(Much about gay porn, so there’s plenty about the male body and man-man sex, in very plain language, but (just barely) without the visuals. Use your judgment. There are also a few linguistic notes.)

It starts with postcards that Max Meredith Vasilatos has been sending me, including a couple with photographs by Matt Bauer (who was new to me): shots of gay pornstars that are clearly gay porn, and intended to be, but are also male art of some interest. Mark Mason in particular.

To come: material on Mason; then on Bauer and some subjects of his other than Mason; then a digression on what is almost surely a different  photographer named Matt Bauer. Mark Mason then led me to a vein of humor/criticism that I hadn’t realized existed: Gay Porn Minus Gay Sex, intended as a critique of bad gay porn: when you don’t have the visuals (the meat in the sandwich, as it were), you’re forced to attend to the acting and so will begin to appreciate the deficiences of the acting. (In particular, “Tales From Two Cities” Minus Gay Sex”; Mason appears in the cast of the original “Tales From Two Cities” of 1999.)

Mark Mason. Here’s a version of the postcard photo, with Mason’s genitals cropped out:

(#1)

Here we see the muscular, mildly scruffy Mason gazing intently, invitingly,  into your eyes, with the suggestion that he might smile soon, meanwhile displaying his body, especially his six-pack, for you. (Also note the erect nipples; he’s aroused.) In the postcard version of the photo, his mouth is slightly open, a further gesture of invitation.

The full photo — from the Gay Muscle Time site (“focusing on gay muscle men”) — can be seen as #1 in my “Mark Mason” posting on AZBlogX. There, Mason’s cock is half-hard, inviting you to make it fully hard. All in all, a performance signaling receptivity.

Also from the Gay Muscle Time site, another photo (pretty clearly from the same shoot as #1), with focus on his biceps as well as his abs, but this time fully open to you, in a pits-n-tits pose:

(#2)

(The uncropped photo is #2 in my AZBlogX posting.)

Brief digression (from an earlier posting here) on the photographer Jonathan Black and his book Idols; on male photography, which explores the male body, especially with a gay gaze; and on the genre of images like the two above:

What the photographer reveals. Some commenters on the Idols book dismiss it as high-class (and expensive) jack-off material. There’s no question that the images present the subjects as “objects of lust”, as one commenter put it, and I’m sure that was part of Black’s intention; there would be nothing surprising, or wrong, in jacking off to whichever of these photos move you. … But Black was also trying to evoke characters: the personas he saw in these men, and perhaps the ones they saw in themselves.

Similarly for Bauer in his images of Mason.

Jonathan Black is especially relevant here, because he too shot Mason back in the 90s. Mason on Black’s cover of Advocate Men for December 1996, with his pecs featured prominently:

(#3)

On Advocate Men, from Wikipedia:

Men was an American gay pornographic magazine originally published as Advocate Men from 1984 until 1997, when it was retitled Men. … [It offered] explicit nude male photography [typically by accomplished photographers], often featuring popular stars from the gay adult film industry, erotic fiction, video reviews and other features.

About Mason. He was born 4/20/64 in West Virginia and in the 90s identified as gay. From a gay pornstar site, somewhat edited here:

He started working in the hardcore business in 1997 at the age of 33. Mark was featured in Boy Toy Wrestling 2, which was directed by Paul Carrigan. The meaty [Mason] also appeared in Paul Barresi’s The Mentor, released in 2006. Mark Mason teamed up with Patrick Ives, Kip Casey and Kent Burke in the film The Orgy Experience. He was last seen performing in 1999 and never went back to the business.

A still from The Mentor, Mason and youngman Peter Wilder about to kiss at the dinner table:

(#4)

Mason as mentor/daddy, Wilder as student/boy. The studio’s entertaining blurb:

“These horny young students of man sex are taking their lessons the hard way. But nobody is complaining. They have discovered that their daddy mentors have a lot more than just experience to offer…”

Matt Bauer. I have no real information about the photographer of #1 and #2. He had a substantial career in male photography, specializing in pornstars as his subjects, in the 90s and then seems to have vanished. Two more images from him: pornstar Cicero Scott on the cover of the November 1996 Advocate Men, pornstar Jim Thorpe in a feature in the December 1996 issue:

(#5)

(#6)

Digression: Matt C. Bauer. Searching for information about 90s pornman Matt Bauer led me to a more recent photographer Bauer: the outdoorsy, athletic Matt C. Bauer, with a website on which he identifies himself as a “photographer, creative director, entrepreneur” in Venice CA and writes enthusiastically about himself:

Matt Bauer is a self taught photographer who’s only filter is following his passions. After completing his collegiate Division 1 swimming career with a degree in advertising, Matt left the east coast to chase his dream, working in the action sports industry. Matt broke down the stereotypes of what a surf obsessed youth from Philadelphia could do.

Outdoorsy Matt Bauer shoots surfers and skateboarders; landscapes (for instance, Yosemite); and lots of commercial photography (for instance, for GLCO, Garrett Leight California Optical).

Two photos of Bauer (by other photographers): with his surfboard; and in glasses from GLCO:

(#7)

(#8)

An interesting photographic subject in his own right.

I haven’t been able to find out how old outdoorsy Matt C. Bauer is, but I can’t imagine that he’s old enough to be a new incarnation of pornman Matt Bauer from 20 years ago.

Gay Porn Minus Gay Sex. Now, a great find via Mark Mason: the video “Tales From Two Cities” Minus Gay Sex — Bad Gay Porn Acting”:

(There is in fact, a whole series of “Bad Gay Porn Acting” videos.)

The video starts with 1999 gay porn flick from Catalina Video,”Tales From Two Cities”, breathlessly described by the studio as follows:

When this sexy couple travels out of town, they can’t help but miss each other…or avoid their sexual urges! With a muscle-clad cast led by Blake Harper and Steve Rambo, watch as these hairy studs find themselves in sticky situation after sticky situation…literally! With FOUR scenes full of chiseled manly-men, throbbing cocks and nonstop ass-pounding, this is one Catalina production you don’t want to miss!

The cities in question are L.A. and Chicago. Harper and Rambo are married, and have sworn to monogamy, but in the course of the flick, both are unfaithful, though the resolution is that they reaffirm their exclusive bond to one another, with one swearing, “Your dick is the only one I want up my ass”. Ah, the poetry of true love!

The actors, with two names boldfaced (Mason’s and for reasons that will soon become clear, Steve Hurley’s): Blake Harper, Dave Nelson, Jason Branch, Joshua Scott, Mark Mason, Perry James, Steve Hurley, Steve Rambo, Carson Cole, and Rob Lance.

The Gay Porn Minus Gay Sex version was created by suppressing the video in all the visually X-rated parts — the good stuff — with graphics of rainbow pandas:

(#9)

The audio, with its sex talk and sex noises, is preserved. The effect is to focus your attention on the acting.

The Minus version was apparently created by “Titpig”, presumably the actor Steve Hurley, a hairy, muscular bear who is sometimes known by this name, from his own sexual predilections.

Minus versions. One side point: the model expession here is, I assume, the Music Minus One recordings, in which versions of multi-part musical compositions are made with one part suppressed, so that users can perform this part themselves.

Eventually, we get to things like the Garfield Minus Garfield comics, which I’ve posted about here.

Gay tits and titpigs. Another sidepoint, which comes in two parts.

First, tits in a gay sexual context. In brief: straight men have nipples, gay men have tits. Yes, a carry-over of usage for women to usage for gay men, as in a number of other cases. Compare man pussy, boy cunt, etc, in which we have the ‘male anus viewed as a sexual organ’ (posting here). In gay tits, we have the male nipple viewed as a sexual organ.

Then to titpig in a gay sexual context, using “the snowclonelet X pig, denoting someone who’s seriously into X (sex pig, involving sex in general or specifically “dirty sex” of various kinds; dick pig; piss pig)” (posting here). Specifically, a gay man who’s seriously into titplay, either as receiver or giver (very often both), so a gay man especially aroused by getting or giving nipple stimulation or (in a BDSM context) pain. Titpigs are stereotypically big hairy men, bears, leathermen, and sexual fetishists. Steve Hurvey is all of these (on the last, he has a thing for cigars), so the name fits him well.

It started with a postcard from my friend Max:

(#1)

The card said this was a photo of model Nathan Black, from Body Image Productions. That led me to the company’s website (not especially easy to negotiate) and eventually to the information that #1 was from a photo spread in Men magazine (formerly Advocate Men) by male photographer Ron Lloyd — a magazine that was one of a number of publications that supplied high-quality erotic photography (featuring lots of full-frontal nudity) appealing primarily to to gay men (who used it as jack-off fuel) but also to straight women. The models have attractive (and carefully developed) bodies — they are muscle hunks — which they, in effect, sell: they are professional muscle hunks.

Body Image Productions has an even narrower focus: its wares are aimed specifically and unapologetically at gay men, and they are intended as well “for the physique connoisseur”.

The company sells books and calendars of erotic male photography, and now DVDs in which Lloyd’s hunky models do a specialized form of gay porn: solo performances, with a man jacking off for an audience. (Some guys who do solo-only are in fact straight, but they love to display their bodies and usually revel in the attention they get from gay men.)

Still photography calls for some acting ability, some talent for projecting a persona; Nathan Black was really good at this. (If you decide to look at his Men spread, you should know ahead of time that Black has some scarring on his (otherwise very attractive) penis that shows as a white strip — an imperfection that Black, admirably, just ignores in his performance for the camera.) But videos call for more serious acting abilities, and not all professional muscle hunks have them. In a while I’ll post more about one who’s really wonderful doing solo work, the regrettably named Braun Drek (I’ll post about the name, too).

Now, Ron Lloyd. From his book publisher in an amazon.com writeup:

Ron Lloyd, the man behind Body Image Productions, started his career as a professional photographer in the early 80’s. As a young man he developed a passion for the beauty of pronounced forms through looking a bodybuilding magazines.

Now he supplies these images for other aficionados.

From the Body Image Production site on Lloyd’s most recent Legend Men photo book (reproduced here exactly as on the site):

Photographer Ron Lloyd has one of the best jobs of this planet without doubt: He’s looking for muscular, incredibly good looking hunks and makes them strip off their clothes in front of his camera … all their clothes. With a naughty grin on their face these dream-made-flesh guys present their bodies, which are immaculate from top to bottom. Horny hunks such as Zeb Atlas and Von Legend are popular among gay men worldwide — and in Lloyds third photo book LEGEND MEN they offer us a look that really deserves to be called “legendary”.

(#2)

Model Von Legend aka Matt Davis on the cover

(If a Lloyd model has any clothes on at all, he’s about to strip them off.)

And Lloyd’s recent book Built!, with Zeb Atlas on the cover:

(#3)

(No, Zeb Atlas doesn’t have a small head; it’s entirely normal in size, but he has an absolutely gigantic upper body. He has a big dick, but in photos it often looks small, by comparison to his musculature. However, if you actually dealt with it, as guys do in the hard-core porn Atlas performs in, you’d realize that it was really big.)

Now from the company’s calendar days — it no longer seems to produce them — two examples: Naked Straight Men, with Max Wheeler on the cover; and Naked Hairy Jocks, with Braun Drek on the cover:

(#4)

(#5)

Now we’re in video and DVD days. Here’s the cover of the Legend Men DVD, with Braun Drek again:

(#6)

Pornhub has a big pile of Drek solo videos. I’m not generally a fan of solo performances, but these are really good. He has a handsome face, a great smile, and a long dick, and he loves to display himself. He puts on a fine show.

Digression on the name. I haven’t yet found an audio in which Braun Drek pronounces his stage name, or even one in which someone else does, but I’m pretty sure his first name is not /brawn/ (like brown), as it would be if taken directly from the German family name, but instead /brɔn/ (like brawn), as in Carol Mosely Braun and the bodybuilder P.J. Braun. That would be an auspicious first name for a professional muscle hunk

But Drek is harder to cope with. It would, alas, seem to be dreck /drɛk/. From NOAD2:

rubbish; trash: this so-called art is pure dreck. ORIGIN early 20th cent.: from Yiddish drek ‘filth, dregs,’ from a Germanic base shared by Old English threax; probably related to Greek skōr ‘dung’

Dreck is often glossed as crap (both as ‘rubbish, junk; nonsense’ and as ‘excrement’) or even shit (again, two sense ranges).

Maybe someone thought of Drek as powerful name, like Shrek (the ogre), suggestive of German Schreck ‘terror, shock, fear’, or Dred, suggestive of dread (note pornstar Dred Scott); or as suggestive of Derek / Derik (derrick, a construction machine with masculine associations) and Drake ‘male duck’. But it sure does sound like dreck. And if you know a bit of Yiddish, Braun Drek reads as ‘brown shit’.

The muscle hunk continuum. Ron Lloyd’s models are far out on the continuum of muscle hunks, a continuum that ranges from well-muscled very fit men (like most underwear models and many actors given to shirtlessness) to the Truly Huge, like the “massively muscled bodybuilder type” Billy Herrington (the pornstar) and, even more, competitive bodybuilders like Flex Wheeler, with high muscular definition and very low bodyfat. Both Herrington and Wheeler were treated in a December 7th posting of mine.

At the high end, we have men who are extremely ripped: not only massively muscled, but also with bodyfat low enough to produce very prominent veining. Note the comment in the earlier posting about the veining, and also the comment about men at the high end of the continuum as victims of “testosterone poisoning”. Both comments were from gay men; some gay men celebrate, even fetishize, men at the high end of the continuum, but many are turned off by them.

The economy of professional body-workers. Professional body-workers are those who exploit their bodies to earn a living. The category covers the professional muscle hunks I’ve been talking about, men who use their bodies to earn model fees for work for photographers, but it includes much more: male models in general, especially underwear models; male strip-tease performers, like the Chippendales dancers and Channing Tatum and other actors in the Magic Mike movies, all of whom do “male erotic dance shows”, and men performing solo at parties; other men paid to dance for audiences (doing pole-dancing for tips, for example); men who do solo porn; and men who are straightforwardly sexworkers of one sort or another — doing hard-core porn, doing live sex shows, and men working as rentboys, escorts providing sex, and sexual masseurs. It’s very common for men who serve in one of these occupations to take on work in another, or of course other work outside of body-work. (Gay porn actors may also work as models, dancers, or escorts, and many have more ordinary jobs.) And of course men whose main source of income is something other that body-work (notably professional athletes and actors) may do some body-work as a sideline.

Very few men who get modeling fees can come close to living on them; they need other work. Male photographers (like Ron Lloyd and others I’ve talked about) can get closer to living on the fees they get from selling their photographs of men, but almost all of them do other sorts of photography (say, fashion photography, portraiture, journalistic photography, or “art photography”) and some do other kinds of artwork as well. But, still, they have to piece together a living, and many have resorted to operating as their own distributors, in the belief that the real money comes from selling the products (books, DVDs, and videos-on-demand (VODs), in particular) to the public.

This is what Ron Lloyd has done with the videos he makes. In addition to Body Image Productions, there is a separate legendmen.com site, with spreads on all of the models he’s used, which serve as a come-on to a subscription service for VODs.

Two male-hunk calenders, one with an image for the Christmas season. Mr. December from the Meet the Bern calender, supporting Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders:

(#1)

And the cover image from the Calendrier des Pompiers calender, with homoerotic male photography celebrating French firemen:

  (#2)

(Hat tip to several Facebook friends for #1, to Kim Darnell for #2.)

Bern. The Sanders calendar (note: not an official product of the Sanders campaign) has attractive men in little or no clothing, most having bits of language play (including double entendres) supporting Bernie. From BuzzFeed:

Twelve months of dudes wearing not much more than a Sanders sticker — sometimes even less than that — plus a centerfold.

#1 above has a minimally clothed underwear model putting a Bernie doll at the top of his Christmas tree. Here’s Mr. May (the models are of a wide range of physical types) with a jokey caption and a Bern pun:

  (#3)

Les Pompiers. From the Bright Side website, which says:

These firemen from France have released the most stunning 2016 calendar you’ve ever seen

#2 I recognized as the work of male photographer Fred Goudon, who I’ve posted about twice on AZBlogX: “Concealing and revealing: Fred Goudon” of 11/16/10; and “Concealing and revealing: more Fred Goudon” of 11/23/10. In the latter posting I wrote:

Cinq is thoroughly erotic in tone, focused on beautiful, sensuously presented, young men (as are Goudon’s four other books).

(A sixth book, Summer Souvenirs, has now been published.)

Wikipedia on Goudon:

Fred Goudon is a French professional photographer. Originally from Cannes ([in the] south of France), he is now based in Paris.

He started shooting when his father gave him a camera as a gift on his 16th birthday. His work includes shooting of the 2006 issue of Dieux du Stade, (English: Gods of the Stadium) calendar and DVD, featuring nude and semi-nude photographs of members of Stade Français, a Paris-based domestic French rugby team as well as at times players from other rugby union clubs and athletes from other sports. He was invited again to shoot both the 2014 calendar issue and the 2015 issue of the series. He publishes some of his work in books through Bruno Gmunder publishers.

Two covers of the Dieux calendars, for 2014 and 2015:

  (#4)

  (#5)

And one more shot from the fireman calendar, a voluptous nude shot (but with the man’s penis concealed):

  (#6)

Intensely masculine men. And then Goudon does underwear photography as well, for a number of companies. A fabulous video spread of this work can be viewed on YouTube here, set to the song “Let Me Be Your Underwear” by Club 69.

(Steamy, but not actually X-rated, images of hot men, though most are NSFW. Some plain talk about gay sexual practices, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

Homoerotic illustrator is how the Spanish graphic artist Kike Sorroche describes himself (in Spanish) on his Twitter page. His work includes art for its own sake (usually homoerotically tinged, sometimes sexually explicit), commercial art (often for gay-related organizations and causes), and cartoons (all, I think, gay-themed). He favors bearded men with muscular furry chests (much like himself, in fact), especially in leather, and in general can be characterized, in terms he uses of his work, as mucho-G (that is, really gay, given that the name of the letter G in Spanish is pronounced /ge/, close to gay in English). Publicity for his three-panel cartoons about the character Aday:

(#1)

(Aday’s adventures at the beach, mostly cruising in the dunes. Un chico entre las dunas is an allusion to Wakefield Poole’s landmark gay porn movie Boys in the Sand.)

Sorroche came to my attention yesterday, via a one-panel cartoon (in a series) that Mike McKinley sent me:

(#2)

A little hymn to analingus, in plain language ass-licking or rimming. This one has been supplied with English text, but normally his cartoons are in Spanish.

This particular strip, Tristán Dixit ‘Tristan (has) said’ (in Latin), stars the ginger-haired character Tristan, and what Tristan says is that red (hair) is gold (top of the line). The text in the Spanish version:

A veces me gusta pensar en cosas muy, muy profundas…

Mmm… ¡¡beso negro!!

from which we learn that Spanish slang for rimming is beso negro ‘black / dark kiss(ing)’.

Now, two commercial graphics, one for the “hard & fetish” gay bar Berlin Dark in Barcelona (an image showing a bit of testicle, but not the whole package) and one for Club Piss (showing a guy savoring piss in his mouth, but not showing the cock providing it):

(#3)

Meanwhile, Berlin has a number of Spanish-themed gay bars, featuring some Spanish decor and the fantasy of hot steamy Spanish sex (you know what Latin lovers are like!). What I don’t know is whether any of these Spain-in-Berlin establishments are also hard-core fetish bars.

(#4)

Club Piss is a Spanish organization that arranges piss parties in Barcelona and Madrid (and probably other cities as well). From the site: “Club Piss: Bienvenidos al primer club de piss play en España”, from which we learn that gay Spanish for piss play is piss play; it also turns out that gay Spanish for piss party is, yes, piss party, plural piss parties.

Next comes a image whose background I don’t know. This might have been created for a Spanish gay organization, or it might have been created on Sorroche’s own hook, as an expression of gay pride:

(#5)

There are also stand-along images, not part of a cartoon series and apparently not commercially sponsored: Sorroche’s personal art work, much of it drawings (some explicit) of men he fancies: gay pornstar Jonan Wolff, the model for his character Tristan, and so on. Here’s Jonan:

(#6)

Despite the name Wolff, the man is Spanish. Here he is in real life, displaying himself teasingly in his skivvies:

(#7)

Wolff is boyfriends with another gay pornstar, Axel Brooks (who is also Spanish).

From Chris Ambidge a little while back, this arresting piece of sculpture in the form of a human body — a collaboration between model and photographer to yield an image that looks like something made of a silvery metal. In a pose that reminded Chris of photos I’ve posted of male ballet dancers executing movements that make them appear to be flying in mid-air; but this man is posing supported:

An extraordinary, almost hyper-real body in a remarkable pose.

Chris found this on the net, on a site that identified neither the model nor the photographer, though both deserve credit (and praise). So I went to the Google images site in the hope of finding at least one of these pieces of information.

And found that the image had been passed around from one image-aggregation site to another, with never an attribution.

Some people who posted the image thought the model was a bodybuilder, and some thought he was a practitioner of yoga (and a tribute to the vegetarian way of living), and a few lovers of beards were engaged by his scruffy face, but no one seems to have wondered who he was or what the photographer was after in the image.

(This posting alludes to some male-male sexual practices — given the content of the books, that could scarcely be avoided — but in measured language rather than street talk, in accord with the tones of the books, one deeply sexy but sweet, the other not especially sexy but funny. Use your judgment.)

Arrived together a few days ago, two books of (sort of) male photography, where male photography is photography with a homoerotic slant. Sort of in one case because the book goes way beyond a homoerotic slant to explicit gay porn, sort of in the other case because the book alludes to images of men soliciting sex with other men and has a gay sensibility (manifested in its wry take on things: it’s intended to be funny, and it’s hilarious) but is focused elsewhere, on interior decoration as practiced by (non-professional) men.

The first is a product of the CockyBoys porn studio: Sixty Nine: Joyful Gay Sex (Bruno Gmünder, 2015) by photographers RJ Sebastian & Jake Jaxson. The second is the work of photographer and cultural critic (among other things) Justin Jorgensen: Obscene Interiors: Hardcore Amateur Décor (Baby Tattoo Books, 2004). What unites them is their association with artist and gay pornstar Colby Keller; my 2/2 posting on Keller has a section on Jorgensen and a section on CockyBoys.

Sixty Nine. A big book (13.4 x 10.2 x 0.8 in.) on thick stock, primarily featuring lush photos (in relatively soft focus) celebrating men having joyous, affectionate sex with one another. Anal intercourse — and there’s a huge amount of it in this book — has never looked so good.

(#1)

(That’s a grinning Levi Karter playfully licking a foot.)

Accompanying the photos are seven pieces of romantic short fiction about sexual encounters between men. In order:

We Will Always Have Paris, We Watched Ourselves in the Mirror, Naked in the Woods, The Blue Chair, We Wanted to Love and be Loved, Sex on a Sunday, A Fire Island Love Story

The sex is hot, but suffused by love.

Two photos of Karter (on the left in both) with a taller, rougher-looking  (but still loving) Ricky Roman on Fire Island:

(#2)

(#3)

That’s the good stuff. Then the annoying things: the pages aren’t numbered; hence, there can be no table of contents or index; nowhere that I can see are the author(s) of the short fiction identified; the actors in the photos aren’t identifed either (I can pick out Karter and Roman by their tattoos, and I recognize a few other actors because they are favorites of mine, but that wouldn’t work for most people). At least, the Acknowledgments page at the back of the book lists them all:

Pierre Fitch, Ricky Roman, Levi Karter, Tayte Hanson, Justin Matthews, Rafael Alencar, Max Carter, Levi Michaels, Chris Harder. Jaxon Radoc, Jake Bass, Darius Ferdynand, Gabriel Clark, David Corey, Dillon Rossi, Jasper Robinson, Duncan Black, Seth Santoto

Many of them are young (and impudent) and some of them are twinks, but far from all the guys who perform for the studio are boys or boyish.

Obscene Interiors. (Photos in my Colby Keller posting.)  Jorgensen’s inspired idea was to take photos of men that they distribute to solicit sex with other men (I say this carefully, because many of these men don’t identify as gay or bisexual) and focus not on the way these men pose their bodies but on the way they have decorated the spaces they live in. To this end, he replaced the images of bodies with solid gray outlines.

(Note: in many cases, it’s still possible to figure out how they’re displaying themselves. Some of then are clearly showing off their erect penises, others are offering their buttocks (in quite a range of ways), and some probably have neither of these foci of man-man sex exposed, but are open to negotiation.)

In his introduction, Jorgensen frames his central question:

How do we create a space that communicates our ideals of masculinity while simultaneously storing our possessions and displaying our interests? How do we make that same space appeal to our mates? In other words, how do we decorate? The answer: not very well.

Now, surely a fair number of guys soliciting men for sex identify as gay or bisexual, but there’s no evidence in this book that they have any more taste in decorating than other men. We still get clashing colors, regrettably chosen and placed art, odd accumulations of objects, truly ugly or overly fussy furniture, things bizarrely (or dangerously) placed on the top of other things, and so on.

The fact is that men get virtually no preparation in these matters. They decorate spaces that they have reserved for themselves (a number illustrated in Jorgensen’s book), creating dens and mancaves, with wood panelling, the symbols and materials of hunting, fishing, sports, automobile racing, and/or golf, maybe some gym equipment, and plenty of cool electronics and computer games — plus a workshop where they can make things with their tools. These are high-masculinity spaces, places where masculinity is displayed, but also spaces defined by their exclusion of women and their rejection of femininity.  Otherwise, women do most of the decorating.

And so you get to extreme examples, like the one on p. 32, which Jorgensen describes as

proving masculinity by not even attempting anything that could be considered decorating.

I wonder if it ever happens that two guys hook up on-line, one guy goes to the other guy’s place, takes it in says, “I really want to do you in the worst way, but I can’t possibly have sex in a room that looks like this.” Maybe not; urgent desire could probably override almost any degree of good taste.

(About photography/video and the male body, rather than about language.)

It started with a wonderful atmospheric photograph of a gorgeous nude man, sent to me by Mike McKinley, but without a source. The image is #1 in a posting I just did on AZBlogX; although it’s clearly a work of art (by a professional photographer using a professional model), it has a penis in it, so I can’t reproduce it here or on Facebook or Google+.

I gave the image the name “Romantic Haze” (since the model was posed in a blue-purple haze) while I searched for the source. This time Google Images eventually brought me to young Dutch filmmaker and photographer Paul Sixta and his model Marios.

From Sixta’s website, a brief bio:

Paul Sixta (Netherlands, 1979) graduated in 2003 from the Audio-Visual department at St. Joost Breda. Sixta works as a filmmaker and photographer. His films and video-installations were shown on festivals and museums worldwide and won several prizes. Sixta often collaborates with other artists and his work ranges from visual anthropology to performance videos. Sixta’s work deals with sensitive subjects, emphasizes the story telling, and delicately explores relationships.

There’s a generous sampling of his work on his website. There’s a wide range of stuff, including work on couples of all sorts, among them male couples. The studies of men are certainly homoerotic, but they are also character studies. My AZBlogX has three examples, of very different tones; in each, the model’s penis plays a role in the story you might tell about the man in the photo.

Sixta has done other nude studies of Marios, without showing his penis, so I can sample a few of these for you here. First, a shot of Marios’s face:

(#1)

Then a model who is probably Marios but might be another of Sixta’s bearded models (his body seems to be slenderer),  pretty much in full, with his head tilted back, perhaps ecstatically:

(#2)

And then a remarkable pair of mirror-man studies:

(#3)

(#4)

Again, this might be Marios or it might be another of Sixta’s bearded models (he uses a number of them); the model seems to be substantially more muscular and hairier than the Marios in (#1) or in the AZBlogX photo — still, those eyes and that hair!. (Of course, some of these characteristics can be altered by shaving or grooming, and some by manipulating images digitally; note the moustache+beard differences between #3 and #4.)

Today on AZBlogX, two postings:

a follow-up to “Jim French / Rip Colt” of 2/24/13: “Another shot at French/Colt”, with photos from the 1992 “The Macho Image” by Rip Colt (the porn side of French/Colt): randy men in costumes

“Cinco de Mayo with Lucas men”: a Cinco de Mayo sale ad from the Lucas gay porn studio, with an Anglo boy engaging two Latino studs for the holiday

(Only a bit about language, and given the topic, not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The subject of the 2009 book:

Escort: 40 Profiles with Photographs of Men Who Sell Sex (text by David Leddick and Heriberto Sanchez, photographs by David Vance)

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(cover model: Stefan Pinto)

Leddick has a significant career writing about male nudes and male photography, and Vance is a well-known male photographer (though almost always modest in his work, concealing genitals in one way or another, as in the cover photo).

Background X-rated material from AZBlogX, in a posting yesterday on “Guys for hire”, about the Escort book: models Tony Serrano (#1) and Sloan Christian (#2) in full-frontal shots, model Chris (broadly smiling in #3 and #4) in a clothed/unclothed pairing (a common visual scheme in male photography). (Note: all the models are referred to by the pseudonyms they use in their sex work.)

From the book: a variant of the clothed/unclothed pairing, model A. Gabriel (or just A.G.), Israeli-born, now doing sex work in South Florida, broadly smiling, first in (some of his) business clothes (he has a parallel career as an accountant), but featuring a jock strap and athletic socks, and on a bed, paired with him doing a cock tease pose in army camo (he actually served in the Israeli army, and says he hustled while on duty):

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Backgound about existing Pages on this blog: one on postings about concealing and revealing, covering both photographers’ preferences for one presentation of male bodies over the other and also clothed/unclothed pairings; and one on postings about  male prostitution.

Background about Leddick, from his own website (note the source):

[Born 1930 in Detroit MI, now living in Miami Beach,] David Leddick is known world-wide for his novels and homoerotic art books. The author of the Lambda Award-winning books: “Naked Men” and “The Male Nude”, David Leddick has published no less than 27 works [including gay novels]. His latest book is “I’m Not for Everyone. Neither Are You”, from Black Irish Press, Spring 2014.

Leddick has also written musicals with Andrew Sargent as composer: “The Secrets of the Chorus”, “Quentin and I’, “Presenting Gilda Lilly” and “RentBoy… The Musical”, are some of the shows in which he starred.

Previously he has been an officer in the U.S. Navy, danced at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, directed TV commercials and was the Worldwide Creative Director for Revlon at Grey Advertising and International Creative Director for L’Oreal at McCann-Erickson, Paris.

Leddick’s current presentation of self seems to be as an outrageous old queen, a role he performs beautifully. A recent book: Gorgeous Gallery: The Best in Gay Erotic Art (2012):

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(a young man in awe of David’s dick)

Background on Heriberto Sanchez, a young man originally from San Juan PR, working here on his first photo-journalism project. He begins his introductory essay, “Reflecting on Escorts”, with a really fine bit of anaphora into an anaphoric island:

I’ve never escorted nor hired one.

where the nominal anaphor one conveys ‘an escort’, linking to a noun escort that doesn’t actually occur in the preceding context but instead is evoked by the verb escort ‘work as an escort’ that does occur there. See the “Anaphoric islands” Page on this blog.

Sanchez emphasizes that the book is not intended to glamorize prostitution, but to humanize it — to reveal something about the (very diverse) lives of guys in the business.

Background on David Vance, treated at some length in a 3/25/13 posting on this blog (with a number of examples of his work), which is both male art (with the male body as its focus) and character study (with the nature of the subjects revealed especially by their facial expressions, but also by their carriage, posture, dress, and their surroundings).

And as male art, the work is both an aesthetic enterprise (an appreciation of the male body) and an unashamedly homoerotic one (an invitation to arousal).

As I noted above, in most of Vance’s work, he shears away from showing the model’s genitals, supplying instead head shots, torso shors, butt shots, and the full range of cock-tease poses. But even in the full-frontals that Vance shot for the Escort book, it’s the faces that catch your eye first: the face, then the dick, then everything else. A broadly smiling face, as in #2 and #3 above (A.G.), and #3 and #4 on AZBlogX (Chris); an intense, welcoming gaze-lock as in #1 above (Stefan Pinto) and #1 on AZBlogX (Tony Serrano); or a playfully cocky face as in #2 on AZBlogX (Sloan Christian).

And then there’s Arpad Miklos, a high-end pornstar hunk (and total top) and much sought-after escort who used his right hand to call attention tio his beautiful uncut dick, while offering a gentle soulmate face. Here with the dick cropped so you can focus on his face:

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The escorts’ life stories are all over the place. Some of the men are jaunty, resilient,  entrepreneurial, happy in their sex work. Others are conflicted, trapped, hiding their dirty secret from family and friends, even desperate. It’s hard not to think that most of the difficulties of being in the life stem from social stigma (some of it internalized) and legal penalties rather than from individual failings or the intrinsic evils of prostitution.

Despite his great success in porn (mostly gay, but also straight) and escorting, Arpad Miklos fell into depression and committed suicide in February 2013, at the age of 45 (alas, old for a pornstar). Because of this, I was hesitant to include Miklos in this posting, despite the attractions of Vance’s photo — but I need to observe that the man had a career as a chemical engineer before he got into porn and escorting, so he wasn’t necessarily confronting a dead end in his life; some individual stories take a sad turn.

Yesterday, I posted, in “Two extravagant mani-corns”, two homoerotic photos of hunky men dressed as unicorns: #1 elaborately posed, #2 an unposed shot taken on the fly at this year’s Coachella Festival. I quickly discovered the photographer for #2, but failed to identify either the photographer or the model in #1. But that’s been remedied, in Facebook by David Preston, in a comment on my posting here by reader R: the photo comes from the studio Exterface (an obvious play on interface), and the model works under the professional name David Morgan. But both my informants noted that the shot in #1, extravagant though it was, was only the tamest in a wild portfolio of photos, three more of which I’ll post here.

It’s not easy to get information about Exterface Studio, but from the material on its site, it would seem to be devoted to intensely homoerotic photography (though, apparently, short of displaying genitals openly). High quality, totally in-your-face work.

A BuzzFeed piece (of 2/19/13 by Saeed Jones) on what I’ll call the Homo Pony spread comes under the headings:

The Sexiest Gay S&M Unicorn Photo Shoot You’ve Ever Seen

There are bronies, and then there are bronies. This unicorn is so NSFW.

(From a 9/20/11 posting: brony is “bro + pony (as in My Little Pony): a grown man who’s a fan of the television show and the toys”.)

Yesterday’s #1, with the meme text there cropped out:

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This is wonderfully outrageous, but on to harder stuff: Homo Pony with a crystal ball gag, in a photo that also highlights his pink harness and collar, plus the pink armband (on his right arm, signifying that he’s a bottom):

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Then a blatant crotch display (in pink crotchless pants and a pink jockstrap), holding a riding crop in his teeth:

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Finally, a cock-tease shot, with a smiling Homo Pony wearing a My Little Pony t-shirt (showing a pony named Ruben):

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(The X-rated images are on AZBlogX, but, still, there’s some plain talk about male-male sex here, so probably not for kids or the sexually modest.)

It starts on AZBlogX, with a posting “The T-formation blowjob”, taking off from a Bound Gods image (#1 there) illustrating the pleasures of bondage, submission, and humiliation, but viewed on my blog primarily for the carefully aligned bodies of the two men engaged in a complex sexual act: the submissive, bound and gagged, man entirely vertical, including his hard cock, the dominant man (edging him) leaning over at right angles to him, making a visual T. A similar T-formation blowjob appears in #2 there, in a carefully posed scene (from gay porn) of group sex, with its central feature a fellated man (again making a strong vertical) aligned at right angles to his fellator (bent over at his task), with two flanking men (nearly vertical) serving as bookends, so to speak.

The larger topic is the alignment of bodies in photography, painting, and drawing: alignment to one another and to features of the physical context, and the direction of gazes in these scenes.

The AZBlogX series continues (#4) with another scene from that gay porn flick (Packed Raw, focused on bareback sex): “Another carefully posed shot of the same men, with verticals, horizontals, and … nicely parallel angled bodies in [a] central fuck shot”.

And it then continues with a second Bound Gods ad, another formal composition: “[the submissive] is bound on his hands and knees in the pi (or ∏) position, while [the dominant]’s body is similarly disposed but in a standing position. The idea is that [the dominant]’s body matches [the submissives]’s, so that [the dominant] will fit perfectly into [the submissive]” in fucking him.

Formal compositions of this sort are all over art and photography and are often commented on at length in analyses of particular works. Homoerotically inclined works are no exception, and works intended frankly as pornographic are no exception either. Note that publicity shots for gay porn are almost never screenshots, but are instead images set up by the photographer (often images that have little to do with the movies in question); in this situation, porn photographers act just like male photographers in general, and structure the alignment of bodies to one another, the alignment of bodies (singly or in groups) to the physical context, and the alignment of gazes. (All of this can of course be done artfully or clumsily.)

Just look at the many examples of male photography that have come up on this blog. Or consider two homoerotically inclined painters with a particular interest in male bathers (this is a surprisingly crowded field, about as crowded as the world of artists and photograhers with a particular interest in locker rooms / changing rooms):

Henry Scott Tuke, British, 1858-1929: a bathing group from 1914:

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Georges Paul Le Roux, French, 1877-1957: Bathing in the Tiber in Rome:

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Both paintings have a central standing figure (a strong vertical, in the case of #2 mirroring many things in the context) with a subsidiary crouching figure gazing up at the central figure (in the case of #1, with the second figure’s back parallel to the central figure’s bent knee.

There’s a lot more to be said about these two paintings — about the central figure’s arms and buttocks, the position of his feet, and the role of fabric in the compositions, for instance — but this will do for a start, and it goes beyond the obvious observation that both painters were taken by the bodies of young men.

Addendum: on Facebook, Rod Williams notes the most famous counterpart to these two paintings, Thomas Eakins’s The Swimming Hole:

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On Eakins’s paintings (and photographs) of male nudes and of men swimming, rowing, boxing, and wrestling, see John Esten’s Thomas Eakins: The Absolute Male (2002).

Another unearthing — of photo sets (or photosets) from two male photography studios in the 1990s: Colt Studio (American, the work of Jim French / Rip Colt) and Marco Studio (Brazilian). Details on the studios in an AZBlogX posting “Colt and Marco”, along with samples of the photography: four shots of three models from Colt, three shots from Marco, plus a more recent Marco shot of pornstar Rafael Alencar.

All of this is X-rated, all of it is created for the sexual pleasure of a gay male audience, and all of it is carefully, artfully composed photography (in the case of the Colt photos, of high quality). That is, these are artworks and also works serving a non-artistic function — like drawings or paintings meant to excite laughter or to advance social or political criticism, like scientific illustrations, like photograpy (including fashion photography) meant to advertise or market products, like visual art or music mean to praise a deity and excite devotion in followers.

In the case of male art (including male photography), there is a range of work according to intention: artworks with purely aesthetic aims, whose makers choose to take the male body as their subject; artworks depicting male subjects with a homoerotic eye; artworks frankly intended to arouse sexual desire. From an aesthetic point of view, all can be done well, or routinely, or shabbily and awkwardly. Just like, say, hymns.

(Sexually suggestive, but not explicit.)

From Daily Jocks on 9/14, with its ad copy (which an Austraian friend found deeply embarrassing) and my caption:

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Aussie Essence captures the spirit of living in the great land of Australia. From sweating it out on the land, to closing the big deal in the city and catching all the waves in between, we celebrate the diversity of backgrounds we all come from whilst being proud of the aussie culture.

Sweating on the station, he was known as
Ned (the Outlaw) — in the city, where he was
Made by tons of Aussies, they called him
AbsFab and PecMate — on Bondi Beach he was just
Salty Dog

Notes:

station. From the Macquarie Dictionary (1981):

a privately-owned rural establishment for raising sheep or cattle

Ned Kelly. From Wikipedia:

Edward “Ned” Kelly (December 1854 – 11 November 1880) was an Australian bushranger of Irish descent.

… Arrested in 1870 for associating with bushranger Harry Power, Kelly was first convicted of stealing horses and imprisoned for three years. He fled to the bush in 1878 after being indicted for the attempted murder of a police officer at the Kelly family’s home. After he, his brother Dan, and two associates fatally shot three policemen, the Government of Victoria proclaimed them outlaws. [Kelly was captured and executed by hanging in 1880]

… Despite the passage of more than a century, he remains a cultural icon, inspiring countless works in the arts, and is the subject of more biographies than any other Australian. Kelly continues to cause division in his homeland: some celebrate him as Australia’s equivalent of Robin Hood, while others regard him as a murderous villain undeserving of his folk hero status.

Gay Sydney. A photo of the Gay Bar, on Oxford Street in Sydney:

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In your face, mate.

Bondi Beach. A publicity photo for S1 E6 (2006) of the tv show Bondi Rescue:

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From Wikipedia:

Bondi Rescue is an Australian factual television programme which is broadcast on Channel Ten. The programme, which has aired since 2006, follows the daily lives and routines of the Waverley Council professional lifeguards who patrol Bondi Beach [in Sydney].

This brings me to Paul Freeman, the premiere chronicler of Aussie man-meat, notably in two series of high quality b&w male photography: an Outback series — Outback, Outback – Currawong Creek, Outback Brumby, Outback Bushmen, Outback Dusk — and a Bondi series — Bondi Classic, Bondi Urban, Bondi Work, Bondi Road:

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From Freeman’s own (self-aggrandizing) website, announcing his latest book:

Paul Freeman is one of the most admired photographers of his generation, an important and astute recorder of the contemporary male nude with a style that is undeniably his own. His latest book, Outback Dusk, is a collection of over one hundred and eighty fine art nude photographic portraits of men captured in Australian outback settings.

(I have the first two Bondi books. Dramatically posed, high-masculinity images. Now quite expensive: $150 USD from Freeman’s site, somewhat less from Amazon.)

(About men’s bodies and man-man sex, in very plain talk, with only a little bit of linguistic interest — so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

What is this man so earnestly fixed on?:

A penis, which he’s about to fellate avidly. (The full picture, and some details, in #6 in the AZBlogX posting linked to below.)

On AZBlogX, an extended pictorial essay “Poised to prong, psyched to suck”, on the representation of fellators in publicity for gay porn. Here’s the text (without the thoroughly X-rated images), edited down somewhat to concentrate on the visual conventions in a corner of the gay porn world, but preserving the style of the original, which uses lots of street vernacular.

This is an essay on the representation of man-man sex in the publicity shots for gay porn — not in the porn itself, but in the stills used for publicity. These aren’t screen shots, but carefully posed photos designed to advertise the flicks themselves: buy this (or rent this or view it on demand, but pay for it), it’s **hot**!!! (As I’ve noted before, not infrequently these photos show things that never actually made it on screen.)

Visual gay porn is focussed, first of all, on dick; secondarily on asses: these two as sources of sexual pleasure. The overriding principle is Everything To the Max: really big — magnificently long and thick — cocks, in particular, accorded Maximum Visibility. The porn actors jack those cocks (their own or each other’s) off, suck them and get theirs sucked, fuck with them or get fucked by them, and all the while the cocks are the stars of the action, the top draw for the men using the videos for their own pleasure, so of course the films show as much of the stars as they can, for as long as they can. This drive for Maximum Visibility is much greater in still shots, of course.

In videos, a cock shown in all its splendor can be — will be, must be — engulfed, in part or in whole, in a mouth or asshole, but more of it will soon be back on view. On the other hand, in still shots, you have only the frozen moment; a photo of cock plunged to the hilt in ass or mouth shows no cock at all, and is therefore not even technically X-rated. In any case, many men find such shots unsatisfying (I find them quite moving, since they depict the deepest possible union between two bodies), so we get publicity shots in which cocks are shown in their entirety (poised to thrust into mouth or asshole) or almost so (with only the tip inserted). The latter approach, which I’ll call tipping, is a compromise between Maximum Visibility and another principle of visual porn, Carnal Connection, calling for actual physical engagement of two bodies. The other, less carnal, approach I’ll call gearing-up.

My impression is that tipping is by far the dominant approach in publicity shots. #1 on AZBlog shows a recent all-tipping mail ad from the C1R company for some Cocky Boys videos — which I was going to post anyway because of the remarkable athleticism (so wonderful to look at, so unlikely in real life) in the ad for Hung Flip Fuckers.

The real topic of the AZBlogX posting, however, is gearing-up, because it was featured so prominently in an issue of Adam Gay XXX Showcase (Vol. 8 No. 7, January 2001) I recently unearthed (from only 15 years ago, but in some ways an artifact from another world).

In tipping shots, the enthusiasm of the receptive (cock-taking) partner isn’t at issue; after all, the guy has the dick in his mouth or (partly) up his ass. But for gearing-up shots, things are not always so clear. For fuck shots, you’ve got the fucker poised to prong the hole, and the hole has usually arranged himself to convey his enthusiasm for the deed (humping up for doggie sex, for instance). In any case, all he really has to do is offer his asshole, make it available.

But for suck shots, you’ve mostly got the insertive partner doing the offering, and the prospective fellator showing, somehow, that he’s psyched to suck. I find these gearing-up for cocksucking shots almost always somewhat ridiculous, unintentionally funny. So many choices for the cockhound: how to position himself vis-a-vis the engorged treasure, what facial expression to display, what to do with his mouth (and tongue). The fellatee, meanwhile, can just stand (or sit or lie) there, offering his stiff rod, and his face can take on any expression appropriate for a guy engaged in having sex, of any kind (including solo jacking-off) — but the fellator is having a social encounter with a much-desired phallic partner. Hablale, to paraphrase Almodóvar.

The AZBlogX posting then surveys 10 Adam Gay images of such encounters, from three jack-off flicks released in 2000. Several are beautifully composed, several strike me as notably (unintentionally) funny, and one has an especially impressive implement, as I put it there. Some, of course, are artless or awkward. But they’ve all got dick.

(About art photography and men’s bodies.)

With an alert from Michael Palmer on Facebook, the latest of Fred Goudon’s calendars:

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Reported in “French Farmers Pose For Hot 2017 Calendar, And Everything Is Going To Be Fine Next Year” on 12/1 by James Gould-Bourn on the boredpanda site. Gould-Bourn’s lead:

Remember the smoking hot fireman calendar by French fashion photographer Fred Goudon? Well, now he’s back with an even hotter calendar featuring a bunch of semi-naked French farmers posing with livestock. Because why not, right?

My report on Goudon’s Les Pompiers calendar appears in a 2/22/15 posting “Calendrical hunks”, with a fireman in #2, material on Goudon and his male art, and more of his photos in #4-6.

One more young hunky farmer-type:

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(Yes, those aren’t workingmen’s muscles, but that shouldn’t be allowed to spoil the fantasy.)

This would be a good time to alert readers to the “Male art” Page on this blog, about my collection of books on male art, seen here some time ago (right after I got them into order after having them lying in piles all over my bedroom):

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The collection was enriched a few days ago by importing a number of books that had been living at my Staunton Ct. condo.

On the Page:

Male art / queer art / homosexuality in art (with an emphasis on photography).

There’s no attempt here to distinguish porn from “fine art”. Or to restrict the list to depictions of men — a restriction that would eliminate, for instance, Mapplethorpe [with his photos of women and flowers as well as men].

This is not a bibliography, but a shelf list of items in my collection in December 2016. Some items from the collection have become unavailable for one reason or another; their entries are enclosed in square brackets.

My original idea was to offer the books for sale (many of them were quite expensive, and I’m strapped for money), but I was daunted by the complexities of such sales, and, as Kim Darnell pointed out to me, for the moment I have space for them and I can still get pleasure from them, so why not keep them.

If you actually want to get to postings of mine on male art, there are two routes: use the Category “Male art” (though I see that I’ve not been very good about using this Category label), or (by far the superior route) check out my Page on Art postings, on which art with significant homoerotic content is labeled MALE; that includes all sorts of art I’ve posted about, not just the material in my book collection.

An image of an exciting find:

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The drawing of the martyred St. Sebastian, attributed to Leonardo (Tajan auction house)

In an article by Scott Reyburn in the NYT on-line on the 11th, under the head:

An Artistic Discovery Makes
A Curator’s Heart Pound
A retired doctor visited a Paris auction house in March with a portfolio of drawings. It contained a work now attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and valued at about $15.8 million.

and in print on the 12th, under the head:

A Curator’s Heart Pounds
The discovery of what is believed to be a long-lost drawing by Leonardo da Vinci generates excitement

The story begins:

Paris — It’s an auctioneer’s jackpot dream. A man walks in off the street, opens a portfolio of drawings, and there, mixed in with the jumble of routine low-value items, is a long-lost work by Leonardo da Vinci.

Earlier on this blog, a 5/20/11 posting on the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian as a homoerotic image. An image that appealed to Leonardo, as seen in two authenticated drawings by him, one in the Hamburger Kunsthalle:

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and one available through Getty Images:

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(References to male bodies and man-man sex.)

Another chapter in the annual celebration of cultural, as opposed to religious, Christmas — a set of customs and practices that includes, among other things (in the U.S.),  Christmas trees, mistletoe, eggnog, Christmas cards, Christmas presents, garlands, Christmas cookies, fruitcake, sentimental reverence for snow, gingerbread, roast turkey (or duck or goose), Christmas songs, Christmas ham, secret Santas, colored lights, red and green everything, candy canes, television shows, a zillion Christmas movies (more appearing every year), wreaths, and of course human Santa Clauses: soliciting charitable contributions on the street, taking gift lists from children in malls and stores, and handing out gifts at children’s parties.

Plus gay Santa Claus images, some of them of men just posing in Santa drag with a homoerotic subtext, many of them behaving flamboyantly gaily: cavorting with the three gay reindeer (Dancer, Prancer, and Vixen, but especially Prancer), exposing themselves in public, molesting handsome young men, and kissing Daddy under the mistletoe (or more flagrantly, performing acts of enthusiastic m2m sex with him under the Christmas tree).

From the stupendous array of gay Santa goodies available, I’ve chosen only five this year: all but one found on Tumblr; three photos of men in costume, two drawings; all with beards; none of them X-rated (despite a rich lode of phallically explicit images to choose from), but one just barely not; all but one showing Santa with his characteristic cap; and several combining the gay Santa theme with a gay geek or nerd theme.

Santa #1: Lee Tucker. Not only a real person, but someone I know (and a gay techie). The photo is one he put up on Facebook for the Christmas season :

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Lee’s caption: Who’s the biggest Ho Ho Ho?

The conventional cap, in dark red, but bold fashion choices for the rest of his Santa ensemble: red checked shirt, silver tie, and a bright red jacket, apparently a blazer. Otherwise projecting unconventionality and niceness in roughly equal parts.

Santa #2: Otter Potter. Another, younger, geek, with a precious Christmas bone in his mouth.

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Good boy!

The bright lavender cap is a nice touch.

Santa #3: gogovi. He comes in flecks of silver. All over himself (belly, chest, face), naughty boy:

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Conventional cap, but all the rest is fashion-forward. The Santa coat has been reduced to a very short men’s bolero top (but with snowflake applique, for visual interest), and the Santa trousers have been eliminated completely, in favor of tight short-short checked trunks, with red suspenders pulled down for this photo. All designed to show off his delicious pecs, abs, and inguinal cleft.

Santa #4: randy Santa Daddy:

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Billy Boy fondles Santa’s treasure, and Santa fondles his. (AMZ’s caption)

Right on the X-line, this one. Santa of course has no cap, so he can display his bald head. And his Santa coat is open, to display his hairy chest. All combined to contrast maximally with Billy Boy’s smooth blond youthfulness.

I found this on the Tumblr site of Harrison Tucker (posting under several names, most often HarrysonTucker), who seems to be a young gay geek with an interest in fashion and a passion for running. Tucker doesn’t credit an artist for the drawing; the image is reproduced in many places, mostly with a link to Tucker. (The style is like Josman’s, and the image also incorporates Josman’s preoccupation with intergenerational sex, but I haven’t found this specific image in Josman’s work.)

Santa #5: Santa with a Harry Bush hard boy. In #4, Santa’s in charge, t to Billy’s b. In fact, Billy Boy is soliciting Santa’s cock (while Santa is taking Billy Boy’s ass), so that Santa is acting as sexual topman to Billy as bottom boy. The roles are reversed in this Harry Bush illustration:

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Here, Santa is begging sexual favors from the insolent young stud, offering him a ’66 Chevy Corvette in exchange for access to his cock. In Bush’s world, young men have sex (of all kinds) with one another, but interact with adult men (especially authority figures) primarily by having the older men service them.

About Harry Bush: Hard Boys, ed. by Robert Mainardi (2007):

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Harry Bush’s drawings for magazines such as Physique Pictorial, Mr. Sun, Touch, Drummer, and Stroke combined masterful technique, exceptionally well-endowed subjects, and a wicked sense of humor that made his work extremely popular. Despite long periods of self-imposed retirement and a fear of being outed that led him to destroy much of his own work, the reclusive artist’s drawings were as recognized and recognizable as those of Tom of Finland throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Hard Boys examines the life and work of this brilliant, mysterious, and paradoxical gay artist. Featured are some of Bush’s best-known works along with previously unpublished drawings from the artist’s private sketchbooks, as well as excerpts from Bush’s correspondence that offer insight into a complex personality: egomaniacal artist, self-critical individual, frustrated homosexual, and acerbic social commentator. This eagerly awaited collection allows fans to rediscover Bush’s witty, beautifully executed work while exposing it to a much wider audience. (from the publisher’s blurb)

The sexual content is crude; the illustrations are wonderfully done.

Santa actors. In the images above, we see men presented as (gay) Santas for the sake of a photo or illustration; they are fantasy images. In the somewhat more complicated real world, men take on playing the role of Santa Claus as a job, and ordinarily their identities outside of this job are seen as irrelevant. But with several startling exceptions, one being that if it’s revealed that a man playing Santa Claus is in fact gay, there’s one hell of an uproar, given that Santa actors largely interact with children, and there’s a widespread (false) belief that all gay men are pedophiles.

The other startling exception has to do with race, ethnicity, and religion. Megyn Kelly explained to the world on her Fox News show back in 2013 that Santa Claus is white, so a black man playing Santa (as one now does at the Mall of America) is simply unacceptable, and a great many people have agreed with her, vehemently. (Kelly also told us, preposterously, that Jesus, a Middle Eastern Jew, was also white.) In any case, a black man has a hard time getting hired to play Santa, except possibly in a context that’s all-black. (And maybe not even there: if you truly believe that Santa is white, then he’s white no matter where he is, even in the black ghetto.)

Now, move (for a moment) from race to ethnicity: what about latino/hispanic Santa Clauses, Native American, and Asian-American Santa Clauses (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian, in particular)? George Takei notes that in the internment camps back in the 1940s, they had Japanese-American Santa Clauses. (Of course they did; who else would they get? The important point is that they had a Santa Claus — because they were, after all, Americans, and Santa Claus is an American cultural tradition.)

I suspect that “ethnic” (latino, Native American, Asian-American) Santa Clauses are not easily accepted, except (again) possibly in mono-ethnic contexts. The general rule is that white Anglo parents would be very reluctant to expose their children to a Santa Claus who didn’t look (normatively) “American” (while “ethnic” or “minority” parents should expect that, possibly except in a 100% minority ghetto, all Santa Clauses will be Anglo whites).

I’m not at all sure how far this suspicion of the Other extends. Are recognizably (southern) Italian, Greek, or Irish Santa Clauses acceptable, now that these ethnic groups have been assimilated to whiteness? What about Santa Clauses with “foreign accents” (even British, Australian, or French)? How do these things work in Hawaii? (I’m sure that things are looser there, and a Santa Claus might even wear an aloha shirt.)

One further step. Many Americans aren’t particularly good at distinguishing Jews from gentiles, and in consequence a fair number of Jewish men have gotten jobs as Santa actors. Are they in danger of losing their jobs if they’re found out? The Santa Claus role has nothing to do with Christianity, so they shouldn’t be. But…

Now to the neat stuff. The cultural customs and practices associated with commercial Christmas vary enormously from place to place, and most of this variation arises within these places, rather than by cultural diffusion. That brings me to Japan, a country with a neglible Christian presence in the society and culture, but with a set of Christmas customs and practices, which the Japanese see as “American”, that is, derived from the U.S., even though many of them are not in fact borrowings of American Christmas customs.

Christmas trees are now available in Japan, but apparently artificial ones are much easier to find than natural trees. And decorations for the trees, some gorgeous or whimsical, are easily available.

But then there’s the food. Japanese Christmas cake for Christmas eve, which has cream and berries on it, so it doesn’t keep well, and has no real U.S. counterpart. And KFC (or other fast-food) fried chicken; one report says that 1 out of 3 Japanese adults has fried chicken for Christmas.

In music, there are gigantic performances of the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony as a regular feature of Christmas in Japan.

Then Santa Claus, in visual representations as a Buddhist monk, anime figures, Colonel Sanders, or kindly old bearded Western men. And Santa actors, who ideally should look “American”. American visitors are sometimes impressed into service as Santa actors. One American long-time resident in Japan, blogging as “The Japan Guy”, writes on “Being Santa Claus in Japan”:

I find it interesting, that I never once had to don a Santa suit while living in the United States, but since I’ve been here in Japan, every single year, without fail, something comes up where I always end up in a Santa suit. (link)

The kick is that he’s black — a fact that makes him really really American in Japanese eyes, not someone you could conceivably take to be Japanese (or even European). This is not the best picture of him, but it does show him on a magazine cover with associates:

(#7)

What disqualifies him in America makes him desirable in Japan. (Note: most Japanese know very little indeed about race in the U.S.)

(Male bodies and elaborate photographic fantasies, to inaugurate 2017, which is, by the way, a prime number.)

From my correspondent RJP, a link to the work of the Skiinmode studio (supplying Asian male muscle posed in complex fantasy scenes) on Tumblr. (The material is available on a number of sites, especially on Tumblr and Instagram.)

Men of several nationalities and body types (all with pleasing muscles and most in cocktease poses), in fanciful settings, sometimes appearing as complex imaginary creatures.

(The Asia of this material seems to start in Southeast Asia and go on east from there.)

Four examples, from a great many available on the web:

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

(#4)

(About men kissing and how people interpret such acts. There will be references to man-on-man sexual acts, so you should be prepared to exercise some judgment.)

A kiss is not just a kiss; it’s almost always something else as well. Sticking to the topic of men kissing men, we’ve got MSMs (“men who have sex with men” — but identify as straight) who sometimes won’t kiss men; and then we’ve got people who are offended and disgusted just at the sight of same-sex kisses, especially between men, and lash out in various ways, from having them banned from public view to verbally abusing the kissers to physically attacking them. These two reactions spring from two different views of same-sex kissing: for MSMs, who want “just sex”, kissing can be problematic because it isn’t sex, it’s affection and love, and emotional intimacy is not what they’re in the market for; while for enraged objectors, same-sex kissing is a sex act, and doing it in public is having sex in public, which is offensive, simply unacceptable.

Then there are people like me, for whom images like this —

  (#1)

— are deeply satisfying, because we see the kiss as embodying both loving affection and sexual connection, while not being in itself a sex act. Two responses, together: “Awww, so sweet!” and “Wow, that’s hot!”

Three more kisses. The kiss in #1 (a David Vance shot of models Paul Francis and Levi Pouter) and the many other man-man kisses I’ve posted about over the years (there is now a”Men kissing” Page on this blog) are displays of affection and sexual connection, not social kisses, not merely conventional actions. Here are three more images: one more with “like attracts like” as in #1, where two similar men kiss; and then two with “opposites attract” (black man and white man kissing, older man and younger man kissing):

  (#2)

  (#3)

  (#4)

I don’t know the sources of #2 and #3, but #4 is a photo by Spanish artist Juan Hidalgo that was used by the Madrid-based Visible Culture LGBT group for its ‘Gay Arts Looks For A Home’ initiative in 2012. It was one of a number of images of same-sex kisses removed by Facebook in (roughly) 2010-12 on the grounds that the images portrayed sex acts (while similar kisses involving a man and a woman were not treated this way).

The song. The title of this posting quotes one line from the song “As Time Goes By”, treated in a 10/12/15 posting “You must remember this”:

You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by
And when two lovers woo
They still say, “I love you”
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by

The song was made famous by the movie Casablanca and has since become the representative song of Warner Bros. and was also the title and theme song of the 1990s British romantic comedy series As Time Goes By.

The line “A kiss is just a kiss” was also used as the title of a 1971 British tv play, which might have had a gay theme, though that’s hard to judge from the cryptically minimal Wikipedia entry. In its entirety:

A Kiss is Just a Kiss is a 1971 British TV play written by Alec Coppel for ITV Playhouse.

Wealthy young lawyer Kit Shaeffer [David Hedison] visits his doctor [Dr. Alex Noon (Keir Dullea)] for a check up.

In the land of MSMs. From yesterday’s report on Danny Vox in the ultimate fantasy t-room (Mens Room Bakersfield Station), where he has enthusiastic receptive sex with a number of men:

[Danny Vox’s character] doesn’t get kissed — in fact, turns away from attempts to kiss him — until his very last moments in the t-room

… At the end of the Bakersfield flick, a man appears, takes DV’s arm and says, encouragingly, “Don’t panic”, bends forward, and kisses DV passionately; DV melts into him, while the music swells.

DV’s character is presented as a young man who is intrigued by mansex and only somewhat reluctantly (at the beginning) enters into sexual acts with other men, but he quickly warms to his role as a total dickslut, though he doesn’t identify as gay. Director Joe Gage frames DV’s character, like most of the other 12 men in the fantasy t-room, as an MSM, in this place just for sex (some of them wear wedding bands), As in real life, where many MSMs are entirely comfortable with kissing (in fact, enthusiastic about it as foreplay to “real sex” or as a sign of satisfaction after a sexual encounter — “thanks, buddy, that was fantastic!”) while others reject it as coming too close to emotional intimacy, so in the fantasy Bakersfield t-room: some of the t-room men kiss with abandon, especially at the beginning or end of sexual connections, while others avoid kissing. DV’s character is on a voyage on sexual self-discovery, moving from curiosity to identification as a t-room sex man (in fact, a sexually submissive one) and eventually to acceptance of himself as a gay man, seeking not only sexual but also emotional union with other men.

Insofar as I understand these things, in the real world, MSMs do gain emotional satisfactions from the mansex they engage in, but they’re not the satisfactions of loving intimacy. Instead, MSMs see themselves as celebrating their masculinity, boosting it even, by bonding sexually with other strongly masculine men. Discussing their sexual activities, they sometimes compare them to playing sports with a buddy: possibly on a team together, but also making each other better men by competing with each other. These attitudes make it entirely possibly for an MSM to be enthusiastic about getting fucked but repelled by the idea of getting kissed by another man.

Horror at PDAs. Public displays of same-sex affection — kissing, embacing, or just holding hands — can set off firestorms of negative reaction. Especially if they’re between men, especially if the observer is male.

At the low end of the scale, we get reactions like Facebook’s banning images of same-sex kisses on the grounds that they are depictions of sex. The background attitude here is that affection between women and men is simply normal, not rooted in sex in any way, and that affection between two men or two women is an abnormality, a deviation, a sickness, a sin, whatever, which manifests itself in the performance of certain sex acts. In this way of looking at the world, same-sex affection is all about sex, and consequently homosexuality is a private matter, which should never be brought into the public sphere.

For a long time now, queers have worked to re-shape these attitudes, to establish a parity and symmetry between gay and straight. For many younger, white, educated Americans, this program has largely succeeded, and you’ll find dialogues like this one between a young gay man and his straight buddy (dimly recalled from some tv program):

YGM: You get hard for pussy, I get hard for dick; we’re just wired different, that’s all.

SB: Yeah, no biggie. [They go on to talk about video games, or sports, or movies and tv, or music, or current events, or their problems getting dates, the way guys do.]

The point is that SB doesn’t think that hanging out with a gay guy will make people think that he’s gay (not that there would be anything wrong with that): gayness isn’t bad, it’s not, like, a communicable disease, it’s just a state of being, and, by the way, gay guys aren’t predatory, they’re not after your precious heterosexual dick (no matter how wonderful you think it is), and they’re not interested in fucking your precious heterosexual ass (no matter how handsome you think it is), so they’re not threatening.

But Oldthink persists in many corners, maintained in considerable part by the teachings of the homo-hostile churches (notably, the Roman Catholic Church, evangelical churches, and the Mormon Church), which tell their flocks that homosex is a sin, in a special sense of sin, which can be forgiven only through an act of renunciation and contrition on the part of the sinner. The churchly notion of sin, from NOAD2:

an immoral act considered to be a transgression against divine law

It’s the ‘transgression against divine law’ part that brings the homo-hostile churches into the matter, because they claim to know that homosex is an offense against God’s Law. But enlightened queers cut things off before they get to the divine law shit: we straightforwardly deny that homosex should be considered immoral, so we refuse to renounce our desires and practices, we are uncontrite, and we don’t accept the short-circuit in reasoning and imagination that gets so many people from a mere indexing of homosexuality immediately to raw homosex, especially to guys fucking guys. Of course, homosex in public is no more acceptable than heterosex in public (except in special spaces, like sex clubs and gay baths, carved out as, in effect, private for sexual purposes, even though the acts are visible to those in them), but none of the following is, we maintain, homosex in public:

announcing or presupposing that you’re queer

referring to a same-sex relationship of yours

displaying same-sex affection in public

displaying a symbol of queerness, a queer slogan, or a queer image (like the male kisses above)

or, even, publicly discussing homosex (as I do here on a regular basis, though with warnings to my readers)

(This list is not exhaustive.)

But there are plenty of people — some men are especially vocal on the subject — who see all of these things as homosex in public and have violent visceral reactions to them, ranging from assertions that these things make them want to puke, all the way up to murderous attacks on the sources. (The ghost of Dan White will, apparently, always be with us, as will the Levitical “abomination” text that calls for all of us fags to be stoned to death; I mean, it’s God’s Law, right?)

Changes in public attitudes have now evolved to the point where a lot of people seem to believe that unrepentant queers have a right to their lives and their same-sex relationships (up to and including marriage), but only if they keep everything in the closet, keep everything private, out of the sight and hearing of decent people, who would, only naturally, be offended and disgusted. I, of course, flagrantly and fiercely refuse.

Public displays of affection are a tricky business. Jacques and I behaved affectionately among friends and our families (including our parents), and in a few places we gauged to be both tolerant and safe. I’m pleased to hear (from staff) that the restaurant Reposado finds nothing noteworthy about same-sex couples holding hands or kissing, and the same was true of the restaurant Gordon Biersch (its successor, Dan Gordon’s, is a sports bar, so not a safe bet). But elsewhere and on the street, even in supposedly liberal and tolerant Palo Alto, Jacques and I were circumspect. Back in the bad old days, we were verbally harassed on the street for having a rainbow sticker on our car (and the car was defaced), I got death threats on the phone for being a fag, and acquaintainces were thrown out of places and beaten up on the street because of public displays of affection.

Hearteningly, all of that moderated. But now the winds of intolerance blow fresh and strong (for Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, women, and queers too). So I live in fear (and wonder whether I should be fleeing to Canada, but I’m an old man and tightly woven into my life in Palo Alto). Nevertheless, I’m doubling down on flagrant displays of queerness, everything from images of men kissing (which I totally adore — the images and the kissing both) up to images of cock-sucking and butt-fucking (which I also totally adore — again, the images and the acts both — and am happy to subject to extended analysis).

… the male model, in body-display, rather than fashion-display, mode — so only a little about language. On the other hand, this posting is, in word and image, at least technically SFW (though homo-steamy).

It begins with a Facebook comment from Ken Rudolph about image #1 in my “Hitchhiking” posting of yesterday:

(#1)

Ken asked:

Who is #1? And where did that still come from…it looks more like a regular movie than a porn.

Not any kind of movie, but a posed still done by a professional photographer (as are, I think, #2-7 in my hitchhiking posting, and the three photos in the accompanying AZBlogX posting). Meanwhile, a Google Images search led me to Saucier.

(The name Saucier is, no surprise, originally French. It comes, at least in part, to the U.S. from Canada, through Acadians who settled in Saucier, Mississippi, and no doubt other places as well.)

Proviso. There are two Corey Sauciers. Searching on the net leads you mostly to the one above, a Texan white guy still in his 20s, but sometimes to the Californian (went to UCSC, lives in L.A.) black guy, an HIV-positive writer and performance artist who’s now 40 — and also much more massive than the Texan model. His current profile photo:

(#2)

He too is given to shirtless photos, so on that score they could be confused.

The fashion model began appearing in print in 2010, managed by several agencies and modeling for DNA magazine and Calvin Klein, among others. A gay-gushy piece on the homorazzi site (portmanteaus are everywhere: homosexual + paparazzi), “where homos dish everything”: “Model Behavior: Corey Saucier”, by Donovan on 11/18/11:

For this week’s Model Behavior, I really wanted to give you one saucy beyotch [beyotch is a friendly version of bitch]. In this case, it’s pretty literal. Meet Corey Saucier. As his last name suggests, he’s definitely “saucier” than your average male model next door. Perhaps, it’s due to the fact he’s from Houston, Texas. They say everything grows bigger in the Lone Star state and this 6’1″ stud certainly lives up to that motto. I’d gulp down this tall tasty drink of sexy any day of the week. [Have I discussed tall drink of a man? Apparently not.]

The 23-year-old male model was raised in a Houston suburb – Spring to be exact. Growing up, he played numerous sports including football, baseball and basketball. He continued with both football and baseball all the way through til his college years at Texas State University. He majored in business management but dropped out to pursue a career in modeling after being urged by friends to give it a try.

Those friends definitely knew what they were talking about. Upon arriving in New York, Saucier quickly signed with AIG model management. In his relatively short career, Corey has caught the eye of gay the community thanks to his spreads in Out magazine, The Advocate and YVY Mag. With his extremely hot body its hard not to get noticed. He’s also caught the eyes of veteran photographers like Jeremy Kost, Greg Lotus and Eric Schwabel. Check out a few pics from these photogs and others of Saucer below. Be forewarned, you might need a cold shower from all the shirtless pics. Enjoy.

Homorazzi has a substantial photo display, as do a number of other sites from the period; Saucier has a big fan base, among women and gay men. I’ll start with a smiling shirtless pose (with lowered jeans as a bonus) that’s closest to #1 above:

(#3)

(The spread-lip smile is by no means confined to SoCal, though it’s a stereotype of surfer dudes there. Part of the stereotype is that it’s the source of the unrounded variant, [ʉ], of /U/ in good etc., there: those dudes smile, with spread lips, all the time, so they can’t manage to round their lips for /U/. Mysteriously, they round just fine for /u/, as in pool and cute.)

On the homorazzi site, a pubic hair cock tease (also conveying power via his muscular pecs and neck):

(#3)

On the Morphosis (Men’s Fashion and Music) site in 2011, a head and torso shot with hot nips:

(#4)

In a photo by Jeremy Kost for DNA on 12/1/10, we get an armpit display, plus low-riding jeans:

(#5)

Finally, two “Corey Saucier – Male Model Monday” photos on the SocialiteLife site (“Celebrity News, Photos & Gossp”, with a Shirtless album of men as well as a Bikini album of women) on 5/16/10, both decdedly homoerotic (steamy naked pit shot, Calvin Klein crotch grab):

(#6)

(#7)

Then recent news on the Ford Models Facebook page on 4/11/16:

Announcing Corey Saucier as our #MCM [Man Crush Monday]! Corey went to school for business in San Marcos, TX and joined the #FORDmen team soon after!

There’s a brief video interview with Saucier there.

Sexualized images of models are collaborations between photographer and model; #1 and #3-7 above are deliberate achievements, presenting Saucier’s body as sexually desirable, and the homoerotic appeal is deliberate. Meanwhile, Saucer works out regularly to maintain this body, and I’m guessing that he shaves his body as well as his face, to craft the image of one type of masculine beauty, maintaining a youthful smoothness that appeals to many women and gay men. At the same time, he’s got the boyish hair and a stock of varied facial expressions, and he projects a sense of physical power in reserve. Plus the flagrant cock teasing.

Like male models in general, in collaboration with his photographers, he’s using his body to sell himself and the clothes he wears. Of course, none of this says anything about his own sexuality — but he has to appreciate the homoerotic appeal he projects, be comfortable with it, and (to be really successful) welcome it, revel in it. Good job, Sauce Man!