Peter Scolari: Wacky inventor, gay dad, Tom Hanks' bosom buddy, and an icon of my childhood. With bonus dicks.

It's sad when you discover that one of the icons of your childhood has died.  Sadder when you discover that he died in 2021.  

Peter Scolari was short, blond, muscular, handsome -- perfect.  Born in New Rochelle, New York, in 1955, his tv career began in 1978, with some guest spots and a starring role in the short-lived Goodtime Girls, with such future stars as Annie Potts, Scott Baio, and Adrian Zmed.  It was set during World War II, so the "good time" was just a gushy tagline, like the tv shows Happy Days and..um..Good Times.

In 1980, Peter hit television fame with Bosom Buddies, pitched to the network as a "witty Billy Wilder-style buddy comedy, like Some Like It Hot."  The network only heard Some Like it Hot, and put the buddies, Peter and then-unknown Tom Hanks, in drag. They explain in the intro that it's just so they can live in an all-female residential hotel; they're heterosexual, so "it's all perfectly normal."

In the second season, they minimized the "they're guys in dresses, har har!" jokes to concentrate on the buddy-bonding.  The two became lifelong friends off-camera, too. Tom Hanks states that they were "connected at the molecular level."  Today we would call it a bromance.

 The theme song, Billy Joel's "This is My Life," was an anthem for all of the gay boys of the 1980s who fled homophobic small towns for the freedom of West Hollywood or New York:

I  don't need you to worry for me, cause I'm all right, 

I don't want you to tell me it's time to come home. 

I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life. 

Go ahead with your own life, and leave me alone.

Next came episodes of Steambath, which was Loveboat at the baths, with no gay characters; Finder of Lost Loves, which was Loveboat with private detectives, with no gay characters; and Love Boat.

The next tv show I saw Peter in was Newhart (1984- 90), with Bob Newhart as the proprietor of a rustic New England bed-and-breakfast, later the host of a tv show, Vermont Today. Peter played his producer, Michael Harris, who falls in love with heiress-turned-maid Stephanie.  No beefcake -- in an interview, Peter said that he never takes his shirt off because Michael "doesn't have biceps like this"; no gay characters, and it ends horribly, when the whole series turns out to be the dream of the psychiatrist Bob Newhart in his old show. 

Still, as it bounced around the schedule with Designing Women and Kate and Allie, it provided some glimpses of gay potential, like the three buddy-bonding brothers, Larry, Darryl, and Darryl.

I didn't see much of Peter after Newhart. I was living in West Hollywood, then New York, and not interacting much in the Straight World.  He had some guest spots on Empty Nest and Burke's Law,  voiced Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain, and had a starring role in Dweebs, another short-lived series about computer nerds.  Future queer-friendly comedian Kathy Griffin also appeared.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Series sounds awful, but it won two Emmies, a review calls it "the best-written kids' show on television," and it lasted for 68 episodes. Peter played the guy who shrinks kids, and Thomas Dekker, who would grow up to have a chest, played the kid who gets shrunk. 

Actually, the shrinking in the title was just to draw in audiences from the movies. Peter's character invents a lot of things: glasses that allow you to see the dead; a time machine; a brain-swapping device, a clone machine; a love drug.

More tv shows follow:Touched by an Angel, Ally McBeal, Reba, The West Wing, Commissioner Loeb in Gotham, Peter in Madoff, and then his magnum opus, Girls, 2012-17.

The Girls are in their 20s, living in New York City, and, according to wikipedia, having "post-feminist conversations around the body politic and female sexual subjecthood." 

There are various men in their lives, including Andrew Rannells, who dated Hannah in college before coming out as gay in Season 4, and Peter as Hannah's father Tad, who comes out as gay in Season 4 also, and starts dating Keith, played by Ethan Phillips.  

More after the break

Knox Gibson: Australian swimmer, model, "Hunger Games" baddie, disability advocate. With some n*de co-stars and random twinks

As of this writing Knox Gibson. aka Captain Knoxie,  is 17 years old,  so I won't be searching for n*de photos. But he's not shy about showing off his physique.

And I have some n*de photos of his co-stars, like Clemons Schick (left), and some random Australian twinks (after the break).

Knox grew up in Orange, NSW, a small town about 250 km (150 miles) from Sydney.  His first love is swimming: he was selected for the Australian Age National Championships four times, and placed for the breast stroke  (2021, 2024) and the individual medley (2023). 

He also swims for his high school, St. Stanislaus College in Bathhurst. In 2024, he represented NSW in the all-Australia School Sport Games, and won the silver medal in the breast stroke.

Knox's second love is modeling, both fashion and runway. 

In  2020, he wore Tommy Hilfinger for New York's Fashion Week.  

In 2023, the Bonds company did a "As Worn By Us" campaign, showing Australians of every age wearing their clothes.  Knox appeared as  "Age 16."

Knox moved into acting with episodes of the Australian children's shows Teddies and Creature Mania (2017). 

 Three episodes of Lap of Honor followed (2018), then starring roles in the shorts Midnight Gun (2019), about a journalist and "masked hero" tracking down kidnapped children, and Forgive Us Our Trespasses (2022), about a boy in Nazi Germany, where people with disabilities are murdered, running for his life.

He has also starred in two music videos, "Handyman" by Triple One (2020) and "The Road," by the Zela Margossian Quintet (2022), and commercials for Kmart, NSW Transport, and Breeze Singapore

More after the break. Caution: Explicit

Johnny Berchtold: I have good news and bad news. The good news is his cock.

I researched Johnny Berchtold, who plays the gay-vague or maybe canonically gay college student Richard Beck on Season 3 of Reacher.   

I have good news and bad news.

The good news: He is hung.

 

The bad news: The d*ck pic is from the movie A Hard Problem (2021).  Johnny plays a guy who tries to reconnect with his sister and recruits The Girl to help him clean out his deceased mother's house. Heteronormativity all the way down.

The good news:  In addition to Reacher, Johnny has a gay-vague role in  The Passenger (2023). Violent loose-cannon Benson (Kyle Gallner) decides to "fix" beset-upon fast-food worker  Randy (Johnny), killing his bullies, helping him stand up to his overbearing mother, and so on.

The script was heteronormative, but queer director Carter Smith had the actors push up the homoeroticism until they are almost a gay couple.  (Spoiler: one dies at the end).

The bad news: I couldn't find any other gay or gay-vague roles.

In Tiny Pretty Things (2023), his character is married to Claire (Katherine Hahn of Agatha All Along).

In spite of the whimsical pun-title, Dog Gone (2023) is about a dying guy and his dog, who is also dying.  He's probably straight, but I'm not sure: the plot synopsis was so disturbing that I just skimmed through.

In Gaslight (2021), which is about Watergate, not Victorian England, Johnny plays Jay Jennings, the estranged son of Martha Mitchell (wife of Attorney General John Mitchell).  He's married to a woman.

In spite of the whimsical title,  Life as a Mermaid (2016-2018) is a live-action drama about two mermaid sisters living among humans.  Johnny plays the Barnacle King, sort of a nerdish character with disgusting barnacles attached to his face.  He has a male sidekick, but I couldn't stomach watching long enough to determine if he is gay or gay-vague.

Fun fact: Life as a Mermaid is also a documentary about transgender people in Borneo.

The good news: Johnny is way into horror.  His instagram is full of photos of him in bloody and monster makeup, and getting Chucky as a roommate.  

More after the break. Caution: Explicit.

"The Other Two," Episode 1.6: Cary goes shirtless, Chase twerks, and there's enough bulges and butts for everyone

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Reacher, Episode 3.1: The man-mountain bonds with a gay college boy with a drug dealer dad, and there are plot twists and d*cks

I see that Reacher is in its third season on Amazon Prime. "When retired Military Police Officer Jack Reacher is arrested for a murder he did not commit, he finds himself in the middle of a deadly conspiracy full of dirty cops, shady businessmen, and scheming politicians."

What's the big deal?  "Crime he did not commit" has been a cliche since "The Fugitive" in 1963, and every single movie and tv show has dirty cops.  No way would I consider watching something so trite and......

...um...

...boring....um....

I mean, I can't wait to start watching.  I'm reviewing Episode 3.1, "Persuader"

Recap: Reacher (Alan Ritchson) travels from town to town, helping people with their problems, mostly requiring him to shoot machine guns, kick guys in the balls, and throw them off balconies into trash piles, then take a Trailways bus somewhere else.

Scene 1: Establishing shots of Havenhurst University in Abbotsville, Maine.  Not real places, but they could mean Bowdoin College, the safety school for lots of valedictorians.  Reacher pulls up to the Vinyl Vault downtown, grimaces, and brings his record collection in to sell.

While he's bickering with the shopkeeper, Steve (David Daniel Stewart) drives up in his pick-up truck.  Suspicious, Reacher watches as he deliberately plows into the car, pushes it into a telephone pole, kills the driver, and drags the whimpering college student Richard Beck (Johnny Berthold, below) from the back seat into his truck.

Reacher intervenes and shoots out the tires.  Steve opens fire, but Reacher shoots him in the arm and retrieves the whimpering Richard, loads him into his van, shoots a cop ("I didn't know -- I thought he was pulling a gun"), and zooms away, with more cops in hot pursuit.  The campus police?  Can they even make arrests?

Scene 2: A well choreographed chase, with a lot of sudden turns and smashed cars -- the staging must have cost a fortune.  They stop so Reacher can steal a new car.   He tells Richard to call for a ride; "tell them you're in shock and can't remember what I looked like." 

But Richard wants more help; the kidnappers could still be around.  "No.  I'm a drifter who used an unlicensed gun to kill a cop.  I gotta disappear."

"At least take me home. My dad's rich, and can help you disappear."

"Nope."

"Please?" Offer to let him screw you.

"Well, ok." 

Back story: Richard was kidnapped before, five years ago.  Dad wouldn't pay the ransom until the kidnappers cut off his ear. 

Scene 3: Establishing shot of Richard's huge Federal-style mansion, on a rocky coast.  Wait -- I swear I hear the "Dark Shadows" theme. Is this Collinwood?  Is Richard like the grandson of Barnabas Collins?

Richard tells Paulie, the hot security guard (Olivier Richters, the Dutch Giant), that it's ok, Reacher is a friend, but Paulie doesn't believe him.  Well, he could be a kidnapper.   

Reacher doesn't want to submit to a search or get his gun confiscated, but Richard bats his eyes and says "Pretty please?  For me?"  

More after the break

Shane Harper: the "Good Luck Charlie" and "God's Not Dead" guy shows his dick surprisingly often

 I wanted to research Shane Harper, the extremely well-hung drug dealer  Junior on Hightown (2020-21).  He's distraught over his girlfriend's death, so he makes some homophobic comments to two leather daddies, hoping that they will kill him.  They just beat him up; he dies of a drug overdose later.

Shane only has six photos on his Instagram, and two on his X, including this one: he getting a spray-on tan,  with the caption: "this is probably the only nude photo I'll ever post."

Don't believe him.  He posts a lot of nude photos.

So who is this guy?

According to the IMDB, he was born in San Diego, and began dancing, singing, and acting in community productions at the age of nine.   He played dancers in Re-Animated, High School Musical 2, Dance Revolution, and Dancing on Sunset.

Then he bounced arund the Disney Channel for a few years, guest starring in Zoey 101 and  Wizards of Waverly Place, and starring in Good Luck, Charlie as Teddy's boyfriend (Teddy is a girl; so is Charlie)

He released an album in 2011,  so I check out the heterosexism: the number of songs that shout "girl! girl! girl!," thus proclaiming that every relationship is heterosexual and invalidating the desires and relationships of LGBT fans.

Not much heterosexism.   But then look what happens:

God's Not Dead, 2014, starrs right-wing nutjob Kevin Sorbo as an evil college professor who forces his students to submit signed statements affirming that "God is dead."  This is utterly ridiculous. College professors don't force students to accept any point of view. They aren't allowed to.

Besides, The Death of God  (1961) was a book complaining that modern society had lost its sense of transcendence, the magical in everyday life.  The author didn't mean that the actual Supreme Being was dead.  And it was 50 years ago.  Why are fundamentalists still upset about it?

Shane plays the student who bravely challenges the evil prof and ends up proving that God is, in fact, still alive.

He returns in God's Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness (2018), in which a Christian pastor is tormented, and his church burned down, by an army of atheists and liberals.  No philosophy professors?  

OMG, that is jaw-droppingly idiotic. 

In a 2011 interview, Shane states that he only takes "wholesome" and "uplifting" roles. For instance, he would be ok with playing a gay guy, as long as the movie establishes that being gay is wrong, and has him give up the lifestyle.  

That was over a decade ago. Let's see what Shane has been up to lately.

Besides posting nude photos, I mean.

More after the break.

"Twin Peaks: The Return": Paranormal weirdness, 25 years later. See if you can figure it out. With Beymer butt and James' junk

  

We've been watching the 1990s cult classic Twin Peaks, about paranormal, cryptic, and just weird events befalling FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLaughlan) as he investigates the murder of high schooler Laura Palmer, who had "lots of secrets."  And now we're on Twin Peaks: The Return (2017-18), a continuation of the original story.  

Some problems:

1. People stare for lengthy periods before speaking, and then speak slo-www-ly.  If conversations occurred at a normal pace, each episode would be ten minutes long.

2. About half of every episode consists of a naked woman talking to a fully-clothed man.  Granted, some of the men are attractive, but there's no way to look at them without seeing a lot of lady parts.

3. The story makes no friggin* sense.

See if you can figure out what's going in the first 2 episodes, plus a scene.

Red Room:  The original series ended with many unresolved plotlines, notably Agent Cooper (left) losing his (second) True Love and being possessed by the malevolent spirit Bob.    

In 2016, we discover that Agent Cooper was split into three parts.  The Doppleganger, controlled by the evil Bob, was loosed upon the world.  His body, now named Dougie, moved to Las Vegas, got a job in insurance, had a wife and a kid, and now consorts with naked prostitutes who stare at him for a lo...ong time.  Agent Cooper's spirit was trapped in the Red Room, where the other spirits make cryptic remarks, talk backwards, and stare at him for a lo...ong time. 

Still trapped, Agent Cooper's spirit is talking to the Giant Alien, who told him that "the owls are not what they seem," one of the big unresolved mysteries of the original.  Now Giant Alien tells him to listen to the sounds on an old Victrola. 

Twin Peaks: The psychiatrist who counseled and had sex with Laura Palmer, now batshit crazy, is in his survivalist cabin, waiting for delivery of a bunch of shovels. 

New York: A young man (James Croak) has a job sitting in an empty room, staring at a large round window, to see if anything happens.  A girl from the coffee shop drops by, hoping to have sex with him, but he can't because the security guard is watching, and he's not allowed visitors.  No one should know what's going on.  Doing a good job!

Twin Peaks: Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer of West Side Story, top photo), owner of the Great Northern Hotel and the One Eyed Jacks casino and brothel, who had sex with Laura Palmer before she died, was last seen going batshit crazy and thinking that he was a Civil War General. In 2016, he is telling a newly hired lady about the hotel rules.   His younger brother comes in, lambasts him for hiring someone else to have sex with, and talks about his new business, marijuana.

Meanwhile, at the sheriff's office, Lucy the Receptionist turns away a salesman who wants to see "the sheriff," because he doesn't know which he wants: there are three of them, two named Truman, and one is sick.  The other is Robert Forster (left), the brother of the Sheriff Harry Truman who buddy-bonded with Agent Cooper 25 years ago.

Unknown Location: The Agent Cooper Doppelganger gets out of his car  and bangs on the door of an isolated house.  After disabling the guard, he goes inside and stares for a lo...ong time at several people who will never appear again. He criticizes one for having inadequate guards, but she explains that "it's a world of truck drivers."  

She fetches a man (George Griffith) and a woman, and they hug everyone else in the house -- I forget how many people -- and leave with the Doppelganger.

New York: The coffee shop girl visits the young man who has a job staring at a window, with more coffee.  This time the security guard is out, so he invites her in.  They begin sex: she is naked, her backside bouncing, her breasts heaving, while we get a glimpse of his chest. Pay careful attention, as that's the only beefcake you'll be seeing amid the endless heaving breasts.  Then a wraith comes through the window and slashes them to death.  

Buckhorn, South Dakota.  An apartment has a weird smell coming out of it, so a resident calls the police.  There's a long, involved bit about who is in charge and who has the key, with a lot of characters who never appear again, until the lady realize that she has the key.  Oy vey.  Inside the apartment is the school librarian's head on the decapitated body of an older, chubby man.  We never find out who he is, or why the killer arranged them like that.

Twin Peaks: Sheriff Hawk receives a phone call from the batshit-crazy Log Lady, whose pet log has psychic powers.  It has a cryptic message explaining that the disappearance of Agent Cooper 25 years ago was related to Sheriff Hawk's Native American heritage and "something missing."

Buckhorn, South Dakota: The Forensics Lab has a match on the fingerprints in the decapitated librarian's apartment: they belong to the high school principal. (Matthew Lillard). So two agents and two cops, including the principal's best friend George, arrest him.  "It's all a mistake," he yells. 

Twin Peaks: To discover "what's missing," Sheriff Hawk pulls all of the files on Agent Cooper, and he and Receptionist Lucy go through them.  She ate a chocolate rabbit from some Easter evidence, but that's not it: his heritage has nothing to do with Easter bunnies.

Buckhorn, South Dakota: The Principal is interrogated about the decapitated people.  He was not having an affair with the librarian, and he was never in her apartment.  He can account for all of his activities on Thursday, except for about 15 minutes.  They lock him up, then get a warrant to go search his car.  There's either a human tongue or a piece of fish in the trunk.

The wife visits the Principal in prison to tell him that she framed him so she can pursue a romance with his best friend, George (Neil Dickson).  As she leaves, we see another cell occupied by a guy in an old-fashioned Davy Crocket outfit, covered with soot.  He vanishes.

At home, the Doppelganger tells the wife that she did a good job pretending to be a human being, and shoots her.

More non sequiters after the break