I'm not a huge fan of Hentai, but I do like Gengoroh Tagame, who is basically manga's answer to Tom of Finland.  Like Tom, Tagame is fascinated by BDSM themes, which are admittedly rich for artists of all stripes.  All of culture could be subsumed under the rubric of BDSM, after all.  (Well, at least all culture worth keeping around.)

I'm pretty vanilla when it comes to actual sex, but I can get pretty freaky with my art.  And I don't see a contradiction in this.  I have, on my long and winding road, taken a few detours into dom/sub territory — not deep into it, mind you — and it's been fun in a sort of meta way.  Nice place to visit, wouldn't want to live there, bound, gagged and chained to a urinal.

I let art do all the suffering for me.  Pornwise, light BDSM is one among among the many genres I enjoy, depending on the phase of the moon.  There is an element of play in consensual gay BDSM porn — on marvelously-named sites like Bound Gods, for example, or Naked Kombat — and sketchier, more hardcore fetish fare like the Johnny Rahm classic Pigs at Troff can, at their raunchiest reach a spiritual apotheosis.  Again, I see no contradiction.  I mean, if Saint Catherine of Sienna can do it, so can we.

Side note.  Johnny Rahm, whose real name was Barry Rogers, had started out in the '80s as the skinny bi guy with the big dick, and ended up a suicide by hanging himself off the fence line at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens a year after Pigs at Troff was shot (in 2000). He was 39, HIV+, and had gotten into increasingly sketchy fetish films (stuff that after Abu Ghraib actually seems vanilla). Roger's "passion" if you will, parallels his porn, and I find that as powerful as anything Pasolini ever did (and Pigs had higher production values to boot).

I'm all for allowing gay porn into the pantheon of art, myself.  And considering most depictions of Christ on the Cross were only just slightly sublimated softcore, there is a precedent.  The marvelous Dr. Lakra exhibition at the ICA, while not gay and not porn (go figure), has some of the irreverent spirit I associate with smut.  I highly recommend it.

So anyway, when I heard about the latest from Tagame — a full-length graphic novel not yet available in the US — I started investigating where I could get my hands on it.  This, of course, led me down a rabbit hole into the wacky world of Jinglish, which finally dead-ended some time around two this morning on a Japanese site called "rainbow shoppers" where, while I did not find Tagame's book, I did find some exciting DVD titles I'd like to share with you (all in the worst possible taste, it goes without saying, and NSFW)!

EXPLOSIVE BUSINESS SUITE
ALRIGHT 4
HEATING BUTT IN SUITS
REARED
FUCK AT WILL
DUSKY-RED HUGE DICK
WORKMAN AND CAUCASIAN
AWAKENING AS A MALE DOG
DREAM CUM
HHH -Hard Hot Hentai
MIDNIGHT-ZONE (REVIVAL)
TICKLE HEAVEN MINI SERIES 1
THUNDER ZOOM 11
CHERRY BOY
PERVERT SWIM KING
HENTAI IS A BEAUTIFUL BOY
BRISK BUTT HOLE
STRAIGHT BOYS HUNTING AT THE HOSPITAL
THE MAMA OF FOOTBASE BOYS
STICK OUT TENNIS COACH
YEAAH ! SEA OF CLOUDS
STROLL SEX JOURNEY 4
ICHIRO'S HOLE DECIPLINE
THE RIPE MAN
TOSHI THUMPING WITH SARA AND YURI
SPERM VIOLENCE vol.7*

Dōitashimashite (You're welcome).
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*(No sperm were harmed in the writing of this post.)