Rick Gomez: What has Endless Mike of "Pete & Pete" been doing lately? Is Steve Zahn his boyfriend? Is he really endless? With Rick d*ck

Remember this?

Hey smilin' strange
You're lookin' happily deranged
Can you settle to shoot me?
Or have you picked your target yet

It's the theme song of The Adventures of Pete and Pete (1991-95), the first of the Nickelodeon "adults are insane" teencoms.  Two brothers, both named Pete, negotiate the weirdness of the city of Wellsville, where no one is really well. 

A bowling ball has mystical powers.

A garage band vanishes overnight.

Little Pete accidentally erases baseball from existence.

I liked Rick Gomez as Endless Mike, who knows more about the town's weirdness than he lets on.  He sometimes bullies and humiliates Big Pete, and sometimes acts as his ally and protector. You might even find a gay subtext in their interaction.

No one ever explains why his name is Endless.  Maybe the teenage boy is a manifestation of a transdimensional being who exists beyond time and space as we perceive it.

Or maybe he's got a big one.

When Pete & Pete ended, I moved on to other things, and thought about Endless Mike rarely, if at all.  And the years passed.

Recently we started watching Silo (2023-), a dystopian science fiction series where 10,000 people, all of surviving humanity (that they know of) live in a huge underground helix.  They can't go outside, or ever open the single door, because the air is poisonous (or so they are told). 

And there in the cast list was Rick Gomez!

He plays Patrick Kennedy, a maintenance worker with a dead wife (of course) who sells strictly-forbidden relics from the Before Time.  He starts to suspect that they are being lied to (they are, sort of), and joins the Resistance.  

Right: Steve Zahn plays Solo, who survived a rebellion in his own silo, where everyone went outside and died.  They buddy bond in Season 3.

A few years have passed, but you can still see that insoucient, all-knowing smile.  

I wanted to check what Rick has been doing since 1995, whether he is actually gay in real life, and if he is really endless.

Searching for "Rick Gomez," "actor," and "nude" yields a lot of photos of Rick kissing guys and showing his butt (left) in at least three movies, but it turns out to be a Google Images misdirection.  The gay/nude actor is Ricardo Gomez.

Our Rick starred in five tv series between Pete & Pete and Silo.

1. Hitz (1997), about workers at a record company (remember records?)

2. Band of Brothers (2001), about World War II soldiers. Rick plays George Luz, who does some buddy-bonding during the War, but then returns to Rhode Island and does the married-with-children bit.

Not much of gay interest so far.

More after the break

"The Terrors of Jordan Mendoza" mostly involve guys hitting on him. With Marc Maron's butt and a lot of Pinoy cocks

 

The Terrors of Jordan Mendoza, written, directed, and starring Jordan Mendoza playing himself, popped up on Hulu.  He mentions pranking a girlfriend so he must be straight or bi, but he's produced episodes of the gay-inclusive Chad Powers, Big Mouth, and Neon, and the gay-themed Overcompensating. There may be some inclusivity.

Scene 1: Jordan calls Steve Buscemi to ask him to be the host of his new sketch show illustrating his nightmares.   Steve refuses, so Jordan guilts him: "This will be the first ever Asian sketch show.  It'd be racist if you didn't do it."  

Is that your boyfriend sitting at the table in your back yard, buddy?

Cut to Steve introducing the show a la Twilight Zone: "You're about to enter a realm of desire, dread, fantasy, dreams, and nightmares, hopes and horrors."

Before starting on the dreams, let's take a look at Jordan's bulge.

And a nude Pinoy guy. 

First Dream: Jordan is a bank robber bank holding five customers hostage. The police bring in Steve as a hostage negotiator.  

Jordan's demand: "I want to be a famous snake."  Steve tries to clarify what he means, but he gets upset and starts shooting people. They start naming famous snakes, like Kaa from The Jungle Book, but Jordan changes his mind: now he wants to be a hostage negotiator.

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

Austin Lindsay: The casually naked roommate on "Overcompensating" has a BFA and a lot of depressing shorts. With bonus nude fratboys

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It's a "Different World" than where you come from. There are gay guys at Hillman College now, with muscular physiques and cocks

In 1987, daughter Denice (Lisa Bonet) of The Cosby Show spun off into college, "A Different World than where you come from."  It aired between Cosby and Cheers, so we had no choice but to watch.  But no problem: there was a lot of beefcake -- I especially liked Short Guy Ron (Darryl M. Bell) -- and some gay-subtext buddy bonding; the snobbish aristocrat Whitley stole the show; and the historically black Hillman College was interesting, "a different world" to many viewers.

It wasn't actually a comedy, at least not after the first season, when Denice leftt and Whitley was promotd to focus character. The world became a cold, dark place, with episodes about sexual assault, abusive relationships, AIDS, and a lot of racism. I especially disliked the constant victimization of math major Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison), who for some inexplicable reason starts dating Whitley, his polar opposite. Eventually we stopped watching. No point in getting depressed every Thursday night.

Nearly 30 years later, a new generation of first-years has arrived at Hillman for a rebooted Different World on Netflix. The focus character is Deborah Wayne, the daughter of now-divorced Dwayne and Whitley.  Hillman is her safety school, even though her dad is provost or something --- all of the old gang have stuck around, and now have important jobs at the college.

A homophobic Redditer complained, "Why do they have to make 99% of the characters on every tv show gay? It's like straight people don't even exist anymore."  So let's look for the gay characters.  The character and episode descriptions on Netflix and Wikipedia offer some clues.

There are seven main male characters.  Five are identified as heterosexual:

Superstar basketball player Shaquille Johnson (Cornel Young IV, left), son of Short Guy Ron, chose Hillman against his dad's advice that he go to a Big 10 School and then turn pro. He starts dating Deborah.

Jalen (Elijah J. Roberts, left) is a "sexy point guard" on the basketball team, who starts dating Deborah's friend Hazel.

Ghanian-Nigerian fashion design major
Koji (Chbuikem Ujike, left) is in college only to please his parents. He actualy wants to drop out and start his own fashion company.  Sounds promising, but Netflix says that his main pastime is "charming girls."

Left: I went through the cast list, looking for nude photos of the male stars, and found Michael Vargas being oiled up in a video on XYMen.

More after the break