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)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man with a spectacular body must be in want of a stripper gig in Vegas.

These boys dream of working on the Strip, the only Strip that matters: the Boulevard of Neon that stretches from Glitter Gulch to the Bellagio and Beyond.

And so they have very sensibly put their audition tapes on YouTube.

Who needs a “talent reel” or a bachelors degree in “Tele-Communications” — that college major unofficially, and quite universally, known as the School for Spokesmodels?

YouTube and balls of brass is all you need to get you through those golden casino doors.

Nightcharm presents a gaggle of stripper hopefuls for you to cast your cruel but fair eyes upon.

Score on a scale of 0 to 100. And try, try, try to find some place in your heart where you can be more Paula Abdul than Simon Cowell!
(read the full article)

We live, Gore Vidal observed during the Salem Witch Follies known as the Starr Investigation, in a nation “evenly divided between political reactionaries and religious maniacs.”

There isn’t a liberal in sight, he chortles — not a pretty sound — off the pages of The Last Empire — Essays 1992-2000 .

And, really, of all the “liberals” who have announced their candidacy for President in 2008, not a one wants to handle gay marriage in anything like a sober, informed way.

Not a one makes anything like a forthright declarative sentence in support of the full and equal civil rights of that dependable portion of their base that has been relegated to weekend trysts on Brokeback Mountain. (read the full article)

Okay, so far its been 24/7 Anna Nicole.

Every cable news station has turned into Access Hollywood.

War in Iraq? Bombs over Iran? Who gives a hoot!

All we wanna know is did Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband father Baby Dannielynn?

And so Nightcharm will scoop them all with 10 Totally True*, Totally Shocking Things About the Anna Nicole that Nobody Knew.

And when we say TRUE, we mean The Star true. We mean The Globe true! (At left, Anna does Marlyn in an ad for the animal-rights organization PETA.)

Here then are 10 things you’ll soon hear repeated — we’re sure — by the Inquiring Minds at 24/7 News, ever on the hunt to hike up ratings with new Anna Nicole tidbits. (read the full article)

Here then are our 12 Men of Christmas.

Get out of your scorecards, kids. Just as we did last year when we graded awful guys, we’re making a list and checking it twice. In our annual countdown of unlikely mugs we’d fuck anyway, we thought we’d present those Men Who Are Too Beautiful.

You know who they are: Heart-stoppers. Humdingers. All-around impossible beauties. (like soap actor, Victor Weber at top.) (read the full article)

I’ve decided to forgo Christmas this year. With my home remodel stalled in a Kafka-like legal snag, many good friends out of town, several family members in jail and a boyfriend who’s a former, no-holiday-celebrating Jehovah’s Witness, it felt futile to try and fire up my festive fires.

The upside of Scrooging? I’d save money on gifting.

Hardly. Several days in the city to run errands last week and I was shopping like a meth-fueled Ivana Trump.

But shopping for myself.

Here then is my list of highly recommended items to give yourself for Christmas this year. Because to love yourself is — indeed — the greatest love of all.
(read the full article)

“Haven’t found her yet,” Paul Lynde would say when asked by reporters when he might marry.

The gay and beloved and self-hating “Center Square” on Hollywood Squares, Lynde (left) was always famously searching for “the right girl.” By the time TV fame hit, in the 60′s, both he and the entertainment reporters were in on the joke and no one was surprised when he would erupt in his trademark hacking laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Like many gay men who elect to be professionally “straight” — who are homophobic in its strictest sense, that is, they fear the homosexual (in themselves, in this case) — Lynde was aware of his own absurdity. It was perhaps that awareness, accelerated by alcoholism and career envy, that made him so colossally bitter in private.

We have just witnessed the fall of a gay Congressman, who has of late tried to explain himself but in ways that spin homosexuality further out into the Twilight Zone of rehabs and childhood sex traumas. He hasn’t quite come to terms with how ridiculous he has made himself, not only with underaged staffers, but by his self-defeating, anti-gay voting record.

Time perhaps may be kinder than we can be at this moment. Time may, in her gentle forgetful way, soften the edges as she has with other famous homophobic homosexuals that walked that same mile in the same shoes — shoes that ultimately squeaked and bit into their lying toes. (read the full article)