The Jonas Brothers: I wanna be like you

 

The Jonas Brothers, consisting of Nick (born 1992), Joe (born 1989, left), and Kevin (born 1987), were already popular performers, recording several albums and appearing on MTV, the Cartoon Network, and Nickelodeon --  not to mention the White House -- before Disney took notice around 2006.

But after that the group was a Disney Channel juggernaut, recording new versions of movie classics like "I Want to Be Like You" (from The Jungle Book), appearing on Hannah Montana and Camp Rock, and finally getting two tv series of their own, The Jonas Brothers: Living the Dream (2008-2010) and Jonas (2009-2010).

That didn't keep them from releasing new songs: 14 singles and 16 music videos between 2005 and 2010, plus two more in 2013.

And from releasing beefcake photos.  Like Justin Bieber, they drew the special interest of fans looking for random arousal.  Joe seemed especially vulnerable; his moments were tagged "joners."

Like most boy bands, their lyrics were heterosexist, with lots of "girl! girl! girl!"  But some dropped pronouns.  And their version of  "I Wanna Be Like You"  sounds decidedly homoerotic:

What I desire is man's red fire
To make my dream come true
Give me the secret, mancub
Clue me what to do
Give me the power of man's red flower
So I can be like you

I wouldn't mind getting a little of that power of man's red flower myself.

The brothers are gay allies.   In an interview with The Advocate in 2012, Nick (left) noted that they loved their gay fans: "They’ve been incredible over the years. My brothers and I totally look forward to meeting them, because they really respond to our style."

In 2013 they appeared on the cover of Out magazine.

Their boy band days are long past, but Jonas Brothers are stil performing together.  Joe has also embarked on a solo career, and appeared as himself in tv shows like Dash and Lily and The Righteous Gemstones.

Joe nude, sort of, after the break

Theo James: Why is he naked all the time, and has he done anything gay-positive?

 

In White Lotus Season 2, Cameron and Ethan (Theo James, Will Sharpe) and their wives visit the Italian resort, and start flirting with every woman in sight, plus each other. In Episode 4, Cameron even says "I want to be inside you.  I want to do stuff to you."  But it is just queerbaiting; the two never lock lips.  In fact, they hate each other.

You could probably figure that White Lotus, well known for its shocking homophobia, would never portray an actual gay romance.  After all, it was created and written by Mike White, aka The Devil. 

But Theo James is not personally homophobic; he has been interviewed an a dozen gay magazines, he wants to play a gay action-adventure hero, and he was in the running to play gay pop star George Michael.  Let's check his previous work for gay roles.

The Time Traveler's Wife (2022) features (straight) lovers stymied by the guy's frequent involuntary time slips.  Heterosexuals all the way down, although it does give us some nice rear and frontal nudity.

Sanditon (2019-22) is an adaption of a novel that Jane Austen left unfinished at her death in 1817. There is actually a gay character, outed in the second season. Theo plays Sidney Parker, whom focus character Charlotte love/hates with the "He's arrogant!" trope.  

In the animated Castlevania (2018-21), Theo plays Hector, whose plot is propelled by that horribly cliched Dead Wife Trope.  

Archive (2020)?  Another guy with a Dead Wife, who he tries to recreate with an android.  Yawn.  I'm beginning to think that it will be tired cliches as well as heterosexuals  all the way down.  Are the butts and dicks worth the trouble?

Lying and Stealing (2019)? Caper romance between two thieves.

How it Ends (2018)?  "In the midst of an Apocalypse, a man struggles to reach his pregnant fiance, who is a thousand miles away." That's actually the motive behind about half of the characters on The Walking Dead: "I'm looking for my wife!"

Before The White Lotus, Theo was most famous for the Divergent series, four movies set in a teen dystopia where people are classified according to their primary virtue: Candor, Dauntless, Erudite, Abnegation, and Amity.  He plays Four, a Dauntless instructor who romances focus character Beatrice. 

Ok, let's try Theo's future projects.  In the upcoming The Gentleman (2024), he plays Eddie Halsted, who inherits his father's estate without realizing that it is the front for a drug empire.  And he...falls in love...with...

I give up.

Bonus: Theo dick after the break

Alex Saxon: From fundamentalist Missouri to ace and trans roles to androgynous teen angst hunk. With his n*de older brother

A new Righteous Gemstones character has appeared in the Episode 4.1 cast list, Alex Saxon as "Thaddeus," no doubt a Civil War guy.

According to Alex Saxon's biography on the IMDB, he was born in  1987 in Liberty, Missouri, 15 miles north of Kansas City, began acting in the theater at age 8.

A femme appearance, in the theater, and living in Liberty, Missouri.  I can't imagine how terrible the bullying was.

He sang, danced, and sometimes acted in Bye Bye Birdie, Jekyll& Hyde: The Musical, Grease, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and The Breakfast Club Live

After high school, he enrolled at William Jewell College as a pre-med major, but then changed to Psychology and Applied Critical Thought, with a minor in Chemistry.  He graduated magna cum laude in 2009.

The William Jewell College in Liberty is affiliated with the Baptist Church, so I imagine that it's not at all gay friendly. 

He hit Los Angeles in 2011, and began acting for the screen:

A vampire guy at the Big Dance in an episode of Awkward (2011).

The Olivia Experiment (2012): A woman suspects that she is asexual, so she accepts a friend's offer of sex with her own boyfriend to find out.  That is wrong on so many levels.  You know whether you're into sex or not without actually having it.  That's like the people who ask "How do you know you don't like sex with women unless you've tried it?"  Easy...look at a woman, and ask yourself "Do you want to have sex with her?"

Alex plays a member of the Asexual Support Group, where Olivia is informed that she's not really asexual, she's just afraid to open up to intimacy.  

Young Paul Holt in Chapman (2013), which seems to be a Western.

Young Henry Bird in The Advocates (2013), which seems to be about lawyers

Chloe in two episodes of Ray Donovan (2013-2015): a "transvestite" hooker who is blackmailing movie star Tommy (Austin Nichols) to get money for "a sex change."  What is this, 1975?  The vocabulary is all wrong.  Transgender people don't get "sex changes," they transition.

Coin Heist (2017), about four teens -- "the hacker, the slacker, the athlete, and the perfect student," who scheme to steal from the U.S. Mint.  Alex, with relatively short hair, plays the Slacker, who is the ex-boyfriend of the Perfect Student (a girl, of course) and falls in love with the Hacker (a girl, of course).  Not to worry, the Perfect Student hooks up with the Athlete (a boy, of course), so everything is all tied up into a nice little heteronormative package.

Then it's back to long hair for 28 episodes of the teen angst series The Fosters (2013-18), as Callie's on-off boyfriend

36 episodes of the teen angst series Finding Carter (2014-15) as the on-off boyfriend of Carter's sister.

10 episodes of The Fix (2019) as the stepson of Sevvy Johnson (Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje), an actor accused of murdering two of his girlfriends.  He assaults his father, gets into fights, and does other deviant stuff while dating girls.

62 episodes of Nancy Drew(2019-23), as a drug-addled outsider who becomes one of the teen sleuth's scoobies and dates girls.

An episode of Criminal Minds as Pete Bailey, younger brother of the murdered Deputy Director Doug Bailey (Nicholas D'Agosto, left).

Noticing a pattern in Alex's screen presence? Long hair, soft, feminine, gay-coded in spite of his characters' endless series of girlfriends.

He doesn't have Instagram, and his X just promotes his tv series, so his personal life is up for speculation.  LezWatch calls him cisgender heterosexual, but that may just be default.

Could he be gay in real life?

More after the break

Caleb Ruminer: From fundamentalist Arkansas to angst drama, softcore straight porn, j/o videos, and gay teases

 

In the teen drama Finding Carter (2014-2015), 16-year old Carter (Kathryn Prescott) discovers that the woman she thinks of as her mother actually kidnapped her when she was three.  She is reunited with her birth family, and must juggle the standard high school "boyfriends! fashion!  mean girls!" drama with soap opera angst: kidnapping, insanity, sexual assault, cancer, drug abuse, murder, "shocking revelations," and "dark secrets."

She has two potential boyfriends, the violent drug dealer Crash (Caleb Ruminer) and the kind, gentle Max (Alex Saxon). 

There are two lesbian characters, Madison and Bird, who face extensive homophobia, go through extensive angst, and date Max before figuring "it" out. 

I've already done a profile of Alex Saxon, so this is about Caleb Ruminer,  which is hard to type without it sounding dirty.  It means "someone who ruminates," fixates on negative thoughts.

Caleb was born in Cabot, Arkansas, about 25 miles north of Little Rock.   Ulp.

He found his passion for acting while singing in church, appearing in church plays, and so on. Ulp.

After graduating from high school, he attended the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, AMDA, in Los Angeles, for two years. Then dropped out because they were too liberal?

His first acting gig was an 2013 episode of Castle, as the brother of a teenager who would grow up to be on death row.

Then came the unyielding angst of Finding Carter 

In a 2014 interview in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (wait -- there are Democrats in Arkansas?), Caleb talks about a struggle with being a Christian and playing a bad dude.  But, he figures, the bad dude is never praised for committing sins, so it's ok.  He found a church in Los Angeles where they talk about how you can be Christian and an actor.  

Ulp.  Doubtless there's some (a lot) of homophobia in Caleb's background.

But some penises, too (after the break)

After Carter, Caleb starred in Lethal Seduction (2015), which is what it sounds like: teenager Caleb is seduced by his cougar neighbor, who influences him to do  a lot of deviant stuff.  His mother is also in love with him, so the two psychos have an increasingly violent tug-of-war with Caleb in the middle. Plus he has a teen girlfriend and a best buddy (Sam Lerner, right)

Sam Lerner is best known as Geoff Schwartz on The Goldbergs (2014-23). Here he chills with some very gifted homies.

Next Caleb had guest spots on:

Episode 1.5 of The World According to Billy Potwin (2018), about a far-right anti-vax 13-year old in a family of liberals. Like Family Ties? 

Episode 1.1 of Strange Ones (2018): "Two enigmatic travelers make their way across a remote landscape," facing paranormal peril. First up: an abused high school girl conjures a demon.  Wait, a movie entitled The Strange Ones and a tv series called Strange Ones both premiered in 2018.  I may be mixing them up.

Episode 2.3 of Dirty John: Betty Broderick (2020), a true-crime show about the woman who murdered her ex-husband (Christian Slater) and his new wife in 1989.  "Betty takes a desperate step to save her marriage."

Episode 1.1 of The Irrational (2023): A professor (Jesse L. Martin, left) uses his knowledge of human nature to solve murders.  His roommate and best friend is a queer woman.

Caleb's character is a former Marine suffering from PTSD and alcohol abuse.  Figures.

Dude, try a comedy.  They aren't that bad.

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit