Ryan Masson: Gay actor with one gay role and then "girls! girls! girls!" all the way down. With his d*ck and a bonus Zack Robidas

 

In The Last of Us, Episode 2.4 (2025), some 20 years into the zombie Apocalypse, the Washington Liberation Front ("Wolves') and a death cult called the Seraphites are battling for control of zombie-ravaged Seattle.  Wolf Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) captures  Seraphite Malcolm (Ryan Masson) and tortures him into revealing the location of cult's headquarters.  

It's a brutal scene.  Malcolm is all bloody, so I'm not going to show his face.  But I was interested in his cute little cock.  Maybe we could take a look at Ryan Masson in more aesthetically pleasing roles.

Ryan grew up in Memphis.  He became interested in acting through watching old movies with his grandfather, novelist John Fergus Ryan.

 He played Puck in his middle-school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and a dandy in A Christmas Carol. although he didn't know what a dandy was.  By high school, he knew, and shied away from the theater, thinking it too "feminine."

At the College of Charleston, Ryan majored in biology and minored in French, planning to go to some isolated locale to researched endangered species.  But the acting bug won out over his fear of being "called gay": he starred in Romeo and Juliet (as Romeo) and Child's Play (about a Catholic school where some of the boys are demon-possessed).  

During his senior year, Ryan starred in the weekly webseries Dank Shadows (2011), a parody of the 1960s Gothic soap opera.  His Marolyn Foddard was a reflection of the vampire, werewolf, and Frankenstein-bedevilled heiress Carolyn Stoddard. 

After graduation, Ryan moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts, where he received a MFA in acting in 2015.  

He went home for four episodes of  Feral (2016), which is not about werewolves: it's an angst-drama about LGBTQ friends, like Looking but set in Memphis.   He plays the boyfriend of focus character Billy (Jordan Nichols), who suffers from depression.  I guess he wasn't worried about being "called gay" anymore.

His next starring role was Involution (2018), a Russian movie where "the Earth has been sent out of control, affected by a cruel and inhuman mechanism that turns back Darwin's Theory of Evolution."  I don't know what that means, but Ryan's character gets a girlfriend.

A comedic role, sort of, in the "Thelma and Louise" episode of Good Girls (2019), about three suburban housewives who commit crimes.  One of their husbands is interested in killing crime boss Rio (Manny Montana, top photo), so he hires professional assassins PJ and Tobin (Ryan, Travis Mills).  They turn out to be "not what he expected."  

I'll have to check the episode to see if they are a gay couple.

Nope, they talk about "getting all freaky" with chicks.

Left: When I went through the cast list of Good Girls to see if any of the male actors had n*de photos, this popped up.  It's Zack Robidas, who does not appear on the show.

More after the break

Blake McIver: The "musical" kid from "Full House" grows up, sings, snoots, and shows us what Superman is packing

Full House (1987-95) was a TGIF sitcom set in an annoyingly gay-free San Francisco.  The premise: sportscaster Danny (Bob Saget) loses his wife (don't worry, it's a 1980s death, with no grief).  He can't take care of his three daughters on his own, so his friends Joey and Jesse (Dave Coulier, John Stamos) move in to help. 

I didn't watch -- in West Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s, who was home on a Friday night?  But I recognize the iconic Full House house, 1709 Broderick Street, about two miles from the Castro, and I know that Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson, who played Danny's infant daughter Michelle, became pop culture icons, starring in a string of movies before starting their own fashion company.  

If you watched, you may have noticed Blake McIver Ewing, who played Derek, Michelle's "musical" friend and fellow thespian, during Seasons 6-8.  From the clips I watched while researching this profile, I gather that he is quite femme.  A contemporary blogger references "the blinding supernova of Derek's undeniable gayness," but on the show itself no one ever suspects.  Michelle's friend Lisa even asks him to the Big Valentine's Day Dance. 

The grown-up Blake's primary interest is music -- his IMDB biography effuses over its "wonderful power to be cohesive, moving, influential, emotive, subdued, deferential, caustic, achingly beautiful, full of character, simplistic, complex and/or virtually any other adjective one can think of."  Like overwritten?   He has 44 music credits and 15 composing credits on the IMDB, and nine songs available on Apple Music, including the gay anthems "It Gets Better" and "This is Who We Are."

He was recently cast in The Boy from Oz, a musical about the life of bisexual singer/songwriter Peter Allen.

But Blake also has 31 acting credits, beginning with the six-year old Ned, played as a grownup by Gabriel Olds, in Calendar Girl (1993) -- which everybody in West Hollywood went to because of the opportunity to gawk at the backsides of Gabriel and Jason Priestley, but not Jerry O'Connell, darn it.

Other than Derek, Blake is best known for playing Waldo Aloysius Johnston II in the Little Rascals movie (1994).  He sabotages the Big Go-Kart Race and steals the girlfriend of preteen Lothario Alfalfa (future homophobe Bug Hall).  Don't worry, she dumps him and returns to Alfalfa after discovering that he is a jerk.

What Superman is packing after the break

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.