Any minute now, Naked Pictures Of Your Dad is going to celebrate another milestone:  5,000 posts!

I planned to announce a NPOYD party last week, but my stupid illness/laryngitis–plus planning three other events that will be taking place within a pretty short time-span–have delayed that a little bit…  Soon, though, I swear!

My porny Tumblr will be turning the big oh-two tomorrow, so to celebrate I’ve asked over twenty of my favorite people from the internet and the real world (and places in-between) to send me guest posts.

It kicked off about half an hour ago and runs through Friday.

There’s been a lot of talk in the last few years about the ethics of bareback porn, but multiple articles* I’ve come across in the past week have made me consider my own feelings about condom-free porn, and also about unprotected sex in general.

Now, I should prefact this by saying that I’m only speaking about gay porn.  I’ve read articles by lady writers whose opinions I value, arguing both for and against condom-only porn, and I honestly don’t feel qualified to give an opinion on that because I really don’t know anything about the technicalities of AIM testing or latex rubbing against vaginas for hours at a time.

But here is what I do know.

When I am having sex, particularly with someone I don’t really know well, I ALWAYS work under the assumption that they have diseases that I do not want to catch.  And I act accordingly.  Always with condoms, if it even gets to fucking, and no anal at all unless the guy seems clean and sane and sober and honest and smart enough to give a considered answer when I ask him how recently he’s been tested.  This method is not fool-proof, of course, because a lot of people are good liars.  But, really, this is the safest tactic for any sexually active man who has sex with other men.  It also, despite how it sounds, relieves a lot of anxiety and paranoia.

However, I also know that not everyone behaves this way, and that a whole lot of people who profess to be “clean” and “d/d free” are more than willing to bend their own rules on certain occasions.  Maybe that works for them.  I don’t expect the whole world to live by my rules.  If you and your partner are comfortably monogamous and want to ditch the latex, good for you.  (But when you or your partner come to me looking to add some spice to your life, be warned that you are not going to get anywhere near me unless your jimmy is firmly hatted.)

Paul Morris, the mogul behind bareback-only Treasure Island Media, claims that his films are more authentic than “mainstream” porn movies because real people don’t use rubbers when they fuck.  He cites companies like Titan for producing condom-only depictions of sex that are unlike anything people can relate to.  And while it’s true that none of my sexual experiences have EVER really looked like a Titan movie**, I think that’s missing the point.  (I also think that denying Treasure Island’s mainstream status is disingenuous, but that’s maybe an argument for another day.)

Arguing that porn without condoms is somehow more “authentic” is akin to arguing that horror movies would be better if the dead bodies were real.  Reality is not the point of porn, ever.  Media-savvy pornographer Michael Lucas founded his company with the premise that his features depict sober-looking performers who use condoms all the time.  Is that necessarily reality?  Maybe not for you, but there is a difference between the breed-and-seed orgy you parTied your way over to last weekend and a movie starring paid actors performing in a room with a film crew.  PORN IS ABOUT MONEY, and the primary responsibility of ANY company should be the health and safety of its employees (or contractors).  Whether it’s a coal mine or an elementary school or a slaughterhouse or a circus or a porn set, no one should be making money by willingly endangering their own health, or the health of others.

There is a difference–a really huge difference–between people thoughtfully deciding to forgo the rubbers and paid performers appearing in a movie called Bareback Soccer Sluts (to name one Dark Alley title currently on the GayVN bestsellers list.)  What, are soccer sluts not hot enough on their own?

What you do at home is your business, and what porn performers do at home is their business.  The problem is when the reckless act of barebacking is fetishized.  Honestly, when I watch porn, I tend not to notice whether there’s a condom at all (though I should note that my favorite commercial porn companies–Titan, Lucas, and the more web-based Men At Play) are all pro-condom.  But when words like “bareback,” “raw” and “breeding” are used as marketing points, this is serious.  It’s not accidental or spontaneous, it’s a money-making film studio telling you that they do not care about the safety of their workers.

I don’t want to get into an art-imitating-life v. life-imitating-art argument, and I don’t necessarily think that anyone will or won’t use condoms based on whatever porn they streamed online last night, but turning unsafe sex into a commodity–a financially lucrative one, despite Treasure Island’s rather unbelievable self-postitioning as an outsider company–is dangerous to performers and also to viewers.  Because if barebacking earns a company money–which it does, unquestionably–that company will pressure more performers to work without condoms, pay more money to men willing to risk their health, (arguably) convince viewers that unsafe sex with strangers is lots of fun, and reap a whole lot of profits along the way.

“Reality” is not the issue.  Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

[*Sorry for the vagueness.  There's a much longer Chris Ashford article here, and I also stumbled across an old Paul Morris thing from 1998 or so, the link to which I lost when Firefox crashed on me the other day.  I'll update if I find it again.]

[**A boy can dream, though.]

I apparently have 84 tabs open in Firefox right now, and less than 1 gig of space left on my hard drive. Here’s some links, so I can maybe clear some of this up:

Oregon State University uninvited feminist pornographer/university lecturer Tristan Taormino from speaking at their Modern Sex event. Taormino cried censorship, but the university says the blame lies on student organizers who requested the wrong type of funds. I have mixed feelings about this, I guess, but this Examiner article (!) seems pretty thoroughly researched.

Peggy Scott-Adams “Bill,” a mid-nineties bluesy R&B song about a lady whose man is busy doing it with his baby’s god-uncle, re-entered my memory the other day.  It terrified me as a teenager, though now it’s kind of hilarious.

Bobby Farrell, the male face of cheeseball music group Boney M, passed away on December 30th, though I didn’t see anything about it until the other day.  The group, best known in the US for their Christmas staple “Mary’s Boychild,” had four members officially, though only Liz Mitchell actually sang on their most popular recordings; male parts were done not by Farrell, but by producer Frank Farian.  Farrell did, however, move on to a later solo career.  Here is his first single, 1981′s Grace Jones-ish “Polizei.”

“It had cost her lots of hundreds of dollars, as did everything she owned.”

My boyfriend bought a Volvo this week, and so in celebration we have been listening to a lot of ABBA.  Molly Lambert has also been listening to a lot of ABBA, it seems.

This NBC-Comcast merger is some crazy ish, huh?!

I’ve been kind of geeking out over the Open Air Library in Magdeberg, Germany.  It’s up for a Brit Insurance Design Of The Year Award.

Finally, speaking of libraries, some British folks were upset about the potential closing of a local library and they responded by checking out every single book.

[image: Italian model Sasha Marini by Monica Antonelli for denim label Q-ZEE; it's from last summer, though I've been, uh, looking at a lot of photos of Marini lately.]

While I sit here and wait for a call from a pair of models who may be flaking on me, I thought I’d drop you some news updates.

A little over one year after prostitution was criminalized in Rhode Island, the police have brought their first trafficking charges against two 23-year old men from New York who, according to be police, first came to Rhode Island because of the prostitution law.  Surprisingly, the Providence Journal article spends three paragraphs describing how the trafficked woman was not carried away in handcuffs, and how she was immediately taken to meet with an advocate from Day One, a local rape crisis center.

The UN, however, does not have nice things to say about American sex work laws.

The king of Sweden used to visit Mafia-run sex clubs when he was younger, according to a new book.

The Smithsonian is looking at gay portraiture for the first time since, like, ever.

Consumers went nuts this week calling for an Amazon boycott, after it came out that they were selling a pro-pedophilia book.  Hundreds of people responded by angrily giving the book a one-star rating.

Nominations are out for this year’s Cybersocket Awards; again, I realize I know nothing at all about the current state of porn.

It’s Movember.

Finally, you’ve probably heard this already, but it’s worth repeating: Pulp are getting back together!

[image: Croatian designer Matija Drozdek; via Escape Into Life]

Because it was asked, and because I can’t sleep, and because I am currently full of beer and chatty (yet alone), I will tell you the story of the first time I ever went to a strip club.  At least, the first time I went to a strip club where ladies dance.  (Previously I had attended an all-male event called Lube Wrestling, about which the less said the better, probably.)

It was 2007 and I was in Las Vegas tagging along with my boyfriend to the AVN show.  I was really into straight porn at the time and even started a blog about it (which lasted two weeks, but hush.)  We went to a strip club party after maybe the third day of weird Las Vegas-ness (ie, watching giant-boobed women wearing pasties, because that is the law, while enormous jumbotrons projected scenes of the same ladies in really intense hardcore scenes, because that was okay.)

But you know who is not excited by strippers?  People who spend all day wheeling and dealing with (or at least gawking at and ogling) the ladies of the porn industry.  The club was really crowded but you could tell it was kind of the slowest night ever for the staff.

One dancer came up and asked me, or maybe my boyfriend, if I’d/he’d like a dance; we declined, and she left in a huffy way.  Meanwhile, someone on the stage was dancing to, I don’t know, “It’s My Life” by Bon Jovi, which was really disappointing to me because all the strippers during the day were dancing to songs like Portishead’s “Glory Box.”  Which is just as cheesy, don’t get me wrong, but which is a far better song outside of the pole-dancing context.

Anyway, a few minutes later another dancer came up and asked if either of us wanted a dance.  We declined again, because Las Vegas is fucking expensive and also because, you know, the gay thing.

“Hmmm, I don’t know if you belong here,” she said.

I was nervous, like I’d breached some unspoken hetero strip club rule on my first visit.  “No?”

“No,” she said.  “Actually, I know exactly where you should go.”

I was more nervous, like she was going to tell me to go to hell, and like I might cry once she said it.  She continued.

“It’s a bar called the Double Down, it’s in the gay part of town, the Fruit Loop.  I think you’d really like it there.”

We thanked her, and she moved on, because the first stripper we turned down was giving her the evil eye from across the room.  And shortly after our party moved on, leaving the club for a Chi Chi LaRue party which, as it turned out, was in the Fruit Loop, just across the street from the strip mall that housed the Double Down.

That stripper, it turned out, was completely right.  The Double Down was far and away my favorite part of Vegas.  They had bacon martinis.  They sold puke insurance (for $20 up front they wouldn’t make you clean up your own vomit!)  Their drinks were not a million dollars and there was at least 50% less fakeness than in the rest of the city.  Plus they had a real jukebox, stocked with CDs by bands I knew (even the Midnight Creeps, who I thought were just a Providence thing!)

Anyway, the whole point of this story was to explain how my first-ever strip club experience involved Pulp’s “This Is Hardcore.”  But now I realize that that story is my second-ever strip club experience.  So stay tuned for that one…

I’m off to a gay pool party–have I told you this yet?–so I’m keeping this short.

Erykah Badu’s released a new video (sort of) for “Get Munney,” one of my favorite songs off New Amerykah Part 2, which is probably my album of the year so far.  It starts off with two full minutes of “Window Seat” and mainly reminds me that a) I automatically love every single thing this woman does, but also b) Rick Ross’s beard is seriously dreamy.

Last week was shark week and fittingly beaches were closed, but also it was, as a friend of mine put it, noir week.  Drowning teenagers, murdered dogs, dead bodies in houses full of trash and the Tokyo’s oldest woman missing.  (And that was just one day!)

Also it was missing bike prevention week.  This happened in New York, but also something really odd happened during a Headmaster meeting the other day.  One of the other Headmasters locked his bike to one of those metal poles that road signs come on, but an old one that didn’t have a road sign anymore.  He figured it’d be okay because those things are like eight feet high, but when he walked out of the building to get some lunch he found a man standing on top of a trash can, trying to lift the bike (and bike lock) over the pole.  When he questioned the guy, the guy was like “Oh, I thought that was my bike.”  BUT MEANWHILE, the sister of my former city councilman happened to be passing by and she called the cops and ID’ed the guy, and eventually the man was arrested.

Finally, dreamy porn star Conner Habib has a blog now.

Banana Republic’s herringbone pants are available in big and tall.

Lynsey G from McSweeney’s on the meaning of the money shot.  I like her column because she’s so completely ambivalent about everything.  But also right.

China will hopefully put an end to “shame parades,” in which suspected prostitutes are shackled together and then forced to walk around in public.

Reality condoms.  I don’t know anything about these from a health or pleasure standpoint, but maybe they’re a good thing?

Dragons having sex with cars.

The Reykjavik Grapevine interviews Bjork about Iceland’s economy, working with Antony, and how Paris Hilton basically saved serious pop music.  Definitely worth reading.

Racism, Shirley Sherrod and the Obama White House.  I’m not one to post political stuff, normally, but Sherrod’s forced resignation is one of the most fascinating (and also stupid) things I’ve heard of in a long, long time.

Is Italy too Italian? (And are those Italian clothes actually Italian at all?)

Finally, I spent a good chunk of this week reading some (extremely long) reviews of early-nineties RL Stine novels, written in 2010 by an adult.  This, because I was trying desperately to remember the name of the author who wrote the deranged killer story that I read when I was maybe ten, that took place in a Rhode Island ice cream place.  (It was Ellen Emerson White.)

This week Rhode Island’s hateful governor vetoed a bill that would expand the state’s list of hate crimes to include crimes based on gender identity.  Tony Perkins and his horrid Family Research Council approved.  (The governor of Rhode Island will be gone in January, thank the lord.)

The Village Voice writes about “straight bears.” I feel like this warrants a whole post of its own, and it’s not a bad article, but my main gripe is that the (totally skinny) writer calls professional rugby player Ben Cohen “portly” just one paragraph before he calls Kevin Smith “portly.”  Also, no article needs to have the word “portly” in it more than once, anyway.

Jezebel says that sex workers’ rights are rights for all women.  Which, duh.  But it’s true.

The 100 best websites for women.  Umm, 100 is a lot.  Also Feministe is not the best anything for anybody.

Miss this Times article from last Sunday about Lady Gaga’s Telephone video.

Texas Republicans hate sex and want to ban strip clubs and porn and gay sex and whatever.

A 65-meter long dick draws some attention.

Kok is the name of a nerdy new homo blog that posts vintage-y porn illustrations and photos of Captain Kirk in bondage gear (see above).  I like it!

Natty Soltesz is making a porn book and using Kickstarter to fund it; he’s already made the money he needs, but the prizes are pretty good: snail-mailed porn stories for $15!

Annie linked to this fabulousness on her Twitter the other day.  It’s really something!

The guy from Shears and Snares has a new blog, which I mention because it’s named after one of my favorite songs.

[image: Black Madonna of Czestochowa, via HommeStar]