The most beautiful Dorian Gray?

Archive: Images

This blonde youth strikes me as the loveliest male I?ve ever seen in the role of Dorian Gray.

Dorian faces the painting that has preserved his youth and beauty.

Hair cut Dorian sits with the wicked Lord Henry.

This strikes me as Dorian Gray would be conjured in a Marc Almond song. Surely The Picture of Dorian Gray would be a fine basis for Almond?s music. I find this image of Dorian looking bitchy and queer very seductive.

The actor is Michel Altieri. From what I was able to read - Google?s translation service wasn?t working well for me this morning - he appeared in an Italian musical comedy (possibly Google?s error, can?t imagine these scenes being funny anything funny).

More photos of Michel Altieri. More about the musical Il Ritratto Di Dorian Gray.

The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

Archive: Culture Low and HighArchive: Gay Themed

From a review of Neil McKenna?s The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde:

McKenna?s agenda is to detail Wilde?s sexuality, his love of boys, his tempestuous relationship with Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas) and how his love of the love that dare not speak his name, his belief in art as the great redeemer and his unassailable hubris, all led him from the salons of Europe to the dingy confines of Reading jail.

The whole of Michael Larsen?s review

Sinful Dorian Gray (was a woman!)

Archive: Images

Tony Perkins was in a lamentable 1983 TV movie movie called The Sins of Dorian Gray. Too old to be Dorian he played Lord Henry.

Belinda Bauer (who?) was Dorian Gray. Recasting the role for a woman is what passes for clever on television. Not that it couldn?t be done but I suspect there?s a good reason I?d never heard of this movie until the day before yesterday.

Picture of course became sin because Americans don?t care much for pictures unless they contain sin.

Pictures of Dorian Gray

Archive: Images

There are many images of Dorian Gray from the Oscar Wilde novel. Here are a few.

The movie starring a young George Sanders.

In Spanish.

Dan Curtis, most famous for the Dark Shadows horror soap opera cast Shane Briant (who I think looked better in a vampire movie or two).

I suspect Helmut Berger came the closest to my image of Dorian Gray (even if the movie wasn?t that good).

In Greek.

As an illustration.

Gay Apprentices (secrets of the Gay Agenda)

Archive: Images

Mark convinced Jeffrey that only a fine line divided straights from gays. Then he helped him cross it.

I?m probably going to get into trouble with the queer mafia behind the Gay Agenda in disclosing the apprentice system we homosexual recruiters use for inducting previously straight males into the homosexual lifestyle.

What better place to begin their transition from god-fearing family lovers into selfish hedonists than in the shower at a locker room or gym. There they can?t escape the terrifying truth that the male body can be quite beautiful.

Of course the process of queer conversion requires much fore planning. We?ve had to get gay geography teachers into high schools. Infiltrate the Roman Catholic clergy with sodomites. So many queers devote themselves tirelessly to the effort of converting straight men. But I like to think that at the moment they make the man cross over into his new deviant lifestyle they feel they have their reward.

You may know how the Gay Agenda works but we?ll get you next anyway.

Ten inches (to toke?)

Archive: Images

This would?ve made a good accompaniment for Joint Hunger.

Again you have the drug/sex pun. While I?ve never made the association myself it is easy to see toking on a joint being translated into fellatio: toking on a penis. ?Author? Rich Cummings? name is quite a pun, no? No. Well they tried. I guess.

Coming Out II

Archive: Images

Another couple of covers that exploit gay men?s coming out of the closet.

Cummin? Out isn?t even minimally imaginative. I?m sure the book was sold by its cover art and the cum was the icing as it were.

Coming Out: Eight First Homosexual Encounters sounds sincere doesn?t it? I?ve never heard of the Proctor File.

Given the slovenly artwork it is hard to judge the ages of the guys abusing the youth. We?ll assume they are college age or thereabouts.

If I weren?t a sometimes fan of the Nifty Archives authoritarian section I?d never have guessed that many gay men have actually fantasized this as their first sexual experience. While I never wanted to be abused by school jocks, frat brothers, neighborhood punks, I guess they were often the only examples of masculine beauty many young gay men had growing up.

And many gay guys do have fantasies of being taken and used by a strong butch male. Nothing wrong with that. I suspect this cover is meant to appeal to those dreams, not tell us a sad story.

Dick and Peter

Archive: Images

You can?t really hope to apprehend the creator?s ecstasy the author or editor felt when he arrived at what probably struck him as the ultimate title for a gay porn novel.

Joint Hunger?

Archive: Images

You have to give the editorial work behind Joint Hunger credit for piling on the ambiguity.

The needle lets you wonder if the joint is a marijuana cigarette instead of what lurks beneath the muscular blond?s* towel.

Is the novel about drugs or queer sex (not that the two can?t happily combine). Or is the guy using steroids.

The blond* chest and leg hair is pretty well done for this sort of thing. Often is just looks as if the hunk has a skin disease.

* Microsoft Word insists that the possessive of blond must include an ?e,? I say the word works with or without.

Going back to Tulsa with Bob Wills

Archive: Listening

I grew up listening to country music. Back then Hank Williams, Sr. had many tracks still on the juke boxes and many of the singers, years after his death, were performing music deeply indebted to him.

Western Swing wasn?t something I heard when I was kid. I never knowingly heard it until one evening when I caught a few minutes on some PBS TV show. While I enjoyed it music wasn?t something I was buying so I didn?t give my pleasure a second thought.

Western Swing doesn?t remind me of the redneck music I enjoyed as a kid and eventually learned to enjoy again as an adult.

When ?swing? was the thing, in the 1930s, young people from coast to coast were dancing in urban ballrooms to the music of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Sammy Kaye, and a long list of other popular dance bands of the era. Country cousins of these youngsters were doing the same, but not in ballrooms and not to the ?uptown? bands whose names most readily come to mind when the era of swing music is recalled. It was something described as ?hot fiddling? when it first began to stir in the Southwest?something that was not as gentile as the string-band sounds of the Eastern Appalachians.

Western Swing

It was ?Spade? Cooley who, in the early 1940?s, coined the term ?Western Swing?. Before that, the music had been called everything from ?Hillbilly? (a definite misnomer) to ?Texas Swing? (more correct).

?String Bands? fathered the music which we now call Western Swing. It originated in the Texas and Oklahoma lower Great Plains area. These early String Bands often consisted of just a Mandolin, Banjo, a standard 6-string Guitar, and a 4-string ?tenor guitar? (a Baritone Ukulele - still popular in the Southwest and in Mexico). By and large, the music (in a European style) consisted of just instrumental ?breakdowns? because vocalists could not be heard clearly above the noise (microphones were not yet in wide use).

Western Swing Bands

When I started buying compact discs I asked a friend who shared many of my tastes - ranging from Duke Ellington to Louis Prima which musicians he thought I might enjoy but hadn?t gotten around to.

He suggested I give Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys a listen.

A bandleader, fiddler, singer, and songwriter, James Robert Wills is the most famous exponent of the popular musical amalgam now known as western swing, which synthesized ragtime, traditional fiddling, New Orleans jazz, blues, Mexican songs, and big band swing. Wills blended it all into a swinging dance music that was wildly popular in the Southwest and on the West Coast from the 1930s into the 1950s.

Country Music Hall of Fame

Bob?s cheerful, nasal voice could be heard in nearly every song, as he threw hollers like ?Play it, boys!,? ?Ahh, now!,? ?That?s what I said!,? and any imaginable thought that might (or might not) pertain to the words of the song at hand.

Famous Texans

A friend of mine doesn?t listen to Wills because of those oddball asides but I?ve always found them part of the charm.

I?ve read that Bob Wills considered himself a jazz musician. Others have said he couldn?t play jazz. Nomenclature isn?t an axe I ever care to grind.

The Texas Playboys? music swings as much as any of the famous traditional big bands of the 30s and 40s. And might appeal to you even if you don?t enjoy honky-tonk or countrypolitan.

For years all I owned were the ten WWII radio transcription discs known as the Tiffany Transcriptions. I?d always meant to buy more but never was sure what to add. When I saw that Proper Records had released one of their amazingly cheap, always well-produced four CD box sets, Take Me Back to Tulsa, my choice was made for me. 109 track for about $20. One of the great things about the English reissue producers is that they do a fine job still sell a box for little more than the price of a mainline pop album.

Highest recommendation.

Stud House

Archive: Images

In real life stud house is a place you go to find a male dog for breeding your pedigree pooch.

Surely there must?ve been House Stud as well as Stud House(s).

Armed with hammer and tape measure our stud at least works on houses. The house style seeks to emulate mainstream potboilers of the time so the crotch is modest by the very immodest standards of most queer paperback publishers.

Betty eye candy that most construction workers real or imagined.

Now I like this one. The lad strikes me as more of cute bottom (well he at least has one) and the men beneath him are easily ignored. I?ve yet to learn the cover artist name but from other samples he specialized in rendering pretty boys.

Stud House has been used for videos as well. Though it looks as if this man is in the big house.

And the department of demented completist brings you the pedestrian cover of In-house Stud.

I?d rather visit Twink House myself.

Making the Jock

Archive: Images

I?ve been puzzled by this old queer paperback cover for some time.

For a long time I thought the mysterious figure in the background was holding a whip. And thought he looked something like someone out of an old sword and sandal or sorcery novel.

Finally I realized the man is holding an automatic rifle.

Discerning that the jock?s shirt probably says Olympics it began to sort of fall together.

My guess is that the novel takes place at an Olympics somewhere overseas. My guess would be the Middle East and the mystery man in the back is either a terrorist or freedom fighter (which is determined by your political sympathies).

Now it could be that the jock is kidnapped and sold to a wealthy sheik to become part of the latter?s male harem. My reading of the Nifty archives shows that more common fantasy than I?d ever guess. Perhaps the jock falls in love with the swarthy man and helps him defeat evil. Or something completely different. No way to know.

The outline of the jock?s underwear suggests that his balls are so big he needs to visit his doctor. He?s not on steroids anyway.

Julia Lee's King Size Papa

Archive: Listening

What has been called blues music has meant many different things. Often it is melancholy even bitter reflections on lost love and frustrated lust. But a blues shouter like Joe Turner is apt to shake, rattle and role along. And blues piano was the rocking sound of boogie-woogie.

Julia Lee

Some of the track on Julia Lee?s Kansas City?s First Lady of the Blues are of sober resignation in the faithlessness of men.

But what most people remember and I enjoy most are her double-entendre songs. Take her King Size Papa ?there?s such a lot of him? and ?everything I need he carries in his king size pack.?

Julia Lee?s band, called her Boyfriends was an ad hoc, often changing group. On this two CD set many cuts feature Benny Carter and Red Norvo.

The Happy Hustlers

Archive: Gay ThemedArchive: Images

While I hope many callboys are happy I had no idea there?d been two different happy hustlers in book form.

When Grant Tracy Saxon?s* memoir came out I was helping produce an early Atlanta gay newspaper, The Atlanta Barb. On the side I was a renting young men as the owner of Youngman, Incorporated.

A youth who?d read the book was so taken that he wished to emulate the author. He called me hoping for a job. I had to tell him that he didn?t meet our minimum age requirement but did agree to let him drop by and talk to him about the sex trade. A very handsome lad, he?d have been easily vendible. But I had to be firm about our policy. Not that I was so ungracious as to accept the free sample he forcibly offered. It was my first experience with frotting which proved more satisfactory than I?d anticipated.

I?ve never seen a copy of this Happy Hustler, a novel but possible as truthful as the autobiography. This is at least the third old gay paperback I?ve seen lately using the door-to-door salesman motif. Sadly I only get Jehovah?s Witnesses at my door (though I did once enjoy chasing some away by greeting them in the nude).

* There was a sequel: Making Love: The Happy Hustler?s Intimate Way to Bisensual Lovemaking.