ABOVE: Remembering Silent Era hottie David Rollins.
BONUS HOT PIECE:
Hard at work! (Image via Facebook)
BELOW: Keep reading for a loss in the queer comedy community, Luca Guadagnino on a gay James Bond and more ...
A man of many moments (Images via Dennis Forbes & Falcon)
If you appreciate BoyCulture, I need you to do me a quick favor — please CLICK HERE and subscribe to my Substack. You can sign up for free or for a small fee (which is appreciated).
The beginning of my latest story to give you a free taste of it:
Dennis Forbes may have photographed more men more erotically than anyone else during the Golden Age of Gay Porn.
But who is he?
Fred sexy (Image via Dennis Forbes)
He's better known — but still not widely known enough — as Fred Bisonnes, whose vision of the male form became one of the most dominant in gay fantasy history, thanks not only to his running Western Man publishing in the '70s and '80s and his founding of Advocate Men in June 1984, but to his being involved
with so many other publications, businesses and creators, starting more than 50 years ago: After Dark, Vector, The Advocate, Jim French, Kristen Bjorn, Crawford Barton, Kenn Duncan, Chuck Holmes, John Preston, Modernismo's Mandate and Honcho, and many others.
He shot everyone from Christopher Isherwood to Peter Berlin, Casey Donovan to Bill Henson, Al Parker to Leo Ford — and in many cases produced the very images you think of first when you hear those names. He built on Colt's image, and he revamped Falcon's, putting his personal stamp on both.
The impossibly handsome Bill Henson(Image via Dennis Forbes)
The book in Henson's hands in the image above. (Image via Stonehill)
In short, the Fred Bisonnes aesthetic was a cock ring around the entire scene.
Because this Renaissance man — who had been in the Navy, attended Brigham Young University, at one point looked like a hippie and worked as a copywriter for Better Homes & Gardens— wore so many hats, he wound up having had an impact on gay culture far greater than he might have as merely another gifted photographer. He was a writer first, he became an illustrator, he created collages and he was a one-man packager as well as a freelancer.
Through it all, Forbes's eye for beauty, his taste level, and the decisions he made about what he would not do at a time when many others were happy to do whatever they were asked, to the detriment of making anything lasting, established his own unique style. You can tell his work a mile away — or from a distance of nine or so inches. His men are natural stunners with timeless expressions.
Even when the same models are drenched in '70s clone trappings or '80s California-twink couture in other, contemporaneous photographs, you'd be hard-pressed to find a camp Bisonnes spread.
His men look the way he saw them, and they are still as immortal as his legacy should be.
Most surprisingly, Forbes documented this casual beauty largely in a time when gay men, including many of his subjects, were dying. At the time a visual relief, the images today are also a testament to defiant self-love, sexual expression and even community amid suffering, oppression and death.
A lifelong artist, Dennis, who turned 84 this year, has not photographed a naked man in 35 years. He spent decades publishing Kmt, a magazine devoted to one of his passions, Egypt, a pursuit he only recently ended after 132 issues, and he has produced several books that chronicle his contributions: his 2006 novel Last Call (begun in 1980 for The Advocate), a book of his beefcake drawings called Blue (2011) and — most indispensable — volumes 1 and 2 of Bare Essentials (from 2021), his phonebook-sized memoirs.
For his first open-ended interview in forever, he spoke to me by phone from his home on a wooded mountainside outside Asheville, North Carolina.
The gay aspect started in 1972, when I moved to San Francisco from Iowa City, Iowa, where I was then director of publications for the University of Iowa. A few months before that long-planned move took place, as a subscriber of After Dark Magazine, I was fascinated by a San Francisco model who'd appeared in a small photo in the magazine's A&E pages named John Appleton, so wrote to editor in chief Bill Como about his interest in me finding Appleton and interviewing and photographing him for the magazine, when I moved to San Francisco in a few weeks. To my surprise Como wrote back, saying that there'd been more response to that small photo than anything else After Dark had published previously, so, yes, go for it! He even included a letter of introduction, so that "if Appleton has any questions about your legitimacy, he can see that I've given you authorization for the interview." So, I did "go for it."
I began asking around. He wasn’t in the phonebook. People knew him. He was benefiting from his fame from being in After Dark. He had shoulder-length hair and a big handlebar mustache and a fantastic body, all of which were visible in a non-frontal nude photo of him wearing turquoise jewelry by a San Francisco designer friend of his who advertised in After Dark. He was a bartender at the Midnight Sun off of Castro Street. I approached him at work. He was reluctant at first and said he’d been hassled too much and regretted he’d agreed to do the photography in the first place, blah-blah-blah. I said, “Well, here’s my card, and if you ever change your mind, give me a call.” That led to me ultimately doing the interview and the article being published in After Dark.
I’d also begun doing another article on the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. At that time, they were holding one in Los Angeles and one in Northern California over in Marin County annually. In those days, it was a big event where people got dressed up in medieval costumes and strolled around in this farmer’s wooded area with all sorts of vendors. I did photography and I wrote a story about that, which Bill Como published in After Dark. So that was the launching of my journalistic career.
ABOVE: Practically naked.
BELOW: Keep reading for Trump's meltdown, Olympic explanation and more ...
ABOVE: Happy 84th to James Brolin and his tightie-whities!
BELOW: Keep reading for an embarrassing arrest, porn portraiture, Biden's diagnosis and more ...
(Image by Eli Schmidt for Esquire.com)
For two years, I worked on a lengthy oral history of Mandate Magazine and the gay-porn empire it spawned, known as — among other things — Mavety Media.
I worked there as associate editor of Torso and with a hand in other titles (Honcho, Inches, Playguy, Mandate) in the '90s, leaving at the end of 2001 for greener pastures. It was a truly weird and wonderful experience, formative, and it included interacting with George Mavety, who ran the business ... and who founded it, in spite of being ostensibly straight.
Though he later made more cash from Juggs and Leg Show, not to mention real estate deals, the gay-porn mags were his faves, as they came first.
Now, a version of the oral history is up at Esquire.com. I would love it if you would read it and share it widely.
If anyone has their own connections to those magazines, I'm all ears — I'm hoping to continue with this, either at my Substack or in an eventual book.
(Image by Matthew Rettenmund)
Justin Heath Smith aka Austin Wolf, arguably one of the most identifiable gay-porn content-makers, has been arrested. He is charged with distributing and possessing child pornography, and faces many years behind bars.
ABOVE: Ed Fury was sex on legs, and damn near lived to 100.
BELOW: Keep reading for Christian Campbell nude, Japan's gay series and more ...
(Image via Greenwich)
Queen of the Deuce, a new doc about the life and loves (which include preserving family and making money hand over fist) of NYC's notorious porn magnate Chelly Wilson, is a fascinating portrait of an immigrant who wrestled the American Dream to the ground and proceeded to pimp it out.
Directed by Valerie Kontakos, Queen of the Deuce — which refers to 42nd Street, as it was known before America's shitty Mayor Rudy Giuliani Disneyfied Times Square — is a surprisingly touching look at an unlikely pornographer, a woman who escaped the Holocaust, married men but was eventually unapologetically a lesbian, and who made her money in a field that seemed to interest her strictly for the financial reward.
