Giovanni Ribisi: Cute on "Friends," then all dreary, depressing, homophobic art-house movies. At least he shows his d*ck

 


I first saw Giovanni Ribisi on Friends, where he had a recurring role as Phoebe's cute, naive younger brother Frank (1995-2003).  Nice biceps, buddy.

His plotlines were extensively heterosexist -- it was Friends, after all.   Eventually he falls in love with a much older woman (Debra Jo Rupp of That 70s Show), and asks Phoebe to be the surrogate mother for his child.











But the 21-year old actor, son of a talent agent and a musician, had been on screen since he was 9 years old, with recurring roles in The New Leave It to Beaver, Davis Rules, My Two Dads, The Wonder Years, and Family Album, and guest shots practically everywhere.

Here Teddy and Boz (Giovanni, Stephen Dorff) rib their "dateless amigo" Bud Bundy on a 1989 episode of Married With Children. 




As a young adult, Giovanni had a lean, rugged frame and a handsome but quirky face.  I got such a strong gay vibe that I expected a lot of gay characters or subtexts in his work.  Instead, he played a lot of brooding, depressed heterosexuals in art-house movies: 

SubUrbia (1996): a group of teens in small-town Austin, Texas (of all places) experience angst and want to escape.   Nice physique, buddy

Lost Highway (1997):  A neo-noir by David Lynch, so of course it makes no sense.  No men show their stuff, as one expects from Mr. Lynch, but there are lots of lady parts.






First Love, Last Rites (1997): 
Two Generation X-ers, Giovanni and a girl, do bedroom stuff and are bored.  

Nice backside, buddy.

Scotch and Milk (1998): Written, directed, and starring Adam Goldberg: "A brooding self-styled swinger loses himself in booze and night clubbing amongst similar other men. Meanwhile he pines for the woman he really loves."  In spite of the gay tease, there aren't any gay characters.  Giovanni plays his friend.




More after the break

Jay R. Ferguson: The "obviously gay" teen idol of the 1990s moves on to play a 1960s sleazoid and the dad of gay sons. With Jay and Carter cocks


In the early 1990s, I was living in West Hollywood, and completely immersed in the LGBT community.  Media from the Straight World was suspect, if not homophobic than heteronormative, presenting men and women gazing at each other as the meaning of life.  So we chose our television programs carefully. On Monday nights, it was Fresh Prince of Bel Air (Carleton, sigh!), Blossom (Joey Lawrence, sigh!), and Designing Women (drag queen inspiration Suzanne Sugarbaker).  Certainly not Evening Shade (1990-94), with Burt Reynolds as a football coach (ugh!) in a small town (ugh!) in Arkansas (ugh!).

So when this photo of a shirtless, partying young man began appearing on all of the gay celebrity websites, we had no idea who he was. 





The photos kept coming.  We discovered that he was Jay R. Ferguson, who played Taylor, son of Burt Reynolds' character Wood.  Wood?  Really?

 Generally he was swishing it up, as in this iconic photo: apparently saying "Hey, Girl!" in a classic twink outfit, a short top. a bare midriff, and jeans with a club bulge.  Obviously gay!  

In the days when television was entirely heterosexist or homophobic,when even the most flamboyant actor stayed in the closet or saw his career fade away, seeing "one of us" was amazing.  

Unfortunately,the only way to conduct research was to buy a teen magazine -- and the Different Light bookstore on Santa Monica did not stock Tiger Beat.  

The show ended, the photo stream ended, and we forgot about the obviously-gay Jay.  .

For thirty years.


Until 2025, when The Real O'Neils (2016-2018) appeared on Hulu.  A conservative Irish-Catholic family has to deal with a number of problems: Dad wants a divorce; the daughter is an atheist; the oldest son (Matthew Shively) has an eating disorder; the youngest son (Noah Galvin) is gay.  

Yeah, I don't like "gay" being portrayed as a problem, either.  But I like Noah Galvin.

And the hunky dad is played by...Jay R. Ferguson!

Three questions:
1. What has he been doing in the years since Evening Shade?

2. Any nude photos?

3. Is he really gay?



1. What has he been doing?

Jay's first project after Evening Shade was Higher Learning (1995), which is not a teen sex comedy: Omar Epps (left) stars as a student experiencing racism at Columbia University.  But Jay did show us his butt (while sexing a girl).






And an under-the-covers erection, probably a prosthetic.

Next  Jay moved into teen horror (Campfire Tales, 1997),  sex comedy (Pink as the Day She Was Born, 1997), teen angst (Blue Ridge Falls, 1999), and dark secrets (The In Crowd, 2000), before finding his niche in television:

Glory Days (2001-02).  Oddly, it's not about soldiers, it stars Eddie Cahill as a writer who dished the dirt on residents of his home town, and is surprised when he returns to find that they don't like him.  Jay plays the sheriff.


Judging Amy (2003-4), which is not about a judge named Amy.  A woman has problems with her mother, husband, and child.  Jay plays a doctor.

In a 2005 episode of Medium, Allison realizes that her troubled half-brother Michael (Ryan Hurst) has a "secret."   One assumes that it's being gay, but it's actually that he shares her gift of seeing the future.  Jay plays his buddy.  That's as close to a gay character as he gets.

Surface (2005-2006):  Marine biologist Lake (Lake?): her "will they or won't they?" sparring partner, insurance salesman Rich (Jay), and a teenage boy (Carter Jenkins, left, recent photo) discover a "new and dangerous" species of marine life.  This one actually looks interesting.

By the way, Carter, who went on to star in Shadow Diaries, has a j/o video (after the break).

Dylan Everett: The depressed Degrassi teen buddy-bonds with three gay guys, wears tight jeans, joins the army. With a lot of backsides and a Dylan dick.


 I'm not usually into backsides -- I prefer the side with pecs, abs, and beneath-the-belt stuff -- but isn't this the cutest thing?  It belongs to Dylan Everett, then 26, who you probably know as Campbell Saunders on the Canadian teen soap Degrassi: The Next Generation. 









 Cam appears in Season 12 (2012-13) as a "good-hearted, gentle, nice, shy, cool, and sweet" hockey player who rejects an offer of friendship from the gay kid Tristan, for fear of being assumed gay himself, but then apologizes.  They hang out, and he begins dating Tristan's friend Maya.  But anxiety and depression take their toll, and his plot arc ends with suicide.

Born in Toronto in 1995, Dylan began acting in commercials at age ten, and moved into television with The Doodlebops, "the ultimate rock n roll band for kids."   He first played the friend of a gay kid in Breakfast with Scott (2007): a "straight-acting" gay couple (Tom Cavanaugh, Ben Shenkman) become the guardians of a flamboyantly femme boy (Noah Benett).


A lot of teencoms and tv movies followed, notably How to Be Indie (2009-2011): the Indian-Canadian girl has two friends, a teencom standard: Abbie (a girl) and Marlon (Dylan), who according to the fan wiki is "always full of bright ideas," but sometimes annoying.  He wears pants that are so tight, he can't sit down, has a gay-subtext boyfriend, John Lu (Jason Jia), and displays no interest in girls -- obviously gay.  At least until the showrunners decided to queerbait by giving him a girlfriend in Episode 49.




Next the busy teenager simultaneously appeared on
Degrassi
and starred in the teencom Wingin' It (2010-13): To earn his wings,  apprentice angel Porter (Demetrius Joyette) must help outcast high schooler Carl (Dylan) become popular.  I'm not sure how much of an outcast Carl is, since he has the standard teencom two friends, Jane and Alex (Brian Alexander White), but most episodes involve crushing on girls, competing with Porter for girls, asking girls out, and so on.  Apparently popularity means having a girlfriend.


Dylan played Mark-Paul Gosselaer in The Unauthorized "Saved by the Bell" Story (2014), himself in Dylan (2015), the young Dean Winchester in three episodes of Supernatural (2013-15), and a heterosexual teenager in Undercover Grandpa (2017).  

He has a nude scene in All About Who You Know (2019): an aspiring screenwriter tries to meet his idol by arranging a romcom-style romance with the guy's daughter. Or you could just call him.

AusCaps has a scene where his friend Austin (Stephen Joffe) wakes up in bed with a guy, and looks surprised but does not recoil in homophobic horror, so maybe he has a gay plotline.

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

Gideon Gemstone's Secret Life, Part 2: Keefe singing, Jimmy twerking, and Gideon in his underwear



In Part 1, Jimmy Olsen visits the Gemstones at the Lake House to write a story for The Daily Planet, and learns that something happened to Gideon that no one will talk about. On Friday, he interviews Jesse, Amber, Abraham, and Pontius.  It's Saturday morning, time for Kelvin and Keefe.  Then Gideon arrives

Kelvin Gemstone: The Top Christ Following Man

On Saturday morning, Jimmy came downstairs to the staff bustling about, cleaning bedrooms, mopping, vacuuming.  Most of the family had already finished breakfast and scattered to the boat or the swimming pools, but Kelvin and Keefe were still in the breakfast nook.  The youngest of the Gemstones was short, sturdy, muscular, and femme, a Tom of Finland drag queen, married to a long-haired muscleman with a fading “Hail Satan” tattoo visible on his forearm. 

“Good morning!” Kelvin called, flashing the usual Look.  “I hope you got a lot of rest, ‘cause we have a full day planned.”

Jimmy sat next to him.  A waiter jumped forward to fill his coffee cup and hand him the breakfast menu.  He ordered the Denver omelet and sourdough toast. 

“To be honest, after the noise and honking horns of Metropolis, it was hard to sleep in the quiet.”  Especially with his superpower revealing who was going at it at 3 and 4 am.

“Back when I was in Satan’s Baby, we toured in Metropolis a lot,” Keefe said. “I used to be a regular in the gay club scene up there.  Have you been to The Metropolis Eagle?”

Why did Keefe think that Jimmy would be hanging out in gay clubs?  “Your heavy metal past is a story waiting to be told. Maybe I can interview you later?”

He looked down at his mostly-eaten frittata.  “Thanks, but I like to stay out of the spotlight.  I’m the roots of the tree, and Kelvin is the branches.” 

Ok, so he wouldn’t be getting much information from Keefe.  Time to interrogate Kelvin. “So you came out publicly last year, but I’m sure the family knew long before that.  How did you come out to them?”

“Well, I didn’t really need to come out to them – they knew long before I did, back when I was a kid and sneaked peeks at my sister’s teen magazines. It took me forever to figure it out for myself.  I was in denial for years, until…”  He hesitated.  “I guess the kidnapping.”


But that was in 2023.  He had the God Squad, a cadre of bodybuilders living in yurts on his front lawn, in 2022.  How could he not know?

Keefe objected, too: “But we were doing stuff back when we first met, when Gideon and Scotty….” Kelvin shot him a harsh look, and he trailed off.

Obviously Kelvin was trying to control the narrative, present himself as unaware until 2023, so he could claim not to know about Gideon and Scotty….who the heck was Scotty, and what did it have to do with Kelvin?

“Keefe, are you sure you won’t reconsider that interview?  Maybe we can do it while swimming later.  I heard that the Lake House was clothing optional?”'

Keefe flashed the Look and glanced at Kelvin, who nodded his consent.



Kelvin Gemstone is short in stature, but he knows how to Do It Big: with puffy muscles, flamboyant outfits, and a series of revolutionary ministry innovations.  His most recent, a daily reflection for queer youth, averages 200 people in the on-site meeting and over a million views on the Gemstone streaming service, and won him the Top Christ Following Man of the Year Award.  Yet at home he is the quintessential nerd, a quiet, shy guy who collects comic books, plays arcade games with his husband, and can name all of the planets in the “Star Wars” universe.



Keefe Chambers: the Heavy Metal Rocker

City boy Jimmy learned to swim in a public pool, had been rescued from a sinking ship by Beast Boy, and was trembling with fear on the floating dock as Keefe dove into the 200-foot deep water of Lake Murray   (Kelvin stayed behind to do some work with Prism.)  He pulled himself up, rocking the dock – the guy weighed 200 pounds – and climbed up to the slide. 

He paused.  “Aren’t you coming in, Jimmy?” 

“No, thanks -- I’ll just work on my tan.  But I’m enjoying watching you.”  Jimmy hesitated, realizing that it sounded like he was interested – and maybe he was.  The guy was massive everywhere. Of course, he had a semi due to their proximity, but Keefe was bigger with a semi than most guys fully aroused.  He'd definitely need an extra-extra big condom.  If Jimmy was going to accept one of the three-way hints this weekend, it would be with the heavy metal rocker and his husband.

Keefe tumbled down the slide, dove in again, and then lay on the beach towel next to Jimmy – so close that they were touching, of course.  .

“Tell me about how you and Kelvin met,” Jimmy suggested.

He grinned at the memory.  “It was at Charleston Pride 2019.  I was passing out fliers for Baby Queef – my solo act after I quit Satan’s Baby.  Kelvin came to one of my performances, and that was it.  For me, anyway.  It took like three years to convince him that we should be more than sex buddies, and five years to talk him into marrying me.”

Keefe Chambers was on his way to an impressive career – lead singer in a heavy metal band, a solo act as a Satanic comedian, friends with musical giants Ozzie Osborne and Trent Reznor, covers of “It’s Raining Men” and “I’m Coming Out” that charted in France. But he gave it all up to stand in the wings, quietly supporting Kelvin Gemstone, his best friend, boyfriend, and eventually his husband.

“So Charleston Pride, June 2019, right?”  Jimmy fished. "Was that before or after Gideon and Scotty?”

“Gideon came home from California later, after I moved into Kelvin's house.  Maybe in January or February?  Scotty came up a week or so later, and stayed through...well, stayed awhile.”

“A boyfriend?”

“Probably.  I mean, we had them over for dinner, like they were a couple.”

“So Gideon is gay?”

Keefe patted his shoulder. “You'd better ask him yourself.  He likes irises and Greek food.”  He dove into the water again.

If Rev. Gemstone allowed Gideon and his boyfriend to live openly in his house in the spring of 2020, the thing that happened couldn’t be about being gay.  Unless he started homophobic, kicked Gideon out of the house, and somehow the relationship was restored.

More after the break