Stretching out

I've never heard of Kosmix (which is described as "Beta-ish" in its logo at the moment), but they've heard of me, and presumably you, too. That is to say, they've got a page devoted to Spandex Fetishism. Kind of handy, I guess, since it includes Wikipedia entries, Google searches, videos, and lots of other web resources of interest to underwear perverts the world over. Check it out!

Here's a sample: a portion of an amateur video that is so completely abstract you may even have trouble figuring out the gender of the star. Now that's what I call a fetish!



(Consider the above my gift to the various het and bi males and lesbians I've befriended via this blog and our mutual fondness for stretchy synthetic fibers, no matter who happens to be wearing them.)

As a bonus, the video above led me to two more you might enjoy, starting with this homemade montage of ... well, it's pretty clear right away:



And here's an appealing little tease from an Eye of the Cyclone DVD:



I'm happy to see that "eyeofthecyclone" has a YouTube channel, since the main website is now subscription-based. I'm all for helping a fellow pervert earn an honest buck in these tough times, but it seems like the lion's share of Cyclone stuff is wrestling-related, and while there's nothing wrong with that in my book, it doesn't exactly float my boat, either (if you'll permit me to mix metaphors).

A new year, a new leaf

When my British counterpart/colleague noticed I'd been posting more updates here lately, he asked if I was making up for lost time. Could be--though I've also promised myself that in 2009 I'm going to devote a little time each day to at least one of the many blogs and sites I'm involved with (as Batfan and in my Bruce Wayne existence). Go ahead, call it a resolution if you must. Lord knows I'm way behind with this one and especially this one.

To that end, I made quite a few tweaks to the sidebar on the right tonight. In addition to plenty more links and even a few new categories of them, you can now find the latest updates from the blogs I check most often for H&V-related info, subscribe to this one, and even become a "follower" of H&V. (Yikes.)

While I'm at it, here's more of my ongoing attempt to finally share some items I've been steadily bookmarking for years. (Just call me the Axl Rose of batbloggery.) No overriding theme this time, just odds and ends:

•If, like me, you sometimes take pleasure in obscure comic book heroes and villains from long-forgotten publishers, check out this regularly updated collection of them, which also includes new characters evoking the moldy oldies. The entire Flashback Universe blog from which that list comes is fun, and I've added it to the links sidebar.

•Here's a funny Conan O'Brien/Jim Gaffigan superhero cartoon. (True confession: I wouldn't kick either of these two out of my bed, whether in costume or out. Not sure I'd want them shooting deathrays out of their nipples, though.)

•Despite the horrendous reviews the new Spirit movie has been getting, I will naturally be seeing it. And I will always have a not-so-soft spot in my, er, heart for Sam Jones in the equally ill-fated 1987 tv movie, paid tribute to here. I mean, would you feast your eyes on this man, for the love of God?



•Nice collection of boot-fetish videos on YouTube, which will also point you to plenty of related works. Here's an enjoyable example of Stand & Model attitude:



Minimal, yes, but face it: Had Warhol shot this, it would be playing in museums the world over.

*A reader sent me a link to his 26-chapter BDSM-themed serial, which took him more than two years to complete. I've only dipped in to random chapters thus far, which means I have plenty more to ... chew on.

•Speaking of fiction, here's a reservoir of comics-related fanfic I found somewhere long ago, including some Bat ones. The broader-based home page of the site is now in my links list, too. Oh, and here's a weird, potentially hilarious assignment for your own ill-conceived fanfic.

•Courtesy of another online buddy, here's a Universal Studios Spider-Man getting dressed and doing his duty for the girls and boys, and a few of us oldsters, too. Bonus points for UnderArmour usage beneath the spideysuit:



•I forget exactly why I bookmarked this in the first place--I think it was for a post I was going to write (two years ago) about (male) rape fantasies--but now that I look more closely, I see these are all (?) women victims, so I feel kind of creepy sharing it with you sans political comment. Anyway, here's a semi-famous list, updated here and here.

This looks like a good place to stop for now, but trust me, I've got plenty more where these came from, and this appears to be one of those periods when I'm feeling the impluse to blog again, so stay tuned.

Close but no cigar (and cigars are NMF, too, for that matter)

Two items that beautifully illustrate/complicate what I mean by the "Not My Fetish" category among the list of blogpost tags/labels to the right over there:



1. WETSUITS = MY FETISH
PENGUINS IN WETSUITS = NOT MY FETISH
Thanks to an item in tonight's news, I learned about Pierre the Penguin who has lost much of his feathers and has been outfitted with a neoprene replacement suit. This recent post notwithstanding, I am not particularly into the sight of animals in outfits that would look great if they were worn by balding adult human males, and yet I still visited this page of penguincams (no sightings of Burgess Meredith or Danny deVito, btw) and even watched this brief CNN clip of Pierre in his fetish gear.



2. GLOVES = MY FETISH
GLOVES IN THE GUTTER = NOT MY FETISH
I've had a link to this now-defunct blog from a now-defunct art project bookmarked as "bloggable" for half a year or more and it took Pierre up there to remind me of it. I can't remember where I heard about this thing, but I assume it too was NPR-related. (Hell, maybe I should ditch the whole Batman/Cop focus of this blog and just write down all my favorite NPR items; that would surely entice a larger readership, anyway.)

This should be clear, but to spell it out, I love leather gloves on men's hands--my own, or almost anyone else's--and spandexy/lyrcraish ones on superheroes' hands, and I have even been known to lust after empty pairs of them hanging on a store rack, but when they are lying in the street, not so much.

(Here is a still-lively site that elaborates on and even markets the same basic concept as above. Handsome design, but still not my fetish.)

You animal!

I was intrigued by the film Zoo from the moment I heard about it. Way back in the taboo-shattering mid-70s, my late mother contended that bestiality was going to be the last taboo. (That should tell you a lot about her.) I should point out right away that neither she nor I was "into" sex with animals, to use the parlance of the day, except as an intriguing topic of conversation on a long car trip. In the intervening years I have of course come out, first as a gay man, and then--to a far smaller public--as a man with several powerful fetishes, and I've often found it interesting to learn more about sexual attractions I don't share, both because they help to shed light on sexuality in general and because I feel a certain empathy for other people with minority tastes.

That said, Zoo isn't really the movie I was expecting at all. It's not a wide-ranging documentary about "zoophilia" in general so much as a true-crime examination of a specific case. Granted, it avoids the snickering tone of other chronicles of the saga of "Mr. Hands", but it doesn't really shed much light on the phenomenon of people who identify really closely with their pets and other animals. (Stylistically, it's a blatant ripoff of Errol Morris's aesthetic, and I could never quite get past that.) As far as parallels with other fetishes, the only one that really struck me was the huge role that the internet has played in bringing people together. Hard to imagine the circle that gathered around Mr. Hands forming without it--just as I can't really fathom meeting (virtually, at least) as many people into masks, gloves, and lycra-clad superheroes as I have without the aid of Yahoo groups, sites like GearFetish, and this very blog.

Beyond that one commonality, I'm on the outside looking in. (The Hub was there with me for about 30 minutes, but lost interest after that.)

... And here's what I don't love about comics

I got about a third of the way through this explanation of (relatively) recent developments in the DC uni/multiverse before throwing my hands up in despair. I was referred to the entry by the Anonymous Donor when I said I didn't get the whole "Superboy Prime" business I've heard a wee bit about.

Hey, look, I just want hot guys in tight outfits to be tied up, like they were in my youth. Is that too much to ask?

It's not easy being Green, part 2

Seems my man Green Lantern suffers a lot of head trauma.



Sometimes it's the bad guys:



Sometimes it's police brutality:



Sometimes it's just plain weird:



Now, at long last, the hilariously named Hal Jordan Head Injury Project compiles a whole bunch of this stuff. (First learned about it from this Scans Daily post.) I'm not particularly into the head-injury aspect per se, but I do enjoy a good image of Hal knocked cold or otherwise waylaid. There are over a hundred to choose from on the Flickr page, so let's wrap this up with one of my all-time faves, featuring a very wet and freshly unmasked Hal and his equally damp and undisguised pal Ollie:

Superman in the news

Dear lord, am I ever slacking on the blog front these days! I have no seasonal disorders to blame at the moment, just an overfull schedule that I will ... one day ... discuss here.

But I could delay blgging no longer when I was driving home a moment ago and heard a radio report on recent sightings of a flying, blue-suited Superman in Romania. (No surprise, the flying part interests me way less than the shiny blue tights, red boots, and red cape.)

That, in turn, reminded me that I never got around to sharing an item that my cyberpal Wwuf passed along ages ago, about a former Army drill sargeant who forced his male trainees to dress like the Man of Steel and perform sexual acts.

To-do list:
1. Join the Army
2. Get stationed in Romania.

Oh, and:
3. Update blog more often.

Atomic dawg

I have a passing, semi-academic interest in fetishes that I don't happen to share, perhaps because they shed light on the dynamic behind the stuff that does turn me on. Rubber dog masks (brought to my attention by a potential Robin-in-training) aren't entirely my cup of tea, fetishwise, but I admit there's something hot about these, especially when modelled by a tasty treat like this guy:



If you're interested, check out the "RubberDawg.com" site.

Woof, as they say.

Hiding My Candy

Saw the movie Hard Candy tonight. (That link is to the system-slowing official site; IMDB page is here.) Ended up going alone, because I knew none of my friends were interested in this story of a 14-year-old girl and the 30something man she meets online. This only heightened the intense creeeeeeepiness of the experience. It is by no means a feel-good film, and I felt increasingly numb through most of it, from the opening scene through the last of the half-dozen-or-so twists and turns. (Spoiler alert: I will try not to reveal anything you don't find out in the first 30 minutes of the movie or won't discover from any review, but if you want to see it, you might not want to read this entry till afterward. And by no means should you take a peek at the following officially released still, which has been fairly widely disseminated by now:)



A friend asked me why I wanted to see this thing, and I told her I'd heard good stuff about the film and the female lead, Ellen Page and that I am always interested in films about what I euphemistically referrred to as "shifting power dynamics." All true. But because I'm writing anonymously here, I can say what you probably already know, which is that I was titillated by the prospect of seeing that cute Patrick Wilson from the HBO version of Angels in America tied up and tortured, no matter who was doing the tying and torturing. The pedophilia theme held no interest for me, intellectually or erotically--although I did recently finish listening to the audiobook version of Lolita, which is something I've been meaning to write about here for ages and still might, but I digress.

The same fascination with film depictions of fairly extreme states has previously led me to watch the recent horror movie Hostel and the reeeaaaaaally bad Nicholas Cage/Joel Schumacher thriller 8mm (both accompanied by horror-fan friends); I'd like to see the two Saw movies someday, too, even though I have a feeling I won't like them very much. Many years ago I tried to watch the Spanish film In a Glass Cage (another tale of someone seeking revenge on a pedophile, this one a Nazi pedophile), but I walked out in revulsion after the first 45 minutes or so.

Part of me feels like "What's this world coming to / all these escalating images of torture and depravity / it's all basically a form of mainstreamed fetish porn [etc]," and another part of me confesses that I'm a member of the very audience i'm decrying. I don't particularly like rollercoasters, but I do (sometimes) enjoy the thrill of a good suspenseful movie that isn't afraid to go into very dark territory. I'm just a little concerned that our culture is so willing to keep amping up its definition of "very dark territory"--shades of the fall of the Roman Empire, you know.

As for Hard Candy, I must admit that Roger Ebert has a point; a lot of the concerns he raises in his (essentially positive) review passed through my mind as well.

But I want to suggest an alternate perspective that occured to me about an hour into the film, which is that it can be viewed as a superhero movie, about a Batman (or more accurately Punisher)-style vigilante dishing out homegrown justice against criminals whose evils would probably go underpunished by the justice system. It's all there: dual identities, copious research and training, arsenal of specialized weapons, you name it. The fact that the "hero" is such an unlikely individual, and the "villain" elicits such sympathy, only demonstates why it's so much more interesting than any actual superhero flick I can think of.

Cleaning out my closet

Today's one of those days to sort through stuff I've bookmarked to write about here and have forgotten for months, sometimes years:

This AlterNet story on gays and comics dates back to 2003, but if you haven't seen it, it's still worth checking out.

An insanely detailed guide to the '66 TV show and accompanying movie, listing clues, gizmos, Robin's "holy" expressions, trivia, and so much more for every single episode. (And people call me obsessive...)

The Land of Nod is a site devoted entirely to images of characters who have been chloroformed or gassed by members of the opposite sex. (Of course there are Batman shots! Need you ask?) Hasn't been updated since 1999, but if you go for this sort of thing, you won't leave disappointed.

Beauty in Darkness is a blog on the history of BDSM, in conjunction with a work-in-progress book on that subject. I found it, oddly enough, through a Google search long ago for "Batman + Midnighter" (the Batman-esque leatherman hero of The Authority), and that reference does indeed appear, but I think I will be exploring the rest of the site in more detail, so I'm adding it to the links list on the right.

More to come, but surely at least one of the above will float yer boat in the meantime.

Oh, and you'll be happy, if not shocked, to learn that I've actually updated my "Secret Room" website for the first time in over a year. It's mostly just adding the above, and I certainly have much more to add and subtact, but at least it's a start.

Stop the presses!

While looking for something completely different (ain't it always the way?) I stumbled across Google Talk, a random-phrase generator whose inner workings are a mystery to me, though you can read about them at the site. In a nutshell, you enter three or four words to start the thing, and the site takes it from there. Thus it was that I learned the following:

"Batman has a fetish for women s lingerie. and Underwear at terrific prices!"

Now we know.

The politics of ... ooo, feelin' good

Must admit I got a little nervous when I visited GlovdCopSF's beautiful website for the first time in a while, and discovered this prefatory text:

"Forget about advancements of technology, social progress... We have entered into a forced regression to uber-Christianity rule, rivaled only by the Dark Ages. Galileo - hide yourself, and your ideas. This is the new Amercian Theocracy."
--Anonymous

Was it a warning, or a boast, this talk of a New Theocracy? I assumed/hoped for the former, but I've always been a little wary of the webMaster's politics--even if he is a permanent resident of my Top Ten Top Men list--based in part on his "disclaimer for PC shitheads" accompanying his description of the rather rigid qualities he looks for in a sex partner. (I mean, I've been known to find both Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly disturbingly hot under the proper lights, but in reality I don't particularly want to share a room with either of them.) Granted, GlovdCopSF has always been quite clear that his site is entirely about sex and NOT about his own personal politics or any other aspect of his life, but even so, I tend to be put off by other people's brushes with authoritarianism (just as I am by my own attraction to jackbooted thugs).

Fortunately, any misgivings I might have had about the true meaning of the "New Theocracy" quote were immediately cleared up when I visited the site's November 2004 "Fetish of the Month" photo gallery. I make a point of checking this one out every 30 days or so, because 9 times out of 10 GlovdCop's taste resembles mine. (Damn, not only is he a hot number, but he's got a good eye for beauty in others, too!) This time around, the images themselves don't excite me as much as the explanatory text, which begins

So what does the Bush Administration have in common with this month's gallery? A bunch of assholes...

From there you get a staggeringly vast collection of pictures of "leather breeches with a zipper down the ass." Highly specific, and not exactly my cuppa drool, but I applaud the man for providing "105 assholes for you, but the kind you actually like" in response to our countrymen's recent regrettable reappointment of one of the biggest buttholes around to the highest office in the land.

GlovdCop may claim his site is politics-free, and the blog you're currently reading tends to focus on sex over the other issues that matter most in my life, but sometimes the cold light of reality falls on even the deepest, darkest places.

Come out, come out, wherever you are, Galileo. Don't let the theocrats and assholes get you down. We need you, dude--and that goes double for you, GlovdCopSF.

I'm not normally a big fan of Andrew Sullivan's political views (but boy, is he a cutie--anybody see a pattern developing here? Maybe it's not just cops I lust after but conservatives in general. Yikes!). So imagine my surprise when I visited his blog and found an essay of his from Salon on bear culture that I found myself mostly agreeing with. I really like what he has to say about bearness in relation to masculinity, to more "mainsteam" gay culture, and to class, for starters. (I could do without the quote from the insufferable Camille Paglia, but nobody's perfect.)

My generally hairless chest and scrawny frame mean I'm not a bear myself, and while there's much overlap between bears and my particular taste in men, I'm not strictly speaking a bear-lover. (For the record, I tend to go for men who are at least 30 and have very little hair on their heads, which often means they have a good deal on their chests and sometimes their faces. A little heft can generally be a plus, but it's not a prerequisite by any means. I'm basically talking Andrew himself, in other words--but you can slap a uniform or some spandex on just about anybody, including a few women, and get my attention--which does indeed make me a true fetishist, according to the Wikipedia. But I digress.)

What I truly cherish about the whole bear phenomenon is the way it opens up new dimensions of sexual attractiveness within, or rather outside, the old-school gay male ideal--which was always far more restrictive and oppressive than the straight-guy definition of beauty, if you ask me. Watching a couple of twig-like twinks with smooth chests going at it in a porn tape does about as much for me as watching hetero porn. For years I felt like a total exile from Gayville because the men who turned me on were ignored or even laughed at by "real" gay guys. It was only when I started visiting leather bars that I grasped the appeal of going out, because most of the gay bars I'd been to up to then were full of the aforementioned pretty boys, and it was exciting to see men who weren't afraid of their masculinity or their age or the natural dimensions of their bodies. (Saddest moment on Queer Eye so far? The scene where the adorable crew member gets his back hair waxed away and his chest hair "manscaped." Refuse and resist the tyrannical cult of artificially prolonged youth, Fab Five!)

Admittedly, this whole bear business has already mutated into a body fascism of its own, and I'm really not into the marketing of teddy bears and related knick-knacks, but that's a subject for another day. What matters to me here is the larger issue: if gay culture, and perhaps eventually the larger culture of which it is a subset, can make a space for bears, then it can make room for all kinds of things. And embracing genuine diversity can only be good for all of us.

Read another Tagame story today, this one called "Jujitsu Kyoshi" (aka "The Judo Master") via the Yahoo group "Woody's Tagame Scans." No cops this time, but still incredibly hot and hairy. The group moderator -- Woody -- posts the following comments about the story in group message #291, which I'm excerpting here (without his permission, but trying to give credit where credit is due). I'll give you his plot synopsis first so you'll have some idea of the territory if you don't know the artist's work, but the part I'm most interested (re race/ethnicity and sexuality) comes after that so I'll italicize it:

"The first part seems to involve our protagonist seeing something on a television that starts him reminiscing (erotically) about a past encounter, only to later run into one of the perpetrators of the sexual humiliation that resulted from that encounter, who then seems to set him up to be kidnapped into sexual slavery, where after his training is complete (at some later date - and I presume at the request of his master) he then writes back to the perpetrator of his kidnapping to tell him of what has happened and how he likes his new life as a sex slave, only now we find our perpetrator regrets his actions and remembers fondly the good times they'd shared back when he was his Judo Master. [...]

"In the second half of the story, note the use of a grey haired (presumably American) black man as the Trainer/Master that our protagonist (who also as per usual, is well muscled, hunky and very un-Japanese looking) is enslaved by - another marker pointing to the sorts of racial conflict sprinkled through much of Tagame's work. Also note this is another story where the protagonist is the big butch alpha male type that is eventually reduced to the docile sex toy for the amusement of others.

"As I've said before, none of these themes are accidental in Tagame's works--and the undercurrents of humiliation & degradation of what would typically (to those that know Japanese culture - I don't claim to be one of those people) be a figure of unshakeable authority are designed to show the sort of eroticism that is especially powerful in these eastern cultures."

Woody's comments provide so much food for thought for me that I don't know where to begin. I do know that the Tagame stories I've seen so far are light years away from most of the Japanese visual style I've come across elsewhere: wispy, androgynous faery-boys with feminine eyes and bangs and wings and crap like that, which holds zero appeal for me on any level, aesthetic, erotic, or otherwise. Tagame's men are big and burly and clearly Anglo-looking; they exude authority, and it really gets me hard to see them humbled and literally brought to their knees. (He's been called "The Tom of Finland of Japan" -- but shouldn't that be just "Tom of Japan"?) Until I read Woody's remarks, I hadn't connected the imagery and storylines with Japanese attitudes about power and control -- though I should also say that I think of those attitudes as mighty close to my own. In real life I am fairly meek, more prone to obeying the law than breaking it (except in cases of civil disobedience), intimidated by cops, etc -- but in my fantasies the tables are turned. Sometimes, that is.

I also can't help connecting Tagame's storylines with fascism, and my mind leaps from Japan to Germany, another culture with its own rather intense connection to power. (I'm sure there's some kind of subtext in the story about American soldiers occupying Japan after WWII, to say nothing of the black master overpowering and dominating the white ex-master -- it's one huge struggle for dominance!) I'm not proud of the way I get a little woozy at the image of jackboots and Nazi uniforms and the like -- particularly since I realize I'd have been a prime candidate for the pink triangle and probably the ovens -- but I have to acknowledge the attraction even as I abhor its real-life manifestations. Sure, sure, I know all about eroticizing the oppressor, although I must point out that in my own lifetime I haven't been particularly oppressed by government-sponsored goon squads. (Not yet, at least--though I gotta say it looks more and more like we're heading in that direction. But I digress yet again...)

Speaking of eroticizing oppressors: if you buy that line, then how come I don't find the Taliban the least bit sexy? They were/are every bit as homophobic and authoritarian as the Third Reich, but they leave me stone cold on the fantasy front. I blame the lousy fashion sense. (Saddam, on the other hand, has/had better taste in uniforms and a bulky hairy body that cries out to be hogtied and shoved into a toilet by a Tagame torturer...)

Okay,THIS is why this journal must remain anonymous--there's no way I could say any of this out loud under my own name!

Welcome to my lair! A brief introduction: I'm (among other things) an out gay man in my 40s, and I'm happy with both my work and my love life. When I say I'm "out," I mean (among other things) that after the usual long and painful struggle, I'm reasonably comfortable with my sexual identity and that my family and friends and a fair number of strangers know I'm attracted to other men.

What many of those folks, even the ones who are also gay, DON'T know is that the men I'm most attracted to tend to be either fictional characters (masked and spandex-clad superheroes) or their real-life equivalents (cops, who are the closest thing reality has to offer in terms of both occupation and outfits), and that my fantasies revolve around bondage, entrapment, humiliation, punishment, and the like. Comic book stores are for me what porn shops are for people with more mainstream tastes; I pore through the racks in seach of some previously unseen panel depicting Batman bound to a torture device, his costume shredded and his mask about to be removed by a nefarious lycra-clad bad guy.

For many years, from adolescence through my 30s, I was ashamed of this particular fetish (the superhero one, that is; everybody knows gay guys are hot for men in uniform, so the cop business is much easier to talk about). I went through at least three years of therapy, dredging up every other conceivable nook and cranny of my psyche with my only trusted confidant, before I felt comfortable enough to broach the subject.

And once I did bring it up, my life began to change: I sought out leather bars (particularly those with uniform nights), I checked out S/M videos (many of which still didn't float my boat), and above all I turned to the internet (where I soon discovered that every conceivable kink has long ago spawned two dozen websites and Yahoo groups). At the same time, I started creating and spending my nights in outfits of my own: a basic batsuit and variations, cop uniforms of various kinds, etc. I also found a life partner (a cop, by amazing coincidence) who doesn't share my fantasies with quite the same intensity but who is more than happy to explore them with me from time to time.

In short, I know now that I'm not alone in my minority tastes. But I've also seen that, amidst the scores of sites and groups devoted to exchanging JPEGs and erotic fiction about cops and caped crusaders, there aren't many places where like-minded fetishists can really talk about how their desire has affected other aspects of their lives. I'm interested in talking about this stuff semi-publicly now, partly because it makes me hot, and partly because I want to compare notes with other folks on their own life journeys. (You'll note that I'm using a pseudonym, which suggests that I don't particularly want to reveal EVERYTHING about myself here -- and besides, every superhero worth his salt has an alter ego, and one thing I've learned from my own explorations is that secrecy is a big part of the turn-on.)

I'll have more to say about what I have in mind here in a future entry. Once I learn my way around this "blog" business, I'll make sure it's possible for readers to post here themselves (or at least e-mail me)--but hey, if it's really just me talking to myself, that's okay, too. Cynics claim most online journals are masturbatory, and believe me, I've got nothing against solo sex -- in the proper disguise, of course.

See you here again soon--same bat-time, same bat-blog.

--batfan 60 (aka Bruce Wayne) (aka ****** ******* *****)