Fantasy / Reality

First, let me make this perfectly clear:  There is absolutely nothing wrong with Jesper Trip.  If a boy who looked like Jesper Trip looka were to so much as bat his eyelashes at me, no doubt I would faint dead away from the sheer joy of it.  So, this is not a criticism of Jesper, in any way.  But look at these professional photographs of him above,  and now look at the Polaroids of him below. Does that even look like the same person to you?

That's because, in the top pictures, he is groomed, made-up, carefully lit, and extensively Photoshopped to the point that the picture isn't really of him at all, but is a piece of digital artwork based upon him. In the bottom pictures he is an actual human being.  This is true of every professional picture of a model you have ever seen.  Fantasy vs. Reality.  Know the difference.

Here's a few more pictures of Jesper. The fantasy version.

Why I Hate Nostalgia (But Love Old Things)

Boys wore short shorts in the 70s! It was paradise!

Back in the 1970s, when I was just entering teenhood, Curtis Publishing published eight issues of a magazine called Nostalgia Illustrated.  I happened upon this magazine one winter's day in 1975 at a Cedar Rapids  Hy-Vee store.  Mae West on the cover was the attraction for me, but truth be told, I was in love with this magazine.  For the remaining four issues of Nostalgia Illustrated's short life I bought and devoured every word of every issue.  I read and reread each issue until it literally fell apart in my hands. A story about Wurlitzer jukeboxes?  Sign me up. Biographies of Fay Wray and Ann Miller?  You betcha! A feature about Fanny Brice?  You had me at Fanny!  

Like most of the American population in the 1970s, I was under the influence of an illness called "Nostalgia."  I was thirteen years old, but I was certain that there was a golden age, known vaguely as "The Past," or "The Good Old Days,"  and I had the misfortune to be born too late to experience it.  I'm not sure when I got over that kind of thinking. One of the major cultural forces of the 1970s was nostalgia, whether it was proto-hipsters and members of the gay community  who enjoyed objects from the past for their camp value, or people who were worn down by the cares of that horrific decade and simply longed for a better time.  Personally, the fabulous Hollywood sirens of the past (along with other things like comic books and my shameful, secret admiration of male teen idols) offered me a great deal of escape from my awful Junior High School experience. Because we only had four TV channels in Cedar Rapids in those days, we tended to only see the very best that Golden Age Hollywood had to offer, and were spared most, not all, of its more tawdry and mediocre product.  It was in the 1990s, when all of western culture suddenly became available online,  that  I realized how much of the ancient culture I had so venerated (sight unseen) was actually not very good.  Ninety per cent of everything is crap, right?  It was as true then as it is now.

Today, I see people my age, and younger, speak of the 1970s, the era of Watergate, and gas shortages, and double-digit inflation,  as if it was some kind of Eden.  These are people who lived through the time, but don't really remember it.  They remember the toys they played with, and the bikes they rode, and the TV shows they watched. They remember candy and Christmas trees, the first people they fell in love with, and the tiny swimsuits boys used to wear at the beach. If you grow up in the relative privilege of American suburbia, free of abuse and hunger, it's easy to remember your childhood  as a  lost paradise. But you weren't paying the bills, or worrying about getting laid off, or worried about getting shipped to Viet Nam. However if you were ten years old, it might seem like a paradise because it was the only time when you didn't have any real responsibilities.  It's easy to forget the bad things because, lucky you, you probably weren't even aware of them.

I'm not suggesting that we forget the past or write it off. There were beautiful things then, and ridiculous things, and things that were both at the same time. 

If you look at the artifacts of your youth, some of the things you thought were pretty groovy at the time (such as the word "groovy")  don't hold up very well at all. That doesn't mean you don't still have a fondness for them- I still occasionally listen to my old Partridge Family Albums- but it also doesn't mean that you should fool yourself into thinking that they are better than they are.

Of course there are things from the past that were, are, and always will be wonderful and perfect, but please don't let yourself think that they come from a wonderful and perfect  world. 

Probably the biggest pitfall of nostalgia is that its victims come to believe the lie that since everything from the past was wonderful, it can only follow that everything in the present must be comparatively crappy. It isn't true. It is true that things are different now.  Some things are better, some are worse.  But amazingly enough,  there is already nostalgia for the 1990s and the 2000s,  and there is a whole generation who will soon be wistfully remembering the 2010s, when music was better, fashion was better, food tasted better, and the world was sublime. 

Carpe diem.

Writing Smut

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The Politics of Legal

If you want to see exactly why Famous Males Forums, once my go-to site for pictures and information about celebrity males,  with an emphasis on U.K. celebrities, has become almost unbearable to read, you need look no further than a recent post made on the occasion of Austin Mahone's 18th birthday.  The usual inane bitchery that always appears there (not almost always, always) is par for the course, but of particular interest is a long argument about the appropriateness of showing shirtless pictures of a newly adult man, especially on his birthday.

Several years ago, due to a bizarre misreading of U.K. anti-pornography law, Famous Male Forums instituted a rule that any and all pictures of any person under the age of 18 must never appear there, the logic being that any photo of a person under 18, even if it is a cap from a mainstream movie, TV show, or magazine, even in a country where the age of consent is 16, and even on a non-pornographic site,  could be construed as sexual in nature and lead to... well, God knows what.  It takes a special kind of paranoia, but it's a privately owned site, and if its owner is that afraid of the draconian state, so be it.  But even before the rule went into place,  and teenagers under the age of 18 appeared there regularly, there was always someone who was ready to act as the thought police, and to condemn anybody who recognized and admired the beauty of a 17-year-old, suggesting that they were pedophiles, or at the very least, creepy.  This, of course, lead to a lot of debate and name-calling,  mostly  name-calling.  If the powers that be at FMForums thought that the rule change would put an end to the controversy, they were woefully mistaken. The same naysayers were just as happy to condemn anyone who enjoys adult men who "look too young."  I kid you not.  This leads to people being called out as pedophiles for the crime of posting pictures of people as old as 25.  It also leads to bizarre examinations of each and every picture of anyone under 20 to determine exactly how old they were when the picture was taken.  Imagine how corrupting it would be to see a picture of Harry Styles when he was on The X Factor and not yet 18.  The world might end.

At any rate, something good came out of the whole kerfuffle, and that was a nice collection of shirtless photos of Austin Mahone, a lovey specimen no matter how old he is.

My Problem

Kristoffer Hasslevall

Callum Ball

George Elliot

The problem with me, one of my many shortcomings as a human being, is that I need to be obsessed with something, or someone, at all times.  The problem with obsession is that it can only be sustained for so long before either escalating into madness, or mellowing into a pleasant  affection.  When I started blogging here, there were so many guys on the scene who made me dizzy with lust that my job here was easy.   At the moment though, I don't have that kind of crazy google-him-every-ten-minutes feeling about anyone, which is maybe (probably) healthy, but not a lot of fun.  

Look at the three boys pictured above,  all perfectly gorgeous, all utterly worthy of an exhaustively researched, carefully curated fifty-or-more picture post. Even though I love looking at them, they don't inspire me the way I need to be inspired.  And that scares me a bit. Mother of God, is this the end of Vera?

Have You Seen This Picture Before?

Longtime readers of this blog may recognize this photo, which I first posted in the Spring of 2012.  I knew that I had posted it in the past but I wanted to find out exactly when.  I found what I was looking for, but also discovered a site whose M.O. is to lift the content of my blog- photos, commentary and all- and publish them, in their entirety, without comment or attribution, on their site.  I'd say I was surprised, but it isn't the first time it has happened. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but stealing is just stealing.

Tom Daley, Coming Out, Sad Queens, And Bullshit On The Internet

It sometimes seems as if Tom Daley has been with us forever;  he's been put forward by the media as an object of lust from a very early age,  and it may be easy to forget that he is only 19 years old.  Yesterday he released a video in which he told the world that he was in a romantic relationship with another guy.  Didn't say that he was gay,  said he still "fancies" girls, but that right now he is dating a guy.  I don't really need to tell you this, though, because this news has already lit up the Internet, and everybody seems to have an opinion.  My opinion:  Good for you, young Tom.  I hope you are happy, and I'm proud of you for making the difficult decision to come out.  

Here's what gets my goat,  and it's got nothing to do with Tom Daley's actions.  I expect pig-ignorant, homophobic heterosexuals and closet cases to come out vocally against Tom's sexuality and his decision to make it public.  It has already begun.  What I don't expect is for members of the queer community to be equally hateful in their reactions. God knows, I should be used to it by now, as it happens every time a high profile person comes out. This is something that I first noticed when Ricky Martin came out in 2010.  

You see, there is a subset of the queer community that I call "Sad Queens."  I don't know whether or not there are a lot of Sad Queens, or if there's only a small amount of them who are extremely vocal. Either way, whenever a celebrity comes out, they are at every forum, message board, and comments section to spread their bile. 

The Sad Queen's first comment is always the same. "I'm not one bit surprised.  I knew it all along."  I believe in Gaydar, but the Sad Queen has flawless, infallible Gaydar. They don't just have a feeling, they know.

Next, they carefully parse the subjects words,  as if to somehow poke a hole in their story.  "He never actually says he's gay. He says he still likes girls.  This is an obvious lie.  He's a liar!  He's just saying this because it is more acceptable to be bi than it is to be gay (?) and he doesn't want to hurt his career."

Often the Sad Queen will parrot the homophobe's lie that it is completely unnecessary to come out in this enlightened age.  "Why should it matter? Straight boys never come out."

Finally we will get the cynical list of the "real" reasons why our subject decided to come out.  "He had to or the media would have outed him."  "He's doing it help his career."  Or this actual quote from Famous Male Forums: "He's saying it because he's been told to. This is the least genuine video ever."  He's been told to.  That's all we need to know.

I grow tired of the Sad Queens.  Tom Daley's declaration of his happiness and his love for another man should be a cause to rejoice,  but like everything else in the Sad Queens' miserable, little world,  it is merely becomes an excuse to air their cynicism,  and  to jack up their own egos.  Don't be a Sad Queen.  Choose life.

And congratulations to Tom Daley.  I'm very happy for him, and proud of him for choosing to live an open, honest life.