Gaysploitation.

Unlike the Blaxploitation and Kung Fu crazes of the early and mid 70s, the Gay Exploitation genre never really arrived. Outside of underground films and odd shorts and loops, gay characters just didn’t bust out on drive-in screens and urban adult-only theaters. Where was our vigilante Pam Grier, our abtacular Bruce Lee?

Only the peerless Tura Satana (top right) as Varla in Russ Meyer’s 1965 classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has the balls to assume the mantle of all-time Super Queer.

The joy of Faster, Pussycat! is that Ms. Satana is in many ways playing herself. She was trained in karate, did a stint in reform school, married at thirteen, joined an all-girl gang, was a popular burlesque dancer, dated Elvis and garnered bit parts in a Hollywood studio system that couldn’t accommodate her exoticism.

We know her Varla is bad because she’s got a face like a kabuki mask of disdain, a repetoire of judo death blows, and cleavage that runs deeper than a California fault line. Add her two sociopathic go-go dancer cohorts Rosie, the enigmatic Haji (supine below) and Billie, the bodacious Lori Williams (below right), into the mix and the movie spills deliriously over the top.

The triad is such an stunning camp spectacle that they’re almost impossible to define as fully man or woman. Are they buxom, cat-fighting male fantasies? Brawling bull daggers behind the wheel? She-male outlaws or tranny terrors on a desert death trip into oblivion? (more…)

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.) (more…)

“One Never Knows When a Homosexual is About.” The voice-over is extreme and distinctly 60s in tenor. The scenario could be an outtake from The Donna Reed Show. The narrator continues: “He may appear normal and it may be too late when you discover he is mentally ill.”

My dilemma, at age 14 when I first saw the instructional film Boys Beware — during a special boys-only junior high assembly — was that it wasn’t too late … and I did already know: I was a homosexual. And I wanted some of that man-on-man stuff. But please mister, let me live after you’ve blown me!

Ah, yes, my 1970s school days: Lunch money, my collection of Diana Ross records and stewing in the cautionary wisdom offered up by 60s kid-films director Sid Davis. (more…)

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. (more…)

Well, we’ve never been to Nice, Greece, or ME, but like many a drag queen, we know what hot dick looks like.

When we saw the work of Venetian photographer Piero Pazzi we knew we had found a fellow searcher for … let’s call it truth.

Perhaps most known (notorious?) for his calendars of heartstoppingly handsome Italian priests, Pazzi also brings out a calendar and guide to the luscious — and seemingly available — gondoliers that ply the waters of the Grand Canal — and who knows what else is plied or plowed under those famous midnight bridges?

We’re dreaming, in particular, of a nighttime passage piloted by the sturdy arms of some lordly lad, coming to a lengthy stop beneath the Rialto Bridge with its lace-like stone canopy and Renaissance arches — a place so self-intoxicated with Italian beauty that it was a beloved cruising spot for Sebastian Venerable, Tom Ripley, and so many other twilight males of High Lavender Literature.

None more famous than Gustav Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, which bring us to our excuse for running all these diveen-o pictures.

Because of the Thomas Mann classic, Venice, a city already sunk in watery melancholy, will forever have a certain haunted homoeroticism.

Death in Venice provides us as well with a humpy, never-to-be forgotten portrait of the gondolieri, as you will see:

One day an eminent historian, greatly lionized in his native Germany, finds himself for the first time staring at a coarse red-headed man in a cemetery, and in his embarrassment flees — but apparently not far enough.

He decides he must take a trip. Fatally, he decides it will be Venice.
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“Gay culture has been a feature of seafaring life for centuries,” states the website for Liverpool’s maritime museum. “It is still a hidden one, even today when the Royal Navy actively recruits gay sailors. ”

The Merseyside Maritime Museum, which is dedicated to the seafaring history of that port city, is throwing a light on this hidden culture in an exhibition charmingly titled Hello Sailor: Gay Life on the Ocean Wave.

To promote the show, which runs to the end of March, a series of brief essays have been posted on the museum’s website filled with insider tidbits and an unmistakable first-hand authenticity.

Here we learn that though homosexuality was a crime in Britain until 1967 (sometimes punished by prison sentences, most famously that of Oscar Wilde, as well as the man who broke the Nazi war code, Alan Turing), the “sodomic” tradition was allowed to flourish in the Royal navy as an open secret. It thus endured as a haven for randy middle-class boys who, with often only nominal attempts to pass for straight, joined up to meet men and see the world. (more…)

“Haven’t found her yet,” Paul Lynde would say when asked by reporters when he might marry.

The gay and beloved and self-hating “Center Square” on Hollywood Squares, Lynde (left) was always famously searching for “the right girl.” By the time TV fame hit, in the 60’s, both he and the entertainment reporters were in on the joke and no one was surprised when he would erupt in his trademark hacking laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Like many gay men who elect to be professionally “straight” — who are homophobic in its strictest sense, that is, they fear the homosexual (in themselves, in this case) — Lynde was aware of his own absurdity. It was perhaps that awareness, accelerated by alcoholism and career envy, that made him so colossally bitter in private.

We have just witnessed the fall of a gay Congressman, who has of late tried to explain himself but in ways that spin homosexuality further out into the Twilight Zone of rehabs and childhood sex traumas. He hasn’t quite come to terms with how ridiculous he has made himself, not only with underaged staffers, but by his self-defeating, anti-gay voting record.

Time perhaps may be kinder than we can be at this moment. Time may, in her gentle forgetful way, soften the edges as she has with other famous homophobic homosexuals that walked that same mile in the same shoes — shoes that ultimately squeaked and bit into their lying toes. (more…)