I hate ads.

They’re just everywhere, and if we’re not being bombarded with commercials and billboards, then we get sore-thumb product placement and hidden plugs. As a minority, it’s a toss-up as to what’s worse: just being outright ignored by marketers or having people who categorically don’t understand a thing about you try to pander to your perceived interests.

The results can range from the eye-rolling, to the embarrassing, to the cringe-inducing. Just the casual assumptions about what’s universal are bad enough. Your average shaving or shower gel ad aimed at men will assert that men (read: real men) think about sports every minute and about chicks every other minute. I don’t do either, and yet I’m a user of both products. Huh.

Many is the woman I’ve met who complains that her husband can’t multitask or pick up after himself, yet a single gay guy like me doesn’t have a girlfriend or Blue Fairy to waft in weekly and clean my space for me. When’s the last time you even saw an ad for a household product that featured a man in it? Ever see a single father give a kid cough syrup? How come there are no gay couples in erectile disfunction ads, and more pressingly, why the fuck is everyone always in an outdoor bathtub holding hands?

The thing with advertising is that it’s so unnecessary. Ads create needs for products that didn’t previously exist before a team of execs decided they must, they sell unobtainable dreams, and they treat all of us like monolithic demographics with no social overlap. Gay ads — this encompasses not only directly-targeted merchandise like underwear or fitness equipment, but also Public Service Announcements, implicitly gay commercials, and natch, the Gay Panic ad — are often the worst because they tend to play to the lowest common denominator. A virtual porn aesthetic isn’t really pushed to the same degree in hetero-themed ads like it is in gay ones. Why, you’d swear all we do is fuck and work out! (read the full article)

Gay spectatorship: it used to be all about deciphering.

Before True Blood, Glee, Ugly Betty, and Modern Family, gay characters in television tended to be canny in-jokes among writers; the game was to see how far gay signifiers and innuendo could be pushed so as to register with one smaller audience while completely going over the head of another broader one. It’s a certain campy, broad, conspicuous, idiosyncratic, or “colorful” quality that marks these characters as somehow “other.” This is what accounts for the are-they-or-aren’t-they? inscrutability of Crypto-Gay characters — they have to be discerned by those in-the-know, and their natures are channeled through the eye of the beholder.

Mainstays like Dr. Smith from Lost In Space, Batman and Robin, half the cast of Bewitched, hothouse flower Monroe from Too Close For Comfort, and even more contemporary figures like Joey and Chandler from Friends, the Crane Brothers from Frasier, and ball-breaking Xena are likely to come to mind first, but I’ve assembled a gathering of ten characters who’ve hit home with me through the years and remained favorites who’ve largely managed to slip under the gaydar: (read the full article)

You’ve come a long way, baby.

It’s hard to believe in today’s hyper-produced, corporatized porn industry that there was a time when porn really wasn’t that pretty to watch. Gay porn stars may have kicked the ‘roids, tattooing, and manscaping into high gear, but their medium always required a certain level of physical presentability. Straight porn? Not so much. Men — despite the vital purpose they serve — occupy a decidedly secondary position in that product.

Many of the male stars employed as hardcore porn was introduced to the U.S. were not much to crow about, and if anything, their spindly, shag-headed, porn ’stached aesthetic was deliberately utilized so as to avoid threatening the male viewer’s ego. Today, there are more manly lookers in straight porn than you can shake a dick at — with traditional gay types like spike-haired twinks, tanned frat boys, shaved-down bodybuilders, assertive daddies, and inked-up sex pigs becoming practically common — who are proving that foxy fuckers in skin flicks can actually attract straight male fanfare while garnering appreciative gay audiences.

It’s easy to take a Charles Dera, Evan Stone, or Nacho Vidal for granted, but what about the studs who paved the way for them? Prior to the Web making porn so accessible, many of us relied on our brother’s porn cache or pass-around videos from guys at school, meaning straight stars provided us with our maiden voyages into Smut City. (read the full article)

Porn, to me, can be boiled down to my simple need to admire large, gorgeous cock. I don’t really know what else it’s for, even as the studios labor to ensure that there are impressive train explosions or musical numbers sprinkled throughout the boffing. I can’t be alone when I say "Show me the dick."

Here’s a collection of the current crop of meat-rods that most reliably hold my attention.

Barrett Long has starred in what seems like hundreds of uninspired videos. Luckily, with a dick like his, inspiration is purely optional. It’s best when he’s demanding and talks dirty, of course. I dug his solo scene in Playback (available from Movie Mountain along with tons of his other videos), his recent stuff on My Brother’s Hot Friend (especially the scene where he destroys Kurt Wildwood’s cute little butt) and all that skeevy early stuff for Dink Flamingo.

Anton Adamos (a.k.a. Petri Kent, Axel Cane) is an enigma. I can’t tell you ten words about the man besides that timeless and sort of mysterious art shots of him have drifted all over the net over the past five years, and some of them look like they were taken in the ’80s while others look like modern studio shots. The only commercial video I know of which features him is Bel Ami’s XL Files Volume 3.

Harry Louis, a fixture on UK Naked Men, is known secondarily for his cute, perpetual smile, dangerous body, deep brown eyes — and primarily for his submarine-sandwich-style cock. No matter what strange get-up they put him in, or what sort of gawdy set they film him on, the godly cock is the main attraction. Don’t bother trying to look at anything else.

(read the full article)

Types. Everyone has one. Everyone is one.

The Boy Next Door. The Dreamboat. Mr. Right. Mr. Vain. Big, Dumb and Slutty. Every cliché exists in life. Some lose ground and become merely quaint. Others gather stream and become iconic. The It Type of the moment: Douchebags. They’re everywhere, and this emerging new type is easy to nail but hard to nail down. Not soulful, tortured or cool enough to be true Bad Boys and too oversexed to be geeks, it seems to be sheer unwarranted self-belief in all-consuming ego that drives them. Hollywood — the lodestar of all that we love and loathe sexually — is churning these dipwads out by the bucketful. With a sea of Summer’s Eve to wade through, how ever does one choose the pioneers?

Now, for your pleasure and edification, the definitive Top Ten Guide to the Douchebag Pantheon featuring a dazzling array of deluded D-bags not soon forgotten:

10. Wilmer Valderrama: Fun-Sized Douche

Like technically hot-from-the-neck down Dax Shepard and Sean “I couldn’t decide on a first name” William Scott, Wilmer is yet another Ashton Kutcher douche protégé. Wilmer really went against type on That ’70s Show by playing a petit, fey man-child with a strange name who could only get young women who had terrible emotional problems to spread for him. His real claim to fame is his role as Hollywood’s preeminent Virgin Surgeon. All manner of unsuspecting young starlets are drawn to his magnetic douchiness. Either that or his immense tool, which Wilmer is always happy to boast about. Quoth the douche: “Honestly, I’ve been very blessed. This is the place where I will tell you, yes, I am cursed with this gift. It’s over 8 inches.” Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to be deflowered by this sawed-off lothario so that he can later rate you on a scale of 1 to 10? Fate has smiled again on Wilmer as he’s now essaying the role he was born for: portraying Francis “Ponch” Poncherello in the upcoming C.H.I.P.s remake, a part once made famous by his predecessor douche equivalent Erik Estrada. (read the full article)

1. Turn Your Fetish for Rigid Members Into the Toast of Manhattan

Robert Mapplethorpe combined the shock effect of hardcore S&M porn with the fashion lighting and stagey compositions of George Platt Lynes, a photographer of artistic male nudes from the 40’s and, in many ways, Mapplethorpe’s gay herald.

But where Lynes had concentrated on elegant male forms, Mapplethorpe, an artist of the 70’s, focused on images of hard-ons, such as the monster cock at top. In his own way, Mapplethorpe’s boners were just as elegantly framed and fit in smoothly with the rest of his portfolio,vaguely glamorous shots of underground celebrities like Patti Smith, Grace Jones and Keith Haring. (read the full article)

10. Stop with the Plywood Gloryholes, Please!

Not all productions have to have King Kong budgets. Cheap-o amateur releases have their own charm and enormous followings. A straight- looking dork with a tough set of pecs and guns to match can succeed at being sexy, lurid, erotic, brilliant, and worth every penny.

Thing is if we buy an amateur video, we should pay amateur prices. Yo, Mr. Porn Producer! Crummy lighting and plywood sets do not require putting your house up for a second mortgage. Renting a room at a Days Inn, as well as some Jenna Jameson videos for your star to watch, does not make this an Andrew Lloyd Webber extravaganza.

On the other hand when we buy the latest $79.95 big-budget bonanza, we damn well better get our money’s worth. It better be excessively overblown — in every sense of that word! Shot in villas and on foreign shores. For 80 bucks, we want a cast of thousands — great looking men having fantastic sex with hallucinatory sunset lighting everywhere.

And a soundtrack we can dance to.

9. Spare us the Shaved Man-Pussies

Shaving is for pussies — literally. Listen up, you princes of porn, you big-balled sultans of swing. The only part of you that should be shaved is your head — so that it more resembles a dick. You — no matter what you may feel deep down when men shower you with gifts and call you a movie star — are not a woman. If you were, a trimmed quim might be cool. Female genitals are hidden inside the body so it makes sense to clear away the brush.

But dig it, you’re a meat puppet, Jocko. It’s already hanging out there, ready to go. Bald pubic areas look awful. They infantalize and neuter a guy. It may be next to godliness, but when it comes to sex, there’s such a thing as being way too clean!

8. Not Enough Big Dicks

Sure, there are probably over eight million videos devoted solely to the glory of Monster Dick. We say, why not 80 million?

Cock-worship is at the heart of all things homo. It unites every gay male around one gigantic lingam pole, where we can join hands, revel in our commonality, and go quietly nuts.

If we don’t see the kind of cock that rates its own zip code on an average of one every cinema minute, we might think, oh shit, we’re sitting through The Hours again!

Don’t short shrift us. (read the full article)

Welcome to the United States of Rapture.

Can there ever be enough Jesus? Having won their War on Christmas (yes, we are happy to report, it will be held again next year) and signing up their flocks in Republican voter drives, and enlisting all those happy, shiny evangelicals as “Marriage Protectors” (not to be confused with Athletic Protectors), Christians in America are straining under their persecution.

It is a persecution that comes from living in a country where false religions are unpunished by public burnings at the stake, where science is still taken seriously, where the death prayers and earthquake fatwahs of the Reverend Pat Robinson have become — shock! — a national joke!

Because Jesus is simply not ubiquitous enough, not embedded in art, books, movies, songs and gift-shop brick-a-brac enough, Nightcharm lists some rare but recent sightings of this obscure First Century Deity — hard because in America, his hidden catacomb cult is relegated to megachurches, cable networks, and weekly councils with the President.

Here then are our favorite moments in Jesus USA.

Oops, we forgot. First a prayer from the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. Please bow your head …

Amen. And take it away, Jesus …. (read the full article)