This July a new and very homo-hot version of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd will dominate the 2005 Munich Opera Festival.
The drama — in which the angelic Billy Budd becomes the sexual focus of a sadistic master-at-arms — stars the very humpy Nathan Gunn (above) in a production that features over 50 all-singing, all-shirtless sailors.
Now the last time we checked, opera torsos looked like the beached Pavarotti washing up on the Bay of Naples. Thank you America and Nautilus machines and 2xist underwear ads for putting on the pressure to create a baritone like Nathan Gunn!
Gunn has made quite a reputation for himself singing in as near-naked a state as the directors can possibly devise.
Opera News — a must-read for every opera queen in the universe — wrote of a recent performance that “Nathan Gunn was brilliant in every respect as Riolobo, the mystical character who summons local Amazonian spirits to avoid disaster…His singing was beautiful, strong and well-defined; like an athletic Ariel, Gunn’s Riolobo guided us into the heart of darkness and light.”
Translation: His chest was making us fucking cah-ray-zee!
Okay, we don’t know anything about opera, but we know lots about “well-defined” and “athletic.” We also know Nathan Gunn, 34, is married and very much with children — five of them! But even if he’s straight, he’s obviously not narrow:
“I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy all the roles I’ve sung because all have special moments,” he says. “I really love singing the title role in Billy Budd because Benjamin Britten, like Mozart, tackles the good and evil in man. It’s like a Greek tragedy in that it shows a real brotherly love among the men in their understanding of each other.”
Well, that’s all very sweet and for the family audience, but Billy Budd, both in the Herman Melville original and the Benjamin Britten opera, is hardly about anything as pale as “brotherly love.” 
We’re talking about the murderously bottled-up sex drive of a closeted master-at-arms who ties the beautiful young Billy to a mast and — because he can not make love to him — takes twisted relish in watching him flinch beneath his lash.
We prefer to flinch from the shameless array of naked Gunns we have gathered for you here.
Are you fucking kidding me? THIS is what I’ve been missing when I beg off on an excursion to the opera? My bad… Damn, who knew highbrow could be so hot?
Try Rodney Gilfrey (last seen in Andre Previn’s Streetcar Named Desire on PBS with Renee Fleming) and several other Hunky baritones currently circulating in the opera world. Nathan Gunn is the best but not in the least the ONLY opera hunk.
Yeah, Gunn’s hot, but for sheer sensuality, nothing has ever equaled the 1970’s New York City Opera production of Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” with a young Alan Titus as Nerone (Nero). Titus, around 26 at the time and a major hunk, performed most of the opera in a kind of Roman posing strap. That, combined with the yearning, aching, highly sexually-charged music of this seventeenth century Venetian priest (!), made for an evening that sent me straight to the baths afterwards.
[By the way, when Poppea is away, Nero amuses himself with his male friend Lucano.]
What about the gorgeous Perry twins in Seller’s version of Mozart’s “Don G?” Talk about HOT! They wore nothing but speedos in one scene.
Keep an eye on the opera stage for New Zealand baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes. Tall, blond, muscular and handsome. Already popular in Australia/NZ and now singing sometimes in North America. Another handsome blond baritone (why do they all seem to be baritones?) is Bo Skovhus from Denmark. He is pictured shirtless on the cover of his recording of Wozzeck.
Dude i went to Munich to see this!!
i fainted
Hi suche geilen Hengst mit ein geilen xxl Schwanz und Ich bin die geile Studte bin 19 Jahre alt und gut sportlich gebaut
he is hot
http://tinyurl.com/7v23w
Simon Keenlyside
muschi
Keep an eye out for another NZ baritone (this is the little country that gave you Dame Kiri AND Donald McIntyre), Paul Whelan. Tall, dark, handsome and thin, he came on in Elisir on a motorbike in full leather. HOT. He can go from Mozart (the Don) to Wagner (Amfortas). Sexuality unknown but he’s a friendly guy.
(Oh, and for the record, it’s not Billy who gets whipped, but another sailor)
Hey, there is also tenor John McVeigh, he’s so smoking hot (and gay).
And what about Thomas Rolf Truhitte? Heldentenor, I saw him as Tristan in Virginia Opera production (cut version). He sang half the opera half-naked, and there was quite a commotion among the ladies in the audience (of both sexes, I mean). As for singing… well I heard better. There was something funny about his voice, kind of pressing down on the tone… it didn’t spin. I was way too distracted by his naked body to pay attention to the voice.
its so hot
And, then, there is always Simon Keenlyside, shown barechested in the ads for the current BILLY BUDD at English National Opera.
Not to mention Dmitri Hrostovosky, undressed and dressed by his servants in the beginning of Act III EUGIN ONEGIN IN THE CURRENT PRODUCTION of The Metropolitan Opera. As well as Sam Ramey who started the whole thing a number of years back as Mephistofeles in Boito’s MEFISTOLE. And, I did see Nathan Gunn and William Burdon, the tenor, as the two buddies who sang the whole of Bizet’s THE PEARL FISHERS, wearing little but low slung sarongs.