"The Fosters": Twelve hunks and hunkoids, all grown up. With a few grown-up dicks

The Fosters (2013-2018) was a groundbreaking drama on ABC Family, now on Netflix, about a lesbian couple (Stef and Lena) with five children, biological, adopted, and foster (Brandon, Jesus, Jude, Callie, Mariana). The Fosters have foster children, har har 

But it wasn't all sunlight and diversity. Actually, it wasn't sunlight at all. I never watched -- I don't do tragedy -- but the episode synopses sound grim. There were drinking problems, psychological problems, incurable diseases, deaths, homophobic hate crimes, custody battles...like a live-action Howard Cruse comic.   But for many viewers, the remarkably open gay content was worth being depressed.

Besides, there are endless teenage boys with their shirts off to draw in the gay boys and straight girls. I'm checking to see if there were any adult hunks in the crowd, or if any of Fosters Fave Raves have grown up.

1. David Lambert:  Brandon, the oldest son in the family. an aspiring pianist whose dreams are dashed when an injury paralyzes his hand.  He also becomes the victim of statutory rape by hooking up with his father's girlfriend.

The adult Lambert shows his butt while sexing a girl in The Lifeguard.

2. Danny Nucci: Mike, Brandon's biological father, a cop who has a drinking problem, shot an unarmed suspect, and has a girlfriend who hooks up with Brandon.

Nucci butt

3. Tom Williamson: AJ, Mike's foster son.  When does Mike find the time to be a foster parent?

4. Jake T. Austin: Jesus, the second son, who has Attention-Deficit Disorder.

5. Brandon Quinn: Gabe, Jesus' biological father, who didn't tell Jesus because he didn't want the boy to know he's a registered sex offender.

6. Hadyn Byerly: Jude, the youngest son, who becomes mute in angst over coming out as gay (with lesbian parents?), but eventually learns to accept himself and starts dating, with probably the youngest same-sex kiss on television.







More bulges and bods after the break.  Warning: explicit.

"I Don't Want to Pretend that We're Just Coworkers": Starring Bert and Ernie, Patrick and David, and Kelvin and Keefe

 

Ernie: I don't want to pretend that we're just coworkers.

Bert: But we are just coworkers. Try a pink block next, and watch your angles.

David:  I don't want to pretend that we're just coworkers.

Patrick: But we are just coworkers. The aloe moisturizer arrived this morning; these are ready to shelve.

More coworkers after the break

Ride Share: Skyler Gisondo's Bar Mitzvah, Beau Mirchoff nude, and Andy Favreau just because

 

Ride Overshare was a nine-episode tv series about a rideshare driver named Morgan (Morgan Philips) getting involved in the lives of his passengers.

 

 Skyler Gisondo appears as Ben in Episode 1.2 (2017), "Lox of Love": Morgan "does a mitzvah for a young boy about to become a young man."  "Mitzvah" just means good deed, but from the description it's obvious that Morgan is getting him to his bar mitzvah on time. 

I haven't been able to find the 4-minute episode, or the series, anywhere online, but does this look like a 13-year old to you?  Skyler was 18 or 19 in 2017.

Skyler's companion, Moishe, is played by Sam Lerner, best known for The Goldbergs.

The internet says that this is Sam nude.  I'm not so sure.

More after the break

"Cruising": Homophobic classic about sin, degradation, and dicks in a doomed gay world. With a nude Mr. Big.

During the 1970s and 1980s, gay men appeared in movies almost exclusively as limp-wristed hairdressers and drag queens with murderous split personalities.  Cruising, 1980, promised something different: gay men with apartments, jobs, and hangouts; and who were masculine, actually super-macho, with muscles, club bulges, and leather chaps.

Sounds like fun, right?  Wrong.

The tv promo said only that Al Pacino would play a cop who "disappears into the darkness," and the theatrical trail showed him putting on makeup, plus men dancing together, and brief flashes of the words "homosexual,"  "violence," "murder," "fear," and "sex").  
The movie wasn't playing in Rock Island, so one cold Saturday my boyfriend Fred and I drove an hour west to the college town of Iowa City to see our first gay movie, ever.

The plot: in sleazy, decadent gay bar, a "homosexual" played by Arnaldo Santana cruises a mysterious stranger.  After discussing what turned them gay, they go home together, where the stranger politely asks the "homosexual," to lie still while he stabs him to death.  Santana complies!

During the 1970s, criminologists often theorized about why gay men would pick up total strangers for sex.  Some said that they were unable to control their "deviant" sexual desires, and others, that they were looking for a quick, easy way to destroy society by "wasting their seed" instead of making a baby. But most said that they felt so guilty over being gay that they wanted to be murdered.

More bar pickups, more murders. There's a gay serial killer out there "targeting his own!"  Police detective Steve Burns (Al Pacino) is asked to go undercover and catch him.  

So he moves into a sleazy apartment in the bad part of town, puts on a leather vest, applies makeup, and goes cruising.

He befriends his next door neighbor (Don Scardino), but runs afoul of Ted's effeminate, histrionic dancer-boyfriend (James Remar).

Occasionally Steve sees his girlfriend, but he becomes less and less interested in her as he is infected by the "gay lifestyle."

More sin, degradation, and dicks after the break

Erin go Feirc: Nine Kilkenney cocks and Dublin dicks, plus a castle, a dolmen, and the Londonderry wall

I visited Ireland several years ago to research language education.  First stop: Glenstal Abbey School, near Limerick, about 2 hours southwest of Dublin.

The abbey entrance

Not one of the students

Kilkenny fun run

Not one of the runners

Gay couple in Dublin

Northern Ireland after the break

Paul Mescal: Does he appear in anything good? Is ok to post cock pics?

 

Paul Mescal was born in Maynooth, Ireland, about 30 minutes west of Dublin.  He graduated from Trinity College in 2017, and went to work in the theater, getting roles in The Great Gatsby, The Plough and the Stars, A Midsummer Night's Dream, A Streetcar Named Desire and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 

 In 2020 he broke into television with a starring role in Normal People, about two Trinity College undergrads in love.

Wait -- why are they "normal people"?  Do they have some marginalized trait, like being autistic? Reading the description, it doesn't sound like it. Marianne is rich and outspoken, Paul an A-list athlete. Sounds like "Love Story." The only conflict I can see is that they both have friends who would oppose the match, so they have to keep it a secret.  I guess "normal" just means being heterosexual, as opposed to gay.

Apparently the two have a lot of sex, with long scenes of them being languid in each other's arms afterwards, so if you can find some way to crop the girl out, you can get a lot of dick pics. 

But wait -- Buzzfeed News tells us that "Paul Mescal just called out a woman who made him "really angry" by telling him she'd seen him naked and saved a nude screenshot." 

The woman approached him in a bar and said: "I didn’t think the show was any good, but I saw your willy and I have a photo!”

His response: “Truly gross. What is a person supposed to reply to something like that?  That's fucking rude!"

I can understand his reaction: you haven't seen the actor naked, you've seen the character he is portraying.  Besides, even if you did see someone's dick without an invitation, like in the urinals or the locker room, why would you brag to them about it?  It would be like saying "I'm stalking you."

But he brings up a question: is seeing an actor's penis on screen substantially different from seeing his face, or his bare chest?  The aesthetic appeal of the actor's face and physique adds to our enjoyment of the movie, in some cases quite a lot.  But does the penis move the scene away from the aesthetic into the erotic?  And is that inappropriate?

I don't think so.  An actor's work can be enjoyed on many levels.  Faces and physiques can be quite erotic, and a penis has aesthetic appeal.  Viewers can enjoy an image in many ways, for what it reveals about the character, for its placement in the narrative, for its symbolic value, because it is beautiful, or because it is hot. Especially with the girl cropped out.

Next question: Does Paul star in anything good? That is, with gay characters, gay subtexts, or an intriguing premise, and minimal red flags like terminal illness.

Normal People is out.  I'm turned off by the implication that being heterosexual is "normal," so being gay is "abnormal."  Besides, it's just a collegiate romance.  We've seen hundreds of them.  

According to the IMDB, Paul next appeared in four episodes of The Deceived, 2020: A university student falls in love with her prof, who may have killed his wife.  Paul's character is in love with her. Looking for gay content, I found a reference to a subplot on a discussion board, but nothing about it appears in reviews. Nope.

The Lost Daughter, 2021: A university professor on holiday in Greece remembers being a "selfish and unnatural" mother who had an affair and abandoned her family.  Yuck.

God's Creatures, 2022. "In a windswept fishing village, a mother is torn between protecting her beloved son and her own sense of right and wrong"  I'm looking for something interesting, innit?

More Paul after the break

"American Gigolo," 1980 and 2022: Frontal nudity and homophobia, or underwear shots and gay erasure. Which do you prefer?

 

In 1980, American Gigolo became famous for Richard Gere's biceps, chest, abs, and penis -- the first  full frontal shot in any mainstream movie!   

Every gay magazine had an article on The Nude Scene, with a screen shot.  This was before you could buy a DVD or stream the movie, so every gay guy in the country, probably in the world, marched down to the Cineplexto see it.  Gere plays Julian, a hustler who specializes in women, and in fact rejects any assignment involving "fag tricks."  The plot involves Julian falling in love with one of his clients (of course), and being framed for murder.  (He was with a client that night, but she refuses to come forward.)

Gay men of the era didn't mind that the hustlers have 100% female clients, while in real life 97% of their clients are closeted gay/bi men.  They were used to being erased.

They didn't consider homophobic slurs a problem. You weren't allowed to mention gay people, even in slurs, before the 1960s, so in the 1970s and 1980s, most movie characters threw in a few "fags" and "fruits" to demonstrate that they were cool.

Nor did they get upset when the villain turned out to be gay: Julian's pimp (Bill Duke), whom he pushes out a window to his death. Straight people hated us; it was a given, a simple fact of life.  You couldn't escape it,  unless you managed to live and work in a gay neighborhood and avoid mainstream media altogether.  The rest of us would hear homophobic jibes, slurs, scandals and jokes from family and friends, from coworkers, from random strangers on the bus, so what difference did a movie make?  You got to see a dick on screen!

Writer/director Paul Schrader has been involved with a number of other homophobic projects, such as Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, about the gay writer who developed a fixation with bodybuilders.  Again, being gay is all about darkness, destruction, death. Being gay is evil.

But not Richard Gere.  A year before American Gigolo,he  starred in the gay-themed (and not homophobic) Bent on Broadway, about gay men who are sent to a concentration camp in Nazi Germany.  In 1993 he appeared in And the Band Played On, about the first years of the AIDS crisis.

How did he manage all three?  Does he hate gay people, or not?  

In an interview in Entertainment Weekly.  Gere reveals that he took the part because Julian was so different from himself, into fashion and languages (which Gere was not), and with "a gay thing flirting through it," and he knew nothing about "that community."  Good enough explanation, I guess.

In 2022, an American Gigolo tv series appeared.  15 years after the events in the movie, the middle-aged Julian (Jon Bernthal) tries to find out who framed him (I thought Leon confessed?) and to reconnect with The Girl of His Dreams.  

Paul Schrader was not involved, so no homophobic slurs and no gay villain. But gay men are still erased; 100% of the hustlers' clients are women.  There's a lesbian cop, which is not nearly adequate representation.

And no frontal nudity, just a butt shot.

Is that progress?

Richard Gere's dick after the break