“I think the human body is a remarkable machine in all its shapes and sizes,” says Portuguese artist HvH.

This refreshing point of view is exactly what drew us to the artist’s graphic celebration of bears and even overweight men.

When we asked if he were attracted perhaps exclusively to bears, HvH gave us the sort of answer that — while it let slip nothing really personal — seemed to embrace all humanity:

“I am linked to the ‘bears movement’ but only because I started showing my erotic work on a bears website,” he said. “Even there, I drew all sorts of characters: young, old — bears, twinkies, transsexuals. Men and women.”

In a world of gay art that magnifies standard perfection and beguiles us with studly impossibilities, HvH strikes out for wider vistas and undiscovered continents, where the natives, with their chunky down-to-earth bodies and odd “imperfections,” are just as hot and universal yet so different from the sons of Tom of Finland that we know and love back home. (read the full article)

Welcome, Winston, to the Ministry of Love.

You are afraid, aren’t you? The man with the truncheon by the door is frightening you. Have you been guilty of a thoughtcrime, Winston? Your neighbor’s daughter said she heard you singing in your apartment. Were you singing, Winston?

I told you once before that if we ever met again it would be here. This is Room 101. Sit in the chair. The wires are connected to a terminus that will send volts through your body. The more I turn the dial, the more volts. You are shaking, Winston. You are imagining indescribable pain. We have watched you, Winston. We have heard you. You were singing in your apartment. Are you a traitor, Winston? Have you tried to overthrow Big Brother? Have you made up your own rules? We have the tape: (read the full article)

To feature a woman on Nightcharm’s front page she must be a creature who mirrors the pagan, crystal vision that inspires our staff to conjure all of the high quality juju we offer up to you, dear reader, week after week.

And who better to feature this week than the earth and moon-inspired blond witchy woman herself: Stevie Nicks.

When I caught Camille Paglia on tour recently she mentioned how the entirety of her new book Break, Blow, Burn was written with Nicks’ Trouble in Shangri-La spinning in the background.

Paglia considers Stevie Nicks a nature poet, a poet of the earth and sky: The planets, sun and the moon (and then some). A few audience members balked at Paglia’s statement, but I nodded my head in agreement while fingering my love beads.

As Joyce Millman from Salon reminds us: “The women in Nicks’ songs are free birds and gypsies: independent, unafraid to be alone, uncaged. In the manly world of rock ‘n’ roll, Nicks articulated a yearning female spirituality. She put her womanliness right out there, undiluted.” (read the full article)

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst who advanced the work of Freud by reinterpreting some of the masters’ basic tenets. Lacan wrote extensively of a “mirror stage” in a child’s psychological development. Above, Philadelphia artist Rebecca Fuchs has applied Lacan’s theory to her stunning new series of photographs.

Lacan maintained that infants pass through a stage in which the external image of the body creates in the psyche a mental representation of the Self — or an I. For Lacan, this mirror stage establishes the ego as fundamentally dependent upon external objects, on an other. In Lacan’s world, without an other the I doesn’t exist.

Fuchs shows how bathrooms and locker rooms become, for many of us, places where the mirror game takes on a highly-charged, precarious connotation. She stages her photographic narratives in public restrooms and school locker rooms to highlight the acts of mimicry and performance associated with such spaces. Locales where, she writes, “the self is performed and peers are mimicked.” (read the full article)

OMYGAWD!

It’s our favorite porn dream come true! Whenever these two outrageously cute American Idols hit the stage our wicked minds race to undress them. Then we toss blond-streaked Blake and hypnotically slate-eyed Chris together and … well, wait to see what pops up.

And we thought it was a dream. And guess what! It is, apparently. Courtesy of Photoshop…

OR IS IT?

hat tip to Towleroad

Welcome to the United States of Rapture.

Can there ever be enough Jesus? Having won their War on Christmas (yes, we are happy to report, it will be held again next year) and signing up their flocks in Republican voter drives, and enlisting all those happy, shiny evangelicals as “Marriage Protectors” (not to be confused with Athletic Protectors), Christians in America are straining under their persecution.

It is a persecution that comes from living in a country where false religions are unpunished by public burnings at the stake, where science is still taken seriously, where the death prayers and earthquake fatwahs of the Reverend Pat Robinson have become — shock! — a national joke!

Because Jesus is simply not ubiquitous enough, not embedded in art, books, movies, songs and gift-shop brick-a-brac enough, Nightcharm lists some rare but recent sightings of this obscure First Century Deity — hard because in America, his hidden catacomb cult is relegated to megachurches, cable networks, and weekly councils with the President.

Here then are our favorite moments in Jesus USA.

Oops, we forgot. First a prayer from the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. Please bow your head …

Amen. And take it away, Jesus …. (read the full article)

Jesuses come and Jesuses go.

It is said each generation remakes God in its own image.

No surprise then that this Easter Sunday we have the Matthew Passion, a bold but, from all accounts, flawed Off-Broadway play that draws a parallel between Jesus, gay-bash victim Matthew Shepard, and an HIV+ gay man wracked by the guilt of having survived so long with AIDS.

In a a style reminiscent of Angels in America, the plot weaves in and out of the lives of the three men, with dream encounters between them ( the HIV man is acting a part in a play about Matthew Shepard), climaxing in a meeting of the three on the hill of the Crucifixion, above, with the two gay men cast as the thieves, one despairing of his life, the other filled with the promise of a better world to come. (read the full article)

Welcome to the Museum of Unnatural History.

This summer parents can take their kids to a slew of multimillion dollar Creationist “Museums” where the deer and the dinosaur roam as Adam and Eve bathe beneath thundering waterfalls, their male and female parts coyly obscured by leaves, spray and dogma.

A museum in name only, these mini-Disneylands are cropping up throughout the Southwest and present a hodgepodge of naive Biblical beliefs, long discredited by scientists, as well as serious scholars of religion. Here children “of all ages” (as they say at the circus) are taught that dinosaurs traveled on Noah’s ark and that the earth — like Zsa Zsa Gabor — is only 6, 000 years old,. “That would mean, ” quipped biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, “that the earth didn’t come about until after the agricultural revolution.” The “Young Earth” creationists derive their numbers from Biblical genealogies; actual estimates, based on radiometric dating, place the earth’s age closer to 4.5 billion years.

Thus we see the latest skirmish in the centuries-old battle between religion and science. Coexistence is really not possible, despite what moderates contend. This is a battle to the death, and a battle vigorously waged for the only reason that matters: the victor gets to decide ultimate reality — a ground that both sides claim exclusives rights to. Of course that particular battle has long been over — over that is except for the shouting. As the score stands, it’s Lions 10; Christians 0. (read the full article)

Christophe is an answered prayer to any of you with a yearning for dirty guys with pretty boy faces and unruly cocks. As an added bonus, find his hickey. (read the full article)

In Ancient Sparta, the only way they could separate the men from the boys was with a crowbar — and crowbars wouldn’t be invented for hundreds of years to come. So it was all fuck, fight, and fuck some more.

Above we see a recreation from the film 300 of the Ancient Spartan Come-Hither Look. Come hither and I’ll kill you — but first, Hector, we fuck! Ah Sparta. Such romantics.

And yet, ASTONISHINGLY, in 300, there was plenty of man ass running around but not a sign of men assing around in that … how shall we put it, classically Greek way. (read the full article)