Sunday, December 28, 2025
A Gay Man Watches Straight Smut #6*: ‘The Passions of Carol’
Friday, November 28, 2025
Reading Roundup: Sin in the Suburbs More Fun Than Small Town Secrets
As important as the setting can be to a story, I often encounter authors (and sometimes filmmakers) who treat it as inconsequential. This is especially true of books about the sexploits of the beautiful people, which usually do little more than mention the city where the characters reside/travel to (Los Angeles, New York, Paris) and a few chic locations (Rodeo Drive, Le Cirque, Maxim’s) before focusing on excessive cocaine use, backstabbing and fucking. Of course, there are other authors who go too far in the other direction and use up a lot of ink with florid descriptions of every vista observed, every street traveled, every room entered, every zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
But most authors
get it just right, careful to evoke their story’s setting without writing about
it to distraction. Not surprisingly, one of those authors is John D. MacDonald,
whose 1958 thriller SOFT TOUCH provides a snapshot of suburban depravity, where bored couples fill
their empty existences with liberal amounts of alcohol and casual flings. For Jerry, suburbia is a stifling prison, made unendurable by his wife Lorraine, described as “unhappy, shallow, lazy, short-tempered, cruel and
amoral.” Lorraine spends most of her time partying with the neighbors, only coming home
to sleep it off or pregame for the next night. Jerry wants to divorce her and hook
up with Liz, the attractive secretary at E.J. Malton Construction Company where
he works. Except, the construction company is owned by his father-in-law. If
only he had the capital to start his own company, he could make a
clean break and start over with Liz.
Enter his old war
buddy, Vince Biskay, who now works as a pilot doing odd jobs for a South
American dictator. Vince has come to Jerry with a scheme to intercept a
suitcase filled with the dictator’s cash in Miami before it’s handed over to an arms dealer. Jerry
is resistant at first but is ultimately swayed when assured he’ll be little
more than a getaway driver.
Things don’t go as
planned, and they get worse as Jerry’s increasing greed and paranoia clouds his
thinking. The ever-reliable MacDonald ramps up the tension as Jerry tries to
stay one step ahead of real and imagined threats, convinced he’s pulling it off
despite his near-misses and total fuckups, which includes a fight with Lorraine that ends very badly and a tryst with one of the
neighborhood’s bored, horny housewives who steps naked out of the bedroom at
the worst possible moment.
Soft Touch is a lean, fast-paced
thriller that proves once again that MacDonald was a master of the genre. I’ll also recommend the 1961 movie adaptation, Man-Trap.
Though Ed Waters’ screenplay takes a lot of liberties with the book’s story, giving
it a much happier ending, the movie is largely worth watching for Stella
Stevens’ enjoyably nasty performance as Lorraine (re-named Nina in the movie for some
reason).
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| The model’s expression on this 1975 paperback edition of The World They Wanted is less “Come hither,” and more “What the hell do you want?” |
Sticking with
another tried-and-true author, I selected something from the Herbert Kastle
bibliography, THE WORLD THEY WANTED, in which suburban
malaise moves to center stage.
Though the cover of
the Mayflower Books edition I have makes the novel appear to be about
bed-hopping in the 1970s, the novel was originally published in 1962, when women
weren’t expected to have ambitions beyond becoming a housewife, when $17K a year was a decent
income, and when a three-bedroom split level could be purchased for $20,000. And
$20 grand is what it costs to buy such a home in Birch Hills, a development that’s
the brainchild of builder Matt Swain, who hopes there are New York City
residents willing to make the move to a more bucolic setting.
Plenty are. Among
the first to buy homes in Birch Hills are the Rands, who hope that their juvenile
delinquent son George will start flying right once he’s moved away from the bad
influences of the city. Joe Bialdi, who has been struggling with mental illness
much of his adult life, thinks owning a home in Birch Hills will give him
plenty of projects to occupy his troubled mind. Only the Lerners make the move
to the ’burbs for typical reasons—more space for the kids—though Miriam Lerner
wishes her husband Dave would consider some place closer to NYC, a place that
is known to have a Jewish community. Dave, who wants only to assimilate into WASP
circles, is drawn to Birch Hills precisely because it affords him an opportunity
to deny his Jewish identity.
Of course, the move
doesn’t mean their problems stay behind in the city. George Rand finds
different ways to rebel, mainly by boning the Bialdis’ overweight daughter, Josie,
who has decided the best way to attract boys’ attention is to put out (well,
she’s not wrong). Meanwhile, his parents’ marriage begins to fall apart. Steve
Rand becomes an alcoholic, and his wife Nancy reveals herself to be a
judgmental, antisemitic bitch who hates sex. Is it any wonder that Steve
cheats on her?
The move also
threatens the Lerners’ marriage. Dave, a commercial artist, is experiencing a
career slump and takes his frustrations out on his wife—violently at one point.
Miriam, who’s seen how Matt Swain looks at her, contemplates having an affair. Joe
Bialdi, on the other hand, seems to get what he wants out of the move, but mowing
the lawn and chopping wood can’t keep his inner demons at bay when he discovers
George is “taking advantage of” Josie.
It's tempting to
label The World They Wanted as a soap opera and, well, it basically is,
but it’s more John Updike than Grace Metalious. It has plenty of lurid parts, but
they are written to make a point rather than titillate—and much less explicit
than similar scenes in Kastle’s later books. Kastle certainly has the talent to pull
off a more ambitious novel, and he almost does it with The World They Wanted.
Unfortunately, it’s brought down with a wrap-around narrative concerning Matt Swain and his sales director Adeline Teel. I found myself
way more invested in Matt’s business challenges than whether he’d finally come
to his senses and marry Adeline (or whether “Addy” would finally come to hers and move on). Worse,
Kastle gives the book a corny ending that’s so Hollywood romance you can practically
hear the swelling orchestra as you read the final paragraphs.
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| Avon at least got its cover right for its 1982 paperback edition of Family Reunion. |
Ten years have
passed since Jenny Holland left behind her mother and the small town she grew
up in for New York City. Though she hasn’t once visited during her decade away,
she has kept in touch with letters to her mentally unstable mother, who never replies, and her
cousin Wendell, who writes frequently, never mind that Jenny rejected his
wedding proposal before lighting out for NYC. (As for that whole cousins thing: Our cousinship was far enough removed to make this union not only feasible but
appropriate.) Recently (roughly 1979 or ’80) Wendell has been writing to Jenny
about a planned family reunion at River House, her late grandmother’s estate
that has been vacant since her passing. Jenny, who has some unanswered
questions about her late father as well as hoping to make amends with her
mother, decides the reunion is as good a time to visit as any, and books a
flight.
Returning to her hometown raises more questions than answers. An antique straight razor frequently disappears, only to reappear in different parts of River House. The door to the house’s cupola has rusted hinges but a shiny new padlock that is sometimes locked, sometimes not. Jenny returns to her room to find her new clothes cut to ribbons. A heavy dresser in an upstairs children’s room is mysteriously overturned while all adults are on the ground floor. Jenny hears ghostly voices calling to her from across the nearby river. The face of an old hag appears in a kitchen window, disappearing just as suddenly. Are these events supernatural, or part of a sinister real-world plot? Also, what really happened to Jenny’s father?
These mysterious goings-on and past secrets might have yielded an intriguing Midwest gothic (assuming Jenny’s hometown is a fictional stand-in for Harrington’s hometown of Marietta, Ohio), if only Harrington hadn’t written the suspense out of her story at almost every turn. The characterization of Jenny, our narrator, is uneven to the point of being annoying. She is at once quirky and independent, passive and needy, depending on what the story needs her to be. There are a few passages that imply she’s possibly unwell, such as when, seemingly possessed, she contemplates slicing her wrist with that straight razor. One could argue that revelations later in the book would explain some of her behavior, such as her becoming more unsure of herself once in the presence of her family, but Harrington never quite makes that connection.
But Jenny isn’t the
only problem character. There is Wendell’s sister Fearn (probably pronounced
Fern, but that extraneous “a” had me wanting to pronounce it Fee-urn), who is mildly bitchy
at best, a total cunt at worst, and she’s usually at her worst. When she’s not berating Jenny like a high
school bully she’s yelling at her children whenever they move, being downright abusive to her daughter Millie. However, there are moments when she’s suddenly
nice to Jenny, which immediately struck me as suspicious. These moments come to
nothing, though, and Fearn resumes being her usual unpleasant self. Another thought was Fearn was being set up as cannon fodder
and I eagerly awaited the moment she was killed by whatever/whoever is terrorizing this family reunion, or at the very least, that someone would beat the
shit out of her. Instead, Fearn remains unharmed for the entire book, with
no one, not even Jenny, bothering to call her out on her shitty attitude.
Most of the other characters in Jenny’s family are
written as either judgmental biddies or close-minded yokels, suspicious of
Jenny and her big city ways. The few exceptions are Aunt Tillie, a
sharp-tongued retired schoolteacher, and another conveniently distant
cousin, David, a hot, motorcycle riding hippie who lives in Tucson with his young son Malachi. David becomes Jenny’s closest ally and eventual love interest, Harrington having a
thing about keeping romance within the family.
To Harrington’s credit, she does effectively capture the setting of River House and its nearby town, though her description of the unnamed town’s named neighborhood of Muley is cringeworthy: It wasn’t quite the town ghetto, but a few [B]lacks lived there. Oof! Too bad Harrington seemed more concerned with writing about Jenny’s hometown like a high school outcast with an axe to grind than crafting an entertaining gothic thriller. Had it been kept to 200 pages, Family Reunion could have been a tight tale of suspense. Instead, it’s a long-winded and tedious 304 pages, not really kicking into gear until its final 75. Like most family reunions, this one’s best avoided.
Thursday, October 30, 2025
What if ‘Hellraiser’ was Gay(er) and DTF?
Are men with giant bird heads scary? Moreover, are they hot?
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| Kinda? (Photo from BJ’s Gay Porno-Crazed Ramblings) |
Those are but two
of the questions you’ll ask yourself while watching the late Michael Zen’s 1976 gay porn horror film FALCONHEAD and its mid-1980s sequel, FALCONHEAD
II: THE MANEATERS. Both films are considered classics of the gay porn genre, even likened
to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, writer-director Zen telling dark erotic stories—often
abstractly—through dreamy imagery, effective, if unlicensed, music, lots
of smoke, and, of course, lots of cum-drenched sex scenes.
However, while both
movies are classics, they aren’t exactly scary.
![]() |
| Though both movies they have their moments. |
What the Falconhead movies lack in genuine scares is made up for with mood, which is decidedly unsettling, somewhat creepy, often disorienting and just a wee bit pretentious. The first Falconhead is the more cryptic of the two films, with a barely-there storyline that waits a good thirty minutes to present itself. More immediate is the movie’s theme, narcissism, making it perfect for the age of social media.
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| Vince Perilli’s good side. |
The titular Falconhead—a tall imposing man with, yes, a falcon head—descends a long outdoor staircase (UCLA’s Janss Steps in fact) to where a naked Vince Perilli waits, spread-eagle and ass-up. After Perilli licks the Falconhead’s leather boots, he is presented with a mirror. Suddenly, Perilli is licking and caressing his own reflection. A title card appears onscreen, reading: “He gazed into a mirror and was consumed by it.” Falconhead’s storytelling may be surreal, but its messaging isn’t subtle.
From there, we are dropped
into a scene featuring one of the mirror’s earlier victims, a bearded man with
a slim athletic build (“a slim athletic build” pretty much describes everyone
who has a sexual role in the film). This is Adrian Wade, who was a member of
the leather drag group the Cycle
Sluts. His furry body is oiled and glistens in a red light. When I listened to
the podcast Ask Any Buddy for background on the Falconhead films (and you can too), one of the hosts
brought up that the combo of the oil and red light made it appear as if Wade
was covered in blood. I guess, if you want to go there. I did not. Besides,
there was more than enough bloodletting for me in the sequel (don’t worry,
we’ll get to it soon enough).
Anyway, back to
Wade pleasuring himself. Much of the scene is in extreme closeup, making it
difficult to tell what part of his body Wade is rubbing.
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| Though some parts are less ambiguous than others. |
A second well-hung
man enters the frame; the scene is shot in such a way as to render him
practically anonymous. Smoke further helps obscure his identity (Zen loves his
smoke machines). There’s no mistaking what the guys are doing, however, as they
kiss, the camera so close to their mouths that the scene almost becomes an endoscopy,
and stroke each other, until Wade’s partner kneels to blow him. At the scene’s
juicy conclusion, they kiss. The mystery man disappears, and Wade is left
staring at his own bearded visage.
Next, we’re in the
woods, where a heavy-set hippie dude in a black caftan is doing some sort of Wiccan
shit. Suddenly his face fills the screen, and it’s one of the movie’s few jump
scares. This hippie warlock who does his eyeliner with a Sharpie is Buddha Jon
(a.k.a. John Parker, Brigid Berlin’s ex-husband), and
what’s got him turning to the camera so startingly is his tenant, Anthony Lee (whom
I think was Wade’s partner in the previous scene). Lee, tromping through the
woods looking like he’s returning from a night at the Outcast, is carrying the
mirror. In one of the movie’s two scenes with dialog, B.J. asks Anthony—his
character name is Cat, but I’ll stick with the performer’s name—about the rent
he’s owed, then asks about the mirror, accusing him of stealing it from “some
trick.”
Lee ignores B.J.
and retreats to his apartment. Staring at his own reflection, he fishes his
cock out of a conveniently located hole in his jeans, then thinks better of it
and stuffs it back in his pants, figuring it will be easier to just finish
unbuttoning his fly. His stroke session becomes more intense, Lee ripping up
his wifebeater and swallowing his own fist.
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| Gulp. |
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| Mark David’s hot pants. |
His hand isn’t all Lee swallows, as we soon see after he spews his copious load all over the mirror. It’s a moment that could easily be featured in this particular cumpilation [the whole goddamn post is NSFW, so you do the math regarding the links]. The scene segues into Lee’s post-nut fantasy (um, aren’t the fantasies before and during a stroke sesh?) A blond dude appears, his dick dangling out of a pair of crotchless leather shorts. Per Ask Any Buddy, it’s Mark David (a.k.a. Mike Daniels), one of the few members of this cast of one ’n’ dones to have a had a career in gay porn, albeit a short one. It’s at this point the movie moves beyond beating off and blowjobs to feature some rimming and fucking. The scene concludes with Lee, naked and asleep, his head resting on the mirror, while Buddha Jon looks through the window.
Next, fluffy-haired
blond Joe Deitrich, wearing aviator sunglasses and black muscle tee, steps into
an antiques store to browse. Deitrich is immediately drawn to the mirrors on
display. Deitrich inquires about a mirror behind the counter—the mirror—and
is told it’s $85. When he says he’ll take it, the manager (artist SabatoFiorello) hands it to him. “It’s yours,” he says with a knowing smile (I think it’s
given to him free of charge, but the movie doesn’t clarify).
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| Mise en schlong. |
Back at his ‘70s AF
apartment, complete with mirrored walls and shaggy orange bedspread, a naked
and glistening Deitrich snaps on a cock ring in preparation for some self-gratification
(all the guys in this movie take their masturbation very seriously). However,
Deitrich isn’t so serious that he can’t enjoy a joint with his wank. It’s at
this point that another pair of hands slide up around his torso. The hands
belong to a beefy stud wearing a leather hood, not credited but according to
Ask Any Buddy it’s Glenn Robinson, also in Wakefield Poole’s Take One. It’s
a pretty hot scene, with one of the more artfully shot rim jobs you’re likely
to see in gay porn (as opposed to, I don’t know, the MCU).
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| The Falconhead gets some head. |
Just when it looks
like Perilli is going to get fucked by the Falconhead, he finds himself atop
black sheets, in a black room. In the room are Deitrich, wearing nothing but a
metal-studded belt with matching cuffs, and Lee, with only a leather collar
around his neck. They pounce on Perilli like tigers thrown a slab of raw meat. Perilli
seems into it at first—I can certainly think of worse fates than getting my ass
eaten by Lee while Deitrich feeds me his cock—but then the sex becomes rough;
Lee and Deitrich become violent. Perilli’s pleasure means nothing. He’s there
to be used. Worse, there’s no escape. He, like them, is now trapped in the
mirror.
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| Doomed to be fucked by Joe Deitrich for an eternity. |
According to the
hosts of the Ask Any Buddy podcast, Elizabeth Purchell and Tyler Thomas, Falconhead
is considered the Hellraiser of gay porn, which I hadn’t heard before, but
I can see the connection. The puzzle box functions the same as the mirror,
after all, though being trapped in a mirror to have rough sex for eternity doesn’t
quite have the same stakes as being ripped apart by Cenobites—or forced to
watch Hellraiser: Relevations.
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| Falconhead and his pet. |
Making
the Most of a Backyard Pool,
a Smoke Machine and Saran Wrap
After directing a
couple of porn movies for the heterosexuals (Reflections; The Filthy
Rich), Zen returned to the Falconhead myth, releasing Falconhead II: The
Maneaters in 1984. Though just as dreamlike (and pretentious) as the
original, the sequel has something of a plot.
![]() |
| Manimal after dark. |
The end of the dream is cut in such a way that it appears the Falconhead’s load lands on Derek, but then as Derek rubs it onto his chest lather appears. He is in the shower. In V.O., he talks of being haunted by the dream, though he’s clearly very turned on by it. Let’s just say his privates are thoroughly lathered during this shower. Still, he’d rather get off to memories of a recent tryst in “the mountains” (but the same backyard pool setting as the Falconhead dream). I get it. It’s like when you click on a porno video that has acts/themes you’re not comfortable responding to (I can’t be into stepdad-stepson piss play, can I?) and jump to something more familiar. Derek just isn’t cool with being aroused by falcon/muscle bear hybrids.
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| Paul Baressi has a proposition for Rick Taylor. |
As Derek is rinsing off his splooge a man decked out in full leather gear (also Baressi) enters his home, careful to take the phone off the hook as he approaches the bathroom. This sequence is quite effective, actually, and one of the few moments in either of the Falconhead films that feels like a conventional horror movie. Derek, however, seems more annoyed than threatened (“Who the fuck are you?” he asks in a distinctly British accent). The leather man ignores his protests, informing Derek in a slow, gruff whisper, that he is perfect (i.e., a total narcissist) for the assignment, which is to find the Falconhead and “rescue” the leather man’s slave. All Derek has to do is enter the mirror and resist the temptations he finds there. Derek agrees, but only after the leather man promises to set him up “for the rest of [his] goddamned life.” As for the identity of the leather man’s “boy,” Derek is only told that he’ll know him when he sees him.
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| Sabato Fiorelli (right) wonders what the hell is that on Rick Taylor’s head. |
The leather man disappears and suddenly Derek is at a costume party, wearing some sort of horse headdress constructed of leather and chains. This is like Hellraiser, albeit one of its lesser sequels. It is here that he’s presented with various temptations, the first being two young men with “identical” cocks. “Now they can masturbate and be fucked at the same time by the same cock,” explains a narrator, who just might be Derek. These two men are Paul Monroe and, sporting a ’stache and tattoos, Brad Mason, and their scene together is quite intense. I was also surprised to see it features an instance of a performer spitting in another’s mouth (Monroe into Mason’s, specifically), which I thought was more of a 1990s thing—especially in the videos by TitanMedia.com—as sort of a safe sex workaround to guys taking loads in the mouth. To be clear, Falconhead II was made just ahead of gay porn incorporating safer sex precautions, so the spitting here is just to spice things up.
![]() |
| Rose-y Palmer |
Derek next
encounters a middle-aged drag queen in a wedding dress. The queen bride presents
a mirror that shows a master-slave scenario. Steve Collins, dressed much as he was
in Gayracula, sans cape, summons his servant, who appears wearing
a mask/headdress and little else, proffering a tray with an apéritif. Collins
removes the servant’s mask to reveal we’re getting a second and welcome appearance
by Brad Mason. Mason immediately drops to his knees. Here Zen uses a Vangelis track, the jaunty
electronica working especially well when Collins fucks Mason, almost in time to
the music.
![]() |
| “Nothing saves like Saran Wrap®.” |
![]() |
| Paul Monroe goes down on a motorcycle. |
We’re not done with Mason yet, or Paul Monroe, as they both return for the penultimate sex scene, which involves Monroe jerking off on a motorcycle while recalling a grungy encounter with Mason. I’m all for another helping of Mason and Monroe, but I’ve seldom seen the sex-with-a-motorcycle motif not look dumb. Fortunately, Zen focuses more on Monroe than the bike, but Monroe still incorporates the bike into his jack-off session. Then again, I drive a Kia Soul, so what do I know about being sexually aroused by vehicles.
Having successfully resisted the temptations along the way (never mind that only one drag queen offered), Derek is granted access into the Falconhead’s smoky garden lair, the same backyard with the tropical landscaping seen earlier. The Falconhead hands Derek a sword, which makes the leather man’s trussed-up slave appear, somehow. Naturally, Derek can’t resist the temptation of the leather man’s “boy.” The slave is played by Danny Combs, who’s got a sweet ass and big dick, so it’s understandable why Derek would want him for himself. This doesn’t sit well with the leather man, however: “You…mother…fucking…bastard. He’s mine. Mine!” The leather man vows revenge, teasing a third movie that never happened.
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| As is its custom, Bijou features photos from a completely different movie on its DVD cover for Falconhead. |
If you want to check out Falconhead II, be aware that the versions available on adult streaming sites are severely edited, removing the Saran Wrap scene and the final scene, though it looks like “the rose scene” is mostly left intact, at least it is on GayHotMovies.com. Fortunately, there are full 80-minute versions floating around, you just need to know where to look, like here. The first Falconhead appears to be uncut, and can viewed on PinkLabel.tv, GayHotMovies.com and BijouWorld.com. Just remember if you watch either film: “Ejaculation is the final denial of death.”
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| Whaaa? |
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