You couldn’t buy better advocates than these.

The irrational, religion-based opposition to — really, gay civil rights, though the role of Civil Rights will be played today by Same-Sex Marriage — recently brought out a collection of hilarious nutjobs in opposition to a bill in Connecticut that would legalize gay marriage.

But to no effect — except for the low humor always on offer when sideshow buffoons do pratfalls. (As you will see in the double feature below the jump.)

In the end, the Judiciary Committee passed the bill, 27 to 15; the governor vowed to veto it, and the armies are even now gathering on either side for a voter-driven referendum fight. The foes want to rescind the progressive civil union legislation that Connecticut has already extended to gay couples. (read the full article)

Today’s Fratman, Craig, is a little shy at first. It might come off as being aloof, but all you’ve got to do is talk to him, and he opens the floodgate. Suddenly he won’t shut up! It’s that same energy he taps into when he shoots his load. It’s a sloppy, spurting geyser!

We’re not sure if he’s gay, but he probably wouldn’t mind the company of a friend.

(MEMBERS / non-MEMBERS take a free tour)

“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)

Image, communications experts tell us, is all about what you look like and sound like, but has very little to do with what you are actually saying.

And the power of one’s image is the theme running through two recent columns from our favorite gal reporter, the Pulitzer Prize winning fashion writer Robin Givhan.

Givhan’s special gift is her ability to read the pop-cultural information in the way hair is combed or a suit is worn. Her columns, nominally about clothing, are more likely to be about the cultural impact of a pop celebrity or politician — she has written about Condi Rice (”Rice’s coat and boots speak of sex and power … a volatile combination … that in political circles rarely leads to anything but scandal”) as well as Dick Cheney (”The vice president was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.”)

Thus it was with relish that we read her column today which connected the powerful visual jujitsu of the Rutgers basketball girls with the Duke Lacrosse boys. Both teams were coming back from a barrage of racial slurs and both were the prime players in near simultaneous press conferences: (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