Last month we were honored to bring you our first installment of Bad Beefcake™, which included such gems as Sean Connery in a thong, Chace Crawford as a come-hither cowboy, and Ralph Fiennes channeling George of the Jungle for a Vanity Fair cover. (You can click on the thumbnails below to enlarge these gems.)

We thought Bad Beefcake would only be a one-off feature, but no, in the last month even more egregious lapses in male celebrity judgment have surfaced. And so we bring you....

Bad Beefcake Volume 2!

First up is Thomas Dekker, the young heartthrob whose Heroes character who was so infamously de-gayed last year. Given that history, one wonders how these publicity shots for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles slipped past his agent. And, er, what does a mylar heart balloon have to do with Terminator?

Stilll, we're not complaining because they certainly are good for a laugh.

Speaking of Heroes...

2007 was quite a year for gay geeks, with gay representation in comics books, on science fiction television and in video games being a frequent discussion topic. While these topics aren't entirely new, this year the discussion was at its most active.

On TV, we saw ourselves more often, especially on BBC America's Torchwood ... even though we had frustrating setbacks on shows like Heroes. Things looked incredibly bright for gamers, who found themselves expecting a good number of games with expected gay-inclusiveness and found it easier to find each other.

Additionally, gay geeks became more visible. Logo debuted its collection of animation, Alien Boot Camp,which included bumpers showing gay fans at comics and sci-fi conventions, as well as gay comic creators like Alison Bechtel. For a long time, this subset of queers weren't seen often, with gay geeks being happily surprised when they found each other, but that's changing as our visibility within the gay community increases.

Let's take a look back at the past year, shall we?

Here they come, the sound of drums

If we were to declare a king of the gay geeks, Russel T. Davies would be the candidate to beat. The Doctor Who producer did plenty to increase gay visibility on sci-fi television. The past season of Who regularly showed gay people as simply a part of the human tapestry. More importantly, 2007 was the year Torchwood made its USA debut. The series quickly became BBC America's biggest hit and, seeking to maintain the momentum from season one's success, the network announced that the second season will air only two weeks after it airs on BBC Three.

The success of Torchwood, as well as Doctor Who, is a significant development for gay sci-fi fans. On Torchwood, Captain Jack Harkness is a very different way of portraying queer men on television: as a dashing, heroic lead. Meanwhile, Captain Jack's return to Doctor Who this season continued to show his relationship with The Doctor as one having the kind of strained affection previously seen only with female companions like Sarah Jane Smith and Rose Tyler.

While Doctor Who is an obscure series for American fans, it's a major franchise in the UK and the series is the target of constant rumors and speculation regarding arrivals and departures both in front and behind the cameras. Those rumors included talk that Davies' may be cutting back on his Who duties with Steven Moffat taking over the series. Moffat wrote some of Who's most popular episodes and created the gay-inclusive Coupling and Jeckyll. If the speculation has any merit, Moffat sounds like a promising replacement.

We're still holding on for our hero on Heroes, Monday nights

For some media pundits, Heroes is a solid example of what diversity should look like on television,; but for people who actively advocate for increased diversity, the show is a mix of potential and problems. Last December, we noted that early promotion for the series had Zach as gay but that the show had suddenly turned away from the idea. Discussion into the character continued into the new year. Out producer Bryan Fuller confirmed that the character was written as gay, only to have those plans derailed by the management of Thomas Dekker, who played Zach. In its second season, Heroes was supposed to add a lesbian character but she, too, disappeared before becoming a major presence.

• I can't say it any better than the poster's description: "Inmates of CPDRC Philippines dancing the Radio Gaga by the Queen." It's like Marat Sade, but with a beat you can dance to. (t/y Popcandy)
  
• Conan uses a clip from gay porn Feed the Bears without permission, and Cyberbears are doing a good job of pretending not to be thrilled about the best free PR they've ever had.
• Out actor Rupert Everett cheeky as ever in discussing gay parenting: "Oh God, I could never do that to a child. Can you imagine what it would be like, having your two dads coming to school speech days? And hearing those awful queeny rows while you are trying to get to sleep?"
• The Sarah Conner Chronicles' Thomas Dekker is still not answering the question in regards to Heroes and his character's straightification -- and really, at this point he's living large enough not to need to, I guess. I wonder what kind of FTD bouquet he sent Isaiah Washington to say "thanks for distracting the gay mafia with the f-bomb while I made a slippery escape"... would that be irises?
• Emmy-nominated gay actor Neil Patrick Harris talks about the honor and rates the nominated actresses in character as Barney: "Tina Fey is kind of dirty hot."

Not that we needed any more confirmation that the character of Zach (Thomas Dekker) on Heroes had been degayed (a story broken by AfterElton.com), but Heroes writer Bryan Fuller (pictured) again says Zach was written as gay. He also again confirms that it was Dekker's agent who forced the issue because her client was up for the part of John Carter in The Sarah Connor Chronicles because she feared it might affect FOX's interest in hiring him. Instead, she got him yanked off one of the year's biggest hit shows, so don't go looking for him to reappear in tonight's episode. (Boy, Dekker sure has himself one smooth agent!)

Here are some quotes from the interview with with Popgurls.com.

On whether making Zach gay was a path they were always going to take:

It absolutely was a path that we were going to take. In the first meetings when we were sitting down and talking about the show, one of the things about the show that Tim said that he wanted all these characters to represent different people in the world and we had an Asian guy and an Indian guy and. a whole bunch of white people. He just wanted it to be a United Benetton cast. I said that's fantastic, but if we have this many people, then we need to have a gay character. If you want to represent the world, that's certainly a demographic that we need to hit.

On why it would have been good to have a gay character on Heroes:

Considering Heroes is a show about people embracing what's special about themselves, it would have been great for gay teens see themselves reflected on TV by Zach.

On his reaction to the whole debacle:

I was very upset by it - I was not happy about it at all. There were times I had to avoid talking about it because we didn't want to have a negative reflection on the show. The show's been such a positive experience for so many people, we didn't want to get hung up on the fact that one actor's management felt that it was a career killer for him to play a homosexual which, as a gay man, I found incredibly insulting.

Hopefully, this will finally shut up clarify things for all the straight boys who keep insisting Zach was never gay.

I know it may seem like this is water under the bridge -- but the truth is, we never got a concrete public statement from the folks behind Heroes regarding exactly what happened to the intended-to-be-gay character of Zach (a story which AfterElton.com broke to the world back in December).

It looks like we finally have something on the record: at the recent Wizard World convention in Los Angeles, the show's fans put it to the panel of the show's masterminds exactly what happened to the sexuality of Claire's friend Zach, played by Thomas Dekker. Producer Bryan Fuller replied with confirmation of our suspicions, according to SpoilerTV's coverage of the panel:

The panel seemed at first reluctant to address the controversy surrounding the sexuality of Claire’s friend Zach, portrayed by actor Thomas Dekker. But Fuller did eventually say, that Dekker’s management “didn’t want him to be playing a gay character” for career reasons. The panel then did acknowledge that they’d originally conceived of the Zach character as gay, and that the ambiguity is a result of an “unfortunate miscommunication.”

First off, tip of the hat to the fans at the convention for not letting the producers off the hook on this one (I hope it was an AfterElton.com reader who lobbed the question!). And it's good to have official word on exactly what happened (assuming that SpoilerTV.com is reporting correctly), so that we can put this thing to rest and simply resolve to boycott Dekker's career rather than skip any more episodes of Heroes. Because let's face it -- that's a hard habit to break.