (below), who have graduated from the short films of your dad's generation to TikTok videos.  They were hired to write for Saturday Night Live in 2021, and their first movie just dropped on Peacock: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain.  

It's recommended by Adam Devine, but I'd have to subscribe to Peacock to see it, so I've been checking trailers, synopses, and reviews for gay characters, gay subtexts, and beefcake.

The plot: Like Adam, Anders, and Blake of Workaholics, the three play "themselves" as clueless dudebros who live together, work together, and haven't quite made it to adulthood --  which in movies usually means hetero-romance.  Only Martin has a girlfriend.  

Ben wants to impress his Dad by being a business success, and John is content to play video games and drink beer.  They decide to go on one last adventure, searching for a lost treasure, a bust of Marie Antoinette worth several million dollars. 

On the way, they run afoul of a homicidal hawk (who becomes an ally), greedy park rangers, a gang, a cult, fireworks, fist-fights, and danger.  

Heterosexism:  Martin already has a girlfriend, and John falls in love with one of the cult girls.  As far as I can tell, Ben stays unattached.  

Gay Characters/Subtext: None that I could tell from the plot synopsis or reviews, but Bowen Yang, who plays the head cultist, is gay in real life and plays a lot of gay roles.  

There also might be a queer code in this scene of a communal bath: Martin and Ben are being soaped up by men, and John by a woman.  Or it could be a homophobic joke; it's hard to tell.

Beefcake: The guys are shirtless at least twice. Also, when they are learning to glide off mountaintops, with the help of their hawk buddy, John's suit busts open, and we see his penis swinging around.  

Penises after the break

"Welcome to Plathville": Beefcake and bulges of a hard-core fundamentalist family, including the Boylicious model

 

Welcome to Plathville, originally on TLC but recently streamed to Hulu, is a six-season long reality series about the Plaths: "A strikingly blonde, blue-eyed Quiverfull family with 9 children in Southeastern Georgia, who are very passionate about traditional roles, their courtship rituals, music, God, and domestic life."

Brr.  Sounds too scary.  They must be wildly homophobic, but I imagine that they agreed to appear only if there were no "homosexuals" in the crew, so maybe they won't mention them at all.  Episodes appear to be soap-opera like, with marital problems, career troubles, treks into secular civilization, and lots of clickbait "dark secrets" and "startling revelations."

The elder Plaths belong to the No Greater Joy Ministries, an out-of-the-box fundamentalist cult that, other than hating homos, teaches that women must always be subservient to men -- working outside the home is a major sin, and will turn her into an evil lesbian.  Plus you must beat your children to ensure their subservience -- if you don't, they'll start to talk back and turn gay.

I'm definitely too squeamish to watch, but I'll check the Plaths for fundamentalist beefcake.

The parents, Barry and Kim, have broken up and gotten a divorce.  In my childhood church, that would have gotten them kicked out.

Their oldest child, Ethan,left,  married the outsider Olivia, who works as a photographer.  A woman working outside the home!  Shocking!

They got divorced, also.

Ethan and a buddy at the gym.

Daughter Hosanna refused to appear on the show.  She has left the family, moved to Ohio, and married an outsider.  Shocking revelation!

Daughter Moriah visited San Francisco and had sex with her boyfriend Max Kallschmidt. A dark secret revealed!

 The younger children are Lydia, Isaac, Amber, Cassidy, and Mercy.  

Micah works as a model, which means he has to work with gay people.  Uh-oh, he's doomed. 

Wait -- a model?  He must have some n*de photos out there somewhere.

More after the break.

Aaron Goldenberg: Former fundamentalist, Cousin Karl's boyfriend, Mean Gay. With some underwear bulges.

 

Aaron Goldenberg is an Atlanta based comedian with 41.000 followers on Facebook, 294,000,  on Instagram, and 1.2 million on Tiktok. 

He is best known for his series of "Mean Gays" videos with Jake Jonez: they make snarky comments at your wedding, your baby shower, by the pool, at your dinner party. The "hookup" video, where the Mean Gays invite you over for "some fun" and discover that you're a little older and huskier than your profile photo, has gone viral, with over 4 million views on Twitter and Tiktok.

Well, we've all been there.

The Mean Gays went national in 2024 when they "invaded," or rather hosted, the Razzies, the annual awards for the worst movies and actors of the year.

Aaron also riffs, or rather comments, on his fundamentalist childhood -- hiding in plain sight, parents in denial, friends saying "Hate the sin but love the sinner," coming out to his pastor.  It did not go well.

Aaron has 21 acting and 9 writing credits on the IMBD, beginning in his fundamentalist days with the short "Witnesscylin," about a drug that can help you win souls.  He has played Confused Bellhop in Burn Notice, Emaciated Vampire in So Dark, and the Host of Rap Shit.

He has a scene in Season 3 of The Righteous Gemstones, as Percy the Interior Designer, who is working on the siblings' new executive board room.  Kelvin is nice to him,so I interpreted this as an attempt to form social connections with other LGBT people. 

I was so impressed with Percy that I used him in four fan stories: he has a date with Kelvin during the breakup with Keefe; attends their commitment ceremony; and finally starts dating Cousin Karl Montgomery.  There's even an explicit story about their first night together.

More Percy..um, I mean Aaron..after the break