Month: January 2011

More of "It"

wrestlebardLeave a comment

The din of my work life is starting to drown out the rest of my life these days. Posts and new stories may be a little more sparse for a while, but I’m sure I’ll find some things that I just have to put into print. For example…

Superherofan reposted this clip from Ellen, in Alex Pettyfer’s debut talk show appearance in America. Truly, welcome, Alex! This kid is just adorable.

Alex’s shirtlessness comes up frequently in conversation (thanks, Ellen!). He’s pretty cool and suave about the whole thing to start with. He even accepts the invitation to strip out of his button up, starched white dress shirt in order to don Ellen’s gift of an “I ♡ Ellen” T.

Sweet mother of god, that boy has world class abs. He soaks in the screams of the fans with just a little twinge of self-consciousness to start with, but obviously, Alex knows what the paying public appreciates most about him.

But when Ellen toys with him, offering him the t-shirt and then pulling it away to make him stand shirtless under the stage lights a little longer, there appears to be the most adorable wave of self-consciousness wash over the Brit “It Boy” on the rise. He tries to grab the shirt, but when he realizes what Ellen is doing, he turns his back and lowers his head, looking genuinely embarrassed.

Ellen relents and hands the hunk the t-shirt, which he quickly squeezes into as he turns back to the frenzied audience. There’s just something completely adorable and human about the hunky kid that makes me swoon just a little. I know that there’s NOTHING unscripted in Hollywood. I know that this is precisely why they refer to these people as “actors.” But both Ellen and Alex sell this playful little scene of self-consciousness so well that I’m completely sucked in and rooting for him as if I was his personal sugar daddy. He’s welcome to consider me an adoring patron for the $11 I’ll most definitely be shelling out to see him in his upcoming sci-fi flick.

And this bonding moment makes me that much more excited to give my homoerotic superhero character, Arthur (with Alex’ body and face as model) the back story he’s got coming to him.

A Greek God

wrestlebard1 Comment

I’ve given 80’s pro-wrestler Billy Jack Haynes probably inadequate credit for turning me gay and carving a wrestling kink deep into the core of my sexual fantasies. I never bought any of his attempts at a heel turn. He was always a big, brutal, musclebound face, cock sure that his physical superiority was all that he’d ever need to tear his opponents limb from limb until they screamed in utter despair and he crushed him like a grape.

After struggling with my reaction to the ultra-skinny physique of NK rookie, Dragon, yesterday, I found myself craving big, thick, powerful beef like few have ever offered on the scale that Billy Jack did. Happily, more of Billy Jack’s matches continue to find their way onto YouTube, immortalizing the performances that grabbed me by the crotch and rocked me to my core as kid.

The commentators for this match between Billy Jack and Gerald Finley are nothing short of awed body worshipers. “Look at that… now, he looks like a Greek god, the way he’s built!” These are pretty much the first words of commentary for this match. And true enough, Billy was simply exquisite. He had a flat-footed, straight-forward stance that made him look like even more of a mountain of a man than his thick, hard muscles and 6’2″ frame already did. When I was watching Billy Jack weekly, it was a few years before this match, when Billy was even more a figure stolen off of the Acropolis, with a narrower waist that made his hard, round muscle ass and tree-trunk thighs look that much more divine. But that beard, the gorgeous head of hair, the furry pecs and bulging… well, the bulging everything made this version of Billy Jack perhaps the most erotic of his incarnations.

The elements of this match are all classic Billy Jack, as far as I remember him from the early 80’s. He delivers (entirely legal) forearm smashes that crush his opponent helplessly into the mat. He milks his fully suspended bearhug for every ounce of punishment it has to offer, rolling his fists savagely deeper and deeper into Finley’s tortured back. When Finley launches the one offensive effort he puts up in this contest, he literally bounces off of Billy Jack’s gargantuan pecs as if he’d just tried to tackle a brick wall. And, in the end, Billy Jack looks like he a out to rip the poor sucker’s arms out by the shoulder joints as he applies his signature finisher, a full-nelson for the ages.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if perhaps my love lost with mainstream pro wrestling might be rooted in the way that WWF plasticized and softened up Billy Jack in the 90s. I realize that jumping promotions is frequently accompanied with an entirely rewritten character, but WWF wrote everything out of Billy Jack’s persona that grabbed me so powerfully years earlier. Billy Jack was “pretty” for all of about 3 weeks in 1982, as far as I’m concerned, but he was never “ugly” until WWF got a hold of him. To me, though, he’ll always be the Greek god, carved out of marble and equally as hard and crushingly brutal as cold stone, ever committed to the illusion that the best man will win, and always somewhere along the story arc of building the image of the juggernaut or suddenly shocked disbelievingly by derailing dirty tricks of mere mortals, unjustly stripping from him the dignity of victory that he always believed to be rightfully his. Thanks for the delightful memories, avk62.

wrestlebardLeave a comment
I’m the first in line to marvel at a ridiculously defined physique. The sight of striated muscle born of astonishingly low body fat can frequently send me into a swoon, all on its own. One need not be a competition bodybuilder to turn me on, by any means, but a hyperfit wrestler with musculature straight out of Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body will nearly always work for me.

Newbie Naked Kombat fighter Dragon, however, gives me pause. From a distance, I think this could totally work. He’s got a washboard and nice, broad pecs. He looks handsome and hard. But up close, I’m actually a little concerned for the guy. Granted, he may be marathon runner with legitimately undetectable body fat. But I just keep thinking to myself, “This guy needs to eat more!

I’ve noted KL at the BG East Headquarters yahoo page often caution commenters from getting too catty with criticizing wrestlers’ bodies. These guys are real people with real feelings. I’d bet my bank account that more than a handful of homoerotic wrestlers have serious body image problems, even with you and me seeing them like the Greek gods they resemble. I don’t want to be catty in the least as I sit back in my armchair and comment on Dragon’s physique. But I just have to say, this guy looks unhealthily skinny.

He says at the beginning of his match with DJ in this week’s NK release that he’s 5’10” and 135 pounds. I’m no physiologist, but a quick look at a BMI calculator says that Dragon is just barely over top of the “underweight” category (and I’d venture that he may be exaggerating his weight). Perhaps he’s still in a healthy range, clinically speaking. But he looks too damn skinny!

In Dragon’s match with Mr. Franchise, DJ, I seriously worry that the poor rookie is going to get snapped in half. It takes a lot to make DJ look like anything other than a (hot) skinny little scrapper himself, but relatively speaking, DJ’s looking like a big, bad bully face-to-face with his somewhat freakishly skin-and-bones opponent. Dragon works hard, but this is unsurprisingly a squash. Not to spoil things too, too much, but the rookie doesn’t make it out of single digits in “NK Points.” To be fair, I didn’t watch the whole match, so there may be more there than I’m giving it credit for. But frankly, I couldn’t watch the whole thing. I had to fast forward when I found myself tempted to look up interventions for anorexics. It made me uncomfortable. When DJ climbed on for his victory lap pony ride, I found myself gritting my teeth, hoping that Dragon’s pipe cleaner arms could bear the weight.

I’ll bet Dragon is 110% up someone’s alley out there, and both for you and for him I’m completely supportive of what it is that gets your blood pumping. But… (and I sincerely hope that I’m not sounding too catty)… please, please, feed this sincere little scrapper some more carbs, have him put on another 20 pounds of muscle and 5 or 10 pounds of unashamed fat, and then send him back out for another go. As is, he’s just too damn skinny to make me anything but patronizingly worried about his health, and this doesn’t make me proud to admit it.
Posted in UncategorizedTagged ,

The Arts

wrestlebard2 Comments
I should have loved Black Swan. But it was a near miss for me. Perhaps if there were an equally explicit sex scene between Vincent Cassel and Benjamin Millepied as there was between the two female leads, it would have put me over the edge.
The Hollywood story is that Millepied, who played the principal male dancer in the movie and also choreographed the movie, is now Natalie Portman’s baby daddy and owner of the pedigree of straight privilege: her fiance. Whatever. Just let me get another look at that man’s incredibly muscled ass in tights again!
Baby daddy also has an artistic tummy tat on that smokin’ hot dancer’s body. Seriously now, Vincent Cassel wrestling Benjamin to the studio floor, blowing him until he pops, and then flipping him over to his stomach to plow those big, screen-worthy glutes… surely that would be an Oscar winning flick.

While the movie left me disappointed, I’m now a little obsessed with Benjamin in tights. It brings to mind the intuitive connection between homoerotic wrestling and dancers. As my mind’s eye muses over an image of heel daddy Vincent tossing Benjamin into a wrestling ring and making that fine body suffer in a merciless boston crab, I’m reminded that this wouldn’t be the first classically trained dancer to have his body on the line in a wrestling ring.

The description for X-Fights 3 match between Kid Leopard and Joey Smit sets the scenario this way:

Joey says he’s a professional ballet dancer and experienced sex-fighter. Let’s see, who else is a professional dancer? Uh huh, the lightweight X-fights champ himself, KL, jazz and flamenco specialist. “A ballet boy? Sounds like a pussy to me.”, KL scoffs.

KL was a classically trained dancer. It makes me wonder how much this fact has shaped my own wrestling fetish tastes, since it’s BG East’s brand of homoerotic wrestling that feeds my hunger most satisfyingly. The fact that the Boss himself was a dancer has got to lend some quality to the shape of the homoerotic wrestling history crafted by KL through producing BG East. 



Like dance itself, homoerotic wrestling is really about story telling. Both arts build characters and craft plots primarily from the physical forms of the principals. Both are grueling athletic feats of strength and endurance. Both wrestling and dance combine physical mastery and artistic performance to transform a stage/a ring into a boundless reality all its own, with rules and morals that often run counter to the standards of more pedestrian settings.

I haven’t sorted through all the strings that connect my current infatuation with dancer Benjamin Millepied with my wrestling kink ala dancer Kid Leopard, but I’m convinced that there’s at least one direct line connecting the two.

The Give and Take

wrestlebard2 Comments

At some point I lost track of Wrestling Arsenal’s fine blog, but I just found it again. He has a nice, smart take on wrestling, and he’s got a fun sense of humor. Wrestling Arsenal’s post yesterday, for example, offers an insightful examination of the suffering wrestling hunk.

“The true beauty of pro wrestling,” he writes, “lies not in the strength and stamina of the winner, but in the frailty, vulnerability, and suffering of the loser.” The ironic twist is that so many of us want to see our favorite wrestler suffer. Hell, I’d venture to guess 99.9% of the readers of this blog get wildly aroused to see our favorite wrestler suffer! Wrestling Arsenal argues that the sight of the suffering hero stirs the most profound pathos. Our sympathies and identification with the sufferer are boiled down to the most potent essence of humanity as we watch the vulnerability of one man laid out so completely, without the least pretense of dignity left to him.

I like this deconstruction of the iconic moment of a wrestler’s suffering. It strikes a chord in me. It also makes me think about the additional element that causes a drastic drop in my blood pressure: the victor gazing down upon the suffering loser. I think all the same elements apply that Wrestling Arsenal describes. And I think that there’s also an element of profound intimacy in that exchange between the two battlers that speaks directly to the inherent homoeroticism of wrestling.

When Jack Guerin climbed into the ring with Joshua Goodman (that’s Mr. Joshua to you!), he had a grin that stretched from ear to ear. He was a young, hard, eager rookie. Seriously sweet pecs and thick shoulders. Ominously, he’d not done his homework, though. He didn’t really know who Mr. Joshua was. He didn’t know what Mr. Joshua was capable of. He didn’t know that 15 minutes later, he’d find himself flat on his stomach in the middle of the ring, completely dazed and nearly delirious. And the key thing that young Jack didn’t know was that Mr. Joshua was standing overtop of him, his feet straddling Jack’s torso, staring down at the young buck’s muscled back. There’s an element of self-congratulations about the victor’s gaze upon his beaten, defenseless opponent. He’s appreciating his handiwork. He’s admiring the effect of his labors played out so explicitly on the suffering body of his once-invincible challenger. Of course, Mr. Joshua is also just waiting for poor Jack to crawl back up to his hands and knees so that he can drop his ass down punishingly into the small of Jack’s back, sending him crashing back to the mat (and then needing to adjust his massive package for his effort). But before that, there’s something almost more intimate about Mr. Joshua’s fixed gaze on upon his outmatched opponent suffering beneath him than any physical contact exchanged between the two.

I haven’t yet seen the classic battle between Dante Rosetti and Davey Dee from Fantasymen 13, but I confess that I’ve been nursing a growing infatuation with Dante lately. The sight of Davey smiling down so malevolently as Dante is flat on his back in the center of the ring is an entire novel of story telling in one photo. Okay, set aside (if you can) the distracting sight of Davey’s cock so clearly outlined beneath the taut, shiny fabric of his white tights. And once you’ve managed to tear your eyes away from both men’s stunning physiques, take another look at Davey’s face. With his head cocked slightly to the side, he’s soaking in Dante’s defenseless. With his hands planted domineeringly on his narrow hips, Davey is simply delighting in the physical vulnerability of his gorgeous opponent. Even though I haven’t seen the match, I can tell with absolute certainty that the the gorgeous dark Italian that climbed into the ring with such a sense of inevitability about his victory couldn’t have imagined he’d be flattened and helpless soon enough. Whatever these two got up to in the ring (or out of the ring, for that matter), this pleased, assessing gaze that Davey gives his beaten hunk just seems astonishingly intimate to me.

My last case in point comes from one of the all time great mat battles in my book. Mitch Colby, the then owner of my favorite homoerotic wrestling pornboy title, faced off against the timeless physique and constantly growing mat savvy of BG East veteran Patrick Donovan. These two stunning hunks compare stats before the match starts. Mitch has an extra inch of height and a couple handfuls of pounds over Patrick, but both coldly calculating studs agree that they’re evenly matched on paper. When the scramble begins, it turns out that they’re evenly matched in practice, as well. The submissions fly fast and furious. Both boys are twisted and crushed to the point that it makes me wince just to watch it. They both fight a little dirty, taking unnecessary advantage, refusing to break on submissions, resorting to crotch claws to steal the wind from each other’s sails. When Patrick suggests a bearhug challenge, both long, tall slabs of beef are soaked in sweat and put on gorgeous display as they take turns willingly suffering in each other’s arms. Back and forth, back and forth, you begin to wonder if either of these boys will manage to build the momentum to finally derail his tenacious opponent.

But in the end, Mitch conquers like the reigning champ he was. Patrick is lying in pools of both boys’ sweat, flat on his back, pretty much oblivious to the world in the exhausted haze Mitch left him in. Mitch flexes and preens. He throws his own little victory party as he celebrates while Patrick slowly writhes on the mat with Mitch’s foot planted alternatingly on his ass and then crushing his crotch. And then Mitch takes up that familiar position, his feet straddling Patrick’s ridiculously narrow waist as he stares down long and hard at the fallen gladiator. Patrick’s instantly inadequate orange thong barely does the job of reigning in the veteran’s swollen moneymaker. True enough, Mitch pretty quickly connects all the dots going through your mind and mine by dropping to his hand and knees, grinding his own pouch into Patrick’s, pinning the loser’s wrists over his head, and tasting the sweet taste of victory. But I swear to you, that moment that Mitch is hovering, gazing down at his beaten man, that’s the most intimate moment of this match in my mind, as Mitch simply witnesses up close what Wrestling Arsenal calls “the vulnerability, frailty, and suffering of the loser.”

Power and vulnerability. Strength and weakness. Dominance and submission. Victory and defeat. It’s the combination of these elements that write the wrestling stories that grab hold of us. I keep watching not for the sight of one man’s hand raised in victory, but for that erotic telling of the story of a relationship, of power against power and the slow turning of power into vulnerability.

I’ve Got It Hard for BBC

wrestlebardLeave a comment

Once again, I curse the fates that landed me on this side of the Atlantic when BBC is premiering the third season of Being Human on the other side. I like this show… a lot. I know, this isn’t news to regular readers. But seeing caps of the 3rd season premier at superherofan reminds me once again. I need to move to the UK for 1) first run enjoyment of Being Human (and other superior shows), and 2) a crack at attending Ashley Ryder’s Grapple 101 in London.

Via superherofan, we see that Being Human 3 delivers precisely the goods that have made me such a loyal fanatic: namely, Russell Tovey’s naked ass. Russell haunts my dreams and fantasies (particularly the wrestling ones) in a way that’s completely out of proportion to his objective stats, I’ll admit. He’s not a hard, Hollywood muscle hunk. In fact, he’s pretty soft around the middle. He’s just so ridiculously adorable in a way that runs counter to characterizing him as “handsome.” And those ears were, undoubtedly, a source of teasing at least at some point in his life. And I think he’s one sexy-as-hell mother fucker (to put a fine point on it).

Being Human SyFy-style isn’t measuring up so far. I’ll say more later, but for now I’m busy skimming through job postings for American ex-pats in Great Britain. How long would my dogs have to be in quarantine?

The Classics

wrestlebard3 Comments

There’s little that can warm up the chill of winter better than a tight, hot homoerotic wrestler with an unbelievable ass. Jimmy Royce is made to order for sub-zero temperatures, as far as I’m concerned. At 5’10, 180 pounds, blond and blue-eyed, Jimmy wrestled in 7 of the prototypical Can-Am franchise products, Canadian Musclehunk Wrestling (both in and out of oil). I’m warming up just thinking about him.

Jimmy surely gets major credit for enticing me to purchase my first homoerotic wrestling product, Canadian Musclehunk Oil Wrestling 3. More to the point, Jimmy’s ass gets the credit. I still don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it since. I’m not sure what physical activity a young 20-something pretty boy has to engage in to develop glutes like that. Dancing, perhaps, though I think his legs were relatively underdeveloped in comparison to the astonishing development of those massive, muscled ass cheeks of his.

Wedgies were simply impossible for Jimmy to avoid when he climbed into the ring or oil pit. In fact, before any physical contact, he’d often have at least one of those gorgeous glutes squeezing free from the ridiculously inadequate dimensions of his speedo.

His backside was so eye catching, one could be excused for taking a little while to appreciate the stuffed basket he sported up front. Jimmy was next to none in managing to just barely wear his gear, his cock and balls appearing at any instant ready to pop out of his trunks. Particularly in oil, with his trunks nearly disappeared between his lightly hairy, epic ass cheeks, his speedo stretched so tightly across his crotch that every contour, bulge and crevice was outlined as if with a highlighter.

My hunch is that Jimmy had some legitimate amateur wrestling in his background. He frequently seemed to be working points by exposing his opponent’s back to the mat or mentally keeping count of his riding time, which is obviously nearly pointless in homoerotic wrestling (unless we’re talking about an entirely different type of “riding time”). He was also frequently undone by distinctly non-amateur tactics, such as the inevitable position Jimmy seemed to always find himself in, with his ankles trapped in his opponent’s hands while his opponent shoved his foot high and hard up his ass.

A reader recently asked me if I’d thought about posting more about the aural aspects of homoerotic wrestling, the grunts and slaps and thumps and groans. Of the abundance of delights in Jimmy’s match with Beau Hopkins in Canadian Musclehunk Oil Wrestling 3, the most erotic for me by far was when Beau had Jimmy caught for the umpteenth time on his stomach, both arms wrenched painfully behind his back and pried nearly up to the base of his neck. He was helpless against this move from Beau, and the smirking baby heel milked it relentlessly. Straddling that world class ass, Beau held onto Jimmy’s wrists and bounced his weight up and down over and over, driving Jimmy’s face repeatedly into the oil soaked mat and threatening to pop Jimmy’s shoulders entirely out of joint. Jimmy’s grunts of pain were squeezed out of him in rhythm with Beau’s sadistic bouncing. At first, the air came rushing out of Jimmy’s lungs in low, strained gasps. After about half dozen or so bounces, though, Jimmy’s voice suddenly rose an octave and a half with what had to be genuine pain and a twinge of panic. The last two guttural gasps were more like a primal pleading for mercy, as if signaling to Beau that he just pushed the fun and games a fraction too far. The nasty heel planted on Jimmy’s wedgied ass did, indeed relent, but only with a cocky smirk and sneering chuckle as he reveled in his precise control of Jimmy’s beautiful body’s tolerances.

Jimmy wasn’t the biggest homoerotic wrestler. He wasn’t the most muscular, or even the prettiest (though pretty he was). He might qualify to be in the running for the best ass in homoerotic wrestling, but even there he’d have stiff competition. But Jimmy was a hard working classic, and he can turn me on today every bit as instantly as he did 14 years ago.

It Boy

wrestlebardLeave a comment

It appears that when I was scouting for visual inspiration for character development in my superhero series a few months ago, I unknowingly stumbled across a rising star. Just Jared is reporting that Alex Pettyfer is being touted as “the  new ‘It’ boy.” For my purposes, Alex became the physical template for the character of the benevolent coach of team Trident known simply as Arthur.

By my count, everyone within this fictional universe of mine has tipped his hand with regard to the possession of a superpower, except for Arthur. As opposed to the coach of the Chargers, Barry, Arthur has a soft touch with his team and seems to inspire an easy camaraderie shared between main character, Brett and his teammates.

What attracted me to Alex as a model for Arthur’s character is, ironically, the hit of both maturity and youthfulness in his appearance. I say its ironic because he is, in fact, just 20 years old. I think he has “old” eyes, though, eyes that make me think he holds secrets.

Oh, and of course, he’s pretty. As I’ve defensively pointed out in the past, it isn’t just the pretty boys that turn my crank. But I’ve stuck with the pretty boys as models for my wrestling characters. Genuine babyface characters that inhabit the models of pretty boys seem obvious enough, and for that matter, pretty boys as templates for nasty, vicious heels make for a delightful reminder about books and their covers.

Alex is apparently starring in a couple of relatively big release films and generating all sorts of buzz for what might be in store for the pretty Brit. In the mean time, you may see him in a homoerotic wrestling story near you.

Wrestling Ink

wrestlebard1 Comment
I think it’s been a while since last I took the time to marvel at the particular pleasures of wrestling ink. While I’m awfully entertained by many of my favorite wrestlers who manage to be a work of art and a blank canvas simultaneouslyl, I continue to nurse a visceral infatuation with tattooed wrestlers.
True, it isn’t Thunder’s Arena wrestler Big Sexy’s tattoos that make me marvel the most. It takes a lot for his extensive and colorful body art to fail to be the most eye catching feature on his fantastic physique. But there’s pretty much nothing that could beat that ass of his, though I, for one, would like to get in line for just that task. As his ass is true to his name, his expansive and gorgeous ink is also both big and sexy. His most recent scrap after calling out devasting muscle hunk, Ace Hanson, is just about the sexiest pairing of wrestling bodies I’ve ever seen.

Another recent Thunder’s match, Mat Wars 22, also has me appreciating some more wrestling ink. Perennial battler Angel is simply stunning for both his beautiful body and the delightful artwork. I’m also intrigued by the sizable crucifix tattooed on the ribcage of new wrestler, fratboy-deluxe, Jackson. Is it sacrilegious of me to note that the crucifix makes me hot to see Jackson suffer even more? Probably. Nevertheless…

Recent BG East matches have also been well-populated with ink lately. Newcomer Hoyt Riley already has a massive quantity  of body art, and it looks like he’s in the middle of getting more. Some outlines ready for shading make me wonder if his beatdown at the hands of Mitch Colby may have provided the down payment for another trip to his artist.

Far less expansive, but still sexy as hell are Jonny Firestorm’s armband and shoulder characters. I’d love to see Jonny both continue to heel and take more ink. Send the pretty, pretty boy rookies to Jonny and the legitimate wrestler rookies to Denny to break in. Denny and Jonny can fight over who gets to welcome the pretty, pretty boy legitimate wrestlers to BGE.

Last, but certainly not least, I’ve appreciated the gorgeous art on Can-Am’s Michael Vineland lately. I’m still a little giddy over his fantastic performance with rookie homoerotic wrestling pornboy, Landon Mycles in Pro Sex Fight 1. I’ve gone heavy on the appreciation of Landon’s performance, including making the pornboy turned “pro wrestler” last October’s homoerotic wrestler of the month for the effort. But credit where credit’s due, Michael accounts for at least 50% of the excellent salesmanship in this match, and he’s bigger and harder than I’ve ever seen him. He’s also got a lot of ink adorning those incredibly sexy, massive muscles of his.

Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good

wrestlebard2 Comments

Model David Gandy says that male models are “the lowest of the low.” He bemoans the portrayal of male models from the perspective of Zoolander, as narcissistic, dull, vapid and expandable bottom dwellers. To be a male model is inherently damaging to one’s pride and dignity, because in a world in which men are supposed to be active, conquerors, doers and producers of tangible goods, to be a model is presumed to be the last refuge of the profoundly incompetent, emasculated, and impotent of men.

I’m tempted to be bitterly catty, but frankly, I’m just not going to be. I will say that I enjoyed Zoolander on multiple levels, including the introduction of Alexander Skarsgård into my life, and I still don’t actually assume that male models all borderline profoundly retarded (in the diagnostic sense).

But I’m totally willing to allow that a 6’2″ tall, blue-eyed, granite-chinned pretty boy with a 32″ waist and 38″ chest can suffer. Life may not be effortless even for a genetic megamillions lottery winner like David. To be so abundantly blessed with physical perfection certainly does not suggest that one will be taken seriously, respected, listened to or loved.

David may not appreciate exactly how I imagine male models, but in my own homoerotic wrestling alternate universe, I actually conceptualize them as highly skilled students of human nature and non-verbal communication. In some sense, male models rule the post-apocalyptic world I paint, as insightful, level-headed, brutally calculating masterminds. They are both figuratively and literally “producers,” highly masculine and interventive. They are distinctly not Derek Zoolander.

To have a male model-quality appearance likely does not equate to eternal happiness and adoration, just like to have something other than a male model-quality appearance does not equate with misery and failure. I, for one, am entirely ready to give David Gandy a second look, to conceive of him in terms other than silent, dull-eyed beauty. So perhaps there’s a slight whining twinge to his recent comments (I suspect I live for a year on what he’s paid for a single photo shoot… at best…). But for his troubles, I’m going to make it a priority to write him a highly respected, powerful role in my own fictional universe.

There’s a lesson here for us all, though, not just the world class male models among us. We are more than any one dimension of ourselves. We are more complex than anyone else ever recognizes. We are more beautiful in more ways than we are ever appreciated for by any one person. We are more thoughtful, more insightful, more potent than we are likely to ever be seen as. The trick is not to believe in the simplified versions of ourselves that are constructed around us all the time. Our task is to continue to break down those constricting mirages that are foisted on us, and to continue to live as authentic selves with sincerity and humility.