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Tracking Down My High School Crush..
This is a photo from a February 2018 tweet about a high school swim team in the Quad Cities.I'm interested in the one on the left, who has a very distinctive name, so I'll call him Bill to maintain his...
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The Borg Twins, Kurt and Cody Wetherill
I've been watching Star Trek: Voyager. Dreadful stuff. A Star Fleet ship is zapped across the galaxy, 70,000 light years from home, and have to find their way back. They come across many species...
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Eli Goree Keeps His Shirt On
Eli Goree was on Riverdale, briefly. He had a total of three scenes in three episodes, and about a dozen lines. Most viewers didn't hear any of those lines, because they had fainted at the sight of...
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Peeking into the Homophobes in Training at the Dayspring Christian Academy
I was looking on Amazon for a Latin Bible, maybe Jerome's Vulgate, when this popped up: Latin Bible Reader, with some Bible passages in Latin and vocabulary lists and really amateur illustrations,...
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The Moline Morons
Looking for beefcake in my home town of Rock Island,Illinois has proven fruitless.Too little, late.But Moline, the town next door, is a beefcake paradise.It literally abuts Rock Island. Five blocks...
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Get Out
African-American photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) reluctantly accepts his white girlfriend Rose's invitation to visit her ultra-rich family for the weekend. They're not at all racist! she assures...
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Dynasty 2017: For Fans Only
Rebooting classic series is tricky. You have a built-in audience of aging fans of the original, but after the initial nostalgia, they will get bored and leave -- unless you give them something to make...
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Leominster, The Bible Belt of Massachusetts
You expect homophobes in training to be somewhere in the South or Mountains, but what about blue Massachusetts?It's not all Boston and Amherst. In between, there are some relatively conservative,...
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The Polish Buddies of "1983"
I'm a sucker for those international tv series on Netflix. Who wouldn't want to watch a tv show in Catalan, Basque, Romanian, or Polish?And the premise of 1983 sounded promising: a terrorist attack in...
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Escape from Hell-fer-Sartain
I spent a year (actually 210 dreadful days) in Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas, teaching bonehead English to homophobes at a horrible college about 15 miles north of Houston (which means an hour's drive on the...
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Rodzinka.pl: Poland's Answer to "My Three Sons"
It's always fun to investigate a tv show from outside the U.S., You find interviews, photographs, award shows, articles, a whole world of pop culture that you've been completely oblivious to. Like the...
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The "Krypton" tv series: As Heavy as Kryptonite
In Superman's first appearance (Action Comics #1, 1938), we first heard that the Man of Steel left from the planet Krypton (named after an element on the Periodic Table) justbefore it blew up.Through...
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Shtisel: A Lot of Haredi Men Find Love
The Haredim are ultra-Orthodox, the Nazarenes of the Jewish world:no tv, no movies, no secular books, no internet. They wear untrimmed earlocks and Russian hats. Men and women are strictly segregated...
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Pallance Dladla: Biceps,Bulge,Gay Character, and Braggadocio
Of course I'm going to watch Shadow (2019), an action-adventure tv series from South Africa, set in Johannesburg, where half the cast speaks Zulu half the time. You've got to love those Zulu names:...
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The Catholic Fundamentalists
When I was growing up in the Nazarene Church, we yelled. We jumped up and down. We raised our hands. We clapped our hands. We chanted "Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!"I hated it. It went against everything...
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"The Silence":What Do Barry Van Dyke, Boxing, and "Jurassic Park" Have in...
Netflix already had a horror movie, Bird Box, about sight: alien monsters compel anyone who sees them to commit suicide, so you have to walk around wearing a blindfold.Next comes The Silence, about...
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The Men of "Bomb Girls"
This is Billy MacLellan from The Silence (2019), a shot obviously not taken from the movie. He's standing in a lake, pretneding to be naked, biceps, chest, and abs on display, holding up a sign with a...
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Was the Duck Man Gay?
When I was growing up in Rock Island, Disney comics were a mixed bag. Some stories depicted Donald Duck as a harried urban schlub, taking soul-destroying jobs and being abused by his nattering...
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Black Summer: The First Days of a Gay-Free Zombie Apocalypse
Do we really need more zombies, after Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead, Shaun of the Dead, Juan of the Dead, Zombieland, 28 Weeks Later, after zombie comedies, children's movies, and teen...
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In Search of Billy MacLellan
Ok, this is getting serious. Billy MacLellan appears in The Silence for five minutes in a priest outfit, has two episodes as a minor character in Bomb Girls (which is on Amazon Prime but not Netflix),...
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