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)

It was a spring day, a day, a day for a lay when the air
Smelled like a locker-room, a day to blow or get blown.
Returning from lunch I turned my corner and there
On a near-by stoop I saw him standing alone.

I glanced as I advanced.
The clean white T-shirt outlined
A forceful torso, the light-blue denims divulged
Much.

I observed the snug curves where they hugged the behind,
I watched the crotch where the cloth intriguingly bulged.
Our eyes met, I felt sick.
My knees turned weak. I couldn’t move.
I didn’t know what to say. (read the full article)

Porn names — the kind that make you groan from the klutzy pun grinning toothily from the middle of them — don’t get any more cringe-worthy than “Harry Bush.”

Except Harry Bush was Harry Bush’s real name.

And that’s just the first of many surprises to be found in a new, sumptuously illustrated coffee-table book Harry Bush: Hard Boys, a collection of 230 pencil sketches, featuring a candid memoir by Robert Mainardi, the artist’s friend and major collector.

The reclusive Harry with the all too pubic name led a most improbable, counter-intuitive life.

Far from being a dabbler who was moonlighting from a career in advertisement or magazine illustration — the natural habitats you would think for such a polished draftsman — Harry Bush was, for many years, a deeply closeted Pentagon employee, who took up illustration only late in life, after a brief drawing course in a community college.

Right from the start, in the mid 1960′s, when he sold his first illustrations to the covertly homo Physique Pictorial — a notorious cavalcade of “health cultists” and “male nudists” in gaily striped posing pouches — all the hallmarks of the Harry Bush style were in place: The easy flow of his line; the concentration on blocky buns and heavy dicks; the All American faces that had about them a national lyricism as authentic as Norman Rockwell’s.

Harry Bush was, as Hard Boys points out, a mass of contradictions. He worked under his own name yet lived in fear of losing his Air Force pension as some sort of retribution for being a pornographer. He cut himself off from his family before they could cut themselves off from him. Inculcated with the occupational homophobia of the military, he was revulsed by the world he had entered — the noir side of Hollywood with its hustlers, Johns and fly-by-night models — yet continued to draw that world as a joyous homosexual playground.

Here was a man who brought a lighthearted humor to his celebrations of hard-bodied surfers and manboy teenagers — porn with a wink — yet was relentlessly cantankerous in private, bitterly grousing about the gay scene, never failing in his many handwritten letters to wrap the words gay community in mocking quote marks.
(read the full article)

John Waters is one of the icons of these post-Andy Warhol times.

Once hailed as a “Master of Sleaze”, the man with the creepy pencil mustache and the look of a drained vampire shunning the sun behind big swoopy sunglasses, John Waters has, with his films and books, subtly shaped the atmosphere of hip taste and pop intellectualism. It now drapes around him as comfortably as a well-made suit.

As the picture at left quietly attests, he is the essence of courtliness and chic, reminiscent, oddly, of Zachary Scott, the silky, duplicitous playboy who so brings our Joan to grief in Mildred Pierce. Yes, the bard of Baltimore has become stylish — after all.

Stylish and one of our sharpest gay humorists.

More culture critic, than funny man, his refreshing — at times, startling — takes on recent cultural events such as Britney’s MTV debacle or his own surprising commercial success with the musical Hairspray were on offer in an interview he gave a North Carolina newspaper, The Independent, before his talk there at Duke University. (read the full article)

Who didn’t love Tammy Faye, who died this past week (but not before doing the full hour with Larry King)? She was crazy in that crazy American way. Singing and crying and loving on Jesus, then in the next breath telling you all major credit cards were accepted.

Her trademark was the triple-ply false eyelashes, mascara-streaked tears bubbling out through the blissed-out smiles, and an ability to sing, laugh and cry all in the same hallucinatory moment.

It was a talent later imitated but never quite equaled by another screaming-Mimi of the Christian Ministries, Jan Crouch, the Jayne Mansfield to Tammy’s purer, more sincere Marilyn.

Sincerity, that is, as far as it went for a wiggy televangelist like Tammy who would sprint off to dismal foreign slums for a day and wrap her on-camera arms around a starving child — some adorable wretch with big suffering eyes and flies alighting on his lips — and then all at once something kooky would happen.

The script would fly out of her head; Tammy could never linger too long on the negative. A sunburst would break through the tears, one of her notorious outbreaks of inappropriate giggling. She’d start praising the lord and thanking Jesus for all her own gifts, which could be yours too if you sent in the prayer money. Then, mission accomplished, sticky child removed from arm, she would store the big hair back on the private jet and fly home to one of several plantation-style mansions in the subdivisions of South Carolina. (read the full article)

In the dawn-tinted Parthenon of awful gay movies, Cruising stands alone. It doesn’t merely backfire; it backfires brilliantly.

So it is with mixed emotions (two parts joy, three parts delirium) that we turn our gaze on September 18 when this anti-classic will be released finally on DVD in its shameless uncut glory (with restored scenes never released) — and even better in hi-def, so you can catch all the undulating male bodies in the background of its bar scenes where, according to the movie’s fantastical conceit, everyone is always in some state of fuck or suck.

Cruising was certainly a shocker in its day. The 1980 thriller is set in the night-world of New York’s orgiastic backrooms, peepshows and open-air fuck-fests that ran 24/7 in the bushes of Central Park. A then hot and nasty Al Pacino goes undercover to attract a serial killer, decoying himself as a hungry bottom in wife-beaters and low-slung jeans. The killer, meanwhile, a lanky, long-torsoed lad whose face is always concealed, is shown tricking and then killing his bound-up S&M partners — a sort of buyer’s remorse we usually associate with the black widow spider — ever whispering in his victim’s ear the moronic catchphrase “You made me do that.” (read the full article)

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? (read the full article)

“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. (read the full article)

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.
(read the full article)

(read the full article)