Tag: gay

Colby Kern – More from table manners (2015)

Kern telegraphs his familiarity with Nan Goldin and Araki too much for my taste. (There’s some Ryan McGinley in there as well, which would at least be more in keeping with the work.)

It’s unfortunate because there are a couple of things his work does that turns out to be more interesting–at least to me–than the work he’s referencing.

For example: he has no qualms depicting graphic nudity. Yet, when sexual overtones emerge in the images, he always either partially or completely obscures his subjects genitals. Frequently, the frame edges or someone else provide assistance in such obscuring. It comes across as very nearly playful–which is why I think McGinley is perhaps the better reference to pursue given only the three aforementioned photographers.

I think this image is especially interesting because of the triangulation. The image maker is a participant in the image–he may not be casting that dark shadow on the lower table but with the guy looking at his hand covering the boys groin and the boy making eyes at the camera, the circular table cycles the eye continually around the frame. (I do think there should have been a third cup or no cups, however.)

Lastly, although I can’t figure out exactly how to explain it–I feel like there’s some genderfuckery at play in this. The boy stretched out on the table is both clearly masculine but the pose and the way he’s flirting with the camera are something one would typically see in fashion editorials target straight white cismen. Yet the placement of the blocking hand does more than anything to activate a sort of suggestion of androgyny. (Yes, if you follow the implication far enough–I’m pretty sure it turns out to be a problematic depiction. But it’s a sentimental image and when fine art folks eschew sentiment it’s not so much that sentiment in itself is bad; more the tendency to respond out of habit instead of thoughtfully. (It’s the same reason poets are told to avoid cliches, really.)

Source: heycolbykern

Source unknown – Title unknown (200X)

Netflix’s Sense8 was renewed yesterday–the shared fictional birthdate of the series eight protagonists.

I’m not sure why I gave it a chance. The reviews were middling at best and I already have arguably too full a plate of shows that I follow with something not unlike religious devotion.

And truthfully, I spent the first three episodes frustrated and highly critical of the proceedings. But something shifted right around the 4 Non Blondes full cluster sing-along–I found myself weeping uncontrollably.

It’s not a perfect show but it is in my opinion a great one for all the ways it’s daring to challenge the conventions of what we should expect from entertainment.

One of the things that it manages–one thing which despite some of the notably sexist conventions of say the Matrix–is to push the Wachowskis’ tendency for inclusive diversity in casting to a heretofore never realized extreme. But beyond that, there’s a decidedly queer bias to the program. Virtually all the sex is either group sex or queer sex.

The image above reminds me of one of literally hundreds of scenes that have subsequently become stuck like a splinter in my mind. In it two gay characters, begin to make out. Things escalate rapidly and they forget that there dear female friend is watching them. She slides her hand down her stomach and into her bikini, beginning to masturbate while watching her friends fuck.

Under the direction of less attentive storytellers, it would have easily seemed creepy or inappropriate. But what shines through the scene is a respect for both an honest, unguarded personal expression and respect arising from deep connection and understanding of the boundaries of others.

It’s that feeling that I’m frequently trying to channel through this project. I think I fail more than I succeed. But I do hope that sometimes you feel it, too.

And truthfully, although I know it’s just a silly sci-fi show…Sense8 does make me feel marginally less abandonded and alone. I think that’s one of the reasons I cried when I found out it was renewed. Because I desperately need more Riley, Sun,  Lido, Nomi, Capheus, Kala, Will, and Wolfgang in my life.

More fabulously open and forward thinking depictions of queer sex are just a stellar fringe benefit.

Source: ouledsoltane

Stanely Stellar – Jerkoff (1977)

It’s mind boggling that the site of this photograph looks like this now.

However, if you didn’t know a bit about Stellar and/or the history of pier 46, there’s nothing to immediately betray the image as anything less than contemporary. (The towel, facial hair and discarded underpants strike me as par for the The Hipster Porn Project-course props.

I have always felt this profound and extremely problematic nostalgia for the NYC circa the late 70’s/early 80s. The grit and desperation. Patti Smith. Swans. But also the AIDS epidemic and a despite being post-Stonewall there was still a prevailing rampant homophobic sentiment.

For me that milieu tries to shift what I think of this image. I say tries because I see it as both brash and dangerous–regardless of where it was shot. But there’s also a beautiful openness to it. And I don’t care whether or not you see me, this is who I am. (I’m someone who always views radical honesty as worth whatever risks comes with it.)

And as much progress as has been made–not that the work is by any means complete–I do feel a heavy despair knowing that living in the city these days means there’s little (if any chance) I’ll ever encountered this sort of open display of sexuality in public but I’m accosted by Justin fucking Bieber’s Calvin Klein wrapped package on the side of every fifth bus and bus stop enclosure.

I can’t help but think of Iranian poet Ahmad Shamloo. In the same year, Stellar made this image, Shamloo left Iran to protest the Shah’s regime. He traveled around the US lecturing at various colleges.

I’m not sure if it’s apocryphal but apparently a number of people were rather surprised when he chose to return to Iran. On being asked why he claimed that at least in Iran the mechanism of state control and oppression were clearly visible. He said that the reason America worked is because they had grown so adept at hiding the very same mechanism.

(As an aside: I can’t help making a rather obvious correlation between this image and Stranger by the Lake– it’s streaming on Netflix, you have no excuse. It doesn’t escape my notice that Stellar is essentially filling the role of the skeevy guy who stands around awkwardly masturbating while folks he’s attracted to hook up.)

Source: raveneuse

Source unknown – Title Unknown (201X)

I have objections to this–namely, the camera’s proximity to the action implicates it as a participant/not strictly an observer. The image would’ve been improved dramatically by moving backward say two feet. (Further, you know, DoF could’ve been a little more thoughtfully implemented and a series of unfortunate Photoshop decisions might’ve been avoided.)

Still, the image is super hot and not just because of the graphic penetration. (Also, it bears mention that I am super supportive of this as a depiction of safe sex that doesn’t come off as perfunctory, forced or trite.) I think it appeals to me because there’s enough context to suggest that this is a public environment. But something I’m realizing more and more about myself is depictions of sex that are salaciously focused on reproductive organs just do not do it for me. I want to see an effort to communicate physically the unsayable intensity of passion. Her the kiss is what sells the image and it in no small part reminds me of another equally arousing (though non-pornographic) photograph by Lina Scheynius.

Source Unknown

The composition here is certainly not The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp; but at least it’s thoughtful enough to present a legible staging: 16 seemingly male-bodied persons in 4 groups–3 threesomes & 2 couplings.

There are:

  • 4 instances of fellatio
  • 2 handjobs
  • 1 soixante-neuf situation, and
  • 1 occasion of anal penetration.

It is unclear what the gent whose stroked erection marks the center of the frame is doing with his hands between his two attendants legs. (Cradling their testicles? Fingering their asses?)

And I can’t help thinking that the photographer must have had some decent art historical chops due to the pose of the fellow who is licking the reclining gent in the white shirt’s scrotum, is too much like Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus to be accidental.

Further this isn’t the worst example of the whole proximity/participation thing I am always kvetching about w/r/t close-ups.

Yes, the camera hung back to front load explicit content into the frame. But that’s probably less due to an aesthetic concern than a a necessity borne of limitation– i.e. scarcity of equipment/skill required for its operation.

Take a minute to consider each of the 4 groups independent of the others–again the composition makes this fairly easy to accomplish. What would close-up really add? Reducing the totality to a metonymy of explicit action. Does that add anything? Does seeing the sheen of saliva on an stiff cock bestow some kind of hyper-real synesthetic sensory stimuli?

Whereas in a wider shot bodies not only move in relation to each other, they retain evidence of being ground in their particular form of life.

Danny Fields

If I had I been born a decade earlier I would have lived on New York’s Lower East Side and died (of heroin or AIDS).

For better or worse, that ship sailed without me—more often than not I think it’s the latter.

I know Danny Fields as the first manager of punk icons The Ramones as well as the guy who signed both The Stooges and MC5 on the same day.

And, as Karley Sciortino over at Slutever—awesome name—points out, he was also a prolific pornographer, snapping a metric fuckton illicit Polaroids over the years.

No one is surprised I dig these images except old, toothless Stevie, who lives in a shotgun shack on the outskirts of Duluth and is surprised by everything.

But what surprises me is that I do find something off-putting about these images. I am not entirely sure what it is, so let’s go over the obvious stuff it’s not first:

  • Fields’ Polaroids feature prostitutes paid $40 to do whatever he wanted. Yes, that’s totally sketchy; but, I am the last person who is going to denounce sex work; further objecting to the use of prostitutes as models means you object, by dint, to the entire western art historical canon. So yeah, bring on the whores.
  • It doesn’t bother me that Fields admits these boys were loaded to the gills with drugs during sessions. Hell, it was the eighties who wasn’t?
  • I do not even mind the graphic display of gay kink. Hell, if watching people who really want to fuck each other is what one needs to get off, then one would do well to skip over hetero porn completely.
  • And I do dig the images– especially the one I’ve posted.

What feels off to me, I think, isn’t a result of anything intrinsic to the images; it’s reading Fields ideas with regard to sex:

I just think it’s best to fuck whores. I’ve never been in a situation where being emotionally involved with a person has made the sex better. While I’m fucking someone I care about them, and that’s enough for me—that’s where it means something. I want sex to be so intense that I’m not thinking about anything else. The loving part is distracting: who’s going to pay the rent, who didn’t clean the bathroom, that kind of stuff. After I cum I just want a trap door to open and whoever I’m with to fall through the floor.

I can’t relate this notion of intimacy but hey different strokes for different folks. But when this disposition is coupled with situations involving heavy drug use, sexual charged interacts and money changing hands, it’s all too easy for things to turn coercive and the imperative for explicit consent to become muddied.

Fields’ preempts accusations of exploitation by stating the images were produced prior to the Internet; a bullshit dodge since the Internet exists and sure enough the images are on it. Therefore the original intent is less certain than that he understood that any future right to privacy was forfeited when he paid the $40 fee.

I am not necessarily condemning the man—passing judgement on ethical matters is the last thing I am qualified to do.

Aesthetically, I think the images are great—they feature exactly the sort openness and permissive immediacy that will always be a quintessential turn on.

Unfortunately, they suffer under critical inspection. And not due exploitative elements or Fields insistence on that intimacy is essentially disposable. It’s their conjunction and Fields implicit nonchalance to it that is problematic. That does not make him a terrible person so much as intellectually disingenuous.

And isn’t disingenuity,the most un-punk thing ever?