“Dated” — it’s such an unfair word.

Sometimes, being era-specific can be a virtue.

Gay porn doesn’t really date all that well — it’s amazing to see how polished and professional the medium has become since the days of the handheld video revolution — and I’m frankly glad for that. So much of “new” porn is striking me as rather bland; creative sets have fallen by the wayside in favor of these generic “porn house” locales, music is no longer sublimely terrible than it is just ambient synth, and context isn’t as integral to setting a scene’s mood anymore.

The joys of dated gay porn are about more than just the stars, though it is nice to know that there was a time when models looked like fresh, approachable extras on The Dukes of Hazzard or Melrose Place rather than overly-’roided-out, too-aggressive sex mutants who require a team of day laborers to lift their elephant-sized legs while they’re getting nailed on their backs (true story). No, it’s the sore-dick little details that might as well have pop-up captions over them — look at the pic to the right and tell me what jumps out to you — that pull you down the rabbit hole. (read the full article)

Even though I tell myself that this is tragic and chemically-enhanced male beauty, I still can’t stop my groin from stiffening at the sight of it. As a child, I had no conception of what “gay” was — much more the existence of the Muscle Bear — but that didn’t keep me from laying eyes on Brawn Master Lyle Alzado, secretly desiring that he would punish me hard, and thinking…

…Daaaaayuuuuum.

I’m fairly certain that many a gay man’s body enhancement obsession can be directly linked to this ad and its variants which aired during many of our formative years. Gym equipment, gay workout shorts, the idealized self reflected in the magic mirror — all of it achievable if you just chug gallons of milk. Didn’t we all drink it, but how many of us grew up into fucking Disney princes? Straight Disney princes? And what about stage two of the transformation in which we become hot Chachi-voiced guys from the Bronx?

Still waiting!

The greatest fucking TV cast ever.

“…and it’s like I fell into a dream…”

David Lynch’s peerless Twin Peaks — the autumn-hued, gauzily dreamy, swooningly romantic, endlessly quotable, and shudderingly scary series that gave birth to the new wave of culty ’90s network TV — turns twenty this year.

This past weekend, the artist collective In The Trees held a banner event to commemorate the occasion at L.A.’s Clifton’s Cafeteria — a woodland-bedecked eatery that proves trees don’t just grow in Brooklyn.

Take a gander here to bear witness to the incredible array of curios on exhibition. Between Paul Chatem’s mind-bending A Damn Good Cup of Coffee, Grace Zabriskie’s eerie decoupages, Tim Biskup’s Walk with Bob, and Amy Casey’s A Small Logging Town, I’m positively evergreen with envy that I couldn’t be there.

Still, the Stendhal Syndrome is kicking in nicely.

David Alan Grier as the immortal Don “No Soul” Simmons, hands-down my favorite gag in Amazon Women On The Moon.

We should totally start a charity for GoProud!:

“Gays Without Scruples.”

This is the sort of Glamour Shots by way of Frederick’s of Hollywood elegance that only Sheena Easton, Kelly LeBrock, Vanity, or a Landers Sister circa 1985 could pull off. Bonus points for the subtle phallic imagery and reverse sexism, and for the blond with the bleached crew cut who looks like the condom broke when Dolph Lundgren and Brigitte Nielsen had a brief fling — the combined effects of their Aryan super genes producing a being not quite of this mortal coil.

A reluctant gay pin-up of yesteryear is officially clink-bound as of this month.

Scott Madsen, the iconic ’80s spokesomodel for Soloflex, now 48, was sentenced in mid-January to two years in the big house for getting creative with the cash flow of Adair Financial Services in Washington during his tenure as General Manager — as in pocketing 250K for himself. Sounds like a great subplot from season four of Oz, and assuming he won’t be doing time in a country club prison, if Madsen still commands fanfare on the inside, he’s either got a ready-made gang to fall in with or staring down a serious boning for old time’s sake.

Like Lucky Vanous or Fabio after him, Madsen was the rare case of a fitness model achieving name recognition with an audience who may or may not actually be buying the product he’s selling. He’d been a one-time Oregon high school gymnast and college drop-out who answered an ad for a fledgling fitness company and found himself plucked out of obscurity, becoming the face of a nationwide ad campaign for Soloflex beginning in 1984, a now-venerated print ad featuring Madsen doffing his tank running in Newsweek.

That same year, Oregon Magazine dubbed him “[a] man-child in a promising land,” and “a teen heartthrob profiled in the pages of ‘Tiger Beat,’ a pin-up boy in San Francisco’s gay bars and a symbol of commercial success sought after by Richard Avedon, Christian Dior and Universal Studios.”

Day-um! That’s good copy! (read the full article)

The Valley of Lost TV Series.

As a wayward demographic, it’s a place I visit often, a mist-shrouded swale where the shades of TV series past — the misbegottenly terrible, the cheesily dated, and the brilliantly canceled who never got their just due — wander in eternal limbo.

DVD has been a veritable treasure trove that’s been the path of deliverance for some; you’re apt to find, say, a crypto-sleuthing Night Stalker, a studying-abroad She-Wolf of London, and an antioxidant-powered Swamp Thing channeled from the Spirit World via my Plasma, but what about the lost souls remembered by only a select few? Who will help them go into the light?

Who the hell knew that Lost had an antecedent in not only the kiddie mindbender Land of The Lost, but also in The New People, a 1969 curio involving an airplane full of multiculti castaways marooned on a mysterious isle complete with government experiments and a lost city? I actually whispered “Jinkies!” when I learned that TV’s first gay wedding took place on a fossilized series called Sirota’s Court way back in ’76. Isn’t 1965′s Hank — centering on the collegiate adventures of an impoverished chameleon who takes menial jobs on campus so that he can assume absent students’ identities in order to get a free education — just begging to be remade as Community‘s ideal companion show? And can you really say your life is complete until you’ve seen the domestic hilarity of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun shacking up in Heil Honey, I’m Home!?

While the name Sidney Shorr may not set off your nostalgic Gaydar at first blush, this largely-forgotten confirmed bachelor centerpiece of the early ’80s sitcom Love, Sidney still resonates as a floorboard-creaking skeleton in the cobwebbed confines of the Primetime TV closet. (read the full article)