Asa Butterfield: A dozen "boy meets girl" movies, a dozen nude photos, and a boyfriend

I keep thinking that Asa Butterfield is American due to his old-fashioned name -- maybe Moravian or Amish -- but he's actually British, born in Islington, 30 minutes by underground from the British Museum.  It has pubs called The Earl of Essex, The Duke of Cambridge, and the Pig and the Butcher.  Can't get more British than that.

He got his start in horribly depressing movies like After Thomas and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, 2007, which of course were on my "run away fast" list.  

Then came Hugo, 2011, a fantasy with an ending that made me cringe -- the photo looks like two boys have the adventure, but it's actually a boy and a girl.  When Hugo announces that he's got a girlfriend, the adults throw confetti, high-five each other, and scream with joy.  That happened to me every time I mentioned a girl, no matter how casually: "A girl in my class did a book report on Finnegan's Wake."  "Hallelujah, he's straight!  He's normal!  We don't have to worry anymore!  Here, have some money and the keys to the car!"

Although it did allow me to get away with anything: "Sorry I left my jacket on the bus.  I was talking to this girl, see..."  "Hah-hah, of course, boys will be boys!  Here, have some money and the keys to the car!"

I didn't see Ender's Game, 2013, because the original novel was written by the horribly homophobic Orson Scott Card, or A Brilliant Young Mind, 2014, because the brilliant young math prodigy gets a brilliant young girlfriend. 

The novel version of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children contains no heterosexual romance, but in the 2016 movie version, there are three of them. It's boys and girls gazing into each other's eyes all the way down. 

Are you noticing a pattern here?

Then Came You, 2018: A boy falls in love with a dying girl. This seems to be quite a trope.  Why do girls never fall in love with dying boys?  Of course I'm not seeing it.

Time Freak, 2018.  At least Asa has a gay-subtext relationship with Skyler Gisondo en route to winning the Girl of His Dreams.

Your Christmas or Mine?, 2022.  Isn't Asa a little young to graduate to Christmas romcoms?

Asa's biggest role to date is in the tv series Sex Education, 2019-23.  He plays Otis, a boy whose mom is a sex therapist, so he and his friends get the idea of opening a clinic to solve teenagers' sex problems. There are some gay characters, but Otis is straight.  And naked a lot.

More after the break. Caution: Explicit

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

"We're Here": Drag queens bring love to homophobic small towns. With bonus small town guys' dicks

When I "figured it out," back in the 1980s, I immediately started looking for a safe place, where you weren't asked "What girl do you like?" every thirty seconds, where your friends wouldn't run away in horror if they found out, where you didn't have to hide all the time.  

Everyone did. They called it The Great Gay Migration: every gay man who could afford it, and many who couldn't, fled from their homophobic small towns to the gay neighborhoods of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York -- that's all we knew about, at first.  Later, some chose smaller gay neighborhoods in Houston, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Montreal, and Toronto.  We went home once a year, maybe, to field questions about the hotness of California girls at Thanksgiving Dinner.

We knew that some LGBT people stayed home, or made the Great Gay Migration, then changed their minds and went back.  We had no idea why.  I still don't, after watching several episodes of We're Here, a reality series where three drag queens sashay down the street in small, redneck towns like Selma, Alabama; Watertown, South Dakota; and St. George, Utah.  I'd be afraid to go near them, even as  cisgender and masculine-presenting.  Establishing shots minimize the horrified looks and screeching about the Book of Leviticus, probably because you have to get the screechers' release: most people seem delighted by the sashaying queens in their dull, colorless town.

The queens teach some of the locals the basics of drag, like how to hide your bulge, and put on a show with them. 

In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, amid the Confederate flags and monuments, they help:

A femme guy who works the makeup counter at the drug store.  His only gay friend in town moved to Philadelphia.  Why didn't you?

A cisgender straight guy who wants to do drag as an ally.

A woman who rejected her daughter when she came out as bisexual -- "I just thought, 'she's going over to the enemy."  Then she found the daughter's diary, and wondered what she did to make the girl consider suicide.  Being rejected by the family, maybe?  She wants to do drag to restore the relationship.

In the immensely Mormon, cowboy-redneck Twin Falls, Idaho, which looks horrible no matter how hard the queens work at finding it quaint, they help:

A queen who can spend months without ever seeing another queer person.

A reformed homophobe -- "I threw the slurs around.  I just thought, 'They're bad people.  Good people don't do that.'"

A transman and his wife. who haven't exactly been rejected by the family -- "Mom came to our wedding, but she wasn't happy about it."

In Christian-central Branson, Missouri, they help:

A Dad who wants to do drag to become more emotionally available to his sick daughter.

Tanner, who came out at age 17.  His mother was completely supportive.  Then he decided that he had to choose God over the "homosexual lifestyle."  She doesn't get it.  He wants to do drag do let Mom know that it's ok, he's going to heaven, so he doesn't need sex or romance on Earth.

Grr -- the second thing I did after "figuring it out" was to find a gay-friendly church, and there was one in my homophobic small town 40 years ago.  Somebody tell this guy that the five "clobber verses" in the Bible have nothing to do with contemporary LGBT people or committed gay relationships, being gay is ok in most mainstream Protestant churches, and 70% of young evangelicals support gay marriage.

More after the break