Naked Came I

Best Friend Ben got cruised by a Hollywood star this week.

And then on Friday he did a porn film in one day (which included casting two roles after performers just didn't show up).

You go, Ben.

Labels: friends

One of the men who brought George W. Bush to political prominence has broken with the president.

Matthew Dowd was a political advisor to the Democratic lieutenant governor of Texas, Bob Bullock. Bullock himself was a mentor to Bush -- a political neophyte who had been elected governor of the state.

Dowd was convinced that President Bill Clinton was a weak-willed divider who appealed to partisanship rather than uniting the country. Dowd believed Bush would govern the country with the same relatively cooperative spirit he'd governed with in Austin. So Dowd switched parties and joined Bush's brain trust in 1994. Dowd became an expert at interpreting polls. His polling analyses gave Karl Rove the insight they needed to woo voters, attack opponents at their weakest points, and exploit divisions between Democratics and Republicans.

In 2004, Dowd was named the chief campaign strategist for the Bush re-election effort.

It was Dowd who came up with the idea to call Sen. John Kerry a flip-flopper and "weak on defense," and to push the issue of trust with voters ("you can trust the president on Iraq").


Now, hoever, Dowd says he is so disillusioned with the war that he considered joining street demonstrations against it. Earlier this year, Dowd says he tried to write an op-ed article which woud make the case for staying in Iraq. Instead, his op-ed piece came out the other way, and he tentatively titled it "Kerry Was Right" before shelving the piece.

Dowd says he will not do any political work in 2008.

Instead, Dowd says, he wants to "restore gentleness" to the country. "I wouldn't be surprised if I wasn't walking around in Africa or South America doing something that was like mission work."


That's a total cop-out.

Repentance, Mr. Dowd, is not just feeling sorry for what you did. Repentance does beyond not merely agreeing to never do it again.

Repentance is about rectifying the situation, reversing the negative effects of what you've done.

You got us into Iraq, Mr. Dowd. Now you've got to work like hell to get us out.

You worked to elect a man who approves of medieval torture as a means of national policy. Now you've got to work like hell to elect someone else.

You worked to elect a president who is the most partisan, most rigid, most ideological, most inept president since Richard Nixon. Now you're got to work not merely to unseat him, but to repair the damage you caused.

Anything less, Mr. Dowd, is a cop-out. Cheap grace. Cheap, meaningless forgiveness. It's not absolution, it's avoidance. You brought torture, war, death and maim into the world, Matthew Dowd. You raised a generation of young Americans to think what you did, how you did it, and the policies you advocated as cool, smart, moral and right. Instead of feeding puppies and taking care of babies, you need to undo the evil you did.

Otherwise, Mr. Dowd, you are just a guilt-ridden pig.

Responsibility does not mean being sorry. Responsibility carries with it the human dignity of making things right again.

The country awaits your action, Mr. Dowd.

Repentance, or lying guilt-ridden pig? You choose.

Labels: politics

People often ask me what the first gay porn film was that I ever saw.

I don't know.

I was just um...well, 15...when I started watching gay porn. I'd snuck into an adult bookstore, and began faithful attendance at my new church twice a week. ("This is my body....eat of my flesh...oh yes, boy, eat me...")

The first film I saw was a Mustang clip from the 1970s, I'm sure. I only know that it starred two California brunettes so darkly tanned that they looked African American or Latino. They had crisp tan lines, though, and pure white crotches and hips. Each had a long, thick, gnarled cock. They sprayed so much cum on each other, it looked like they'd just come out of the pool. After the one had pulled his cock out of the boy's alabaster-white ass, their huge, half-hard cocks lolled across their hips, and they kissed and cuddled while keeping their crotchs facing the camera.

It was hot.

Memories of such times can be easily muddled. When you're watching porn for the first time, there's so much sensory overload.

But I remember Jim Bentley.

Jim Bentley

Jim's was one of the first faces, names and cocks I remember. After all, who could forget that angle face and platinum blond hair? That cute smile? Who could forget that all-American name? And who could forget that magnificent, long cock? His prick is so reminiscent of Johnny Rahm's cock: Long, curved, slender, famously steel-hard, able to spurt semen like a geyser. Of course, I loved his body, too. Long and slender, with just the right amount of tone to those pecs.

I first saw him in "Danny Does Dallas." It was one of the first hard-core gay porn films I'd ever seen. There's this segment where Bentley is in his father's basement, standing near a bar. He gradually seduces another guy, and then turns him around to face the gleaming aluminum bar. The boy props his leg high up on the bar, and Bentley forces his long, curved scimitar of a cock into him. The other boy gasps and cries out as if he's in extreme pain, but it's just extreme lust. Watch Bentley's eyes: He loves torturing the boy with his huge prick. Loves making him scream and edge and get so aroused that he goes feral with lust.

Yeah, Jim Bentley may look like an angel, but he's a nasty, dirty boy. God, that turned me on. (It still does.)

I'm sure the video isn't nearly as good as my then-16-year-old-brain thought. But at the time, I was mesmerized. I stayed mesmerized about Bentley.

Some porn insiders say he's a total bitch to work with. They don't like his attitude, they don't like his perfectionism, they don't like the way he's a total sex-pig, they don't like his demand that he fuck only the best (or that only the best fuck him). But that's maybe because directors know his cock is always hard, and he could fuck a watermelon or a knothole and still make it look sexy. Directors know Bentley is a workhorse; most performers couldn't get it up for someone they disliked. Bentley can. But Bentley refuses to be taken advantage of that way, and so he resists. Good for him.

A lot of people claimed Bentley retired around 1990. Not so. He made films through 1992, took a two-year break, and made more films through 1999. That's a 15-year career, folks. Falcon coaxed him out of real retirement in 2002 to do "Splash Shots 3," but he's stayed retired since then.

He did 64 films in that time. These include some true, mind-blowing, never-a-soft-moment classics like "Getting It," "Making It Huge," "Splash Shots," "They Work Hard for Their Money," "Thinking Big," "Giant Splash Shots 2," "The All-American Boy," "Switch Hitters," "Switch Hitters 2," "Behind Closed Doors," and "Spokes 2."

I can't get enough of him in "Spokes 2." His three-way with Chris Williams and Casey Jordan is nothing short of astonishing. And his multiple scenes in "Giant Splash Shots 2" is jaw-dropping.

A few years ago, Bentley did an autobiography. You can buy it off his Web site, or you can get it from A Different Light Bookstore. It's partly an autobiography, and partly an art work.

In his 18 years in adult film, I don't think Jim Bentley's cock was ever soft on film. I don't think he, personally, ever turned in a bad sexual performance (although others around him clearly did).

I wouldn't mind knowing him in person.

I also woldn't mind having him fuck the living crap out of me. He's one of those sex performers who I am crazily in lust for.













Jim Bentley filmography
Advocate Men Live 4 (Malibu Sales, 1988)
All the Way (Hombres Productions, 1987)
All-American Boy, The (Midnight Men, 1987)
Behind Closed Doors (Falcon, 1989)
Best Wishes (Le Salon, 1987)
Bi-Day, Bi-Night (L.A. Video, 1989)
Big Show Off (Tenderloin Productions, 1995)
Bi-Surprise (Metro Pictures, 1988)
Boys On Call (Rosebud Male, 1992)
Breakthrough (Minotaur Studios, 1995)
Buster, The Best Years (TCS Studios, 1984)
Cabin Fever (Le Salon, 1988)
Castro Commando (Rosebud Male, 1992)
Daddy's Revenge (All Worlds Video, 1995)
Danny Does Dallas (Stallion Video, 1988)
Danny Does 'Em All (Stallion Video, 1989)
Dirty Tricks (Princeton Steele Productions/By Attraction, 1991)
Do Me Dirty (Video 10, 1995)
Dogs in Heat (Rosebud Male, 1992)
Eagle Pack 1 (Eagle Studios, 1987)
Easy Prey (InTropics, 1987)
Entertainment Bi Night (InTropics, 1987)
Fire in the Hole (Tenderloin Productions, 1995)
Foolin' Around (Castro Video, 1995)
Getting It (Bijou, 1985)
Giant Splash Shots 2 (Falcon, 1986)
Gym Tails (Polk St. Productions, 1996)
Haulin' 'n' Ballin' (Vidco, 1989)
Health Club Gigolo (In Hand, 1990)
Heroes (L.A. Video, 1984)
Historic Affairs (U.S. Male, 1998)
Hot, High and Horny (All Worlds Video, 1995)
Interracial Affairs (Stud, 1988)
J.S. Big Time (Stryker Productions, 1995)
Just Men (New Age Pictures, 1996)
Late Nite Porn (Stable Entertainment, 1999)
Made for You (Falcon, 1989)
Making It Huge (HIS Video, 1985)
Marine Obsessions (U.S. Male, 1998)
Matinee Idol (HIS Video, 1995)
Men Together (Tenderloin Productions, 1995)
Moonlusting 2 (Pleasure Productions, 1987)
New Zealand Undercovers (Marathon Films, 1987)
Night At Alfies, A (Marathon Films, 1987)
Officer Dick (All Worlds Video, 1997)
Ripe for Harvest (Falcon, 1995)
San Francisco Sex (Tenderloin Productions, 1995)
Secret Action Club (Polk St. Productions, 1997)
Sex Alley (All Worlds Video, 1996)
Shooting Porn (Caryn Horowitz Presents, 1997)
South of Market Leather (Polk St. Productions, 1997)
Splash Shots (Falcon, 1985)
Splash Shots 3 (Falcon, 2002)
Spokes 2 (Falcon, 1998)
Strokers (Oh Man! Studios, 1999)
Swing Shift (Pleasure Productions, 1989)
Switch Hitters (InTropics, 1987)
Switch Hitters 2 (InTropics, 1987)
Switch Hitters 9 (Metro Pictures, 1995)
Taste of Leather, A (Polk St. Productions, 1997)
They Work Hard for Their Money (Catalina, 1985)
Thinking Big (HIS Video, 1985)
Ticket to Ride, A (Big Video, 1997)
Tough Competition (L.A. Video, 1985)

Labels: bareback, big balls, big cocks, gay porn, Jim Bentley, photography, twinks

My first year in grad school, I had to be a TA for a class on law and society.

There was this quiet boy in the class, John. John was a cross-country runner, and somewhat short. He was probably about 5'8", and slender. He had short grey-brown hair and icy blue eyes. When he smiled, he blushed. Since the class I taught was a spring one, naturally everyone began wearing shorts in class toward the end of the year. John had really nice legs, somewhat muscular, but not tremendously so.

I totally fell for him. He was so quiet, so gentle, so shy. But he oozed sex-appeal.

I saw him on the quad one warm afternoon. He had stripped off his shirt to reveal a tightly toned, sweetly muscled body with a trail of hair jetting up his belly. He was pulling a t-shirt on, and blushed bright red over the stir he caused.

I fell for him even harder.

The last week of classes, I was in the library myself doing research and work. I saw John sitting at a table near the reference section. He was in a tank-top and knee-length red shorts, no socks, and tennis shoes. He was staring directly ahead at something. I walked over to him. As I got closer, I realized his left hand was on his crotch. John was holding his erection in his left hand through the fabric of his shorts. His cock was easily 8 inches in length, if not more. It thrust like a pole down the right leg of his shorts, and he was moving it up and down against his thigh. I suspect he enjoyed the feeling of his sensitive knob rubbing against the hair of his leg. Whenever he lifted it up past his thigh, I could see the ful length of it, shrouded in its red nylon fabric. It nearly thrust out of the leg of his shorts.

I stopped dead. I stared for several seconds.

John started, and looked at me. He blushed deep red, and let go of his penis. He stared down at the open reference work on the table in front of him. I walked over to him and sat down next to him. I could feel the heat off his crotch.

I said something like, "Hey, John, what're you doing?" He said, "Studying." I turned to look down the aisle of the stacks. What had he been looking at? There was Kathy. I had two roommates, both straight guys, and Kathy was dating one of them. She was a bouncy, big-breasted cheerleader with jet-black hair, a brain and a perky personality. She was a real sweetheart (although why she dated my roommate is beyond me, as he was a selfish, insensitive, temperamental asshole).

"Oh, Kathy," I said.

John turned to stare, slack-jawed, at me. "You know her?" Yes, I said. I was thrilled that John was even looking at me. I knew something he wanted to know, and I knew Kathy. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see John had gripped his erection again and was squeezing his huge cock very hard, over and over.

I told him that Kathy was a friend of mine, and was dating my roommate.

John was crestfallen. You could see it on his face.

Right then, I think I could have promised to get him together with Kathy if he'd sleep with me. I think he would have done it.

But I am hardly the heartless, manipulative type. I told him that Kathy was pretty much in love with my roommate, and she was probably not open to a three-way. Or to cheating on her boyfriend.

Kathy moved away, oblivious. John turned back to his book, his disinterest in me more than apparent. I got up and left.

A year later, I learned that John had founded a queueing company here in D.C. You can hire his firm to stand in line for you -- at Congressional hearings, for concert tickets, for whatever. His company is still around, I see (his workers were standing in line at Al Gore's global warming hearings last week).

I have no doubt that he's now married with children.

And I am deeply envious that someone other than me is feeling John's huge, long, straight prick deep inside them.

It took me a long time to get over John.

Labels: memories

CVS is buying up Caremark. CVS is one of the nation's largest drug-store chains. Caremark is a pharmacy-benefits manager. Most large healthcare insurers (such as Medicaid, Blue Cross, Kaiser, Aetna, etc.) try to keep costs low by creating a list of approved pharmaceuticals they will pay for. Drug companies can often realize larger revenues by lowering their prices to get on these "formularies" (trading high per-unit cost for much larger sales). Caremark manages formularies for these insurers and health plans.

Meanwhile, CVS announced that it wants to buy back 150 million of its shares at $35.00 a share.

I don't see why anyone would want to do that.

CVS has been on a share-buying spree anyway for the last couple of years. Buying up their shares makes them scarce, and scarce shares mean higher share prices. CVS' share price had languished for years, and the company's directors decided to hike the share price through a buy-back.

It worked.

Additionally, CVS instituted a wide number of management and inventory changes which cut costs company-wide dramatically. This, more than the share buy-back plan, drove CVS shares up, up, up.

Today, CVS' share price was $34.16.

Wow, seems like a shareholder should take that buy-back offer, huh?

No.

See, CVS' share price has been skyrocketing for months due to improved management. It's likely to shoot past that $35 level any time now. Additionally, the massive influx of revenues from the Caremark purchase, as well as the increased business CVS is going to do at physical stores and online due to the Caremark acquisition, mean that the merged company will do much better than either did alone. This, too, will push the share price above $35 a share.

In fact, tender offers are almost always a sucker's bet. The company knows that it has to offer a slight premium on the current share price. But the company can't toss the tender offer way up into the sky, because that just won't make business sense. (If your share is selling at $10, you don't do a tender offer at $50.) What a company does is estimate just how much of a premium stockholders need to induce them to sell. The company may even estimate how much a share is worth to it; after all, the company may value the share much more highly than an existing stockholder. But the company won't go over that valuation; to do so is poor business sense, and irrational.

Essentially, the tender offer is a gauge of just how much negative sentiment there is in the stock market for the Caremark merger. Really, the only people who will sell their stock are those who think the merger will be a bust (Time Warner, as you listening?). And that $35 tender offer price is just high enough to trigger their sense of insecurity.

Me? Both companies have sound fundamentals. Both are doing well. Their businesses will mesh well, I suspect.

There's no way I'd sell at $35.

Labels: economics

"Meet the Robinsons" is one of the worst animated Disney features in quite some time...

-- A.O. Scott, "New York Times"

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!!!!!!!

Labels: cinema

I can't stop laughing...

Labels: politics

Labels: politics

Everywhere
It's been the same
Feeling
Like I'm outside in the rain..










Cum on my face, baby

Labels: big cocks, cum, twinks

It's official:

D.C.'s tree pollen is kicking my allergic ass. A seven-sneeze fit just ended, and my head felt like it came off and rolled across the floor.

Labels: spring

I'm a sucker for used books.

A used book I just purchased has the word "Discarded" stamped on the edge.

"Discarded." I can't believe that. Who would discard a book? That's like throwing a puppy out the window, or refusing to water a plant just to see it die. Books are like living things. How could someone not find this book a good home?

Many years ago, I was in the home of Robert and John, two partners who owned a small two-story wood house in a Boston suburb. I loved their house: There were massive stacks of books all over the place. It was like that apartment Edward G. Robinson inhabited in the movie "Soylent Green." Books, books, books, books from floor to ceiling, crammed into shelves and on the table and on the floor.

Books are important. Who would discard one?

Labels: literature

Interesting...

Many years ago, I bought "Flesh and the Word" on a lark at Lambda Rising Bookstore. The book totally enthralled me, primarily because editor John Preston really pushed hard to establish erotica as a genre of good writing rather than something whose pages will stick together after the second "reading." I edged for nearly a year, until "Flesh and the Word 2" came out.

Preston died of AIDS while editing the third volume. A relatively uninspiring editor, Mike Rowe, took over. Rowe was a fetish author who specialized in BDSM fiction. The third volume reflected quite strongly Rowe's own taste in fiction, and I think the volume suffered measurably for it.

Nevertheless, I was willing to give Rowe the benefit of the doubt. When his book of author fiction, "Writing Below the Belt," came out a year after "Flesh and the Word 3," I eagerly picked it up. I was disappointed. For one thing, most of the interviews were with no-name authors rather than the demi-gods of fiction who I'd expected him to interview. Second, nearly all the interviewees were from the BDSM school of writing. It became painfully clear just a few interviews into the book that nearly all these authors had some sort of personal issue to work out through their writing. Worse, all the issues seemed the same. Reading "how I need to work X out" over and over just got boring. I nearly gave up on the book, but plowed ahead through sheer obstinacy. I guess I really hoped to find some gems in there, but found only slag.

I did get one good thing out of all of this. "Flesh and the Word 2" introduced me to Aaron Travis (aka Steven Saylor), a BDSM author. Uninterested in the genre, I nevertheless read his story. It was amazing. I finally understood why Preston had argued so vociferously that "good writing is good writing, whatever the genre." The short story was goddamn good writing.

A few years later, I was looking for a gift for a friend who is an erotic fiction writer. Travis/Saylor had written at least one novel that I was aware of, "Slaves of Rome." I decided to see if Saylor had written other novels, and thought I might build my friend a little "BDSM library" for his home library.

Imagine my surprise when I found that Saylor had written only the one erotic novel.

Like many authors, Saylor tasted fame and found it good. He quickly gave up on BDSM and erotic fiction in order to write relatively tame "historical novels" about the Roman period. He has now written some seven or eight novels, with many more on the way.

I remember reading in "Writing Below the Belt" how Saylor adamantly asserted that BDSM was his ouevre and One True Love and that nothing would deter him from writing in that style.

But suddenly, he gave it all up.

I know I'm judging the man on precious little evidence, but I feel really ripped off.

How many times has the gay community finally developed a truly good artist, only to have that artist run off in search of fame and wealth -- abandoning the genre which made him or her popular in the first place? Bryan Singer did superb small homoerotic films like "Apt Pupil," then sold out to do "X-Men" and "Superman Returns." Instead of helming the first gay "Gone With the Wind," he did comic books.

It all sort of ticks me off, to be honest. Artists now wonder why the gay community won't support them. I think such complaints are naive at best, hypocritical at worst.

Labels: cinema, writing

My workplace shares the same floor with a computer training company.

I just saw the most stunningly beautiful guy working there. I actually saw him last Friday walking to work. He is about six feet tall, and super-skinny but with very broad shoulders. He's got light-brown, almost strawberry-blond hair. It's his face which is the killer: Fine boned, chiseled cheeks, strong jaw, and piercing blue eyes which stare out intently from the long curving bangs he slings over his forehead.

At first I thought he was just a student, and I'd never see him again. But today I realized he actually works there.

Maybe I should take some computer classes....

When I was 22, my friend Karl and I took a trip up into the Rocky Mountains. We went up to my family's cabin on the Blackfoot River. We called it a "cabin," but in reality it was a large two-story house. My parents had been too poor to finish the thing, so it had only cold water and a wood stove for heat, and no interior drywall.

The cabin was about two miles east of the small town of Lincoln, the stopping point half-way between Great Falls and Missoula.

We'd bought some sake (Karl was on a Japan kick at the time), wine coolers (hey, I like them, get off my back), food and other stuff. We didn't get up there until late, probably 8 p.m. or so. As the sun set spectacularly over the Continental Divide, I cooked burgers on the electric stove and Karl made a salad and baked fries in the oven. We sat the linoleum kitchen table and ate and talked. We left everything out, afterward.

We walked down to the river. It was late August. The Blackfoot is fed by run-off, and was largely dry by this time of year. Only a small stream of water far in the center of the quarter-mile-wide gravelly riverbed still ran. We saw medium-sized cutthroat trout in the warm water. We skipped some stones, saw deer crossing the riverbed downstream, and a porcupine waddling into the cottonwoods. (Karl, being from the big city, was very excited to have seen a porcupine.)

Because the river was nearly dry, there were no mosquitoes.

Karl heated his sake, and I built a fire in the fireplace. It got dark. We sat out on back deck, facing the river. Looking up, you could see every star in the sky. Every single one. There wasn't a single man-made light source close by for miles. Karl actually got to see the Milky Way for the first time in his life. He was astonished by it.

We laid our lounge chairs way back, so we could lie on our backs and watch the stars. We talked, but there were long stretches of silence between each sentence. We saw many falling stars, and many satellites. It was fun to try to say where in the sky a satellite was. "Look, up there!" "Where?" "Over to the west." "High or low?" "Low." "Near where that very tall pine tree sticks into the sky?" "No, near where the pine tree with the crooked branch is." "There are four pine trees with crooked branches." "The pine tree near the cottonwood tree." "Oh, that pine tree with the crooked branch. What am I looking at, again?" "That satellite. It's moving north to south." "Oh yeah, now I see it. Are you sure that isn't east to west?" "I don't know, maybe it is. It's moving in a straight line." "I think all satellites move in a straight line, Karl. If they didn't, it'd be a UFO or a plane." "Oh. Yeah, that makes sense... Look! There's another one!" "Where?"...

It got very, very late. We got very, very drunk. But quietly drunk.

We went back inside. I'd laid out sleeping bags on the floor in front of the fire, and zipped them together so we could lay side-by-side. We stripped and climbed in. Karl kept his boxes on. For a guy with a hot muscular body, he was very body-shy.

We listened to the fire snap and crackle. The night breeze began to make that rushing, whooshing, sussurrusing sound as it spilled through the pine trees, almost like the sound of surf on a beach. Karl was mesmerized by it. The air smelled of pine, smoke and clean...clean something. Clean air, I guess. We rolled together and I put my arm around his waist. We lay there, listening to the wind and the fire. Maybe a half hour later, coyotes began yipping about a mile and a half away, down on the riverbed. Karl was thrilled. His body tensed up, his skin got goosebumps, and he shivered. I thought it was cute.

We fell asleep like that. I woke up in the middle of the night. Karl'd opened the sliding glass door onto the balcony. He was out there, boxers around his ankles, peeing off the deck. He climbed back into the sleeping bag, and put his arm around me. We slept again. I woke around dawn. I went out onto the deck and did the same thing. As I was finishing, I heard Karl say, "Come back inside with me." I did. The air was very crisp and clean. Dawn was just beginning to break, but we were on the west side of the house and the sunlight wouldn't wake us for several hours yet. I climbed back into the sleeping bag. My skin was cold, and Karl got up close behind me, put his arm around me, and pulled me in close.

We woke around 10 a.m., made eggs and toast, and then went off on the rest of our trip.


I think the thing I miss most about the West is looking up and seeing a sky so full of stars that it's overwhelming. And seeing the satellites.

Labels: friends, memories

So the new "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" season "ended" last night, just as "Battlestar Galactica's" season ended.

About "Galactica" later.

AQTF was not that good. How many times have we see weird duos take on the Force? First it was the Mooninites, then the Plutonians. Now it's floating brains.

The show seems more and more repetitive, rather than inventive. It's as if all the creative energy were sucked out of it by requiring the staff to do a two-hour movie.

In six years, the show has managed to air 68 episodes. That's six episodes a year, or 90 minutes a year. HUH??? I don't see how it takes so much time and effort to churn out a surrealistic 15-minute Flash animated TV show.

Labels: Cartoon Network

The D.C. Public Library (DCPL) is advocating that the MLK Jr. Public Library be torn down. Although the building was designed by noted architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the building suffers from poor layout and interior design. Its heating, AC and ventiliation system has never worked properly, leaks are common, and the library requires major infrastructure improvements (especially regarding electrical, telephone, fiber-optic and elevators).

The question before the city since 2005 has been: Demolish it or renovate it?

In 2006, the Mayor's Task Force on the Future of the District of Columbia Public Library System released its report advocating demolition.

Now, I won't attempt to go into the reasons for or against demolition of a historic landmark (among other things, the library is the only example of modern architecture in the city of Washington, and Mies' last building), for or against building's lifespan (it is close to the end of it), for or against the building's location (why a central library when branches would be more effective?), or any of the myriad issues involved.

Overall, I think the Mayor's Task Force utterly bungled the job. I don't think anyone can say whether the MLK Building should be torn down or renovated, because the report is so shoddy.

There are these illogical howlers in the report which I can't help but point out:

DCPL says a new MLK Building will generate $2.1 billion annually.
Wow, what an awesome number, right? Yes, if you are the entire state of Florida. The problem is that D.C. is a mere city. The study the DCPL report cites talks about the entire state of Florida. D.C. is not a huge state. Worse, there are no cities in Florida comparable to D.C. in size, economy and demographics. Tallahassee comes close (although not in size or demographics). Most large Florida cities are coastal and have major transshipment ports, and D.C. has nothing like that. How much external revenue would a D.C. library generate? Well, we don't know. Florida has a number of major research universities; D.C. has none. Florida's population is whiter, more educated, wealthier, and more likely to use its libraries.

The report likes to compare D.C. to Seattle as well, where the new public library generated $16 million in new spending its first year. The report foolishly extends this out for two decades (although there is no reason to assume that spending will stay at that level for that length of time). But D.C. is no Seattle. Researchers at Central Connecticut State University ranked Seattle the most literate city in America in 2005. Unless you count soft-core pornographer Zane, D.C. residents rarely read. Seattle has the highest percentage of college graduates of any major U.S. city. D.C.? More than than 70 percent of its fourth-graders cannot read at grade-level, 40 percent of its high school students drop out before graduation, and 37 percent of its adult citizens are functionally illiterate. D.C. residents tend to use the library as a place to go to the bathroom, a place to sleep when its cold, a place to hang out, and a place to eat. It's not seen as a place to receive programs, check out books, do research or hold meetings. D.C. likes to trumpet that nearly half of all residents at least 25 years old have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher. But these tend to be short-term residents who are overwhelmingly white. Just how many L Street attorneys, K Street lobbyists, and AU Park professionals are using the MLK Jr. library downtown?


Cost isn't a factor.
The new Seattle public library cost $165 million to build. Private donors contributed $83 million of this cost.

Does D.C. have that kind of money? Hardly. On top of that, D.C. doesn't have the sort of major-donor base that Seattle does. Seattle is home to a number of major corporations, and big-money people in Seattle tend to be fairly civic-minded. All D.C. has are rich lawyers, most of whom don't live in the city, don't care about libraries for poor blacks, and don't contribute dime-one to the city's nonprofit enterprises. (Just look at near-bankrupt Whitman-Walker Clinic...)

Worse, the District is spending every available dime on a new baseball stadium. Just this past Thursday, D.C. officials estimated that the new baseball stadium is going to cost more than $700 million. The previous estimate was $589 million. Who pays for that extra $111 million? The city claims it won't, but in fact it's paid big premiums on "cost overrun insurance" -- and once the insurance kicks in, the city will still have to pony up half the cost overruns. Anyone got an extra $55 million lying around??

Worse, that baseball stadium is actually going to reduce the city's economic tax base over the next 10 years. Yes, you heard right: Rather than increase spending the in city, the baseball stadium is going to reduce it.

A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) study of the net economic impact of professional sports in 37 American cities that hosted professional sports teams over the past three decades showas a reduction in real per capita income.

Why? Because pro sports teams suck productivity out of the area, causing an average net loss of 1,924 jobs in the retail and restaurant sector. And while net wages for hotel workers rises about $10 per worker year, but wages in bars and restaurants drop about $162 per worker per year as people attend baseball games rather than go out to eat or drink. D.C.'s estimate? The Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development claims the new ballpark will create 30 jobs earning an annual total of $94 million a year –- or a whopping $261,111 per job. That sort of bullshit economics is what the city estimates it will get. Economists know better. (Even the fucking City of New York knows better. NYC is considering building two new stadiums, and has only estimated new revenues at $5 million a year. That's for a city with two new stadiums, and 13 million people to draw on. Come on, D.C.! Stop the lies.)

Worse, D.C. is going to start subsidizing the Nationals' use of the stadium. The Nats have a 30-year lease which commits them to pay $3.5 million in rent for the first five years, and $5 million in rent in the fifth year. In the sixth through thirtieth years, the rent increases by 2 percent a year (minus $10,000 per year). But since inflation averages 3 percent over 30 years, D.C. taxpayers will actually be subisidizing the rent on the new stadium by $28.8 million over 30 years. That's a payment of almost $1 million a year to the Nats!! (And if attendance falls below a certain number, the rent won't even increase by the expected 2 percent.)

Then there's the $20 million cost of upgrading the Navy Yard Metro stop, the $50 million fund the city must establish to maintain and upgrade the stadium over its 30-year life, and the $20-million-a-year cost of security and traffic personnel at each game.

Total per-year cost to the city for the new stadium? $77.7 million a year (which includes amortized interest costs on those bonds).

D.C. officials have also over-estimated the amount of tax revenues the stadium will generate. That's because sports fans would have spent money on things outside the stadium. Whether consumers spend money inside the stadium or outside it, the expenditure (and tax revenues) would still be the same.

D.C. officials says they have protected citizens by levying a higher tax on D.C.-based corporations. But corporations don't pay taxes, people do. Companies just pass on the cost of the new taxes to consumers. Hey, great...

Cost of a $200 million city library? $19.4 million a year (including that $50 million fund to maintain it over 30 years).

I'm not going to try to estimate how much money a new city library will generate for the city. Let the DCPL come up with meth-induced numbers on that.

But more and more, a new city library looks much cheaper than a baseball stadium, and it's better for people too.



This whole process is just so fucked up.

Labels: Washington D.C.

Worst Internet Purchase Horror Story Ever:

Steve in Paris got me to thinking about this. Here's my worst Internet purchase horror story ever...

So I'm trying to order something online. I get to the spot where I need to enter my shipping address. I scroll down through the states... No Washington, D.C.

I call the company. I get some dweeb on the phone.

Me: I live in Washington, D.C. Did you notice that D.C. is not one of your choices as a shipping state?
Him: Uh...
Me: Can you add it?
Him: Just choose Maryland or Virginia.
Me: Now wait a minute. D.C. is not Mary--
Him: I told you to just choose Maryland or Virginia.
Me: The post office -- hell, no one! -- will deliver to D.C. if you say the state is Maryland or Virginia.
Him: Well, D.C.'s not a state so we don't have it listed there.
Me: Are you telling me you won't ship to the 600,000 people living in the nation's capital?
Him: Listen, I told you several times now: Just choose Maryland or Virignia. Why don't you understand that?
Me: My package won't arrive if I do that. Why can't you just add D.C. to your list?
Him: I guess you don't want to buy from us, do you?
Me: No, I do want this item. But, see --
Him: Pal, I told you what to do. You'll either do it or not do business with us.

That's when I realized I should not be doing business with them.

I did, however, write to the CEO and told him just what a slipshod piece of crap company he was running, how his helpline staff was obnoxious and stupid, and how I was reporting his company to the FTC and the D.C. Better Business Bureau.

I've not had any experience quite like that anywhere else. But it certainly was a nasty situation.

Anyone else got a horror story?

Labels: Internet

The "New York Times" is reporting today that city police spied heavily on pro-peace and progressive groups prior to the 2004 Republican Convention

The goal was not to stop violence but rather to collect information on their political goals, the extent of their political organizing, the sophistication of their organizing efforts, and who belonged to these groups.

In thousands of reports which the NYPD tried to keep secret, the police are revealed to have spied on hundreds of groups which had no intention of breaking the law. The NYPD shared this information widely with police departments in other cities and nations in an attempt to label these groups as terrorist and to encourage other law enforcement departments to suppress, harass and undermine them as well.

NONE of the groups committed violence. All were anti-Bush groups, engaged in purely political organizing.

Under federal and city rules, senior police officials must certify that there is some indication of illegal activity before an inquiry is begun. NYPD police files show clearly that nearly all the groups under surveillance had no intention of committing any violation of the law whatsoever, and that the NYPD bald-face lied to federal and state judges in order to obtain permission to spy on these organizations.

During the demostrations at the GOP Convention, civil rights attorneys claimed that spying and interference with peaceful anti-Bush groups was widespread and that federal and city law enforcement were interfering with the democratic process to further Republican political goals. NYPD police denied these claims outright, saying that such assertions were over-blown and that no such program existed.

Today, we have learned that the NYPD blatantly lied.


THIS IS CALLED FASCISM. It is the use of the power of the state to spy on, antagonize, threaten, infiltrate and undermine the legitimate use of the democratic process to further the political agenda of the party in power.

The Bush and Bloomberg administrations are fascist, and there is no longer room for argument. Both clearly are undermining the democratic process in order to protect and further their own selfish, personal political goals.



"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
........- Benjamin Franklin

Labels: Bush, fascism, politics

I got up late today, and switched on the TV to see what the weather was going to be like today.

Instead, I got "Breakfast with the Arts" on A&E. I normally never watch A&E, because it's turned into a junk-network. It was the "South Pacific" episode.

My penis tented up the bedsheets. They were in Tahiti, and visiting a vanilla plantation. A sizzling hot Tahitian stud in sleevless t-shirt and tight-in-the-crotch basketball shorts was showing the host (a dumb-sounding gee-whiz blond who appears either to be four months pregnant or just fat) how vanilla is grown, dried, and processed. There were many shots of his chest. Big, beautiful, tight pecs with nipples which stood out to heeeeerrrreee. He had a sweet, big, somehwat shy smile that lit up the room!

I was masturbating and already dripping when the show switched over to Les Grands Ballet de Tahiti. The taut-bodied Tahitian young men produced two extremely potent, sheet-needing-washing-now responses.

Having now washed up, thrown the sheets into the laundry, and spent another 15 minutes "alone with...", I thought I should honor the sexual memory of this morning.

Yes, with hot naked Asian guys. I wish there were hot naked South Pacific men, but you have to take what you can get.

Naked Asian men rock!

Labels: Asians, cum, foreskin, photography, twinks

Ian Thorpe has gotten astonishingly hunky since he let his body hair grow in.

Please tell me the rumors about his sexuality are true... I would die if he slipped his Thorpedo into me!

Labels: celebrities

In 1990, I was introduced to the Internet.

At the time, there was no Web. The Internet was text-only, with no Web pages and no graphics whatsoever. (Mosaic, the first browser to permit graphics, was not introduced until 1993. That's when the Web, as we know it, took off.) The primary uses of the Internet were email and newsgroups. Email traffic was unheard of except (for the most part) between college students and scientists. And Usenet (which still exists) was the primary way people of like minds would come together to discuss things.

I immediately found alt.sex.movies, or ASM. At the time, there might be 10 or 15 posts a week (yes, a week) to ASM. And it was all heterosexual. Most of the traffic on ASM was porn reviews.

I leapt in with both feet. I posted a very long review of the classic film "Big Guns." My goal was to see just how these supposedly open-minded heteros would react to the broadening of some horizons.

Amazingly (yes, I was amazed), the reaction was positive. Although they couldn't bring themselves to read what I had written, I wasn't flamed off the group.

By 1993 or so, Usenet was awash in spam. Worse, some mentally ill individuals (notably a Las Vegas-based former attorney named "Pig-fucker") had decided to spam the group and flood it with crap.

Shortly thereafter, the top five posters of alt.sex.movies resolved to form a moderated Usenet group. The "alt." hierarchy was so full of traffic and spam that many universities and ISPs refused to carry it any longer. So we decided to go for one of the "legitimate" hierarchies: Rec. Almost everyone carried the rec. hierarchy. But getting into that hierarchy meant a lengthy process of approval from the Usenet gods.

We cleared that burden, and rec.arts.movies.erotica (RAME) was born. I was one of five original moderators. RAME still exists, although we went to robo-moderation three years ago. Sadly, it's largely overrun with "raincoaters" -- straight men who think women are all "ho's" and "skanks" and whose vocabulary is limited to the word "hot." I haven't read the group in nearly four years.

In those early days, this was all just a lark for me. I loved gay porn (I'd been watching it in adult bookstores since I was 16). But I'd only just started learning about how porn was made, which directors and studios were any good, and which names went with which bodies.

Only several years later did I realize that I'd gotten myself famous, somehow, for writing these lengthy gay porn reviews. It led to a short-lived career as a porn reviewer (being a nice guy, I tended to get the crappy films no one else would review), and as a gay porn industry columnist. I even judged the GEVA awards twice.

I managed to save a few of my early reviews. They're cute. My writing is so bad, and my use of exclamation points and elipses rivals that of Tom Wolfe. Not only that, but it's fun to see how my sexual tastes have matured over time.

An online friend I've since lost contact with once told me that my reviews were hotter than the actual films. I don't know about that.

But here's one review... I've left it as-is, having only cleaned up the spelling errors.

My first gay porn review: Big Guns

BIG GUNS


If you ever want to show a gay video to your straight friends and say, "This is what real gay sex is like," OR you want to watch a gay fuck flick where the guys REALLY ENJOY fucking each other and being in each other's company, then get this film!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, yeah -- "It's a William Higgins film, and he's the god of gay porn!" Probably not..... Higgins is listed as the main man behind this film, but he probably only did the first three scenes (which were shot on film). The three "editors" probably did the film after Higgins bailed when gay porn went video just as this was being made.

And hey -- THERE'S ACTUALLY A GOOD PLOT HERE!!!!!!!!!! It's 1987, and in the days before AIDS everyone fucks without rubbers (for you who care). Mike Henson, who is buff and sweet looking and handsome in his glory (hole) days in this film, is the star who is just waiting to get off leave and go back to being a Navy flier.

This scene is on film, and the transfer is not so good for this one scene. It's supposedly winter, and Mike is lying in bed. There are some AWESOME ass-worship shots here as Mike gets out of bed and looks out the window. He decides to sleep in and jack off (who wouldn't) rather than get up. After climbing back into this HUGE bed, Mike lays on his stomach, legs spread BEAUTIFULLY, and humps the blankets for a while.

There are several GREAT shots of Henson's hot ass, his cheeks spread wide by his legs, and then Mike gets to his knees and jacks off some more. There are some good chest shots here of a Mike Henson still working out, and there are some GREAT close-ups of Mike's long, veined dick as he works his crank. Mike leans back on one arm, poking his prong into the cool morning air, and eventually he gets out of bed (why?). He goes over to this chair, props one leg up on the chair (which is supposed to give us a nice ass shot again, but it doesn't) and he JOs some more. Then Mike is BACK ON THE BED for the final sequence, lying on his back, his VERY stiff prick stabbing into the sky. (There isn't a limp cock in this film, by the way!) After some more JO, Mike shoots long, sticky, wet ropes of cum onto his belly. MMMmmm-mmm good! Just like the Colonel says, it's finger lickin' good, and Mike scoops up some pearls and tastes his own jism.

This scene is JUST THE RIGHT length for jacking off--both for Mike and for us viewers. There is this dreamy, mellow music throughout, which adds a nice subtle touch. WHEW! To be honest, I wasn't a Mike Henson fan before this, having only seen his inebriated performance (say hi to everyone at Betty Ford for us, Mikey!) with Dolph Knight in "Score Ten" and his crew-cut, less-then-buff body in a spirited (well, not spirited, but ANYTHING looks good next to Lex Baldwin's Valium-induced acting!) session with Lex Baldwin in the opening scene to "Powertool 2" last year. But now -- WHEW!!!!!!!!!!! Someone tell Mike he needs to get back in the gym and stop hanging out with Johnny Walker.....

Suddenly, it's summer. (HUH???) Mike is preparing to go to Palm Springs on the last leg of his leave (awfully fucking damn long shore leave if you ask me!) and he runs into high school chum Kevin Wiles who is apparently still IN high school, because Kevin still has a paper route.

Kevin sits down gingerly, and spins Mike a story about how he got laid by super-hung Chad Douglas last night. It's the old "he answered the door naked, dressed only in a robe that swung open, revealing his massive prick" routine, and it's DUMB. Even my goldfish was trying to give two thumbs down to this one.

First Kevin sucks Chad, and Kevin unwittingly chokes some on Chad's cock -- at least the ad-libbing here is good, with Douglas playing the "master" and telling Kevin to "shut up and suck". There's some slapping of Chad Douglas's limp cock in Kevin's face, and some very VIOLENT throat fucking that Chad forces Kevin to do.

Eventually Chad bends Kevin over a table, and Kevin strips. Chad fucks him, and there's some of the Douglas trademark "aim the cock at his asshole, and if it enters his ass well great, and if it misses too bad if it hurts him" sort of stuff that I always thought was a bit of a turnoff. Chad then turns Kevin on his back, and fucks him some more. Eventually they BOTH end up on the table, Chad crouching over Kevin. There are some UGLY shots of Kevin's swollen, red, raw asshole, the hemorrhoids hanging out as Chad penetrates him over and over, removing his cock from Wiles' ass and putting it back in. If this was supposed to be arousing, well it aroused my LUNCH anyway! Right back up the old esophagus.....

Finally Kevin has his standard large, sloppy load, and Douglas cums in what for him is a fairly small cumshot -- but still pretty large! But we're not done, unfortunately. (Is this why Higgins got the boot from this film? We hope so; this fascination with Chad Douglas' "master" image is dumb......) Back on the couch now, Kevin rides Chad's cock, first facing Chad and then away from him. The music here gets VERY repetitive, VERY boring, and DUMB sounding. It tries to make the scene "throb" with quick energy, but instead the only thing throbbing was my head from the Muzak-like quality of the soundtrack! Again, we see both men cum , and it's the same story again.

And we switch back to Kevin Wiles talking to Mike Henson, and Henson grins at Kevin's story and they both leave. Why this couldn't have been cut from the film is TOTALLY beyond me...........

Now we begin to hit the REAL story here........ In his apartment, Navy fly-boy Chris Gray (WHEW!!!!!!!! Somebody get this guy on the phone and convince him to do more gay porn!) is fooling around with Johnny Davenport's gun, which he finds under the bed. Johnny tells him it's no toy, and they go to the firing range to show Chris how to shoot it. There is a REAL GUN here, and a real firing range! Gray's startled reaction to the loud bangs the gun makes are either VERY real, or he's a great actor!!! This whole scene is pretty well done, with Gray's timidity towards weapons very apparent and well thought-out. And as we knew, eventually Johnny Davenport can't keep his hands off of Gray's crotch as Chris fires the weapon, and we end up back at the apartment.

There is a LOT of tongue kissing action here. Johnny gets to his knees, and he actually BLOWS CHRIS! (First time a cock has passed his lips on screen, I believe.....) Johnny kneads Chris' ass cheeks VERY well, and we see plenty of virile male asshole to drool over. Then Chris gets on his knees, and he slips Davenport's dong through his fly and blows him. There is some HEAVY throating of Johnny's 10"+ cock, and the music here (which finally starts) is a bit tinny. But this is all dwarfed by the sight of Chris' VERY wet cocksucking; his red lips and tight nipples caught by the camera as he sucks Davenport is extremely hot!!! Johnny's cock has never looked more veined, bumpy, ridged or wet, and the two boys eventually collapse onto the bed, Johnny Davenport's dick still locked between Chris Gray's lips!

Davenport strips Gray down as fast as he can, and then rushes to penetrate him. There is a HOT penetration shot here showing Johnny spearing into Chris -- it's something we don't often see in movies these days. There is a problem here, when Davenport has trouble with his erection and has to use his fist as an impromptu cockring. It's annoying. It does get better, though, as the sheer look of ECSTASY passing over Chris Gray's face made EVERYONE in my living room spew their loads!!! Even the sight of Chris' beefy thighs and his hand on his hard cock is exciting!!!!!!!!

The fucking does get better, even if we do get far-away shots showing Johnny Davenport reaming Chris Gray for all his life and then the close-ups show only a little tiny bit of movement as Davenport struggles to penetrate Gray with his relatively limp dick. Chris Gray cums in a NICE load, very thick and rich, and Davenport has one of his trademark squirter loads where the clearly shoots HUGE amounts of cum and it flies at least four feet. They finally collapse on top of one another.

Now at this point, I was going to be disappointed in this scene. But then the surprise hit -- Davenport turns Gray over, and they fuck some more! And double-fuck sex scenes are ANOTHER thing you don't see much of any more these days.....

Davenport is MUCH stiffer the second time around, and the action in Gray's ass is MUCH better, frenzied, and arousing. After a few more minutes of some VERY rough sex, Gray actually looking in pain for a few moments, we get some more wet, heavy cumshots from both men. Davenport actually has to BACK AWAY from Gray and the camera so we can see him shoot and still keep it all in frame!!! Gray gets to his knees, and with Davenport holding onto him from behind, he drops a nice thick load onto the sheets..... Both men hold on to each other in the afterglow, which is nice.........WHEW!

Now the plot thickens and becomes a real plot: Mike Henson arrives in Davenport's apartment, and they decide to go suntan by the pool at Henson's hotel. Here is where the flick switches from film to video, and you can see how the filmmaking styles change, too. While sitting by the pool at Mike's hotel (it won't be obvious until later that it's Mike's hotel...), the guys see Kevin Williams go into the hotel with his parents. They comment on how hot he is, and Kevin comes back out in a tight bikini and takes a swim in the pool.

Davenport bets Henson $100 that Henson can't get Kevin Williams in bed, and the race is on! Kevin's parents stop by the pool to tell their "little" boy they will be out for several hours, and he goes back inside. Meanwhile, Davenport and Henson are changing into their clothes in Mike's hotel room. There is some wasted opportunity here to show each man's dick and ass and body while they dress. If you were like me, you just wanted to see more of HOT Mike Henson!!!

Davenport shows Henson the new toy he has: a 1987 style videocam that he can put in a gym back that has a convenient window, and Henson can film his exploits as proof of his conquest. Davenport can even watch it from a little TV he has that's linked electronically to the videocam. Yeah right......... This part in the room just lasts too long.

Eventually, Henson shows at Kevin's door posing as a masseur for his folks. He says Kevin should take it or it will just go to waste, and he agrees to let him in. Mike uses the old "I don't want to get oil on you, why don't you take off your clothes" routine. Kevin acts DUMB in this scene, not naive or innocent, but for some reason both cliches work!!!!!!!!! For a masseur, Mike stinks -- he just runs his fingertips over Kevin's body and oils him up a lot. Mike even starts to admit to Kevin that sometimes "I fuck the women I massage" (like Mike Henson has even SEEN a woman naked before, the queen!) Eventually, Mike touches Kevin's balls and when there's no reaction Mike goes for it, and gets Kevin to strip totally naked. The deal is, many directors and writers TRY to use a similar plot cliche, but few can make it work. It works here, largely because the director takes SO LONG to set it up!

And lo and behold, Kevin gets an erection and soon Mike is massaging (i.e., JACKING OFF) Kevin's cock. This is actually so FUCKING SENSUAL that I shot right here! We even see Davenport in the other room bitching about his lost $100 now..... And Johnny decides to at least enjoy the free peep show he's getting.

Kevin rolls onto his belly, and Mike oils his ass and spreads his ass wide and does some HOT ass play. The shots of Davenport JOing here are annoyingly spliced in, but they will get better. The scene shifts now to Mike Henson fucking the shit out of Kevin Williams' ass!

Mike is STIFF AS STEEL and the penetration shots here are fucking AWESOME!!!!!! Mike then crouches over Kevin's ass, and again the fucking is just as fast, hard, and deep as before!!! It's VERY arousing to watch Henson lick Kevin's ears, face and lips as he fucks him from behind...... It's clear: Mike Henson KNOWS how to fuck a man!!!!!! Then they switch positions, both men on their sides, Henson pushing into Kevin's ass. Again, this side-by-side fucking position has been used by a lot of people, but only these two seem to have the athletic ability to really pull it off! Both men are CLEARLY into their fucking as well, which makes this scene one of the hottest in the film.

Now Kevin gets on his back and rolls into his shoulders, his ankles to his ears. Mike stands over him, and penetrates his ass in a VERY kinky position that once more brought several cumshot-muscles into action in my household! Shots of Mike repeatedly entering Kevin, and fucking him HARD, are interspersed with shots of Kevin's face clouded in the sheer wildness and desire of this scene. Then the two guys switch to the standard missionary position, and there are even MORE awe-inspiring penetration shots here! Easily, this is the beat-off scene of the YEAR (even if it was done first in 1987!). Now come more shots of Johnny Davenport in the other room JOing -- it's an awesome thing to see this stud fisting his dick, and when the fist is at the root, about six inches of rigid fuck pole STILL PROTRUDE over his thumb and forefinger!!!!!!!!

Switch back again to Mike reaming the crap out of Kevin, and now Kevin does something I've had my fuck partners do, too: He reaches behind Mike's ass and inserts a finger into Mike's hole. As Mike humps, that finger stabs in and out of his ass, and the look on Henson's face is sheer heaven! Now at the end, Mike Henson shoots a sort of smaller load, but it's followed by Davenport spurting like Old Faithful -- pointing his dick straight into the air, Davenport spurts shot after shot of thick cum three to four FEET into the air!!!!!!!!!!!

It's one of the MOST erotic cumshots I've ever seen! And it's followed up by a sloppy, wet load that Kevin Williams shoots onto his own taut belly.........

Back in Johnny's room, Mike refuses the $100 -- he took the poor guy's cherry, and he doesn't want to cheapen it by taking Davenport's cash. That was nice......

Now the plot twists: Mike gets his brand new American Express card in his hotel mail, and he decides to move to a nicer hotel and party with his friends. Mike now picks up buddies Mike Ryan and Jeff Boote, and they go to Mike Henson's NICE suite in downtown Palm Springs. Again, we get a little longer than necessary scene where we see the Palm Springs hotel strip, and it doesn't get any better quick. The boys decide to use the hot tub in Henson's room, and soon they are all stripped down to their underwear and enjoying the water. Boote gets an erection in the tub, and they decide to get out and "seek some women" (again, like these guys have ever even WANTED to fuck pussy before...). This whole thing about getting into town and getting in and out of the tub is about the most boring thing you can imagine! But it resolves rather nicely here: Boote starts poking around in Henson's luggage, and he finds some "Fundies" -- the underwear for two. Henson and Ryan show him how they are used, and they all collapse on the bed.

Now, here's where the movie is great -- we get about five to seven minutes (really!) of three guys just horsing around. They are very physical as they wrestle on the bed, sure. But the deal is, the laughter sounds real, the horse-play is honest and fun to watch, and it's VERY CLEAR that these three guys like each other and enjoy each other's company. It's just like three gay friends should be -- happy to get naked and get it on, and have a good time doing so!!! And that, amazingly enough, is just what happens........

Ryan and Boote manage to roll Henson on his back, and discover he's got an erection. But Henson wriggles loose, and Ryan and Henson push BOOTE on his back, where he has an even MORE substantial erection! Soon, Henson is jacking Boote off, and the action begins.

There is some spanking here, too -- nothing that's supposed to be quasi-S&M, just enough slapping to get you to think that this is the sort of mild "punishment" three guys fucking around in bed might get into for three minutes before the blowjobs begin. Soon, Mike Ryan is blowing Jeff Boote, and Boote REALLY gets off on it!!!!!! Henson does some okay ass-eating of Boote, and eventually Boote and Mike Ryan 69, with Henson also licking Boote's very nice 7" cock. Boote slips a finger into Mike Ryan's ass. Then, Henson and Ryan go butt-to-butt while on their backs to allow Boote to blow them both at the same time; there is some GREAT two-cocks-in-one-mouth action here, which I've seen VERY few men capable of carrying off well -- but it's done PERFECTLY here! Henson CLEARLY enjoys THIS!!!!!!!!

There's even a little ad-libbing here: Henson reaches between Boote's legs and jacks him off as Boote blows, a scene clearly not intended by the hurried look of the way it was shot, but a segment that shows how aroused these guys were by each other. There are again some EXTREMELY nice shots of Jeff Boote's ass cheeks spread as he kneels to suck these guys off. Then Boote mounts Henson's cock, and rides it home; both men are CLEARLY getting off on this!!!!!!!! Mike Ryan cums here in a VERY sloppy, very large, far-spurting cumshot which is obviously very intense for him. Henson has another okay cumshot (not POOR by any means, just okay) which lands on his own belly, but Boote saves his for later....... Hmmmm.

Mike Ryan now kneels doggie style on the bed, and Mike Henson gets on top of him in a similar fashion but doesn't penetrate him at all. It's Jeff Boote's turn to do the fucking, and WOW does he know how to pack the fudge!!!!! Boote fucks them both doggie style, alternating between assholes!!! He is EXTREMELY energetic here, and Henson is in OBVIOUS ecstasy as Boote plows him open. (Why hasn't this guy, like Chris Gray, made any more videos???) After Boote spends five minutes really giving it to these two guys, he himself gets on his back for a little missionary fucking from Mike Henson while Mike Ryan slips his cock between Jeff's lips.......

Henson again shows that he knows how to ball a guy VERY WELL, and Boote again slips some fingers up Mike's ass as he fucks; Mike Ryan also ends up licking Boote's toes and feet here. After more of this awesome ass plowing, Boote 69s with Ryan again as Henson continues to show us his piston imitation. Henson slaps some beautiful balls against Jeff Boote's ass, and he gets Boote to cream a NICE load all over Mike Ryan's face. Henson himself creams a fairly large load all over Boote's ass, and there is an AWESOME sight of Jeff Boote hungrily looking into a mirror (which is at the head of the bed) and ogling Henson's cock and shooting spunk!!!!!!!! Finally, Mike Ryan drops ANOTHER sloppy, large load on his own stomach. The music throughout this scene is throbbing, driving, and subtle -- the way it is throughout the film. These three fuck buddies end up showering together, soaping each other up and stripping cum and sweat from their bodies.

It's the end of the film, folks, and we get to the final scene where Johnny Davenport and Mike Henson are finally back in uniform -- dress whites -- at a bar. In comes Rocky Armano, aide de camp to an admiral; Davenport and Henson share yucks about how Armano sucks his way to the top and how Henson fucked him a year ago -- they think it's funny the ramrod strict and straight admiral would have the biggest cocksucker in the Navy on his staff (this will lose it's humor if the Navy ever has to admit gays........ Geez, it's going to be difficult for people in the near future to see why this is so funny, once gays are an accepted part of military life!)

At any rate, the emphasis of this scene is not on Henson or Davenport, but on two other stud Navy fliers: Jeff Quinn and John Rocklin (who, by the way, had met before on the set of "Giant Splash Shots 2" earlier in the year, and were lovers on that set; it's why Rocklin agreed to do this film, only his second, and why he agreed to do what he did in this film , as you'll see later.......) When a hot-looking babe walks in the door and says hi to Rocklin, he plays Bob Packwood and grabs her tits. She flames him, and the drunken fliers go outside to commiserate about why Rocklin can't pick up women. (Here's a hint: BECAUSE YOU ARE AS GAY AS NOEL COWARD, YOU STUPID SHITS!!!!!!!!!!! Why gay porn makers INSIST on reproducing and sucking up to this "inside every gay man is also a hetero man" is beyond me...........)

God, these men are hot to watch!!!!!! In the hot summer night, Rocklin takes off his officer's jacket, and both men sweat profusely, soaking their clothes and hair and looking VERY sultry....... Rocklin asks Quinn to show him how to pick up a woman, and Quinn says the secret is to never take your hands off her but also never to go too fast right away..... Jeff touches John's ears, face, pecs, nipples, abdomen -- and Rocklin begins to swoon! Soon Jeff Quinn is licking at John Rocklin's armpit, and he works his way down John's body to his waist.

This CHEESY Mexican-type guitar music begins here, but thank god it doesn't last long! Soon, Quinn is taking off John's boots, and begins to engage in some SEXY foot worship! But it's when Quinn finally reaches for Rocklin's cock, which is half-sticking out of his pants, that the action takes off: Quinn doesn't suck Rocklin right away; instead, he LICKS John's cock for a solid five minutes. The cum fairly FLOWED from the cocks in the room where we were watching this! Here now, some harder, more rock-like music begins, very subtly, and Jeff Quinn starts to blow John Rocklin FEROCIOUSLY!!!

Both men strip, and the sight of sweat POURING off their hard bodies is enough to stiffen even the limp dicks us poor reviewing audiences now had after our eighth cum of the film! Quinn stops sucking John and tries to get John to suck his cock, but John says "No, I can't do that." Yeah, right -- anyone see "Giant Splash Shots 2" where John DEEP THROATS hung Jim Bentley???? Instead, Quinn makes Rocklin bend over a wicker basket, where Quinn eats his ass out like it was full of honey and Jeff Quinn was a diabetic Somalian with low blood sugar and a sweet tooth!!!!!!!!! There are some AWESOME shots of both men's EXTREMELY stiff penises here, and it is enough to get that joy juice rolling again!

Jeff Quinn, however, even fingers his own ass as he eats John out. Finally Quinn fucks Rocklin, who is doggie style over the basket. The sight of Quinn's tan flesh against Rocklin's white ass is incredible!!!!!!!! Not to mention the fact that Jeff Quinn is one of the most ABLE fucks in the world, and he has a well-deserved reputation in gay porn for being one of the BEST tops around in terms of pleasing his fellow actors. And he proves it again here -- Jeff lays pipe into John's ass hard, fast, steady, and swift; Rocklin then props one leg up on the basket so we can supposedly see the penetration better, and we get some VERY hot penetration shots!!! Jeff Quinn then has a VERY intense orgasm, one so strong he involuntarily whimpers out loud and cries out as he spills a VERY LARGE LOAD on Rocklin's pretty globes.

Rocklin then humps his cock in his fist; the sight of his curving cock, seen from behind through his legs, is just fucking INCREDIBLE, and John spews a BIG load as well.

Now Quinn puts Rocklin on his back and REALLY fucks him missionary style. You can see why every man alive in 1987 felt their loins tremble whenever Jeff Quinn got erect -- Quinn knows how to FUCK. There are some great shots here of Jeff's low-hanging balls slapping smartly against Rocklin's ass cheeks, and some nice lingering shots of Quinn's sweating and muscular pecs.....

And now we get something we rarely see, either, these days: the top finally bottoming in the same scene!!!!!!! Here is what John Rocklin never wanted to do until Jeff Quinn forced him to -- make love to his REAL LIFE lover on screen. But Jeff Quinn puts Rocklin on his back, climbs on board, and IMPALES himself on John's stiff fuck tool. Quinn rides it like the Lone Ranger striving to reach the train before the bomb explodes -- except that the only thing exploding in THIS movie is these cocks!!!!!!! Wave after wave of sheer joy crosses Jeff Quinn's face as he rides that prick -- and me and my reviewing partners shot ONE MORE TIME!!!!!!!!! Quinn also pinches his own nipples and twists at his own pecs here in an awesome display of self-pleasuring.

Then Quinn dismounts, and Rocklin fucks him doggie-style (something else John said he'd never do to his real lover on screen ). If you're a John Rocklin fan (I'm one), here's the scene in which he FINALLY tops another man. Shit, WE KNEW YOU COULD, JOHN BUDDY!!!!!!!!! John's strokes are steady and measured, and he lets loose a fairly nice load over Quinn's butt. GOD Rocklin has a nice cock -- long, thick, and with a VERY SMOOTH KNOB that drives me WILD when I see it polished with cum !!!!! Now it's Jeff's turn, and he cums in a VERY large and wet load, how own sizable rod showing its glorious head as Quinn clearly enjoys popping his nut.

The final scene in this film -- for you folks at home looking at the box cover, you've probably been sitting there scratching your head and saying, "Hey, I thought Rocky Armano was in this film MORE than just that cameo in the bar!" And you're sort of right.......... BUT THIS IS A DUMB ENDING.

Mike Henson and Jeff Quinn (real life best friends, by the way) are playing paintball war games as practice for their Navy flying (huh?) and they are joined by Armano. Quinn says that the loser should get stripped down and tied to a tree all night long, and of course Quinn and Henson gang up on hunky Rocky and he loses.

There's an over-long and boring paintball fight scene here, with the physical acting not NEARLY as good as it was earlier in the Hotel Suite scene or could have been here either. Why Jeff Quinn strips down halfway through this scene is also a mystery deserving of Twin Peaks fans........ At any rate, Henson and Quinn now strip Armano to his Army camouflage shorts (although I didn't know the Army made low-rise g-strings!!!). They tie his hands together and string him up from a tree limb where he dangles several feet off the ground, his big pouch full of prick and balls clearly exposed, and his muscles flexing........

FLEXING FOR WHAT??? THIS IS WHERE THE FUCKING MOVIE ENDS!!!! All we get now is a stupid end credit saying "To be continued in Hot Rods: The Young and the Hung Part 2".

HUH????? Both "Hot Rods" and "The Young and the Hung" are OTHER MOVIES -- why do their sequels get spliced together and collapsed with the sequel to "Big Guns"????

God only knows, if even He can figure this one out.... The thing is, the scene in "Hot Rods 2" IS very, very, very hot where Armano gets abused and raped by Quinn and Henson. The trouble is, I think that's ALL I liked about that film......... And why make us buy it, just to see ONE SCENE?????

Okay, so I'm no porn producer and I'll never figure this out. But what I CAN say is that on the five-star rating scale (1 being total coldness like space where no one can hear you scream, and a 5 being the heat of Jeff Quinn's breath on your neck just before his massive cock splits into your man-beaver), this films rates a solid and whopping:

FIVE STARS.

Labels: gay porn

Dear Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton:

I am writing to you to alert you to some very shoddy, incompetent service rendered to me by the U.S. Postal Service from March 13, 2007, to March 25, 2007.

My letter carrier attempted a delivery of a parcel to my home on Tuesday, March 13, 2007. No one was home, so the letter carrier left a "Delivery Notice/Reminder/Receipt" form.

On Saturday, March 17, 2007, I attempted to physically retrieve my parcel from the Frederick Douglass Station on Alabama Avenue SE. I had several two "Delivery Notice/Reminder/Receipt" forms to turn in, each with two parcels listed.

The postal worker gave me two of the four parcels. When I asked her directly, "Shouldn't there be four parcels?", she replied that there were only two "in the back". As per Postal Service rules, I surrendered my two "Delivery Notice/Reminder/Receipt" forms.

Suspicious, I checked the delivery confirmation information given to me by the retailers who had sold me the items being delivered. I did this check online via the U.S. Postal Service Web site (www.usps.gov). The USPS auotmatic email indicated the shipping dates and various stops the item had made during its travels. The email indicated that the item was at the Frederick Douglass Station awaiting pick-up! You can imagine how angry I was about the postal worker's error.

On the late afternoon of Saturday, March 17, I emailed the U.S. Postal Service via the complaint form on the USPS.gov Web site. I asked them to verify that the items were still at the Frederick Douglass station, and how I could retrieve them without "Delivery Notice/Reminder/Receipt" forms.

The USPS replied on Tuesday, March 20. The reply asked for the confirmation numbers on the "Delivery Notice/Reminder/Receipt" forms. I replied via email the same day, and indicated that I had no idea what the confirmation numbers were as the postal worker had taken my "Delivery Notice/Reminder/Receipt" forms.

The USPS replied on Wednesday, March 21. They assigned me a confirmation number of [.....], and told me I would receive a telephone call within 24 hours.

I received the telephone call late on Thursday, March 22. Mr. Battery (sp?) left a voicemail message, asking me whether the items had been insured and whether I had the missing confirmation numbers. I could not take the call as, obviously, I was working during the day and not home.

I emailed the USPS on Thursday evening, March 22, and told them once more than a) I did not have the missing confirmation numbers because the postal clerk had taken my "Delivery Notice/Reminder/Receipt" forms, and b) I just needed to know how to pick up my packages without the form.

On Friday, March 23, I received another email from the USPS. This time, the USPS claimed one item had been delivered! About the other item, there was no mention. Again, there was no answer to my question about how to retrieve my packages (which the USPS claimed just two days previously were at the Frederick Douglass station).

On Saturday, March 24, I went to the Frederick Douglass station. I showed the postal worker my confirmation number from the email I'd received from the retailer. The postal worker retrieved one of the two missing parcels, but did not find the fourth parcel.

I returned home. I checked the USPS Web site on Saturday, March 24, and found that I had 15 days in which to retrieve my parcel. Since this was only the 11th day and I had received no second or final "Delivery Notice/Reminder/Receipt" form from my letter carrier, I attempted to use the USPS.gov Web site to get redelivery.

Imagine my shock when, after putting in my confirmation number, the USPS Web site told me that my parcel had been returned to the sender! After only 10 days! And no second or final "Delivery Notice/Reminder/Receipt" form from my letter carrier!

Congresswoman Norton, despite direct questions on Saturday, March 17, about the availability of my mail, the USPS made a grievous error in reporting two parcels "not received" when they were sitting in the back of the Frederick Douglass Station.

Second, USPS refused to give me a straight answer about how to retrieve my package. Instead, the USPS dithered by asking me irrelevant information and addressing issues (such as whether the item had been insured) which were not at issue. Despite repeated attempts to get a simple answer, the USPS refused to do so.

Third, despite a second trip to the Frederick Douglass Station and another direct, clear question about the fourth parcel, once more the postal workers could not give me my package.

Fourth, now the USPS has apparently returned my item to the retailer! This, after only 11 days and without any second or final notice.

If this problem is happening to me, I cannot believe what sort of shoddy service the elderly, the home-bound, the poor or those with special requirements are having.

I doubt there is anything you can do to help me retrieve my package.

But I would greatly appreciate it if your office could alert the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about this issue. As the second most senior Democrat on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service, and the District of Columbia Subcommittee, I am sure you, along with Subcommittee Chairman Davis and Committee Chairman Waxman, can help do something about this.

The citizens of the District of Columbia deserve much better service than this from the U.S. Postal Service.


Thank you,

Me

It is said that St. Theresa of Avila had a vision in 1560. Ill from a series of undiagnosed diseases and problems, she was often incapacitated and sometimes near death.

In her vision, an angel appeared to her, holding a long lance in his hand. He told her the lance represented the love of God. He savagely thrust the lance deep into her heart, causing an ineffable spiritual and bodily ecstasy. Repeatedly, the angel pierced her with the lance. As he did so, Theresa later claimed, she began to float up toward heaven. The other nuns in the monastery had to hold her down, or she would have floated to the ceiling, and perhaps out the window to who-knows-where.

Being fucked by a huge cock makes me feel the same way. It satisfies something deep in my soul, makes me feel normal, makes me feel...healed. When I'm fucked by a long, thick cock, I'm physically satisfied, at long last. And when that happens, I feel like everyone else, like all those guys who deeply enjoy a 6" dick. I don't feel like I'm on the outside of sexual fulfillment, looking in. I don't feel like an abnormal freak who wants a horse for a lover; I feel normal, like everyone else. I feel like I don't have to struggle in bed to get satisfaction. I can focus on other other guy, like other people do. The physical can be dispensed with; now I can focus on pleasure, on pleasing him, on the relationship, on the love, on the connection and connectedness.

The ecstasy and the agony

I once knew a super-hung Italian twink who had an uncut penis so large that other men refused to let him fuck them. He was very screwed up by this. He ended up being a bottom, and a tortured one. All he wanted was to fit in a little, and be "like other guys." He enjoyed topping, and wanted to pleasure other men with his penis. It was very important to him to that he be able to do so. Being denied the simple pleasure of putting his manhood into another boy's body fucked him up. (I offered my body, and he declined.)

When I'm drunk and fantasizing, I often wish to find someone like him. Someone so huge that he's denied most of the time. Someone who wishes he could find a bottom that could take him easily, so he wouldn't have to hold back, go easy, pull out half of it, go slow, spend lots of prep time opening up his partner, etc. Someone who craves a man who could take it cold and dry, and let him slam it home for maybe six hours. Someone who he could be "normal" with, like those men who have 6" or 5" or 7". So he could be himself, without worrying about his "pyusical abnormality" of his gigantic prick.

I need to be drunk to indulge in that fantasy any more.

I can't even begin to ask the universe/God/Buddha/karma for him to be anything else (twinkish, black hair, big dark eyes, full pubes, foreskin, big cummer, insatiable in bed, a little shy, compassionate, socially conscious, uninhibited, polyamorous, etc.). It's enough that I'm forced to grovel for "just one thing," but less the whole package.

In high school, I knew a boy who was deeply religious. He once confessed that he was envious of most of his church-going peers. Why?, I asked. "Because God speaks to them," he said. God did not see fit to speak to him. He felt very bad about it, because he longed to have reassurance from God, to hear Her Voice, to feel that sweet sense of connection.

I know what he felt. I didn't at the time, but I do now. I envy those who find it easy to obtain physical satisfaction, who can be fucked by a 6-inch dick and enjoy it and cum. Who can find their God, and be fucked by Him, and float toward the ceiling in joy.......

Labels: anal sex, big cocks, photography, twinks

"Summer's lease hath all too short a date."

Okay, so it's actually spring. Just barely. The way people act around here, though, you'd think everyone had just been through the darkest, harshest winter in the past half-century. Look, folks, if you dislike winter so much, move to Florida and drown with the rest of them when the seas rise from global warming.

I was walking from work to the Metro Thursday, and ran across maybe 10 hot guys in shorts. (Great legs, superb calves, sweet butts, full crotches.) They must change in the bathrooms at work. But who anticipiates such warm weather that they bring a change of clothes with them to work??

I always find it funny that people who think 55 degrees is "freezing" in the fall will practically strip to nothing to enjoy such weather in the spring.

The Boys of Summer

But I can see you
Your brown skin shining in the sun
You got your hair combed back and your
Sunglasses on, baby
And I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer have gone

Labels: anal sex, big cocks, cum, foreskin, photography, twinks

Noam Jenkins from "Saw II" is really hot.

You're telling me he can't get a real acting job? Or a gay porn career? Why does he show up in this sort of dreck?

Labels: cinema

Late at night, when it's very quiet everywhere and you've got your fifth (okay, seventh) glass of Irish Mist in your hand and you're feeling mellow and very laid out, I think there's probably not much better than good '70s rock to listen to.

You know, "Do You Feel Like I Do?" by Peter Frampton. (I bought that poster of his so I could jack off to it. It was ruined within a week.) "Jane" by Jefferson Starship. "Layla" by Derek and the Dominoes. "Night Moves" by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. "Dust in the Wind" by Kansas. "Head Games" by Foreigner. "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult. "Don't Bring Me Down" by E.L.O. "Hotel California" by the Eagles. "Somebody to Love" by Queen."

When you're drunk, tired and the world is quiet at night, that's the stuff.

By the way, all the windows in every apartment is dark tonight. There's one exception. Someone has candles flickering in a bedroom. No people. No movement. Just flickering candlelight.

Very mesmerizing.

Labels: music

I got an article onto the "Did You Know...?" section on Wikipedia's front page.

...that the steel strike of 1959 led to significant importation of foreign steel for the first time in United States history?

Labels: labor, Wikipedia

Sci Fi Channel has picked up an additional 9 episodes of "Battlestar Galactica" -- bringing its total order for Season 4 to a full 22 episodes.

YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SFC had originally ordered only 13 episodes, the bare minimum needed to keep the series afloat. But now the network has upped that to the full 22.

Additionally, SFC says it will air a special two-hour Galactica movie in "winter quarter 2007" -- which probably means November sweeps.

The regular season will kick off in early 2008 in the U.S.

Labels: Battlestar Galactica

I got an article onto the "Did You Know...?" section on Wikipedia's front page.

...that the Texas State University labor historian Gregg Andrews is also a folk musician performing under the name "Doctor G"?

Labels: labor, Wikipedia

I miss International Wavelength.

In the early 1990s, there wasn't any Latino gay porn. Kristen Bjorn might produce a film a year, maybe two. But that was it. If you were really lucky, Latino Fan Club or Latin Connection might produce a film. And you'd get 90 minutes of straight Puerto Rican thugs unable to get an erection.

But International Wavelength.. They distributed their own films, as well as those by Pescador Estudio Cinematigrafico. International Wavelength actually went to Mexico (with two white boys in tow), and let Mexican guys fuck them.

The Mexicans were always on top.

Can you imagine that???? This wasn't sexual colonialism, where studly white boys fucked passive Mexicans up the ass. Just the opposite: Caucasians were the submissive ones. The Mexicans were shown to be educated (they often talked about college classes), and the ones with money (they had nice apartments, they had good clothes, they hosted the "poor" American college boys). The Mexicans never initiated sex; it was the Caucasians who begged for sex, and the Mexicans who then power-fucked them halfway to Sunday.

To this very day, one of my all-time favorite films is "International Affair." The opening scene is amazing. Blond and brunette American college kids from Texas are in Mexico City for some fun. They have already met two Mexican twinks, who take them swimming in their parent's pool. Afterward, they go inside. Soon, the two Americans are flat on their backs while the supremely well-hung Mexicans are fucking them hard and deep.

What makes this so outrageously erotic to me is that the more outgoing Mexican kid is plowing the blond American. The blond just starts shooting. The Mexican stops. The blond looks back at the director, pleading. The blond then turns back toward the Mexican, and gestures: "Keep going..." The Mexican twink begins power-fucking the blond with his huge prick, and in another minute or so the blond shoots all over himself again.

Fuck yes.

I wish films like that were still being produced.

Labels: gay porn, Latinos

I love stubby noses. I'm not entirely sure why.

This guy has one.

He also has a big cock.

Mercy me

I really like his face, eyes, body, prick.

Labels: big cocks, cum, Latinos, photography, twinks

God, I love Bolerium Books.

I sooooooooo wish I had disposable income, so that I could afford to buy some of their artwork and other ephemera.

Labels: bookstores

Hey squirt!

Yeah, you.

Get over here.

You little squirt...




Pumpers

Pump a big, sloppy one on me, baby.

Labels: big cocks, cum, facials, gay porn, muscle, photography, twinks

The Book Quiz


1. What is the first book which made a deep impression on you?
"Star Beast" by Robert Heinlein. I desperately wanted a friend that close to me, and wanted a super-dog like that.

2. Name a book which scared you.
I don't know the title but it was a book of ghost stories. I read it in the fifth or sixth grade. The introduction told you to put a simple wooden chair in the middle of the room. Pull your feet up off the floor. Turn on all the lights. Make sure the windows and doors are locked. Then read the stories. "You should be safe from anything which might grab you, haunt you, or kill you..." Just the intro terrified the shit out of me!

3. Name a book which made you cry.
I dont think any book has. "Prayers for Bobby" came really close. So did "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches" (which I read on a plane while flying to Seattle to see my dying ex-boyfriend).

4. Name a book where you fell in love with the title character.
"Auntie Sheila," described elsewhere in this family-friendly blog.

5. Name a book which so impressed you, you tried desperately to lay your hands on everything else he or she wrote.
"Berserker" by Fred Saberhagen. Saberhagen can be awfully derivative. But at times, he can write superb short stories. I own every single novel he ever wrote.

6. Name a book which so enraged you, you threw it across the floor.
Enraged, as in "I hated the crappy book"? Or enraged as in "I'm so mad now!" There isn't any which has done the latter, but the former? "Glove Puppet." Cited by nearly every GLBTQ publication as a great work of our times, it's dreck.

7. Name a book where you hated where the hero died.
"Born Free." I read the book when I was maybe eight or nine (I was reading about five or six grades higher than my own). I was really upset when I learned that Elsa the lion died so horribly at the end.

8. Name a book which could have been better...
"Murder on the Orient Express" by Agatha Christie. I know, that's heresy, right? But it's true. The film version of this book resolves itself pretty neatly. But the book version feels truncated, chopped off, and a cheat.

9. Name a book which seems perfect to you.
Tom Spanbauer's "The Man Who Fell in Love With The Moon." Not only does Spanbauer make magical realism (sic) comprehensible (e.g., you can read it and it still makes sense), but his writing is so evocative that you begin to really feel the things the character does. I would also say Bram Stoker's "Dracula," because it is such a seamless, astonishing whole. The inventiveness of it (the use of diaries, newspaper articles, etc.), and the way it picks up every thread of Christian thought and twists it into the vampire myth. I think it's also a fairly scary book.

10. Name a book which you wish went on longer.
It's a trilogy: Brain Daley's "Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds," "Jinx on a Terran Inheritance" and "Fall of the White Ship Avatar." I just kept wanting to read more and more and more. Damn, this would make a good mini-series. (Come on, Sci Fi Channel, are you listening?)

11. Name a good history book.
Robert Middlekauff's "The Glorious Cause." Richly detailed, provocative, and able to create real feelings of desperation and excitement. And it's about a subject everyone thinks they know something about: The American Revolution.

12. Name the toughest book you've ever read.
"Fear of a Queer Planet" is probably the toughest, because the density of the prose could stop a bullet. Queer theory, meet good writing. Good writing, meet queer theory. Good. Now that you know one anther, would you please stay together? I'd say the second densest was Dante's "Divine Comedy." The footnoting needed to make it explicable to a reader in the late 20th century, the length, the intensity of it, the fantastic art which usually accompanies it... wow. Took me six months.

13. Name the book which made you laugh out loud.
Joe Keenan's "Blue Heaven." I burst out laughing at practically every page, and I must have re-read the thing maybe 20 times by now. The final wedding scene, where Moira sticks her head out from under the wedding cake table, is pricelss. "A Bride's Nightmare..." PRICELESS!

14. Name a book you couldn't put down.
That would be Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything Is Illuminated." It's good. But for some reason, I just picked it up and read right through to the end, all in about a five-hour sitting. Nathaniel Philbrick's "In the Heart of the Sea" was another.

15. Name a book which had a revolutionary impact on your life.
"Better Sex Through Chemistry"? Hmmm. "The Politics of Fear"? Hmm. "Reinventing Comics"? Hmm. "Billy and the Boingers Bootleg"? Hmmmmm. Well, I would say a couple, actually: John Preston's edited volume, "Flesh and the Word." Bardwell and Thompson's "Film Art." Sex Panic!'s "Policing Public Sex." George Orwell's "Animal Farm." Carl Sagan's "Cosmos."

16. Name the best art book you've ever read.
Robert Hughes' "Art in America" is the best, but so is Paul Greenhalgh's "Art Nouveau." I might give honorable mention's to Michael Huhn's "Peep Show," Wilhelm von Gloeden's "Taormina" and Walter Kundzicz's "Champions."

17. Name the best graphic novel you've ever read.
None. I've never read one all the way through, although I've read collections of comic books bound together in a book.

18. Is there a book you'd recommend to someone in trouble?
Wouldn't that depend on what the trouble was?

19. What was the last book you discussed with your friends?
Eh... Most of my friends don't read. I had a two-man book club with a friend once. But he never liked anything I picked. I found he always wanted to pick "what America was reading" (e.g., whatever the Oprah Book Club or NY Times had chosen that month). After about four books from me and five from him, it died... I blog about books, but I don't discuss them with people really.

20. What was the last book you saw someone else reading?
Some awful piece of trash by "Zane" -- the black author who writes crappy, sexually-explicit novels for women. I see six or seven of them every morning on the Metro subway cars. Young girls, old women, business executives, hot sexy models, security guards, frumpy housewives: They all read Zane. I often see prudish right-wing Christian fundamentalist women with the Bible sticking out of their purse reading Zane. Bookstores and schools seem not to care that hard-core porngoraphy is in the hands of teenage girls. (Nor do I, but there you go.) Zane's books are awful. To quote Calculon on "Futurama": "That was so terrible, it gave me cancer."

Labels: literature

I so do like bareback sex.

Pretty nice

Labels: anal sex, bareback, foreskin, gay porn, muscle, photography

The Cinema Quiz


1. What is your earliest memory of a movie?
"Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang." One of the broadcast television networks used to run it at Thanksgiving time. I remember seeing it when I was perhaps five years old.

2. What film makes you cry?
"It's A Wonderful Life." "The Miracle Worker" comes in a close second. The end of both films get me.

3. What film made you want to go out and read the book?
"Jaws." My parents refused to let me see the film, although everyone else in my neighborhood had seen it. My moron parents had been given a five-year subscription to the Reader's Digest Condensed Book Club. (How freaky is that??) They never read the books, just put the five-book volumes up on a shelf. One of them was "Jaws." I read the book, then snuck in to see the movie. I had to laugh: The movie wasn't that bad at all, but my parents (who probably never have seen it) were terrified of it!

4. What was the first film which made your mouth drop open in surprise?
Not sure... "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" with Charles Laughton, maybe. The scene where he swings out to save Esmerelda -- and it's totally silent. Maybe "The Phantom of the Opera," the silent version. The image of the Phantom sitting atop the tower overlooking the two lovers, his massive red cape flowing about him like a whirlpool blows my mind every time.

5. What was the first film that made you want to be the character in the movie?
"Star Wars." I wanted so bad to be Luke Skywalker. Looking back, I realize how pathetic and cardboard a character that is. But I really wanted to be swashbuckling and adventuresome like he seemed to be. (I never liked Han Solo... too brash.)

6. What film (if any) made you fall in love with cinema?
I'm not entirely sure. I've always liked movies. I fell in love with special effects after seeing "War of the Worlds": Those cool desk-lamp alien ships just blew me away. I think I really started falling for cinema as a negative thing. It was seeing "Platoon" and realizing what a piece of shit movie it was.

7. What film (if any) is closely tied to a particular crisis in your life?
None.

8. What film (if any) made you want to go out and change the world?
None.

9. What film (if any) made you leave the theater in disgust?
None. Even though plenty of films have been utter dreck, I usually stay just for the laugh-factor. Like seeing "Saw II" and "The Hills Have Eyes" (the 2006 remake) and laughing all the way through at the absurdity and stupidity of the film. (It's also enjoyable to poke fun at the idiots who think such films are scary when they are just moronic.)

10. What film is one that "everyone should see," and why?
Tough one. "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" and "Citizen Kane." The first for being probably the best gay film yet made, and the second for being the greatest film of all time (IMHO).

Labels: cinema

If there is one thing worse than being an ugly duckling in a house of swans, it's having the swans pretend there's no difference.

- Teena Booth, Falling From Fire

Labels: quotes

So far, I'm disappointed in the first release from the new Nine Inch Nails album.

Labels: music

My preference is to not blog about this at all, but then I'll take shit if I don't. And if I do, then I'll take shit for what I say.

Fuck it. Here goes:

So friends came into town from Pennsylvania last night, and once more we hit Annie's for dinner. This time, there was no waiting. We had a good meal downstairs (by the windows). We had a good time, although by the end the cell phone dominated.

It proved an unfortunate omen.

That fucking goddamn cell phone -- constant calls, constant text messages, constant interruptions, constant calls to other people.

In my world, you're out with friends. You talk to them. You don't sit there talking or texting someone else all fucking night long. If that's what you want to do, stay at home. The sheer rudeness of that is astonishing. But more to the point, it points out where a person's real priorities lie. Say I go out with a friend to dinner, but I spend most of my time talking to someone else. It's rude, but my friend sees that he's nothing but a pretext and he's not my priority. In other words, I used him. That's pretty brutal.

The drama didn't stop there. Tom, one of the people I was with, is the ex-boyfriend of James, who I went out with a couple weeks ago. The real drama came in the constant competition I got last night: Who did I like better, Tom or James? Who did I have more fun with, Tom or James? Who's hotter, Tom or James?

Boys, boys: You can both fuck me. (Would that were what they wanted. But one's a bottom and the other repeatedly told me how much he likes me but how much he'd never even consider... Yeah, well.)

There were good highlights to the drama-filled evening, however. Among them:

• Great bacon double cheeseburger at Annie's.
• Walking up 22nd Street NW toward Apex behind a hot guy and his lithe chickie. Tom going on and on about James, very loudly. The couple not five feet in front of us clearly embarrassed by his five-Long-Island-iced-teas discussion. Me: "Tom, you're scaring the straight people." Tom: "He's not straight." The couple run across the street to the other sidewalk.
• Continuing up the street toward Apex. A pretty Chinese girl cuts in front of us from a side street. We talk about Rex, a stripper here in D.C. whom I used to know. Tom says something about how many costumes he wears in one night. Me: "Well, he has to wear them. He's only been stripping the past 20 years. It used to be that he would pull out that huge cock if his and get it hard, and that was the big attraction. But he can't get it hard for the crowd any more, so it's all costumes." Tom: "Rex has a big cock?" Me (loudly, talking about my favorite subject): "Fuck yes! His cock is goddamn huge! It's one of the biggest I've ever seen!" The Chinese girl stops dead, turns, stares at us with her mouth open and begins laughing really hard. Me: "Well, it's truuuue!!!" Beautiful Chinese girl turns, keeps laughing, slapping her thigh. (I'm glad I made someone laugh last night).
• Running into Michael, the film festival volunteer who lives across the street from Apex. He's so cute. I copped a feel of his very stiff nipples later in the evening, when we were both drunk.
• Seeing Ms. Billie Ross (the former bartender at La Cage) for the first time in, oh, three years. Billie looks terrific, and did a superb show. (He's just as hot out of drag.)
• Meeting Miss Tonya, a 60-year-old drag queen from Richmond. The best part was when a handsome guy in his early 50s walked up to her and said, "Miss Tonya?" He had seen her perform in the early 1980s down at Lackland's (did I get that right?) when he was just 15. They chatted about a famous show she once did where she twirled a flaming baton. At another show, she and two other performers did a white version of The Supremes for a Halloween party -- complete with arrival in a 1965 limo and red carpet walk. I was as much amazed that this man was sneaking out to gay clubs when he was 15 as I was by Miss Tonya's terrific tales of the Golden Age of drag.
• Meeting Freddy, the hot, short, slightly hairy Latino go-go boy at Apex. He's such a boy, but he has such a nice, fat penis. And great calves. He seemed super-happy to see me. (Fuck me, Freddy.)
• Sitting at Annie's and seeing Daddy and His Son come in. Daddy Clone is a muscle-man with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. But Son was an eye-catcher: Black eyes, kissable mouth, slender (but with nice biceps), clearly ill-at-ease in public and being adored the way he was. Son had a sort of longish face. Some might say he was ugly, or had a horse-face. Me? He was totally sexy. Quite the corn-fed farmboy type. When he smiled, the room lit up. He was so nervous, he kept shifting about in his seat, looking up and down and around and under the table. He would gesture, then quickly pull his arms and hands in as if embarrassed that he'd taken up more space. When he got up to leave, he showed off the most amazing ass. Two perfect bowling balls in a pair of tight ragged jeans. You know, I bet he's a top. And he's got a long, fat prick with a bulbous cock. Damn, he was hot.

I did see two boys I was astonished by.

The first was seated in the front row of chairs for the drag show. He was about 5'10", short (as if he'd had a crewcut which had been grown out for the past three months) medium-brown hair, red silk dress shirt, jeans, and was pretty as the day is long. He was drunk off his ass already, and kept getting up to dance and lip-synch to the music along with the drag performers. He was hairy-chested, and just so goddamn adorable. His eyes were very bright and liquid brown, and he had the cutest mouth and smile. His boyfriend (yes, clearly he had a boyfriend) was a muscular, shaved-headed lug about 10 years older. Clearly, the lug wanted this pretty twink. And the pretty twink was into muscle. Must be amazing then opposites attract like that, and it clicks.

For my money, however, the best part of the night came at about 12:30 a.m.

Having watched my companions walk off because another friend of theirs had shown up (no, don't bring him up to meet me; no, don't ask me to come downstairs and meet him; spend the night text-messaging him because he's hot and wants to fuck Tom and then go meet him after he rushes in from work to see Tom, and make sure I don't see him because that would just cramp everyone's style, I guess), I sat at the bar upstairs at Apex and watched '80s videos.

In walks a big clique of people. One stood out. How could he not? He was a tall boy, maybe 6'4". Floppy, longish dirty blond/light brown hair, somewhat parted on the left and flopping in a wild, crazy, wind-blown look over his eyes. Very slender, but with great strength in his arms. Bright crystal blue eyes, which flashed from under those long bangs. He had an "X" on his hand, which meant he wasn't yet 21. All the better. He itched his crotch twice. Each time, it was readily apparent that he was smuggling tennis balls and a foot-long sausage in his pants. That, or he was superbly hung. And when he smiled...it pierced the heart. He seemed quiet and hung back in the crowd he was with. God, shy twinky boys with big cocks? Be still my heart.

One final comment, I guess: While we were at Annie's, Tom complained that he'd had his ass grabbed while in the bathroom. Three times. Oddly, when James was in town, he'd complained because four hot guys were rubbing up against him and "forcing" him to dance while grinding their erect pricks against his crotch and ass.

Both men complained bitterly about it.

Guys? Guess what? If you don't like it, say no. And guys? Some day, you'll figure out just how much it absolutely and utterly sucks to never have anyone pay any attention to you at all. When no one's grabbing you, dancing with you, or groping you, you'll long for the day when they did. You'll look back and say, "Geez, the attention made me feel like a piece of meat, and the pinches on my ass left bruises. But it's a lot better than not having any attention at all."

When I heard, for the second time in a row, how much it sucked to be treated like a hot boy, all I could think was: "Poooooor little rich boy." Does being worshipped suck? Maybe. Is it annoying to have your ass pinched? Maybe. Is being confronted with all that sexuality and pressure frightening, and off-putting because it's not what you want in a boyfriend? Maybe.

You know, most people would kill to be treated like a god, just for a few moments.
- "Hoosiers" (1986, Orion Pictures)

In the end, I did have a good time. Just as I had a terrific time with James. I like them both a lot.

Labels: friends

I want him to fuck me.

Mercilessly.

After he's done unloading the biggest load of cum ever produced by a human being up my ass, I want him to collapse on top of me, his huge prick twitching inside me.

And then I want him to whimper, and whisper, "I need to fuck you again."

And I want that to happen five times in a row the first night we meet.

Not a man, but a god



How appropriate is it that he's wearing an "Ireland" t-shirt and it's St. Patrick's Day?

Labels: big cocks, photography, twinks

Just on principle, I'd marry Cillian Murphy.

Acting like this is why I'd marry Cillian Murphy -- on principle. Every time he does some sort of bullshit role in a mainstream thriller, he has four superb acting jobs (like this one) where he blows me the fuck out of the water.

Even his minor parts -- like "Cold Mountain" -- make me realize that acting is not dead.

The truth is, I felt The Scarecrow was very under-used in "Batman Returns." He became a minor villain supporting Ras al Ghul. Whereas in the comic the Scarecrow invented his own terror-inducing weapons, in the film he relied solely on Ras. And yet, for having very little to do except go psycho on people, Murphy poured his heart and soul into that role. Like James Franco in the first "Spider-man," he was much better than the role required.

It would not be an overstatement to say that he's the best actor of his generation. That's because he's a real actor, having spent most of his life on the stage learning how to act. Maybe the fact that he's also not a classically handsome pretty-boy (while still having a certain masculine allure, and -- I might say, having seen him nude at the beginning of "28 Days Later" -- a hot body and sweet cock) has helped. He gets roles where he could be a love-interest, but he's not pushed into them and forced to act with his pecs like Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck, or Paul Walker.

So just on principle, I'd marry Cillian Murphy.

Labels: cinema

Eustace Lycett, a special effects designer with Disney, has died at the age of 91. He produced such memorable effects as making people walk on steps made out of smoke in "Mary Poppins" and empty suits of armor fight Our Heroes in "Bedknobs and Broomsticks."

He is the second person associated with the two films to die recently. Peter Ellenshaw, another special effects master, passed away just a short time back, too.

Let's hope Julie Andrews and Angela Lansbury don't eat any fish-bones any time soon.

Labels: obituary

Both of these are by a Web-artist (whose name escapes me) who puts pictures of beautiful boys in front of artistic images.

If I'm not mistaken, these images come from the Peacock Room, a famous series of wallpapers, paintings and other artwork created by the famous American artist, James McNeill Whistler.

But that's not why I like them.

Peacocks brandishing their masculinity

I like them because the penises on these two cute young men are amazing. Beautiful. Well-formed. Large. Uncut. Sweet.

Labels: big cocks, photography, twinks

The building where I work offered all residents lime-green punch and shamrock-shaped cookies with green sprinkles on them today.

The punch turned my tongue fluorescent green. I drank my punch slowly, to keep my tongue as green as possible as long as I could.

Despite the heavy rain and sleet, it was a good day.

Labels: food

Homophobe Terence Howard has a new movie coming out. "Pride" is about a coach who puts together an all-black swim team in Philadelphia.

The bus ads show the word "PRIDE" in huge capital letters. And there's Howard in nothing but cap and Speedo, bent foward as if he's a swimmer on the deck about to leap into the water.

Now, I honestly believed this movie was about a gay black swimmer. "Pride"???? Come on! The only thing missing is for the word "PRIDE" to be in rainbow colors. And the way the hunk is bent forward? What closet-case designed that ad??? It looks like he's bent forward so that he can take it up the ass!!!!!

Of course, that would be appropriate. Terence Howard should get fucked up ass, and good, until he confesses the errors of his hate-filled ways.

Labels: celebrities, cinema

That's one hot Asian guy.

Makes my jaw (and zipper) drop every time.







Loving the Asian man

No, the guy below is not that smiling hunk above. But one can hope the smiling hunk strips nude for us some day...

Labels: Asians, big cocks, photography

A friend of mine called from Tampa tonight, where he's on spring break.

He wanted me to talk dirty to him and help him get off. I was a bit taken aback. Not by the request, because I can talk dirty to anyone. I don't mind someone jack off to what I tell him.

But the request was pretty damn abrupt. I thought he wanted to chat, and so I started talking about this and that. Then he interrupted me and said, "Tim, I really don't want to talk about any of that." He then made his request for phone sex. He told me exactly what he wanted, and then paused.

I sighed, and got him off.

I feel abused.

I was sitting on the couch afterward, just staring into space. I kind of realized that when most people call me, they want something. They had a rough day, they are horny, they want distraction. I give it to them, meet their need. But I realized tonight that I do that a lot. But when I want to call them and get something -- conversation, catching up, whatever -- I'm often put off. I never quite realized that until tonight.

Labels: friends

Can I say I'm disappointed?

I'm reading a back-issues of the "Gay and Lesbian Review" (from this fall), and Patricia Nell Warren has a big article in it. She delves into gay cowboy culture, using "Brokeback Mountain" as her stepping off point.

But instead of an insightful look at gay cowboy culture, what we get is a big fluff piece. The first half of the article basically is nothing more than a shallow overview of where cowboys come from. Jesus, I could have gotten that off Wikipedia!

Then there's some idle speculation about gay cowboys -- but no sources, quotes, literary works, nothing. Most of it is along the lines of: "Being a cowboy was lonly work, with many months spent on the trail. It's entirely likely that some cowboys became more than friendly."

Well...........DUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

The last third of the article is basically a historical overview of the rodeo, and how "Jack Twist would have had social opportunities through rodeos that Ennis del Mar would not."

Jeez, how'd this see print?

You know, I like Warren's work a whole lot. She's a fantastic writer. But this article was nothing but pablum.

Labels: writing

"Maelstrom" is over. It's been a big turning point on "Battlestar Galactica."

The show has gotten major attention from the "Los Angeles Times" and "San Francisco Chronicle," and the blogosphere has doubled its bandwidth as people talk about the show.

Me?

I was unimpressed. Annoyed, actually.






"Maelstrom" -- with lots of spoilers

I thought the episode was only so-so. I found it to be a pretty traditional episode about a fucked-up woman who was physically abused and who has a death-wish. She gets so fucked up that she sees her death-wish not as something to be avoided but as something to be embraced. She embraces it, and she dies.

Eh?

I fail to see the drama in that. We knew that a major character was going to die, and the producers all but said, "Starbuck" months ago.

So?

I found Kara's relationship to her mother abusive. Not in the sense that her mother physically abused her, but that it abused the audience. First of all, the episode doesn't depict physical abuse of a child realistically. It turned it into a Hollywoodized version of abuse, over-dramatic and over-played. Stephen McNutt's cinematography was particularly loathsome in the way it lovingly and sadistically shows the abuse. I felt like I was watching "Saw II" rather than "Battlestar Galactica." (Compare the scene of Kara's fingers being slammed in the door to the episode in which Baltar is tortured by Biers. Notice the difference? "Maelstrom" is just abuse. "A Measure of Salvation" is drama.)

Moreover, Kara's adult relationship to her mother is the worst sort of misogyny. Here is a grown woman who exhibits nothing but doormat-ism. Most people whose parents are that abusive grow up to hate them. (I did.) They don't want to be around them, and when they are around them they are barely civil toward them. Their relationship is not one of constantly seeking mommy's love and approval, the way BSG showed it. That's a Hollywood-ized version of what goes on. Yes, you end up damaged, fucked-up, guilt-ridden, ashamed, filled with hatred, filled with self-loathing, and unbalanced. If you are really, really lucky (like I was), you find a way past that. If you aren't lucky, you end up self-destructive. But what did we get on this show? Kara desperately wanting her mother's love. Signing up to be a pilot, because that's what she thinks her mother wants. And when momma has cancer, feeling even worse because she can't solve that problem for mother, either. And then she feels racked with guilt, because mom dies alone.

What the fuck is that???

I also have a lot of trouble wondering where the hell Starbuck's father was in all this. You know, in "Spider-man," Peter never, ever, ever mentions his parents. It's all "Aunt May" and "Uncle Ben." That's the worst sort of manipulative dreck. Peter should be intensely interested in his parents: Who they were, how they died, all that. (My cousin, Jimmy, lost his parents in a car wreck when he was five. Jimmy is like many kids, in that he grew up wanting to know more about what he lost. Not "obsessed", but just intensely interested.) Let's look at "Maelstrom": There isn't a single mention of Starbuck's dad. Not that he's alive, not that he's dead. He's just out of the picture. Shit, even "Boogie Nights" showed Mark Wahlberg's dad! I fully understand the reason why BSG did this: A dyad (two-person drama) makes for a cleaner dramatic act. A dead father would be a distraction ("why did daddy have to die?" or "I wish my father were here, then everything would be all right"). A living father is even more of one. So they just ignore it. But life is never that clean, and I had serious problems with this part of the show.

I was also really pissed off at the manipulative way the show had Socrata Thrace come down with cancer the very day Starbuck shows up to announce she'd joined the military. That's just pure bullshit. I can't criticize that plot decision enough.

So we've got a silly, hammy, ignorant mother-daughter love-hate relationship going.

My third issue here was the dumb way that Starbuck's problems were handled. Here we have the two people closest to her -- Adm. Adama, who loves her like a father, and Lee Adama, who loves her with his penis. Without discussing things with the XO (Tigh) or the other CAG/former XO (Helo), these two amazingly biased individuals decide to keep Starbuck on active duty, then remove her, then put her back. This is just absurd. Helo may be an over-sensitive boy-man, but he does make decisions, and I can't really see him permitting Starbuck to fly had he been consulted. Tigh certainly would not have permitted it, either. Yet neither man is consulted, and these two Adama bozos refuse to acknowledge their biases. It's like a doctor operating on his own son. There are good reasons why that doesn't happen (because the doctor would make emotional rather than medical decisions about the best quality of care), and there should have been good reasons why Adm. Adama and Capt. Adama should not have, either.

Worse, however, I found their justifications ridiculous. "Flying is what's holding her together" is not a rational decision. We know this is a silly rational because Lee throws it out the window without a second thought the moment he thinks Starbuck has gone crazy on the hanger deck. On top of that, Adm. Adama seems not to question Apollo's decision to ground Starbuck. Yet, Starbuck doesn't "collapse" or "go crazy" or fall apart or any such nonsense.

You'd think that a good captain or admiral would know that -- no matter how good a pilot -- you don't let someone who is hallucinating about Cylon Raiders go out amongst the fleet. What if Starbuck sees a "Raider" and starts blasting away -- only to pop a few holes in the side of Colonial One and initiate the line of succession (e.g., kill the president)? No one in their right mind would have continued to let her fly (and Cottle said so, we're told). So why didn't they listen? I have to assume they were just stupid. Now they feel guilty for being stupid. I feel stupid for having swallowed this bullshit.

My next big problem with this episode was the role of Leoben Conoy in it. For weeks, we've been told that Starbuck keeps having dreams of being back in her cell, of being fucked by Conoy, of being psychologically manipulated by him. As an audience members who bring a certain amount of knowledge of the show to this episode, we naturally see these dreams as similar to the "Six-in-his-head" segments we've seen with Baltar, Biers, Six and Adama. So what do the writers do? They deliberately lie to the audience. They play on this assumption, and then tell us right at the end that what we've been seeing all along was a lie. "No, see, it wasn't Leoben all along! It was an angel!" (An angel who fucked Starbuck, but anyway...)

I think that's a cheap, dirty, silly trick. Hollywood does this all the time, though. "Dallas" infamously killed off Bobby, and then at the end of the season (as the ratings tanked), brought him back. "Oh, it was all just a dream...just a dream..." Viewers felt so abused that they abandoned the show anyway, and "Dallas" never recovered from that. Other shows do it, too. "Grey's Anatomy" did it most recently. Comic books do it almost all the time (killing off major characters, but not really -- or else finding absurd ways to keep them alive or let them escape). We got pretty much the same thing here. The audience, in good faith, made the assumption that Leoben-in-her-head was similar to the Six-in-his-head. And the writers violated that trust. Why should I trust the writers from here on out? Why should I believe anything I see now? Why should I believe anything I am told???? In fact, it makes me want to give up on the show. If the writers are going to violate my good-faith assumption about what's real on BSG, then why should I watch the show? Only in very limited circumstances could I agree to continue with a show that does this. (The only case which comes to mind is "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," when they introduced Dawn. Even then, Dawn was eventually explained. I guess "Babylon 5" did it, too, well enough to retain my trust.)

Another major problem I have with the episode is the inane way that they resolved Starbuck's relationship problem with her mother. Somehow, being there when her mother dies -- even if it is just a fever-dream -- "makes it all better." Nonsense!!! No one who has suffered years and years of abuse ever just "lets it all go" after one incident. It takes years of hard work to unbreak bad habits of thought and behavior. Yes, a person may have an epiphany which can motivate you to change yourself and stop being so self-destructive. (I certainly did, or I wouldn't have made it out of college alive. I'm serious.) But "catharsis" is a Hollywood piece of thick-sliced baloney. If you've had any experience with anyone who has had a catharsis, you know that it's what people call a "mountaintop experience." You feel great on the mountain. And so long as you stay in that static place -- physically, emotionally, intellectually -- you're fine. but move, just a smidgen, and you are in the valley again.

I've been around suicidal gay teens who crack, emotionally. They hate themselves with such a pure passion... No matter what the facts are, they are absolutely convinced that they are ugly, stupid, pathetic, worthless. I actually had one guy tell me, "When I first saw you, I was sure you were going to turn away in horror and run off, I'm so ugly." Ugly? Fuck, he was gorgeous! But that is the kind of psychologically upside-down world such people live in.

But when you break that mindset, when they finally let go of this self-delusion, when they crack under the intense pressure of their own self-hatred................wow. They weep. Weep like they have no hope. Strong, powerful, violent men weep like lost children. Uncontrollably.

And the relief they feel...you can feel it wash over you like a tidal wash. It's that palpable, that powerful. The intense self-hatred is gone, all gone.

But you know, that guy is going to have to stop being held by me. He's going to have to call his mom, or leave the room and talk to his friends at dinner. He's going to have to go to work or school the next day. He has to confront dating, living, behaving, fucking, friends, enemies, employers, teachers, parents, siblings.

For that one moment, when I hold that guy in my arms and he weeps like there's no stopping, he's all right. He is safe, right there. He's totally assured that he's loved, and he's totally assured that he is going to be OK. But the moment he leaves my arms to go pee, or get a drink of water, or just move a little because he's too hot or his foot is asleep....even the physical movement is enough to break the spell. Time breaks it, too. I can hold a guy for hours on end, but soon his emotions are going to calm down. He's going to start thinking about the next hour, the next two hours, that night, the next day, the next week, the next month.

That's the valley. When you're on top of the mountain, you've only one place to go: Down. Into the dark, cold, wet valley.

All the guy's friends expect him to act like he always has: Self-loathing, morose, sad, angry, bitter. You can't ask the guy to tell everyone what happened to him. They'll look at him like he's crazy. When a person converts to Christianity, they can't go around telling everyone how wonderful "my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is." People look at them like they're batty. Same with any catharsis. Even worse, it's very tough psychologically to do that. A person has to go around telling everyone why he hated his mother/did drugs/abused his body/raped women/tortured puppies/lit fires...whatever it is he did. Confession may be good for the soul, but you can't constantly keep picking the scab from the wound and letting the blood flow freely. You either get numb to it (and the confession loses its meaning and power for you), or you can't take the stress of constantly "coming out" about your problem. (This is why alcoholics don't go around telling everyone they are an alkie. They just stay away from liquor.)

After a catharsis, a person has to find a way to live in the valleys. It takes a lot of strength and willpower to act differently when everyone around you expect you to act "like the same old Joe." Co-workers, friends, family: They will expect you to be "the same angry Bob" or "the same bitter Susan" or "the same morose Dan." To suddenly be different, without really explaining yourself too much, is tough. Very tough. Exceptionally hard. People will stop making assumptions, but those first few days and weeks (sometimes months) are really rough. And for a year or more, you'll keep running into people who expect you to be "the same old fucked-up Jason." Some people you only see once in a while (Mark only sees his cousins at Christmas; Julie only sees Aunt Peg every three years during family vacations to Georgia). It's stressful and difficult to have to keep up that strength. But it's doable. (After all, a person expanded vast amounts of energy hating themselves. Overcoming everyone else's assumptions takes far less energy.)

So, back to BSG (and not rescuing suicidal gay teenaged boys): Here we have Kara having a catharsis. Catharsis is pretty rare, in the first place. And when it does happen, it's rarely that cathartic. Yeah, sometimes, your whole world-view inverts all at once. (It did for me.) But most of the time, the catharsis requires multiple catharses. The world-view is a series of hurdles. Once one falls ("I'm ugly"), the others ("I'm stupid" and "Everyone hates queers" and "I'm a loser") will come down, too. But you still have to do battle against them.

What we get in "Maelstrom" is a cheap, easy, silly, Hollywood-ized version of catharsis. Kara has one cathartic moment (which she does not realize is fake), and everything is suddenly okay.

Except that she still commits suicide.

I don't know if others have read Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." There is a turning point in the book in which the cousin from Prague does something near-suicidal. It forces his cousin (the American one) to do something as well. It's one of those situations where one guy says "You don't need to commit suicide!" and the other says, "I know...but I'm going to anyway." And he leaps, and the other weeps on the edge of the building while the music swells. (That's not what happens in the book, but you get the idea.)

In Chabon's novel (it'd be so much easier if you've read it; I just can't spoil the book at all, sorry), all of this trite shit is avoided. That's because we know the Prague cousin is not dead. But terrible things happen anyway, and the selfishness of the Prague cousin's choices have repercussions he never quite realizes. (In this way, it's similar to why people say suicide is selfish; the surviving friends and family ache and hurt in ways the suicide never realizes.)

While Chabon did a superb job in his novel in avoiding all these cliches, BSG did not. All we got were cliches. The fear-ridden voice over the cockpit helmet. The catharsis that's far too easy. The sudden "calm like I've never felt before" and "for the first time in my life, I'm sure of something" and "just let me go, Lee...let me go..." That's crap. Pure crap right from the cow's ass.

Then there's the bit with the seer. What the fuck was that???????????????? You know, if these awesome prophets are among the people, why is no one consulting them? Don't Roslin and the other priests know about them??? Why do these people seem to appear out of nowhere, alter the entire direction of the show, then disappear? That's called "deus ex machina" writing, and I'm not a fan of it one fucking bit. Explain that, someone. Explain why that's good writing. Explain why Starbuck couldn't just sink into madness on her own and not need that seer to "force" her to see that "the Cylon is your friend."

What really galls me at the end is that Starbuck isn't really dead. I can almost guarantee you that she's coming back. No show kills of one of its main characters. Even "Cheers" just had Diane going off to Los Angeles (so they could bring her back if Shelly Long ever wanted to). "She's not really dead" -- man, if that isn't trite, I don't know what is. It takes all the shock value out of the show for me. (And shocking the audience is easily. Good writing is not.) If I know she's not really dead, why should I feel anything about her Viper blowing up? In fact, what I feel is anticipation and eagerness over her death. I want to know how she's coming back to life. And if that isn't twisted, sick, and silly -- to make your audience want to see a character die, just to they can come back to life later in some weird, new form -- then I don't know what sick and twisted is.

Now, there are some good things about this episode.

Katee Sackhoff certainly did a superb job. The best of her career so far.

Dorothy Lyman (formerly of "Mama's Family"!!!) did a terrific job as Socrata Thrace.

Eddie Olmos cries better than anyone in Hollywood. Any lesser actor could not have gotten away with the destruction of the model ship, but he pulled it off.

The director (Michael Nankin) did an outstanding job of creating atmosphere and mood. I really gt into the headspace of this show, to the point where I was really feeling a lot of what he wanted me to feel. The sounds, the music, the acting, the cinematography: It really worked to create a physical, auditory and emotional space which is highly effective.

But in the end, I just can't buy it.

There's too much going on here that is just such inanity. Yeah, I see the drama. "Starbuck dies." But so what? We get nearly 40 minutes of nothing happening but talk. And then we get three minutes of Starbuck chasing an invisible Raider, and then three more minutes of her chasing one when there's a hole in her ship. That's drama? No, I don't think so.

You know what would have been cool? To have Starbuck's friends actually talk to her. Instead of two-minute conversations on the hanger deck, we'd have people actually talk. Carry on a conversation. Follow ideas to their conclusion, instead of letting them hang in the air in "pregnant silence" after 30 seconds. Instead of cutesy, smart-alec words of wisdom (like Romo Lampkin spouted this week) which "pierce the soul," we'd get people struggling to come to conclusions about Starbuck's problems.

In the end, Starbuck would make a decision. And she'd just fly into the maelstrom. No drama, no sweeping strings, no strident cries on the comm system from an ex-lover. Just a determined Starbuck. Fly, zip. Done. Over. The shock of that would be astounding.

That would have been cool.

Labels: Battlestar Galactica

Saw the cutest boys yesterday. Both quite young, maybe 20 or 22 years old. One had thick, long sideburns and '70s hair. A wide tie, a bad suit. The other was a perfectly formed twink with crystal blues eyes and a wide-open, smiling, pixie-ish face.

They made me do nasty things to my penis in the bathroom afterward.

Oh, now that's hot.

Young. Handsome. Strong, but bulky. Those legs get me. So does that cock, jutting out like old-growth timber from that thick thatch.

Take my breath away

And foreskin, too.

I think my contacts just fogged up!

Labels: big cocks, muscle, photography

Is it "naked celebrity host" week?? Did I miss a memo??

First, Nick Baker of "The Really Wild Show" on the BBC gets his shirt off for what is probably the only time in the show's history. Damn, he's fine!

Then Dominic Wood (another host on the show) appears in a tight, clinging sleeveless gayboy dance-club tee as well. Fuck, he's hot!

Next, Steve Backshall gets shirtless. The hairy-chested muscle-hunk with the stupid grin hosts "Really Wild" sometimes, too. But this sighting was on "Expedition Borneo", as he cave-dives into a sinkhole. The dripping water forces him to strip down. I had visions of the hot Javanese porters gang-banging him at night. *moan*

JEEZ! This is fucking torture!

Labels: celebrities

"Jeff stepped from shower. He could feel the rivulets of water coursing down his chest, down his belly, into his pubic hair. He cold feel the rivulets down his legs. He reached out with his left hand and lifted the towel off the rod. The wooden dowel rattled as he did so. He liked the feeling of being wet, of dripping.

"He roughly dried his hair, then massage his pecs with the warm cotton. He let the towel caress his nipples. The cold air of the apartment made his nipples erect, and the terry-cloth fabric felt even better against them.

"He brushed down his body, wiping rather than drying. He wanted to stay as wet as possible, for as long as possible.

"Jeff stepped from the tub. The small bathroom was steamy, the mirror frosted over. Little streams of water ran down the mirror's surface. Unconsciously, he shivered as the tiny waterfalls reminded him of the sensation of the water over his own slender, defined body.

"Jeff reached for the heavy blue robe hanging from the hook on the back of the door. He pushed his arms through the sleeves, but left the robe open.

"Jeff opened the bathroom door and walked down the short hallway into the living room. His long, heavy cock swung and banged against his thighs.

"Mark looked up from the sofa, where he was reading the comics. Naked. His eyes locked on the pendulum gently bobbing between Jeff's furry thighs. His own substantial prick began rising from the thick nest of black pubic hair, a cobra thrusting its dusky-red head from under its hood, wanting to spit its venom. And soon.

" 'I'm done with my shower.' "

" 'I can see...' "

"Mark put the newspaper aside. His prick lolled wetly across his stomach, already drooling."

" 'Fuck, you look sexy in an open robe...' "

Two nude men in bathrobes

Labels: bathrobe, big cocks, photography

This weekend, I watched "The Birdman of Alcatraz" (United Artists, 1962). It was directed by John Frankenheimer, and based on a book by Tom Gaddis. It stars Burt Lancaster ("Robert Stroud"), Thelma Ritter ("Mrs. Stroud"), Betty Field ("Stella Johnson"), Neville Brand ("Bull Ransom, the guard"), Karl Malden ("Warden Shoemaker"), Telly Savalas ("Vito Gomez"), Hugh Marlowe ("Warden Comstock") and Whit Bissell ("Dr. Ellis").

It was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Actor (Lancaster), Best Supporting Actor (Savalas), Best Supporting Actress (Ritter) and Best Black-and-White Cinematography (Burnett Guffey). (Guffey also won Academy Awards for "From Here to Eternity" and "Bonnie and Clyde," and was the cinematographer for "All the King's Men," "In a Lonely Place," "The Great White Hope" and "Foreign Correspondent.")

The film is a fictionalized version of a real-life prisoner, Robert Stroud. The film follows Stroud after his incarceration in 1909 at the age of 19 for murdering a man in Alaska.

Burt Lancaster, Birdman at Law -- and yes, many spoilers

Stroud is imprisoned in Leavenworth, Kansas. The film portrays Stroud (who in real-life was a pimp, moonshiner, and multi-murderer) as a hoodlum. He is unrepentant for his crime. (The film says was it justifiable homicide. In real life, Stroud's wife sold her sexual favors to a man. He refused to pay her, and for good measure beat and raped her. Stroud showed up and killed him in cold blood.) The film depicts Stroud as exceedingly violent, and someone who has a real problem with authority and conformism. However, he has a bit of a good side. For one thing, he loves his mother (almost obsessively). For another, he seems to care for his fellow man. In the opening scenes, he is on a prison train passing through some desert country. The prisoners are suffocating, and he breaks a window to get them air.

Once at Leavenworth, Stroud runs into Warden Shoemaker (Malden), who demands that Stroud adhere rigorously to every single prison rule as a symbol of his rehabilitation. Of course, Stroud can't. He gets into a fight with his cellmate (who touches Stroud's photograph of his mother), and with another inmate in the laundry (who defends the cellmate Stroud just beat). Stroud is put into solitary confinement for six months. His mother (Ritter) comes from Alaska to see him. She can't, though, because Stroud is not yet out of isolation. When a guard tells him that he missed her visit, Stroud pokes his finger at the guard's chest to demand that he be allowed to see his mother. Touching a guard is a crime, and Stroud is likely to be sent into isolation for a month if the guard reports him. When Stroud encounters the guard the next day at breakfast, he begs the guard to have mercy. The guard doesn't, and Stroud knifes him.

Stroud is tried for murder. In a montage segment, he is shown being tried (mistrial), being tried again (convicted to life), the Supreme Court overturning his trial, and being tried a third time (this time he is convicted and sentenced to die). By now it is 1918. His mother petitions First Lady Edith Bolling Wilson (who has surreptitiously taken the reins of governmonet after President Woodrow Wilson had a debilitating stroke) to have mercy. President Wilson (sic) commutes the sentence to life. But the attorney general says Stroud must be kept in solitary confinement for the rest of his life.

For his part, Shoemaker is furious: The guard had told him not to release Stroud back into the general population. Now that guard is dead, and Shoemaker feels responsible. He pledges to do all he can to punish Stroud. For four years, Stroud is kept in isolation. Only one guard, "Bull" Ransom, feeds him, but Ransom is not permitted to talk to him. Stroud remains violent and vicious. He refuses all reading material, sinking into sullen hatred. Once a day, he is permitted an hour (with no other prisoners) in the small workout yard.

Stroud secretly values his time walking in the yard. He walks slowly, so no one will see his excitement. But he values it so much that one day, when a lightning and rain storm hits, he continues to walk in the yard. A tree branch is blown into the yard, and Stroud finds a bird's nest and a newly hatched bird in it. He picks the next and chick up, and the guard permits him to take it back to his cell. At first, Stroud doesn't care if the bird lives or dies. But within 24 hours, he is feeding the feisty sparrow chick. Three months later, he has trained it to come to him when he snaps his fingers, and to fly. The ice melts with Bull Ransom, who now talks to Stroud. Stroud teaches his bird to pull a wagon made of paper, and to open and shut its own cage door (with bars made from brown paper). Warden Shoemaker is transferred to the newly-created Federal Bureau of Prisons, and introduces a new warden to Stroud. Stroud shows off his bird. The new warden is so impressed, he permits Stroud to keep the bird.

Soon, other prisoners want birds, too. Stroud is able to get two canaries as well, using money his mother gives him. He begs a guard for a glass soda bottle, which he cuts into a watering trough for the birds. He begs a guard for a wooden apple crate, and carves it into an ornate bird cage for his birds. Stroud begins to melt inside, although this is not readily apparent (because he has so little interaction with anyone else). He begins to breed canaries, using a bird borrowed from next-door-prisoner Vito Gomez (Savalas). Soon his cell is full of cages and as many as 100 birds.

Stroud releases his original sparrow into the wild. A year later, it returns. But it has brought a terrible disease with it (septicemia), for which there is no cure. Suddenly, all the birds in the prison are sick and dying. The cell block, once full of singing sounds, is silent. Stroud asks the prison physician, Dr. Ellis (Bissell), for help. He's desperate and doesn't want his new friends to die. Ellis can't help him, but does agree to lend him some medical books even though he's sure Stroud can't use them. Stroud (who only has a third-grade education) begins experimenting on his birds, since they are dying anyway. His mother buys him flasks, Bunsen burners, and chemicals. Over the course of a month, he discovers that some chemical mixtures have a helpful effect on the sick birds. But the chemicals are too powerful for the small birds. So he begins buffering them. Meanwhile, the birds still die. Finally, Stroud discovers a cure -- and the singing begins again.

Stroud begins researching birds. He has nothing else to do, and the warden permits it. He makes major discoveries in anatomy, morphology, hematology (blood), histology (tissues), and pathology (diseases). His cures for bird diseases save American poultry farmers millions of dollars -- but he doens't see a penny. Ransom buys him a $1,000 microscope (although he doesn't tell Stroud that this is how much it cost), and Stroud builds a massive medical library and tissue sample collection.

Stroud publishes his findings about septicemia in a scientific bird journal. It earns him a prize, and Stella Johnson (Field) -- a widower from Indiana whose dead husband financed the journal -- delivers it (a special black canary) personally. She offers Stroud a deal: He continues his research into bird diseases, and (using her inheritance from her dead husband) she will start a company to market the cures to bird-lovers. Stroud agrees, and soon "Stroud's Specifics" are making thousands of dollars a month.

Several years pass. A new warden, Warden Comstock (Marlowe), arrives. Stroud has written a book about bird diseases, and has hand-drawn thousands of pages of diagrams. Comstock isn't sure if he should let Stroud publish it. Dr. Ellis declares Stroud a genius and fully rehabilitated. But Comstock voices the same opinion Shoemaker did: Rehabilitation means obeying the rules, and Stroud violates them routinely with his requests for chemicals, laboratory equipment, bird seed, and more. Having become a major research scientist doesn't count for anything in Comstock's limited vision of rehabilitation. (As an audience member, it's so clear Comstock is a man of limited intelligence. "Of course" Comstock's vision of rehabilitation is limited. We don't question that...)

Meanwhile, Stella has fallen in love with Stroud. She moves to Leavenworth, and they marry. This so infuriates Stroud's mother than she renounces her son and tells his parole board that he should never be released. Stroud is kept in prison another five years.

Then new instructions come down from Washington: Prisoners may no longer keep pets, and prisoners in isolation may not have glass, metal or tools in their possession. Warden Shoemaker has never forgotten Stroud, and clearly the new rules (although meant for all prisoners) are aimed at punishing Stroud. Stroud, now in his 40s and mellowed a bit, gives up his laboratory. He descends into melancholy. Stroud ages. As he reaches his 60s, he's getting slow and quiet.

Without warning, he is transferred in the dead of night to Alcatraz. He can't bring his birds, his books, his lab equipment. He soon realizes why: Warden Shoemaker has retired from the Federal Bureau of Prisons and is now running Alcatraz. Shoemaker puts him into isolation with 24-hour-a-day silence. Stroud begins writing a book about the American penal system from 1789 to the present. Within a year, he's completed it. Shoemaker finds the manuscript and seizes it. They have a confrontation in which Stroud blasts the prison system not for rehabilitating men but for stripping their dignity and turning them into animals.

A few years later, and Stroud is an old man. A riot breaks out in the prison, and some guns are seized. Shoemaker calls in the U.S. military to break the riot. Bazookas and machine-guns are used. After the two ringleaders are killed, Stroud convinces Shoemaker to stop shooting and that the riot is over. Stroud has come to value his life, rather than hate it. At the end of the film, Stroud is transferred to a prison hospital in Illinois. He's confronted on the dock by Gaddis, who is writing a book about his life. For the first time in his life, Stroud holds out hope for an appeal.

The End.

My overall impression is pretty damn good. Amazing, even.

It all hinges on Lancaster, who is in practically every scene. Lancaster has to make you believe that he's capable of extreme violence, while not falling into the "con with a heart of gold" schtick. He's awfully successful at that. I think the only thing where this fails is when Stroud is at Alcatraz and his wife comes to see him. He tells her "you're better off without me...pretend I'm dead" and she leaves. It's one of those moments which feels wrong. No person would suppress his feeling so much that he'd tell his one outside contact to abandon him. That scene reeks of the "I'm no good for ya, baby" crap (even though it superbly played by both Field and Lancaster).

Otherwise, the film works really well. I avoided seeing this film for a long time, because modern cinema has "ruined me for other women." (Er...men.) I've seen so many films about the "bad guy with the heart of gold" -- both from the classic era, when the Hays Office was trying to tell Americans what to believe, and from the modern era, when filmmaking sucked.

Imagine my surprise when this movie totally hooked me about 10 minutes in!

It's all Lancaster, of course. He's athletic and has this terrific ability to harden his face while smiling. You really get the sense he's a killer or sociopath (when, in real life, he was shy and bookish). The initial murder is glossed over (it happens off-screen, before the film begins). You don't even see Thelma Ritter until nearly 30 minutes in, and her arrival is relatively unheralded. When Lancaster breaks open the prison train's windows, it's not altruistic: He himself is suffocating. You get the sense that, yeah, he has a warped sense of honor and dignity. But that is really beneath his primary goal, which is self-preservation.

In a way, the first half hour of the film is played like a gangster film. "White Heat" came to mind most of all. That's the Jimmy Cagney film where Cagney memorably plays psychopath Cody Jarrett, the mother-obsessed killer with no temper-control. (The film has a great scene where Jarrett goes out to his car. An FBI man is in the trunk. "Can you breathe?" Jarrett asks. No, the G-man replies. "Well," Jarett says, "let me give you some air holes." Jarett pulls out his gun and shoots the man dead through the trunk. The film ends with him on top of an oil tank, which blows up. And you get that great last line: "Look, ma! I'm on top of the world!" Blammo!) Lancaster is brutal and vicious beneath that veneer of suave charm. In a sense, you get the idea that had the guard not reported him, Lancaster might have knuckled under to the system. Instead, the guard enforces a rule -- depriving Lancaster of the chance to see his beloved mother. Lancaster attacks the guard, the guard tries to club him, and Lancaster thrusts the shiv into his belly.

That's when you realize this film has almost no musical soundtrack. Elmer Bernstein did the music, but I think there are only beginning and end compositions. This moment with the guard is played with dead silence, and it's very anxiety-producing because it's so quiet. The whole prison cafeteria just watches as these two men engage in a death-struggle. But instead of sweeping strings and a blast of horns, you get silence. A grunt or two. Then the guard's head goes back in surprise (no cheesy moan), and it's over.

The first truly amazing scene in the film is a short one. Malden brings Lancaster the news that the president has commuted his sentence to life in prison. It's a very short scene, no more than two or three minutes. But damn! It's superb. Lancaster has already heard the news through the prison grapevine while on death row, so he has the upper hand on Malden. His confidence in what's going to happen to him is supreme, although controlled. He wants to fool Malden, watch Malden be in shock. It's totally in character with Stroud's desire to be in total control of everything and everyone around him. And the Malden drops his own bombshell: "You were sentenced to isolation until such time as you should hang. That's what will happen to you: Isolation. For the rest of your life." Lancaster almost looks frantic. "But that ain't what the judge meant!" Malden gets this gleam in his eye. Just imperceptible, but it's there. "But that's what the judge wrote. And that's what the attorney general says." Lancaster looks panic-stricken. And for the first time, you get a sense of what's going on underneath that calm exterior. Lancaster is really desperate to be with people. He's had a seemingly unlimited capacity for isolation without falling into insanity or despair. It's amazed everyone. Yet, the truth is, he was nearing the end of his rope. He needs contact, needs something to hang on to, needs people.

In a way, the scene is the first major shift in Stroud's character. You, the audience member, see Stroud understand for the first time that he isn't an island. I don't think Stroud himself knew this yet, but you as an audience member can see the change in him. Lancaster plays this like a reverse-epiphany. Most actors would get all confused, introspective, lower their head and face, pout, look contemplative. But Lancaster plays the role as a man overcome by shock and panic and trying to hide the fact. He's confronted by the truth, and now he's terrified by it. He doesn't embrace it, he wants it to go away. He doesn't even realize that he's realized it yet, either. He just feels the sudden need to be with people, and the sudden terror of not being with them.

The panic is barely beneath the surface of Lancaster's performance for the next segment of the movie. He sticks to routine, exercise, pacing -- anything so he can stay sane. And you realize he's losing ground. There's a moment when the guard is distributing magazines. For the first time, he says something to Stroud. "You want a magazine?" Stroud is right up against the bars (not deep in his cell), and rocking back and forth like a crazy animal in a bad zoo. Stroud stops moving. "When I want something from you, I'll ask for it," he says icily. The guard snorts and moves on. Lancaster sinks right back into insanity, rocking again. You can see that something is battling inside Stroud, something trying to get dominant.

The conflict is resolved once Stroud finds the fledgling bird. The fact that he even picks up the nest is a major development. You can tell something has changed right away. But that's just a battle, not the war. At first, Stroud does nothing but throw the nest on the floor of his cell. The soaked, naked chick peeps away. He puts the chick into a dry sock. Hours pass. He eats. The chick peeps away. You don't realize it until someone says it later in the film, but Stroud is impressed by the chick's fight to live. It's gutsy, like he is. He feeds it. Now you know the battle is won.

And its such an odd win, too. A sparrow chick? Not a pit bull, not a snake, not a nasty mouse ("The Green Mile"), not a cockroach. A sparrow. A fragile, common songbird. It's so strange. And the thing is, it doesn't "melt his heart." Stroud stays a mean, nasty, vicious human being. He barely acknowledges the bird. He doesn't do anything more than feed it and let it fly around his room. This is when you know you've got a totally different movie on your hands.

Stroud's evolution from hardened sociopath to human being is never really completed until the very last minute of the film. Yeah, he loves his sparrow. Yeah, he loves his birds. But he hates people still. Only after several years does he even begin to like the other prisoners. His desire to learn about bird diseases is not because he wants to save the world, but for the entirely selfish reason that he wants to save his own birds. He doesn't want to publish his findings until the prison doctor encourages him to do so. Even then, he does it primarily because he realizes this could get him parole. Even so, you get the sense that while altruism is a second-place goal, it's no longer a distant second. You see that in Stroud's response to the doctor's suggestion. Altruism is gaining ground in his value-hierarchy.

This decades-long shift in Stroud's personality is what makes the whole film worthwhile. Unlike "The Shawshank Redemption" (which echoes this film in a hundred ways), Stroud is not sympathetic. "Shawshank" makes sure that you understand, very clearly, the passage of time. But no character really changes during that passage of time. You're just supposed to be emotionally moved by the passage of time. "Gosh," the audience is supposed to think, "isn't it terrible that this nice Tim Robbins is spending so much time in jail and being attacked by those mean ol' faggots?" But "The Birdman of Alcatraz" never does that. Indeed, the audience receives very little visual or editing information about the passage of time. No leaves falling from trees, no newspaper headline about WWII, etc. You have to pay attention to what people say, and even then it is very subtly done. The most obvious change comes later in the film, as Lancaster's hair whitens and thins noticeably from scene to scene.

In many ways, "Birdman" is really a psychological study. It's a character drama. It's not about the "con with a heart of gold," but rather about the small and gradual changes in one man. As an audience member, you totally understand this only after the shift to Alcatraz. Stroud is upset that he's been forced to leave his birds, wife and lab behind. But he still believes he's not worth the love of other humankind. When his wife shows up, he tells her to forget about him -- and she does.

Another transformation occurs when Stroud encounters Vito again at Alcatraz. Vito has been out of prison all of four years in the last 23. Stroud is shocked by that, and realizes that prison isn't about rehabilitation or reform but just punishment. He realizes that Vito is more at home in prison than outside it. He's not been rehabilitated, he's been lobotomized -- not literally, but morally. Vito's free will is gone. The realization starts Stroud writing a book on American penology (which occurs off-screen, probably for time reasons).

Then comes the film's second great scene. Shoemaker finds out that Stroud has been writing a book. He lets him complete it, and then seizes the manuscript. It's a tense moment: Stroud comes back from lunch to see Shoemaker in his cell, reading the manuscript. Stroud sits on his low bed. Shoemaker tells him that the manuscript is a lie, just one huge lie. Shoemaker hisses that from the very beginning Stroud has been nothing but a troublemaker. All he's asked is that Stroud obey the rules, but instead Stroud insists on keeping birds, building a lab, securing materials, making trouble for him.

Stroud angrily replies that obeying the rules is not rehabilitation. He lectures Shoemaker on the reason behind prison. "You break men's spirits, and warp men's souls," he says.

Shoemaker says Stroud has ignored everything he has worked to overcome: The striped clothes and the ball-and-chains are gone. Chain-gangs are a thing of the past. Prisoners get work...

"Work?" Stroud cries. Stamping belt buckles and mowing weeds on the highways isn't dignified work. It's slavery. Look at the recidivism rate, Stroud says. Half the men who leave Shoemaker's penal paradise return within three years. They end up so hardened by prison life that the country is growing a permanent prison class which can never be released back into society. For all those accomplishments, Stroud says, things have only gotten worse. His grand Alcatraz -- once a former military base, now a sparkling clean model prison -- is nothing but a regimented plantation where everyone cries "Yes sir!" and no one learns how to live.

It's a stunning speech, superbly crafted. Yet, it's delivered without the fancy language and crisp phrases that you find in similar cinema speeches. You know, these sorts of confrontations between wardens and prisoners -- like that in "The Shawshank Redemption" or "The Defiant Ones" -- are usually filled with taut writing that contains language more often used by people with a master's degree in English than by poverty-row prisoners. The reason why this scene works is because Stroud's language isn't like that. He's using only a few big words. Most of his language is that of the poor, the disempowered, the lower-class. It's what he has to say and the emotion with which he says it, not the actual language he uses, that give the speech power and meaning.

Karl Malden once said that this film is Burt Lancaster's finest picture ever. That is in no small part due to an actor named Karl Malden. Malden is a giving actor.

A "giving" actor doesn't just sit there. A "giving" actor reacts to what you're saying. He or she responds, as if they are hearing those words or seeing those actions for the first time. A "giving" actor isn't just listening, a "giving" actor is refraining from responding. No "giving" actor just sits there, waiting for the next line. A "giving" actor is constantly flooded with emotion and thought, actively refraining from action and word and seeking the proper emotional moment to reply or act.

Malden gives Lancaster everything he has in this scene. Watch him. He barely moves. Neither man is moving at all, but at least Lancaster gets to speak. Malden just stares. And yet, there is more emotion coming through Malden's eyes and face and body and hands than Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise or George Clooney have delivered in 50 films.

And when it's over, Malden reacts with the decency that has motivated the man all along. He wasn't some vengeful demi-urge, seeking to wound and punish Stroud for killing that guard (which is the way a lesser film would portray him). He was, and always has been, a decent man trying to do the right thing by the prisoners he watched over. He honestly believed that denying Stroud his birds and lab equipment and moving him to Alcatraz was the right thing to do.

And yet, now he, too, must confront something life-changing. Now he, too, has come face-to-face with a terrible truth about his life. The sparrow has flown into his life, and he struggles to understand that not only has his world turned upside down, but that he -- a thinking, intelligent, educated, law-abiding man -- has been just as dead-wrong about his life and world as Stroud was about his. He can't let Stroud know that, not yet. Not when he himself is not entirely sure that's what's happened. So he seizes the manuscript and walks out. But as an audience member you are blown away.

That might have been the end of a lesser film, this great poignant scene between two mighty antagonists. It isn't.

A few years later, Stroud is a creaking, slow old man. Two prisoners manage to break into a storage locker and steal a rifle and handgun. They seize Cell Block D, and free all the other prisoners. This is based on a real-life incident at Alcatraz that occurred in 1946. The U.S. Marines really were called in, and they really did use bazookas and machine-guns to assault the cell block.

Up in his cell, Stroud cowers behind his mattress, not wanting to be shot. He doesn't participate in the riot. He's a tired old man, too arthritic to do anything, even if he wanted to.

The riot begins to peter out when the prisoners realize they are trapped. Soon the shelling of the prison by troops begins. The rifleman is shot. Stroud helps him, as he knows something of medicine. Stroud realizes the young prisoner, who is maybe no more than 25 years old, is not that badly wounded. But the prisoner wants to die. Stroud tells him that's nonsense, that he's a young man and has a lot to live for. Yet, the young prisoner does die a few minutes later. Stroud can't believe it. Did the prisoner will himself to die?

Stroud stares dumbfounded at the young man's face. And you see it again: That look of panic, that look of terror, the sudden realization that something tremendous has happened but that Stroud can't seem to comprehend what. It's that same look of astonishment mixed with insane incomprehension that you saw when Warden Shoemaker told him he would be in solitary confinement for the rest of his life.

It's the look of a man who believed he was not worthy of life, and suddenly finds that life is worth living after all.

It's the look of a man who realizes his whole life has been wrong. That every thought, every action, every single thing he believed in was a lie.

Suddenly, the prisoner with the handgun is shot and dies, too. Stroud picks up the guns and throws them out the window. Using the prison P.A. system, he tells Shoemaker that there are no more weapons in the cell block. A young Marine asks Shoemaker if he's going to take the word of a con. "He's never lied to me yet," Shoemaker says.

Wow. What an admission!

The film ends minutes later. It's now perhaps another five or six years in the future. It's 1962. Alcatraz is closing for good. Stroud is being transferred to a prison hospital in Illinois. When the Alcatraz ferry arrives at the dock in San Francisco, Stroud is met by author Tom Gaddis. Gaddis asks him what he's learned inside. And Stroud says that life is worth living. He says that, at last, he hopes for parole.

What a damn good film.

Labels: cinema

How dare you say that my behavior's unacceptable
So condescending unnecessarily critical
I have the tendency of getting very physical
So watch your step 'cause if I do you'll need a miracle

You drain me dry and make me wonder why I'm even here
This double-vision I was seeing is finally clear
You want to stay but you know very well I want you gone
Not fit to fucking tread the ground that I am walking on

When it gets cold outside and you got nobody to love
You'll understand what I mean when I say there's no way we're gonna give up
And like a little girl cries in the face of a monster that lives in her dreams
Is there anyone out there cause it's getting harder and harder to breathe
Is there anyone out there cause it's getting harder and harder to breathe

What you are doing is screwing things up inside my head
You should know better you never listened to what I've said
Clutching your pillow and writhing in a naked sweat
Hoping somebody someday will do you like I did

When it gets cold outside and you got nobody to love
You'll understand what I mean when I say there's no way we're gonna give up
And like a little girl cries in the face of a monster that lives in her dreams
Is there anyone out there cause it's getting harder and harder to breathe
Is there anyone out there cause it's getting harder and harder to breathe

Does it kill
Does it burn
Is it painful to learn
That it's me that has all the control

Does it thrill
Does it sting
When you feel what I bring
And you wish that you had me to hold

When it gets cold outside and you got nobody to love
You'll understand what I mean when I say there's no way we're gonna give up
And like a little girl cries in the face of a monster that lives in her dreams
Is there anyone out there cause it's getting harder and harder to breathe
Is there anyone out there cause it's getting harder and harder to breathe
Is there anyone out there cause it's getting harder and harder to breathe
Is there anyone out there cause it's getting harder and harder to breathe

Labels: music

I love the '80s.

I love '80s porn.

I love barebacking, and untouched pubes, and natural guys and slutty innocence and twinks and cum.

I (heart) '80s porn

God this stuff is good.

Labels: '80s porn, anal sex, big balls, big cocks, black men, blonds, cum, foreskin, gay porn, interracial sex, Italian, Latinos, photography, twinks

Yes, I'd like to nurse on Gerard Butler's nipples for, say, a month.

Sadly, the pecs are about the only thing I liked about "The 300."

Did anyone else find the portrayal of Xerxes to be homophobic? The earrings, the slender body, the dark good looks, etc. "All invaders are exotic, freakish hippie homosexuals, while all good people are handsome, musclebound heterosexuals and have short hair." It just seemed wrong.

Labels: cinema

If I hear one more person talk about "the Big Dance," I'm gonna go over to ESPN Zone and start shooting patrons.

Jesus. Is this the most over-used sports cliche ever???

Labels: sports

Ever since The Lemonheads released "It's A Shame About Ray," I've wanted to sleep with Evan Dando.

I know he's a total heroin-addicted, skirt-chasing waste of human skin. I know he's got intense emotional and mental health issues. (Ever read that "Rolling Stone" interview? The guy sounds like he's sleeping with his father!) But I just want to have him on top of me. But I don't want to date him. I just want to sleep with him. A lot of times. Have come in every night, share some blowjobs, kiss a little, and then fuck me halfway to Friday. When my ass is sloppy with his jizz, my face is thickly layered with his cum, and my belly swells from drinking his sperm, he'll pull his sweaty body off me, pat my ass, tell me it was awesome ("as always"), and leave. Go shoot up or whatever it is he does these days.

And while he's laying on top of me, fucking the living shit out of my ass, I get to run my fingers through that long hair and caress those cheekbones.

Yeah, Evan. Fuck me.

Labels: celebrities, music

I went to the post office today and came home with two armloads of books. That's thanks to the $150 in gift cards I got at Christmas and the used book sales feature on Amazon.com.

Some items were new, such a Jay Diers' "Raw Youth" and the new omnibus "Visions: Contemporary Male Photography."

Most of it was old. And that means old labor history books.

I just ordered a whole bunch of books:

• "Forging a Union of Steel: Philip Murray, SWOC and the United Steelworkers," edited by Paul Clark, et al.
• "The CIO challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935-1941," by Walter Galenson
• "John L. Lewis: A Biography," by Melvyn Dubofsky
• "The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1930," by Irving Bernstein
• "AFL-CIO: Labor United," by Arthur J. Goldberg
• "The A.F. of L. From the Death of Gompers to the Merger," by Philip Taft
• "The A. F. of L. in the Time of Gompers," by Philip Taft
• "The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941," by Irving Bernstein
• "The Fall of the House of Labor," by David Montgomery
• "The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States," by Michael Goldfield

But here's where I began to wonder. I mean, I have a fairly extensive labor library. I've got almost all the primary works, and a lot of minor ones (as well as a host of journal articles).

But I began to take stock after a while. For one thing, I wanted to ensure that I had all the major works. And I pretty much did (or will have).

I began to see a pattern, however.

See, most books about the U.S. labor movement cover the period from the 1870s to 1955. The 1870s is when industrialism rises in the U.S. and when most American labor unions are formed (primarily the Knights of Labor, but in 1881 the American Federation of Labor). And there are some amazing strikes during this time -- Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886, the Haymarket Riot of 1886, the Homestead strike of 1892, the Pullman strike of 1894, the Cripple Creek miners' strike of 1894 -- which significantly alter the shape and outcomes of American history.

All of this is pretty well covered:

• "History of the Labor Movement in the United States. Vols. 1-10," by Philip Foner (probably the most comprehensive labor history around, even if it does only go up to 1929)
• "Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872," by David Montgomery
• "The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925," by David Montgomery
• "The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century," by Kim Voss
• "Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America," by James Green
"The Battle for Homestead, 1890-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel," by Paul Krause
• "Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day," by Philip Foner and David Roediger
• "The Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era," by David Brody
• "We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World," by Melvyn Dubofsky
• "Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-21," by Joseph McCartin
• "A History of Trade Unionism in the United States," by Selig Perlman
• "A Theory of the Labor Movement," by Selig Perlman
• "The A.F. of L. in the Time of Gompers," by Philip Taft
• "Republicans and Labor, 1919-1929," by Robert Zieger
• "Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881-1917," by Julie Greene
• "American Labor Unions and Politics, 1900-1918," by Marc Karson
• "Samuel Gompers: A Biography," by Bernard Mandel
• "Samuel Gompers and Organized Labor in America," by Harold Livesay

The fact is, there are some pretty damn decent books here. Samuel Gompers, founder and first president of the American Federation of Labor (from 1881 to 1924, except for one brief year), has several good biographies. His papers are all catalogued and published, too. There are really solid histories of the AFL and its political activities. There are good books about the major strikes of the era (such as the Haymarket and Homestead books listed above; but excellent ones exist on others as well). There are good books about the organization of major industries, too, such as steel, construction, the timber industry, coal mining, and others.

The post-Gompers period lasts from 1924 to the AFL's merger with the CIO in 1955. The AFL had William Green as president during this time, while the CIO had John L. Lewis and Philip Murray. There is a lot of New Deal labor policy experimented with in the early 1930s, and then the National Labor Relations Act is passed in 1935. The Congress of Industrial Organizations itself is formed in 1936 after a split develops in the AFL, and there is a great wave of union organizing in steel, automobiles, mining, and other heavy industries.

And there are a lot of good books on all this:

• "The A.F. of L. From the Death of Gompers to the Merger," by Philip Taft
• "Labor in the Great Depression and the New Deal," by Melvyn Dubofsky
• "The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement," by Walter Galenson
• "Walter Reuther, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit," by Nelson Lichtenstein
• "Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II," by Nelson Lichtenstein
• "A History of American Labor," by Joseph Rayback
• "The CIO, 1935-1955," by Robert Zieger
• "AFL-CIO: Labor United," by Arthur J. Goldberg
• "The Crisis of American Labor: Operation Dixie and the Defeat of the CIO," by Barbara Griffith
• "William Green: Biography of a Labor Leader," Craig Phelan

There are a lot of histories about individual unions covering this time period as well. The CIO in particular is pretty well-studied.

The National Labor Relations Act and early National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) history are also well-studied. There's a lot of work here, especially about passage of the Act and early NLRB history and rulings. Much is interspersed throughout other histories. But some is purely legal in nature:

• "The Blue Eagle At Work: Reclaiming Democratic Rights In The American Workplace," by Charles Morris
• "Taking Back the Workers' Law," by Ellen Dannin

But then what?

There is a half-century of labor history left. The AFL and CIO merge in 1955. But there is only one book about this, written by an inside (Arthur Goldberg). There's almost nothing else about the merger itself. That's astonishing.

There are exactly three general histories of the American labor movement which cover the post-1955 period: "Labor in America," by Melvyn Dubofsky and Foster Rhea Dulles (more an introductory textbook for labor history classes than anything else; it's very superficial); "American Labor Since the New Deal," by Melvyn Dubofsky (see the previous comment, plus it only go up to 1971); and "The American Labor Movement, 1955-1995," by Walter Galenson. The Galenson book is probably the best. But Galenson was not a historian; he was a labor economist, and it shows in his writing.

There are other books, some of which cover law, some of which cover certain regions, and some of which cover the main players:

• "Truman and Taft-Hartley: A Question of Mandate," by R. Alton Lee
• "Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century South," by Robert Zieger
• "Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor," by Paul Buhle
• "George Meany and His Times," by Archie Robinson
• "George Meany: Modern Leader of the American Federation of Labor," by Blythe F. Finke and D. Steve Rahmas
• "Meany," by Joseph Goulden
• "Lane Kirkland: Champion of American Labor," by Arch Puddington

That's it????

Think about it. You've got the entire 1950s, with the purge of Communists from the labor movement, William Green's death and the presidency of George Meany, the passage of two major anti-union pieces of legislation (Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin), the unionization of the federal bureaucracy and the massive growth in public employee collective bargaining, the gradual collapse of the labor movement (it lost most of its members from 1955 to 1980), labor's role in supporting the Vietnam War, Meany's involvement in anti-communist shenanigans overseas, stabilization of collective bargaining in construction and autos and steel, a growing right-to-work movement in the 1970s, the death of Meany and the presidency of Lane Kirkland, Kirkland's anti-communist shenanigans overseas, major legislative failures on the national level (including then common situs picketing bill in 1976 and the strikebreaker bill in 1993), the PATCO strike and the rise of Reaganism, collapse of the NLRB as an effective enforcer of federal labor law, several major court decisions limiting collective bargaining rights (such as Yeshiva University), growing AFL stagnation in organizing, the rise of teacher unionism, the rise of healthcare unionism, the rise of SEIU as the major player in the American labor movement, the free trade movement and the rise of globalization, John Sweeney kicking Lane Kirkland out of the AFL-CIO, the Sweeney administration, and the Stern attack on Sweeney in 2005.

And to cover all of that, we've got a couple of general texts which aren't that good. One half-decent bio of Meany which only goes up to 1972 (the rest are fluff pieces). One polemic against Kirkland, and one blowjob for Kirkland. Nothing on Sweeney. A few books on the rise of late-blooming unions (AFSCME, for example, or 1199).

And...well, not much else.

Jesus, that's horrible!!!!!!!!!!!!

In a way, it's really depressing. And, in a way, it's sort of frustrating. The best young scholars (like Joseph McCartin, for example) are doing work on the 1880s. Hasn't that been plumbed by now??? The really important work -- at least as far as today's workers are concerned -- has to do with the things that got labor into its current predicament. That goes to Taft-Hartley, to the stagnation of organizing, to the stagnation of legislative work, to the obsession with anti-communism of Meany and Kirkland at the expense of basic labor work, to the collapse of the NLRA and NLRB, to broad changes in the workplace and economy, to bureaucracy and the enervating nature of certain institutional structures.

You know, in the 1950s, many labor historians took up what is called the "new labor history." They wanted to get away from the institutional, legal and economic focus on existing labor studies and focus on "bottom-up" history. What did actual workers feel, do, and behave during the Great Depression or the great wave of organizing created by the National Industrial Recovery Act? How did workers take control of their destinies during the Flint sit-down strike or the Little Steel strike? Why did radicalism seem to go the way of the dodo as soon as the clock struck 1954?

That shift in focus was needed and essential.

But perhaps that shift in focus is not serving us well now. "Workers telling their stories" is all well and fine. But if you don't have cash, people, training and experience to help organize the workplace, you're nothing but an anarchist. And anarchists get the fuck crushed out of them when they go up against organizations. Despite the popular myth, bureaucracy functions -- and it functions very, very well. Tax agents, police and armies are the height of bureaucracy, and dear god are they efficient at what they do!

The truth is that the 2005 debate over the future of the AFL-CIO was really about personal power. Andy Stern wanted it, and John Sweeney wouldn't let him have it.

But there was a sub-discussion going on. (It's the one the media and labor press seem to think was the real debate. It wasn't.) The sub-discussion was about the nature of the structures of the AFL-CIO. They're 125 years old. What seems to have served the federation well for the first 75 years hasn't done so hot in the last 50. And now things are at a crisis point. There was a legitimate debate over the structures, priorities and goals of the AFL-CIO in 2005.

I don't think that discussion every got resolved, to be honest.

Worse, labor historians and labor studies academics, who have so much to add to this discussion, remained in navel-gazing mode...fixated on "workers stories."

Boy, does that need to change.

Labels: history, labor, reading

So, the California Nurses Association has joined the AFL-CIO.

Did I predict this last year or what?

Labels: labor

Brad Delp, lead singer for the famous '70s band "Boston," has died. He was 55.

He was found dead at his home in Atkinson, New Hampshire. Apparently, he died while alone and there was no indication of foul play. The cause of death is under investigation.

Boston's eponymous debut album was released in 1976. It was recorded in band member Tom Scholz's basement. The album, which contained the rock anthem "More Than a Feeling" and contained psychedelic spaceship cover art (which also became instantly famous), sold an astonishing 17 million copies. Boston quickly became known as one of the first arena bands, filling massive stadiums where only months before it had played in small clubs. The band's second single from the album was "Foreplay/Long Time," which ran nearly eight minutes long and included a lengthy virtuoso performance on rock organ as an introduction (and is almost instantly recognizable when you hear it).

Boston was a band almost doomed from the start. Epic/CBS Records wanted a follow-up album immediately. But Scholz was a meticulous songwriter, and refused to move quickly.

Boston's second album, "Don't Look Back," came out in 1978. Delp again provided lead vocals. The only big single to come off the album was its title track, "Don't Look Back." Nevertheless, the album sold 4 million copies in its first month (and 7 million in its first year).

Scholz took his own sweet time writing the band's third album. Meanwhile, Delp and new band member Barry Goudreau did a side-project. The sound was so much like the Boston sound that Scholz was infuriated. His anger rose as CBS blatantly marketed Goudreau's side-project as "almost Boston".

Boston began disintegrating. Three band members (although not Delp) accused Scholz of withholding royalties from them and sued. Scholz accused them of trying to push him out of the band, and fired them. In 1980, Epic/CBS began withholding royalties from Scholz in an attempt to get him to move faster. Scholz sued; he won the case in 1990 and not only received back royalties but $1.6 million in punitive damages. In the interim, he designed custom guitars for Sammy Hagar, ZZ Top, Ted Nugent and Journey.

In 1986, Boston's third album, "Third Stage," came out. It sold poorly, but was a big critical success.

However, Boston did play a number of AIDS charity concerts during this time. Boston was one of the first big-name bands to support AIDS causes, and it won significant acclaim for the move (especially because, at the time, there was an extremely high stigma attached to AIDS and AIDS charitable work).

Delp left Boston after its "Third Stage" tour. He joined Goudrea's new band, Orion the Hunter. Epic/CBS chose not to reveal Delp's departure. Many fans of the band only found out that he had quit the band after purchasing the album and finding out that his vocals were not on it.

Boston released its fourth album, "Walk On," in 1994. Oddly, although Delp did not sing on the album, he rejoined Boston and toured with the band as their lead singer.

Boston, with Delp as lead vocalist still, released "Corporate America" in 2002. It sold poorly. Although the band did well on tour, the tour was nonetheless more of a "greatest hits" tour than anything else.

In the last year, there were rumors that Goudreau might reunite with Boston for the first "classic Boston" line-up since 1978. Delp had also said on his Web site (now taken down) that a new Boston album was in the works, that he was preparing to tour with Goudreau and others in the summer of 2007, and that he even might marry this summer.

Labels: obituary

John Inman, the legendary British comedian best known for his role as the fey Mr. Humphries on the ultra-popular BBC comedy "Are You Being Served?", died on March 8, 2007.

The cause of death was complications from hepatitis A. He was 71.

He is survived by his partner of 35 years , Ron Lynch. They were married in a civil ceremony in December 2005.

"Are You Being Served?" aired from 1972 (early episodes were in black-and-white) to 1985. A theatrical film was released in 1977 at the height of the show's popularity. There were a total of 69 episodes 9which includes five Christmas specials). A second series, "Grace and Favour" (known in the U.S. as "Are You Being Served? Again!"), aired from 1992 to 1993. Twelve episodes screened.

Of the original cast of main characters -- Frank Thornton ("Capt. Peacock"), Mollie Sugden ("Mrs. Slocombe"), Wendy Richard ("Miss Brahms"), Nicholas Smith ("Mr. Rumbold"), Arthur Brough ("Mr. Grainger"), Trevor Bannister ("Mr. Lucas"), Harold Bennett ("Young Mr. Grace"), Larry Martyn ("Mr. Mash"), Arthur English ("Mr. Harman"), James Hayter ("Mr. Tebbs"), Alfie Bass ("Mr. Goldberg"), Mike Berry ("Mr. Spooner"), Kenneth Waller ("Old Mr. Grace"), Benny Lee ("Mr. Klein"), Milo Sperber ("Mr. Grossman") and Inman -- Inman is the fourth original cast member to die, and the tenth cast member overall to pass on.

Others who've died include:

• Arthur Brough left the show in 1978 after the death of his wife of 50 years. He died a few weeks after his last episode aired. He was 73.
• Harold Bennett left the show in 1977 at the age of 78. He died of a heart attack in 1985.
• Larry Martyn left the show in 1977 as well, after being hired on the show "Spring and Autumn." He died in 1994 at the age of 60.
• Arthur English was Martyn's replacement as the gauche head of the service employee's department. He continued until the show ended. Suffering from emphysema, he was unable to participate in "Grave and Favour," and died in 1995 at the age of 76.
• James Hayter joined the show as Arthur Brough's replacement as "the senior" in 1978. He left the show after just one season to become the highly-paid spokesman for a snack food company. He died in 1983 at the age of 76.
• Alfie Bass replaced Hayter as "the senior." He, too, left the show after just one year. He left to join the seires "Dick Turpin," and retired from acting a year later due to ill health. He died in 1987 at the age of 66.
• Kenneth Waller joined the show in 1981 as Harold Bennet's replacement. He was only 54 at the time, and spent most of the show in a bad bald-cap. He went on a successful career on the show "Bread," and died in 2000 at the age of 73.
• Benny Lee replaced James Hayter in 1981, but only lasted four episodes. He died in 1995 at the age of 79 after complications from an operation.
• Milo Sperber replaced Benny Lee in 1981, and stayed with the show for its last three seasons. He was 74 when the show ended. He died in 1992 at the age of 81.

Inman began acting in his teens in local playhouse and summer stock, but it wasn't until he was 35 that he performed in fully professional theatrical productions. For many years, he was a real window-dresser and menswear attendant (notably for high-class clothier Austin Reed).

Inman's big break came in 1972, when he was cast as the mincing Mr. Humphries. Oddly, he ever again gained much fame. His 1981 sitcom, "Take a Letter, Mr. Jones," flopped.

After "Are You Being Served?" ended its run, Inman became a pantomime dame, a role he had been performing since his teens. He became extremely well known for his performances. Later in life, Inman professed to enjoying his performances in children's theater most of all.

British gay rights groups attacked Inman and showrunner David Croft for what was perceived as a stereotypical performance. But in the United States, Humphries was wildly popular and never received any such criticism. (In one famous incident, Inman was walking in San Francisco when a gay man on a bicycle rode past. The man was so surprised to see Inman that he fell off his bicycle. Inman rushed over to help him, and the man gushed, "I love you, Mr. Humphries!")

In recent years, Inman had suffered from very severe health problems. He had bronchitis, and was hospitalized in 1993 and 2001.

Labels: obituary

Recently, I re-connected with a hung twink I had not talked to in a very long time.

Among this and that and the other thing, he told me that he'd been fucking this very handsome guy. "Do tell," I said, pulling out my penis for a little surreptious masturbation. He proceeded to describe a muscular, handsome, hung hottie who's a total bottom and a total closet-case. Apparently, they met at work. (My friend works for one of the largest non-profits in the U.S.) They started screwing in December, and hook up twice a week.

"And get this: He's a total fundamentalist, and lectures me on why we are sinning every time I fuck him up the ass."

That had me laughing for nearly five minutes. My friend says his fuck-buddy will shout, "Jesus, help me! Keep me from sinning, Lord!" during sex. He'll moan into the pillow, "I'm such a sinner, such a sick and evil sinner...oh, forgive me Lord, forgive me!" When my friend shot a load on his face last week, he jacked off and started cumming. As the jizz dripped off his eyes and cheeks and he shot his load on the floor, he moaned about how he had defiled the temple of the Lord and how he should be punished in hellfire and brimstone for his sexual sin.

After they have sex, my friend says, the guy sincerely and sternly lectures him on why homosexuality is wrong, why promiscuity is the devil's handiwork, and why adultery is destroying the nation and giving succor to al-Quaeda.

"Why do you put up with that bullshit?" I asked (my own penis dripping across my hand).

"Because it's hot!" my friend said. My friend thinks that his fuck-buddy doesn't really believe it, but rather gets off on beating himself up. Some men like tit twisting, some men like being spit on, some men like to be spanked. He likes to have Jesus tell him how much of a sinner he is.

That just made me laugh harder.

Now, an hour later, I wonder. I think the guy is just fucked up. I don't think he gets off on it, but really is some kind of crazy.

I can't be too upset, I guess. At least my friend's getting some very hot sex in the deal.

Labels: friends, religion

Rafael Carreras could make me his whore-bitch, and I would not complain.

One hung Spaniard

He's got everything I look for in a man. All eight and a half inches of it. Hooded, too.

Labels: big cocks, foreskin, gay porn, photography, pubes, Spaniards

I don't know why I am so in love with Simon Jacobi. I just am.

Those crystal blue eyes. That mouth. The way his nose wrinkles when he laughs or smiles. His gigantic penis. How twinky he is, but what great legs and pubes he has. That ass. Those huge balls.













Simon Jacobi: Perfection

I've only seen him fuck once. He screws Claude Cocteau. Simon looks like a natural top. He uses all of his cock, every single inch of it. While he's fucking Cocteau, Simon's practically in awe of how much sensation is coming out of his own cock. He can't stop watching Cocteau's eyes roll back in his head from lust and pain. He can't stop watching his own prick impale Cocteau, split him in two.

For five years, I have not been able to stop looking at Simon Jacobi. People give me photos for my desktop, but they never last.

Simon lasts.

Oh, god, I could totally fall in love with Simon Jacobi.

Labels: ass, Bel Ami, big balls, big cocks, foreskin, gay porn, photography, pubes, Simon Jacobi, twinks

"Filmmaker" magazine has a terrific blog. They provide links to many filmmakers' Web sites. I've used those links to leaves messages of appreciation for aspiring filmmakers whose work I find worthwhile. I've had a fair number of people reply to me, which always surprises me. (Aren't these people big-time by now? Do they take the time to reply to all fan-email? I feel like I'm that episode of "The Simpsons" where Marge gets a note from Ringo Starr after 25 years.)

One person has worked on a few shorts films I very much like. He's not a director or writer, but has worked on them. He replied to me on behalf of the filmmaker, and we struck up a conversation. Anyway, he told me that he has also earned a few bucks here and there reviewing gay porn films. I was thrilled! We started talking about adult film, and I became much less so. His general opinion is that "all gay porn sucks." I disagree.

Then he revealed his secret to reviewing: He watches five random minutes of film, hits the fast-forward key, and randomly stops the film to watch another three minutes. He does this five or six times, then makes his review.


You know, I think that's shitty of him to do.

It's akin to watching five minutes of "Lawrence of Arabia" and then skipping ahead a half-hour to watch five more minutes.

You'd come to the conclusion that the movie was about sand. You'd be right. But also very, very wrong.

Why would anyone do such a disservice to adult film? You know, these guys are putting their whole lives on the line to do this. They won't get work afterward. No law firm, no labor union, no corporate entity, no book store, no graphic design firm is going to hire them when they see "Adult Film Star, 2001 to 2007" on their resume. These guys diet until their lives suck. They work out until their joints creak. They put their naked bodies on display for people to laugh at ("look at how skinny he is!" "look at how small his dick is!" "look at how fat he is!"). They have sexual intercourse with people they don't know and often don't like -- and make it look halfway decent (sometimes really hot). They get it up, they spend six hours screwing (try that, just once; you'll hate sex afterward), and they cum. For what? For a lousy $1,000. Most guys make about six movies a year, so none of them are getting rich off this. And the fame? Yeah, maybe they get famous. A handfull will. Most will stay pretty obscure. Even then, most people will treat the guy like nothing more than a piece of meat, a "porn star to fuck" rather than someone with dreams, aspirations, hopes, fears and joys.

It really disturbed me to hear this person talk about gay porn as if it were "just smut."

If gay porn were "just smut," why would people go to jail for it? Why did people risk their lives and lengthy prison sentences and get dragged in front of the U.S. Supreme Court to defend their right to produce it? Why are these men doing this, when it pretty much stunts and distorts their lives, if it were "just smut"? That's like saying a book is "just writing" or a painting "just art." "You can do without it. It's not essential to life, like food or clothing or housing."

Bullshit it's not.

Labels: gay porn

"The 300" is about as violent as "Apocalypto" and twice as stupid.

A.O. Scott, "New York Times," March 9, 2007

HA HA HA HA HA!!!

Yeah, I have to agree. The more I see of this film, the more it seems to rip off "The Return of the King" and rouse the heterosexual pussy-hound hormones so that no child will point to the mostly-naked muscle-men bonding on the beach and say loudly, "Mommy, are those men gay?"

Labels: cinema

SHAMELESSLY stolen from The Adams Report:

Republican Activist Unmasked as Ex-Model Rod Majors

Retired performer Rod Majors has resurfaced in the public eye under his own name, Matt Sanchez, and using his affiliation as a USMC reservist, to capitalize on a controversy at Columbia University. An eagle-eyed blogger broke the story, describing Mr. Sanchez as having "recently made the rounds of right-wing talk shows like 'O'Reilly Factor' and 'Hannity & Colmes,' where he received praise for coming forward and complaining about his treatment at the hands of Columbia's 'radical anti-military students' who called him names and mocked his military service."

Mr. Sanchez, 36, is currently a junior at Columbia and a Republican activist. He was celebrated last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference where Ann Coulter uttered her "faggot joke" about presidential candidate John Edwards, and was a guest of Bill O'Reilly on his Fox News program the same week the host denounced San Francisco's mayor for declaring "COLT Studio Day" in honor of the studio's 40th anniversary.

Nude pics of Matt Sanchez sucking cock and fucking men inside

Soon after Mr. Sanchez appeared on Fox News he was quickly unmasked by a blogger JoeMyGod.blogspot.com as well as eagle-eyed members of Datalounge.com (who apparently located his online profile as an escort). Other gay blogs and news sites soon picked up the story.

Matt Sanchez performed as Rod Majors and Pierre LaBranche between 1992 and 1995, with several titles in 1998-99 as well as various compilations. Some of his titles include ALL ABOUT LAST NIGHT (1995, Thrust Studios); BUILT TOUGH (1995, Jocks Studios); HARDBODY VIDEO MAGAZINE 5 (1995, Men of Odyssey); IDOL COUNTRY (1994, HIS Video); MONTREAL MEN (1992, Kristen Bjorn); POWER TRIP (1995, Studio 2000); TIJUANA TOILET TRAMPS (1994, Stallion Video).

Notes Joe.My.God, "Porn stars are entitled to enter the military, although Sanchez obviously had to do it [secretly]. Porn stars are entitled to have a right-wing ideology, even though the very people he supports would love to see gay porn stars strung up by the nuts... The right-wing has gobbled up this porn hunk with a spoon, never knowing that tons of men have gobbled up his monster cock on film."

Fleshbot.com observes that "his status as a wankable sex symbol has already been severely compromised by posing for a photo with Ann Coulter, with whom he apparently canoodled while being honored at that conference last week...In retrospect, appearing in GLORY HOLES OF FAME 3 might have been a much savvier career move."

Matt Sanchez apparently plans to respond to the controversy later this week.

- - - - -

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force today issued a press release titled "11 Inches of Pure Hypocrisy."

But below is my own tribute to the uncut cocksucking, ass-pounding stud.

Hey Matt! Come over to my house, we'll play "shock 'n' awe"!

Labels: big balls, big cocks, celebrities, foreskin, gay porn, Latinos, Matt Sanchez, photography, Rod Majors, sex scandal

The first time I tasted another man's cum was... well, never mind.

The second time I tasted cum, I was in a another boy's bed in a double-wide trailer on the edge of town. It was about 1 a.m., and we'd been having sex for nearly two hours. He finally shot in my mouth, and I was terribly, terribly surprised. There was a lot of it, and it was very thin and not very tasty.

We had sex for another two hours.

Afterward, I lay on a sleeping bag on the floor next to his bed. I could hear the wind whistling past the edges of the trailer, and it rocked ever so slightly. I couldn't stop moving my tongue in my mouth, and tasting that wonderful taste. I just lay there, staring at the ceiling, and comparing the taste of the first time to the taste of the second. I stared at the ceiling, lying there naked, touching myself and thinking how wonderful the taste of cum was.

Drink your fill

When I was in graduate school, I used to go to the English Department building and hang out in their restroom. Late in November was the best time. It was cold out, and people tended to go home early. On good nights, I'd get four loads in my mouth in quick succession.

There was a beautiful young blond boy with firm, toned pecs who always wore Disney boxers and who had a very large prick and very large cumshot.

There was a taller guy in his mid-30s who had a long, skinny cock and black hair and a very nice load.

There was a Japanese bodybuilder who had a very, very, very large load. He'd cover his cock with one hand and jack off with the other. When he got ready to shoot, he'd allow just the knob of his cock to show. If you were a little late and didn't get your mouth on his cock, you'd be sorry: He was such a strong shooter that you'd end up doused from head to crotch with a huge, spraying cumshot.

There was also a dark-skinned (Italian? Spanish? Californian?) fratboy with nice pecs and a furry stomach and a somewhat long, fat uncut prick. He didn't shoot far, but he got maybe 15 very, very thick spurts out of his knob each time. It was like drinking tapioca.

I loved the taste of four cumshots in my mouth at once.

No one said anything. I just sucked a lot of cock and the guys jacked off while watching me do it. When one came, the others wouldn't be far behind.

I never got fucked there, and never got my own nut. But I loved the taste of cum in my mouth. I wouldn't eat or drink anything for hours afterward, so I could keep the taste of warm cum on my tongue.

Labels: big balls, big cocks, cum, gay porn, photography, twinks

I'm in with the in crowd
I go where the in crowd goes
I'm in with the in crowd
And I know what the in crowd knows (How to have fun!)

Any time of the year, don't you hear? (How to have fun!)
Dressin' fine, makin' time
We breeze up and down the street
We get respect from the people we meet
They make way day or night
They know the in crowd is out of sight

I'm in with the in crowd
I know ev'ry latest dance
When you're in with the in crowd
It's easy to find romance (And we work out!)

At a spot where the beat's really hot (And we work out!)
If it's square we ain't there
We make ev'ry minute count
Our share is always the biggest amount
Other guys imitate us
But the original's still the greatest

We got our own way of walkin'
We got our own way of talkin' (Gotta have fun!)
Any time of the year, don't you hear (Gotta have fun!)
Spendin' cash, talkin' trash
Girl, I'll show you a real good time

Come on with me and leave your troubles behind
I don't care where you've been
You ain't been nowhere till you been in with the in crowd

Labels: music

I've never been out in public with someone stunningly beautiful before.

But I can say this: It's amazing how hot men think they can take him away from you. As if the handsome guy were "just doing you a favor" by hanging out with you, when the handsome guy really wanted to be with them. It's amazing how rude they can be: Dragging him off, pulling him away, sidling up to him and rubbing their over-sized crotches against his cock and ass. Fondling him, caressing him, trying to Kiss him.

Don't try to drag the handsome guy off, either. They'll sneer at you, and the evil flames of Satan Incarnate will dance in their eyes as they watch you "interfere" with their seduction of the handsome guy. Of course, their attitude is: "Well, Mr. Handsome went off with him just to be nice to him. To settle him down. To patronize that ugly guy...because, after all, he really wants to be with us. The in-crowd."

I find the sense of ownership that hot men have over other hot men to be....well, in part, astonishing. And in part, offensive. And, in part, sick.

But it exists.

I like DVD reviews, primarily because they often get into the sort of critical analyses about why a film was important or odious that I find intellectually stimulating and emotionally satisfying. I like the background on the film, and learning that there's something worth listening to on an audio commentary (instead of the traditional insane ramblings of an uneducated actor or bored and lowly-paid film historian reading a piece-of-crap script) makes my day.



- - - - - -
New DVDs: The Prisoner(s) of Zenda
By Dave Kehr
New York Times
March 6, 2007


Anthony Hope published his swashbuckling romance "The Prisoner of Zenda" in 1894, and it took all of a year for it to reach the London stage. Hope's boys-own adventure has held its place in popular culture ever since. It offers a rousing tale of a tweedy Englishman, Rudolf Rassendyll, who finds himself taking the place of his distant cousin and double, Rudolf V of Ruritania (a fictional Mittel-European country), who is threatened by a palace coup. It inspired two sequels, countless stage productions, an operetta (with music by Sigmund Romberg), a musical (with music by Vernon Duke) and quite a few movies.

The two best-known film versions, the David O. Selznick production of 1937 starring Ronald Colman, Madeleine Carroll and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and the 1952 MGM version with Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr and James Mason, are out today on a double-sided disc from Warner Home Video, and it's surprising how resilient the familiar and much-parodied material, with its preposterous coincidences and unshaded characterizations, continues to be. (The most recent unofficial version is probably Ivan Reitman's "Dave" of 1993, with Kevin Kline as an average American drafted to replace a comatose president.)

Perhaps the secret of its lasting appeal lies in the myth of rebirth it so satisfyingly embodies; the great moment in most versions arrives when Princess Flavia, the king's intended, realizes that he is not the drunken, immature lout she has long assumed him to be, but has mysteriously become an Oxford-educated gentleman whose erudition and athleticism are matched only by his decency and courage. That's a makeover that even Oprah would have a hard time engineering.

By the time Selznick signed up Ronald Colman for the part, Mr. Colman had already appeared in a "Zenda" knockoff called "The Masquerader" (1933), as a journalist who takes the place (and the wife) of his look-alike cousin, a member of Parliament with a secret drug addiction.

That "Zenda" could no longer be played straight must have been obvious to everyone, and so Selznick and his principal director, John Cromwell, approached it with just enough irony and self-awareness to pull the material into the 20th century without losing its Victorian charm. (Selznick being Selznick, he insisted on rewrites and reshoots, bringing in, among others, the writers Donald Ogden Stewart, Ben Hecht and Sidney Howard, and the directors George Cukor and W. S. Van Dyke).

Hollywood legend holds that Stewart Granger, the strapping Englishman whom MGM was grooming as its swashbuckling star of the '50s, saw the Selznick film and immediately insisted that MGM buy it for him. Selznick, it is said, asked so much for the remake rights that MGM had no money left for a new script, so the director Richard Thorpe simply reshot the Cromwell version, practically scene for scene and line for line. (Even Alfred Newman's score was recycled, though in a new orchestration by Conrad Salinger.)

Watching the two films back to back is a little like returning to Gus Van Sant's notorious remake of "Psycho" (1998), in which everything is the same but somehow hideously different. The advantages the remake does hold are the Technicolor photography of Joseph Ruttenberg and the Technicolor-friendly red tresses of Deborah Kerr, who is this version's Flavia. But this is one double-sided disc that probably will not be flipped more than once. $19.98, not rated.


THE BRIDE AND THE BEAST

The psychosexual undercurrents of the American cinema frequently ran closer to the surface in Poverty Row and B pictures than they did in the more strictly supervised mainstream productions. Few exploitation genres were more fraught with Freudian tension than the "girl and the gorilla" pictures that flourished for years after "King Kong."

"The Bride and the Beast," from VCI Entertainment, is a late (1958) but engaging example of the genre, thanks mainly to a loopy screenplay by Edward D. Wood Jr. that somehow manages to recycle the odd obsession with angora sweaters so unforgettably indulged in Wood's cross-dressing classic of 1953, "Glen or Glenda?"

Charlotte Austin, a genre regular ("Gorilla at Large," 1954), stars as Laura, a game young woman who marries an explorer (Lance Fuller), only to find herself strangely attracted to the pet gorilla, Spanky, he keeps in the basement. Is it Spanky's soulful eyes, or is it his luxurious pelt, which subtly reflects the striped angora sweater and fuzzy wool nightgown that are the basic elements of Laura's wardrobe?

"The Bride and the Beast," unfortunately, was not directed by Wood but by the marginally more competent (and hence, much less interesting) Adrian Weiss. Still, the lack of Woodsian mise-en-scène is made up for by the party happening on the audio commentary track, where Ms. Austin shares her riotous memories of the filming with a panel of experts that includes the film historian Tom Weaver, the supporting player Slick Slavin and the irreplaceable Bob Burns, a veteran gorilla-suit performer who is the unofficial historian of Hollywood's "gorilla guys."

The "co-hit" on this "positively no refunds" double feature is possibly even sillier: a 1945 Weiss Brothers production called "The White Gorilla," in which some 30 minutes of generic jungle scenes (from a 1927 serial) are casually matched with some 1945 back lot shots to create the thrilling tale of a fatal rivalry between a black gorilla and his albino cousin, both played by the B movie star and stuntman Ray Corrigan.

The lack of action gives Mr. Weaver and Mr. Burns plenty of time to discuss the theory and practice of gorilla impersonation and to analyze the varied styles of its leading practitioners, Emil Van Horn, George Barrows and the undisputed master of the art, Charles Gemora. Both films have been mastered from the original camera negatives, which means that they probably look better than they ever did on those faraway Saturday afternoons at the Bijou. $14.99, not rated.

Labels: cinema

There's yet another big article on "Hottie Potter" today in the "New York Times." It's essentially a rehash of a previous Associated Press piece from two weeks ago about how fans are reacting to seeing Daniel Radcliffe's pink bits on stage for nearly 10 minutes.

And here's an image of the "rad Radcliffe" orgasming while riding a horse. (I don't make this up. It's in the play.)

Labels: celebrities

I got an article onto the "Did You Know...?" section on Wikipedia's front page.

...that the "Mohawk Valley formula," a strikebreaking plan devised during the Remington Rand strike of 1936-1937, was declared by the National Labor Relations Board to be "a battle plan for industrial war"?

Labels: labor, Wikipedia

I saw twins barebacking a hung blond today.

Alex and Alan Fisher. Twins. Real, hung, twinky twins. When Alex is being deep-throated, Alan (who is fucking the hung blond missionary) can't stop staring at his brother's cock.

I couldn't stop staring at Alex and Alan's dick as they slid up that ass.

On being fucked



It's the thing I miss: That feeling of being totally filled up, and dick so deep inside me that I think my stomach will rupture. And then that whole monstrously obscene thing sliding in and out of my body.

The very thought of it depresses me. To see it is even worse.

Labels: big cocks, bottoming, photography, twinks, twins

Pete Wentz of Fallout Boy is so pretty and so twinky and so hung.

He's half-naked on the cover of "Rolling Stone" this week.

*sigh*

Labels: celebrities, music

I got an article onto the "Did You Know...?" section on Wikipedia's front page.

...that six striking coal miners, nine of their family members, and one bystander were killed during the Westmoreland County Coal Strike of 1910-1911?

Labels: Wikipedia

Kevin Sessums' new book, "Mississippi Sissy," is reviewed today in the "New York Times Book World."

Sessums, a well-known magazine writer, was orphaned at 10. He was repeatedly sexually molested, and was almost strangled to death by one molester. He was taken in by Frank Hains, a local newspaper editor and gay man. When he was a teenager, Sessums came home one day and discovered Hains' body. His guardian had been beaten to death just moments before, and his warm, dying corpse lay on the floor at Sessums' feet. Sessums actually heard the killer in the house, and fled. To top it all off, Sessums was tall, handsome, hung like a horse (for which nearly every boy, Sessums says, revered him), and very, very, very gay. Sissy-boy gay. Limp-wristed, mincing, "Woops! Don't mind me!" gay.


I can only think of one thing (which I know makes me appear incredibly shallow). In my most selfish, most insensitive of moments (which is right now), I think such reverence probably makes up for a lot of the rest.

Labels: big cocks, celebrities, writing

Stolen like a brazen hussy from Foucaultonacid:


1. What is a question that people ask you that always gets on your nerves?
"Why don't you lower your standards?" ranks right up there with "You're not going to do that again, are you?"


2. Name something you have in common with all your siblings:
Lived in Montana for a long time.


3. What is the greatest amount of physical pain you have ever endured?
Having my wisdom teeth out. The ache was unbearable for nearly a week.


4. What number of drinks constitutes your limit?
None.


5. Do you fold your underwear?
Usually, yes.


6. Who is the last person you wrote a letter to?
I guess email ("the modern letter") doesn't count... My dad, I guess.


7. Have you fired a gun before?
Yes, zillions of times.


8. What are your favourite flowers?
I don't have one.


9. What was your favourite childhood toy?
Plastic dinosaurs.


10. Name a sound that disturbs you:
Middle school kids shrieking.


11. Name something random that you would never do:
Nothing. I don't really do random things.


12. Name a person whose diary you would love to read:
Not a clue.


13. Have you ever had the same dream more than once?
I've had many dreams many times over.


14. Name a song that makes you sentimental:
"More Than A Feeling" by Boston.


15. Name something that made you laugh this week:
My own writing.


16. How old were you when you received your first kiss?
I assume this means an adult, sexual or emotional kiss and not grandma bussing your cheeks. I was 11.


17. Are you in love right now?
Don't make me laugh.


18. If you were in an emergency situation and you had to deliver a baby, could you do it?
Sure.


19. If you could do one thing before you died, what would it be?
This is the most stupid question in the world. Martin Luther was asked what he'd do if he knew Christ were returning to Earth the next day. "Plant a garden," he said. Foreknowledge of death is meaningless. We all die. The point is to live each day as if it was the most important one of 10 million more.


20. What do you dislike about being in a committed relationship?
Nothing.


21. If you were famous, what would you be famous for?
Being famous. Certainly not my wealth, huge cock, awesome body, mind or face.


22. Name something you dislike about your mother:
She's dead, so I can't dislike anything.


23. Name something you dislike about your father:
He beat the living shit out of me for 15 years.


24. What is on your refrigerator door?
Magnets and recipes.


25. Name the closest thing to you that is green:
Dental floss.


26. If someone who didn't know you had to guess your name, what would they guess?
They wouldn't. They'd ask me.


27. Name something you have to do tomorrow:
Go to work.


28. Name a movie you are looking forward to watching:
Absolutely nothing. Cinema died when "Ghost Rider" cleared $100 million.


29. Have you ever called 911?
Yes.


30. Name something you've heard about women that tends to be true.
They are women. Otherwise, they are so individualistic that I can't begin to make such blatantly sexist generalizations.

Labels: meme

The beauty of Asian men knows no boundaries.
























































Pure, pure beauty

Labels: Asians, big cocks, photography, twinks

Gay porn star and escort Brett Mycles (real name: Robert C. Sager) died in his sleep on early in the morning on February 24, 2007.

The cause of death was congestive heart failure.

He was just 29 years old.




Brett Mycles, R.I.P.

Sager was born in Houston, Texas, on December 2, 1977, and raised in Toledo, Ohio. He became an avid bodybuilder in junior high. After graduating from high school, he worked at various jobs in and around Toledo, and continued to bodybuild.

In 1999, when he was 22, Sager entered an Arnold Classic bodybuilding contest. Although he didn't win, fitness photographer Irvin Gelb spotted him. Gelb showcased him in a layout, and his career as a fitness model took off. Sager eventually appeared on the cover of numerous muscle and fitness magazines. He also worked as a photographic and physique model, and worked extensively with photographer P. Michael Perez. He also had experience as a clothing model with International Male and Undergear.

Sager moved to Northridge, California, in 2001 to attend college at Cal State-Northridge. He moved back and forth between the two states, living at various times in Toledo, Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys. He attended college (although it is unclear if he graduated), and worked for a home remodeling company (house-flippers).

Sager was named "Male Fitness Model of the Year" in 2002 by MuscleWeb.com, and won the Aloha Muscle Classic title the same year. He also produced his own lifstyle video, and at one time had a Web site -- RobSager.com -- on which he dispensed fitness and bodybuilding tips (the site was taken down two years ago).

In 2003, Sager moved to Las Vegas.

Sager claimed to be bisexual, and in a January 2005 interview he revealed that he had recently married a woman who had been his high school sweetheart. (It is also unclear whether he was still married to her at the time of his death, or whether she knew of his gay porn or escort work.)

Sager worked primarily for Jet Set Productions, although his film work only encompassed two years (2000 and 2001). However, he continued to work as an escort after leaving the adult industry. Sager also did online wrestling and nude wrestling shoots for All American Guys.

There is no information yet on where or when he will be buried, or if the family would like donations to be made to a charitable fund.


Brett Mycles filmography*
College Jocks, Vol. 2 (Jet Set, 2001)
Jackhammer (Jet Set, 2001)
Prime Cut Video Magazine 5 (Jet Set, 2000)
Prime Cut Video Magazine 6: Reunion of The Stars (Jet Set, 2001)
Storm Fighter (Jet Set, 2001)
Wrestler For Hire (Jet Set, 2001)

* - There are also several compilation tapes of his adult film work.

Labels: celebrities, gay porn, muscle, obituary

German publisher Bruno Gmunder just released Joe Oppedisano's new book of gay BDSM photography, "Testosterone." Here is the blurb:

Men and their hormones -– hard, wild and aggressive. Joe Oppedisano presents them in dark stylised photos that sometimes appear to come from a different epoch but are simultaneously very modern. You see a lot of skin, sweat, leather and dirt and will be helpelssly drawn to these specimens of raw masculinity. The photos are perfectly set into scene, usually with just a single light source in gloomy places like bars, cellars and stairwells, drawing you into a sexually charged demiworld.

There are so many things wrong with this, I have trouble knowing where to begin.

First, identifying sexuality with "hormones" removes the concept of free will. Yet, in the BDSM community, free will -– the free submission of the slave to his Master, the free offering of the body to ones Trainer or the gang-bangers, the free acceptance of a submissive under your care -- is key. Does Oppedisano mean to ridicule that community? Does he really intend to undermine the honest, real, truthful sexuality of that community with such a crass, unlearned appeal? I guess so. But this makes his photography either satire or silly. (I vote for silly.) Worse, I look at this and can only hear a femme-bot squealing in his highest drag-voice: "Sorry, girl, that's just my hormones! Guess I'm on the rag tonight!!" This is masculinity??

Second, the stylization of the photos undercuts their realism and believability. It's bad enough that a bunch of over-coiffurred guys whose bodies have been built up for many years in expensive, clean, modern gyms are clad in leather and other gear costing thousands of dollars. That looks like such porn-star bullshit to me. But to top it all off, Oppedisano then "stylizes" the photos???????????????? Geez. Talk about ruining the image!

Third, does anything think I'm a fool? The "sweat" is just sprayed on. The "dirt" is make-up. And the skin has just come from S/p/alon. Funny, I looked closely at the leather in these images. I didn't see scuffing. I didn't see any marks. I saw clean, raw edges. I saw chain link which was as clean and shiny as the day it was bought from the store. I saw clothes with the Undergear label. The blurb claims that these men exhibit "raw masculinity." No, I'm afraid not. Saying these men are into leather and BDSM and "raw masculinity" is like saying pond scum is champagne.

Fourth, just what is this book saying? Are we to be so ashamed of BDSM culture that we are forced to keep it in the cellar, the dark and dank bar, the stairwell? I thought BDSM culture was something to be proud of! I thought it was to be practiced in the sunlight, in the open, in public. I thought that the shackles of oppression were to be thrown off, and the Master-slave relationship normalized, brought into the open, practiced freely. But like some Uncle Tom, this book revels in its own oppression. Instead of saying, "Leather and rubber gear should be accepted by society at large and worn openly in public," this book shows the audience that people should be ashamed of it, keep it hidden in the night, keep it underground and in the dark. The book trades on this Uncle Tom-ism, making the implied claim that "leather sex is only hot when you’re ashamed of it." Wow, that's stunningly self-loathing.

Fifth, I'm not exactly sure who the target audience for this book is. It's certainly not other Masters or tops. Every single man in this book is a muscular, hung top-man. I guess the audience is really slaves, submissives, and others who find such men "hot." (What does this say about Oppedisano??) But that's a pretty narrow band of men, isn't it? I find it rather amusing that Oppedisano and his publisher make the claim that this book is for "everyone" into "raw masculinity." In fact, the book is aimed at only half that audience. Don't they realize that? I would argue that they don't. I would argue that this just shows how limited Oppedisano's vision really is, how driven it is by mass-media images (which is to say, how unoriginal). It's a fake, porn-inspired, warped view of the real BDSM sexuality and culture. It's an unintentional and unwitting parody of it, the kind you see in Jerry Falwell's nightmares. Not the way it really is. Not the really "raw" sexuality that is out there, but a fake and plastic imitation of it.

Sixth, isn't it interesting that this book fixates obsessively on leather? In the real world, there are a wide variety of gear and non-gear practitioners of BDSM. But this book focuses solely on leather-heads and ignores gear-heads, rubber fetishists, Levi-and-denim lovers, and non-gear sensualists. Given the amazingly wide range of real-world sexuality out there, Oppedisano has a tunnel vision which thinks "raw masculinity" is expressed solely through baldness, muscle, leather and cigars. In fact, that's nothing more than a through-the-keyhole view of the world. It's the kind of vision only someone outside the real BDSM community would have. It's the kind of vision a poseur would have. It's the kind of inside-the-Beltway, Hollywoodized, "8mm", cramped-imagination view of the real BDSM community and the real fetish gear community.


When Fred Halsted produced his legendary adult sex film, "L.A. Plays Itself," he showed these sorts of images.

Halsted's work was a parody and satire, however. Yes, it was meant to be erotic (after all, he showed naked gay men having sex). But its primary purpose was to be a parody. Halsted had taken a look around him at the leather, B&D, S&M and other "underground" sexualities around him (and which he was part of) and found them surprisingly narrow in scope. Instead of being broad-minded about sex, these communities had extremely narrow views of what was acceptable. Each person had to tightly conform to a very narrow range of roles. Any individualism, any imagination, any innovation was strictly frowned on and punished with quick expulsion from the community.

"L.A. Plays Itself" was issued in 1974. The narrow conceptualization of what constituted BDSM -– leather, muscle, hairy bodies, cigars, baldness, etc. -- had been imposed on people for at least a decade already.

Fred Halsted made fun of these images in "L.A. Plays Itself."

The adult film community never got the joke. Instead, the adult film community said, "Wow, what vision! That's exactly what it's supposed to be like!" And it quickly imposed this cramped, twisted, narrow, silly vision on itself.

Fred Halsted said that the emperor had no clothes. And instead of laughing, the adult film community took off its clothes and said, "Look, we're just like the emperor! Aren't we smart?"

No, you're not.

Nearly 35 years later, and the BDSM and adult film communities haven't evolved one damn bit. The same narrow, cramped visions existing in 1965 (when Fred Halsted got into BDSM) exist today. If anything, they are even more rigorously enforced and maintained than ever before.

Joe Oppedisano's book merely imitates what is already out there. Whatever its technical, costume, scenic or other qualities, the book utterly fails in its attempt to depict erotic images from the BDSM community.

I'm sure it will sell well. But then, so do Elvises on black velvet and pictures of dogs playing poker.

Because of this, I can't say Joe Oppedisano's "Testosterone" is either good photography or good sexuality. It's just mass-media junk.

Labels: BDSM, gay art, photobooks, photography

I'm interested in the use of iconic images in the gay community.

Perhaps this is because I have my own internal iconic images, which I gathered as a teenager and which haunt and inform my imagination still.

Not being Catholic, certain images -- St. Sebastian, for example -- never held much allure for me. That's because I was never exposed to the images at a formative age, and a images now only seem to echo other images I already have in my head.

Being poor and rural also didn't help. I never saw Michelango's "David" sculpture until I was in my late teens, for example. A lot of artistic gay icons which other people find wildly erotic never imprinted themselves on my imagination.

Prometheus is one which did, however. In part, this is because the Promethean myth always seemed such a minor part of the legendarium. In school, everyone knew about Pandora's box, and how Echo got turned into an Echo, and the story of Jason and the Argonauts. But a young, handsome, muscular Titan creating humanity, then bringing fire to his creation, then suffering for his foresight and gift? How queer is that???? If Judy Garland is a gay icon because she suffered for her art, it stands to reason that the Prometheus myth is just as powerful. And it certainly had its hold on me.

I was chatting with a young gay man a while back, and he mentioned that he was impressed by the legend of Apollo. Here was a god of healing, of beauty, of song and poetry. He was a god of war, but also a god of homosexuality. I said, "But aren't you into BDSM? You like to be tired down and be tortured, right? Why isn't Prometheus more your iconic myth? He seemed pretty startled by that. We talked about the Prometheus myth: Chained down, writhing in pain, constant torture, nudity, exposure to the elements, a father-figure punishing you. It sort of unsettled him that he'd built so much of his self-identity around this one myth, and it wasn't very appropriate.

But then, I don't think that's unusual. The gay community as a whole pretty much ignores the Prometheus myth, and it rarely figures into gay iconography.

I'm more amazed, however, than the Prometheus myth isn't a part of the BDSM community. Maybe it is... but I've never seen it. I see Icarus myths (maybe that's just because the Led Zeppelin album cover is cool, and people don't realize that's really Apollo and not Icarus), I see St. Sebastian myths, I see a lot of other images. I don't see the Prometheus myth, though.

That's kind of amazing to me.

I've noticed over the years that Prometheus is almost always depicted as a muscular, handsome god. About half the time, he's shown just writhing against the rock. Imagine my teenage mind's over-active imagination, and how I interpreted this as orgasm. About half the time, Prometheus is shown being attacked by the eagle, Ethon. The B&D qualities to that are so blatant that even I could figure them out. Oddly, Prometheus is also shown as a young man. Isn't that interesting? I think so.

Labels: art, gay art

Shamelessly stolen in broad daylight from Richmond Spider:

Below are four things about me which are true, and one thing which is false. See if you can tell which one is false:

1) I once took a naked college boy out of the D.C. gay dance club, Badlands, onto a crowded street at 2 a.m., got a cab, and brought him home. (It was quite awkward the next morning, explaining where his clothes were.)

2) I once saw "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches" and "Angels in America: Perestroika" back to back in one day. (Well, we did get a break in the middle for set-changes.)

3) I read Dante's "Divine Comedy" while a high school sophomore (and not just the good parts in "Inferno").

4) I had oral sex with a woman once to prove that straight men simply don't know how to have oral sex.

5) I've never been to a rock concert.

Labels: meme

I walked from McPherson Square to Dupont Circle today. As I strolled up Massachusetts Avenue NW, I got in front of the Johns Hopkins satellite campus building and saw this very cute twink come out. Maybe 21 or 22, 5'8", with a huge mass of curly black hair. Very skinny. His jeans practically fell off him. Great ass, though, and a very full crotch. Like many college kids, he was layered: Long-sleeve undershirt, T-shirt over that, hoodie over that, and jacket over that. Really sharp features, but really quite good looking.

He walked down the cross-street, and I just stared.

Over the weekend, I saw several bodybuilder with enormous dicks. Eh. It's nice and all, but I really prefer skinny guys with no muscle.

True twinks

Skinnier the better, I say.

Gay porn, of course, classifies as "twink" anyone with well-defined pecs and six-pack abs. Nope, sorry. Not a twink.

I was sitting in front of the TV watching a movie tonight, and then found myself drifting away. I think I just sat and thought for about 90 minutes. I thought about that guy I saw today on the street. I thought about someone I saw over the weekend.

I have been through a lot in the last six months. But I realized that nothing would have really hit me as hard as it did had I had someone. Someone twinky, someone hung, someone uncut, someone insatiable, someone shy and gentle, someone next to me.

It's left me melancholy.

I'm not expressing myself well, of course. The last 24 hours have lifted a big weight from my shoulders, and I feel loopy because of it. As if I'd spent far too long at a difficult, complex task, focusing my entire attention on something, and now I'm brain-fogged.

But brain-fogged or not, I know what I'm feeling.

Labels: big cocks, photography, twinks