
… but I’ve never been to me”
— pop song beloved by drag queens
Well, we’ve never been to Nice, Greece, or ME, but like many a drag queen, we know what hot dick looks like.
When we saw the work of Venetian photographer Piero Pazzi we knew we had found a fellow searcher for … let’s call it truth.
Perhaps most known (notorious?) for his calendars of heartstoppingly handsome Italian priests, Pazzi also brings out a calendar and guide to the luscious — and seemingly available — gondoliers that ply the waters of the Grand Canal — and who knows what else is plied or plowed under those famous midnight bridges?
We’re dreaming, in particular, of a nighttime passage piloted by the sturdy arms of some lordly lad, coming to a lengthy stop beneath the Rialto Bridge with its lace-like stone canopy and Renaissance arches — a place so self-intoxicated with Italian beauty that it was a beloved cruising spot for Sebastian Venerable, Tom Ripley, and so many other twilight males of High Lavender Literature.
None more famous than Gustav Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, which bring us to our excuse for running all these diveen-o pictures.
Because of the Thomas Mann classic, Venice, a city already sunk in watery melancholy, will forever have a certain haunted homoeroticism.
Death in Venice provides us as well with a humpy, never-to-be forgotten portrait of the gondolieri, as you will see:
One day an eminent historian, greatly lionized in his native Germany, finds himself for the first time staring at a coarse red-headed man in a cemetery, and in his embarrassment flees — but apparently not far enough.
He decides he must take a trip. Fatally, he decides it will be Venice.
(more…)



If you’re tired of the endless stream of waxed and shaven sissy-boys with angel faces and precious cherub dicks, it’s probably time for you to consider switching to something










