Matt Wilkas and Daniel Vincent Gordh (screen captures)
Funny: ‘Would You Like To Sign Up For Our Rewards Program?’
‘Matt & Dan’ Serve Up Deliciously Off-Kilter Encounter
Don’t you hate it when folks come up to you in public, immediately jump into conversation like they know you, but you have NO IDEA who they are? The latest episode from Matt Wilkas and Daniel Vincent Gordh’s self-titled web series, Matt & Dan, takes the ‘where do I know you from?’ scenario and ramps up the socially awkward score to Level 10. In ‘Best Friends For Never,’ Matt (above) is grabbing some java on his way to CrossFit class when Dan spots him from across the coffee shop. Dan: “Oh, my god…Ben!” Matt: (draws total blank) “So fun…”(not) Amid weird hugs and kisses, Matt tries to decipher where he knows Dan from, but…nothing. Every question is met with a dodge even though Dan clearly knows a LOT about Matt’s life – his recent birthday party, his gym workout schedule… When Matt’s friend ‘Sarah’ (guest star Julia Cho) gets dragged into the increasingly weird meet-up, she tries to divine some background (“Are you in Jill’s Pilates class? Northwestern?”), but only finds herself further and further in the Twilight Zone. We won’t give away where it all goes, but props to the duo for the deliciously off-kilter encounter. Plus – bonus points for Matt Wilkas in a tank top 🙂 Check out the new episode below, and you can find past episodes on their YouTube channel here.
News Round-Up: May 14, 2019
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| Dan Tai |
Some news items you might have missed:
• Instagram: Dan Tai shields his eyes from the sun (…or is he just flexing for us?…) #InstaHunk
• NY Times: Donald Trump Jr. and the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee reached a deal on Tuesday for the president’s eldest son to sit for a private interview with senators in the coming weeks.
• Daily Telegraph: Former Newcastle Jets player, Andy Brennan, becomes the first Australian male soccer player to come out as gay.
• JoeMyGod: Televangelist Pat Robertson says God will destroy America if The Equality Act passes. Just like when she was going to wipe us out after marriage equality and Gay Days at Disney.
• Bloomberg: Trump Tower, the 36-year-old Manhattan residence, is now considered one of the least desirable luxury buildings in New York City. Over the past two years, sales of condo units in the building have taken losses of up to 20 percent.
• New digital series Model Boy explores “the lives of the wide-eyed young men lured into New York’s notoriously fickle high fashion modeling world.”
Check out the first episode below.
Podcast: Pete Buttigieg, Alabama, Missouri, Tennessee, Digital Series ‘After Forever’ Gets Emmy Noms
In this week’s podcast:
• Openly gay presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg surges in a new Iowa poll
• Alabama lawmakers are trying to eliminate marriage licenses entirely because they don’t want LGBT couples to have them
• A Missouri couple were turned away by a homophobic dance instructor
• Tennessee teens actually found acceptance and support as they prepared to attend prom together
• Digital series ‘After Forever’ gets a LOT of Daytime Emmy nominations
All that and more on this episode of The Randy Report.
Gus Kenworthy Helps College Student Be ‘Fearless’ In Coming Out
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| Gus Kenworthy, Ashley Graham help John to come out to his parents |
Ellen DeGeneres has launched a new web series titled, Fearless, hosted by entrepreneur and body positive activist Ashley Graham.
The digital series, hosted on EllenTube, focuses on helping people struggling with their own confidence issues to rally the courage to rise above, take the next step and become unapologetically fearless.
In this episode, Ashley helps 20-year-old college student John come out to his parents.
John admits he’s come out to his friends but the idea of telling his parents he’s gay has him “freaked out.”
He says that he first became aware of being attracted to boys in 7th grade but it wasn’t until after he graduated high school and a friend asked him point blank if he was gay.
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| Gus Kenworthy on coming out |
Ashley brings in out Olympian Gus Kenworthy to help John get up the nerve to make the call to his parents.
Kenworthy famously came out on the cover of ESPN Magazine back in 2015. Since then, he’s become one of the leading voices for LGBTQ representation and authenticity.
Gus shares that coming out for him, while scary and nerve-wracking (he didn’t sleep the night before), was ultimately a very positive experience.
Ashley asks if Gus’s friends wanted to talk about the gay thing after he came out and Gus laughs saying, “There’s a thing that straight people are going to do to you; they’re like, ‘Oh my god, you’re gay? You should meet my friend Jason, he’s gay.’”
And with that, they send John off to make THE call to his parents.
The reaction? Watch the video below to find out. Plus, there’s a surprise twist!
At the end of the short video, Gus has these words for those facing their own coming out:
“For anyone who’s watching that’s in the closet and struggling with their identity, their sexuality, I just want to let you know that you are valid, you are seen, you are heard, you are loved. And it can be really scary thinking about taking that step and revealing who you are and being so transparent with the world. But you’re going to be so much happier for it, and you living your life authentically and unapologetically is going to make it that much easier for other people to do the same.”
Follow the digital series Fearless here with new episodes every Wednesday.
Past episodes include Laverne Cox meeting a transgender man who’s never met another trans person before, and Ashley giving a teacher a lesson on body confidence.
Web Series: “jaded”
From Executive Producers JD Scalzo and Brian Emerick comes the original web series jaded.
We had $9k, 6 days, shot 5 eps, and had 1 amazing cast and crew.
Via press release:
jaded takes a look into the contemporary gay dating world particular to San Francisco, through the eyes of a man lost inside the hookup culture, while on a relentless pursuit for a way out.
He asks all the questions, he tries all the things, he falls in love in all the wrong places.
Exploring a variety of complicated relationships, through a multi-diverse array of friends and lovers, we watch him play both the victim and the culprit, traversing a world full of contradictions, over-the-top self expression, casual drug use, and the age-old idea of “free love” with all the consequences that follow.
In a place seemingly without any rules, how do you know which game to play when you don’t really want to play one to begin with?
’50/20′ – “An Interracial, Age Challenged, Sexually Fluid Web Series”
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| Christopher Long and Christopher Nester in “50/20” |
The new digital offering “50/20” bills itself as “an interracial, age challenged, sexually fluid web series.”
In the new series, written by Christopher Long and Evan Wynkoop, John (Christopher Nester) and Chris (Christopher Long) meet by chance on a baseball field and an accidental conversation becomes a romantic moment.
Or does it?
Chris is an African-American man in his 50s with a great job, great apartment, great friends, but not-so-great love life. Two years after the death of his longtime lover, he’s been on a lot of bad dates.
John is a good-looking guy in his 20s trying to find a career. A college graduate, he’s in that New York City “table-waiting, bartending, personal training” mode.
Neither of the two were looking for anything when they met, but the conversation leads to John asking for Chris’s phone number.
Plus, according to the digital series’ official website, Chris has never dated a white person and John has never dated anyone who wasn’t white.
Did I mention that Chris is gay and John is straight?
It’ll be interesting to see where this goes.
Check out episode one, “Chance Meeting,” below.
Web Series: ‘West 40s’ Episode 1
As regular readers of The Randy Report know I have a famously short attention span.
While I may love the ride of an awesome movie, sometimes the ‘commitment’ of sitting down for two hours to watch something can feel like I’m trapped.
And so you’ll understand my appreciation for web series/digital series. These bite-size morsels of entertainment perfectly suit my inability to concentrate for a long time.
Check out the first episode of the new web series, West 40s.
Here’s the official description: A Midtown, midlife comedy about 5 gay friends stumbling through their 40s in Hell’s Kitchen NYC. In the Episode 1, a 40th birthday party for Luis (the “baby” of the group who’s also a baby daddy) goes hilariously awry, and the gang ends up in places they never expected.
Creators Mark Sam Rosenthal and Brian Sloan said, “In their 30s, they’d meet strangers on the Hell’s Kitchen sidewalk and have sex in less time than it took to climb the four flights up to their apartments. But now past 40 they’re all wondering what they want for the long haul – and questioning whether they can still make it up those stairs!”
The series stars Dalton Blaine, Dan Domingues, Jeff Hiller, Matthew Montelongo, John-Andrew Morrison, and Rosenthal.
Watch the first episode below.
New Web Series “West 40s”
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| The cast of new series ‘West 40s’ |
A new web series, West 40s, plans to explore the lives of five gay men who live in New York City’s Hells Kitchen as they begin to approach middle age.
Creators Mark Sam Rosenthal and Brian Sloan describe the new series thusly: “In their 30s, they’d meet strangers on the Hell’s Kitchen sidewalk and have sex in less time than it took to climb the four flights up to their apartments. But now past 40 they’re all wondering what they want for the long haul – and questioning whether they can still make it up those stairs!”
The show stars Dalton Blaine, Dan Domingues, Jeff Hiller, Matthew Montelongo, John-Andrew Morrison, and Rosenthal.
The first full episode will be available in mid-July but you can check out the short teaser below.
New Web Series ‘Fathers’ Imagines Who Would We Be If AIDS Never Happened?
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| In ‘Fathers’ AIDS activist Vito Russo becomes president instead of dying of AIDS |
In his latest project, filmmaker Leo Herrera posits, “If AIDS never happened, who would we be?”
The new web series Fathers imagines in fictional documentary-style an LGBTQ utopia called ‘Stonewall Nation,’ a collection of queer communes in a parallel universe where the AIDS crisis never happened.
The official website for the series describes the sci-fi “documentary” as “Cruising meets Black Mirror meets Beyonce’s Lemonade.”
In the alternate timeline, communities called ‘Stonewall, Oregon’ and ‘Stonewall, Nevada’ exist peacefully as LGBTQ folks openly thrive.
The Fathers Project imagines AIDS never existed.
Everyone shown here represents someone we lost.
Instead of the LGBTQ community being decimated by disease and seeing the nascent gay rights movement stymied by rising anti-LGBTQ animus in the 1980s, Herrera envisions gays running for president, unconstrained by discrimination and disease, living openly across the country.
The 1980s were a golden age for the gay population.
It was a decade defined by our dominance of the arts, victories in politics
and groundbreaking developments in healthcare.
Relying on LGBTQ historians for accuracy, the characters/people featured in Fathers are actual gay leaders of the past as well as survivors, friends, and family members.
The pilot episode (below) is just the beginning as Herrera plans future installments to explore “the election and presidency of gay president Vito Russo (the real AIDS activist who was killed by the disease in 1990), and will be a direct reflection on the political climate today. They will also deal with the plight of gay seniors and the sexuality of modern queer culture.”
The name ‘Stonewall Nation’ comes from an actual group of queer separatists who hoped to establish their own city in Alpine, California, in 1970. Without proper resources, the plan was never implemented.
You can help fund the project here, and check out the first episode below: