“Hey, my name is Brody,” our new friend tells us as he clunks down on the couch. We’re best buds as of two minutes ago.

“I’m from Del Mar. All the beaches down there are great. I like to hang out, play in the waves, go to clubs. Ride my boogie board through the waves. My boogie board…”

But we’re lost track. This boy version of baby talk always intoxicates us to the point where we start focusing on things like the wisp — the faintest whisper — of reddish hairs that curl up his flat suntanned tummy. You hardly see them except that they fleck red and gold when he breathes. Follow the tracings and they gather finally in a tuft that twirls around his belly button.

“Get all wet and crazy …”

Huh, we say. That part got our attention.

His shoulders drop and he gives us that pained look of infinite forbearance that only a 19-year-old can truly muster. He repeats his words, slowly now, in case we’ve fallen back on lip-reading. “The surf? In the rain? Gets all crazy? And the sea turns knarly and that’s when the big waves…” (read the full article)

Booze, dope and showbiz. How can we resist?

The Valley of the Dolls is finally out on a deluxe 2-disc DVD — just in time for Gay Pride Day. And what a celebration it is! From its shocking-pink plastic case to its tons of queer-centric extras, we have never seen a DVD cater so hard — or so lovingly — to a certain kind of fabuloso gay mania.

Here you will find extras that include: Karaoke versions of the film’s dumbly worded songs where you follow the bouncing Rx bottle. Commentary by a camp-savvy but earnest Barbara Parkins (who hated her boxy, beige good-girl suits when all the other actresses got to wear sparkly Travilla gowns.) Remarks from Patty Duke (who hated the director and was accused of beating up too hard on Susan Hayward in the the film’s campfest finale, the ladies room cat fight.) And comments from a supporting player, who noted that it was a movie where all the actresses hated each other, upstaged each other, and saw their roles as pivotal career-changing opportunities. (read the full article)

Now, fresh from 2-disc DVD rehab, David K and editor John Calendo discuss the magic, the myth, and the madness of Valley of the Dolls.

David K: For years I’ve been smitten with the publicity still of the three girls on the bed. It’s the most famous image associated with the film.

John Calendo: It’s too bad the three actresses never appear in the same scene together. As to what they might all be doing on a big ‘ol Hollywood bed except trying on each other’s falls, I will leave to the girl-on-girl aficionados.

DK: That image symbolizes the heart of what I love most about Dolls: It’s a movie about glamorous, beautiful women … with big hair. But for all its pinky glamor the photo is also disturbing. The way the trio is juxtaposed on the bed, but not relating to each other — that signals complications. Goodie! A movie about Gals in Trouble! That fact shoots the film into the queer stratosphere. Beauty and chaos intermingling — it’s an addictive combo. (read the full article)

There’s more than Voodoo down here on the Bayou.

One year ago, in June of 2005, the residents of Tangipahoa Parish were locked in a heated debate about whether the local school board was unleashing Armageddon on the world.

It was big news here in Louisiana. At issue was a fancy-schmancy biometric fingerprint system that would scan students’ index fingers in the school cafeteria, thereby debiting money from their lunch accounts.

More than a few concerned citizens argued that the system was placing the mark of the beast on their little darlings, even though in reality it was more like that palm-scan thing in Logan’s Run — with tater tots instead of death by laser beam. (read the full article)

As so often happens, our thoughts turn once again to the liner notes on Barbra Streisand’s What About Today album:

“This album is dedicated to the young people,” wrote the singer with all the grave authority that came with being 27-years-old — in other words, a kid herself. Up until then, Barbra had been knocking them dead with old-style nightclub standards and off-beat showtunes. She had concocted a show business personality that was part clutsy Jerry Lewis, part Queen of England. Now she was declaring herself at one with her generation. (read the full article)

Gay men, especially artistic ones, like to fancy themselves as outsiders. But the real social pariahs — the unhospitalized schizophrenics, death-row inmates and self-taught visionaries that are featured in a new gallery show of Outsider Art in London — make most of us look as routine as mailmen.

At the center of the current Whitechapel Gallery show is little-girl artist Henry Darger, whose work you see here.

A janitor who attended Catholic Mass three times a day but otherwise had no human contact, Darger lived in a one-room apartment in Chicago. After he died, in 1973, his landlords discovered that for decades he’d been illustrating a fantastical epic about a war between a group of little girls (the Vivian Girls) and a fascist dictatorship (the Glandelinians). The manuscript was over 15,000 pages, some of it drawn on butcher’s wrapping paper. (read the full article)

“My models are sort of the strongmen of my dreams,” Michael Alago told us when we first ran a piece on his hot-daddy photobook rough gods.

Now he tells us he’s working on a new book, due out next summer, called road trips. And guess what? — it will feature even more of those big, nasty, tattooed Daddies that made our heart go pitter-pat the first time around.

“Most of the men I shoot are in their 30’s and 40’s,” Michael confides, adding “I love this age group, especially when a mature man has a big hulky body and a daddy-like quality. These men exude sex. They have lived their lives and it shows in the way they carry themselves.”

Ah yes, big-titted pecs and a dirty look — always pure heaven!

And can we make a confession of our own? We can never look at Michael’s men without feeling like a character in Gaywyck, that dizzy homo retelling of Jane Eyre where the prose runs the deepest purple. (read the full article)

As Henry James once noted: “Summer afternoon. Summer afternoon … the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

‘Tis true: Time and light elongate, clothing slides off, the air gets lazy, breezy — and so do I.

Here are four discs guaranteed to provide the perfect soundtrack for an unwound summer. Two are new, while the others I’ve pulled from storage because summer just wouldn’t be summer without them. (read the full article)