As a kid I grew up with my mother and grandmother’s copies of Rona Barrett’s Hollywood and The National Enquirer scattered around the house.

My grandmother especially was unapologetic about the gossip rags, and her ardor made it all the easier for me to revel in them too.

Some of my sweetest memories involve everyone in my family lying around on Sunday afternoons discussing Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand having sex together on the set of The Way We Were. Or at least how we imagined they were having sex together. Tabloid time like this was considered quality time in my family.

To this day I still argue with friends about the veracity of The National Enquirer, and why I still read it — explaining how the potential threat of high-cost litigation keeps the paper trustworthy. This pretty much guarantees that whatever sort of outrageous revelation they are publishing is fact-based (well, maybe).

And The Enquirer consistently releases lusciously lurid humdingers — year after year upping the ante to compete with the seemingly endless circle jerk of celebrity gossip blogs.

Within three days I must have read thirty different online spins on Star Jones‘ gastric bypass. One of them involving an alien probe theory that actively held me catptive until I realized I’d landed on a spoofing website. (more…)

He boasts more aliases than Sean Combs and Martin Bormann combined.

He’s been reified by Jack Nicholson, Vincent Price, Burgess Meredith (twice), Robert De Niro, George Burns, Susan Lucci, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

He had his way with Rosemary and got all up in Miss Jones.

He’s the ubiquitous Satan, Prince of Lies and Lord of the Flies, and of all the are-they-or-aren’t-they? names roving around on the gaydar, he’s the one most overdue for a big coming out. We’re talking millennia overdue.

As one of the most recognizable figures in world culture, he’s also one of the most enigmatic. In various contexts, he’s merely the symbolic projection of the natural instinct within man, a living entity bent on leading us all astray, Hell’s overseeing whip master and God’s right hand man version of Karl Rove.

The lone unifying factor: he’s hot as hell and bad as he wants to be. (more…)

In porn it’s called the “money shot” because it’s worth more than the rest of the film put together. In France they call it la petite mort, the little death, bringing connotations of terror and finality. In literature it’s euphemized as a “climax,” pointing to the moment everything so far has led to. But pomp and circumstance aside, an orgasm only lasts about 8 seconds.

But what a captivating 8 seconds!

While watching porn the other day I realized how short an orgasm is. The clip was a little over a minute long, but I was only interested in one 10-second period when the guy, beating off on a bed, moaned, arched his back and came on his chest. I re-played the shot again and again, watching his torso heave upward, his tanned muscles flex and face contort in one fleeting moment of ecstasy, then I’d re-start the scene a second later because I didn’t give a shit what happened in the video after the guy got off. (more…)

Ay, there’s the rub…

The enigmatic French term for it is Frottage, more colloquially, the dry hump, frotting, bagpiping, scrumping and perrear.

But there’s also: The Safety Dance, grinding, cock2cock, cock knocking, dubbing, sandwich dancing, dogging, the Princeton Rub and cock surfing.

It all comes down to putting your dick anywhere other than the big three orifices.

That’s a continent of erogenous zone to cover.

The Greeks paved the way and all-male college campuses took it and ran with it. It’s a favorite of wrestlers, jockeys, bikers, anyone who’s ever taken an abstinence pledge and straight-identified guys who still like a good man-to-man groin grind. It’s something we’re all into in one style or another. Most likely it’s the first form of sexual stimulation we discovered as children by means of some inanimate object. By the time we’d reach our teens, we’d upgraded to another partner.

The expected dick-on-dick friction standoff is just the tip of the iceberg. Thighs, legs, pecs, biceps, faces, asses and feet are all equally game, the full-on body surf being the pinnacle. It’s probably the most instinctive and intuitive form of sexual intercourse – practiced by the most hesitant beginner and the most seasoned veteran – either as a form of teasing or as the big show stopper.

Plus, it’s got range: clothes on or clothes off, standing up or laying down, face to face or back to front, sober or blitzed. Some men even do it unconsciously while they sleep. (more…)

Our entry today is in no way related to April Fools’.

Or, well — maybe it is. Bear with us as we sort out our muddled, post Day-of-Folly brains.

Today we’re feeling mystical and considering the Symmetry of Destinies — a term coined by metaphysical author Ray Grasse to describe fated, interlocking lives and how those lives become connected, sometimes through random, often astounding events.

This being Nightcharm, our Symmetry of Destiny example involves a military guy’s testicles.

Yes, a balls-out miracle we felt compelled to share.

Our amazing story is taken from the 1896 book Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, and involves a soldier wounded during a Civil War battle between Grant’s army and a Confederate detachment.

The fighting was fierce, hope was slim and a split second after our soldier was shot (more…)

Homo-sploitation? Homo-fraternization?

When dealing with a certain sector of the hetero male population, the line gets too hazy to distinguish. The Crypto-Queer — like the cryptozoological missing links of an Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure paperback or Peter Pan’s faction of Lost Boys — is reliant on a dominant male hierarchy and a pack mentality social system. Whether it’s the thrill of pushing a self-imposed boundary or the effects of too much sexual frustration, men (or more technically, man-children) who are the most rigidly heterosexual will flirt with bemusing nasty-boy behavior gays themselves wouldn’t be caught dead acting out.

Sure, it’s a good thing to be in touch with your animal nature. It’s just that some guys maybe need to consider hormone suppressants.

Crypto-Queers have their own highly-specified customs that constantly verge on the brink of all-out gayness but never actually dare to take the plunge. Common markers include: living in close quarters with other members of the herd in the form or brotherhoods and fraternities, spontaneous bouts of public nudity, skinny dipping, circle jerking, pantsing, taking forever to get dressed in locker rooms, rough-housing standing in for actual sexual interplay, spraying one another with beer and putting maximum effort into contorting the body in order to suck their own dicks. (more…)

Don Quixote had it right.

Macrophilia. It’s big terminology for a big inkling … as in the intense sexual attraction to literal giants.

Giants — be they the stuff of the grandest legend or the wonkiest sci-fi romp — are as chimerical as the unicorn or the mermaid, creatures born of mankind’s entreaty to find something more magical than itself. It’s that heady ambition that drives Macrophilia, an abstraction that can never truly be realized yet still beguiles its dreamers nonetheless.

Plus it makes for some great fanfare:

Mammoths with unfettered desires and unyielding bodies! Behemoths breaking seams and busting asses! Grasping! Looming! Dwarfing! Crushing! Cyclopean troglodytes who crave the delicate pleasures that only man can provide! Your body — their plaything. Your world — their toy box! (more…)

The Cult of Mormon.

America’s longest-running scam? An authoritarian and insular power structure that holds its members in a stranglehold of fear and shame? Establisher of the driest and most score-free college campus ever?

Publisher of a highly-specific guide to overcoming the insidious effects of masturbation that depicts the act as if it were heroin addiction or demonic possession?

All of the above?

Damn right. But there’s more!

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints finds itself under the microscope as of late what with the recent accomplice-to-rape conviction of self-styled prophet/child slaver Warren Jeffs and the vapid would-be presidential bid of Mitt Romney, who with the aid of his saccharine sons has attempted to deflect sentiments that he’s a Mormon cyborg by staging the campaign equivalent of an Old Spice ad. (more…)