Richard Grieco put his disease in me.

It’s his fault that I have a thing for Guidos. It was fate that I just happened to be entering the initial materialization of sexual identity at the very time he was sauntering into his 21 Jump Street/Booker brief glimmer of stardom.

During that era, the teen crush objects of Saved By The Bell and Beverly Hills 90210 were Clearasil-skinned Mickey Mousers; Le Grieco was the antithesis of pre-fab Wonder Bread idols — a trashy, spike-haired, downtown slut with the class of an alley cat and a porn star smirk. My Yasmine Bleeth Reflex — the design flaw that leads the well-adjusted inexplicably drawn to ruinous headboard pounders — triggered and my formative Grieco obsession has left me forever susceptible to the wiles of the Guido.

The sexual fantasies that we always turn to are the ones that make us feel the most ashamed, the ones that make us question who we really are and what we really want. It’s when we feel the most dirty that we’re the most gratified. Our polar opposites – those we would never conceivably cross paths with and who personify everything we’re not – can sometimes attract as much as they should repel.

Guidohood is at once highly-cosmetic and curiously virile. At once thought to be a look sported by working class Italians in NewYork’s outer burroughs, New Jersey, and Long Island, the trend has turned up big time in virtually every northeastern city – and as far west as Chicago – likely to have an Italian-American population.

The youthquaking Guido cult has now grown to include Irish-Italians and Greeks, with some Jewish, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern beauhunks going so far as to fake Mediterranean heritage all together in order to pull it off. Even the look has now broadened to include the sons of the taste-challenged nouveau riche (I’m talkin’ to youz, Gotti Boys) with loads of dispensable income to fuel their endless partying and whoring.

Surely Saturday Night Fever’s social-climbing disco slut Tony Manero – who by the time Staying Alive rolled around had ditched the comb-back, leisure suit, and chest hair in favor of feathered locks, glistening tan, and Centurion hard body chorus boy gig – is the Typhoid Mary for every strutting neighborhood guy from the Jersey Shore hoping to slide his way on to Easy Street. Guidohood is all about flash and excess; the males of the breed are self-styled peacocks and their look is so sexless by virtue of its polyglot mutt pedigree.

Cribbed in equal parts from Chelsea Boy muscle mary style, redneck rock wear, Eurotrash club gear, Rap’s gaudy man-drag, war-like Chola maquillage, and the hyper-aggressive Douchebag aesthetic that’s currently all over the place, Guidism ends up seeming weirdly at odds with itself. On one level the plastic, trashy and downright girlie elements should have a gelding result – often times the mens’ faces are virtually indistinguishable from their girlfriends’ – yet the machismo is so overheated and the affects so excessively butch that an impossible equilibrium is achieved.

The ancient Greeks deemed unisex Hermaphroditus as the divine progeny of the gods Hermes and Aphrodite; if Guidas have hard-as-nails countenances and competing hair colors that let them pass for man-rending Maenads, then their glossed-up-yet-rock-hard boyfriends in wife-beaters and sports bands are androgynous gods in their own minds. Their religion: body worship performed on their own gym-built physiques.

The pinnacle of Guido Evolution is the Muscle Guido, the type I’m forever in peril of becoming a tongue-wagging slut for. Every ethnic stereotype has a true-life basis, and these gym rats are so cartoonishly overdeveloped and goombafied that you’d swear they swaggered out of Heavy Traffic. While there’s perhaps a modicum of leeway in terms of personal interpretation, there are prerequisite characteristics that must be attained to keep up with the pack.

You must sport some form of ostentatious head gear, be it a visor, fedora, designer baseball cap (always cocked to the side) or mandana. Hairstyle-wise, it’s gotta come down to either a circa-1995 Caesar cut, a faux-hawk, or most ubiquitously, the Blow Out (aka the Brooklyn Fade), itself a highly-elaborate form of human plumage free of sideburns and elongated quill-like with generous dollops of Paul Mitchell. Tattoos in the form of Chinese characters, barb wire armbands, and suns radiating between the upper delts have become forms of ritualized rites of manhood.

You must frequent freestyle-oriented clubs with names like Blend, Obsessions, Excess, Traxx, and Pleasure Dome that sound like they could only exist in mid-’90s nighttime soaps. Therein, you perform the Guido Fist Pump, a vaguely bellicose dance in which you half-prance, half-skip while brandishing pistoning clenched fists. Every clothing item you wear must be body-hugging and muscle-accentuating, most likely FUBU, Diesel, or Armani Exchange bought off-the-rack at Macy’s. Drape yourself in diamond jewelry and gold watches to complete the gigolo pretense.

Eyebrows must be expertly waxed, and though facial hair is optional, intricately-trimmed chin-strap goatees are de rigeur. Some form of cosmetics like eyeliner, mascara, or lip gloss is essential so that the desired effect of the tarty Guido Pout — cocking back your head and engorging your lips when photographed — really hits home. A massively-pumped physique comes courtesy of steroids and HGH, to be flaunted at any and every opportunity.

It’s tanning that’s universal for terracotta-fleshed Guidos. Fairness of complexion was prized until the early ’20s when Coco Chanel glamorized the tan, and though whiteness is so often coded as ethnically representing “true-blooded Americans,” the nation is still oddly consumed with darkening of the skin when it comes to the pursuit beauty. The wealthy and privileged Victorians prided their lily-whiteness as indicative of having the luxury of abstaining from outdoor labor. Today, the tan has perversely become the symbol of having enough disposable time and income to bronze yourself silly by expensive synthetic means. Guidodom is about nothing if not extravagance obscenely wallowed in for the purpose of one-upping the nearest other developmentally-stunted mini-hulk.

Disappointingly, gay porn — becoming more segmented through the years to appeal to somewhat off-the-beaten-track yens — hasn’t jumped on the trend and produced titles full of Jersey boys whose intense narcissism, arrested adolescent sex drives, and glorification of superficial money culture would make them prime pickings for on-camera sluttony. I want to see titles like Str8 Outta Hoboken, Spiked In Bensonhurst, and Custom Rims hit the market. Only 1993’s Brooklyn-lensed Hey Tony! What’s The Story? comes to mind as subverting West Hollywood conventions.

In the early ’90s, there were token second stringers like thick-skulled Nick Romano, exotic Gianfranco, and quiff-wearing Nick Harmon who approximated a certain Guidoness but never ascended to top-tier stardom. Slick-as-greased-lightning Marco Rossi’s career peak came in Total Corruption when he uttered the immortal line “Man, I don’t get fucked, but I need to feel your dick in my ass crack,” the ideal metaphor for Guidos’ concurrent antipathy for and prick-teasing of gays. A few years back towering Billy Herrington could’ve been mistaken for the fifth and best-looking member of the Massapequa-bred Baldwin clan. Long Island-born behemoth Erik Rhodes currently knuckle-drags with the gay modification of Guido/Douche hybridization.

In the end, I’m haunted by the knowledge that outside of New York City’s ironic velvet-roped environs there’s magical kingdom called New Jersey with pocketed fiefdoms that are just like porn sets everyone seems to be traipsing to or from. There, buffed-up, functionally retarded himbos who look like date rapists cavort in droves. Whither the Joey Juicehead or Pauly Porche in the herd that I may pick off like a lion strips a gazelle? My life can never be complete until I can cajole, extort, or coerce a hapless Guido into some sordid, degrading encounter that leaves him confused and violated while I experience the intense satisfaction of having a ring of passion fruit nectar lip gloss around my dick and the scent of his Axe Body Spray all over me.