Luke Benward: Fried worms, Disney movies, Christian music, gay friends, a j/o video, and a n*de Cameron Monaghan

How to Eat Fried Worms (Thomas Rockwell, 1973) is one of the classic novels of my childhood: Billy brags that he can eat anything, so when his friend Alan offers him $50 to eat a worm a day for 15 days...  He can prepare them any way he wants, but Alan will provide the worms. The parents are in on the scheme, there is no bullying involved, each of the boys has a buddy-bonding best friend, and the only girl is Billy's sister.  No one wins the Girl of His Dreams.

 Remembering the buddy-bonds and the absence of the heterosexist trajectory, I eagerly tuned in to the Disney Channel version (2006).  But now Billy (Luke Benward) is confronted by a gang of  bullies led by Joe (Adam Hicks), he fors a group of friend instead of a special buddy, and there is a Girl of His Dreams.  

A rather disappointing start to Luke Benward's career.  Let's see if he has redeemed himself since with some gay roles.

According to the IMDB, Luke was born in 1995 in Franklin, Tennesse.  

He first appeared on screen playing Mel Gibson's son in We Were Soldiers (2002).  

The infamous homophobe Mel Gibson?  That's even worse. 

After roles in the revamped Family Affair (2002) and Because of Winn-Dixie (2005), Luke hit Disney gold with Fried Worms (2006).  

His Disney stardom assured, he continued with Mostly Ghostly (2007): A shy boy (Sterling Beaumon) encounters a a ghost boy (Luke) and his sister, who has a crush on him.  He must figure out how they died before it's too late, and win the Girl of His Dreams. 

Left: Luke and Sterling Beamon strangling Miles Heizer.  Neither has actually worked with Miles Heizer.  Maybe they're friends?

Minutemen (2008): A teen nerd (Luke), his buddy, and the Girl Next Door become time travelers, allowing him to best the obnoxious jock who is dating the Girl of His Dreams. Guess who he ends up with.

Dog Gone (2008): A boy (Luke) rescues a dog from bumbling thieves, bests the school bully (Cameron Monaghan, left),  and wins the Girl of His Dreams.

Things are not looking good for you, Luke Baby.

Let's skip past Girl v Monster and Zombies and Cheerleaders to Luke's first major tv role in Good Luck Charlie (2013).  Charlie is a girl, not a boy, and she doesn't bring good luck; she's the subject of a video diary filmed by her father.  Luke plays Beau Landry, an employee at Bob's Bugs Be Gone who meets, falls in love with, and eventually becomes the boyfriend of Teddy (another girl.  What's with this show?).

Ok, what about Ravenswood (2013-14), a teen mystery series featuring dark secrets in a small town?  Luke plays Dillon Sanders, who is dating focus character Olivia but is secretly plotting to prevent her from discovering the dark secrets.  Oh, and he kills her father.  That sort of ends the relationship.

Cloud 9 (2014): A snowboarder and her obnoxious boyfriend are trained by snowboarding great Will Cloud (Luke).  The boyfriend gets dumped, and...well you know the rest.

Measure of a Man (2018): Dude gets a girlfriend.

Life of the Party (2018): Middle-aged Deanna, newly dumped by her husband, returns to college, and has s*x with a fratboy (Luke), who becomes obsessed with her.  Guess what?  He's the son of the woman Deanna was dumped for. 

I'm tired of this.  Let's see what else Luke has been up to.

He's done some music, such as the theme song for Cloud 9, and he has appeared in the music videos of several other artists, including Martina McBride and Jason Aldean.  

Wait -- he's the son of Christian country-western singer Aaron Benward, shown here with his boyfriend...um, I mean singing partner Scott Reeves -- and the grandson of Christian music producer Jeoffrey Benward.  They have won Dove Awards, and Jeoffrey was inducted into Christian Music Hall of Fame.  Why didn't anyone tell me this before?  Luke Baby is too fundamentalist to play a gay character, and if he's gay in real life, he's got to be extremely closeted.

According to the  Who's Dated Who website, Luke has been in several relationships with women, and is currently dating Ariel Winter (Alex Dumphy on Modern Family).  You know there were gay characters on that show, right?

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

Riley Polanski: From Xanadu to Silverlake, with n*de photos and bonus Michael J. Fox

Instagram recommended another guy I never heard of: Riley Polanski.  Be sure to include the -n, or you'll get a lot of ladies.  I checked the IMDB to make sure he's an actor.  But before looking at his work, let's check his Instagram to see if he is gay.

Over 150 posts, a lot of muscle-shots (nice swimmer's build), architecture, design, music. No girl-hugging in the first 100 or so, unless you look very carefully: notice the girl in the top photo on the far left, and just behind him next to the handbags in this photo.  

Nicely decorated apartment, but if you look carefully, you'll see a framed 1960 ad from Christian Dior, with a swimsuit lady in the forground.

The last 50 posts display girl-hugging all the way down.

And no guy-hugging. This looks promising, but Riley states that this is his best friend, not a boyfriend, and they're at the Hotel Cafe on Cahuenga, just south of Hollywood Boulevard, near the famous corner of Hollywood and Vine: one of the more heterosexual parts of Los Angeles, a good three miles from the border of West Hollywood.  Dudes are straight.

I pieced together a biography from the IMDB, Backstage, Facebook, and Linkedin.  Riley was born in Pomona, California in 2000, and started acting when he was 10 years old: the Western 6- Guns (2010),  starring 1980s staples Barry Van Dyke and Greg Evigan; Airline Disaster (2011), starring former Family Ties cast members Meredith Baxter-Birney and Scott Valentine; Baseball, Dennis, & the French (2011). 

Left:  In case you are interested, the first celebrity I met when I moved to Los Angeles was Michael J. Fox, who played Alex on "Family Ties."

We just had lunch, but I told my friends that it was an energetic hookup.

  

When he was a teenager, Riley had to put his career on hold due to "family illness." He still performed, in Mulan at the Claremont United Methodist Church (2015) and Xanadu at Claremont High School (2017), and he won second place at the California State Thesbian Festival.

He graduated from Claremont High in 2018 and enrolled in Pasadena City College.  During the next two years, Riley worked as a production assistant on You're the Worst, with Stephen Schneider, and did a lot of acting, primarily in student films:

Worthless Words (USC): "A world where your words are controlled."

The Cup (St. Mary's University MFA): Two aspiring actors encounter a 1920s flapper.

Paz (Chapman University MFA): An abused girl finds strength in a spiritual connection.

Alice In/Somnia (2020): a girl in the Sleep waiting room has to deal with bureacracy.

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

Gemstones Episode 4.3: Keefe does stuff with the Devil, Vance is homophobic, and Kelvin is doomed

 

Title: "To Grieve Like the Rest of Men Who Have No Hope," 1 Thessalonians 4.13.  Paul is telling his followers not to grieve "like men who have no hope," since they will see their loved ones again in heaven.

Kelvin Screams: 2002.  During a thunderstorm, an intruder breaks into the house, smashes a photo of Eli and Aimee-Leigh and some other memorabilia, and takes the gold-plated Bible from the Civil War.  Close up of a destroyed framed magazine cover promising "Hot Gossip" and featuring Brendan Fraser.

The intruder continues into the playroom and smashes a photo of the siblings and Kelvin's army men.  There's a muscle man in skimpy underwear, denoting that Kelvin is gay.

He lifts up the bed to find a hiding 12-year old Kelvin, who screams.  Notice the enclosed space. They will appear often in the episode, giving the viewer a sense of disquiet. The family is trapped.

Night Sweats: Kelvin awakens screaming from a nightmare.   Keefe notes that his nocturnal terrors and night sweats are getting worse, and uses a towel to daub him, but Kelvin insists that it was just a nightmare, and goes back to sleep. I'm worried about the night sweats -- when I was living in West Hollywood, it was the first sign that you were HIV positive -- but surely they don't mean that Kelvin is sick.  

Doing Stuff with the Devil, Part 1: Kelvin hates storms; it's like the Devil is peeing on you.  Keefe agrees, with a amazing monologue about the Devil pouring down his piss on people, who think it's a wine cooler or kombucha, and drink it.  He looks out into the storm and says "Your hot sorcery piss can't hurt us in here. Begone, Devil"  but the Dark Lord is already inside: Keefe has a no-hands orgasm.  

Doing Stuff with the Devil, Part 2:  Looks like that devil is Lori.  She finishes having sex with Eli in the bathroom -- another enclosed space -- and tells him "You're so bad!"  She is tempting him to evil, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

Then they go out to a family picnic.  We meet Lori's son Corey (Seann William Scott, top photo), who used to spend time with the siblings and thinks that their squabbling is hilarious, and his ditzy wife Jana (Arden Myrin).  

Left: a parody Sean Playdude cover.

The scene seems to be mostly ad-libbed cinéma vérité, allowing us to see the Gemstones in a moments of joy before things go very wrong.  Some takeaways:

1. No airport or shopping mall wanted to buy the Prayer Pods, so Jesse is humiliated. 

2. Keefe says that on Gay Reddit, they're called "squirt yurts."  This is the first time he has said "gay."

3. They make fun of Eli for being too old and uncool to attract women, but Lori defends him: "Looks pretty cool to me."  

Later, the siblings and Corey see Eli and Lori together, and laugh at the idea that they could be involved.

The Last Safe Space: On the way home, Keefe imagines Kelvin winning the Top Christian Man award by default, with all of the other nominees dead, weird.

They see that Kelvin's childhood treehouse is being demolished.  The Groundskeeper (Brian Sides) says that it was damaged heavily in the storm, and it's unstable, but Kelvin insists that they don't touch it. Another safe space gone.  

Left: Michael Rooker, who appears in the cast list of the episode.  We don't know who he is playing. Yet. 

Left: the Groundskeeper's butt.  Or at least the butt you get when you search for "Brian Sides" and "nude."

Burning Down the House:  In the board room, Jesse is mentoring Gideon by demonstrating church management.  His Leadership Team enters: the usual crew (Gregory, Levi, Chad, Matthew), plus Martin.  

Bad news: Vance Simkins, one of the antagonists from Season 3, is back, opening a  new church in a mini-mall right next to a Gemstone satellite church.  

Chad suggests burning Vance's church down, but Jesse is trying to be a role model for Gideon, so he takes Martin's suggestion: the siblings could perform at the satellite church, to ensure that members don't defect. 

More after the break

Sylvester Stallone: Nude photos of Rocky, Rambo, Estelle Getty's son, Kurt Russel's boyfriend, and the Italian Stallion

 As Rocky and Rambo, Sylvester Stallone defined the gung-ho cowboy 1980s, singlehandedly defeating the Russian army and winning the Vietnam War.  

His grunting, snarling man-mountains didn't have a lot of sex scenes, but they did manage to get stripped out of their clothes by various cops, prison guards, and torturers.  Here Rambo is fumigated in prison in First Blood (1982).

Tortured in a loincloth in Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985)

During the 1990s and 2000s, Stallone often got naked while playing grunting man-mountains or parodies of them, as in the cop buddy gay-subtext Tango and Cash (1989).  The guy on the left is his gay-subtext buddy, Kurt Russell.

Or Stop, or My Mom will Shoot (1992), with Estelle Getty as the Mom.  Imagine, Rambo and Dorothy of The Golden Girls as siblings.

But to see the Full Monte, we have to go back to 1970.  

Stallone dick after the break. Warning: it gets explicit.