Christmas is almost here, with its perennial promise of expanding our wardrobes, often with gifts so unnecessary and trendy we’d feel too guilty to buy them for ourselves. Magazine ads are all about retail, where waxy models put away the swim trunks and don the most up-to-date name brand clothing.

That’s good news for the oglers, because there’s something about a well-dressed man that never disappoints, even as we grow so accustomed to exposed 6-packs that they get boring.

Fashion is something I forgot through college, where everyone conspicuously dresses like shit. But in high school, attire was a person’s primary identity statement, and conversations about attraction used to go like this: (read the full article)

Gentlemen, your body is a follicular battlefield.

The male identity conundrum of the moment is body waxing. When to do it? How much is too much? Should we even be bothering at all? Is the aesthetic pressure placed for centuries upon the female form striking back at us like a livid rattlesnake clutched by the tail?

The full-throttle nether region wax — dubbed “the Boyzilian” in beauty industry vernacular — is not unlike the Gaza Strip: sacred ground for those male specimens stridently opposed to intimate grooming and an area destined for occupation by those keen on altering the lay of the land. The struggle for manly self-definition may at last be reaching a tipping point; more men are apparently opting for yea rather than nay.

David Beckham — he of the blissfully unthinking visage and Neoclassical physique — and his recent underwear-clad Armani fashion spread have only made the trend that much more discernible. The footballer’s silky bikini line has accrued as much scrutiny as his cod piece-worthy groin. With the heartthrob-of-the-moment and other depilitated notables caught in the flash bulb going flush below their equators, salons are reporting an influx of men from all walks of life following suit. Not just your uptown Patrick Batemanesque power brokers either. Construction workers and other hands-on types are reported to be the most surprising converts. (read the full article)

The time has come to reform your wardrobe for all those possible upcoming romantic interludes that the Autumn affords. That hoodie isn’t going to cut it this time. You’re a year older, for starters, and it has become slightly greasy — much like an ailing cat. Thankfully, resident celebrity psychic, Miranda Celeste-Walters has agreed to chart the course for your Fall fashion future, and beyond!

• The first thing I’m seeing on a lot of men this fall is an over-sized, mid-length short with an insulated lining and “folk” details reminiscent of lederhosen. But this is not a traditional item. This is going to appear for the first time, possibly in a Kanye West promotional spot called “Candy Love,” and it’s going to spread out of control.

• Your socks are going to be completely modernized this Fall. People are going to get serious about waterproof, and there’s going to be a move toward the statement sock. (read the full article)

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. (read the full article)

Well, it used to be a jockstrap.

But, of course, the jock couldn’t work miracles all by its lonely. It needed a nice heavy sack to make the ribbing expand — one’s own “meat and potatoes” as our dear, departed Anna Nicole once said in a rare lapse of taste.

Second best friend would be one of those Styrofoam cheaters that “shape and lift,” the Wonderbra of jockstraps.

Third in line — and the real subject of this entry — is a new invention, the Nuttybuddy.

The Nutty what?

It’s the stronger, tougher jock cup to protect — ah yes — “your boys.” Invented by ex-pitcher Mark Littell, the Nuttybuddy is twice the price ($20) of the usual athletic cup.

But Littell, 54, claims that nine seasons with the Kansas City Royals and St. Louis Cardinals gave him an inside track on both fast balls and ball fastenings.

To make his point, he gamely puts his own jewel box in danger in a — surely unintentionally hot — but hilarious, dick-centric clip that is burning up the bandwidth on YouTube today.

Let’s go the videotape, shall we sports fans? (read the full article)

Half-naked men!

It’s hard to top full-frontal nudity. But some half-dressed men — like the one at left — manage to do it with the sheer menace of their stare… the size of their arms! … the rip of their abs!

Why is it that certain stages of undress appear more naked than outright nudity?

The answer, I think, lies in the eye of the beholder.

Certainly we gay men look at half-naked men more aggressively than women do. The difference has little to do with homosexuality, a lot to do with the male sexual gaze.

“Men look at women,” gender scholar John Berger famously observed. “Women watch themselves being looked at.”

It’s a crucial difference. I think it is this eye-hunger, the frank aggressiveness of the male gaze, that explains why the half-nude seems more maddening to us than the Full Monty.

There is also the fetish power of clothing. Fetishes, for the most part, are about clothes — particularly those sexually charged costumes in which the body appears to be both naked and not naked at the same time: (read the full article)

Like we needed a new excuse to run even more photos of guys in underwear!

Still, thank you New York Times.

Last week the paper that boasts of being the national arbiter of “all the news that’s fit to print” discovered what has been fit — for two decades now — for gay guys to wear under their pants.

That is, when we deign to wear anything at all.

Our dear Gray Lady, flagship of America’s elite opinion-making newspapers, is now fainting with the news:

Men’s underwear has gone flamboyant.

Men’s underwear has gone positively sexy in the most glorious bun-huggy, dick-pushy way.

In a report on colored, patterned, basket-centric briefs, amusingly entitled But What if You Get Hit by a Taxi?, the New York Times made it official for the slow class, that is, the Metrosexuals. (read the full article)

It lifts!
It cups!
It molds!

Yes, as the wise old strippers of Gypsy told the young Natalie Wood, you can pull all the stops out till they call the cops out, grind your behind till you’re dead. But you gotta get a gimmick, girl, if you wanna get ahead.

And who doesn’t need a gimmick today! A little extra, a little boost in these competitive, out-sourcing times?

The gals used to call them falsies — bra padding and flying- buttress wiring to augment their pretty little cupcakes — but we guys … well, the best we guys had was the Sling from International Male …

Ah the Sling! How it brings back those sweet, soft afternoons when we were hardened rent-boys on Santa Monica Boulevard, driving equally hard bargains as we “hitchhiked” under the beating L.A. sun, all bulges and pecs and short-shorts — courtesy of El Sling-o!

But that was yesterday! The old Sling would look positively quaint and flimsy against the latest in not-so-little white lies, the new and improved WONDERJOCK from Aussiebum. (read the full article)

Our favorite fathers of mindfuck, the Italian designers Dolce and Gabbana, are busy seducing farmboys again. This time they have cast their dusky, decadent magic over Canadian mega-model Andrew Stetson.

Stetson is the languid sleeping beauty in Calvin Klein‘s new Euphoria cologne campaign (right). A blond, blue-eyed 28-year-old from Ontario who has but a simple dream: to earn enough money as a supermodel to one day purchase a hunk of land and use his carpentering skills to build his own home. Kind of brings a tear to your eye.

But that was before his recent tangle with the wild boys of Milan, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana. After his recent appearance in D&G’s summer menswear show, we are forced to ask (cue The Shangri-Las:) Can Andrew ever go home again?

The top photo documents an array of menacing mutations — signs that Andrew’s time in Milan has transformed his healthy outdoor tan into D&G’s trademark nightlife wan. A skin hue not unlike the blanched airbrush effect of a Pierre & Gilles photograph. (read the full article)

Nobody can screw up a room like a gay man on a mission.

All the mythology about the deft taste of gay men may be great to keep the rubes shelling out the big bucks to home decorators with fire in their eyes — but buyer beware. Lemmings are committed to a vision too.

One thing that gay men have in abundance is taste. Not necessarily good taste. Just tons and tons of vivid taste.

And this aesthetic imperative, this relentless ordering of the world into “pretty” (or “trendy” or “ugly beautiful”) boxes, smacks up against another gay imperative. The swinish male onrush to have sex everywhere and with everyone. (read the full article)