Is it only gay men who understand the concept of So Bad It’s Good?

Take the Literary Review, a small, upper-class British journal that gives out what it calls “the most dreaded award in literature” — the Bad Sex in Fiction prize.

Each year the current crop of first-rate novels are scanned, offending passages that make the short list are published in the magazine, and then at a ceremony, the winner is announced.

A celebrity hands out the award — Mick Jagger, Sting and the particularly appropriate Courtney Love have all taken turns at the podium — and, in keeping with the spirit of the thing, the trophy is a kitschy objet d’art that in its vague, abstract way resembles a couple, as they say, “in congress.” They being the Literary Lions of Great Britain’s Critical Establishment — or at least the ones plying their trade at the Literary Review.

Everyone has a good laugh at the expense of the author, who, of course, being a swell guy or gal, shows up (only Tom Wolfe refused). The designated victim gives an archly witty speech to show he is not as bad as all that and then chuckles along with the backstabbing quips like an amiable but, alas, drooling hunchback of Notre Dame being carried through the streets as the King of the Idiots. Sharp elbows are everywhere in evidence as hilarity cascades through the peanut gallery.

All in fun then — except, oddly, not to the Literary Review. Behind the cozy smugness of the ceremony, the journal seems quite taken with its role as fiction censor. One suspects that scores are being settled. The stated reason for giving the prize — “To draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.” — has about it the sound of Orwell’s “boot stamping down on a human face forever,” his master metaphor in 1984. (more…)

The poetic French euphemism for it may be more apt than you ever realized.

La Petite Mort, The Little Death.

Sex and death have always been inextricably linked paradoxes, active and brilliant Yang to passive and morose Yin.

Every mythology has played off that dichotomy. Think Lakshmi and Kali, Cain and Abel or Alec and Stephen Baldwin.

The Greeks gods reveled in lust and slaughter with favored or unlucky mortals.

Shakespeare’s works are replete with desire and death.

Era-straddling androgynyne Myra Breckinridge famously averred that every red-blooded American male had, lurking within him, a strangler ready to snap a neck during climax.

And really, what would cock-blocking buzzkill, Friday the 13th’s Jason Vorhees be without an endless supply of nubile, bimbotic summer camp counselors to hack up? Just another Carrie Nation. (more…)

And then there’s Maude,
And then there’s Maude.

Dark Meat, Light Meat, and Who Forgot the Cranberry Sauce — such are the challenges of Thanksgiving.

But none of these seasonal questions so roil our beloved Nightcharmers as Cut or Uncut — a topic that comes up here way more often than Turkey Day.

Every time we run a succulent peek-a-boo schlong like the lip-smacker above (on Sexgaymes model Marcos Pirelli) we race for higher ground, bracing ourselves for the killer wave, the Christmas tsunami of comments that floods in from a dependable army of pro- and anti- circumcision partisans.

The vitriol that flows, the science that’s quoted, the experts that are debunked all mix into a slugfest not seen since the religious wars of the 16th Century. (See the holy hell that breaks out here, here and here.) We’re telling you, between reading those comments and watching Jeopardy every night, a person could get a college education. (more…)

Question for Duncan Hunter: So you think only conservatives become soldiers and that those soldiers are too mentally fragile to have their prejudices challenged. What next, racially segregated units? Thanks a Lot, Fuckhead.

Question for Huckleberry Hound: What a surprise from the Darwin-denier! So you think gay men and women are constitutionally incapable of professional conduct. This from a former preacher who never served in the military talking down to a Brigadier General who had — for 43 years. Thanks a Lot, Fuckhead.

Question to Mitt Romney: Another profile in courage from the Robo-Spokesmodel. Could you be any vaguer? Thanks a Lot, Fuckhead.

Question to John McCain: For whom is this policy working, by the way? Not the Right (who balk at the “Don’t ask” part) and not the Left (who deride the enforced hypocrisy of the “Don’t tell” part). But, more than that, for making your answer entirely an advertisement for your access to 4-star generals: Thanks a Lot, Fuckhead.

BONUS ROUND: And a second, very special Thanks a Lot, Fuckhead to Duncan Hunter for working in something about Judeo-Christian values. In case anyone got the idea that the U.S was a modern, secular nation and not a Baptist theocracy.

Porn names — the kind that make you groan from the klutzy pun grinning toothily from the middle of them — don’t get any more cringe-worthy than “Harry Bush.”

Except Harry Bush was Harry Bush’s real name.

And that’s just the first of many surprises to be found in a new, sumptuously illustrated coffee-table book Harry Bush: Hard Boys, a collection of 230 pencil sketches, featuring a candid memoir by Robert Mainardi, the artist’s friend and major collector.

The reclusive Harry with the all too pubic name led a most improbable, counter-intuitive life.

Far from being a dabbler who was moonlighting from a career in advertisement or magazine illustration — the natural habitats you would think for such a polished draftsman — Harry Bush was, for many years, a deeply closeted Pentagon employee, who took up illustration only late in life, after a brief drawing course in a community college.

Right from the start, in the mid 1960’s, when he sold his first illustrations to the covertly homo Physique Pictorial — a notorious cavalcade of “health cultists” and “male nudists” in gaily striped posing pouches — all the hallmarks of the Harry Bush style were in place: The easy flow of his line; the concentration on blocky buns and heavy dicks; the All American faces that had about them a national lyricism as authentic as Norman Rockwell’s.

Harry Bush was, as Hard Boys points out, a mass of contradictions. He worked under his own name yet lived in fear of losing his Air Force pension as some sort of retribution for being a pornographer. He cut himself off from his family before they could cut themselves off from him. Inculcated with the occupational homophobia of the military, he was revulsed by the world he had entered — the noir side of Hollywood with its hustlers, Johns and fly-by-night models — yet continued to draw that world as a joyous homosexual playground.

Here was a man who brought a lighthearted humor to his celebrations of hard-bodied surfers and manboy teenagers — porn with a wink — yet was relentlessly cantankerous in private, bitterly grousing about the gay scene, never failing in his many handwritten letters to wrap the words gay community in mocking quote marks.
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What maketh a gay cult classic?

The formula’s as combustible as a redneck meth lab: overheated stylishness, a cutting sense of parody, campy sexiness, endlessly quotable dialog, a genuine love for the grotesque and the likelihood that all of the above will be either unfairly misunderstood or unjustly maligned in their own time by the mainstream.

This is what separates the bad in terms of being unruly and naughty from the merely disastrous, the Trash Classics from the Box Office Bombs.

It’s a given that there’s a multiplex in Hell playing a triple feature of Gigli, Glitter and From Justin To Kelly ad infinitum; they are true Children of The Gorgon, too hideous and wretched for even their own makers to defend.

Yet somewhere in that hazy limbo between the Oscars and the Razzies dwell the immortals called Myra Breckinridge, Can’t Stop The Music and Mommie Dearest, ghettoized by the many but beloved by the few.

Rarely can the rigid and straight-leaning Science Fiction genre be said to give rise to a veritable gay free-for-all, but if the rules have ever been broken, then 1980’s lavishly out-of-this-world Flash Gordon is guilty of being a kitsch pleasure.

With flamboyant Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, camp scribe Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and a galaxy of slumming international talent at this rocket’s helm, you know it’s time to strap yourself in and gird your loins for zero gravity.

You don’t have to be gay to love Flash Gordon, but it helps. (more…)

It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely candidate for an elite French film journal than the new release Lumberjack Gang Bang — a frank exploration of the cum-flying, ass-plowing, and mouth-jamming that can be expected when lumberjacks are stranded in the wood, due to a bridge collapse, and can’t get their weekend quota of — as the screenplay drolly puts it — “pussy banging.”

Even the tagline for the film is simple and direct, warranting, so it would seem, no further analysis: In the forest only lumberjacks can hear you beg for more!

Thus we were electrified when we picked up the December issue of Cahiers du Cahiers, which specializes in close readings of American film and bills itself as “a meta-journal” — the name means “Notes on Notes” and is one step up in mental abstraction from the now aged, dawdling Cahiers du Cinéma.

“A wartime masterpiece,” raved cinéaste Jean-Baptiste Bresson, “in which the subtext is Iraq and the American soul.” The massive essay begins, as is the style of the journal, with a long, meditative anecdote on how Bresson had intended to write about Ken Burns’ The War, a 19-hour documentary on World War II that he had just seen at the Cannes Film Festival. (more…)