#GAY SERIES (SHORT MOVIE/SHORT LENGTH SERIES)

[kissablelips-desireslure-vol2]

DADDYHUNT: THE SERIAL (2017)

Directed By: Geoff Ryan

Synopsis: A young man mistakes an older man as a handyman, that leads to an intense romantic love story.

BJ GRUBER (as Boy aka Ben)

&

JIM NEWMAN (as Daddy aka Graydon)

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

Some books and stories that I think are worth reading in conversation with Yellowjackets

Shirley Jackson, all works but especially The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Jackson might or might not need any introduction in this fandom. The Sundial is her take on doomsday preppers, Hill House is of course her haunted house novel (one of the classics of that genre), and Castle has a female protagonist who makes Shauna look like a plaster saint.

Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away. O'Connor's work has some of the most pervasive darkness and brutality of any major American writer (maybe Ambrose Bierce comes close), and the second of two novels that she completed before her death is no exception. (The first, Wise Blood, is also very good; the intended third, Why Do the Heathen Rage?, only exists as a fragmentary short story.) Francis Marion Tarwater is kidnapped and raised in the woods by his great-uncle, who is convinced that Francis is destined to be a prophet. The great-uncle's death commences a bizarre adventure involving auditory hallucinations, sinister truckers, an evil social worker, arson, developmental disabilities, and baptizing and drowning someone at the same time. Content warnings for all of the above plus rape. O'Connor is also a fairly racist author by today's standards--she was a white Southerner who died in 1964--so keep that in mind as well.

Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness. Teenage protagonist is schizophrenic and also a channel for a genuinely supernatural force; well-intentioned but poorly-considered efforts to treat one of these issues make the other worse. Sound familiar? There are supporting characters who are affectionate parodies of Slavoj Zizek and Marie Kondo. A minor character is a middle-aged lesbian who cruises dating apps for hookups with much younger women. Some people find this book preachy and overwritten, but I really like it and would plug it even if I didn't because the author is someone whom I've met and who has been supportive of my own writing.

Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel. Can be read in translation or in the original Japanese. This is the fourth and last book in a series called The Sea of Fertility but I wouldn't necessarily recommend the first three as particularly YJ-ish; Decay is because it deals at great length with issues of doubt and ambiguity about whether or not a genuinely held, but personally damaging, spiritual and religious belief is true. There's also more (as Randy Walsh would put it) lezzy stuff than is usual for Mishima, a gay man. Content warnings for elder abuse, sexual abuse of both children and vulnerable adults in previous books in the series, forced abortion in the first book if you decide to read the whole thing from the beginning, and the fact that in addition to being a great novelist the author was also a far-right political personality.

Howard Frank Mosher, Where the Rivers Flow North. An elderly Vermont lumberjack and his Native American common-law wife refuse to sell their land to a development company that wants to build a hydroelectric power plant. Tragedy ensues. I haven't read this one in a long time but some images from the movie stick in my mind as YJ-y. Lots of fire, water, and trees.

Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers. Yes, this is the same Leonard Cohen who later transitioned into songwriting and became a household name in that art form. Beautiful Losers is a very weird, very horny novel that he wrote as a young man; it deals with the submerged darkness and internal tension within Canadian and specifically Quebecois society. One of the main characters is Kateri Tekakwitha, a seventeenth-century Iroquois convert to Catholicism who was probably a lesbian in real life (although Cohen unfortunately seems unaware of this). This one actually shows up YJ directly; the song "God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot" that plays in the season 2 finale takes its lyrics from a particularly strange passage.

Monica Ojeda, Jawbone. Can be read in translation or in the original Spanish. Extremely-online teenage girls at a posh bilingual Catholic high school in Ecuador start their own cult based on such time-honored fodder as Herman Melville novels, internet creepypasta (no, this book does not look or feel anything like Otherside Picnic), and their repressed but increasingly obvious desire for one another. The last part in particular gets the attention of their English teacher, whose own obsessive internalized homophobia grows into one of the most horrifying monstrous versions of itself I've ever read. Content warning for just about everything that could possibly imply, but especially involuntary confinement, religious and medical abuse, and a final chapter that I don't even know how to describe. Many thanks to @maryblackwood for introducing me to this one.

Jorge Luis Borges, lots of his works but especially "The Aleph," "The Cult of the Phoenix," and "The South." Can be read in translation or in the original Spanish. The three works I list are all short stories. The first deals with mystical experiences and the comprehensibility (or lack thereof) of the universe, the second with coded and submerged references to sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular, the third with leaving your well-appointed city home for a ranch in the middle of nowhere and almost immediately dying in a knife fight, which is surely a very YJ series of things to do.

H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour out of Space," "The Dunwich Horror," "The Dreams in the Witch House," and "The Thing on the Doorstep." Lovecraft in general needs no introduction--the creepiness, the moroseness, the New Englandness, the purple heliotrope prose, his intense racism (recanted late in life but not in time to make any difference in his reception history) and the way his work reflects his fear of the Other. These short stories are noteworthy for having settings that are more woodsy and less maritime than is usual for Lovecraft's New England, for overtones of the supernatural rather than merely the alien, for featuring some of his few interesting female characters, and for their relative lack of obvious racial nastiness. Caveat lector nevertheless.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. It's Moby-Dick. Once you realize that Captain Ahab is forming a cult around the whale and his obsession with it you can't unrealize it.

[absolutebl]

hi there 🖐🏼 what are your recs for bl movies with great acting?

BL Movies with GREAT Acting

Specifically Movies? Do KBLs that were cut into movies count? Hum, I'm gonna make a judgement call given how few actual movies I have to work with and say if it holds as a "movie going experience" I can count it. I should say in order to really push this into the superlative acting space the BL aspect on many of these is... light.

His

Japan 2020 Viki

His is about being a grown adult and still struggling with coming out as gay. It addresses the consequences of life choices disingenuous to identity. Nagisa turns up on Shun’s doorstep with his precocious daughter in tow. This is a touch confusing to Shun since they were each others first love and ended badly. Shun has retreated from society, rejecting the world before it can reject him, already brokenhearted because without Nagisa he never had a reason to fight. Nagisa went the opposite way, tried to pretend to be something he was not and ended up with a daughter he adores and a wife who hates him. The acting is killer, Miyazawa Hio is sulky in the best possible way, the filming is beautiful and the setting unique and interesting...

I'm not wild about the ending. Moody arthouse smackdoodle is going to pretend that "ambiguous" is somehow unique and special rather than bog standard commonplace for narratives of this type. But endings are my hangup, not yours?

This is not really BL (the prequel was), so few of the tropes are used. You do not need to have watched the prequel.

Your Name Engraved Herein

Taiwan 2020 Netflix

This movie is fantastic but it is also seriously depressing. It’s a self acceptance journey that goes emotionally array on the alter of history, but if you wanna wallow in high quality acting and serious gay drama, this’ll do it. I would say it's not really BL, no real trope drops at all.

Okay those two I chose more on the strength of the acting than BL. These others are not going to be at the same standard/style.

If you want moee of the above level of drama, things get very sad in the BL world, so Love of Siam, Dew, Eternal Yesterday, Goodbye Mother, etc...

Restart After Come Back Home (Risutato wa tadaima no ato de)

Japan 2020 Gaga?

Atmospheric study in rural Japan meets complex family dynamics built on a romance framework of city boy meets country boy, grumpy/sunshine. It’s beautiful and icy sweet. Slow moving in places but ultimately worth the patience, low heat, low angst, and stunning. The acting is a touch stiff, in that Japanese reserved way.

This is the only BL movie, as a movie, that I could pull. There are others, I jsut don't think the acting is good enough.

So here are some highly rated short bingable series that are movie length (1.5-2.5 hours) but not really movies - BUT with killer acting. So they still might satisfy the itch. I places them in order of acting and filming quality, not my own personal preference.

From Japan

Old Fashion Cupcake

Tokyo in April is...

Life: Love on the Line (director's cut)

My Beautiful Man

I Cannot Reach You

Seven Days

From Taiwan

Red Balloon

We Best Love (esp part 2)

About Youth

HIStory 2: Crossing the Line

From Korea

To My Star

Long Time No See

The New Employee

Where Your Eyes Linger

More like this?

I want to shout out The Eighth Sense here too. It's longer than movie length but so well acted.

(source)

[topazadine]

Writer Questionnaire

As I prepare for the workday (sigh) I'm going to take a few minutes and hop in on the craze! Please go read @illarian-rambling's answers over here!

1. Is writing a hobby or way of life?

Way of life. Not only is my day job writing, but I spend pretty much all my free time writing my silly stories too. It's all I have ever known and all I ever do.

2. A journal full of writing notes or a clean, completed manuscript?

Clean manuscript. I double outline, meaning that I write a long, looong outline and a short outline with just the bullet points I desperately need. This keeps me from losing momentum while I'm writing because I don't feel like I've done the whole thing and don't need to write it. This sounds confusing, so let me show you what I mean. Here's the long outline for a chapter:

... and this is the short outline.

I then leave a comment on the chapter header in the actual Word document, something like "Cavalry confronts Uileac and Cerie," so I don't need to look back on the outline if I don't want to. Oh, and I do not work on WIPs simultaneously. Ever. One at a time. Can't relate to the people who say "hehe I have a million WIPs that are all half done." Like, girl, why do you think they're all half-done? Because your brain is overloaded with details for too many different plots. Jot down a note and get to it later. Otherwise all those things are going to stay half-done.

3. Who (or what) is your writing inspiration?

I started getting into fiction writing again after a long, long break because of Touken Ranbu, so we'll just say my beloved Uguisumaru.

My king .... I love you ... my darling ....

4. Which is worse: someone you "idolize" reading your first draft or listening to you sing?

Neither of those are particularly torturous to me. I guess singing.

5. Has writing from someone else's POV ever changed your own perspective?

It's very strange, but as a lesbian, I didn't really banish my own internalized homophobia until I started writing slash fic. Even in my own sapphic relationships, I always felt there was something 'wrong' about it and that our relationships weren't as valid as a straight couple. This was due to a lot of very violent homophobia imposed on me by others that made me really struggle to accept being gay. Writing about so many gay couples helped normalize it for me and feel more confident in my own sexuality. I no longer see gay couples as somehow apart from heterosexual relationships but just as deep and loving. In fact, writing stuff like the Moonbeam and Crane series was the push I needed to fully come out as a lesbian and stop pretending I was attracted to men, which is bizarre because, you know, I was writing about men banging. And then I went on to write gay longing and, eventually, a whole gay af series <3

6. Tumblr, AO3, LiveJournal, or FFN?

Archive of Our Own and Amazon :)

7. AO3 wordcount, and are you satisfied with it?

Quite satisfied with it! I did my million words of practice and then some before moving on to original fiction.

8. What movie/book/fic gripped you irrevocably?

Remainder by Tom McCarthy. It has this lulling menace about it. I loved the repetition and the incredible environmental descriptions. Another favorite is Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which really encouraged me to get more experimental with my work. And my all-time favorite, Moby Dick. I've read it three times and keep meaning to go back for a fourth read; every time, I find something different to love about it. I started it again a bit ago and this time, I was focusing on the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg.

9. What’s the highest compliment you’ve ever been given, and have you been given it?

This comment by Wapato_Sprout is the one that convinced me that I was ready to start writing original fiction:

I'm not kidding: I started writing Poesy, the full-length book in the Eirenic Verses series, like one week later. Then went and started filling in the back with shorter stories lmao. Being able to write two original characters with depth, goals, and motivations that people really cared about was such a rush, especially because I'd been told before that my original characters were more plot devices than people. And this should be your reminder that your comments on fanfiction matter a LOT! You may be the push to get a writer to start taking more risks and maybe even writing their own original fiction. Around the same time, my boss randomly told me that I should do more with my writing than just crafting business emails. I like to think that was a bit of divine intervention, to get two nudges from people I respect almost simultaneously. And hey look where it's gotten me! I'm writing a seven-part series now!

10. What defines your writing style?

My background in poetry gives my prose a sense of lyricism and movement. I think about whether my prose would flow like a poem when read aloud, and I hear that rhythm in my head when I write. It also means I know when to go short and choppy, or when to use long, moving description. I would not be anywhere near the writer I am today without those years of practice.

Open tag!

(I think most of the people I would tag were tagged elsewhere lmao)

[heretherebedork]

So I've never watched a single v-bl. no particular reason, just the fact that there's so much to see everywhere else that I didn't wanna add another country to my list. but every time I come here, I see that little pinned post and think, maybe I should watch one. So, where should I start? What's the best one? help me...

Okay, that's hard! There are a lot of good ones. But to start?

You Are Ma Boy is probably the best one to start with, hands down. It's well-written, well-acted, feels like all the best parts of V-BL and is about a celebrity/barista romance that's just darling! Very domestic, very sweet, cute as you get and has a bit of Ba Vinh, the BL actor from Vietnam who is in... basically everything. This is a full length BL series.

My Lascivious Boss is fantastic. Queer and adorable and just... absolutely great. Very, very gay and includes crossdressing and an established gay couple as well!

Beef, Cupcakes, and Him and Hey, Rival, I Love You are both very different but very enjoyable V-BL movies that I totally recommend. They're both good and sweet and end with lots of joy and love all around.

The Lost Ring(also on Gaga for free if the youtube link doesn't work depending on your location) is my favorite, hands down my favorite, short. It's cute and it's sweet and it tells a good story in a very short time. Absolutely recommend this one.

The Most Peaceful Place is also by O2 productions (they make a lot of V-BL) and it about a failed friendship. A good show and a staring vehicle for Ba Vinh. If you like him, watch more O2 but beware that they've now had two shows with disappointing or depressing endings (Love Bill should only be watched if you want a depressing ending and the Cat BL was disappointing) but most of their stuff is pretty solid.

If you like those, especially the O2 ones, I would also look up Mr. Cinderella but that one can be harder to get your hands on depending on your willingness to pay... but it's good. Really good. And it's got Ba Vinh and one of the actors from The Lost Ring in it.

Anyway, this is my basic recommendations. There are more on the list and I haven't updated it in... a while /oops but honestly these are the best.

If you don't care about budget, you might also want to look at Team RL just in general. They're made several enjoyable but very low budget series. There's one set in a rural village that ends with half of the side couple dying so do not recommend but the rest of their shows tend to be goofy, slightly stupid, gay romps.

[nysocboy]

Insurance companies go to great lengths to produce clever commercials, but they rarely venture into the realm of beefcake. That's why the Eastwood Insurance cowboy was so memorable. In California in the 1990s, a series of at least 30 tv commercials showed the Cowboy riding up to a befuddled car owner, almost always a man, who was paying too much for car insurance, and "saving the day" with Eastwood's low, low prices.

The best commercials had him in the shower, naked except for his white cowboy hat, cruising...um, I mean talking about insurance to another naked guy, who seems more interested in his physique than his insurance policies.

Nudity in unexpected places is always stunning.

Besides, he had quite a smile.

The Cowboy was played by Jason Bradley Jacobs, who has only two acting credits on the IMDB:

A record company executive in Selena, 1997, about the Tejana singer who topped the Latin music charts and sang at the Astrodome.

Maurice Charpentier in The Feast of All Saints, 2001, based on the Anne Rice novel about "the Free People of Colour" in 19th century New Orleans, "a dazzling yet damned class caught between the world of white privilege and black oppression."  Anne Rice -- shouldn't there be vampires?

Jason provided the voice and artists' model for a character in a comic book and animated series, Plowboy in the Cornmeal Universe, created by D.W. Newman.  It is set in the Appalachia of 1978, the era of Jimmy Carter, Hee-Haw, and The Dukes of Hazzard, and emphasizes the "raw physicality and blatant sexuality."

I couldn't find anything about the work except for a one-page website full of broken links.  I guess the project was scrapped.  Too bad -- looks like these were gay country boys. 

In 2015, Jason tweeted that he was voicing Raitliff Manor, by D.W. Newman, about the ghost of a Civil War soldier haunting a house.  Nothing on Google about it, but I imagine he was a gay ghost

D.W. Newman's biography on IMDB says that he's a Kentucky country boy, "openly bisexual," with a degree in astronomy, and a bodybuilder. 

No D.W. Newman is listed on bodybuilder websites.  In fact, all I could find out about him was a donation to L.A. teachers and a "like" for Balboa Hybrid Swim Shorts.

There are some nude photos on hook-up sites.

Twitter/X has links to Jacob's other projects, but they are all broken. No new tweets since 2015. Links to his personal website and Facebook are broken. No Instagram.

A frustrated series of broken links and dead ends, with only one real moment, the memory of the Eastwood Insurance Cowboy. And even that is fuzzy.

The full profile, with nude photos, is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

[deramin2]

Rūrangi should be on more people's radars for queer media.

It's a New Zealand show on Hulu about a gay trans man who works as a youth activist. After his boyfriend commits suicide, he has a public breakdown and runs off. He finds himself back in the small dairy farm he abandoned 10 years ago and starts picking up the pieces. Slowly he realizes that while he did need to leave to live, he also has an important place here where his activism is needed.

His best friend is a bi Maori woman who grew up alienated from her culture and is trying to learn the language and reconnect (and gets into delightful mischief fighting colonialism with the aunties).

His ex-boyfriend is coming to terms with his own bisexuality.

His dad, a many generations dairy farmer, has become an environmental activist practicing organic farming trying to pass a bylaw outlawing chemical fertilizers, which he believes contributed to his wife's death from cancer.

It's about how the movements for queer rights, indigenous rights, and environmentalism are intertwined, and just as important in rural areas as cities. Rural towns aren't just conservative backwaters that aren't worth fighting for. They're full of diverse people fighting for a better world.

It's a really powerful series. Almost all trans and nonbinary creators behind the camera, and trans people playing trans characters. It's a great introduction to trans rights if you have family that are ignorant but not necessarily hostile.

Biggest downside: it's extremely indie. The episodes are short and there aren't many of them. The seasons end on big personal wins, but the overall struggle is very ongoing (it's realistic), and three story is obviously incomplete. I think they're still trying to make more but it's slow going. If they got more viewership and more cast they might be able to finish faster.

I just love how real the series feels. I almost think I'll appreciate it more in 10 years and onward when I can look back on it as a time capsule preserving it's moment and who we were as queer people. There's almost no representation for trans men port there so this is really special for me.

Please give it a watch. There are two seasons so far and the entire season is the length of a movie. So it's easy to get through.

[graygiantess]

Thank you for In Hell Together After All, it absolutely crushed me (in a good, painful way). ❤️ It made me wonder what is your history with IWTV/The Vampire Chronicles: how did you become a fan, what caught your attention and what made you want to "stay"?

And also, you probably write a lot of your headcanons into your stories, but do you have any specific headcanons of any of the characters/relationships in the series?

Hey Nonny!

Sorry for the late reply. Covid broke my brain and I can only focus on reading/writing for very short stretches of time.

(I love getting these asks, though, so please no one feel deterred by this, lol!)

I'm so glad you enjoyed In Hell Together After All! And thank you for your ask. 😊

Putting my answer under the break again so as not to clog up people's dash with my novel-length ramblings.

Luce and TVC

I first got into TVC when I was 14, which is almost 21 years ago. My 13yo foster sister and I were completely obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

I was aware that there was a vampire movie with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and wanted to see it. I have a much older half-sister and the three of us ended up having a movie night at her house. We watched Interview With the Vampire and The Blair Witch Project.

We were all very 👁👁 throughout the entire movie. Then I bought a boxset of the first four books, foster sister and inhaled the first three books, watched the QotD movie and got very pissed off by how terrible it was. 😂

We were like, "Guess we'll always have the books 🤷‍♀️". I ordered TVA, because QotD had left me completely Armand-obsessed, and started reading Tale of the Body Thief.

I don't remember quite what it was, but Lestat says something at the start of TotBT that my 14yo self just thought was so stupidly retconny that I went, "Yeah, fuck that". I think it was something about how he only ate bad guys and that that was somehow in service of Jesus? Whatever it was, I wasn’t having it, so I put it down and never picked it back up. 😂

Then in my late teens/early twenties I followed Anne Rice on Facebook for a while, but I got kinda creeped out when she started addressing everyone with 'dearest People of the Page'. I distinctly remember thinking, "Lady, I'm here for gay vampire reasons, not to be in a cult". 😅 So I unfollowed her and spent about a decade not thinking about TVC very much at all.

AND THEN in early summer of 2022 the YouTube algorithm informed me that AMC was making an IWTV show. I reread IWTV and in October thought, "Let’s give this a go."

I had my reservations because I still remembered my teenage rage at the QotD movie, and I wasn't sure how I felt about them changing the time period and casting 'some old guy' as Daniel (sorry Eric! 🙈).

BUT THEN Jacob came on all, "Dear Mr. Molloy, did you know you can orgasm just from hearing a man's voice? Wanna finish what we started half a century ago?" and my head just about exploded!

This is the second interview?! They’re revisiting it 49 years later?! OMGGG, that's the most genius storytelling move in the history of storytelling! 😱

I watched ep2 right after and then desperately needed to yell about the show with other sickos. So I joined Twitter and started reading fic again (which I'd only really done when I was 17 and obsessed with that wizard school franchise), started writing fic, joined fic-themed group chats/Discords and made a Tumblr so I could (lovingly) yell at other fic writers.

And now I've published over 150k words in fic and there's IWTV fan art all over my house. 😂

So it was really the show that made me come back to stay. It's just thee best TV show of all time to me.

And as much as this fandom can be a shit show, it's really helped me stay sane while grappling with my long covid, which has left me very incapacitated in many other areas of my life.

Luce's headcanons

Asking me for my headcanons has the same effect as asking me for my favorite movies or songs in that it immediately makes me forget any headcanons I ever had. 😂

You're right that I write a lot of them into my fics, which are mainly me exploring my headcanons and asking myself what if...? I have a couple others, though I'm not sure these are really headcanons or more actual theories, though, so I apologize if this wasn't what you were looking for.

- I've mentioned this one before, but Louis and Lestat had a grand old time during their honeymoon phase between Louis getting turned and Louis almost eating Grace's baby. I think people tend to make too big a deal out of Louis being an unreliable narrator but it's a little too convenient how quickly he skips over those 6-7 years. I think he doesn’t like to think about how much fun he had with Lestat just having all the sex, getting super rich and eating whoever the fuck he wanted.

- Daniel isn’t going to give a single fuck about the ethics of killing people in order to survive once he finally becomes a vampire. We already know he’s selfish and a hypocrite. I can just see him fully ready to view all humans as savory inferiors once he’s no longer one of them.

- If show!Daniel ever met Marius, he would punch him in the face. 🤭

- Santiago is going to be SO jealous of Louis's relationship with Armand. I don't care if Santiago and Armand end up having zero homoerotic tension between them on screen, they're fucking to me.

- I'm also a Claudeline truther. Show!Claudia doesn’t need a parental figure the way book!Claudia does but she very much yearns for romantic love, and she did say Charlie was the last boy she'd ever love, and went after the woman when Lestat asked her if she wanted the Mr. or the Mrs. in ep7.

Kudos to anyone who made it all the way to the end of this answer! Your prize is getting to choose if I share:

A) A silly anecdote about that movie night I had with my sisters.

B) A shocking fact that might get me cancelled as an Armandaniel fic writer. 👀

(Though tbh, if you pick B, I'll probably still give you A for free.)

[brokenmusicboxwolfe]

I am deeply saddened to see that actor David McCallum has died. While 90 hardly a short life, when someone has mattered to you, even in the distant way of an actor playing make believe for a living, you always wish the life were longer.

I expect I am about to ramble, and not very coherently (sleep deprivation), so all of it will go under the cut.

Actually, he was about the first actor I ever remember recognizing. When I was 3 I adored an obscure tv series called The Invisible Man, where he played the title character. It bares little resemblance to the original story, instead following the adventure show of the 1970s-1980s formula. I think the fact he played a scientist, married to a scientist, and that the couple happily worked together had a lot to do with it. Reminding me of my parents was a natural thing to appeal to a preschooler.

To be honest, I only remembered fragments of the show, but I remembered him vividly. Even as a little kid if I saw him anywhere my first thought was “lt’s the invisible man!!” and a wave of affection would wash over me.

Affection is something you wouldn’t find with my favorite of his tv shows. Steel, in my beloved Sapphire and Steel, is hardly a warm character. How can I describe the show…Well, the title characters aren’t human, but beings that are sent out to deal with problems in time, or maybe you can say caused by time. Nursery rhymes, photographs, and gas stations take on a menacing quality. If these two show up you better be afraid because while they will go to extreme lengths to stop the threat, those lengths might involve sacrificing you.

Steel the cool, sharp edged, and anything but the lovable nice guy I’d adored as a tot….and I adored him here too.

I was late seeing Sapphire and Steel, but I was even later seeing The Outer Limits (original version) where he starred in two of my favorite episodes.

In one, The Sixth Finger, he played a coal miner experimented on by a scientist until he evolved far beyond a connection to his humanity. I have an action figure of that one!

The other, Forms of Things Unknown, has an obvious inspiration in a certain famous French thriller, but then in comes McCallum, a man experimenting with time. While in the other episode he played a man shedding his humanity with every mutation, here he actually is unearthly from the start, a peculiar characterization that reminds me of the madness of characters that have seen to far into the void, but also of a child lost to forces far beyond them….

TBH, I went through a period where this episode was comfort viewing. I would day dream up back story details for McCallum’s character, and even ways to connect it to Sapphire and Steel.

What? just because I was going full geeky fangirl on a single episode of a tv show made well before I was born isn’t THAT weird on here!

And here is another obscure one I’m fond of, a movie called The Ravine. It’s a movie set during WWII where he’s a German soldier sent to capture a woman that’s been acting as a sniper picking of his side like crazy. The concept, that they end up trapped together and do the enemies to lovers thing, seemed like the usual contrived thing. Still, out of mild curiosity I watched a horrible print on Youtube and I was surprised how effective it was. I was actually sold on the tragic relationship, and I’d gone into it expecting to be rolling me eyes. In fact , since it isn’t (or at least wasn’t) available on DVD in the US I got one from Europe. Good thing the acting and setting are more important than dialog, cause I don’t speak Italian!

Frankenstein: The True Story has about as much relationship to the original novel as Bram Stoker’s Dracula has to the book, but it’s actually a rather fascinating take on subject. Tumblr would approve of the gay subtext (more like text, cause how could even folks in the ‘70s miss it) McCallum’s part is supporting, but crucial being both Frankenstein’s mentor and brain donor. I’ll be honest with you, my weakness for mad scientists is showing because I swooned over even has he enthusiastically collects raw materials (ahem) for their work.

Is it weird that this is the roll he played that had me properly, classic fan girl swooning?

There are couple of adaptations that are notable for me. There is that adaptation of Kidnapped he was in. I got it on DVD for my father because the sequel to Kidnapped was a childhood favorite of his, and this was the rare version to use that book (TBH, Pop had a fanboy crush on the girl in that book, from the way he talk! LOL) Unfortunately Pop died before seeing it, so it colors my thoughts on it. And there was an adaptation of Our Mutual Friend, one of my favorite Dickens novels, but I watched it in a “see all the adaptations” kick so it’s a blur of compare and contrast.

I will end this with the most peculiar way a part he played connected with me.

It started unexpectedly, with me watching The Man from UNCLE on a DVD set my father had gotten for Christmas. My parents had liked the show, but like a lot of shows from before I was born I’d heard a lot about it before I’d seen it.

To be honest I wasn’t particularly impressed. Oh, it was fine, and I did like the warm dynamic of the main two characters. **It’s just sort plain potato chip tv, tasty but forgettable. Plus it was sooo of it’s time that the sexism irritated me no end. I have watched, and loved, a lot of 1960s tv, so maybe I just expected more. I enjoyed it, but if you asked me to rank my faves of the “ Sixties lets do the Spy Thing” tv shows I would pick Wild, Wild, West or The Avengers or Danger Man or Get Smart*** even before it.

So it was fine, I enjoyed it while we watched, and then didn’t really think about it anymore.

And then my father got sick.

My father’s illness, and eventual death, hit me hard. Very hard. I was alone dealing with it. I had no friends, and wasn’t even on Tumblr yet. I couldn’t weigh my parents down with my emotions when they had so much of their own. And with my father’s chemo and such I was often actually alone. Obviously not as much as now, but so many days completely alone was new to me then.

So there I was, on the verge of being an emotional but holding it together, desperately aching for someone, anyone, I could turn to….

And then I started dreaming.

Of course I always had dreamed, but this was different. This was nightly dreaming. Serial dreaming. Stories that continued on for days or weeks. And fictional characters started creeping in. Up until then the characters in dreams had always been my OCs, but now suddenly tv shows, books, movies, comics…they were all fodder for the stories helping me escape.

The part may be one of his most famous roles, but it still came as a huge surprise when I found myself dreaming about Illya.

Actually, the first dream was a general Man from UNCLE dream. It was fun, even if it seemed weird to be dreaming about the show. But then the next one had Illya only.

And so it started, an epic series of dreams, chapter after chapter, night after night. Adventures with Illya.

Well, and aliens and time travel and so on. It was, after all, my subconscious spinning the story, not screenwriters. Gotta get time travel and/or alternate universes in there somewhere if it comes out of mushed up brain.

After a while the dreams had bigger gaps between them, but the dreams with Illya still came. In fact over months they dominated my dreaming. Illya was there all the time.

It got so I spent time when I was awake, thinking about the dreams and the character. What would Illya think of this? What would Illya listen to? What would Illya say? What if Illya were in that situation? What if…

Now, I admit, the Illya I was imagining is only inspired by the one David McCallum played. It looked like him. It sounded like him. I even found myself replaying select episodes to remind myself of his “voice” so my brain could make him seem more authentic. But the truth was he was my interpretation of Illya, my head-cannon, my quirks, my obsessions..

Actually I guess it was my need. I needed someone. My dreams even created characters to be my avatars for interacting with him. I those dreams I could talk to him, laugh with him, cry in front of him, save him or be saved by him, and be his friend.

And in a weird way, that is what my brain was doing. It was giving me an imaginary friend while I slept. Someone smart and kind and brave, to save the world…just like the imaginary friend I’d had when I was little.****

I’d given myself an imaginary friend that looked and sounded like Illya!

Well, in dreams. I wasn’t so far gone I talked to him when I was awake!

But it was comforting. I found myself thinking about those dreams, almost cuddling up to them in those painful dark days. I confess I worried that if I ever were in a delirium or under anesthetic or something might call out to him and have some very embarressing questions asked.

Eventually the dreams stopped. Time moves on. Maybe I didn’t need them anymore, or maybe my subconscious got bored.

TBH I kinda wish I still had dreams about him, or some other characters. Any dreams with a repeated cast or continuing story would be beyond welcome. I could REALLY use their company now.

And now, writing this, I realize just why I actually gasped when I saw David McCallum had died. Yes, as an actor he had played many parts I enjoyed, but other actors have done that without the shock of their death knocking the breath from me. But the fact is no other actor has had their performance gift me with something that felt like a friend when I needed one most.

So that’s why I am sad. It isn’t just a list of parts he played that I loved or that he had been a familiar face as long as I can remember. He got stored in a special part of my mind, the strange area of the imagination where strangers and friends get blurred and fiction protect a fracturing heart.

I am eternally grateful he lived. Even if I didn’t have a list of credits I enjoyed ******, as long as I had those dreams he helped inspire when I needed them most I’d mourn his passing.

Condolences to all that loved him, be they friends, family, or fans.

**Though I would end up in fandom exile for seeing them as like brothers or little boy best friends instead of shipping them. Good on you if you do. I think it’s beautiful every character everywhere gets shipped with someone, but dang, what is with the hate for the non-shipping fans?)

*** The Prisoner, possibly my fave tv show ever, isn’t really in this category to my mind, but a lots of folks would disagree.

****My childhood imaginary friend was the ghost of a little boy murdered by his uncle during the American Revolution. Still, the smart, kind, brave, save the world stuff was there too.

*****I didn’t mention something he did that I enjoyed. For instance, Mother Love, a wonderful bit of tv that criminally isn’t on DVD, because it’s Diana Riggs’ showcase. But then I’ve also never seen any of the six billion years of NCIS (I think those are the letters). Who knows how many other of his work I never saw.

[justagalwhowrites]

hello love!

I hope you’re doing amazing and taking care of yourself I wanted to ask you since we gotta till 2025 for season 2 of TLOU I don’t know what to watch in the meantime so what shows or movies do you like or recommend???

OMG hi lovely!

I'm doing great thank you so much for asking! I hope you are, too!!

I haven't been watching much lately, I've been spending basically all my downtime writing lol BUT here's some stuff that I've generally enjoyed over the past few (maybe 10?) years!

Shows:

The Sopranos - Watched this right at the start of the pandemic and almost immediately saw why it was considered one of the best TV shows ever made. The idea of a mob boss going to a therapist? 10/10, fabulous. (HBO/Max)

The Newsroom - I'm a former journalist and lover of Aaron Sorkin so this show was addictive for me. Give me a good walk and talk dialogue sequence any day. Season one is far and away the best but the other two ain't bad. (HBO/Max)

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend - This show was CRIMINALLY underrated. Several new musical numbers every episode, the writing is so damn brilliant it should be taught in school if it's not already. It also tackles mental health beautifully and is hilarious without being overly silly. (Netflix)

Fleabag - Brilliant, insightful, funny and heartbreaking all at once. Phoebe Waller Bridge is a genius. The worst thing about it is that it's so damn short. (Amazon)

Andor - Probably the best Star Wars series so far (SORRY MANDO I LOVE YOU SO MUCH) the storytelling and character work here is so damn good. If you haven't seen it yet, make it a priority. (Disney+)

Movies:

Baby Driver - A love letter to what you can do with sound in film, it's got so much to enjoy. Great performances, editing that's pure genius, excellent storytelling with fun action and a great script. Watch it if you haven't!

500 Days of Summer - in my opinion, this is the best "romantic comedy" (not sure it can REALLY be called that) since When Harry Met Sally. A really critical look at what it means to put the idea of someone over the actual person, it's funny and insightful while making its point.

Promising Young Woman - It's dark and funny and truthful and cathartic all at once. It's a movie length middle finger to the patriarchy and I'm all about it.

Knives Out - Everyone's probably already seen this but the fact that Daniel Craig plays a southern gay detective and is having the time of his life now that he's free of James Bond, it brings me so much joy. The mystery is great, the performances are top tier, it's damn near flawless. Will watch at any time. (Adjacent recommendation: Logan Lucky, a heist movie with a bunch of rednecks robbing a NASCAR race including Daniel Craig debuting his kooky southern drawl. Super fun!)

Nightcrawler - This was one that was super underrated (even though it was up for Best Original Screenplay at the oscars), a noir psychological thriller about a stringer who shoots video freelance for local TV stations. The appetite for bloody content pushes him further than you would expect. It's dark but so well done!

These might be a bit all over the map but hopefully there's some stuff here you've never seen and it's helpful!

Thank you for asking and for being here! Love you!

[pipelinelaserraygun]

It has ALWAYS been one of the very best comedies on television.

Before Social Media, decades ago, I launched a successful ✉️ letterwriting campaign to salvage Futurama.

I personally played a LARGE part in getting the series put 🔙 out of cancellation.

The show was optioned to Comedy Central.

There, the show went on for several seasons, plus FOUR feature-length movies!

No show has packed MORE cautionary tales about where Humanity is headed.

Hedonism is a 🔁 narrative thread on Futurama that has kept repeating. 🚨 Warnings as to *self-indulgence are served, with 🎭 comic/tragic consequences. Today, a look at CONSUMPTION of sin.

MUST ⏰ WATCH, x2‼️

"The people who THINK they are gods, 🆚 everybody else."

People 🐦 currently perched atop corridors of influence are intoxicated from drinking 🚰👿 the devil's Kool-Aid.

The phrase "You are what 🍲 you eat" SHOULD come with disclaimers of side effects.

Byproducts of your sinful 🤖 consumption could be ☠️ HAZARDOUS to your health.

MUST 🙈🙊🙉 ADHERE‼️

SCOTUS summary: ⚖️"Can a State FORCE someone who provides her own expressive services to abandon her conscience and speak its preferred message instead? In some places, the dissent gets so turned around about the facts that it opens FIRE on its own position," Gorsuch wrote. "For instance: While stressing that a Colorado company cannot refuse ‘the full and equal enjoyment of [its] services’ based on a customer’s protected status… the dissent assures us that a company selling creative services ‘to the public’ does have a right ‘to decide what messages to include or not to include…' But if that is true, what are we even debating?"

How will sinners SUFFER 🔥?

Part of "how"👨🏼‍🚒🧯is because the unrepentant don't have a HOLY ✝️🛐 FIREFIGHTER.

[nervouswaltz]

Hello! Happy June! It's Pride and I have another question (4/30)

Today we are talking about queer representation in media. In 1894 "The Dickson Experimental Sound Film" is released, becoming the first "gay film". It was also known as "The Gay Brothers", it feature two men dancing together and it reportedly "shocked audiences with its subversion of conventional male behaviour". Unfortunately, in 1934 the USA introduced the Hays Code, which, while it didn't explicitly ban queerness, banned queerness in effect. This resulted in three decades of queer-coded villains, such as Joel Cairo in "The Maltese Falcon" (1941) and Jack Favell in "Rebecca" (1940).

The Hays Code was lifted in 1968, and the queer cult classic "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" was released in 1975, and gave a much-needed positive and FUN representation of queer people and queerness. Unfortunately, this was short-lived, as the rising AIDs crisis worsened the stigma around the gay community. This didn't stop everyone though, and in 1985 "Desert Hearts" was released; regarded as the first mainstream lesbian film with a happy ending.

Further on, the first gay kiss on TV in the UK was on "EastEnders" in 1989, "Ellen" became the first American tv show with an openly gay lead in 1997, and other show such as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" started to add recurring LGBTQ+ characters. An important show in the UK was "Queer as Folk" (1999) which was one of the first shows to depict the queer community as vibrant and alive.

Even further forward, and "Moonlight" (2017) became the first LGBTQ+ film (and the first all-black cast) to win Best Picture at the Oscars. GLAAD publishes an annual report showing how representation is changing. 2005-2006 1.4% of regular characters vs 2020-2021 the figure is at 9.1%. So, there is still a long way to go obviously, especially because media is often the main or only place that young people have an insight into the community at all.

Because of this, I want to ask you for a recommendation: What is a piece of queer media that you think more people should see? (it can be literally anything, big/small, funny/sad, smart/stupid <- just anything you think deserves to be watched!:))

(I'll go first: "Eu Não Quero Voltar Sozinho" (or "I Don't Want to Go Back Alone) is a really really cute Brazillian short film available on Youtube! (if you enjoy it, there is also a full-length film version called "Hoje Eu Quero Voltar Sozinho" (or "The Way He Looks"))

Happy Pride 🌈 🎉

ooo i’ll check out ur recs!!! this isn’t a watch but it Is a read (i don’t like movies a lot) but i think to understand like. a fantastically written slow burn everyone and their mother should read the raven cycle. it’s so much more than a series About queerness (well. okay. it’s about queer as in Odd a lot of the time and queer as in lgbt some of the time) and i think it tackles this idea of like. queer characters don’t Just have to be their identities. also u need to know ronan lynch to understand me. so.

also i just saw the new spiderverse and i want to say GWEN STACY TGIRL SWAG

[absolutebl]

Please do you have recommendation for bls that involve child rearing. I liked Our Dinning Table and Close Knit (not a bl but a LGBTQ movie) thank you. I like Bls like Moonlight Chicken, Eight Sense, Bad Buddy, Love Tractor, Until We Meet Again, Cutie Pie, Unintentional Love Story, My Love Mix Up. Thank you.

BLs Featuring Tiny Families

There really aren't many. Vietnam and Taiwan tend to be the only ones who offer this with any regularity, and they just don't produce many BLs over all. So slim pickings.

Off the top of my head?

Our Dining Table, Japan - of course, the kid is not just present but the primary driver for the relationship

HIStory 2: Right or Wrong, Taiwan - until ODT came along this would have been my first pick. Out gay college kid accidentally becomes a nanny to his arse professor's adorable daughter. Bonus points for the first mention & depiction of legal marriage equality in a full length BL. Detract points for seriously neglectful parenting. Add points back for lovey high heat action. I like this one a lot more than most do. But I also like teacher/student taboo trope.

Monster in Law, Vietnam (same pair as Hey Rival I Love You) - I ended up dropping this so I don't if it even had an ending, certainly didn't seem to be heading that direction

Papa & Daddy, Taiwan - slice of life gay domesticity set firmly in a realistic queer scene in Taipei that I quite enjoyed but one of the leads switches between seasons 1 & 2, season 1 ends on a cliffhanger

Tein Bromance EXTRA, Vietnam - a spy/mafia/assassin ended up coupled with a teacher (from one of the shorts in the first "series") and they adopt a child. It"s interesting @heretherebedork can tell you more, they like this series better than I do.

Plus & Minus (side couple), Taiwan - one of the characters in the side couple is a single dad, they quite cute

Love is Science? (side plot), Taiwan - sometimes your family is a confident gay man being the responsible dad of his disaster bi’s one night stand’s baby, the baby mommy, and the disaster

Thailand will nod in this direction but so far it's never been key or a plot driver, all the ones I know from Thailand are mentioned in this post from a couple years ago:

I can't think of any more that have happened since then.

So far Korea hasn't been brave enough, but they don't really acknowledge bisexuality (and that seems to be the work around everyone uses) also they v conservative around notions of family and outness...

China edged into it with Word of Honor, but that's gay dad's "adopt the childlike adults in their sphere".

I'll try to update it with the content from this ask and then repost for ya.

[spacevixenmusic]

How long or short should a show be? It seems like there's been too extremes: too popular to stop or too beloved to last.

I have opinions about this, personally.

I don't think there's really an "ideal" length for any show. Obviously there are shows that go on way too long, and shows that are cut short way before they should be, but that has more to do with the nature of the TV Show* format than the actual content of the show itself. For a series to really shine, it has to know how to work within the confines of the 11-22 minute episode box, and how to tell its story within that framework.

(*I'm using the phrase "TV Show" as a general term here)

Historically, the TV Show format works well because it's told in small chunks over a long period of time, allowing people to digest or discuss the episode before the next one airs. We refer to them as "seasons" of a show because one episode a week x 13 episodes = about the length of a season of the year (spring, summer, fall, etc). This is a convenient schedule to work with, and if you know exactly what your story is about, 13 episodes should give plenty of room to tell it.

The kicker is, if a show is successful and makes decent money, the network is likely to order more episodes, meaning a creator needs to have more story ready to go. This can be a problem if the writers already told the whole story in one season and have to scramble to come up with more, but most creators have plenty of story they want to tell (Six Seasons and A Movie, baby!), and are probably banking on getting more than one season.

But personally, I think the best shows are the ones that are built with the TV Show framework in mind. Let's use Infinity Train as an example. It was originally ordered as a 10-episode miniseries, very limited in scope compared to most shows. The writers worked very hard to pack the entire essence of the show into 10 little episodes, giving the viewer exactly as much information as they needed to enjoy that one single season, while still leaving a few doors open and not fully explaining the entire nature of the Train or One-One or Amelia, just in case they got picked up for another season. Using that method, no matter which season the show ended on, it would never feel "incomplete" because each season was written as if it were the last one, rather than leaving off on a cliffhanger or trying to set up for something bigger. That's the true essence of the TV Show format!

But for shows with epic sweeping narratives, this format presents a problem. The show has to be successful enough in its first season for the network to order more, and if it's going to take time for the story to ramp up properly, it might not get that far before the network cuts it short. Or y'know, it might be axed because it's Too Gay For China and can't make enough money in foreign syndication to pay for the cost of more episodes. For shows like The Owl House or Avatar The Last Airbender, it's a bit of a gamble, and as we've seen all too frequently, most networks these days DON'T like to take risks.

So to answer your question: IDEALLY, I think most shows should aim for a super polished single season (13~ episodes). And if it goes well and they get more episodes, then they can open it up further and go Harder Better Faster Stronger for Season 2, and any other seasons that may unlock down the road!

[valerieullmerromanceauthor]

Our Valentine's by S.J. Coles

Our Valentine’s by S.J. Coles Book 2 in the Once Upon a Holiday series General Release Date: 31st January 2023 Word Count: 13,249 Book Length: SHORT STORY Pages: 61 Genres: CELEBRITIES CONTEMPORARY EROTIC ROMANCE FAKE RELATIONSHIPS GAY GLBTQI HOLIDAYS Add to Goodreads Book Description We’ll make it our Valentine’s—and the best show on Earth. Everyone believes movie star Charlie Kearney lives a…

[indigomarketing]

New Release Blitz ~ Our Valentine's by S.J. Coles (Excerpt & Giveaway)

Our Valentine’s by S.J. Coles Book 2 in the Once Upon a Holiday series General Release Date: 31st January 2023 Word Count: 13,249 Book Length: SHORT STORY Pages: 61 Genres: CELEBRITIES CONTEMPORARY EROTIC ROMANCE FAKE RELATIONSHIPS GAY GLBTQI HOLIDAYS Add to Goodreads Book Description We’ll make it our Valentine’s—and the best show on Earth. Everyone believes movie star Charlie Kearney lives a…