Two convicts make love though a hole in the wall, a hole so tiny that the only object that can pass through it is a straw and the only love that can be made is one convict blowing smoke into the other’s mouth.

This is the most famous scene in the dank and languid Un Chant d’Amour (A Song of Love), an underground film made in the year 1950 — an antique prehistoric moment before the emergence of a forthright gay sensibility — by Jean Genet, France’s most acclaimed thief, pornographer and poet of perversity. (You can watch the complete 25-minute film below, after the break.)

And when I say perversity, I’m not being flip or using an egregious code word for “homosexual” favored by haters of gay people. No, Genet had — or perhaps, for the sake of his art, for the “beauty of the gesture,” affected to have — a most Satanic taste for true perversity: he once wrote that the greatest act of love was for one lover to betray the other to the Gestapo, while the accused looked on. (read the full article)

There’s something about those bi guys that burns in our minds whenever we happen to know one.

To be more precise, there’s something about the “bi-curious” male. He claims — truthfully or not — to prefer women, to be, as he might call himself, a “regular dude,” except that if the case is compelling enough he might experiment with a guy.

Our perspectives on him will diverge wildly. Some find him deliciously elusive and have an overwhelming curiosity for him. Others consider him the holy grail of sexual adventure.

I think that most who have been in the gay community for a while meet him with the assumption that he’s just half in the closet or putting on an act. The “something about him” we sense can be distrust or even disdain. Surely, many surmise, he’s a full-blown queer, with the as much inclination for a male partner as any raging queen. He’s just happened to learn that for some reason, when it comes to finding a sexual partner, a lot of gay men find the “questioning straight dude” or “gay first-timer” irresistible.

Which begs the question: why do we find that so irresistible? What’s appealing about the idea of a clearly insecure, unprepared and inexperienced man?

As an aside, I’m not here to claim male bisexuality is not real, and to be fair to my friends who have loved both genders and bisexual guys who visit this site, I’ll say I know real male bisexuality does exist.

Many in the gay community resist acknowledging a real bisexual man, because we’ve encountered the type of gay guy who claims to be bisexual thinking it makes him somehow better than the rest of us. We come away, reasonably, offended by his subtle insistence that we’re faggier or weaker or more “limited” for liking men exclusively.

We can’t let our experience with those men lead to disrespect for real people, those guys who are, indeed, bisexual because of the exact biological impetus that makes others gay or straight.

Nor can we approach any particular self-identified bisexual man drawing initial uninformed conclusions that he’s being disingenuous about his orientation just because we know others are. To make those assumptions is the definition of prejudice. (read the full article)

Porn, as we scholars of the form know, takes place in an alternate universe too lopsided, too abundantly endowed, too strangely convenient to ever be described as parallel.

Pizza boys arrive with hardons. Doctors are as fit as musclemen and when they ask you to drop your pants, they drop theirs.

Here the locker rooms are oddly silent and empty … empty, empty empty — except for HIM! HIM has, of all things, the locker right above yours and a painfully erect whopper that keeps bumping into your face.

Welcome to Pornville. That Land That Never Was and yet can never die thanks to those old eight-millimeter reels that laid down the rules and regulations for all time. Rules like …

Well, finding a stranger asleep in your barn (your barn?) He is naked, of course, totally — except for one odd little hayseedy type thing: he’s wearing a studded cockring. That and giganzo chrome rings through his nipples, cockhead and perineum.

This, you think, must cause a sensation when Hayseed goes through the machines at the airport. But, of course, there aren’t any airports in Pornville. Only barns, locker rooms and embarrassingly queer-looking bedrooms decorated to within an inch of their silly High-Auntie lives. (And boy, do we have the evidence. See our brother site Lurid Digs.) (read the full article)

Once a week when I was a teenager, my friends and I would drive to a gay nightclub downtown. Thursday nights were alcohol-free and 16 was the age of entry. Since there were only a handful of openly gay students at each of our high schools, if even that, the only way we knew to connect with other young gay people was over the Internet and in that club.

Inside was a sea of dancing skinny, hairless teenage boys from the suburbs who looked even younger than they really were, ringed by a flock of straight girls we brought with us, who pole-danced against our thighs. The lesbians gathered in their own clusters to the side. You could hear the bassy music from outside on the patio and cigarette smoke choked the air just before indoor smoking bans hit major cities. Some of the boys would take their shirts off and sag their pants low enough that you could tell their pubes were shaved. The rest of us would sit at the tables smoking, or in my case, take occasional drags from friends’ cigarettes and talk about people who passed by.

Almost everyone in the club was under the age of 20, but there were always a couple of guys aged 27 or so in the mix, and occasionally we’d see a socially-awkward man in his 30s or 40s gawking at the young kids as if to memorize every face. We thought those guys were creepy, and talked shit about them as we talked shit about the teenage boys who were their friends. (read the full article)

Philosophical fancies aside, the intricacies of the human heart are known most plainly to chemists.

We can spend years musing about the psychological precursor to our tastes or behavior, but can often learn as much in minutes from a scientific explanation. And while the full complexity of conscious experience is mysterious and unknown, there are clear links between certain chemicals and our most basic drives – explaining, for example, why we feel horny one moment and mellowed another, or why our sex drives are highest after exercise.

At the core of sexual pursuit are the yin and yang of lust, two vastly different substances but with complimentary roles of switching desire on and off: dopamine and prolactin. They regulate more than sex, but for our purposes we can summarize; dopamine plays a central role in generating horniness – while prolactin shuts it down.

Chances are you’re familiar with the effects of each. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter and relatively small molecule, is your brain’s sense of pleasure and reward. It fires when we see a pretty face, taste sugar, puff a cigarette, or touch skin-to-skin. When your dopamine levels are highest, sex is number one on the agenda, sometimes by so much that you’ll have lower-than-normal interest in food or sleep. (read the full article)

“Husky” is good, right? We would want three hours of continuous, hardcore action from some of Brazil’s “huskiest” men, wouldn’t we? Is it like rugged, only thicker, with grunting and stubble?

A loosely-held secret of porn promotional blurb-writing is that no matter what material the writer is handed, he must find some way to speak well of it.  That said, though he can’t blatantly insult it, he doesn’t want to be entirely dishonest so there are quite a few occasions on which a writer is stuck saying something most easily likened to “that sweater-vest is so different!”

That’s because even though porn is a multi-billion-dollar industry, the quality of the product is wildly unstable. Writers must forge forward and say the best thing they can say to promote the video they may or may not have actually watched.

To that end I’ve compiled this short guide, after years of weary and dedicated porn promo-reading, to help you through the hurdles and hoops of discerning what should be the least traumatic path to your healthy erection.

Physique

Sexy: (Tommy’s sexy body) The model’s body is of appropriate weight and built. Unfortunately, models who are described as “sexy” also tend to have egregiously overwrought hairstyles and a propensity to tilt their heads to the side.

Despite looking like the lost member of the Pussycat Dolls, this model illustrates what porn promo copy writers are talking about when they say someone is “sexy.”

Chiseled: (Baker’s chiseled good looks) The model has protruding muscles and lower-than-average body fat. This is often accompanied by bad skin and a sunken face. (read the full article)

There’s a feeling that arises when you see an extremely attractive guy – one who’s more than just an average double-taker; I’m talking about a specimen of a man, someone you figure is probably inaccessible to the majority of those who ogle at him.

Like most forms of want, that feeling isn’t neither entirely agonizing nor entirely pleasurable. But there is a frustration there, which comes in the form of a duality; when he so captures your attention, is it that you’d rather have him, or be him?

Lust and envy are a pair of haunting Siamese twins. It’s a conflict left exclusively to those in the realm of same-sex attractions, since an average heterosexual man wouldn’t sight a gorgeous woman thinking if only I had a rack* like that. He might look at another man and envy his calves or biceps, then see a woman and want to touch her, but he would never direct both thoughts toward the same person. Gay or bisexual men can experience the impulse to size up a rival, simultaneous with sexual desire for him. (read the full article)

When contemplating whether or not to meet someone from online, the question always arises.

He’ll ask you if you don’t ask first.

The query will come in the universally-recognized instant-message shorthand, as if the cutesy language counteracts the outright audacity of what he wants to know:

how big r u?

Six feet tall, 160 pounds, you could say. Or if you don’t like him, you could give the exceedingly sarcastic, “human sized,” which comes to “about the size of two beer coolers stacked on end.” But you know that isn’t really what he means.

At this point he’s already seen a JPEG picture of your face and probably one of your shirtless body, maybe even one that vaguely reveals the outline of your semi-hard cock through loose-fitting boxer shorts. You’ve sized each other up, and even if you’ve arranged to meet “just to hang out,” you’ve both emphasized that you’re attracted to each other and won’t brush the other’s hand away if later you find it creeping up your thigh.

But there isn’t a green light until he knows how big your cock is.

It’s not necessarily that he’d reject you at this point if your member isn’t to his satisfaction, but he at least wants to prepare himself, or to weigh the information with everything else he knows about you.

So you’re faced with an awfully tricky question.

how big r u?

The thing about the cock size disclosure is that, in my experience, hardly anyone tells the truth. I know the statistics and I’ve seen far too many “nine inch” answers to deny that something funky’s going on. I’ve also had far too many experiences with guys who say they’re “seven and a half,” and I’m thinking, shit, I’m going to feel inferior — but when we finally get down to it we’re exactly the same size.

Online courtship, or perhaps any courtship, is a delicate dance between fantasy and reality. It’s animal, but it’s also political and it’s an art. He wants to know a little about you — wants you to be honest so he knows if he’s in to you — but he also wants to be titillated and entertained. And he expects you to exaggerate a little bit, and to downplay your shortcomings, because that’s what everyone does, and confidence is cool. It’s like a job interview — you wouldn’t say “well I’m not sure if I’m really qualified but if you hire me I guess we’ll know in a month.” (read the full article)