Life is Still Unfair: "Malcolm in the Middle" returns, with a super-jerky Malcolm, a nude Hal, and a nonbinary sibling. Plus Francis and Alex dicks .

Malcolm in the Middle (2000-2006) starred Frankie Muniz as Malcolm, the genius son in a struggling, working-class family with four boys.  I watched mainly because it was inserted into the must-see Sunday night lineup on Fox: Futurama, King of the Hill, The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle, Family Guy, American Dad. 

 I don't remember many of Malcolm's plotlines, but I liked the delinquent older brother Francis (Christopher Masterson) in military school amid hunky gay-subtext dormmates, then moving to Alaska with his...um...best buddy.

Left: Christopher, artistic interpretation.

And middle brother Reese (Justin Berfield), who had so many queer codes that I expected a coming-out episode -- until the spineless writers lost their nerve and gave him a girlfriend. 

20 years have passed, and three of the four brothers (plus their parents, buddies, marital partners, and kids) are back in a four-part miniseries on Hulu.

Scene 1: Suited 40-year old Malcolm tells a reporter that his company does tech stuff to hook up grocery store chains with food banks, so their unsold merchandise goes to people who need it.  Then, addressing the audience, he brags that he is rich, successful, and infinitely happy. And he did it all by cutting off his family. 

I'm not happy about the "Looking at me, I'm so much better than you!"  And your family was not abusive. Cutting them off is cold.

Scene 2: At the house, Mom Lois is shaving Dad Hal's back hair, while he stands naked in front of a laptop, face timing with youngest son Dewey. We're supposed to find this disgusting, but Hal has a perfectly presentable physique for a 70 year old (butt after the break).

Dewey (now played by Caleb Ellsworth-Clark) is performing before King Carl Gustaf of Sweden.  And he brags about his numerous girlfriends. Was the original series this annoyingly heterosexist?

Did you remember that Hal and Lois had a fifth child in a late-series "Why not have a wacky birth?" plot arc?   I didn't, but, but here they are: the young adult Kelly (Vaughan Murrae), who is nonbinary.  

Hal makes a big show of not understanding their pronouns: "We're going shopping.  Does them want to come?"   But Kelly fights back: "Him can't come with we. Us have homework."

In other news, Lois and Hal's big anniversary party is coming up.

Scene 3: On the way home, Malcolm continues to brag about how cutting off his family changed his life: "I don't act like a sociopath.  I'm less angry, more mature. But whenever I'm around them, I revert."  Montage of Malcolm yelling at a family dinner, at a funeral, when his brother criticizes him for bragging about his car.  Now he lives far away, and avoids holiday visits, but a stream of phone calls and emails makes them think that he still cares.

Cut to Hal and Lois at a big box store, looking for a ruby garland.   Craig (David Anthony Higgins), who used to be Lois's boss with a crush on her, pops up to explain why he's no longer working at the drug store.

Suddenly Hal and his old musical group perform an a capella love song -- right in the aisle!    Well, not a love song, precisely: "Your sex takes me to paradise..."

 I remember that group vaguely -- he's the only white member, but he feels left out because the other guys are more successful.  Didn't they also prank Lois's racist mother?

Left: Musical group member Alex Morris, probably.

Lois is embarrassed by the "romantic gesture."  Could they do something likes, for a change?  

Scene 4:  Back to Malcolm.  He introduces his daughter Leah, "a trophy I won for attending my first kegger in college Her mother left three days after giving birth.  I'm a single father, but I'm good at it!"

Cut to Leah crying in her room.  She addresses the camera, explaining that she doesn't cry all the time. She usually does depressed apathy or rage.

Malcolm wants to know what's wrong: she's isolated at school, with no friends, and Mean Girls prank her. 

"Don't worry, it will get better once you go away to college and cut me off."

Mom Lois calls, insisting that they come to the anniversary party. This is her third text, so Malcolm has to strategize, explaining why he didn't answer the others in a way that makes it look like he cares.

More after the break

Javon Walton: Ashtray, Pugsley, Stallone's buddy, a boxer named Wanna. Do you wanna see his muscles, his bulge, or his d*ck?

 

I really should classify my "profiles to do" files properly.  This one is just titled Javon, with seven photos, mostly of working out.  All I can tell is, he's got a respectable physique.  

Does Javon derive from jabón, the Spanish word for soap, or from Javan, the grandson of Noah who became the ancestor of the Greeks?    

I hope it's Greek, so I can make a dirty joke.

This one says "PSD." A reference to pants?

Wait -- is that a fold of fabric, or does Javon have a semi? 

Turns out that Javon is not a very common name, so he was easy to find: Javon Walton, 20 years old as of this writing, with his own wikipedia page and 4.1 million Instagram followers.  

He is a professional boxer, stage name Wanna, apparently quite proficient: so far he's had three wins, one draw, and only one loss, on September 26, 2026, to opponent Henry Cejudo.

I'm not a fan of boxing.  Professional wrestling is more gay-friendly.  There must be some other gay content that led me to put Javon in the "profiles to do" file.  What about his acting?

Javon has six acting credits listed on the IMDB, beginning with 15 episodes of Euphoria (2019-22).  He played Ashtray, left by his mother as collateral with drug dealer Marie, and never picked up.  Marie and her son Fezco (Angus Cloud) raised him, and trained him in the drug dealing business. 

At age 12, when druggies threaten Fezco, Ashtray kills one and breaks the nose of the other (Tyler Chase, left).  Fezco tries to take the blame, but Ashtray doesn't want his "big brother" going to prison, so he locks himself in the bathroom with a lot of weapons, and is killed by the SWAT team. 

He doesn't express any heterosexual interest, but I doubt that he's canonically gay.

Next Javon appeared in eight episodes of Utopia (2020) as Grant, an 11 year old online gamer who pretends to be a professional photographer who drives a Porsche and snags supermodels.  When he claims to have a copy of the Utopia manuscript (which will cause a global catastrophe if released), the evil overlords frame him for a mass murder. 

Cool slave collar, buddy, and I'm digging the posh leopard-print robe, but the nail polish is a bit much.

Pugsley Addams in the animated Addams Family 2 (2021).  Isaac Ordonez plays Pugsley in the live action Wednesday.

Stan in seven episodes of The Umbrella Academy (2022), about misfits with paranormal powers who decide that the world would be better off if they never existed (I'm still upset about that horrible ending). Stan is the son of Diego  (David Castañeda) and Lila, but not really: she lied about his heritage to test Diego's parenting ability.  The two grow to care about the kid before he is killed. 

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit

Aidan Micho: Unexpected beefcake in "Minimum Wage" leads to comedian brothers, a pizza place upstate, bondage, and a 12-incher

 

Minimum Wage (2026) just dropped on Netflix, a mockumentary about quirky teenage employees at a pizza place in central New York.  The surprisingly hunky Randall Park plays company CEO, who drops in to inform the the workers that he's planning to shut down their branch for under-performance, but changes his mind when they help restore his joie de vivre.  

 I was surprised that teenagers working part-time minimum wage jobs love the pizza place so much that they are devastated by the threat of closure.  Couldn't they get new jobs elsewhere?  And why doesn't the title have something t to do with pizza, to go along with premise: "Money doesn't buy happiness, but it buys pizza, which is almost the same thing."  Agreed.

No gay characters are immediately obvious; there are several mentions of girlfriends or the desire for girlfriends in the first episode.  But some of the guys are cute, such as Tommy Armstrong as an indie musician, and there's a shot of unexpected beefcake.

I love it when guys take their shirts off for no reason but to give viewers something to gawk at.

Here it was Aidan (Aidan Micho), pranked by his coworkers into thinking that if you spend ten minutes in the freezer, your penis will grow two inches. When he asks "How long?", they just make numbers up.  That's mean -- and dangerous -- but the reference to Aidan's penis is a plus.  And no one said he had to be shirtless.

1. Is the character Aiden gay?  

He wears a bracelet and an ostentatious ring, and sometimes flashes a limp wrist. When the drama club visits, Aidan becomes defensive about his knowledge of classic musicals: "It's not weird."  Does he mean "It doesn't make me gay?"

He tries to find some male strippers for the female manager's birthday party, and approaches two EMT guys outside a club. "Fun, an EMT theme!  How much do you guys cost?"  "Free, depending on your insurance." 

"Great, my friend is gonna die.  Come to 605 Water Street in ten minutes."  

When he worries about losing his hair, he notes that both of his dads have full heads of hair. "My surrogate mother must be bald!"  Har-har.

They're not going to make a guy with gay dads gay himself. 

Oh, well, at least he takes off his shirt again when they buy a hot tub, and cuddles with Hyde Healy, left.

Sorry Hyde, you're short, but not attractive enough for a profile.

But Aidan? 

Question #2: Has Aidan played any gay characters elsewhere?

Filmmaker and comedian Aidan Micho has 120,000 followers on Instagram and 51,000  on Tiktok, with 1.1 million likes. He and his brother Ryan have 616,000 Youtube subscribers for their comedy shorts.

They grew up in Baldwin, New York --- upstate, about a 20 minute drive from Syracuse - graduated from high school in 2019 and 2021, and attended Syracuse University.

Most of Aidan's on-screen roles have ben walk ons:

Banana Split (2018), about two girls chasing the same boy.  Dylan Sprouse appears.Aidan plays Locker Student.

Left: Dylan's dick, in case you haven't seen it lately.

Miguel Wants to Fight (2023): Miguel (Tyler Dean Flores) is moving to the big city, where he'll have to fight, so he asks his three friends to help him prepare.  Aidan plays a Bully's Friend.

Prom Dates (2024): Two girls break up with their romantic partners just before the big prom.  Now they need new dates in a hurry!  I seem to recall hearing that one of girls is a lesbian. Aidan plays "Cargo Shorts Bro"

More after the break

Jett Klyne: The future bisexual superhero spends his teen years bodybuilding and dating guys. With two twink dicks and an Ecuadorian bulge

 

In Wandavision (2021), the Scarlet Witch, memory-wiped and trapped in a sitcom world, has two sons, Billy and Tommy (Justin Hilliard, Jeff Klyne).  In Agatha All Along (2024), after being adopted by a Jewish family and losing and regaining his memory, Billy Maximoff becomes the gay Jewish superhero Wiccan.  So of course I had to do a profile of Justin.

But what about Tommy Maximoff (Jett Klyne)?  He grows up to become the superhero Speed, who is bisexual in the comics: he dated Kate Bishop in Young Avengers: The Children's Crusade (2010-12), and the male superhero Prodigy in Emperor Hulkling (2020).  He explains "I crushed on who I crushed on."   

Maybe I'd better do a profile of Jett, too.

Jett arguably has a more gay/femme affect.  Guess which is Tommy.

And he has spent his teen years working out.  

I'll answer the standard two questions: has Jett appeared in any movies or tv shows of gay interest?; and is he gay in real life?

Gay-Themed Movies/TV Shows:

 In 2014, when Jett was seven years old, he was in Writing Kim: Aspiring writer Annie (Jett's Mom) heads off on a road trip seeking inspiration, and meets Kim, who has a husband and son (Jett) but also likes ladies. Kim inspires her to embrace her sexual fluidity (you mean she's bi?)  In 2020, it was selected for qFlix, the Philadelphia LGBTQ film festival.  

According to his IMDB biography, Jett's break-out role was in Z (2019).  So a one-word title was too long?  Joshua (Jett) has an "imaginary" friend, Z, who gets more and more disruptive, sabotaging his relationship with his real life friend Daniel and trying to kill his father.  Finally we learn that Z is using Joshua to get to his mother. 

I haven't seen it, but the gay subtexts sort of jump out at you, don't they?

Left: Since Jett is 16 as of this writing, I won't be looking for nude photos, so here's a random twink.

He has a lot of pre-Wandavision guest appearances, mostly in movies that I never heard of: Devil in the Dark, Manny Dearest, The Humanity Bureau, Skyscraper.  Plus three significant post-Wanda movies:

The Boy in the Woods (2023). During World War II, as the Jewish population of Buczarc is being rounded up for the concentration camps, Max (Jett) is sent to live with Janko (Richard Armitage), a synpathetic non-Jewish farmer.  But Janko fears for his family's safety, so he kicks the boy out.  While hiding in the woods, Max forms a buddy-bond with the sensitive, artistic, gay-coded Yanek (David Kohlsmith, right); they discuss their future, living together as artists in Paris, and try to adopt the baby of a dead woman. 

Yanek dies, but the baby grows up, and Max re-unites with her in old age, so symbolically the two had a family.  A definite gay subtext or text.

More after the break