Dorian Gay, or, A Mid-Bummers Dyke's Cream

In other Dorian Gray related news, I fear mine and Caro's hopes that the new film version of Wilde's novel starring Colin Firth and Prince Caspian would be tremblingly homoerotic are to be quashed and thwarted. In a convenient example of triangular desire, it seems the introduction of the character of "Emily Wooton" will serve as both a validation of Lord Henry's frankly dubious heterosexual credentials, and a potential love interest for Gray, and thus provide a cathexis for Wooton and Gray's less Hollywood friendly mutual-facexploration.

AND YET, the choice of Ben Chaplin to play the pro-active aesthete Basil Hallward (and seen here with Billy Crudup in Stage Beauty) is surely some sort of subtle sign? They say a nod is a good as a twink, but I like my nineteenth-century gothic queers to be hot, hard and flaming. I'm writing to gay santa as we speak.

An American stimulus package

For all its faults, Broadway must be given praise for consistently aiming below the belt. Recently I've been putting in hours of research, posting searching questions on messageboards -- "What is the plot of Cute Boys in their Underpants Fight the Evil Trolls?" "Not 100% shure... U SUK DIKKK" -- and generally parking my nosey into the world of gay theatre. (To quote Margaret Cho, it smells like balls in pantyhose.) Firstly, there's James Edwin Parker's 2 Boys in a Bed on a Cold Winter's Night. It's a kind of Cute Boys in Their Underpants but without the underpants and the crippling shyness:

Other intruiging productions include Blowing Whistles and the slightly unappealing but nevertheless glorious Slap and Tickle. But I wonder: are we breaking glass ceilings, or just the fourth wall? With a penis? The New York Times wrote interestingly on this topic in 2005, so as fit crit goes it's practically vintage. Their entire article is but a shameless excuse to show things like the hilariously named Keith Nobbs dressed like this:

Although the Times piece makes some interesting comments about the introduction of the penis to the theatre coinciding with the emergence of gay men from the closet, it failed to question whether this is indeed a positive move. The idea that gay men are only valid if they are entertaining and pecc'd out to the nines -- and indeed judge one another by this standard -- is outdated and potentially harmful. Take Matthew Bourne, the influential choreographer, who has had a lot of success with productions like the incredible, all-male version of Swan Lake and the Play Without Words. However the line between an admiration of beauty and a less artistically credible exploitation is much less defined as it is with female ballet dancers, and I think this is a problem. Bourne's adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray for Sadler's Wells will shortly be returning to the stage:

And I think it'll be interesting to see how Dorian Gray handles this potentially problematic fetishizing of the body -- since this is of course something which the novel explores -- or whether it will itself becomes victim to the narcissism and objectification of art which Wilde critiques. The critic in me fears the latter. The bonertronic in me just doesn't care.

Comparisons are odorous

If you ever want to find an attractive poet -- and believe me I've tried -- you could do a lot worse than Ezra Pound. I am voting him my number one GILF, or gratuituous literary fittie (the 'I' is for eye-candy):

I've recently become interested in early photographic portraits, and the way that posing evolves from stillness to capturing motion, and therefore from intense formality to an intense privacy. Here for example the three-quarter profile is interesting-- head slightly tipped downwards, with an almost blossoming smile. Caught in his shirt-sleeves, this is clearly a private picture and not a public portrait -- and even the pose seems to demonstrate the modernist opposition to everything conservative, suburban and Victorian. It also gives we fitcritics a boner.

In his capacity as (m)advisor to T.S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, he demonstrated an incredible ear, and even better hair:

It is interesting to imagine how Pound would have styled himself with today's sartorial accoutrements. One can only guess what the invention of hairspray and the tortuous manlegging would have done to the poor dear - perhaps the noxious fumes and loss of circulation to the vitals would have only exacerbated his rampant anti-semitism and splendid unreason. Witty and sesquipedelian to the point of incomprehensibility, I would therefore propose for my odious comparison this little chappy, the Ezra Pound of booky wooks:


Take heart, Russell: even the best of us make mistakes on the radio.

Lezz Be 'Avin You

Channel 4, you tease. Having cruelly cancelled the much-loved seminal teen lezzer drama Sugar Rush, they leave us no choice but to turn to the (somewhat disappointing) third series of Skins for our barely-legal fitty needs.


That said, they've pulled off a blinder in the blossoming romance between unsure sapphist Emily and her objet de désir Naomi. Skins never knowingly underdoing the angzzt, we're not quite sure why they didn't go the whole hog and have Emily fancy her equally cutely coiffed twin sister. Sure, it'd infer all manner of outdated queer theory on the lesbian urge to merge, but think of the drama.


What we've got, however, ain't half bad. A gorgeously shot woodland love scene nicely referencing modern epic lezzorama My Summer of Love, followed by a lewdicrously symbolic confessional via Emily's cat flap: the pussy-centred counterpart to Pyramus and Thisbe's hetero hole in the wall. Amazing. Channel 4, we salute you.

Fangerlin

BBC One's latest Doctor Who replacement - Merlin - requires minimum three fitties to fill the, I'm guessing, rather large shoes of David Tennant. One is Arthur:

The squeaky clean, blond do-gooder counterpart to the darker Merlin, but with a rebellious, sexy side as embodied by this snapshot of him in prison. Seriously, this looks like the beginning to every german porn ever made. His looks fit with Merlin's like a key in a lock:

Here he is looking both innocent and seriously broken by the sexy poison induced fever during which he literally screamed "Arthur, faster, faster." Is the BBC taking the legendary relationship and running with it? Because that would seriously make my year. But what will happen next week when a strange combination of both Merlin and Arthur's beautiful bonces in the form of Lancelot comes to court and has a reediculously symbolic fight with Arthur?

Oh to be that fangirl in the background! The only real test as to whether the creators of this infernal show will do the decent thing is next week's episode. Properly, Merlin will become jealous of Lancelot's arrival, perhaps mediated through a woman a la Eve Sedgwick's theory of 'triangular desire.'
But enough about theory! I want to know the answers to the eternal questions:. Does Lancelot like to lance-a-lot? And will Arthur ever find his Martha? I'm praying we find out.

Messymorphoses

Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed into other bodies.

Or rather, how fit faces are changed into somewhat less beautiful faces.

Very appropriately for the recent BBC adaptation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the frustratingly pious and yet frustratingly sexy Angel Clare was played by Eddie Redmayne, who is the possessor of quite the prismatic visage.





His awkward, ethereal beauty which can come across as elegant or ugly was perfect for the role of the idealistic but ultimately hypocritical Angel. It was a lovely example of casting where the Fit can quite literally become the Crit.