There’s something inherently destabilizing about a room full of naked men. Trust me, I know—as a trans man who frequents a clothing-forbidden Korean spa (for the spa water, not the schlongs)—a room of naked men is enough to disrupt the monolithic idea of what it is to be a man.
Not because of sex, exactly, but because clothing is one of masculinity’s favorite tools for control. Full frontal nudity has historically been a tactic that the male gaze forced upon women. To say, “There you are, we see you and your vulnerability!” Strip clothing off a man, and suddenly posture and ascribed power have nowhere to hide. That’s the quiet genius of Laid Bare, the clothing-optional whodunit that premiered January 7th on Apple TV and OUTtv (with new episodes coming out on Wednesdays). Beneath the camp, the horror beats, and the delicious absurdity of a nude men’s resort turned crime scene, the series is really asking a much older question: what happens to codified masculinity when it can’t rely on armor?
Laid Bare follows a group of queer men invited to a remote nude resort under strange circumstances. Before they even arrive, a wealthy benefactor dies, leaving behind an inheritance that will be split among them. The catch is brutally simple. Fewer survivors mean a larger share. What unfolds is a horror-tinged exploration of power, paranoia, desire, and control. It’s Agatha Christie by way of Fire Island, soaked in sweat and existential dread.
What drew me to the project wasn’t just the audacity of its premise, though that certainly helped. (Girl, do we love camp!) It was the way masculinity itself becomes the real mystery. Each character arrives carrying a different relationship to power. Some dominate. Some charm. Some retreat into intellect. Some weaponize beauty. Some are desperate to be chosen. Others to be feared. None of them are neutral.
I play Montana Briggs, a male model who fights to cover up his not-so-perfect past. My character yearns to be perfect, unflawed, and completely in control, all forced by some insecure internal metric. And yet, this arbitrarily placed pressure ultimately leads to his downfall. Sound familiar? Yep. The age-old ideas of what it means to “be a man” are being stripped bare in, well… Laid Bare. Couldn’t help myself.
What Laid Bare gets right is that masculinity isn’t a monolith. It’s a spectrum of strategies for surviving intimacy, threat, desire, and loss. The show understands that men don’t compete only for money or sex. They compete for narrative control. For relevance. For the illusion of safety. In that way, the inheritance plot becomes a pressure cooker, exposing how quickly community erodes when masculinity is tied to scarcity.
There’s also something culturally timely about watching queer men occupy genre space so unapologetically. Horror has always been about what a society represses, and Laid Bare leans into that lineage with relish. It doesn’t sanitize queer desire or flatten it into moral lessons. It lets it be messy, funny, ruthless, tender, and occasionally monstrous. That complexity feels like a corrective to the way queer men are often flattened into symbols rather than characters.
It’s hard not to see Laid Bare alongside the broader moment we’re in, where shows like Heated Rivalry have ignited mainstream obsession with queer male intimacy, competition, and vulnerability. What’s emerging is not just visibility, but a reframing. These stories invite audiences, queer and straight alike, to witness masculinity in dialogue with itself rather than in opposition to femininity or power. They suggest that healing toxic masculinity doesn’t require abolishing masculinity, but expanding it.
On the Laid Bare set, that expansion of masculinity was palpable. A group of men (some gay, some bi, some cis, some trans) were all nude and exposed, playing out the oldest human dramas: fear of abandonment, hunger for control, the desire to be seen. The lack of clothing wasn’t a gimmick, it was an equalizer. When everyone is exposed, hierarchy becomes harder to maintain. Or at least harder to fake.
At its core, Laid Bare isn’t about shock value. It’s about what remains when performance collapses. When the body tells the truth faster than the mouth. When masculinity is no longer something you put on, but something you embody and feel free enough to explore.
That’s what makes this show feel electric to me. Not because it’s provocative, but because it’s honest. It trusts the audience to sit with discomfort, laughter, desire, and dread all at once. And it trusts its characters, flawed and scheming as they are, to reveal something real about the human instinct to protect, possess, and survive.
If masculinity is a story we keep telling ourselves, Laid Bare asks what happens when that story is interrupted. When the narrator dies. When the inheritance is up for grabs. When everyone is watching.
Who are we when the clothes come off… and there’s nowhere left to hide?
By Marval Rex
Watch Episode 1 of Laid Bare for free on YouTube. The first four episodes are streaming now on OUTtv and available on VOD on Apple TV. New episodes debut Wednesdays.
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