Underground Railroad: a gay slave rides a real railroad in a surrealistic South, with a Gemstone alum and nude actors

 

The Underground Railroad was a network of safe houses and allies that helped enslaved African-Americans escape to the North, or after the Fugitive Slave Act, to Canada.  

The 2023 tv miniseries suggests that it was a real railroad, a series of trains and tunnels run by an intricate bureaucracy. As Cora and her friends and love interests head north, pursued by slave-catcher Arnold Ridgeway, they encounter bizarre communities and have adventures that comment on the racism in the pre-Civil War South and the contemporary U.S.

I reviewed Chapter 1, "Georgia."

Scene 1: Surreal montage of people running backwards, falling into a chasm, being all bloody, and finally Cora telling us: "The first and last thing my mama gave me was apologies."  Cut to Caesar (Aaron Pierre, left) asking Cora to head north with him, for "good luck."  She refuses.  The way they keep pushing their heads at each other, they appear to be a romantic couple. 

Scene 2: Whooping and dancing in the slave compound.  Cora brings the older Jockey some food.  Their owners appear: Terrence (Benjamin Walker, left), who runs the other half of the plantation, disapproves of the "lenient" way that James treats his slaves. So they ask a kid to recite the Declaration of Independence.   They mean the Declaration of Secession, so the Civil War is on.  How is anyone heading North?   He can't do it right, and he accidentally touches them, so Terrence has him beaten to death. And Cora, for intervening. They are left chained to the whipping post all night.

Scene 3: In the morning, the ladies tend to Cora's wounds, and Caesar takes her home. Later, his wife Frances says "I know about men like you. You sneak off in the night and roll around in the swamp with other mens on your back."  Ok, so Caesar is gay.  She's fine with it, but master brought them together to reproduce, and if they don't, Master Randall will cut off his dick, so get with your husbandly duties!  

Scene 4: Prideful (Lucius Baston), the black overseer, tells Cora that she's being moved.  She resists (I can't imagine why -- her new owner can't be much worse). 

Cut to James walking through the woods.  He's nice to a little boy named Hezekiah  then coughs and collapses. 

Cut to Terrence in the fields, telling the slaves that his brother James has died, so now he owns the whole plantation, and will stop being "lenient": no more parties, no more outside work, and he'll be overseeing the "breeding,"  Perv just wants to watch couples doing it.  He also wants to have sex with Cora.

Scene 5: Slave catcher Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton, left and below and his assistant, a young black kid named Homer (Chase W. Dillon), have a very muscular escaped slave, Big Anthony (Elijah Everett), in a cage. They return him to Terrence's plantation. 

Ridgeway advises Terrence to place some moles in the fields to rat out talk of escape.  An underground railroad has appeared to abet runaways. Terrence doesn't believe it, but Ridgeway asks him why some escaped slaves disappear forever, as if they've gone to a new world. An alternative reality with no slave trade?

 They discuss his biggest failure -- he couldn't capture Mabel who escaped long ago, when Terrence's father was alive.  Terrence avers that Mabel was evil -- even her daughter Cora is evil -- so his failure to find her is understandable.

Wait -- her daughter?  Maybe she knows something!  Ridgeway interrogates/ sexually assaults her. 

More after the break

Christopher Atkins: Nude photos of my West Hollywood friend and 1980s gay icon (who never played a gay role)

 

I met Christopher Atkins a few times when I lived in California: my friend was starring with him in a Smokey and the Bandits rip-off.  

Recently we became facebook friends. Well, me and 3,800 other people.  But I'm one of the few who responds to his posts.

"Come on, Christopher, it's big, but not big enough to write your entire name and a heart on." (I didn't really say that.)

Christopher was one of the first actors to go full frontal on the big screen.  Several times.Here he shows off in his iconic but immensely heterosexist Blue Lagoon (1980).  At the time, he hated performing nude.

In A Night in Heaven (1983), he played a male stripper at a ladies-only club. 

In real life Christopher has been a gay ally since the start of his career.  While other actors were insisting that only women enjoyed looking at their physique, he was happily discussing his appeal to gay fans in magazines like The Advocate.

More after the break

The boy on the Prospect List

 

When I was growing up in Rock Island,  anyone who set foot inside the Nazarene Church for any reason, but didn't "get saved" and become a member, was placed on the Prospect List.

Even if they just came for Vacation Bible School, or to cheer for a friend at a Jump Quiz Tournament.

They stayed on that list forever, unless they asked to be removed or the Church Board decided to purge the list of names from many years ago.

(All models are over 18)

Every August, about a month before the fall revival, our Sunday school teacher gave each of us the contact information for 10 age- and -gender appropriate Prospects.  We were supposed to make it our business to "win them for the Lord," or at least invite them to church.

During the next month, we received 1 point for each Prospect that we prayed for, 2 points for each letter or post card, 5 points for each telephone call, and 10 points for each in-person visit, plus an extra 10 point if they actually came to church.

You might think that the Prospects would be buried in letters or harassed by constantly-ringing telephones, but in fact most people settled for prayer. It's a daunting prospect to cold-call someone you don't know, who has been to your church just once.

During the fall revival, the kid, teenager, and adult with the most points received awards, usually Bibles, while the whole congregation clapped and yelled "Amen!"

During the summer after 5th grade, the first year I was eligible, I wimped out with "prayer only."

In 6th grade,  I sent a few post cards.

In 7th grade, I tried phone calls, only to get two "wrong numbers" (which didn't count) and one "You made a mistake -- I never went to that church."

During the summer after 8th grade, I decided to go all the way with a personal visit.

I was fascinated by a name that appeared on the Prospect List every year: Francis DePew, who came to Vacation Bible School one summer, but never appeared again. He was in the same grade as me, and he lived on the Hill, but he didn't go to Washington Junior High.

That meant he went to Jordan Catholic School!

The Preacher told us all about Catholics!  When they weren't worshipping idols and being brainwashed by evil priests, they were laughing in the face of God, drinking, smoking, dancing, playing cards, going to movies.  But their favorite form of sin was the sex orgy, men cavorting with other men's wives, teenagers having sex without being married, all manner of abominations, as in the days before the Flood!

All manner of abominations?  I had to meet this Francis DePew!  Maybe I could get him to the altar, where he would cry and apologize to God, and I could wrap my arm around his waist and hug him.

Besides, Catholics were as difficult to win for Christ as Muslims!  He would be good practice for when Dan and I became missionaries to Saudi Arabia.

During the August before 9th grade, Dan and I rode our bikes past Francis DePew's house nearly every day.

He lived a few blocks from the church, nearly across the street from the Saukie Golf Course that the Preacher was always complaining about.

A nice house, big but nothing special.  I got  a little frisson of dread imagining the Satanic orgies going on inside every night.

Then one Saturday afternoon, we hit the jackpot: a cute, muscular teenage boy, washing a car, with his shirt off!

We stopped. "Hey, cool car," I said.

"Thanks.  It's my brother's. He pays me a dollar to wash it, and when I get my driver's license, I can have it."


"Are you Francis DePew?"

"Frank."  He eyed me suspiciously.  "Do you go to Jordan?"

"No way!"  I exclaimed, offended.  "We go to Washington. I..um...I'm on the wrestling team, and I thought I recognized you from a tournament."

"No, we we don't have wrestling.  I was on the football team last year, though."

"Oh, that's it! From a football game...I thought you had the build for wrestling."  Dan nudged me, signifiying that I had said too much.  Or maybe he wanted to be included in the conversation.  Why should I hog the cute guy?  "Um...I'm Boomer, and this is Dan."

"Hi."  Frank shook hands with us both.  "Do you play football?"


How was I going to get the conversation away from sports and onto church?  "Um...no, I'm too busy with Jump Quiz."

"What's that?"

"It's a great sport," Dan offered.  "You have to use your brain and your muscles.  Especially your legs.  We could teach you..."

And then invite him to come to a tournament, and get him saved!  I thought excitedly.  But the Jump Quiz was about the Bible.  The Preacher said that Catholics couldn't read or even touch Bibles -- the holiness zapped them like an electric shock.

"Do you...do you know anything about the Bible?" I asked tentatively.

"Oh, I know a little bit."

A few days later, Frank invited us to his house -- my first time ever in a Catholic house. It wasn't scary at all, except for the "evil" crucifix in the living room.

We set up folding chairs on the patio, and took turns reading the questions and competing one-on-one, with breaks to throw a frisbee to his dog. Frank knew about as much about the Bible as I did, and his muscular legs made him a jump quiz natural.

After an hour, we declared the game a tie, and Frank's mother invited us into the kitchen for sodas and ice cream sandwiches.

"That was fun," Frank said.  "And it really gives your legs a workout.  We should use it for football training."


"It's a big deal at my church.  We have the local eliminations in October, and then the district, and you can go all the way to the Internationals, and get a college scholarship. You should...."  But Frank was being so nice that I felt guilty about the mercenary goal of winning him for Christ.  "You should start a team at your church."

So I didn't win the Prospect. Instead, he won me.

I met a nice guy, and I realized that Catholics weren't as scary and evil as the Preacher kept saying.   In fact, the first person I spent the night with, two years later, was a Maronite Catholic boy from Lebanon.

The Nazarene Teen Idol

When I was growing up in the Nazarene Church, twice a year, in the fall and the spring, we had a "revival": a full week of screeching, foot-stomping, Bible-thumping sermons by an evangelist who made his living going from revival to revival, getting people saved and sanctified.

You were encouraged to bring your friends who went to other churches, and thus might not be amenable to visiting on a Sunday morning.  But on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday night, they were free, right?

We did get a few converts during every revival, but not nearly enough for the evangelist, who stomped and shouted with more and more urgency as the week wore on and nearly everyone who needed to get saved was already saved and only a few people went down. Or no one.

The only bright spot of the whole ordeal was the gospel group that accompanied the evangelist. During the fall revival in my junior year in high school, the evangelist was the young, muscular but bellowing Brother Jonathan, and the musical group was the Smith Family (not to be confused with the punk rock group the Smiths, which I have several times).

They sang fast, upbeat songs which I assumed they wrote -- there were records for sale in the lobby.  Church oldsters used to old Salvation Army-style ballads like "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" were scandalized by their country-inflected lyrics, not to mention their guitars, drums, and tambourines.  One of their songs goes through my head intermittently to this day:

I've got confidence, God is going to see me through
Whatever the case may be, I know He's gonna fix it for me.

(I just discovered that "I've Got Confidence" was not a Smith Family original: it was composed by Andre Crouch and popularized by Elvis Presley.)

I haven't been able to find any photos -- too much interference from other Smiths on the internet -- but they looked something like this: middle-aged husband and young-adult daughter as the lead singers (baritone and soprano), teenage son on the guitar, preteen son on the drums, and wife on the tambourine, piano, or organ.

 Scott, the teenage son, was a year younger than me, tall and buffed with big hands, a round face, short blond hair, and dreamy blue eyes.  The Nazarene equivalent of a teen idol, our own Shaun Cassidy!  I was desperate to become his friend, or at least feel a warm strong handshake, but I didn't have a chance.  He was mobbed.

Girls were swooning, batting their eyes at him, writing him love notes under the guise of prayer requests.  Old people (anyone over 30) were pushing to tell him what a "fine Christian boy" he was and getting him to autograph any piece of paper they could find, even the "notes" page of their study Bibles.  Boys were rushing to kneel at the altar in the hopes that Scott would come down from the podium and put his arm around them as they moaned and cried and "prayed through to victory."

Unfortunately, I couldn't join them at the altar, because I had made a major tactical error.  You could go down only to get saved (forgiven of the sins you had committed), sanctified (made holy, so you would be incapable of future sins), or to help someone else pray through.   And, not knowing that Scott would be there, I got sanctified just a few weeks ago!

Going down again so soon would be admitting that I had never been sanctified at all -- that I had been deceived by Satan into rising from the altar without praying through. Or that I was lying to get the praise and prestige.  A major faux pas. a major humiliation!

Every night I sat in my pew during Brother Jonathan's altar call, counting the teenage boys who went down, calculating whether the chance of Scott choosing me to pray with was worth a public humiliation. Every night I decided against it.

More after the break

Wet Hot American Summer Episode 1.5: Skyler in a satyr costume, a gaslit gay couple, learning how to use your penis

 

Wet Hot American Summer (2001) was set in a summer camp in Maine in 1981: after all of the kids have left, the counselors hold a talent show and hook up. Two guys fall in love and get married.  I've never seen it, so I don't know if the sequence was performed as a homophobic joke or not. 

Undaunted by the 38% Rotten Tomato rating, Netflix produced two Wet Hot tv series, a prequel and a sequel.  Wet Hot American Summer: 10 Years Later catches up with the original characters and some new faces in 1991.  I reviewed Episode 1.5, "King of the Camp," where pompous, snarly, mean-tempered new character Deegs (Skyler Gisondo) and regular Andy (Paul Rudd) compete for the title.

Scene 1: The camp is in session, so there are kids as well as counselors.  Andy's friend points out that he was named King of the Camp every year back in the day, but now the honor goes to that mean-tempered kid, Deegs.  At that moment Deegs throws some trash at them, while his friend Seth does a "fucking" gesture.  So he plans to humiliate them with anal sex? 

They argue. "Fuck off!" "Suck my balls."  Dude, you're a 30 year old man telling a kid to suck your balls.  Doesn't that sound a little odd?  

Finally Andy challenges Deegs to a "King of the Camp Duel."

Scene 2: The King of Camp contest begins with drummers, acrobats, a band dressed like road warriors, and fire dancers (both ladies, darn it).  The contestants are in cages, Andy dressed like a Viking and Deegs dressed like a satyr. Whoa, nice muscles, but shoving your hand into your loincloth is a little distracting. Don't worry, Skyler is 21 years old.

Scene 3: First contest: bag race. Deegs loses his bull horns but keeps the loincloth.

Scene 4:  Next: get dizzy and race with an egg in a spoon.  

Scene 5:  The guys run across the quad for the next contest.  Skyler bouncing around in that satyr outfit is still distracting.  Ok, here it is: make up a song about dinosaurs.  Andy gets weepy about their extinction, while Deegs sings "The Dinosaur Stomp."  

Scene 6: Next: hot pepper eating. Whoops, they're tied.

Scene 7: Next: Man on Fire.  The guys are set on fire, and must walk as far as they can before being overcome.  Hopefully they're wearing fireproof outfits? And using stunt doubles?   They both walk about five feet, and collapse at the same time. But Deegs is an inch ahead, so he wins!  He hugs his bud Seth (Joey Bragg), tells Andy to "suck it," and rushes to collect his prizes. 

As the loser, Andy has to endure the walk of shame, being called names and hit and kicked by the campers.  He complains: "This is total bull jizz!  I should have won!" 

There are six other intertwining plotlines:

1. Yaron and his wife want Victor (Ken Marino) to "shove a baby into her with my penis."   His problem is: he's never had sex, because "my dick has two left thumbs."  His bunkmate, Neil, offers to show him how to use it.  First, to increase his confidence, Neil gives him a makeover ("What do you think I've been taking those night classes at Barbizon for?").  

Then he plops a mattress down and tells Victor to pretend it's a woman. "Slower...don't look like you're going to throw up...smile at her."  He helps, lying on top and thrusting, until Victor has an orgasm.  Ok, you guys just had a dry hump.

This is Ken Marino's bulge from the original movie.  Most likely a prosthetic.

2. Suzie's boyfriend Garth (Jai Courtney, left) got an acting gig, and is leaving the camp -- and her -- for eight months in Budapest. 

3. A girl tells Coop (Michael Showalter) that she doesn't want him hanging out with Katie anymore, He immediately runs into Katie, who wants to have sex with him.

4. McKinley (Michael Ian Black) discovers that his nanny, Renata, has cut all of his faces out of the couple photos, and plans to "Kill the Baby" at 2:00 pm.  He rushes to tell his husband Ben (Adam Scott, left).  

At that moment, she emerges with a cake.  She was planning a surprise anniversary party for them!  She needed the photos for an anniversary montage, and "Kill the Baby" is the band she hired! Hubbie calls him a "paranoid asshole" and rushes off.  But she confesses that he was right: "I wanted to make you insane, so no one will believe you as I destroy your family."  

5. Mark (Mark Feuerstein) keeps a journal of the women he's screwed, upsetting his girlfriend.

6. A journalist shows up at Mikey's door to discuss "him." His wife insists that he (Dax Shepard) not talk to anyone, or "he will kill us." Snooping in the bathroom, the journalist finds a photo of the camp from 1921, with "Ronnie Reagan" among the campers.  This is 1991, just after the Reagan administration, but why would Reagan not want people to know he attended the camp?

Beefcake: Only Skyler, but he is extensively on display.

Heterosexism: Four of the seven plotlines involve heterosexual romance.

Gay Characters: McKinley and Ben.

Gay Subtexts: Victor and Neil (penis functioning plot).  Deegs and Seth (camp leader plot).  Neither expresses any interest in women.  CIA-trained gay subtext couple Eric and Jason (Chris Pine, Jason Schwartzman) appear in later episodes.

My Grade: The contests were very impressive, and some of the plotlines were interesting, even without the back story. A-

Update: Deegs appears in three episodes, and never interacts with a girl.  He is always with his best bud or in a group of guys.  Plus he insults Andy constantly, usually by claiming that he has a nicer dick, but no one ever uses a homophobic slur.  I'm upgrading Deegs from "maybe" to "definitely" gay subtext.

See also: Jason Schwartzman: Lots of quirky guys winning the Girl of their Dreams, with two gay/bi roles and one penis

Zac Efron's Hot/Hung Photos, Part 1: Nude Photos of Adam Devine's Bromantic Partner

Zac Efron is best known for High School Musical and his bromance with Adam Devine.  It's  platonic-ish, gay around the edges: Adam often discusses his erotic attraction to Zac, and brags about seeing his penis -- several times.  (Of course, almost everyone who sees Zac wants to sleep with him.) 

The bromance probably began, or at least became part of their public personas,  when the Workaholics guys did a cameo for Neighbors (2014), playing stoner frat guys from an earlier generation.  Zac and Seth Rogan, the stars of Neighbors, returned the favor: in a promo video for the Season 4 finale, they apply to become the guys' new cubicle mates. Zac gives Adam a lap dance and gets the job.

In Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (2016), Adam and Zac play gay-subtext brothers who for some reason can't get girlfriends. Can't two of the hottest men on the planet just walk up to anyone they like and ask?   They eventually find some girls who will accept their quirks, but still, their non-fraternal love for each other shines through.  And off camera, after two years of trying, Adam finally got a chance to see Zac's penis.

And the rest of him.

Adam always distracts us from his jaw-dropping gorgeousity by making funny faces.  All Zac has to do is keep his shirt on.

Easier said than done.

Nude photos of Zac after the break.

On My Knees in a Cute Guy's Bedroom: one of the perks of growing up Nazarene

 

Every year the family spends a week camping somewhere in the northwoods, fishing, swimming, hiking -- and, on Sunday, finding the nearest Nazarene Church.

This summer, when I am 14 years old, it is in Brainerd, Minnesota, an hour's drive from our campsite

"An hour there and an hour back!" I protest.  "It will be 3:00 by the time we get home-- the whole afternoon wasted."

"Church is never a waste of time," Mom points out.  "Besides, there might be some cute girls there."

I sigh.  Ever since I started junior high, my parents and brother have been pointing out girls, asking if there are any cute girls in my class, high-fiving each other whenenever I casually mention a girl.  So have my friends.  Even the preacher, as he stands at the church door to shake everyone's hand as they leave, gives me a wink and says "A lot of cute girls here today!"

"And what about the soulwinners?: I continue. "We'll be mobbed!"

"Oh, stop complaining.  We'll just call ahead and tell them we're coming."

The most prestigious thing a Nazarene can do is soulwinning, talking sinners (which basically means all non-Nazarenes) into accepting Jesus as their Personal Savior, thereby winning their souls for our team.

We take classes in soulwinning, hear sermons about it, read stories about it, evaluate scenarios.  Our Sunday School teacher often asks "How many souls did you win this week?"

Usually none at all.  It's not easy.  When you were 14 years old, would you have been able to walk up to this guy and say "Hi, do you have a moment to hear the Good News of Jesus Christ?"

If you aren't "spiritually mature" enough for soulwinning, you can witness instead: tell the sinner that you are ecstatically happy every moment of every day because you're saved, or just demonstrate with a broad smile.  The sinner, immersed in the unrelenting agony of the unsaved life, will eventually want to know more.

Soulwinning is so prized that casual visitors to a Nazarene church can easily be mobbed by people grinning at them and trying to start soulwinning conversations.  Unless they come with a member, signifying that they are "taken," or call ahead.

When we walk through the foyer of the Brainerd Church of the Nazarene, looking for all the world like a family of sinners who stumbled in by accident, we are nearly mobbed, but the Sunday School superintendent, the one we called earlier, comes to the rescue.

"We have Nazarenes from Illinois visiting us today," he announces, and the wannabe soulwinners back off.

But in my Sunday School class, they haven't gotten the word.

Ten or so high schoolers are sitting on folding chairs or chatting before the class begins, and every one of them looks up and flashes me a toothy witnessing grin.  Two girls and a boy approach, intent on starting soulwinning conversations.

"I'm from....." I begin.  Then a tall, black haired boy with a strong physique, obviously church royalty, leaves his cluster of admirers and exerts control.  The others back off.

"Welcome!  I'm Roald," he say, offering a warm, tight handshake and a more subtle witnessing smile.  He's done this before!  "Is this your first time?"



This could work to my advantage!

"My parents made me come," I say, which is true.

"Well, sit down over here by me.  I'll tell you how everything works.  If you have any questions, just ask."

So I sit thigh to thigh with a cute boy, who helps me hold the hymnal and shows me how to find Bible verses.

The lesson is about how God has a husband or wife planned out for us, so we should keep ourselves pure and not kiss before marriage.  Standard Sunday school stuff, but I'm already annoyed by Mom's "there may be cute girls there" crack, so I must look rather grumpy.

Roald thinks I'm "under conviction" and puts his arm around me.

Then we have to hold hands for the closing prayer.

This could definitely work to my advantage! 

More after the break