I guess we’re supposed to laugh at a painting like this.

There was a thin line in the 19th century between art and pornography, and the best way to get lots of sweetly-scented pink flesh into a painting was to set it safely in the past.

Homoerotic art of the time was usually signaled by a resort to ancient Greece and Rome.

The British academics — that is artists that painted in a style certified by rigorous art academies — were particularly good at this homoerotic slight of hand.

Here Lord Frederick Leighton — an artist all but forgotten but once so celebrated he was elevated to a peerage — shows us Icarus being fitted out with wings for his famous flight of hubris, an ascent too close to the sun that would end in a fiery, topsy-turvy plunge into the sea.

Forget that the story has particular relevance to the bloody war-torn, page-strewn headlines of this week. We offer this as an antidote to all that. Public servants that we are, Nightcharm brings you your prettiness break. (read the full article)

The ground is moving rapidly under Washington.

Congressman Mark Foley may eventually be seen as a sort of dark Prometheus for finally lighting a fire to the Republican Closet and burning it down.

In the process, he has shed light on how homosexuality is used to scare and distract the Republican party’s rural, Bible-centric base, while in fact, the Republican elite are no more troubled by gay people than any other corporate employer, looking for bright, competent workers — not sexual conformity.

It’s all been a big sinister hoax (at our expense). And now, finally, the jig is up.

Item: The Sex Was Legal, Says Foley Page

The Los Angeles Times reports that a House page acknowledged that he had sex with the disgraced Congressman, but only after he had turned 21. The young man, who quietly knew he was a gay when he was a teenager, agreed to talk to The Times only if his identity was protected, because of his fear that exposure could hurt his job prospects. (read the full article)

He sleeps the dreamless sleep of the innocent.

But everybody dreams, we exclaimed.

It was our second go-round with Remy Delaine, an Inner Circle favorite and star this week of a new video on the Video Launch Pad.

When we first met this French hunkeroonie, he had proved a charming foil for our many questions and totally inappropriate innuendos. Now he was letting his guard down — for starters — and giving us a peek into private realms.

Non, he repeated flatly. He rarely dreamt.

But you must.

“I once met a man,” he began — a charming way to begin any tale. “He was a doctor of …” His deep, accented voice faltered for a moment as he tried to recall. “Something,” he said finally, pronouncing it somesing. “And he told me dreams are what you want to do. Your fantasme — fantasy, oui? But I do my fantasme everyday in the porn. So maybe there’s not so much left for the dream.” (read the full article)

“Haven’t found her yet,” Paul Lynde would say when asked by reporters when he might marry.

The gay and beloved and self-hating “Center Square” on Hollywood Squares, Lynde (left) was always famously searching for “the right girl.” By the time TV fame hit, in the 60’s, both he and the entertainment reporters were in on the joke and no one was surprised when he would erupt in his trademark hacking laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Like many gay men who elect to be professionally “straight” — who are homophobic in its strictest sense, that is, they fear the homosexual (in themselves, in this case) — Lynde was aware of his own absurdity. It was perhaps that awareness, accelerated by alcoholism and career envy, that made him so colossally bitter in private.

We have just witnessed the fall of a gay Congressman, who has of late tried to explain himself but in ways that spin homosexuality further out into the Twilight Zone of rehabs and childhood sex traumas. He hasn’t quite come to terms with how ridiculous he has made himself, not only with underaged staffers, but by his self-defeating, anti-gay voting record.

Time perhaps may be kinder than we can be at this moment. Time may, in her gentle forgetful way, soften the edges as she has with other famous homophobic homosexuals that walked that same mile in the same shoes — shoes that ultimately squeaked and bit into their lying toes. (read the full article)

Editorial from today’s New York Times:

Real Scandals, and Fake Ones

When it comes to sexual scandal, American voters tend to be more rational than American politicians. The House Republicans raced to impeach President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky episode. But the people, shocked as they were, showed no desire to punish him by upending the national government. Conservative politicians frequently try to score political points by railing against homosexuality, but voters from very conservative areas often support politicians who are living out their private — and often not particularly secret — lives as gay men and women. Lawmakers from both parties have announced they were gay over the last generation, and they were almost always re-elected.

(read the full article)

The most striking thing about the emails that Mark Foley sent a 16-year-old Congressional page is how much like a 16-year-old he sounds himself:

“I just emailed Will,” he writes, at full gush, not slowing to punctuate. “hes such a nice guy … acts much older than his age … and hes in really great shape … i am just finished riding my bike on a 25 mile journey now heading to the gym … whats school like for you this year?’”

It’s the sort of naive twittering you might find in a diary entry on MySpace. At any moment you expect the 52-year-old Congressman to tick off a list of his “likes” in the manner of the moonstruck girls on that site (”hugs, making friends, soda, cookies, marshmallows, music”) — but then, as if carried away by the momentum, adding “bubble butts, circle jerks…”

Some of the teenage pages Foley regularly emailed have since come forward and at least one said he was “freaked out” when the Congressman asked him to email back a photo of himself. But other young men apparently took the attentions in their stride. Access to power is a powerful thing, and the Congressional page program is intended to fan just this sort of uncritical youthful vigor. (read the full article)