The Highest Science, 1993, Gareth Roberts
Another new-Who name rears its head in the New Adventures line, as Gareth Roberts would go on to write two of my favorite new-Who episodes “The Shakespeare Code” and “The Unicorn and the Wasp”, as well as several episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures. So the guy knows Who. And here he gives us a great, rollicking sci-fi adventure story, with the Doctor and Benny chasing down Fortean anomalies in space-time and encountering the Chelonians, a war-mongering turtle-like creatures. The Chelonians are great additions to Who-lore, and though they’d probably be budget-stretchers, they’re pretty high on the list of book aliens I wouldn’t mind seeing make it onto the show.

Back when I still worked a 9-to-5 in comics retail, I would occasionally offer up a sampling of music that had been playing in the store, under the title “Music to Torment Customers and Co-Workers With”. In fact, the last time I did one was…really, 2005? And I didn’t even technically work in the comic shop anymore in December 2005. Huh.

Anyway, I still have the urge to talk about music occasionally, and while, for the most part, Andrew makes most music discussion on the internet moot, I held off because, honestly, I never thought I’d be able to come up with a hook as easy for me to work with as “Music to Torment Customers and Co-Workers With.”
So I decided to abandon pretence and artifice and just go ahead and talk about the stuff that I keep listening to over and over and over again.

Hide Nothing, Matt Alber
If you’ve been paying attention to the gay culture blogs, odds are you might have already heard of him. He’s a talent that’s just starting to attract wider attention, and it’s well-deserved, but he’s still flying under the radar of the wider populace. It’s exciting, because you hear his music now, and you can so easily picture the huge name he’s going to become once more people hear him and respond the way you do. His voice is achingly beautiful and tender, and as a song-writer he just takes my breath away. His metaphors are so carefully crafted, and what I take away from his love songs in particular is both a sense of longing, an acknowledgement that relationships face challenges, but an optimism that those challenges prove worthwhile in the end. For me personally, it’s also nice that know that he’s openly gay and his music reflects that. While there is an element of universality to his love songs, many of them also reflect a particular mood that feels specifically gay, if nothing else, particularly on Field Trip Buddy and the elegy Beotia.
Here’s a sample of his music, which I strongly urge you to go buy. Seriously. You won’t regret it.
Matt Alber, Monarch

Years Of Refusal, Morrissey
At this point in my life, buying a new Morrissey album is pretty much a nervous reflex. It comes out, I see it, I buy it. I listen to it a few times, a couple of songs end up not sounding like every other song he’s done since the Smiths broke-up, they make it onto my mp3 player or drive-time mix-discs, and I go on my way until the next Morrissey album drops. Except, every three or four albums, he seems to get some of his old mojo back and something really special comes along. This one…well, it’s not quite there, to be honest. But it’s the closest ol’ Moz has gotten to a “no filler” album in quite some time. In fact, if you cut out the the self-pitying to the point of self-parody Imm throwing my arms around Paris and the equally cliche and obligatory “dead girl-friend” song When last I spoke to Carol, you get a really tight, good album.

Lady Antebellum
It’s fairly rare for me to find a contemporary country-album I actually really like. Most of what I hear is utterly drab to my ears, when it’s not reactionary garbage. And, sadly, I’m not quite gay enough to get into the Dixie Chicks. So I was fairly surprised to stumble across this album last year and then found myself liking it a lot. It’s very commercial country on the surface, but something about it gives it an appeal beyond disposable pop. Which the best pop tends to do anyway, but it still feels fairly rare for the country music scene to produce something like that, as most of the acts coming out of Nashville these days feel more studio and marketing contrived than the latest single from an American Idol also-ran, or worse, AI winner. It elude me a little, what exactly I find so appealing about this album, but I look at it this way; it’s nearly a year old, and it’s still getting played, a lot, by me.

3 Balloons, Stephen Lynch
The trick with singing comedy is that you’ve got to be both funny and able to sing. And thick-skinned enough to be looked down on by “real” comedians and “real” musicians. Lynch can sing and he’s funny, and he’s been at this long enough now that he’s clearly been able to hold up against the slings and arrows crowd. But…on the whole, this isn’t quite up to par with his last two albums. Certain songs are funny. But more of them feel…strained. As if we’re expected to just accept that there’s a joke in there somewhere. The one stand-out exception is America, which is a full-on, Phil Ochs style patriotic folk-song of such fury and anger, expressed via irony and sarcasm, with a quiet reminder of what the real America is all about, that it’s almost startling. I honestly didn’t think Lynch had that sort of thing in him, and it’s astoundingly good and promising, if that’s a direction he decides to go in with his music.

Oh, what the heck, have a Matt Alber video:

Update: Here is the original entry on these actually pretty cool costumes.

Cowboys and their horses…funny, how what seemed so innocent in the fifties sounds like a set-up for a “this is a fetish for somebody” joke today.

I feel reasonably safe in speaking for all gay men that the last thing in the world we wanted was rainbow-striped and pink Target mascots as collectible toys.

I’m about fifty years too young to get excited about Doc Savage merchandise, but the rarity of such unapologetic beefcake in nerd merchandise is note-worthy.

I love JH Williams. I love Kate Kane.
I don’t need to know that she forgot to wear a sports bra under her costume.
That’s a bit more “nipple outline” than I need on my covers.

Yes. More of this sort of thing, please.

For that matter, more super-heroes should be sporting the 70s gay-porn ‘stache as well.
Seriously, can you picture Bruce Wayne rocking that look? It would be like Burt Reynolds in a tux. Fantastic.

Dark Reign: Lethal Legion

When Norman Osborn takes over, what happens to the villains who don’t make his short list of acceptable allies? Grim Reaper, Mr. Hyde, Absorbing Man, Nekra, and Man-Ape are about to find out when their cooperative of crime lands on the wrong side of Norman’s law – but they’re not going down without a fight.

That set-up sounds extremely familiar, but I can’t quite put my finger on why…

If nothing else, one good thing came of the X-Men movies. By casting Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, it gave artists an excuse to finally give us some sexy drawings of Wolverine, and this Salvador Larroca variant cover for Wolverine: Weapon X is a fantastic example of that trend.

Hercules: Prince Of Power is the series where Herc makes doe-eyes at Galactus. That’s probably not quite enough of a justification for you to go and buy a $30 hard-cover (with a variant cover…damn you, Marvel), but these Bob Layton comics are amongst the best examples of good 80s Marvel comics, so if you’ve got the the $30, or you’re a fan of the current Incredible Hercules series, you might be interested in these.

Read the rest of this entry »

Renaissance man and gay porn icon Jack Wrangler died today of complications from lung disease. He was truly amongst the greats, bringing a sense of humor, masculinity and versatility to his erotic roles, in addition to his talents as an actor and director. Those wishing to learn more about his fascinating history should seek out the documentary Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon

Another shot of Jack, in all his glory, is below the cut.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the evolution of gay jokes in sex comedies, teen comedies, and related genres of late. It’s come to mind because I’m frequently finding myself perplexed by which films get a pass from gay critics, and which ones get criticized.

Take, for example, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. It’s not quite as good as the original film, and that’s being kind to a fault, but it was certainly a…continuation of the kinds of humor and situation that the first film dealt with. Fairly early on in the film, there is a sequence in which Harold and Kumar narrowly escaped being raped by the prison guards at Guantanamo Bay. And, as you would expect, the point of the scene is to fear the 18-25 male target demographic with revulsion at the thought of a straight man being forced to perform oral sex on another man. Now, personally, I think that it’s a sign of deep sickness in our society that we make jokes about rape being “okay” because it’s happening in prison. But the way the scene is played in the film is slightly more nuanced than the usual “guys get raped in prison” gag. The guards, of course, are laughably homophobic. Yet they’re the ones seeking sex with other men.

This is offensive humor, but to complain about this particular joke, and gloss over the numerous jokes about race, religion and Appalachia is to miss the larger point, which is that the film is one of those all too rare “equal opportunity” offenders when it comes to offensive humor. In fact, if one takes the approach that the prison rape jokes are really centered around the irony of the abusive, homophobic guards secretly craving sex with men, rather than the usual “its funny because they’re faggots” than it becomes notable that gay people are not singled out for ridicule. And yet, this is the film that I saw bloggers, apparently in all seriousness, implying that Neil Patrick Harris owed the world some justification for appearing in.

Along similar lines is the film Sex Drive. It’s actually a fairly superior example of the “teen sex comedy” genre, with a bit of a bildungsroman lurking beneath the surface (and it doesn’t hurt in the slightest that in, oh, say five to ten years, lead actor Josh Zuckerman is probably going to be making all those “handsomest men alive” lists). The plot is typical: nerdy teen is on a quest to lose his virginity, chaos ensues, social order is restored when he realizes that love is more important than sex. What elevates the film is that, unlike most examples of the genre, its actually funny, with some good performances and the right air of plausible absurdity. But it has two gay jokes that stick out and seem to have aroused the ire of many gay critics. The first, is a man who attempts to solicit Ian, the character played by Zuckerman, in a men’s room. As much as I personally try to remind people, when the topic of men’s room sex comes up, that the kind of men who most frequently engage in it tend to think of themselves as straight, as far as the general public is concerned it’s still a “gay” thing. To the film’s credit, the scene in question is not played as Ian being preyed upon, but rather as Ian being naive and accidentally sending out the wrong signals, but overall, yeah, let’s call that a point against the film.

Interestingly, to me anyway, was that the character that really seemed to bother people was Ian’s older brother, Rex, played by James Marsden. Rex is a sadistic bully and virtually every line out of the character’s mouth is a homophobic taunt of his younger brother. Incessantly. To the point where other characters begin to comment on Rex’s seeming obsession with gay sex. And the pay-off, of course, for all of this is that Rex is revealed to be gay at the end of the film. His homophobic insults were a cover. What critics who objected to Rex seemed to miss is that at no point in the film is Rex a sympathetic character. Even after coming out he’s somewhat of a bully. To object to Rex is to object to homophobic characters as much as homophobic jokes. It’s dangerously close to arguing for no gay jokes whatsoever in popular films, even as a sign that the character making the joke is to be viewed with disdain.

The flip side of these types of characters and jokes has been the slightly older aimed films like I Love You, Man. While being, in general, a very good film, it was highly praised by many gay critics and bloggers, and the film itself seems to pride itself in its lack of offensive jokes simply for the sake of having offensive jokes. But it is also the recent film that I had the most problems with when it came to the portrayal of gay men and the use of gay-aimed humor. First, there is the Thomas Lennon character, Doug, who goes on an ill-fated “man date” with Paul Rudd’s Peter, who has managed to reach his mid-thirties with no male friends. When Doug is introduced, he’s played as a regular guy, not totally dissimilar to Peter. He even checks out their waitress at dinner. At the end of the dinner, however, he kisses Peter, and we find that Doug is gay. The kiss itself is drawn out to mine humor from the (supposed) uncomfortableness the audience will have with watching two men kiss. Later, Peter goes home to his fiance and tells her what happened. He then brushes his teeth, multiple times, and jokes about cleaning his mouth with detergent. The set-up for those jokes is that Doug is a smoker, but the notion of Peter going to such extremes because he kisses a man is not going to escape the audience. That ambiguity is compounded later in the film when Doug reappears, and he has gone from a regular guy to an over-emotional, prissy queen. It’s as if the film-makers, having now identified the character as gay, felt the need to resort to a tired, effeminate stereotype to prolong the joke.

More bothersome and problematic for me, however, was the role of Peter’s brother, Robbie, played by Andy Samberg. Robbie, the clearly preferred son by their father, is a macho, guy’s guy kind of fellow, who happens to be gay. The film takes great pains, in fact, to make sure that we understand that Robbie is a really cool, macho, masculine guy. It’s almost an over-reaction, a deliberate attempt to forestall criticism about the portrayal by making him the most stereotypically straight-acting character of either gender in the entire film. What makes me uncomfortable about the character is Robbie’s assertion that he’s only sexually attracted to straight men. The makers of the film are presenting a gay male character as a lech who pervs on straight men, and presenting it as a positive portrayal of a gay man. It’s one of the oldest and most tired of all anti-gay stereotypes, the gay man who sexually obsesses over straight men, and I’m frankly astonished that in 2009 it can appear in a film without attracting more conversation.

What makes all of these films and characters worth discussing to me is that, with the exception of Neil Patrick Harris in the Harold and Kumar films, none of these films feature openly gay actors, or to the best of my knowledge, are made by openly gay writers or directors. While I’m not suggesting that only gay men should be allowed to make gay jokes, it does tend to beg the question for me: are these straight men laughing with gay men at homophobia and gay caricatures, or are they simply exploiting their audience’s homophobia to dress up a “it’s funny because he’s a faggot” joke in slightly more politically correct clothes. A good example of this “are they or aren’t they” problem occurred recently on Saturday Night Live, again with Andy Samberg:

The satire in that skit works beautifully, because the films being parodied are, by any possible standard, homoerotic to the point of satire being nearly redundant. However, the skit does dance around the issue of whether or not we’re supposed to laugh because the films in question contain unacknowledged homoerotic undertones, or are we supposed to laugh because Samberg and Seth Rogen are two guys who look like they’re about to kiss. That area of ambiguity seems to be the zone in which most contemporary comedies are addressing gay issues.

As some of you may be aware, an incomplete rough-cut of the forthcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine film made it’s way onto the internet last week. I didn’t bother to try to find a copy for myself, because honestly, Ryan Reynolds’ arms are worth paying full price to see on the big screen. Plus, having seen incomplete cuts of films before, I know that they’re very hard to watch. I didn’t want an incomplete film with no special effects to prejudice me against what looks like the most romantic male/male love story to come from Hollywood in years.

Which didn’t stop me from reading plot summations from those who did potentially violate copyright laws by downloading it.

Hey, I’m only human. And besides, I wanted to know if I was right about how very, very gay the film looks.
Well…

Plus, I guess we see Hugh Jackman’s naked ass in this film. That’s almost an argument in favor of buying a Blu-Ray player right there.

Oh No It Isn’t!, 1997, Paul Cornell
After Virgin lost the license to Doctor Who, they continued the “New Adventures” line with Bernice Summerfield. This led to interesting conundrums for continuity purists, as the Benny Adventures could refer to events and characters from the New Adventures period, but not to characters or events related to the television program.
In this first novel, Benny faces off against the evil forces of pantomime.
Yes really.