A final pair of penguin collage postings on AZBlogX: 8 from larger originals, here; 9 from smaller ones, here. Brief comments on the individual collages there.
Most are gay XXX-rated, but some are merely homoerotic. Several I still find funny (though they were created five or more years ago), and some are touching in other ways. For instance, #1 in the second set, which I can reproduce here because it’s genitals-free (but sexily shirtless):
The background image is more than a little poignant for contemporary viewers. The sexily shirtless man is Rock Hudson, on the cover of the September 1954 issue of Photoplay magazine, the “Hollywood’s New Look in Sex” issue. Photoplay, 1911-1980, was one of the first American film fan magazines, and in 1954 Rock Hudson was a very hot star (note the star theme in the collage).
In Setember 1954 I was 14 years old, still proto-gay, but I appreciated Hudson’s easy masculinity and was aroused by his physical presence. By the time I’d come out, it was common knowledge in the sexual underground that Hudson was gay like me. But then we entered the Age of HIV, and (largely against his will) Hudson became the public face of AIDS, and we got to watch him turn into a death’s head, until he did in fact die, in 1985.
The text comes from a magazine of gay sex stories. It takes a lot of enlargement to decipher, but here it is:
Predator and prey, that’s what life is all about, the cruiser and the cruised. Are you a top or are you a bottom? Or does your preference really matter when that pierced-dicked guy picks you up & takes you home? Because you’re gonna do what he wants you [to] do, aren’t you?
The passage aligns predator vs. prey, active vs. passive, dominant vs. submissive, top vs. bottom (and by implication, strong vs. weak, adequate vs. deficient, independent vs. dependent, and more vs. less masculine) — all very common alignments (all deriving at some remove from masculine vs. feminine), though often strikingly inaccurate in the real world, as evidenced in the apparent contradictions in Hudson’s life.
If all this brings you down, look at #3 and #4 in the second set, and from the design point of view, #6 in the first set and #9 in the second.
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