Mom gets a lot of blame.

Pop psychology dictates that she’s at fault for her kids’ (especially the boys’) sorrows; if she isn’t smothering and controlling, then she’s distant or just absent. Too much love or not enough — either way, it either supposed to make us gay, strand us in childhood, or turn us into hooker-preying serial killers.

But what about the Horror of the Father? How many different ways can dear old Dad screw us up? He’s long been posited to be the factor that drives young women onto stripper poles, and ex-gay therapy would have us believe we’re seeking his love/approval in other men as adults, but stripped of all the armchair psychology and soap operatics, the Horror Hag’s other half — the Father Ogre — is more that just a Grim(m) Fairytale. (read the full article)

My mind reflexively catalogues terrible porn dialogue for future use. You always end up needing it later. An offhand remark like “I’ll tell you a secret: I like to suck dick!” could conceivably be met with a reply of “Really! That’s interesting — because I like to get my dick sucked!”

I have to admire the inspiration of any porn player who has the sense to call out “Oh! I’m getting fucked!”…while getting fucked, which is rather like shouting “Help! I’m rolling down a hill!”

Even highly baroque and stagey porn set pieces — a secret agent massaging an Arabian sheik’s groin and asking “Is this some kind of a weapon?,” only to be assured “No — that is just my royal penis!” — could prove handy. (read the full article)

Porno tomes.

I love them, and my bookshelf houses such tell-alls as Christy Canyon’s Lights, Camera Sex!, A Thousand & One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent, Traci Lords: Underneath It All, John Holmes: A Life Measured In Inches, Wonder Bread & Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano, Blue Blake’s Out of the Blue: Confessions of an Unlikely Porn Star, and Boy in the Sand: Casey Donovan, All-American Sex Star.

I know on a superficial level that it’s trivial and voyeuristic to have a fascination with porn stars, but on a deeper one I’ll confess that I find them strangely compelling. They are after all sort of willing freaks in society; even the most with-it of us are conflicted about sex — afraid of what we want, afraid of how much we want it, afraid that no one can give it to us — and so they provide us with a by-proxy catharthis. In a world without disease, emotional entanglements, or taboos, I’d probably be doing everything I see onscreen, but what holds me back is absent for them. That shame valve just wasn’t included in their designs. (read the full article)

This is some compact porn narrative economy we’ve got here. There’s the starving writer pinning his hopes on a screenplay, his typewriter surrounded by crumpled drafts — an image secondary only to a student falling asleep with head rested on a pile of open books when it comes to conveying studious toil. There’s a telegram from a stranded French sailor borne by a commiserating delivery boy who’s such a chipper little eager beaver that he doesn’t pause between sentences. An injured leg is the motive angle that causes him to divulge that he used to be a masseur. Shift to the bedroom wherein he inquires “Do you have any, um, lube — uh, I mean, lotion?” — a line reading that I want to believe is flubbed. Clothes start to come off, and positions are assumed. All this in a mere three minutes.

That’s a-gooda exploitation!

Most people fantasize about doing them. I’d rather be one of them.

Yes, one of my most recurring (so you know it’s good) playgrounds of sexual wish fulfillment is to have a twin. An evil twin as my devious doppelgänger who could detach protozoa-like from my own body and be the vessel into which I could house all the dark and disturbing facets of my personality that I’m not equipped to deal with, thus unburdening me of haunting division. Our sole demarcation? Hair color — that Hitchcockian cliché that distinguishes good from bad, virgin from whore. I would get to be the blond ingenue of the pair who walks in the light, and he’d be the brunet sex kitten driven by unhinged sociopathy and violent possessiveness of me. Then we take to seducing men by night and committing crimes for kicks, ultimately dying together rather than surrendering to the police in an exquisite fade to black.

I have a very elaborate inner world. (read the full article)

One of my first assignments here at Nightcharm was to profile the inimitable porn superstar Jeff Stryker, a feat that proved to be neither as unwieldy as I expected it would nor as superficial. I chose several of his movies from various stages in his career — Big Time, which has thirtysomething Jeff arriving in New Orleans for Mardi Gras à la Godzilla coming ashore in Tokyo, is still the best in my mind — and certainly the attributes that have widely garnered him admiration weren’t lost on me: the cherubic, close-set features; his Thunderbirds hairstyle, the top-heavy build, and that dick that resembles some wildly out-of-proportion member on an African fertility fetish. Something about his inherent Ken Doll plasticity and his near-total lack of self outside of his persona (he’s one of the few porn stars who largely seems to be exactly the same off-camera as he is on-) made him not just endearingly funny to me, but also weirdly hypnotic. (read the full article)

You’ve come a long way, baby.

It’s hard to believe in today’s hyper-produced, corporatized porn industry that there was a time when porn really wasn’t that pretty to watch. Gay porn stars may have kicked the ‘roids, tattooing, and manscaping into high gear, but their medium always required a certain level of physical presentability. Straight porn? Not so much. Men — despite the vital purpose they serve — occupy a decidedly secondary position in that product.

Many of the male stars employed as hardcore porn was introduced to the U.S. were not much to crow about, and if anything, their spindly, shag-headed, porn ’stached aesthetic was deliberately utilized so as to avoid threatening the male viewer’s ego. Today, there are more manly lookers in straight porn than you can shake a dick at — with traditional gay types like spike-haired twinks, tanned frat boys, shaved-down bodybuilders, assertive daddies, and inked-up sex pigs becoming practically common — who are proving that foxy fuckers in skin flicks can actually attract straight male fanfare while garnering appreciative gay audiences.

It’s easy to take a Charles Dera, Evan Stone, or Nacho Vidal for granted, but what about the studs who paved the way for them? Prior to the Web making porn so accessible, many of us relied on our brother’s porn cache or pass-around videos from guys at school, meaning straight stars provided us with our maiden voyages into Smut City. (read the full article)