Jacob Sartorius: Femme teen idol into heterosexism, cowboys, and frontal nudity
Asa Butterfield: A dozen "boy meets girl" movies, a dozen nude photos, and a boyfriend
I keep thinking that Asa Butterfield is American due to his old-fashioned name -- maybe Moravian or Amish -- but he's actually British, born in Islington, 30 minutes by underground from the British Museum. It has pubs called The Earl of Essex, The Duke of Cambridge, and the Pig and the Butcher. Can't get more British than that.
He got his start in horribly depressing movies like After Thomas and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, 2007, which of course were on my "run away fast" list.
Then came Hugo, 2011, a fantasy with an ending that made me cringe -- the photo looks like two boys have the adventure, but it's actually a boy and a girl. When Hugo announces that he's got a girlfriend, the adults throw confetti, high-five each other, and scream with joy. That happened to me every time I mentioned a girl, no matter how casually: "A girl in my class did a book report on Finnegan's Wake." "Hallelujah, he's straight! He's normal! We don't have to worry anymore! Here, have some money and the keys to the car!"
I didn't see Ender's Game, 2013, because the original novel was written by the horribly homophobic Orson Scott Card, or A Brilliant Young Mind, 2014, because the brilliant young math prodigy gets a brilliant young girlfriend.
The novel version of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children contains no heterosexual romance, but in the 2016 movie version, there are three of them. It's boys and girls gazing into each other's eyes all the way down.
Are you noticing a pattern here?
Then Came You, 2018: A boy falls in love with a dying girl. This seems to be quite a trope. Why do girls never fall in love with dying boys? Of course I'm not seeing it.
Time Freak, 2018. At least Asa has a gay-subtext relationship with Skyler Gisondo en route to winning the Girl of His Dreams.
Your Christmas or Mine?, 2022. Isn't Asa a little young to graduate to Christmas romcoms?
Asa's biggest role to date is in the tv series Sex Education, 2019-23. He plays Otis, a boy whose mom is a sex therapist, so he and his friends get the idea of opening a clinic to solve teenagers' sex problems. There are some gay characters, but Otis is straight. And naked a lot.
More after the break. Caution: Explicit
Aaron Goldenberg: Former fundamentalist, Cousin Karl's boyfriend, Mean Gay. With some underwear bulges.
Aaron Goldenberg is an Atlanta based comedian with 41.000 followers on Facebook, 294,000, on Instagram, and 1.2 million on Tiktok.
He is best known for his series of "Mean Gays" videos with Jake Jonez: they make snarky comments at your wedding, your baby shower, by the pool, at your dinner party. The "hookup" video, where the Mean Gays invite you over for "some fun" and discover that you're a little older and huskier than your profile photo, has gone viral, with over 4 million views on Twitter and Tiktok.
Aaron also riffs, or rather comments, on his fundamentalist childhood -- hiding in plain sight, parents in denial, friends saying "Hate the sin but love the sinner," coming out to his pastor. It did not go well.
Aaron has 21 acting and 9 writing credits on the IMBD, beginning in his fundamentalist days with the short "Witnesscylin," about a drug that can help you win souls. He has played Confused Bellhop in Burn Notice, Emaciated Vampire in So Dark, and the Host of Rap Shit.
He has a scene in Season 3 of The Righteous Gemstones, as Percy the Interior Designer, who is working on the siblings' new executive board room. Kelvin is nice to him,so I interpreted this as an attempt to form social connections with other LGBT people.
"Cucumber": Lots of cucumbers on display as gay life in Manchester gets increasingly dark.
Cucumber, on Amazon Prime, is like gay Revenge, with plot twists, hidden agendas, and people who are not what they seem. It starts out as a comedy, but turns darker and darker. The nonsensical title, by the way, comes from a measure of erectile hardness, from tofu (semi-soft) to cucumber (rigid).
1. Middle-aged Manchester insurance salesman Henry (Vincent Franklin) gets angry when his boyfriend Lance (Cyril Nri, top photo) brings an anonymous guy, left, home for a three-way. Maybe if you'd asked first, and waited for him instead of just going down?
Henry calls the police and has the two arrested (on what charge? consensual sexual acts are legal in Britain.),
2. Henry moves out and seeks refuge with a twink couple from work, Dean and Freddie (Fisayo Akinade, Freddie Fox, left). And starts flirting with Freddie! Wait -- you get all huffy when your boyfriend wants an open relationship, but it's ok for the twinks?
4. Meanwhile Ex-Boyfriend Lance tries to hook up with Straight Guy Daniel (James Murray, left). He refuses: "Sorry, I'm straight."
Meanwhile Ex-Boyfriend Lance empties the joint checking account. Never leave much in that joint checking account, buddy. One tiff, and it's gone.
More cucumbers after the break
"Young Rock," Episode 2.8: The Rock hits the big time, with lots of locker room beefcake and bulges
"A Man in Full" or "The Fullness of Man" or "Filling a Man." Whatever, it has a wild penis scene
While I am scrolling through my new photo feed, I am shocked to find two that are extremely explicit (after the break). In the first, an older man wearing a suit catches a young man having anal sex with his boyfriend. So Dad didn't know that he was gay? In the second, the young man confronts the older man -- while fully aroused, and huge!
The caption says Tom Pelphrey, whom I've never heard of, in the movie A Man in Full. It must have a gay theme -- gay men being accused of being "not really men," and all that.
Tom Pelphrey has 10,000 photos on the internet, but he usually looks much older, so this must be a movie from early in his career. Probably European -- what American movie would show full arousal?
More research reveals that he starred in Ozark, but I can't tell which character. An article in People says Perry Abbott, but a Reddit feed says that he was AMAZING as Ben. The Ozark wiki mentions Ben, "a major antagonist in the third season," but not Perry Abbott, so People must be wrong.
Here's a long shot of Ben's butt.
Next I try to look up A Man in Full, but it's such a nonsensical title that I keep searching on A Full Man and The Fullness of Men instead. When I finally get the title right, it's not an artsy European movie from the early 2000s, it's a tv series that dropped on Netflix in 2024! Atlanta real estate mogul Charlie Croker, played by famous actor Jeff Daniels, goes bankrupt, and has to defend his empire. Isn't that, like, "Succession"?
Jeff Daniels is best known for the adulation of 1990s stupidity Dumb and Dumber. Here he shows a bulge in Something Wild (1986).
Tom Pelphrey plays "Raymond Peepgrass" Ridiculous name! This guy is a voyeur of lawns?
Wikipedia doesn't say who he is, so I'm assuming from the photo, the rich guy's lawyer? Why would he care if his lawyer is gay?
Looking for a photo of Croker and Peepgrass -- Peepgrass? -- together, I get the name of the series wrong again!
Reviews mention "a wild scene" and "a shocking scene," but fail to say what episode, so I surmise the last, "Judgment Day." I fast forward to the very last scene of the series.
A peep at Peepgrass after the break. Warning: Explicit.
Hung Hungarian hunks: Eight Budapest bulges, Pecs penises, and Miskolc muscles
Budapest is only 244 km from Vienna, so if you're visiting Austria, there's really no excuse not to go -- the architecture is amazing, all of the art deco glitz of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire.
St Stephen's Basilica, completed in 1905.
Hungary doesn't have a great record on gay rights. Although public opinion is gradually moving forward, many Hungarians continue to believe that same-sex acts should be criminalized, and tv programs that "promote or portray" LGBT persons are prohibited.
Of course, there are some gay bars and saunas, and you can still be invited back to someone's room: Gyere a szobámba

























