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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Outing. It’s not just for politicians, celebrities, pro athletes, and your dad anymore. You don’t even have to be three dimensional to have people wondering which way you swing.

Cartoon characters are facing the same laser intensity of gaydar as anyone else in the public eye.

What was the deal with Snagglepuss? Did little Jonny Quest have two daddies? Were Vanity and Hefty the gayest of the already queer manly commune known as the Smurfs?

And didn’t The Peanuts‘ Peppermint Patty and Marcie seem different than the frillier girl members of the Charlie Brown posse? On some level we’ve always suspected that the tastes of Scooby-Doo ‘s Velma Dinkley leaned more toward Josie & The Pussycats than Thundarr The Barbarian.

Few characters elicit the amount of near-unanimous speculation as the Reagan Era phenom He-Man does. For grade schoolers in the 80s more taken with Dick than Jane, He-Man & The Masters of The Universe was weekly catnip. Years later we’re sure the series meant to present us with a robust action hero who could teach us valuable life lessons. What we really appreciate it for are the curvaceous bodies- rotoscoped over actual bodybuilder models- swaggering toward the camera, the brazen flexing, rippling limbs grappling in combat, and shots being framed from the back between clenched asses and gigantic thighs. (read the full article)

“The stage is a truck stop by a Highway of Hopes.”

So begins HvH’s new anthology of homo-hot tales, set somewhere to the left of the Twilight Zone. “Michael is waiting, his eyes fixed on the poorly lit restroom door…”

And what Micheal will find in that restroom and through its gloryhole is a strange sort of … perfect love. (read the full article)

 
Here’s a little white porcelain planter that seems to be a design collision between Marcel Duchamp and John Waters.

Drawing inspiration from the bonsai, these Park Planters by Science & Sons bring the furtive and feral side of the city park right into your living room. But safely and daintily. (read the full article)

Don’t kiss the world goodbye!

Unleash all the furies of hell on the fucker!

Like Sophie did.

Sophie?

Yes, Sophie Calle, the French artist who has brought grudge-fucking to a high art and become the hit of this year’s Venice Biennale — sort of a Cannes Film Festival for the art world and one of the most competitive venues in Europe for the bright and the new.

When Ms. Calle’s boyfriend emailed her a “Dear Jane” letter, she replied by setting 107 raving women on his ass — Furies, indeed — installing the entire “work” in a pavilion at the Biennale.

Reports the Washington Post‘s sharp-eyed and shaper-tongued Blake Gopnik: (read the full article)

“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)

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)

The humongo cocks, the flying gizzum, the pink depths of ever expanding a-holes – no, the kink never flags in the comic books of Patrick Fillion. Particularly in his call-boy series Satisfaction Guaranteed, which, we are sad to report, comes to an end in this final issue.

“Satisfaction Guaranteed was always our most popular franchise,” says Fillion, who has created a dozen continuing comic titles for his Class Comics enterprise, many of them featuring the sci-fi adventures of heroes with outrageous, over-the-moon size humdingers. (read the full article)

We’ll be the first to admit it. Bringing our queer eye to the art museum is somewhat redundant.

The great works so clearly speak for themselves, and often in accents we recognize as native to our own little corner of the universe.

Digital artist Harald Seiwert decided to take this idea over the top and do explicitly homosexual versions of great masterpieces, calling his new series Inspired by …

Using a combination of Photoshop and photo shoot, he enhanced already homoerotic works like Caravaggio‘s nubile boy cupid in Amor Victorious, at left (click here to see the Caravaggio original), by switching in a live model.

But why limit himself to the handful of often marginally attractive men — mostly burghers, popes and patrons — in great art? The vast majority of masterpieces envisioned beauty in an exclusively female form. He needed to throw in a few transgendered curves to widen his scope, often to pranksterish effect. (read the full article)

It’s called Rainbow Country.

That’s the new title from Patrick Fillion’s line of Class Comics, which usually feature the far-out sexcapades of oversize superheros in distant galaxies.

Rainbow Country is set in the real world — as long as the real world is located somewhere off the French Riviera — and features everyday guys like you and me…

… as long as me and thee have mega pecs, industrial-strength abs, expanding orifices and the sort of flexibility that would bring a gold-medal gymnast to tears — if not his knees.

Dicks the size of salamis, of course, cockheads the size of a baby’s fist — all that comes standard in a Class Comic, and we mention them only in passing, for documentary purposes.

Welcome to Sodom by the Sea: Rainbow Country is a dazzlingly buff gay mecca — all male, all the time — where everyone lives in luxury condos that tower over a glittering aquamarine sea. (read the full article)