Pinup boys of the 1950’s — beautifully lit in black and white and as silkily available as their female counterparts. It amazes us today that the photographer who took these pictures had to go to jail several times for trying to sell them.

What was then the most inflamed, forbidden pornography — one self-righteous blowhard even called the photographer a Communist for trying to corrupt “our clean American boys” — now seems sedate. Homoerotic to be sure, but very tasteful by 21st Century standards.

None of these classic gay photos would exist had it not been for Bob Mizer, photographer and founder of AMG, the Athletic Model Guild. The prolific Mizer left behind, as well, rare film clips and short movies of his scantily dressed discoveries. (Now available in the five-DVD bundle Fantasy Factory from AMG.) At the time no one else was shooting this material, let alone selling it through the mail. (more…)

Trade. Jailbird. Gay for Pay.

Those would be the names for the men seen in these photos. Men from the San Francisco of a quarter century ago, tattooed drifters picked up from lowlife saloons along the Tenderloin, in the lobbies of boozy single-men hotels, outside of store-front clinics where you could sell your blood by the pint.

David Hurles came upon these idle, pent-up studs like a stroke of good luck, a chance to make some easy money, and all they had to do was jerk off while he snapped pictures and made tapes of them talking about their lives.

A skinny unassuming guy, Hurles had made a name for himself in locally produced porn reels, thanks to his oversized organ and his double-jointed ability to auto-fellate (always an ice-breaker).

Now he was in business for himself: “Old Reliable” as he called his “tape and picture” company, and as he himself became known to millions of mail-order fans with a taste for sexy psychos.

Hurles specialized in an extreme type of marginalized man. Rough trade is too tame a word. These guys seemed to be fresh out of Alcatraz and two steps away from San Quentin. (more…)

Passed out sailors, good-time gals and blond men offering smokes to bull-necked marines — it’s the scandal that keeps on giving.

Back in the 1930’s, while America was managing to stay out of the brewing wars in Hitler’s Europe, Paul Cadmus did a series of sailor paintings that enraged the Navy and created such a furor in the papers that the resulting publicity made his name in art circles, with his subsequent one-man show attracting a record 7,000 visitors.

Rather than depict the natty, clean-jawed sailor of the recruiting poster, the young Cadmus, a government sponsored WPA artist, painted drunk, sensual gobs on pussy patrol, their skin-tight Navy whites outlining athletic butts and bulges in a way that would have cause eyebrows to raise had not the paintings mirrored the actual fit of those dreamy, creamy uniforms. (more…)

Exactly how merry were those Merry Men? That is the question. We like the answer Italian artist Valeriano Elfodiluce came up with for his homo-hot comic Robin Hoog, available online in both Italian and English.

In the adventures of this cock Robin, we enter a Sherwood Forest that is cum-drenched to its very roots. Panels are jammed with balls-to-butt sexcapades and the guys rarely come up for air, having to advance the plot between “mhhs”, “ahhs” and “omygods.” (Elfodiluce makes a valiant but happily futile effort to actually tell the story of Robin Hood.) Maid Marian is but nowhere to be found and in her place we meet such burlesque punchlines as “Robert of Cocksley,” “Sir Guy Dickmore” and — of course — “Friar Fuck.”

Even Sherwood Forest is here renamed — somewhat perplexingly — as “Shamewood Forest.” (Hey, Valeriano, didn’t you get the memo? We’re modern queers now. We left shame at Stonewall.) It’s a total homo retrofit and the storyline bares not even an idiot cousin’s resemblance to anything Errol Flynn ever attempted in the classic Warner Brothers version of the legend. (Correction, ever attempted onscreen. Flynn was the Colin Farrel of his day, in both Black Irish good looks and bad-boy pluck.) (more…)

God, that’s sooo gay!

That was the gasp that was heard around the block and around the world when the International Male catalog would arrive in the old days, the closet-bursting 70’s. Then it was the hottest crypto-homo publication sold over the counter — no, not even sold, sent to you for free (was it ever in a brown wrapper?) with its pictures of hunky, porn-caliber models in mesh briefs with padded codpieces. Oh the thrills, oh the chills that shuddered through many a young heart. (more…)

Beware the Eyes that Hypnotize!

In Part I of our Faye extravaganza, we were reminded that like the psychic photographer she played in Eyes of Laura Mars (above), we gay men have always seen fantastic things in the Faye face: (more…)

Faye Dunaway is one of the great movie stars who act with their eyes — or perhaps that should be one of the stars who act greatly with their eyes — in a class with the ocular fireworks of a Bette Davis, as well as the glistening searchlights of the ever-vivid Joan Crawford.

Faye, of course, played Joan Crawford — quite notoriously — in Mommie Dearest, bringing to the proceedings a whole glary-starey madness that had nothing to do with the Joan feeling , that was all Dunaway, and yet captured the truth of the Crawford persona anyway — in the way that art can often say more with one bold stroke of color than with multiple daubs of nuanced photo-realism. (more…)

"Well, she’s drunk all the time on champagne."

Such is the envy and bile, the gossip and bitchery you must deal with when your are the grandest Diva in the entire known world. Oh, you can talk about your Judy Garland, your Maria Callas and even — poor thing, if you are so bereft of queer references — Madonna, but two of those are dead and the other, while increasingly pathetic, is not yet fabulouslY, self-destructively insane. No, on the earthquake scale of Diva-locity, Shirley Bassey is a full-tilt 27.9 (more…)