Monday, November 20, 2017
2:10 AM |
A Review of 'Don't Tell Anyone'
Patrick Limcaco of Pat Sessions reviews Don’t Tell Anyone: Literary Smut, and has wonderful recommendations. Link here. Thank you for reading, Patrick!
Labels: books, erotica, philippine literature, queer, review, sex, writers
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Monday, October 09, 2017
3:00 PM |
A Review of 'Don't Tell Anyone' by Doni Oliveros
Local erotica at its best. Erotica aims to arouse your senses. To titillate. Fine. But this book is more than that. This is literary. The writings of Casocot and Sison are flawless. Crisp. Eloquent yet definitely shameless. The stories, the words, hit you in the groin as well as up there in your head. In her introduction of the book, Sison mentioned that this could be the book that you will hide to everyone while reading: “Bury under your bed and wrap its cover with plain paper.” This is unnecessary or even unforgivable. Books like this are no longer smut these days. Gone were the days when porn at home are your father's and it is somewhere in a locked cabinet. Now, porn is just a click away. Hiding this kind of book is making the works of Anais Nin and James Baldwin inaccessible to Filipinos. Based on what I read, in my opinion, Casocot and Sison are in their leagues. Juxtaposition of male and female in the third-sex worlds. For the uninformed or the naive, this book directly answers what gay men and lesbians do in bed to satisfy their carnal desires. No holds barred yet the emotion, could be love, is there. I am not sure if they are true but the writings of Casocot and Sison sound sincere if not sinfully honest. Which one did I like best? Sison writing lesbian F2F stories or Casocot's gay M2M actions? Sison's is more carnal while Casocot is more emotional. There is a world of difference in there but they are both ohhh so goood. Kudos to Anvil for taking the courage of publishing this homo-erotica. This could be a start of something new for us readers and lovers of Philippine literature.
From Doni Oliveros.
Labels: books, erotica, philippine literature, queer, review
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Thursday, June 16, 2016
2:37 PM |
Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, and All the Pictures to Look At [NSFW]
This is
Robert Mapplethorpe's
Man in Polyester Suit, a 1980 photo of Milton Moore, the artist's then lover, wearing a three-piece suit with his penis blatantly exposed. It made history for commanding $478,000 at an auction in Sotheby's New York. It is a controversial photographic work for some -- but it doesn't even come close to the rest of Mapplethorpe's body of work, a posthumous exhibition of which prompted Republicans in Congress to demand censorship and threatened to cut funding to the National Endowment for the Arts, which gave the show an exhibition grant. (The entire story of that firecracker that begat the current Culture Wars -- as well as a thorough depiction of the tumultuous life of the artist -- is laid out in the exacting documentary
Robert Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.
I like the title of that film, which comes from Senator Jesse Helms' famous rant in Congress, where he was exhorting his colleagues to scrutinise the photographs of Mapplethorpe and call them "pornography," and not art.
Indeed most of the erotically charged photography I love demand very much that everyone should look at the pictures intently, to feel the charge from the sight of mostly naked bodies -- and then see the fine artistry behind it. While there has always been the nude in art, photography has made it all the more immediate (and dangerously so) because of the "realism" that takes away the traditional distance or remove afforded by, say, painting.
The male nude, too, has not exactly been a favourite subject in the curation of many exhibits, for one reason or other. Writer and artist
Abigail Ekue once attempted to fill the gap when she put up an exhibit titled Bare Men, and reasoned that the exhibit was important "because we are [already] bombarded with the female nude": "The female nude is considered more acceptable and desired and it is usually thought that the public only wants to view female nudes. But there are people who want to see male nudes and not just for the gay male audience or for strictly anatomical purposes. Male nudes shouldn’t be rare – the stigma that naked men are 'ugly' or the myth that a penis is threatening or only sexual should be dispelled."
Suspicions of perversion may also be a culprit.
In reviewing Pierre Borhan's
Man to Man: A History of Gay Photography,
a gorgeously illustrated book that is the first of its kind dealing with the subject matter, John Ibson writes: "It is crucial to Borhan, sensibly so, to recall that the earlier photographs were produced when sexual activity between men was widely considered a crime and a sign of mental disorder, while the more recent images were made in a very different cultural climate. In Borhan’s telling, as social scorn and constraints lessened, photographers became increasingly forthright about their own sexual selves, producing correspondingly bolder and more imaginative portrayals of male sexuality."
My first encounter with a photograph that struck me as crackling with such homoerotic charge was in Tokyo in 1997 where I saw an exhibit of the works of
Sakiko Nomura and saw this...
It was beautiful and mysterious and sad and sensual: just a monochrome photo of a Japanese man lying naked in bed and holding a cigarette, while his other hand grasps the hand of a companion hidden and blurry in the shadows and background -- yet the blurry figure is distinctly male, and it adds to the homoerotic charge of the narrative.
Since then, I began collecting photographic male nudes/semi-nudes, and these are some of my favourites, by some of the world's finest photographers...
Boris Ignatovitch's The Showers (1935)
Andres Serrano's A History of Sex (1997) and Bruce Weber for Calvin Klein (1991)
Greg Gorman's As I See It (2000)
Herb Ritts's Justin Timberlake (2002)
Bardo Wu's Lessons in Body Language (2015)
Giovanni Paolo di Mola's Renaissance Men (2001)
Kiu Meireles' "Renan Rocha" from Bedroom (2013) and Joseph Bleu's Patrick Rukai (2010)
Joe Lally's Someone is Watching You in Your Undies (2009)
Benno Thoma's Absolute Sweden (2001)
Mark Morrisroe's Collected Works (1959-1989) and Marc Bessange's French Affair (2002)
Neil Lucente and Claudine Sia's Piolo Pascual (2002)
Ondrea Barbe's Couple (2009) and David Sprigle's Snap (1999)
Walter Pfeiffer's East of My Youth (2012)
Terry Richardson for Sisley (2001)
#PrideMonth2016
Labels: erotica, photography, queer, sex
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Thursday, June 02, 2016
2:37 PM |
The Boys From Rizal Street in Wattpad
I've decided to finally utilise my Wattpad account and post a short story from my forthcoming collection of erotic stories,
Don't Tell Anyone. The story's titled
"The Boys From Rizal Street" and it is very much specific in its use of geography: the main street that cuts across Tanjay, a town north of Dumaguete. The story revolves around a heartbroken guy who painfully recalls three former lovers -- Tobias, Samuel, and Joseph -- who have made it their business to shatter his heart. And then he realises one thing: all of them come from the same stretch of street in the town of Tanjay. It comes in five parts, and while it is slow-going at first, please be warned that the graphic parts are unapologetically pornographic. This story is part of a series of stories I meant to write in the full mode of literate smut.
Here's the
link.
#PrideMonth2016
Labels: erotica, fiction, philippine literature, queer, sex, wattpad
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