I’m largely ambivalent about the holidays this year.

The forced sentimentality, the self-martyring Christian hand-wringing, human beings trampling each other like lemmings for home theaters, the syrupy TV movies starring Tiffani-Amber Thiessen and Rob Lowe — combined it’s all enough to make any Atheist with deep-seated misanthropic tendencies and nothing to lose want to cut a bitch.

Only one thing can warm the cockles of this heart of ice: the niche that is amateur Xmas porn.

The cornucopia MerryXXXmas has taught me to love again in a way that visiting Christmas spirits or being inappropriately touched by an angel ever could. There’s enough here to supply me with thousands of Lurid Digs entries, and some are so magical that I want to encase them in a shakeable snow globe for posterity.

How can I even choose a fave? The Ben Cohen-ish guy with Charlie the Jack-In-The-Box from the Island of Misfit Toys posed at groin-level? The naked guy laying by the Christmas tree who’s either been ruffied or nodded off waiting for Santa? The two hot geeks seated naked on a pile of comics with a Tolkien poster and snuggly Transformers blankies as backdrops? It all makes me want to deck the halls hard and nasty.

One caveat though: however will the elves find a box big enough for the gigantic muscle bear in red briefs with a Santa buckle? And what the hell am I going to feed him?

No, not a porn site for Christ’s sake.

Would the creators of such tawdry pit-stops as Lurid Digs and Trainwrecks honor something as unnoteworthy as porn?

No, this year we cast our eye far beyond the cock (and ass) and decided to esteem a site that helps each of us remember why we celebrate being homosexual. Sites that remind us that being an Outsider is a good thing, especially if ostracism equates with having escaped the soul-killing clutches of “The American Family.”

Which leads me to this year’s award winner: The fabulous aggregate site Awkward Family Photos.

Aside from the whimsical (and hot) candid gems, like the opening wedding album shot pictured above, Awkward Family Photos reminds us of how truly horrid childhood can be. How uncaring and narcissistic parents often are. Remember Shawn Baker‘s surreal deconstruction of this shot, last month? (read the full article)

Why do you Liberal Dems hate Christmas, families, and Charlie Brown?

Yes, every year the crusade to put the Christ back in Christmas commences, and even though none of us actively signed up for duty or even give a fuck, apparently we’re on the front lines of the battle any way.

It’s a veritable Nutcracker Suite of self-branded, self-styled victimhood for the God Wads this year: The American Family Association and other nuisance groups have issued sundry fatwas against the Gap, Best Buy, and Bed, Bath, & Beyond for being corporately-operated witch covens; Glenn Beck‘s tear-jerking (or jerk-tearing) The Christmas Sweater simulcast has reportedly been tanking in regions where jaded urbanites reject Jesus by loving quality entertainment; and the House of Representatives heard the angels calling and felt compelled to vote on a resolution to federally validate Christmas in a nation full of secularists — wearing our slutty Santa costumes — bent on decrucifying our zombie Savior. (read the full article)

One of my college sociology professors argued that gay men significantly expanded the sexual options for straight people. Not in the way you might be thinking; he wasn’t talking about straight guys going trade in bathroom stalls in urban areas. In this case he was talking about the world of socially-accepted ideas about sex.

Basically, he argued, gay men pioneered oral and anal sex. With the rise of mainstream awareness of gay lives in the 1970s came the popularization of necessary improvisations for penetrative intercourse, which in turn gave straight people ideas for having fun without getting pregnant.

It is poignant to the case that gay people started coming out in the public realm at the tail end of the sexual revolution, almost exactly when non-vaginal sex among heterosexuals became something safe to talk about publicly. Today, straight porn has it, straight teenagers talk about it, network sitcoms make jokes about it and before you know it straight President Clinton gets the most famous blow job in human history. (read the full article)

Hat tip to Dwightsupremcacy.com

Abstinence.

The term sounds so hollow and dated now, like Reaganomics or Compassionate Conservatism.

We watched the doctrine implode in teenage pregnancy for the daughter of a Vice Presidential candidate and would-be Morality Matriarch, then cringed as two young people were again shoved into ill-fitting formal wear and untimely adult roles for a series of awkward photo-ops met with disingenuous applause and self-serving pats on the back.

If you’re one of those godless Liberal types with a perspective on young adult sexuality that rises above the mentality of an eleven-year-old boy, then you have Scarleteen and its doyenne Heather Corinna for offering up a progressive and pragmatic alternative to purity rings, Levitical backwardness, and the politics of virginity.

Tackling every verboeten subject — from masturbation and birth control to sexual abuse and the dreaded Gay — Corinna’s honest and frank magnum opus survives on a combination of donations and independent chutzpah in the wake of over a decade of futile government faith-based abstinence-only grants at the marginalized expense of inclusive programs that offer practical answers.

Traditional thinking cast the Scarlet Woman as a wayward tart, a vulgar hoyden, a bawdy harlot made worldly by her sin of sexual knowledge; credit the brains behind the scenes at Scarleteen for undercutting that hackneyed definition with equal doses of wit, nuance and a lively streak of forward-thinking aplomb in a time when such real virtues are in short supply.

If you’ve a keen eye, you caught the word “donation” above. And that’s how Corinna’s site continues to thrive — by donation. Right now Heather is orchestrating a major drive to keep Scarleteen afloat. Please visit the following page for more details and then find it in your heart (and wallet) to help sustain this high-octane outflow of knowledge and information.

During the next two days Heather has a generous donor in place who will match all donations that she receives this weekend. So reach down brothers! After all, it’s that time of the year. Let your heart be full (and light). The misinformed of the world need you. And Scarleteen.

Everything was bigger in the ’80s.

The greed. The hair. The shoulder pads. The himbos.

The Me Decade was all about proving you had enough cash to provide you with leisure time, and the fads it introduced are aptly era-specific to a tone set by the excesses of A.L.F., Xanadu, and American Psycho. Dad frequented the sports bar, Mom had her aerobics classes, and the kids played Laser Tag at the video arcade.

Even the strip club became a legitimate business venture in Reagan America. Gone were the days of low-rent joints with seedy-looking women doing the Pony while having the DTs and just-out-of-the-joint ex-con rough trade shimmying to sleazy disco tracks; the men had their upscale gentlemen’s clubs where doctors, brokers, and lawyers could take in the buffet as they scoped out single mothers, dental hygiene students, and touring porn stars on the pole. (read the full article)