From the Huffington Post:

Ticket Bought At Michigan Porn Shop Worth $129 Million

LANSING, Mich. — A group of friends and family is obscenely rich after winning a nearly $129 million jackpot with a lottery ticket bought at a Detroit-area porn shop. And some of the money will be devoted to sacred purposes.

Mike Greer, a member of the group, came forward Friday to claim the Powerball winnings on behalf of the others, who chose to remain anonymous. Greer – who said only that the group has more than two members and fewer than 100 – indicated some of the riches will be going to a church.

“The only thing I can assume is that the Lord trusted us to do certain things with the money that He bestowed upon us,” he said. “That’s the only thing that I can gather.” (continued on HuffPo)

Well, praise Jesus and put another token in the movie machine.

Now what was that about “Porn hurts everyone?”

Reese Rideout, the hunky porn star in the above picture, would agree that God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.

The recipe for a bravura gay porn set piece:

1. Stranded-in-oblivion close-ups and medium shots performed with rigid, manly posturing.

2. Facial expressions ranging from complete insentience to sneering, teeth-baring scenery-chewing.

3. The director’s SoCal bungalow interior as a backdrop.

4. More cut-off sleeves than you’d find in an entire season of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

5. At least one incredible “international” accent that sounds exactly like Udo Kier by way of The Legend of Lylah Clare.

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)

You don’t want to know how it’s made.

That admonition is usually reserved for referring to certain foods, but it can extend to other products of dubious concoction. Like porn. Specifically, straight porn.

If mainstream gay porn’s personal tumult is whether to doff condoms to compete with encroaching cut-rate bareback productions and a tough economic climate, then top-tier straight porn finds itself questioning just how far is too far when it comes to raunch. I’ll freely admit to enjoying more high-class straight productions based on the new wave of built and attractive male stars they employ. Still, if I avoid condomless gay porn because I think it tends to present performers at their worst, then low-budget gonzo-style straight porn is equally repellent to me.

As its style and tone could worryingly become the new industry standard, I have to wonder if there is some fundamental difference between the straight male and gay male libidos. When we seek out skin flicks, do we really want the same things from them, and are hetero men bringing something to the table that’s foreign and unintelligible to us? For all the adverse drubbing gays take for being supposed perverts and freaks, is there a weird and vicious motivation in the straight male sex drive that’s pandered to by porn merchants and thus implicitly encouraged? (read the full article)

Back when I penned a paean to my knee, um, jerk yen for Guidos, I both anticipated and begged for a Guido-related porn subgenre to emerge. West Hollywood and Eastern Europe have been mined to death, and I’m not so smitten with the umpteenth guy named Tad or Skylar, so when the Jersey Shore straight porno parody hit, I knew a gay-themed entry full of spray tans, sports bands, Ed Hardy wear, gold chains, and blowouts had to be imminent. I mean, what better way to spend my hard-earned porn screed cash than delighting to the sights of hairless man-children tenderizing each other’s steroid asses while adding a superfluous z-sound to “you” or “they”?

Now it is upon us. (read the full article)

It’s about more than just dicks and ass.

The misconception is that women are auditory sexual beings, while men are strictly visual. You can apparently throw any sexual scenario up in front of us, and regardless of concept or presentation, as long as there’s something to feast the eyes on, it’s enough for us. Ours is not an aural, tactile, or evocative libido; it’s strictly visceral, merely hit-it-and-forget-it.

Nothing is more tedious to me in porn than two guys going at it with zero set-up while all their nasty play-by-play is completely drowned out by a generic canned porno score. I need to hear the give-and-take trash talk, and even more implicitly, I need to experience the sounds of sex: the gritting of teeth, the straining of the voice, the pounding of pelvis against ass, and the slapping of balls against balls.

Upon first encountering the Hungarian gay porn genre, the visual differences between it and our own domestic product were marked enough to make them novel: a warm, gauzy ambience, often set outdoors; inexhaustible casts of short, gymnast-bodied man-boys playing lusty gypsies, randy soldiers, and Daisy Duke-wearing mountain jocks; plenty of awkward sexual transitions wherein clothes magically vanish; and an array of fluid, yoga-like sexual positions that I imagine could result in some serious dick sprains if miscalculated.

What inexplicably did it for me, though, was the insane, Rosetta Stone-gone-wrong subtitling. As if the dialogue set pieces — replete with super-arch exchanges that wouldn’t be out of place in a ’60s Sword and Sandal epic — weren’t enough, the sundry ass-banging commands the men dole out to each other had me immediately reaching for a pen. I’ve since amassed my faves (all integrated into my own personal repertoire), and now present them to you from Hungary, with love. Please to enjoy with interest!: (read the full article)

Priceless ad copy:

You know these guys — great bod, great abs, great…wait a minute — everything Butt-A-Face! Ya know, the guy you’d pick up in the last few minutes before closing time at the bar, only after you’ve had a few. See these Butt-A-Face boys get fucked, sucked & jacked off on. It’s like going to the bar, but it won’t cost you and you’ll get laid.

Safe to presume that agents received some livid phone calls after this hit the shelves.

Only two highly symbolic locales ever seem to be perpetually invoked to embody the disparities of our fiscal meltdown: Main Street and Wall Street.

Are Andy and Opie Taylor having to ally with those hillbilly moonshiners in order to continue to afford their fishing lures, and is Patrick Bateman’s Amex Gold Card being refused when he tries to order a coterie of high-end escorts after killing his accountant with a power drill?

But what about Easy Street in Pornopolis? Does no one care about the sacrifices and indignities our favorite gay porn gods have had to endure in a sharp and jagged downturn?

Gay porn is really a subsidiary of the male escort/sex worker scene, lucrative in its own right, but still mainly functioning as a virtual PR firm and calling card for the sex brokers. Long-believed to be recession-proof along with other “vice”-related industries, even All-Male Action has taken a serious hit in the past two years. Revenues not just for DVD and magazine sales are down, but so are the returns for Web-based smut and the dancing circuit. Many is the urban escort who’s resigned himself to turning fewer high-roller tricks in favor of a more economy class clientele, and personal training and/or massage therapy bullet points are not necessarily placed in ironic quotations in resumes anymore. A top-tier star’s name and face just don’t ring up the dollar signs like they did five years ago. (read the full article)