(Entertaining and enlightening, I hope, but definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Yesterday, in my posting “Beau Butler’s shirt” (about shirt-lifting as sexual invitation, and gay porn actor Beau Butler as a practitioner), I ended with a photo of BB engaged instead in shirt-spreading (or -opening), to display his muscular torso (muscular but not ripped like a bodybuilder’s):
(#1) [from the caption there:] … a suave but intense BB
An unusual presentation for BB; he’s characteristically earthy, cheerily (even playfully) crude, brazenly shirtless, bearing with him an aura of powerful male sweat. But the guy in this photo is, as I said, suave — with styled hair (oh! much browner than in other photos, where it’s definitely black), elegant eyebrows, very light facial hair, and (another oh!) piercingly blue eyes. Meanwhile, the handsome light lavender shirt he’s spreading is much more stylish than the t-shirts BB wears when he’s not going shirtless. Even the shirt-spreading gesture is a smoother move, less overtly sexual, than the shirt-lifting of BB’s other photos in yesterday’s posting.
The anomalies pile up. Is this, then, actually BB, or is it a simulacrum of him, presumably AI-generated?
Almost surely a simulacrum, as I’ll argue in a bit. But first, one more (genuine) photo of BB — there are tons of them, mostly with him naked or minimally clothed, available in copies all over the net; most of them are clearly from studios he’s worked for — with him, wearing only boots and socks, doing a crude tush push, jokily advertising his availability as a really fine fuck. Managing to be really goofy and really arousing at the same time. To compare with #1 above.
BB’s tush push. Here’s our guy, posed invitingly on a leather chair in a Falcon Studios PR shot (with some work, I could figure out which snowbound-in-a-cabin gay porn flick it’s from):
(#2) Observe the absolutely pristine boots — they have obviously never walked anywhere before this photo was set up — and the, well, pretty socks: butch boots (to comport with BB’s beefiness) and faggy socks (to harmonize with BB’s enthusiasm for getting fucked); the mixed message is part of BB’s allure as a porn actor
On the pinup / tush push. Discussion (with photos) in my 9/28/19 posting “Gender notes: the pinup push” of the pinup / tush push, a cheesecake pose (for a woman) commandeered jokily as a beefcake pose (for a gay man), in both cases as a sexual performance — the offer of the buttocks, representing a sexcavity (the vagina, or the male anus considered as a sexual organ), for a male audience.
But where does #1 come from? Not, apparently, from any of the usual gay porn studios, premium men’s underwear companies, or photographers specializing in male art (this is a world I know pretty well; it has provided me with considerable pleasure, not to mention a rich source of data for my research). All copies of the BB shirt-opening photo that I’ve found come, in fact, from a single source: the ManCrush site (for subscribers only), posted “by Gareth Johnson” on 9/30/24. Now, the URL for the photo is:
GTV, according to Wikipedia:
GTV Media Group, Inc. is a media company formed in April 2020 by Steve Bannon [AZ: yes, that Steve Bannon, former strategist for Helmet Grabpussy, former executive chairman of Breitbart News, and declared “infrastructure for the global populist movement”, supporting far-right conservative movements around the world] and Guo Wengui. The company operates GTV, a Chinese [specifically, PRC] media platform.
Mighty unsavory territory, to my mind.
Then gtv.blue appears to be a GTV channel for homoerotic material of all sorts, including the ManCrush site, which displays hot men (with postings — all apparently by “Gareth Johnson” — subtitled “We follow him hard”). So Steve Bannon and his Chinese partners are raking in money selling porn to fags like me (not that I’d subscribe to any of their offerings).
I am reminded of various mobs’ involvement in sex-oriented enterprises, including many gay baths, strip clubs offering women to straight men and men to gay men, massage parlors and other organized prostitution, and so on — with these enterprises bringing in income along with drug sales, numbers-running, protection rackets, gun-running, and the like, plus dubious construction and waste management companies.
I very much doubt that there is any political element in the involvement of Bannon and his people and of PRC companies in these these sex-oriented enterprises, any more than there has historically been in the involvement of the Mafia; Grabpussy’s followers and the government of the PRC are wildly antipathetic to homosexuality, as Mafia families have historically been, so they all look on activities like running gtv.blue just as doing business, generating income from society’s subterranean “dirty”counter-economy.