"The Prince": The actor claims that his flashy-femme prince is "just sensitive." See for yourself. With gay-subtext homies and Turkish d*cks

 

The Prince is unfortunately the title of about a dozen tv shows and movies, but the Turkish one (2023-25) stars Giray Altinok as the Prince of Bogonia, a fictional micro-kingdom somewhere in the Balkans during the Middle Ages.  The Prince (no other name because his father hates him) is so flashy-femme, and exhibits such a strong interest in men, that viewers began buzzing.  Altinok went on social media to clear up the "misunderstanding": The Prince isn't gay, he's just sensitive.  Funny, that's what my parents used to say about me.

Of course Altinok would claim that his character is straight: Turkey is the most homophobic country in Europe. It gets 4% on the Rainbow Map of LGBT legal status, while Russia gets 8%, and Poland 15%.  Let's take a look at Episode 1, and see how "not gay" the Prince is.

Scene 1: Establishing shot of Bogonia. Several n*de women, one chained up, snooze with semi-n*de guys (one butt shot).  Can you show naked ladies on Turkish tv?   

A chained up man who has been cuddling with a man and a woman both awakens to a rap on the door, and yells at the Slave Köle (Canberk Gültekin, top photo and left).  Surprise -- he's the Prince!  Identified as bi in the first scene. Maybe Altinok meant "not gay, bi/pan."

 The King has summoned him.  "So what?"   "So what?" He returns to his orgy.

Scene 2: As everyone waits impatiently, the Prince bursts in.  He touches the cheek of one of the courtiers: "Come here, my black lamb."  He lectures against Turkish masculinity: to compete in the modern world, we need to be hugging and touching.  

The problem: The Hungarian army is at the border, and Bogonia doesn't have a big enough army to defeat them.  

"So, get help from our neighbors, like Bosnia?" "No, they all hate us."

Uncle Kalish (Serdar Orçin) suggests just surrendering and paying the tribute.  "No, we'd lose our proud history." "But this country is only twenty years old!"  This enrages the Prince's Older Brother Tenyo (Çagdas Onur Öztürk, left),  who threatens to kill Uncle Kalish for treason.

King to Older Brother: "I'm lucky to have you as a son.  Without you, my name would die with me."  So the Prince isn't going to have any kids.  Maybe he is gay, not bi. 

They decide to fight the Hungarians.  Older Brother gets the horses ready for their 50 soldiers.

Scene 3: The King meets with the Prince in private: "Everyone has some regrets in life.  Mine is you.  I can't find the words to describe my hatred of you." You're just homophobic, Dad.

The King orders Slave Kole to bring his Very Important Sword  to the Blacksmith to get the handle fixed. "The Blacksmith is my oldest and dearest friend, and only he can fix my sword."  The Prince asks him to also fetch the "big ruby necklace" that the jeweler has for him.  Dude is into drag.

Whoops, the King decides to humiliate the Prince by making him take the sword in instead of the slave.

Scene 4: Older Brother Tenyo's Wife has just taken a home pregnancy test (the Medieval version).  Still not pregnant! He is not upset: "Don't obsess over it, it will happen in due time."  But the Queen has been putting pressure on her; she sent a gigantic crib, hint, hint.   Older Brother suggests trying again now.

Scene 5: The Prince and Slave Kole in the market.  He stops to look at some fabric.  Dude is gay.  A commoner complains that the people are starving while the royals live in luxury, "especially that Prince."  "Which one?" "The ugly one."  

Upset, the prince orders him executed.  Slave Kole suggest  they could give him a chance to apologize.  Nope, he's hanged.

Next stop: the Blacksmith, the only person who can fix the King's Very Important Sword.  Except he's the guy they just executed!

Scene 6: The Prince's Sister is practicing swordsmanship when her stepmother, the Queen, bursts in and throws her sword out the window.  "Act like a Princess!"  "No -- I don't want to be a princess!"

"Too bad -- I've arranged for you to marry the Duke of Saxony!"   

"What?  No!  This is the modern world.  I want to be more than just a wife!"

Ok, the main conflicts are established: Older Brother can't get his wife pregnant, Sister wants to be a liberated woman, and the Prince is gay.

Scene 6: The royal family eating together and glaring at each other. 

Uncle  Kalish: "We can't fight the Hungarians! We'll be massacred!"  I've been checking the Prince for queer codes, but look at Uncle Kalish: 35 effeminate rings, no wife.  Dude is gay.

King: "Princess, you are going to get married whether you want to or not." 

Sister: "No!"

Queen: "The Duke of Gaul has had a son.   wish I had a grandchild."

Older Brother's Wife: "You're Older Brother's stepmother, not his mother, so any kids we have will not be your grandchildren.  Besides, how do you know it's my fault?  Maybe Older Brother's not doing his job properly."

Older Brother: "Let's fight the Hungarians right now!" 

King: "Prince, how is my sword repair coming?  The Blacksmith is a very old, dear friend of mine." Uh-oh, the Prince had him executed. 

Scene 7:  Slave Kole fixes the Very Important Sword with glue.  It will take a day to harden, but the King is coming for it now! 

 The Prince asks Slave Kole to hide in the closet (har har), and presents it to the King, who is pleased: "This is the first tim ein your life that you've followed through on a task." Whoops, he puts it in the scabbard with the resin still wet -- he'll never get it out again! A painting of a naked man is in the foreground of every bedroom scene, and there's a fresco in the back that looks like a Roman woman.  Dude is gay or bi.

The King finds Slave Kole in the closet (har har), and becomes angry at the Prince for having s*x with a slave. He has no problem with his son dating men, but they should be upper class.

 Slave Kole starts to explain that he was just fixing the sword, but the Prince cuts him off: "Shut up, Love.  He's onto us.  It's fine."   The King stomps out.  

More after the break

Dan Shor: Tron, Star Trek, an Excellent Adventure, the South Pacific, and the Butt that Changed the World.

Sometime during the days of Blockbuster Video, we rented Strange Behavior (1981), mainly because the cover blurb said something about Galesburg, Illinois, which is near the Quad Cities. 

We weren't aware that it was written by a gay man (Bill Condon), it stars a gay man (Dan Shor), and it features something that would change movies forever.

It's got a silly plot about a crazed college professor named Dr. Le Sange (Dr. Blood), who mind-controls the town teenagers into blood-crazed monsters.

No Galesburg sites are appear mentioned; Apparently they just picked a random town in the Midwest so there would be cornfields and stereotyped farm folk. It was actually filmed in New Zealand.

The focus character is named Pete Brady, which no doubt caused a lot of eye-rolls and derisive laughs in 1981: Viewers would instantly think of the kid from The Brady Bunch (Christopher Knight, who grew up into a muscle hunk.)

This photo teases a gay-subtext buddy bond between focus character Pete Brady (har har) and Oliver (Marc McClure), but the movie is actually heteronormative, with boy-girl romance all the way down.  

I'd rather date Marc McClure, loveable nerd Jimmy Olsen in Superman (1978).

 And Dan Shor, the guy who plays Pete, is not handsome. He's got a long face, a Romanesque nose, and a lantern jaw.

But none of that is important.

What's important is a scene early in the movie where Pete Brady (har har) and his father (not Mike Brady, darn it) have just gotten up in the morning.  Pete approaches him to discuss something.  Naked.  He then moves toward the shower.  We get an extended shot of his butt.

 

It wasn't the first nude butt on film, but it was the first extended butt shot that wasn't for a comedic purpose.

There is no other nudity, male or female, in the film, not even a shirtless shot.  What was the directorial decision to film Dan Shor nude?

In an interview, Dan said that it was a political act, an acknowledgement of gay potential in the homophobic 1980s. It disrupted the heterosexual male gaze and paved the way for movies to present images of male beauty.

"And it sealed my popularity in West Hollywood," Dan joked.  Or maybe he wasn't joking.

Born in New York in 1956, Dan Shor studied acting in England, then moved to Hollywood, where he landed small parts in some serious, "artistic" movies: Young Studs in an adaption of James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan (1979).

Enoch Emery in an adaption of Flannery O'Conner's Wise Blood (1979).

Eric in the After-School Special The Boy Who Drank Too Much (1980), starring Scott Baio as an alcoholic teenager named Buff Saunders (Buff?).

More after the break

Gemstones Episode 4.2: Baby Billy's dong, BJ's pole, Kelvin's pipe, and the Clobber Verses

Previous: Gemstones Episode 4.1: Elijah scoundrels, Winston dies, and Kelvin screams

Title: "You Hurled Me Into the Depths, Into the Very Heart of the Sea." Jonah 2.3: Jonah is in the belly of the great fish, praying for deliverance (not a whale -- there are no whales in the Mediterranean Sea).

Gemstone Roll Call: A gold-and-purple Baby Billy announces Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin in angel costumes.  The rest of the family joins them on stage for the Aimee-Leigh Birthday Give-A-Thon (in case you're interested, she was born on September 21, 1955).

Keefe does a high kick.  The siblings appear in jetpacks, and rise up over the stage, but things go wrong and they crash.  Fortunately, it's just a rehearsal.

Baby Billy's Dong:  In the dressing room, the siblings refuse to continue with the jetpack bit, but Baby Billy insists: this is too important. So he's in charge now? And where the heck is Eli?   Somewhere in Florida. He won't answer their phone calls. 

Baby Billy then drops his trousers to flop his dong around: "This is what a real man looks like.  I booked all these people to the Give-a-Thon, so Eli has to be there!"   Fans were complaining that the stunt cock guy had no balls.  Who's looking for balls?

Eli Hooks Up:  Somewhere in Florida (actually the Keys), a grotesque long-haired Eli awakens on his boat, Nice Mussels, and cooks eggs for the lady he "69ed for 45 minutes" last night.  She wants more of his "thick breakfast sausage" instead, but he explains that he is not ready for a relationship.  He's still trying to figure out what he wants.  Dude, you're 73.  Better hurry.  Besides, "I don't like you."  

She rushes off, but Eli struts down the dock, smoking a cigar, cruising the ladies.  Easter Egg: he has a cap from Adams College, a call-back to "Revenge of the Nerds"

Uh-oh, it's the siblings, for some reason dressed in their Cape and Pistol society costumes.  Judy has an unexplained bandaged hand.  They yell at Eli for drinking too much, and when they find a bra, hooking up with ladies.  "Am I supposed to be in mourning all my life?"  "Yes!"  They had the same argument in Season 2, when Eli hooked up with a lady after Bowling Night.

He refuses to go to the telethon.  The siblings annoy him by saying "p*ssy" over and over, and making the tongue-through-fingers gesture, until he consents.  How does Kelvin know about that?

Time to set up the sibling conflicts for the season:

BJ's Pole:  BJ (not pictured) is in a pole dancing class otherwise occupied entirely by women (the casting call asked for men, too, but I guess none showed up).  Judy disapproves of him spending so much time aroiund hot ladies, or having any life outside of her, but he explains that the "physical rigor and slightly taboo nature of pole dancing" has keyed into his obsessive nature, like pickleball in Season 3 and skating in Season 2.  BJ's story arc always involves trying to become his own person, distinct from Judy.

It turns out that pole dancing is a competitive sport, with men and women participants.

Loud and Proud after the break

Ben and Matt Royer: Disney /Nick teencom twins grow up, become journalists, one dates guys. With Matt and bf d*cks

 

If you were watching the Disney Channel or Nickelodeon between 2015 and 2020, you saw twin brothers Ben and Matt Royer.  They were everywhere, playing conniving, mischievous, silly, or virtuous twins.

The brothers were born in Tarzana, California in 2003 and began acting in 2013, playing Vince and Vance Hodges in the sports comedy Back in the Game.  Griffin Gluck also appeared.

Next came the Nickelodeon teencom 100 Things to Do Before High School (2015-16) had the standard three friends, white male (Owen Patrick Joyner), black male (Jaheem Toombs), and female, giving advice like "say yes to everything for a day," "stay up all night," "adopt a flour baby," "meet your idol," and "get your heart pre-broken."  Ben and Matt played Benji and Enzo Froman. 

Chazz Nittolo played Gorgeous Eighth Grade Boy. In 2025, he's 25 years old.  Not bad.

While working on 100 Things, the twins were cast on the Disney Channel's Best Friends Whenever (2015-16): Two teenage girls and their buddy Barry (Gus Kamp) jump back in time, mostly to the recent past so they can determine why their new lab partner is a jerk or Barry can meet his science hero. Ben and Matt play Brett and Chet Marcus, the younger brothers of one of the girls, with crushes on the other. 

I don't know if the actor Gus Kamp (left) is the same as the trans singer August Kamp.

A lot of twin guest spots followed, including episodes of Pickles & Peanut (as Crabmeat and Umbrella), White Famous (Milo and Otis),The Guest Book (Henry and Hank), and Night Court (as Grant and Brant)

Ben also got non-twin roles on Young Sheldon and American Born Chinese, and in the movie The Happytime Murders (2018).

The twins hosted a podcast, Twinger Talk, where they interviewed celebrities.  I don't recognize the names of their guests, but the top photo looked cute: Jerry Hairston, a baseball player.

Plus they supported a variety of charities, like an anti-bullying initiative and YSB Now ("You're So Beautiful" Now).

They graduated from UCLA in 2024, Ben majoring in Communications and Matt in Political Science.  In 2025 they received their M.A. degrees from the Annenberg School of Journalism at USC. 

Ben (no beard) is now a sports reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and Matt (beard) a graduate fellow at ABC News in New York.  I imagine that they don't have a lot of time for acting.

You're probably wondering: 

1. Are they gay?

2. Any n*de photos?

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.