“Oh! — I’m into that too?”

It’s a question I’ve been self-posing with greater frequency as Nightcharm delves into deeper substrata of kink. With each topic we broach, I find myself asking “Yow! – is that really a thing?,” followed by a bemused, “Huh…That’s hot.”

Furries? I can kind of get it what with being an animal lover, and my swooning third grade love was Vincent — the subway body-surfing lionman from Beauty & The Beast. Macrophilia? Glancing at my DVD shelf and seeing King Kong, Village of The Giants, The Amazing Colossal Man, Frankenstein Conquered The World, and War of The Gargantuas, I ponder how much I’d like to find a man who is taller and stronger than me — I really don’t like having to be the Alpha Male in the relationship full-time — whom I could give myself over to. Male Lactation? Well, I have always been a sucker for a high-sitting rack on a guy. Kilts? I now own one after writing about their appeal. Thus far, only autoerotic asphyxiation has been lost on me, and I think that’s because I tend to chafe easily.

It’s the overlap between Zoophilia and Furryism that I’m falling into, and looking back, that’s not a recent development. The French Orangina ad involving a hot-ass Cougar Man and his human paramour that’s been making rounds on the Net this past week has me realizing that my sexual fantasyscape is a lot broader than I ever imagined.

I do find Cougar Man just dizzyingly gorgeous, and misanthrope that I am, I’ve often opined that I could love an animal imbued with all the sentience of a human mate minus the weakness and flakiness quite easily. That’s the most perverse thing about being a human animal for me; you can possess all the best adaptations with a potent sex drive to boot, but that still doesn’t mean you won’t end up mateless, no matter how enthusiastically you present.

And that raises my hackles. (read the full article)

I’ve never needed enemies.

The Right truly craves monsters — Black Gestapos, Feminist Valkyries, Mexican Marauders, and Homo Hoydens — that it can rail against and use as foils to define itself. Good must have an Evil flipside, otherwise everything becomes confoundingly relative. If it can’t find antagonists, it just conjures them up and insists it’s being lied to by a world that can’t be twisted and shaped to meet its needs.

Personally, I can live just fine without an antipode to define myself, and I’d argue that the gay community by and large is happy to be without them, too. When our families prove to be draining on us and remain obdurate to the realities of our lives, we walk away. I’d wager most of us who work in mixed work places are careful how much we reveal about ourselves for fear of running afoul of someone who’s going to make it their personal mission to run us out. If every fire and brimstone televangelist, fat shock jock, and blonde values whore went extinct tomorrow, there would be no retroactive falsification that would kick in and cause us to admit that they weren’t so bad to have around.

They were, and it sucked. (read the full article)

I was just a kid at Boy Scout Camp when my 13-year-old friend produced a stack of Hustler magazines he’d sneaked onto the trip.

There were four of us in the tent, and we stayed up late with our flashlights on a windy, hot summer night experiencing what was my first view of hardcore porn: there were facials, cumshots, muscled naked men standing over submissive blondes, and close-ups of spread-open vaginas, along with big-breasted women salaciously sticking out their tongues. Hustler was far more explicit than most dirty magazines, and some of the images were shocking.

My friend said he found the stack in a dumpster, though I suspect he was either given them or stole them from his stepdad. Something similar to that experience is shared by nearly every teenage boy in America, gay or straight, generation after generation, as long as they came of age after the invention of photography and before the popularization of the Internet. Dirty pictures were something we all eventually came across, but still a rare thing to be cherished. We got porn from our older brothers, from boxes in the garage our fathers thought they threw out years ago, or as in my case, from friends, proudly presenting discoveries in the form of smut printed on the backs of dirty playing cards and erotic posters.

Discovering porn for the first time was something that made us feel free, mischievous and deviant; ironically, it is also something persistently normal and commonplace, and more often than not our parents who discovered us would feign appropriate anger, but secretly shrug and say that’s what boys do. (read the full article)

Most people fantasize about doing them. I’d rather be one of them.

Yes, one of my most recurring (so you know it’s good) playgrounds of sexual wish fulfillment is to have a twin. An evil twin as my devious doppelgänger who could detach protozoa-like from my own body and be the vessel into which I could house all the dark and disturbing facets of my personality that I’m not equipped to deal with, thus unburdening me of haunting division. Our sole demarcation? Hair color — that Hitchcockian cliché that distinguishes good from bad, virgin from whore. I would get to be the blond ingenue of the pair who walks in the light, and he’d be the brunet sex kitten driven by unhinged sociopathy and violent possessiveness of me. Then we take to seducing men by night and committing crimes for kicks, ultimately dying together rather than surrendering to the police in an exquisite fade to black.

I have a very elaborate inner world. (read the full article)

When it comes to any sort of group activity — pep rallies, sports, flash mobs, gang bangs — I’ve just never been much of a joiner.

In the context of Nightcharm, I’m something of a mutant. Virtually all of the team here are lapsed Catholics who ultimately turned to some other form spirituality, but I was never raised with religion, and I’ll never turn to it.

My sojourn with The Gay doesn’t really fit the established pattern either. I never bore the paralyzing yoke of difference and guilt that hetero-slanted faith places on people. People may want to chip away at me, but no one has ever touched me. I have no soul-rending rejection by a het love interest that haunts me. Even if I could mystically condition my orientation away — it seems rather like trying to learn to breathe, in the sense that it’s so much effort put into an act that doesn’t require it — it wouldn’t alter my social mobility a bit. Shame and inferiority fostered by the Father have never broken my back. (read the full article)

You don’t want to know how it’s made.

That admonition is usually reserved for referring to certain foods, but it can extend to other products of dubious concoction. Like porn. Specifically, straight porn.

If mainstream gay porn’s personal tumult is whether to doff condoms to compete with encroaching cut-rate bareback productions and a tough economic climate, then top-tier straight porn finds itself questioning just how far is too far when it comes to raunch. I’ll freely admit to enjoying more high-class straight productions based on the new wave of built and attractive male stars they employ. Still, if I avoid condomless gay porn because I think it tends to present performers at their worst, then low-budget gonzo-style straight porn is equally repellent to me.

As its style and tone could worryingly become the new industry standard, I have to wonder if there is some fundamental difference between the straight male and gay male libidos. When we seek out skin flicks, do we really want the same things from them, and are hetero men bringing something to the table that’s foreign and unintelligible to us? For all the adverse drubbing gays take for being supposed perverts and freaks, is there a weird and vicious motivation in the straight male sex drive that’s pandered to by porn merchants and thus implicitly encouraged? (read the full article)

Money can’t buy it. At least not all of it.

Cosmetic surgery is not unlike a bad friend or a fair weather boyfriend: it leads you on, promises a lot but rarely delivers, and slowly comes to preoccupy your mind until it reaches the level of a fixation. It’s also used best in small doses. Yes, a looker can ratchet up his appeal by thinning out his nose or maybe broadening his chin, but the idea that you could build a perfect human beauty in a piecemeal manner like you’re sampling from a platter is ill-advised. The goal may be, say Candis Cayne (as close to being Myra Breckinridge‘s “new woman whose astonishing history started with a surgeon’s scalpel” as any man or woman is likely to get), but the reality is more Amanda Lepore. Miss the mark of Brad Pitt, and you end up with Kim Vo. Dare to emulate Angelina Jolie, and the horror that is Octomom ensues.

“Pretty is just a lucky accident,” opined the troubled heroine from Cheerleader Camp, and that’s become my beauty mantra. It comes down to a serendipitous harmony of genes being passed on by two attractive mates, the stronger traits hopefully dominating, the right features maybe coalescing, and symmetry possibly balancing it all out. Even then the end result is still a wild card — you’d think that Hugh Hefner‘s union with amazonian Kimberly Conrad would result in some discernible physical presence of her in their two sons, but no, while Nick Simmons, plagiarist son of Gene Simmons, didn’t luck out despite having mom Shannon Tweed in the mix.

A surgeon can only do so much, and when he endeavors to recreate a person from the ground up, the combined folly of doctor and patient crosses the line from Galatean to Frankensteinian. (read the full article)

For me, it’s the question that’s always the most effective in firing like a black arrow into the heart of the Fundamentalist dragon, felling it down to earth in a cloud of ash and fire:

Why are there gay animals?

Confront even the most strident sexual absolutist with this lone, almost child-like question, and a look of confounded frustration will come over them. Clearly stymied, they’ll never be able to give me even a halfheartedly assured reason for homosexuality existing in the animal kingdom. There’ll be some hurried allusion to God creating Adam and Eve in his own image, then something arcane about man being the master of beings that fly or walk on all fours will be trotted out.

The only conclusion that I can reasonably reach from it all is that Man is held to a higher standard of sexual decency than other life forms by his Sky Daddy. Cain and his whoever-the-hell-she-was wife were special. Her improbable existence has been justified by everything from Adam’s and Eve’s genes being so ideal that they permitted him to a marry a sister without fear of inbred mutation, to Cain marryin’ up an ape-woman member of the early hominids and producing those beastly “other races” whose genealogies lie in the mating of a perfect Aryan with a lesser being. They had to keep it classy. So…ewww either way.

Bambi and Thumper, however, are apparently allowed to throw it around the forest any which way they please. (read the full article)

The current boy-rape scandal in the Catholic Church is shaping up to be a Vatican Watergate. Like President Nixon, Pope Joseph Ratzinger’s fingerprints are all over a worldwide cover-up of child abuse at the hands of priests.

Back in 2005, the first wave of scandals broke in the United States. The immediate impulse of Vatican officials was to change the subject, as the Pope is trying (unsuccessfully) to do now. Blame was laid on “social change” and “homosexuals,” as if priestly abuse began in 1960 and gay men were unknown in a church where the clergy are forbidden to marry. At the time, our Senior Editor John Calendo responded to the tarring of all gay priests with the following post. (read the full article)

Chat Roulette is an adventure.

It’s an expedition in human behavior, namely in what people will do to each other when every inkling of accountability is absent. In its essence, Chatroulette.com is speed-dating over the Internet, except it is unspecific to gender, everyone knows that the end point is not love, and nobody gets a second date. There is no login or registration required; you simply visit the site and click play, and enable your webcam. The server instantly hooks you up with another user - a stranger from anywhere in the world – whose live face appears on the video section of your computer screen. You can chat in a dialog window or by microphone.

The most important portion of your screen is the prominent next button, which you or the other person may click at any time to immediately be whisked off to a new stranger.

When users encounter ordinary people they’ve never met in a community they don’t have any ties to, raw behaviors emerge. There is no one to call you out on rudeness after you next them, so cruel comments will be coupled with blatant rejection. There is no one to ruin your professional reputation, no one to charge you with a misdemeanor for indecency. It’s impossible for strangers to cuss you out or shame you for being a prick if you next them before they can respond, so no one can stop you from accosting elderly women, children and the deeply insecure.

Your tactfulness with rejecting someone or patience with uninteresting encounters is completely up to your own conscience. The anonymity and randomness of the game means that there are no social consequences beyond having to re-set your internet connection if your IP address gets banned by a moderator for indecency, if any moderators even exist. You can do pretty much whatever you want – and people do. (read the full article)

A recent French anti-smoking ad campaign only raises more questions than it answers.

Yes, I’m a non-smoker and always will be, but showing wispy, waify, shag-haired French youths symbolically sucking off the corporate Man in an effort to cast smoking as exploitation has deeper ramifications. When done right, oral is not submissive and steeped in victimization, and what if you have a thing for sexy-ass Daddies in business attire? What if you’re the aggressor forcing yourself on vulnerable older men in a role reversal scenario? How about if you’re waxing his sex stick for gum? Is it OK as long as it’s sugar-free? And what if he smokes afterward? What then?

Torn.

The main reason I’ve never been religious: I always feel like faith is really a product.

God always seems to be cash-strapped what with all his overhead — I never get why the physical embodiment of greed is not a vice in the way that other earthy delights are — and so there’s a pay-to-play covenant to piety. Money goes into a collection plate. Indulgences buy salvation. Televangelists weep for donations, and no one who shells out ever asks why they live on palatial estates. Prayer is an insurance policy that will keep you from harm, and Heaven is like a country club membership. The Daily Show‘s brilliantly cutting swipe at the Catholic Church’s transparent attempt to lure pissed-off Anglicans into its ranks was one of its finest moments. If you’re not satisfied with your religion, just change spiritual providers like you would a cell phone plan.

(read the full article)

I always thought it was interesting that the French language has a masculine and feminine distinction for nouns. For certain words it’s fairly intuitive, but how do you designate the gender of, say, an object like a spoon or a book shelf that doesn’t trigger an immediate phallic or vaginal association?

Having never been a gender reductivist — as a child I loathed the tendency for certain elementary school teachers to nip in the bud anything they perceived as tomboyish or sissy in kids — I can’t fathom the infantile idea of relating everything we do back to our genitals. The hottest women to me have a hint of cliche “male” qualities to them like husky voices or thick eyebrows, and some of the sexiest men have a little lady in their cheekbones or hands. Even my own face is a conglomeration of masculine and feminine traits; I have the broad forehead and nose usually associated with men, but then I have long eyelashes and full lips that play more girlie. Androgyny is more than just a physical state — it’s also a mindset or an aura.

So, if you’re fixated on biological absolutism, then even food has a butch/femme dichotomy.

(read the full article)