Shea Whigham: Cop, gangster, racecar driver, and politician in prison, with two gay/bi subtexts and a nude Colin Farrell bonus.

Born in 1969 in Tallahassee, Florida, Shea Whigham started his career in theater, and broke into tv in 1997 with a guest spot on Ghost Stories.  

A good start, with Tigerland, 2000, a "homoerotic war movie," with Colin Farrell and Matthew Davis falling in gay-subtext love at a training camp for Vietnam War recruits. Shea plays main antagonist Private Wilson, who hates Colin's character and tries to kill him. 

But then things start to go downhill, with lots more soldiers, POWs, cops, sheriffs, and homophobia. 

In  Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006) , Shea's character, Eugene, lives in an afterlife for people who have killed themselves.  Everything is dark and depressing, but otherwise you do the same things you did while alive: eat, sleep, work, fall in love, and go on road trips.  He lives with his parents and brother Kosta, all suicides, of course.  His father, because Kostya was gay.  Kostya, because he was gay.  Two other gay suicides appear.  Geez, does every gay guy kill himself?

Shea continues through movies like Blood Creek, The Fast and the Furious, and The Lincoln Lawyer, and episodes of many tv series, but not a comedy in the lot.  He ended up with a starring role on Boardwalk Empire, 2010-14, about 1930s gangsters, including Lucky Luciano and Al Capone. Shea plays the county sheriff, who is also the younger brother of a crime boss Nucky, played by Steve Buscemi. 

More gangsters, cops, sheriffs, and basically people with guns. Wheelman, 2017, is notable for 286 instances of the f-word, the most in any narrative film.  It stars Frank Grillo as a mob driver who has a lot of bloody problems during one f*king night, including a run-in with Shea's loose-canon Motherf*ker.

As far as I can tell, Shea's first comedy series was Vice Principals (2016-18), featuring Danny McBride as Neal Gamby, a vice principal at a Charleston, South Carolina high school, competing with the other vice principal (Walton Goggins) for the high-prestige principal position.  Shea played the boyfriend of Gamby's ex wife.  

We don't see a gay or gay subtext character again until Small Engine Repair (2021): "the seemingly casual reunion of three old friends at an out-of-the-way repair shop masks a hidden agenda fueled by the arrival of a privileged young frat boy." 

The three old friends are played by Shea Whigham, Jon Bernthal, and John Pollono.  I don't know which have the gay subtexts; the reviews just talk about bromance and "gay jokes."

You'd expect Gaslit (2022) to be set in the Victorian era, but it's actually about the Watergate Scandal, seen through the eyes of peripheral characters.  Shea plays far-right Nixon fan G. Gordon Liddy, who ends up showering and show us his butt in prison.

Shea and Colin dick after the break

Ride Share: Skyler Gisondo's Bar Mitzvah, Beau Mirchoff nude, and Andy Favreau just because

 

Ride Overshare was a nine-episode tv series about a rideshare driver named Morgan (Morgan Philips) getting involved in the lives of his passengers.

 

 Skyler Gisondo appears as Ben in Episode 1.2 (2017), "Lox of Love": Morgan "does a mitzvah for a young boy about to become a young man."  "Mitzvah" just means good deed, but from the description it's obvious that Morgan is getting him to his bar mitzvah on time. 

I haven't been able to find the 4-minute episode, or the series, anywhere online, but does this look like a 13-year old to you?  Skyler was 18 or 19 in 2017.

Skyler's companion, Moishe, is played by Sam Lerner, best known for The Goldbergs.

The internet says that this is Sam nude.  I'm not so sure.

More after the break

"Cruising": Homophobic classic about sin, degradation, and dicks in a doomed gay world. With a nude Mr. Big.

During the 1970s and 1980s, gay men appeared in movies almost exclusively as limp-wristed hairdressers and drag queens with murderous split personalities.  Cruising, 1980, promised something different: gay men with apartments, jobs, and hangouts; and who were masculine, actually super-macho, with muscles, club bulges, and leather chaps.

Sounds like fun, right?  Wrong.

The tv promo said only that Al Pacino would play a cop who "disappears into the darkness," and the theatrical trail showed him putting on makeup, plus men dancing together, and brief flashes of the words "homosexual,"  "violence," "murder," "fear," and "sex").  
The movie wasn't playing in Rock Island, so one cold Saturday my boyfriend Fred and I drove an hour west to the college town of Iowa City to see our first gay movie, ever.

The plot: in sleazy, decadent gay bar, a "homosexual" played by Arnaldo Santana cruises a mysterious stranger.  After discussing what turned them gay, they go home together, where the stranger politely asks the "homosexual," to lie still while he stabs him to death.  Santana complies!

During the 1970s, criminologists often theorized about why gay men would pick up total strangers for sex.  Some said that they were unable to control their "deviant" sexual desires, and others, that they were looking for a quick, easy way to destroy society by "wasting their seed" instead of making a baby. But most said that they felt so guilty over being gay that they wanted to be murdered.

More bar pickups, more murders. There's a gay serial killer out there "targeting his own!"  Police detective Steve Burns (Al Pacino) is asked to go undercover and catch him.  

So he moves into a sleazy apartment in the bad part of town, puts on a leather vest, applies makeup, and goes cruising.

He befriends his next door neighbor (Don Scardino), but runs afoul of Ted's effeminate, histrionic dancer-boyfriend (James Remar).

Occasionally Steve sees his girlfriend, but he becomes less and less interested in her as he is infected by the "gay lifestyle."

More sin, degradation, and dicks after the break