Ryan Pinkston: Hottest of the Short Guy Brigade, martial artist, gigolo, gay cop. With some costar dicks

 


I've never been interested in tall guys; I like them short, the shorter the better, and in the 2000s, the 5'4" Ryan Pinkston was one of the hottest of the Short Guy Brigade

Born in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington DC, Ryan got his start in martial arts: he received his black belt in Wushu Kung Fu at age nine and went on to championships in karate, kung fu, and tae kwan do.


An interview on the Jenny Jones talk show landed him an agent, and within a month he had roles in Spy Kids: 3D (2003) and Bad Santa (2003), and he was helping Austin Kutcher play celebrity pranks on Punked.

But there was a problem.  Although handsome, muscular -- and short -- Ryan was typecast as an aggressive wise guy, basically a jerk. So that's the sort of role he received


In 2004, the 16-year old got his own tv series, Quintuplets, about teenage quintuplets with conflicting personalities.  His Patton was pushy and aggressive; brother Parker (Jake McDorman, left) was the athlete, and Pearce (Johnny K. Lewis, below) was the nerd, who actually danced with another boy in a "prom" episode.





Left: Johnny K. Lewis today

Next came the boorish Felch in Revenge of the Nerds (2006), chronic liar Sam Leonard in Full of It (2007), and Fletcher in the homophobic College (2008), which paradoxically offered an extensive homoerotic subtext.

Ryan's guest spots on the teencoms Out of Jimmy's Head and Hannah Montana were a little better, jerks with a soft, sensitive side.

But then he hit the bottom of the barrel: teen sex comedies. Foreign Exchange (2008), Extreme Movie (2008) with Frankie Muniz, Adventures in Online Dating (2009).




At least he had no problem with shirtless, shower, and swimsuit shots, though he drew the line at nudity.  And he was ok with rolling around with other guys naked.  Teens could sigh over the homoerotic subtexts even if they didn't like his characters.
 
But then, in 2010, something remarkable happened: a complete turnaround.  Ryan's characters changed from jerks to nice guys, and coincidentally some buddy-bonding was added to the girl-crazy schtick.

Boy Band (2010): 
in 1982, his Greg buddy-bonds with Brad (Michael Copon) to form the first boy band in history.


Tower Prep 
(2010), about a school for kids with paranormal powers: his Gabe has a crush on Ian Archer (Drew Van Acker).
















Cougars, Inc. 
(2011): his Jimmy and best friend Sam (Kyle Gallner) can't afford college tuition, so start an escort service pairing older women with teenage boys.  Hey, is that legal? Of course, they get in on the action, too.  We get a nice shot of Ryan's butt as the camera lingers on his supine body, but this only nudity in any movie.




Frontal nudity after the break

Who is Bradley Cooper, and why is he "ultra-famous"? With his gay/sort of bi characters , backside, and d*ck

 


Danny McBride promised an ultra-famous guest star for Righteous Gemstones Episode 4.1, the Civil War prequel, but kept him a super secret, so his appearance would be a shocking reveal.  I watched the entire episode, wondering who the ultra-famous guest star was.  

Turns out that it was....BRADLEY COOPER!!!!!

Who the heck is that? 

It's such a generic name, it could belong to anyone.

The main Bradley Cooper has  75 acting credits on the IMDB. I've seen six:


Wet Hot American Summer
(2001), watched to review.  Bradley plays Ben,  a gay guy at the summer camp who gets a boyfriend.  His peers are horrified: "Ben is a fag!" But they give him a wedding present anyway.


Guardians of the Galaxy, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Avengers: Infinity Game,
and Avengers: Endgame, where he voices the the sentient raccoon character.  

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor among Thieves, where he plays a loveable rogue.

No wonder I didn't recognize him, or his name.





You can't really blame me. Who'd want to see Alias (2001-06), about a lady spy with a  "you're arrogant!" bickering partner?

Or Bending All the Rules (2002), about a woman juggling two boyfriends, David Gail and Bradley?  Even though he shows us his backside.




Or The A-Team (2010), a remake of a 1980s tv show that I never saw.  Even though it shows us Bradley's impressive physique.

Or Wedding Crashers, He's Just Not Into You, The Hangover, or The Hangover II?  They sound like nontstop heteronormative sleaze fests.

I might have gone to see Valentine's Day (2010), if I knew there was a gay plotline in the ensemble: Holden (Bradley) dumps his boyfriend, pro football player Sean (Eric Dane) because he's closeted, but after his career is over, the guy comes out, so Holden takes him back.

More after the break, including some c*ocks

Kenton Duty: The "Shake It Up" star shakes it up with Christian soap operas and j/o videos

 


Some former teen stars retain their cuteness through their 20s, 30s, 40s, and on.  Others move from "dreamy" to "meh," and an unfortunate few turn into gorgons.   I'll leave it to you to decide what happened to Kenton Duty.  

Yes, that's his real name.

Born in 1995, Kenton began acting at the age of nine, and first appeared on screen at age eleven.  He drew fan attention in 2010 for a ridiculous background story on the paranormal Lost: in the first century CE, a Roman woman is shipwrecked on the floating island, has twin sons, Jacob and ___.  Christians and Jews were a tiny minority at the time.  How does she know the Jewish name?   For the rest of the plot arc, everyone refuses to say the name of the other brother, although it obviously has to be Esau.  


This led to Shake It Up (2010-12), a slight variation on the usual Disney teencom format.  Instead of a girl who wants to be a singer, it featured two girls who want to be dancers. Kenton played the German-stereotype Gunther Hessenheffer, who dances with his sister Tinka.  According to the fan wiki, he is "flamboyant, fashion-conscious, theatrical," with a gay-subtext firendship with Ty Blue (Roshon Feagan) but straight, dating and crushing on a number of girls.






You might expect some gay characters or subtexts in Contest (2013), where a  bully and his queer-coded victim (Kenton, left, Daniel Flanagan, not shown) work together to win a contest, but the victim gets a girl.

We do see a lot of Kenton's physique, and Phil of the Future's Raviv Ullman appears.


Don't get excited. It's Guys Night (2015) is a two-minute short in which the guys get a girl to join them.  Why would two guys want to spend time alone?






Kenton's most significant role in the post-Shake It Up era is in the Christian soap Hilton Head Island (2017-19). Michael Swan stars as the dying patriarch of a clan scheming to get their hands on his media empire. Kenton plays a grandson. 

He's done some other Christian tv series, like The Encounter (Jesus steps in to solve people's problems), but also some secular stuff, like Filthy Preppy Teens and A Housekeeper's Revenge.







Kenton also has eight writing and 31 directing credits, mostly in shorts: Labels, All in the Cards, Gloommates, Kids on Patrol, Wasteland, Dead Giveaway, Condemned.  They don't have descriptions on the IMDB, and I doubt that any have gay content, so we'll skip right to the n*de photos. 




More after the break. Caution: explicit

Sage Ftacek: "Sweethearts" Short Brigade Stud from Anoka, with a BFA, some Tiktok videos, and a cock


 I was interested in Sage Ftacek, because he plays a gay character in the Thanksgiving romcom Sweethearts (2024).  Newly out Palmer (Caleb Hearon) is looking for social contacts at a pre-Thanksgiving party.  He is standing in the kitchen.

A blond guy, maybe Kellan (Jake Bongiovi), yells: "Let's roast this sucker!"

Kurt: "Yeah, babe! I'll be right there."  He takes a turkey from the refrigerator, and stops to ask Palmer "Do you know anything about cooking?

Palmer "Not really."  

He starts to walk away, but realizing that he could be a gay social contact, Palmer stops him: "Wait, Kurt.  I'm gay."

Kurt responds with a blank expression: "I'm Kurt."

"I know. We've gone to school together since kindergarten."

"I'm gonna try to cook this turkey on the bonfire."


Later Palmer and Lukas, a gay guy who's interested in him, watch Kurt and his boyfriend rip off their shirts and try to set the turkey on fire. 

That's all, just four lines, but look at him.  Extraordinary cute. 

And at 5'8", a a member of the Short Guy Brigade.

He has a very unusual name -- it's Czech, originally meanng "little bird" -- so he should be easy to track down.






First his Instagram.  It says "golf cart dealership, which may be a joke.

Lots of joke pics, like this one of Sage dismantling a mannekin.







A clever way to see three cocks at once.







And a spare butt, which may be his or a friend's.

According to Facebook, Sage grew up in Anoka, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, where his Dad works at CostCo. He has a younger brother, and a relative who got a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University, specializing in transgender literary texts of the 18th century.  

Sage graduated from the St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists in 2018.

The Rutgers Actors Showcase says that he grew up in Minnesota, "sledding and throwing snowballs,"  fell into the "skateboarding and graffiti" scene when not taking the bus into Minneapolis for acting lessons,  and ended up at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, where he received a BFA in acting. in 2022.

More after the break. Caution: Explicit.

The Top 15 Hunks of the Civil War Gemstones, with some 19th century soldier d*cks


Righteous Gemstones
Episode 4.1, the short film about great-grandpa Elijah Gemstone (Bradley Cooper) grifting and murdering his way through the Civil War, was a nonstop sausage fest, with a cast of 18 men and no women.  Granted, they were all soldiers, grim, grimy, injured, and dying, but still, their inner hunkiness shone through. 

 Instead of trying to profile them separately, I'll do them all at once, excluding Bradley Cooper and the three who have already been profiled (Charles Ambrose, Jackson Kelly).  With such a large group, I'll limit my research to:

* Is he gay?  A man with a wife or girlfriend will be identified as straight.  Sorry, bi and closeted guys.

* Are there any n* ude photos?  I'll just check AZ Nude Men and Instagram.  No time to look through a lot of hookup sites.


1. Jim Cummings, Pete McCabe in Danny McBride's Halloween Kills, as Captain Cane, who accuses the pretend chaplain Elijah of gambling and drinking with the guys.  He's kissing a lady a lot on his Instagram, so: straight.

Here Jim is preparing for a polar plunge.  Yow. 

2. Josh McDermitt, best known as Eugene on The Walking Dead, as Pastor Grieves, whom Elijah murders for the church offering money.  Josh is straight, but likes to pretend to be gay for comedic effect by kissing dudes, har har.




3. Lew Temple,  left, Axel on The Walking Dead, as a condemned Confederate soldier who asks conman chaplain Elijah to say a prayer for them, "send us out with a good one."  He wishes his daughter happy birthday, so I'm going to guess straight.

4. Kimball Farley, star of the indie film Hippo,  as Ned Rollins, who partners with Elijah to cheat during a card game with Captain McFall, and is later murdered.  He and his girlfriend were profiled in the Love Issue of Cosmopolitan: their first kiss was at a stoplight. Straight.







5. Paul Schneider, left, known for All the Real Girls (2003) and Lars and the Real Girl (2007), as an injured soldier.  His Instagram consists of posts about an innocent man on death row, with no personal information, but he kisses girls in a lot of his photos on the IMDB, so I'm going to say straight.

6. Charles Halford, seen here on Lucifer, as a soldier bathing in the river.  There's a d*ck shot, but it's too blurry to post.  He fills his Instagram with art and nature photos, so I can't tell if he's gay or not.





7. Tim Johnson as a soldier.  He played Squi on Freaky and Punk Boss on Daybreak. Otherwise he's difficult to research: there are over 20 Tim Johnsons with Instagram accounts, including a pastor, several "husband and fathers," a fitness trainer, and this guy.  Maybe it's our Tim Johnson, maybe not.

I can't tell if he's gay or not.







More after the break

Rainer Dawn: Was his kiss with Harlan real? Is Aidan his boyfriend? Is that really his d*ck? And three more questions


When I was researching Nickelodeon teencom star Robert Ri'chard, this photo of someone named Rainer Dawn (not Rainier) appeared.  Never heard of him, but he must have been on Nickelodeon at some point, and his Instagram features a lot of pictures with his boyfriend, Aidan, in formal wear, visiting Italy, having a romantic moment on their boat, and so on.  

An actor, gay, with abs.  That's enough for me.

Rainer and his partner have the same last name -- they must have chosen "Dawn" when they married.  Which will prove a problem for research, since most of their acting will be under their previous names.     
But I'm up to the task.

I have six questions.





Question 1: Is Rainer Dawn a Yale grad?

Here Rainer, wearing a Yale jacket and giving his husband his leg, is promoting  or about to see The Game, presented by the Yale Sigma Nu fraternity in 2023.  He must be a Yale man.

Time for a Google search. 

He is from Santa Cruz, he does runway and fashion modeling, and when he was 15, he sailed through Indonesia in his uncle's catamaran.  

So Dawn is his birth name.  The boyfriend must have adopted it when they married.

Rainer graduated from Santa Monica College in 2022 with an Associate's Degree in Economics. One doesn't usually transfer from a community college to the Ivy League.

Answer: Probably not



Question 2: Did Rainer star in a teencom on Nickelodeon?

No Nickelodeon.  Only two acting credits are listed on the IMDB: 

Noah in The Wrong Blind Date (2022), one of those "The Wrong ___"  damsel in distress movies directed by David DeCoteau.  Noah dated focus character Laura in high school, and now gets targeted by the "blind date" trying to kill off the competition.

Cody in five episodes of Wolf Pack (2023), a one-season teenage werewolf series on Paramount Plus starring Rodrigo Santino (left).  According to the blurb: "A teenage boy and girl get their lives changed forever when a California wildfire awakens a terrifying supernatural creature."

Answer: No.



Question 3: Was his kiss with Harlan real?

The fan wiki entry for Cody has him seeing main character Harlan (Tyler Lawrence Gray) at the gym, selling him drugs later, and then flirting with him at a party, causing another guy to get jealous and ask if he likes boys or girls.  Cody replies that he "doesn't like labels," which means that he's gay but doesn't want to come out.

But fans describe them starting a relationship, and the kiss as "perfect."  

Answer: Real


 





Question 4: Is Aidan his boyfriend?

Here's where it gets tricky.  There are so many photos of Rainer and Aidan acting like romantic partners, and they have the same last name.  Surely they're married.

But a post on X reveals a rumor that Rainer is dating Olivia Rodrigo, the singer/songwriter who got her start on Disney Channel teencoms, Bizaardvark and High School Musical: the Musical: The Series.  She has released 8 multi-platinum songs.  I never heard of her, but then, I don't follow popular music.

Left: Ethan Wacker, Olivia's costar in Bizaardvark





More after the break