Boston.com's Big Picture is a twice-a-week aggregate of stunning photography from around the web, chosen by web developer Alan Taylor, and arranged according to some theme.  

In this week's Big Picture at Boston.com, the theme is kissing, a near-universal practice among humans, that, as in many of the photos in Taylor's kissing collection — between a mother and child, for example, or a runner and his shoe — isn't necessarily sexual.  In fact  among the 33 photographs featured there are more dedicated to flag-kissing (most of them draped over coffins) than to necking. 

No one really knows why we kiss. Some philematologists, who study the phenomenon, speculate it originated in the days before Gerber made mashed peas and  "mothers may have chewed food and passed it from their mouths into those of their toothless infants. Even after babies cut their teeth, mothers would continue to press their lips against their toddlers' cheeks to comfort them."

Others believe it's instinctive, citing our horny primate cousins. "Bonobos... do it to make up after fights, to comfort each other, to develop socialbonds, and sometimes for no clear reason at all—just like us."

Passionate kissing is widely thought to be a method of "sniffing out a quality mate": "When our faces are close together, our pheromones 'talk'." 

In Taylor's collection we have men kissing women, dogs, their disabled or dead sons, but no men kissing men — not after a goal in soccer, where it happens all the time, not in the exuberance of friendship, and certainly not in passion.  Taylor's pathological aversion to men showing affection toward other men is beyond sad, it's perverse.

I mean, seriously.  In Taylor's universe, men can kiss other men when one of them is either disabled or dead.  That's it.  And that's strange, by any standard.  That there is a photo of a lesbian couple kissing as they exchange wedding vows doesn't address the aversion to same-sex snogging when it's men in the picture. 

Where did the Globe get this guy anyway?  Such a glaring omission in this day and age — and understand: I'm not just talking about gay men kissing here, but men openly expressing affection in all its iterations — shows a smallness of heart and vision that seems sadly at odds with the Big Picture.