“I have been perfectly happy the way I am,” wrote renowned gay author Christopher Isherwood. “If my mother was responsible for it, I am grateful.”

“My mother,” countered Gore Vidal , “was a traumatic experience.”

Love them or hate them, mothers are often the only major woman in a gay man’s life — the one female relationship that has any depth to it.

Though Freudians in the past indited mothers as the “cause” of male homosexuality, the modern data suggests sexual preference is a biological orientation. The role mothers play seems mainly biochemical:

According to a landmark study of mothers with adult gay children, conducted in 1988 at Minot State University, pregnant women who suffer great stress during their second trimester are more likely to deliver gay sons. (read the full article)

Who’da thunk it? Who knew Wonder Woman had such a stud in the family?

Certainly not Wonder Woman, brought up by Amazons, no boys allowed.

And certainly not DC Comics, originator of the most durable female Superhero since … well, since Katy Keene. Okay, Katy Keene was a fashion model but she was always a Supergal in our book — and nobody wore a paper-doll bathing suit in quite the same curvy way.

Wonder Man, at left, is — let us say — something of a long lost brother (how very DC comics!)

Actually the man with the gold lasso is illustrator Glen Hanson‘s fantasy homage to the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman TV show he grew up on.

“From the age of 10, I was totally obsessed with Wonder Woman.” Glen told us when we interviewed him a year ago. (read the full article)

Ah, to be a pole dancer in a strip club! (like Elizabeth Berkley in the fabled pussy extravaganza Showgirls, at right)

That is the simple wish of so many of us! — including a chubby young lady who comes on stage in Jerry Springer — The Opera and tells Jerry that all she ever wanted to be was a whorey stripper swirling around a pole in a glitter G-string.

“I don’t give a fuck no more,” she tells the onstage Springer audience, who are trying to shout her down with chants of “Loser! Loser!” “I’m tired of laughing and I’m tired of crying. I’m tired of feeling and I’m tired of always trying. I want to do some living because I’ve done enough of dying. I just want to dance, I just want to …fucking dance!”

The longing that Alison Jiear expresses in the song is quite touching and one of the opera’s suite of showstoppers (which also includes “Chick with a Dick” and a wife-stealing tranny shaking her stuff in wifey’s face as she brings down the house with “Talk to the Hand, Bitch.”)

Jerry Springer — The Opera comes from — where else, other than Japan, would they get this loopy over American junk TV? — England, home of Masterpiece Theater! The opus is set to land on our Puritan shores any minute now, but if you can’t wait and don’t want to shell out the big bucks for an import CD, staring David Soul (from Starsky and Hutch, yet!) as a very convincing Jerry, then… (read the full article)

Why has Madonna lasted so long? Even now, in her decline, she is more interesting than the various young blonde updates that were supposed to replace her.

Yvan, a French Canadian writer, looks into his crystal ball at Madonna’s past and discovers her magic charm. Madonna, you see, is an Artist, with a capital A.

Trained and molded by the New York art scene during her scruffy bar-band days, Madonna made herself into an art object, a fiction, a canny, post-Warhol Marilyn Monroe.

“Britney Spears,” lamented Interview magazine editor Ingrid Sischy, “looks like a mall rat when she’s not doing one of her videos.” This prompted culture gadfly Camille Paglia to observe: “It shows the gigantic gap between Britney and Madonna, who has always had a superb instinct for the still photograph. Madonna’s career is much more than dance music and sensational videos. It’s also a phenomenal series of still images.”

Such as the one at left, from Sex, Madonna’s first and mercifully not-for-children foray into publishing. The ass, so the legend goes, belonged to none other than Joey Stefano, whom Nightcharm calls the greatest bottom that ever lived. (UPDATE: Our readers contend the lovely bubble butt belongs to Tony Ward, a Madonna boytoy who appeared in her videos. See comments below.) (read the full article)

It was one of those ultra supreme American Idol moments last night. So cruel, so surprising, so whacked out — Paula’s face buried in her hands. Simon’s anger clamping his sphincter as tight as a vise. You could almost call it Greek-mythic. “America voted,” and Ryan Seacrest delivered the result in a nonchalant trice: The fatal pronouncement, like a trapdoor deathblow, melted Chris Daugherty‘s face right on the spot — so much so my heart actually sank for him.

But then I felt great.

Buh-bye Chris — pictured here with Morticia Addams Priscilla Presley as she welcomes the one-note Creed knockoff to her Hall of Irrelevance. Cue the haunted house sonics. Especially that effect of a large door slamming shut.

When my boyfriend mentioned that Chris shouldn’t have talked about his underwear on Elvis night, I thought he was joking. On second thought, he’s probably right.

I mean, Tuesday night was the first time in a while I was starting to warm to Chris — his performance of Suspicious Minds was understated and believable. Almost charming. But who’da thunk some boxer-brief chitchat would freak out his straight-guy fanbase to such a degree? Was it too “gay” for them? Or maybe it was too vulgar a confession for his Christ-O-Rama constituents? Not to worry. I’m sure Chris will be announced as the new lead singer for Fuel next week. (read the full article)

Let’s consider some of our favorite things about 70s gay porn. And we’re not talking about the acid-wash jeans, masses of unruly hair or calf-hugging tube socks. No, we want to celebrate the dramatic moments. The surprise epiphanies — those clumsy bits of cinema magic when those oh-so-latent gay boys became full-blown gay men.

70′s porn worked extra hard on the narrative. There was the sports massage, the medical exam — situations that welcomed any excuse for a full body rub down, and someone’s tongue inevitably replacing a hand or stethoscope.

Or you would have the horny tailor who couldn’t control himself while taking that awkward crotch measurement during the groom-to-be’s fitting — and ended up deep-throating his way to a wedding invite. (read the full article)

There is an unmistakable grandeur to this photo and we are not sure at first if — but, of course, it is – a man.

It is titled Barcelona, most likely because that was the name this arresting creature went by. Certainly the photographer, Christer Stromholm, was associated with the sleazy-chic lowlights of Paris, circa 1960, and Madame Barcelona may have been one of the twilight demimondes on parade.

How she does gaze at us! The world-weary hauteur of it.

And while this picture certainly speaks one thousand — if not one million — words, Ian Jeffrey, the gifted blurb writer for The Photo Book, where it appears, manged to add a few devastating words of his own: (read the full article)

Why am I not surprised? We are, after all, still living in the reign of George II, King of the Second-Rates. American Idol‘s two best vocalists — Elliott Yamin and Paris Bennett — hit the bottom two last night. So let’s see, that leaves the show’s next best vocalist Katharine McPhee lodged in the number three slot with the Monotone Maven (Chris Daughtery) and Gray Charles (Taylor Hicks) in the top two.

Let’s skip the psychics and decode Idol‘s new “official” photo (right) which was released this morning. The tableau tells us exactly how the next four weeks will play out. Photo’s often reveal more than we dare hope for, and this one … well, this one’s got me crying in my beer.

Elliott, smushed to the edge and with the lowest height, will be the next Idolette to follow little Paris down the chute.

Nerves did him in during Tuesday’s opener, a notoriously bad placement on the show. There’s a reason long-time viewers of Idol call it the Death Spot. (read the full article)

He didn’t mention gay marriage. But comedian Stephen Colbert confronted George W. Bush with nearly every twist of public lying, pious hypocrisy and war ineptitude in his calamitous presidency. Not all of it was funny, but all of it was true.

It happened over the weekend at the White House Correspondents Dinner, usually a genial event where the President pokes gentle fun at himself, and even gentler fun at the press, who sit in their tuxedos and gowns happily liquored up.

Comics are invited to take the President on from the podium — easy going punsters not known for social commentary, like Ray Romano or Drew Carey — and everyone leaves with the sense that the President is a swell guy, after all.

As an example of what usually passes for humor, last year Cedric the Entertainer — who? — was so lame he was overshadowed by the mock-critique First Lady Laura Bush gave her husband from the stage. Typical of the sugar-coated zingers deemed quotable the next day by a sobered press: (read the full article)