Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Men’s bodies, man-on-man sex, raunchy talk — not for kids or the sexually modest.)

To celebrate high summer, my male-calendar pages for the month of July, both featuring smiles: a smile of callipygian appreciation in a Tom of Finland drawing; a subtle half-smile on the face of Cocky Boy Levi Karter — which led quickly to a photo of a sexual encounter between Mr. July Karter and Mr. June Blake Mitchell that exemplifies a common trope of gay male porn (which cries out for a name), combining a facial component — two faces pleasurably engaged with one another (in what I’ll call facial coupling) — and a groin-buttocks component — a back-on-front sit-fuck (what I’ll call a lap fuck). And led from that to the complex career of Levi Karter, with reflections on personas.

July ToF. An early ToF drawing:

(#1) An untitled drawing from 1964, showing an open-mouthed WOW! smile of appreciation (or, in other contexts, surprise); the object of the appreciation is the muscular ass of a black man (a taboo subject in American publications of the time, so Tom’s fascination with black men as objects of sexual desire remained an under-the-counter thing for many years)

Tom sent his first submission to Physique Pictorial in 1956; many of his drawings weren’t published at the time because they were over the line in one way or another. Then the lines shifted in the 1960s; meanwhile, Tom’s style became more assured, his drawings more explicit, more extravagant,  and more stylized; his character Kake debuted in 1968.

Still in the 2022 ToF calendar, for the month of February, we get a smile drawing from his late period (note the TOM patch on the R man’s cap), of a male couple, the L man broadly smiling (presumably in pleasure at the attentions of his partner), the R man with his eyes shut and mouth open in focused desire; all the signs are that R is the dominant, in-charge partner (see the Page on this blog on postings about b/t roles):

(#2) The drawing is in portrait style, with the couple facing us, posing for us, the viewers — as in conventional photos of couples in newspaper wedding announcements

July CockyBoys. The CockyBoys calendar photos are, in principle, all about the dicks, but they offer faces and torsos as well, and the photos are carefully composed by Jake Jaxson and his staff. (Though I’m a serious cock enthusiast, I’m also a serious face guy, and I’m deeply into smiles — so I use the CB dicks primarily for their intended purpose, but return again and again to the photos to study the faces.) The July page offers us pornstar Levi Karter — that’s his porn name — with a facial expression that is not a cruise of death (aggressively dominant), not a blandly neutral face, but is instead a subtle half-smile (achieved with small muscles around the mouth and eyes), projecting modest amiability:

(#3) As I said, the calendars are about the dicks, and the dick cropped out here belongs to the actor who performs as Levi Karter: Lucas Kemmerle, born 5/19/93 (so now 29), is short and compact (5ʹ4ʺ,  140 lbs.) and has (according to CockyBoys) a 7ʺ uncut cock (the pornstar standard), visibly fairly thick; CB lists Karter as a bottom, period (you can find film of Karter getting enthusiastically fucked by dozens of men, but he also fucks other actors when the script calls for it), and Kemmerle’s preference seems to be for bottoming as well

Modest amiability even in a CB cock-tease p.r. photo:

(#4) The usual conveyed message for such a display would be something like “Suck my cock, faggot”, but this is more like “Hey, buddy, here’s my dick for you”

I’ll get back to Kemmerle and Karter and Kemmerle’s other alter ego, the drag queen Sassy Frass, in a while, but now an extended digression occasioned by my discovery that Karter, Mr. July in the CB calendar, had filmed a hot scene with Blake Mitchell, Mr. June, in which they perform the combination of facial coupling and a lap fuck: Karter lying back appreciatively in Mitchell’s arms, with Mitchell’s cock dramatically lodged in his asshole.

Lie back and smile! You’ve got his cock up your ass! A screen shot from the scene, with the genitals merkined out (sadly, because the whole point of filming a lap fuck is to get the maximum exposure of two big hard dicks at once, to gratify the dick-hungry consumer):

(#5) In real life, a lap fuck is really uncomfortable for both men — but this is the performance of a fantasy, pulled off pretty much flawlessly by Karter and Mitchell

Focus on just the faces, showing the close affectionate and pleasurable bond between the characters:

(#6) The characters are fully engaged with one another;  contrast this with the portrait presentation in #2, in which the two characters are facing us as an audience

Brief background on Mitchell, from my 5/3/22 posting “The Merry Homomonth of May”:

(#7)  June: Blake Mitchell. On the dick and the porn persona: Mitchell, uncut, very thick and upstanding: earnest young man with kissable mouth seeks hot ass to fuck like a sledge hammer

And now on facial coupling lap-fucks as a trope in gay porn, from previous postings on this blog:

— from my 10/5/18 posting “Another ubertwink”, about Liam Riley, including in relation to his CockyBoys stablemate and buddy Karter —

Levi [Karter] and Liam [Riley], Levis and lace, (more) butch and (more) femme, twink and near-twink ([Levi with] more muscles, swimmer body type [also unshaved armpits]). Both playful, affectionate, and (professionally) adorable. And competitors in the Ace Ass department. [AZ: Levi is the more butch of the two, but is scarcely butch from the point of view of normative gender; for one thing, he’s got an immediately recognizable gay voice (which I find adorable, but then that’s just me), and the actor who plays him has had it since childhood]

with the two of them breaking each other up in bed, preparing to do on-line interviews there:

(#8)

and with a notable lap fuck of Karter by Arad WinWin, in which Karter sometimes smiles in pleasure:

(#9)

— from my 3/28/20 posting “Reading faces”:

In a number of my gay porn examples, the facial expressions are pretty much inscrutable if you don’t have a lot of context. There are a fair number in which you’re shown what appears to be two guys having an intense friendly conversation while embracing each other, but then it turns out that they’re in mid-fuck, with one of them impaled on the other’s cock. Or you simply can’t figure out what the relationship is like, except that they are heavily into a fuck.

(#10)  Hole on left, fucker on right (it’s a sit-fuck, a reverse cowboy)

Damned if I know how to read those expressions, but it’s entertaining to imagine captions. Certainly a scene of some drama.

— from my 3/13/21 posting “Pornstars do this so you don’t have to”:

It started with a mailing yesterday from the NakedSword gay porn folks, advertising the 2021 flick Lake Need, with a reproduction of the DVD cover, on which Johnny Rapid, Jesse Bolton, and Cyrus Stack together perform a complex sex act (69spitroasting) that requires considerable athleticism and agility. The three men carry it off as an aesthetically satisfying arrangement of bodies — until you think about whether you could do it yourself, and realize that this is something much better left to the professionals.

That led me back to an earlier period of Johnny Rapid’s porn career, which included a flick in which he engaged in an equally challenging two-man sex act (Flying Cowboy) with Rafael Alencar, an act that’s both beautiful to look at and deeply intimate, tremendously sexy. But it’s really not something to try at home — again, it’s much better left to the pros.

I put the two images together in an AZBlogX posting “Johnny Rapid” today, which led one of my LiveJournal readers to judge that:

The positions assumed in both of those photos look uncomfortable to the point of impossible.

Well, yes, but that’s what we pay Johnny Rapid and his brothers in porn for. They do it — they realize physically challenging sexual fantasies — so we don’t have to.

— from my 8/25/21 posting “Sexual notes from 6/5”: material on Reverse Cowboy, with the fuckhole kneeling in #2 there, standing in #4, squatting in #6 — but not lying back in the fucker’s arms

— from my 2/2/22 posting “2/2/22”, in which the facial coupling goes all the way to a kiss:

(#11)  A moving Cruz-Crosse kiss, hard-core sodomy with a pink umbrella of osculation in it: Steve Cruz on Damien Crosse’s lap, while they execute a mutually pleasurable Reverse Cowboy — Crosse’s cock plunged into Cruz’s asshole — and kiss (cropped image from a 2/1/22 ad for a Raging Stallion Studios porn sale)

Reverse Cowboy (out-facing) doesn’t combine well with kissing, because the angle of entry for the fuck is quite uncomfortable, but the combination nevertheless appears fairly often in gay porn …, because it allows viewers to watch two hard dicks in action at the same time …; it’s a difficult maneuver that porn actors master to entertain their audience (they do it so we don’t have to).

Personas and life histories. In an interview, LK comments on the complexity of living three lives, with three different names: in his office job, where he’s Luke Kemmerle; in his porn acting for Cocky Boys, where he’s Levi Karter; and in his side career as the drag queen Sassy Frass. Here’s Sassy Frass, in one of her personas:

(#12)

LK’s rather baroque (‘highly ornate and extravagant in style’ (NOAD)) life history has been made into a film (Leave It to Levi (2019)) by Cocky Boys’ Jake Jaxson. From the IMDb entry (with my amendments):

A documentary about the life and rise of adult gay porn star Levi Karter. It presents his origins as a young [Athens] Ohio boy named Luke [Lucas Kemmerle], the only son and adopted child [from Paraguay, as a baby] of a single mother [Anne], he later left college to pursue his dream of becoming an adult film star [for CockyBoys].

You can watch the (too-short) trailer here. Artwork for the film:

(#13)

(#14) Just to point out that Luke is still a good son and that Levi is indeed a famous (also hard-working) porn star

Levi’s also the source of considerable enjoyable public playfulness (even goofiness) and something of a role model for  bottoming with gusto (he really loves to get fucked) and for unapologetic visible / audible queerness. (For me, he manages to hit both the desire to be him in fantasy (and enjoy sex the way he does) and the desire to do him in fantasy (he manages to vibrate every toppish fiber in my sexual imagination).) Meanwhile, Luke’s thinking seriously about how to compose the rest of his life.

In line with that, Luke has a LinkedIn account advertising his professional qualifications — which is, however, peppered with a significant amount of silliness. The thumbnail photo (easy-going, pleasant, trustworthy):

(#15)

The text is a hoot, heavy with Ornamental Capitalization and references to most of the odd jobs he’s done in his life:

Lucas Kemmerle [in NYC], Performer at Media Partners [producer and distributor of online and video based learning for organizations]: Experienced Performer with a demonstrated history of working in the performing arts industry. Skilled in Catering, Sandwiches, Pet Sitting, Microsoft Word, and Heavy Lifting. Strong arts and design professional

The experience “in the performing arts industry” — referring to Media Partners, not CockyBoys — is entirely serious (and, you’ll note, gets no playful upper-casing). I do wonder how Lucas is going to work around the career-disabling stigma of having been — in his case, continuing to be — a sexworker.

This entry was posted on July 3, 2022 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.