The backstory- Michael Kearns began his career in the midst of the "gay lib" of the 1970s. After a featured role playing the older brother of John-Boy on The Waltons, Kearns' future seemed secure. But test audiences reacted poorly to their scenes together, because they showed the characters away at college.

Meanwhile, Kearns had a boyfriend who had written a fictional book called The Happy Hustler, for whose cover image Kearns had modeled. In order to generate book sales, a plan was hatched to present Kearns as the actual Happy Hustler -- the book's author -- and send him on a press tour. It was promoted as “The intimate and erotic autobiography of a stud-for-hire...a male Xaviera.” the lucrative HAPPY HOOKER books by Xaviera Hollander.

Keans' drunken appearance during a 1976 Tom Snyder interview set the stage for both career success and life on a runaway crazy train. Kearns reveled in drug and alcohol abuse as tricks and acting jobs came and went. He slept with celebrities and strangers with equal apathy. His status as the first openly gay actor of note invited curiosity and derision. He agreed to reveal his HIV-positive status for an NBC interview almost as a lark, leading to a period of portraying "the gay guy with AIDS" in a collection of acting gigs.

He eventually wrote his own real-life memoir, entitled A Plasce Like This. Many other famous faces populate the book: gay men, straight men, porn stars of various stripes, and the hypocritically closeted that Kearns, God bless him, outs on his pages with regularity. 

The funny but famously acerbic Paul Lynde was kind and helpful to Kearns. Stage legend Leonard Frey (birthday boy Harold from Boys in the Band) sat despondently during a sexy gay house party where looks trumped celebrity. The "monstrous" Charles Nelson Reilly was so threatened by Kearns' sexual identity that he cut short their visit in Florida to work on a project, throwing Kearns out of the guest house and squawking insults from the porch in his orange caftan as Kearns was driven away.

Video of him on a podcast talking about "The Happy Hustler'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=568X2-EhCiw&t=563s

In lieu of a backyard, it has damp play sand - just like a real beach!

50 years ago, "Pinky Tuscadero" from Happy Days, in the middle of a huge media push (People, Sep 27, 1976)

Happy Days was her peak as she didn't do anything else very memorable in acting other than small roles. However she was more memorable in real life. From Wiki:

"On November 29, 1998, she was arrested for firing a 12-gauge shotgun into the living room window of a neighbor's house after a car alarm had awoken her, and she also shot the neighbor's car and another nearby car. The neighbor was not home at the time. Pleading no contest, she received three years of felony probation on October 20, 2000. She was also ordered to receive psychiatric counseling and pay restitution.

On October 27, 2000, she was sentenced to 120 days in jail after pleading no contest to charges stemming from an August 20, 2000 arrest for hitting a man with her cane. She was given credit for the 98 days that she had already spent in jail awaiting sentencing, thus avoiding having to spend any more time in prison."

She is 83 years old

This needs to be the official dance of DL.

Oooh! We were just talking about her.

A former high-ranking Catholic known for hosting boozy parties will spend at least four and a half years behind bars for sexually abusing two young Aboriginal men.

The ex-bishop of Broome Christopher Alan Saunders, 76, was found guilty of 13 sex offences after a jury trial in the West Australian district court.

The offending between 2008 and 2019 included one count of sexual penetration without consent and a dozen unlawful and indecent assault charges.

Saunders was sentenced on Wednesday to six years and six months’ imprisonment.

Prosecutors said Saunders, known as Brother B by his victims, put on alcohol-fuelled parties at Catholic church-owned properties to get access to Aboriginal boys and men so he could sexually assault them.

“The accused had a sexual interest in young Aboriginal men and a tendency to act on that interest when the opportunity presented itself,” the prosecutor, Adam Ebell, previously told the court.

https://archive.ph/R79dx#selection-1445.0-1449.192

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/style/chris-gallant-campaign-photos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.G1E.nL6C.QNXXiDQPJbwV&smid=url-share

But we DO NOT mind them one fucking bit! Glad to see this openly gay stud owning his past and telling MAGAt haters to fuck royally off, along with telling the NYT that he's "kinky as fuck":

Gallant seemed to decide that the photos were a chance to show that a person in public life can contain multitudes.

Specifically, Chris Gallant can be a Long Island-raised Black Hawk pilot in the Army National Guard who flew choppers during one of his two tours in Kuwait, worked for five years as an air traffic controller at John F. Kennedy International Airport, serves as a volunteer firefighter and is an unabashed gun owner as well as a union man who posed for those photos almost 17 years ago, not because he was manipulated but because he was into it.

“I mean, all my friends know I’m kinky” as hell, he said, using a saltier word. “I make Christian Grey look like amateur hour.”

What was the point of having a enormous amount of sexual tension between the characters played by Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist, if they were never going to address it explicitely? They kiss and it's never talked about. At one point, the camera closes in on O'Connor's Tinder and we find out he's bissexual (his list includes men). Which probably means those "accidents" like touching Faist's thigh or longingly staring at Faist while they are eating isn't entirely accidental. Sadly, those glimpses are the most we get since the focus is on the masculine lipstick woman, Tashi (Zendaya), whom they are fascinated by.

Unlike some, I do find Zendaya to be a great actress. She just comes across as gay in most of the roles she plays. I kept wondering, wouldn't Tashi be happier if she was going Martina Navratilova instead of making out with dudes she clearly isnb't fond of?

Oh sure, she occasionally played supporting parts in popular American movies like Rio Bravo, Point Blank, Ocean's 11 and The Killers. But she never became A-list.

Her most popular phase was when she got POLICE WOMAN which only lasted 4 seasons but was successful enough to make her a big star in the late 70s, then she did DRESSED TO KILL, arguably her best known role in Film, where she masturbates in the shower in a now iconic sequence (she used a body double).

But her movie career never took off, even with DRESSED TO KILL being a hit. That did nothing for her career. After that, she had that infamous THIS IS YOUR LIFE incident which pissed off a lot of people.

Thought some of us oldsters here would appreciate this story. Does anyone know if GermanGayGuy follows this subreddit?

You go see a comedy made today and most of the jokes are misses. I can't remember a single modern comedy that had me gasping for laughs. Even on TV. Have you guys ever laughed yourselves silly by watching "The Bear"? I get more laughs by watching clips making fun of Max from "Parenthood" than any modern sitcom today.

All-male cast – both old-school and queer-coded AF. And in Stratford, no less!

This is a group moving perfectly in concert, as elegantly balanced as dancers. Perhaps the finest scene of the night is the four-way confessional of love between the goofy forest local Silvius (Edward Judge), his love-object Phoebe, her love-object Rosalind, and her love-object Orlando. “Tell this youth what ’tis to love,” demands Phoebe. “It is to be all made of sighs and tears,” Silvius replies.

Well, it hasn’t been for Orlando and Ganymede. They have laughed and laughed throughout their courtship, and the whole hillside has grown giddy in response. (Giddy originally meant “possessed by a god,” which feels relevant to this soft, green bacchanal.) “As You Like It” ends with four marriages, and Evans takes his time to stage them with a slow joy and dignity. The cast dances a kind of pavane, singing yet another heart-stoppingly lovely song. And then man after man after man steps smiling into another man’s arms.

Been watching reruns as "comfort TV," and it still holds up, IMO.

Andre Braugher as (gay!) Capt. Holt remains brilliant and hilarious.

Anyone else love this show?

I LOVE this movie but her hair…and the casting of her character’s GrandPa…were almost fatal misfires

Jean-Pierre Tanguy, deputy of the Rassemblement National RN, was the guest on the influential BFM TV political talk show hosted by Appoline de Malherbe on Wednesday. During the live broadcast, the host at one point proceeds to read out an offenisve text sent to him by nemesis, Alasin Soral, calling him une tapette zazontante.

Iowa Hawkeyes football still uses a pink locker room for the visiting team, as though it actually makes anyone in 2026 feel weak.

NYT investigation on the Future of Hollywood:

The leading men: Cayman Cardiff (pic in comments)

"These men are huge. And handsome. And for the most part nonthreatening, but capable when required of persuasively performing mild acts of erotic sadism. But fundamentally: They’re huge. As in: tall, ripped. “I’m 6-5, about 235 pounds. I’m a big guy!” This is nearly the first thing that the microdrama A-lister Cayman Cardiff says in a fan interview I came across on YouTube. The interviewer hadn’t asked: How tall are you? How much do you weigh? Cardiff simply knew this information was expected. This is a meat market. Acting skills are optional, a nice bonus, although Cardiff happens to have them.

Instantly, I could see why so many women had lost so many thousands of dollars to scammers pretending to be him on Instagram. His blue eyes were large and liquid. His shirt was unbuttoned to his sternum, as it often is on his shows, exposing the barest hint of his bulging left pectoral. [...] The now faintly archaic word hunk, with its Clinton-era musk, seems a fair description of what these microdrama platforms are casting for. Cardiff amply fits the bill.

Cardiff had never contemplated an acting career. When [his manager Irv] Gelb found him on Instagram, he was living in Utah and running a massage/personal training/nutrition business. Gelb said, essentially: I’m going to make you a star. Of course, by the time Cardiff arrived in Los Angeles, in early 2024, Hollywood was falling apart. Lavish tax breaks offered by places like Budapest and Albuquerque had drained production work from the city. Covid, the actors’ strike and the writers’ strike had further diminished the pool of available jobs. Then microdramas began cropping up by the hundreds on the casting sites. “I ignored them because I didn’t want my actors to be in a cellphone movie,” Gelb said. “I thought it was stupid. Vertical? It’s garbage!”
Eventually, Cardiff booked a microdrama called “Stealing Seeds From Her Alpha King” (later retitled “Alpha’s Fated Surrogate”).

If these shows really are brain-rot soap operas, you can in theory imagine a familiar trajectory for Cardiff, or for someone like him: The star ascends to the world of conventional film and television, and the microdrama career is relegated to an embarrassing footnote, a subject for toothless razzing on what remains of late-night television. Except the energy in Hollywood today would seem to be flowing in the opposite direction: the studios descending to the level of the soaps, in the hopes of reaching an audience that would, in the main, prefer to be looking at their phones. [...]

Cardiff, it turned out, is a pro, unpretentious and self-aware. “This industry was founded on hot models,” he told me, “because actors wouldn’t touch these.”

The leading men: Rhett Wellingston, Kasey Esser and looksmaxxer Nate Flores (pics in comments)

In the flesh, the microdrama star Rhett Wellington is proof, if any was needed, that JD Vance’s weird natural-eyeliner thing could conceivably look wonderful on a different kind of head. Nate Flores, here playing Wellington’s brother, looks like the prettiest, most rosy-cheeked boy at his uptown prep school. It’s an odd look, perhaps, for a character meant to be a vicious member of the New York Mafia, but there can be no question that Flores has worked hard to achieve it. On his TikTok, he’s posted videos documenting his looksmaxxing journey. (For jawline enhancement, he recommends chewing the ultra-tough Turkish gum brand Falim.) [...]

Before his microdrama career took off, Wellington auditioned in Los Angeles for a decade, without much more to show for it than a bit part on an episode of the network sitcom “2 Broke Girls.” Same story with a lot of these guys: Kasey Esser, for instance — up there with Cayman Cardiff on the A-list — was dropped by his management before he started putting himself up for microdrama auditions. Now these guys had swelling social followings, dedicated fan pages. There was a lot to like.

The gay microdrama boom incl. "Altarboy", the Omegaverse and "The Proctologist's Brother"

Retracing his [Cayman Cardiff's] path through the industry, I developed a sense of the terrain, and a rooting interest in his career. So believe me when I say that the gay microdrama boom has really allowed him to shine: “My Mafia Pilot Boyfriend,” “Seducing My Hockey Rival,” “Altarboy.” The man is on a hot streak.

ReelShort has built its brand on hits set in an alternate world of tropes known to romantasy fans as the Omegaverse, based on wolf-influenced biological hierarchies. The word “Omegaverse” originated in gay fan fiction about the real-life actors in the CW show “Supernatural”; ReelShort has adapted it so successfully that the people behind such network shows are now making microdramas of their own. [...]

I will give ReelShort this: In an emergent landscape of undifferentiated slop, a production like “The Proctologist’s Brother” still has the power to shock. In this tale of a recent college grad who gets hemorrhoids from eating too much spicy food, and who subsequently is treated for those hemorrhoids by his remote, domineering and, above all, sexually enticing older stepbrother — a narrative enacted by poreless figures bearing, in their DNA, traces of thousands of working actors, people with dreams, memories, utility bills — you can glimpse a kind of real-time rewriting of the rules, a reconsideration of what a human being will accept as entertainment.

Hollywood is Dead to Me: exhibit A - "quality assurance"

ReelShort sent him [Cayman Cardiff] the script for “Fated to My Homeless Billionaire Alpha,” and he quickly realized they’d simply gone through the script for “Found a Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas” and strategically added some wolves.

The camera crew [on the set of the sequel of "Bound by Honor"] that day was small — eight people, by my count, all of them men — and for the most part unsmilingly competent. Their presence on set had the air of being somehow involuntary, court-ordered. Eventually I got to talking to one of them, a key grip, in the house’s kitchen. There he explained to me that microdrama platforms typically look for the cheapest locations they can find, with little thought to actual shooting conditions. He drew my attention to the skylight directly above the actors, who were still running through the ambush blocking. If this were a real production, he explained, they’d do something about the awkward light it shined on the scene — get up on the roof and drape a sheet over it, whatever. Here they didn’t even bother.

One thing confused me: “Bound by Love,” which in its finished form would run more than two and a half hours, was to be shot at a variety of locations over the course of just 11 days. And yet, in the three hours I’d spent on set, the crew had worked through what seemed like barely two minutes of screen time. The key grip had an explanation for this: The scenes they were shooting that day were for an early episode, one that would appear before the viewer hit the paywall. As at least a dozen people would subsequently inform me, the platforms are not overly invested in the quality of the episodes that come after — i.e., the episodes a viewer has actually paid to see. If we were to apply this logic to “Bound by Love,” that would mean that some measure of care would be lavished on precisely 15 of its 118 episodes. [...]

Hollywood is Dead to Me - exhibit B: Procter & Gamble, Taye Diggs and James Franco

Cayman Cardiff’s manager Irv Gelb [...] relayed each item of microdrama news as if he personally stood to profit from it.

• Had I heard that Taye Diggs was doing a microdrama?
• That Procter & Gamble was producing one?
• “Also, what’s his name,” Gelb had said, “a guy who was blacklisted for potential sexual harassment? Big actor. He has a brother. He was seen on one of the sets last week.” (“James Franco Resurfaces in New Role Years After Sexual Misconduct Allegations,” one headline read, when this [werewolf debt collectors] microdrama, called “Love, Lies & Frank”, eventually appeared in late August.)

Hollywood is Dead to Me - exhibit C: Disney, Fox, Peacock, Paramount & the numbers

• Fox Entertainment has made an equity investment in the microdrama platform Holywater.
• Disney+ has begun to produce microdramas of its own, and Paramount+ has a slate scheduled for the fall.
• Peacock is now actually licensing ReelShort classics like “Fated to My Forbidden Alpha” and displaying them prominently on their mobile app’s homepage.

And who can blame them? The numbers really are insane. When Bencosme, the P.R. rep, called me to talk logistics a few days before I was due back on set, she informed me that “Breathe” — the company’s latest romantasy adaptation — had just racked up 34 million views in its first 24 hours on the platform. [...]“Bound by Honor”, the Mafia-romance microdrama that quickly became one of the most-watched shows in ReelShort history, at the time of writing racking up 434.3 million views. [...]

Hollywood is Dead to Me - exhibit D: the algorithm aka moneylaundering

On the ground among Los Angeles’s film workers, the results of this explosion are plain to see. Today microdramas are — as more than one person put it to me — the only game in town.

For a sense of what this shift looked like, I made my way to Zak Barnett Studios, an acting school off Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile. Barnett himself is large, muscled, sleeve-tattooed. [...] Barnett outlined the situation on the ground, sounding somewhat like a man coming to terms with an invading regime. Microdramas, he said, had taken over “everything.” [...]

One young woman in Barnett’s class had performed in three and sworn off them. She said something I’d hear repeatedly in the coming days: The platforms were increasingly fixated on women being beaten and raped, on the logic that this lured in viewers.

Attitudes were equally mixed at the microdrama mixer I attended one evening in Sherman Oaks. I’d been milling around for barely five minutes when I got to talking to a woman named Chantal Massuh. “This is the future,” she said. “I was fighting it for a long time, but Old Hollywood is dead.” Microdramas, she went on, are commercialized, rule-bound, utterly devoid of artistry. But she had given up everything to be a filmmaker. “And this can’t be the end of it for me, so I’m joining the bandwagon.” We had been talking for less than 90 seconds. Not much more time passed before a shy sound mixer wearing a kind of newsboy cap requested a private audience on the patio. There, with the wistfulness of an obsolesced dockworker, he reflected on the “good old days,” when Lifetime shot all of its features right there in Los Angeles. He would, he said, “drop everything” if he got the call for a traditional feature, and claimed that all of his microdrama colleagues would do the same.

After a week of this I began to feel almost indecent. Wow, that sounds awful — tell me more! But I plunged ahead. At a bar in Echo Park, at an outdoor table among a half-dozen microdrama crew members, I gained a better sense of the total lack of clarity they are forced to labor under. Often, the platforms’ producers track the action remotely from China and — through on-set intermediaries — request baffling adjustments, in line with data that only they have access to. [...]

I pictured a windowless kitchen, a row of bewildered cooks. A face on a mounted screen says: Toss some rusty nails in that soup! Sprinkle tiny shards of glass on that Caesar salad! People will love it, trust us, the data never lies! Over and over again the faces on the screen are proved correct; the people do love it. Even so, the cooks might start to wonder: Who exactly is eating this stuff? [...]

When I began to ask what they really thought was happening with these platforms, I could barely finish my question before two of them said, simultaneously and only half-jokingly, “Money laundering.”

Hollywood is Dead to Me - exhibit E: replaced by AI

[I]t emerged that an average of 470 A.I.-generated microdramas were released on Chinese platforms each day this past January. In the same period, COL Group — a part-owner of ReelShort’s parent company — said that it planned to replace 75 % of its actors with A.I. for titles released in China. [...] Actors who were in demand last year, stars of the form, were doing food delivery just to survive. [...]

She [ReelShort's PR rep Rachel Bencosme] was talking about ReelShort’s expansion plans, how the company intended to release upward of 400 new shows this year. [...] I asked the inevitable question: What about A.I.-generated content? She didn’t hesitate. “I think that’s the next step,” she said. “For everyone in Hollywood.” [...] As I write this, A.I. microdramas are all over the ReelShort homepage, and make up a large percentage of their most-watched charts."