Oliviero Toscani is shocking Europe again. And yes we admit it: the Italian clothing ad, above, for which Toscani is responsible, is way over the line — and would be whether it were a man groping a woman, or a woman, a man. (read the full article)

It’s that time of year again. Out tumble the 2006 calendars. Collected shots of gardens, monster trucks and pugs dressed up as children.

And big swaths of stud-flesh on parade.

Scores of beefcake calendars arrive in our office each October. We’ve seen them all. But this year’s standout has got to be Dieux du Stade 2006, featuring the French rugby team in all its glory. Twelve months of nude sportsmen carefully configured with footballs and clinging wet towels — all shot with a retro-porn twist by Paris photographer Fred Goudon. (read the full article)

How long do you keep a secret?

That was the question recently at a seminar for gay journalists, entitled The Closet Six Feet Under. It was a question that came up here at Nightcharm when we published a remembrance of Luther Vandross and casually mentioned in the first line that, of course, the singer was gay. A heated battle followed (see the Vandross comments).

Objections were raised, some of them preposterous: What if his mother read our entry? Why were we “desecrating” his memory? We suspect these cries from the heart came not from our regular readers but from the stray — yes, probably female — fan who had wandered in through the back door of the Google search engine. Apparently, the revelation of homosexuality in a beloved celebrity makes a lot of people uncomfortable, even ones who profess to know better (again, see the Luther commentary.) (read the full article)

It can happen anywhere, when you least expect it. You’re minding your own business, lost in thought, when suddenly your eyes lock with another man’s gaze. (read the full article)

A married, father of two — and just home from active duty in Iraq — please meet Joel, mellow Marine extraordinare — making good on his promise to “live dangerously” and try everything at least once.

Like posing for a gay porn website.

This former soldier absolutely blew our minds during the making of his “debut.”

Once naked and in front of the cameras (and watching his favorite het porn flick, Big Trouble in Little Vagina) Joel stoked, slathered and stroked his big gun until, well, let’s just say Mount Vesuvius was given a run for its eruptive hottness.

Join our spurting, squirting soldier inside the Inner Circle.

(MEMBERS / non-MEMBERS)

Faye Dunaway is one of the great movie stars who act with their eyes — or perhaps that should be one of the stars who act greatly with their eyes — in a class with the ocular fireworks of a Bette Davis, as well as the glistening searchlights of the ever-vivid Joan Crawford.

Faye, of course, played Joan Crawford — quite notoriously — in Mommie Dearest, bringing to the proceedings a whole glary-starey madness that had nothing to do with the Joan feeling , that was all Dunaway, and yet captured the truth of the Crawford persona anyway — in the way that art can often say more with one bold stroke of color than with multiple daubs of nuanced photo-realism. (read the full article)

All summer long Cindy Sheehan sat outside the ranch in Crawford. She had one question for the President: what was the noble cause that her son had died for? Well, Cindy, we think we have your answer!

As an estimated 100,000 people gather in Washington today for one of the largest anti-war rallies since the bad old Ho Chi Minh days, it becomes more and more obvious that we have made the world safer for full-blown Islamic theocracies. Capitalism Americana meets the Sharia in the starry-eyed little charmer, above, an Islamically correct Barbie-lookalike (that Mattel Barbie, much to its grief, has nothing to do with) is causing a sensation in the Axis of Evil — Little Girl branch (read the full article)

Guys … GUYS! … you’re making us all crazy.

Between flashing the pubes and the nips and the ass cracks, runways have become jerk-off extravaganzas.

Forget about how many buttons you should have on this year’s sportscoat. In the hyper-homo dreamworld of menswear, it’s all about miles and miles of long, lean torso shining out nakedly beneath open shirts.

And can we just say one thing?

All. This. Skin. Is. Killing. Us!

So please … don’t stop!

Oh we know you can’t help it.

It’s the designers who are putting you out there like succulent pieces of meat — Boysicles just ready to be licked!

And it’s not just D&G but Armani, Versace, Prada, Girbaud, Valentino — oh, fuck all of them! (read the full article)

But what about the gay penguins? Ray and Silo at the Central Park Zoo in free-thinking Manhattan? They’re very much in love, billing and cooing and driving the female penguins into a frosty huff. They’re also raising a chick. What would Jesus do, Pat Robertson? Please Pat, as the official Mayor of Crazy Town, comment soon. (read the full article)

In her September 11 essay for Salon, Stacey D’Erasmo’s calm, metered prose dug a hole straight to my heart — and became a kind of poem. Just what I needed.

The title of her piece Flicked Aside By The Universe assured me this wasn’t going to be another polemical jaunt into Bushville. Of all that I’d had enough, after hours of CNN, and net hopping, writing for this site and phone talking — worry bead-like activities that haven’t done much to move me back to my familiar, everyday center. (read the full article)