Thank you Berlin Wall for falling.

Thank you, Mother Russia and all the little Russias — those awful Soviet satellites that sunk Eastern Europe into poverty and created a generation of strikingly handsome but stunningly ill-equipped young men.

Correction: Wonderfully, bountifully, bodaciously equipped young men, with beautiful Slavic faces, heavy Slavic schlongs, and whorls of dripping foreskin.

Take Jiri Zikes, left. As a kid in Slovakia he figured he’d follow in his uncles’ footsteps, indenture himself to some Eastern bloc autocrat as a bodyguard-cum-thug. Then the wall fell and the Iron Curtain lifted. And Jiri was left with a lot of time on his hands.

Enter the Free Market miracle! Enter the American porn industry, with its worldwide reach and steady work for rude-boned, high-cheeked studlings idling away over cigarettes and coffee in plaza cafes.

Where Jeri once had a lot of time on his hands, he now has a lot of hands on his …um, time.

We went kind of nuts for Jiri. We love his Slovak angularity and easy, open smile. We’ve devoted a whole photo gallery to this big boy in our Inner Circle. And, just for you, Nightcharmers: Jeri in action! Yes, he’s on the VideoLaunch Pad, in our Bare! theater, balling his head off in Military Manholes (scene 2).

(MEMBERS / non-MEMBERS)

Everything was going so great in the Garden.

Then Steve showed up.

Are you ready to rumble? Film after the jump. (more…)

The 70s were dying. But from the ashes of disco and its druggy debacuh rose, like a phoenix, a fabulous television show called Solid Gold. And the 80s were born.

The show beamed into homes like a stealthy Trojan Horse, full of twitchy-bitchy sexuality, along with studly helpings of man-ass wiggling for the camera.

It was genius! And the surprise of it all was that neither Aaron Spelling nor Allan Carr had anything to do with this primetime hit: The show ran for nine years!

Solid Gold gave birth to a phenomena we now call Porn Creep — in which pornographic titillation is sneaked into the living room in such small, incremental ways that everyone gets a glow-on and grandma doesn’t have a heart attack.

Grannies and kids loved Solid Gold. Aerobic enthusiasts, invalids, gays — and particularly straight guys. Suddenly everyone could watch together unapologetically without a twinge of anxiety. Pupils dilated with the joy of near-nude gyrations and grindings — week after week, hit after hit. (more…)

They’re written for teenage girls, right? (Over 18, of course.)

For little pink things with pink cell phones text-messaging each other about parties and the proper way to give a blowjob (in a nutshell, girls, watch the teeth. Men are real crybabies about shit like that.)

Yet why do gay men — fully grown ones well, well out of their late-onset teens (which for a gay man means he’s about 30) — why do gay guys often quote these twiddling, diddling lyrics at you like they are bridging some shimmering chasm of profundity, which mere words, un-levitated by string sections, could never span?

Why, you chucklehead 30-year-olds — why?

And why do the same soppy lyrics crop up in farewell letters and over long-distance phone lines and in coffee shops where first-lovers stare sadly– and with such large, glistening corneas — into each other’s eyes?

Must the lyrics always come from the songs of innocence, never the songs of experience? Never from say, that snappy little toe-tapper by Peggy Lee, Is That All There Is? (more…)

The Blowhards love this “war on terror.” Love their little flag-pins and yellow-ribbon bumper stickers. Love their little rah-rah rallies to support the President, where they stand behind him in rows, nodding along — yes, yes! — with every asinine statement.

Photogenic affairs, these rallies, closed to all but invitation-only Republicans, where the rows are strategically arranged to feature every shade of American and where our eye never fails to linger on the black man or woman and wonder what’s that all about! … but then black people must ask the same question about the Log Cabin Republicans.

Thing is so many of these 9/11 patriots are way too old to actually put their ass on the front line, where their mouth is. And of the ones that are of age, so many of of them are overweight wankers tapping out right-wing blogs or dreaming up “think-pieces” for neo-con house organs like The Weekly Standard to ever get any grit under their nails in an actual dustup. (And they call us effete! We who made terms like pig and pigpen sell-words for after-hours clubs and holiday weekends!) (more…)

Actually, one in ten straight men have sex with men ONLY! That is one of the jaw-dropping conclusions of a survey of 4200 men, detailed exhaustively in the Annals of Internal Medicine this month.

We provide a little visual aid at right, courtesy of a Bruce Weber wall poster, On Leave in Waikiki, in case it slipped your mind exactly what makes straight men so fabulicious.

All the men in the sex survey lived in the five boroughs of New York City — in other words, a wide cross section of social classes from blue-collar to executives with advanced degrees — were contacted by telephone, and, when necessary, were interviewed in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Polish, and Haitian Creole.

The purpose of the survey, initially, was to determine how to reach under-served — and perhaps hidden and neglected — populations who might have a higher risk of contracting HIV. The findings, however, were more akin to the Kinsey Report: (more…)

We have to give the media an A (not the same thing as an A+) on the way they handled the marriage this past Saturday of two Spanish airmen in Seville.

Both Reuters, which specified no author for its report, and Daniel Woolls of the Associated Press did a sober and lively job reporting a historic, but by no means world-ending, event.

If we have any quibble (we are withholding the plus sign on that A — and by the way, the mark will go on their records), it’s with the headline writer for the Reuters piece:

The headline ran: Flamenco Flamboyance at Spain Gay Military Wedding

Of course, everyone knows that gay men are always, by definition, flamboyant. We park our cars flamboyantly, show up at work in velveteen outfits with ruffs, and order coffee at Starbucks with ze little finger crooked just so.

The “Flamenco flamboyance” the headline writer was straining to hype (winking at the yahoos is getting much harder these days) was, in fact, a rather ordinary and traditional feature of weddings in Seville. The lead sentence of the piece tried valiantly — and was probably rewritten at the last minute by the editor — to cover for the headline writer’s exuberance: (more…)

Which American painting, do you think, is the most famous? Not the best. Simply the best known.

This was the question buzzing around Datalounge — our favorite all-gay message forum. The candidates put forth included Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, even — a real blast from the past — Whistler’s Mother (more properly known as Arrangement in Grey and Black), a sentimental favorite of the sanctimonious Fifties.

We, however, have to cast our lot with Andy Warhol’s Marilyn – there are hundreds of them, some in large squares that dwarf the viewer, others — the more troubling and profound “assembly line” versions — in slyly ugly diptychs of 50 Marilyn’s back-to-back.

Just on the face of it — if most famous can be measured by most reproduced — our contention is supported by the rough measure of Google’s image search:

Both Nighthawks and American Gothic rate 20 pages each. Warhol’s Marilyn comes in at 28. (Whistler’s Mother doesn’t even signify, poor dear — on life support with a feeble 8 pages worth of acclaim.)

We would also argue, however, that Warhol’s silkscreen is more than a lucky child of Fortune; it is, in fact, a great painting. We wonder if it might not one day rank as the most famous painting of all, edging out the longtime heavyweight, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

In many ways, Warhol’s Marilyn is the hardboiled 20th Century answer to the Mona Lisa.
(more…)