I guess we’re supposed to laugh at a painting like this.

There was a thin line in the 19th century between art and pornography, and the best way to get lots of sweetly-scented pink flesh into a painting was to set it safely in the past.

Homoerotic art of the time was usually signaled by a resort to ancient Greece and Rome.

The British academics — that is artists that painted in a style certified by rigorous art academies — were particularly good at this homoerotic slight of hand.

Here Lord Frederick Leighton — an artist all but forgotten but once so celebrated he was elevated to a peerage — shows us Icarus being fitted out with wings for his famous flight of hubris, an ascent too close to the sun that would end in a fiery, topsy-turvy plunge into the sea.

Forget that the story has particular relevance to the bloody war-torn, page-strewn headlines of this week. We offer this as an antidote to all that. Public servants that we are, Nightcharm brings you your prettiness break. (more…)

Which American painting, do you think, is the most famous? Not the best. Simply the best known.

This was the question buzzing around Datalounge — our favorite all-gay message forum. The candidates put forth included Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, even — a real blast from the past — Whistler’s Mother (more properly known as Arrangement in Grey and Black), a sentimental favorite of the sanctimonious Fifties.

We, however, have to cast our lot with Andy Warhol’s Marilyn – there are hundreds of them, some in large squares that dwarf the viewer, others — the more troubling and profound “assembly line” versions — in slyly ugly diptychs of 50 Marilyn’s back-to-back.

Just on the face of it — if most famous can be measured by most reproduced — our contention is supported by the rough measure of Google’s image search:

Both Nighthawks and American Gothic rate 20 pages each. Warhol’s Marilyn comes in at 28. (Whistler’s Mother doesn’t even signify, poor dear — on life support with a feeble 8 pages worth of acclaim.)

We would also argue, however, that Warhol’s silkscreen is more than a lucky child of Fortune; it is, in fact, a great painting. We wonder if it might not one day rank as the most famous painting of all, edging out the longtime heavyweight, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

In many ways, Warhol’s Marilyn is the hardboiled 20th Century answer to the Mona Lisa.
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We know there are fanatics out there.

Guys who go off their nut, out of their skulls, totally bonkers for foreskin.

Guys who feel terribly deprived — more than that, outraged! — at finding themselves circumcised by some cruel play of fate and modern science, who try one sad scheme after another to grow back that silly little millimeter extra.

And yes, we plead guilty to catering to this obsession. In the lovely literature we publish in the back of the Inner Circle — those fiction tales designed to enlighten, teach and be read with one hand — nary a circumcised cock ever lifts its bare head in anything like triumph.

So it’s time we spent a few moments in heavy thought on — what else? — cock. The uncut kind. (more…)

Supersize me, baby.

Everything in Patrick Fillion’s comic-book wonderland is bigger than life and four times as natural.

In his latest Class Comic, entitled, with charming directness, The Incredibly Hung Naked Justice (that’s our boy at left) — we follow the sexploits of a superhero who is forever bursting out of his clothes to don thigh-high boots and spandex opera gloves.

He wears nothing else — but, then this guy’s nothing is anybody else’s pornucopia of riches: headlight pecs with big, chewy nips and a humdinger of a mantool that rates its own zip code.

It’s no surprise then that when he does battle with super villains, it all turns into an interspecies fuckfest.

Everybody gets it on with everything — and we do mean every thing: No creature is too alien for Fillion’s imagination to deck out in multiple dicks and puckered a-holes. (more…)

Gay men, especially artistic ones, like to fancy themselves as outsiders. But the real social pariahs — the unhospitalized schizophrenics, death-row inmates and self-taught visionaries that are featured in a new gallery show of Outsider Art in London — make most of us look as routine as mailmen.

At the center of the current Whitechapel Gallery show is little-girl artist Henry Darger, whose work you see here.

A janitor who attended Catholic Mass three times a day but otherwise had no human contact, Darger lived in a one-room apartment in Chicago. After he died, in 1973, his landlords discovered that for decades he’d been illustrating a fantastical epic about a war between a group of little girls (the Vivian Girls) and a fascist dictatorship (the Glandelinians). The manuscript was over 15,000 pages, some of it drawn on butcher’s wrapping paper. (more…)

“My models are sort of the strongmen of my dreams,” Michael Alago told us when we first ran a piece on his hot-daddy photobook rough gods.

Now he tells us he’s working on a new book, due out next summer, called road trips. And guess what? — it will feature even more of those big, nasty, tattooed Daddies that made our heart go pitter-pat the first time around.

“Most of the men I shoot are in their 30’s and 40’s,” Michael confides, adding “I love this age group, especially when a mature man has a big hulky body and a daddy-like quality. These men exude sex. They have lived their lives and it shows in the way they carry themselves.”

Ah yes, big-titted pecs and a dirty look — always pure heaven!

And can we make a confession of our own? We can never look at Michael’s men without feeling like a character in Gaywyck, that dizzy homo retelling of Jane Eyre where the prose runs the deepest purple. (more…)

Who’da thunk it? Who knew Wonder Woman had such a stud in the family?

Certainly not Wonder Woman, brought up by Amazons, no boys allowed.

And certainly not DC Comics, originator of the most durable female Superhero since … well, since Katy Keene. Okay, Katy Keene was a fashion model but she was always a Supergal in our book — and nobody wore a paper-doll bathing suit in quite the same curvy way.

Wonder Man, at left, is — let us say — something of a long lost brother (how very DC comics!)

Actually the man with the gold lasso is illustrator Glen Hanson’s fantasy homage to the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman TV show he grew up on.

“From the age of 10, I was totally obsessed with Wonder Woman.” Glen told us when we interviewed him a year ago. (more…)

Slate’s gadfly art critic Lee Siegel takes a distinctly psychoanalytical approach to dissecting the vast array of portraiture included in artist David Hockney’s current retrospective, featured through May 15 at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Siegel has subtitled his Slate Slide Show, “The Shallow Lyricism of one of America’s Favorite Painters.”

Siegel points out that “of all the genres and mediums in which Hockney has worked—landscape, still life, and opera sets, among others—his portraiture is the least accomplished and affecting.”

The problem, for Siegel, is Hockney’s narcissism — coupled with his fear of being alone. Hockney remains too focused on his subject’s role in his life to make a convincing portrait of that person as a person. (more…)