Don’t ask us, we don’t know, we don’t understand. The most surprising thing about this edition of YouTube is fixated is that, in a country with an anime series for every single aspect of life, we have never crossed paths with a show about a struggling group of gymnasts overcoming all the challenges they face to win gold. Besides, this is proof that you can appreciate athletic prowess while having sound effects that enhance the movements. Again, visionary Japan. We can only think about the athlete’s parents, witnessing all the sacrifices, the hours of training, the dieting, the gym, all to go to the event and see this…
Lately, we have been watching old cel animation from the US. First, we watch Spawn. The first season was okay, the second tedious, and the third a mess, what a telenovela! We found Spawn character particularly insufferable. You know that friend who is always asking for advice, but never listens, and actually argues with every suggestion you give? Well, that’s Spawn. Then we switch to Spicy City, with some crazy stories that are refreshing in the current climate of animation. Yet, it’s nice to see that studios these days allow stories to grow and a world to be built by authors. The main problem with both Spawn and Spicy City, is that you can feel the intervention of external forces in the story and production of the series, which resulted in the sensation that you are taking a train to nowhere with the story.
Anyways, in the last of Spicy City, the voluptuous femme fatale Raven sang this song that should be El Corruptor’s anthem.
I’ve been waiting for ten minutes in front of the police building for Pepi to arrive. It is a bit cold, and I have been walking around the city visiting art galleries. I am not in the mood to be standing waiting for things to happen anymore, but she likes to do the putivuelta together and insisted that I linger while she comes from work. It is 7 pm. “Sorry, the gossips at the after-work drinks were good this week.” She is already happy. We walked up the square to the Cuckoo’s Nest, nobody was outside.
“Uuu, the bald guy convention!” says Pepi as soon as we enter. The first floor is packed mostly with older men, some groups of friends, two girls -that’s new-, and some young guys standing holding their beer. The atmosphere is talkative. We sat at the bar next to a couple in their 30s who were not the usual type of clientele of this establishment. They were conventionally handsome, more the type of guys you see at a circuit party than an old darkroom in the center of Amsterdam. We ordered our beer (4.40 each) and immediately headed downstairs to the darkroom. Freed from Desire was blasting on the speakers.
With Pepi, there’s a strict pathway while doing the putivuelta in Cuckoo’s darkroom. First, we walk to the left corridor with the cabins. When we reach the wooden seat, we peek into the darkroom, and if the cabin in front of it is closed, we check what’s happening inside through the glass wall of the next box. Then, we continue to what Pepi likes to call the predatory corner, a section with a group of cabins under a bulb, where you can barely see the people inside the boxes, but they have a clear view of you. We continue through a dark section with two cabins and an open space with a stool, and then to the corridor back to the stairs, where there are two more cabins, a screen, and a rectangular brick pen.
“Not even to sell kidneys in the black market we have material tonight!” I laughed, but I get what Pepi means. The truth is, in Cuckoo’s Nest, some patrons rather than loyal costumers are more part of the bar’s inventory. The old guy seated on the wooden stool, the bald guy who fucks everything that moves, the Brazilian guy who never interacts with other people, the arab guy who plays hard to get. No matter the day or time, you will always find them there. A sure sign of a good darkroom is seeing people you cannot imagine having a life outside of it. Does the desi guy always flashing his big cock at the predatory corner stand in line to get his statiegeld and have long Zoom meetings for work? Unthinkable! This darkroom has plenty of those cases.
It is no coincidence that Cuckoo’s have achieved breeding such a rich native fauna. Its darkroom is very well designed. For me, it should be declared a national monument of the Netherlands. People do not design darkrooms like that anymore. The spacious cabins, with lights that can be turned off, hangers for your clothes, long metal shelves for drinks, and solid wood walls with gloryholes, are a testament to other times. Yet, it is a pity that in such an inviting space, there is not much sex happening tonight. Well, at least for most of us, Pepi is already on her knees sucking a naked guy covering his face with his hair. I will never understand how she does it. “Just go for it, be yourself!” she told me once at the naked beach in The Hague. But for me, cruising is more of a telepathy game than being comfortable in your own skin. I don’t speak cruising, and unless the other person is giving clear, almost physical cues, I don’t get the hint
Often, if sex is off the table, you can easily talk with someone you wouldn’t meet anywhere else. I tried to start a conversation with the guy seated next to me on the bench in front of the darkroom, but I only got back smiles from him. It took me a while to realize he was deaf. Suddenly, a chubby guy decided to start sensually dancing for me to the rhythm of Leigh Howlett’s remix of Holding on by Michael Watford. He opened his mouth and moved his tongue side to side while walking backwards until disappearing into the darkroom. Although flamboyant, I guess that’s the type of signs I get. I could barely decide if I was amazed or horrified when I heard a voice with a thick Spanish accent saying “Not my type…. Not my type….. Not my type!”. It came from a tall guy holding a beer while pointing to everybody who crossed his path. My deaf fella was moaning somewhere in a cabin, and I envy that he couldn’t hear the comments of the entitled pricks that seem to be invading gay spaces lately.
I decided to walk again. I saw a shirtless Pepi stealing a dick that someone else was sucking. The couple of handsome guys we saw at the bar upstairs were now in an open box, putting on a show for everybody to see. Thick beards, toned bodies, Calvin Klein briefs, perfectly shaved pubes. Unfortunately, there was not much to see. Soon, I made friends with a Romanian guy who showed me a handwritten sign in one of the cabins’ ceilings: SUGE PULA, suck dick. Did someone bring paint and brushes into the darkroom? Eventually, I managed to hook up wth an indian guy. “It’s my first time here. Why is everybody walking?” “It’s the putivuelta” I answered. He looked at me confused, and I explained to him that most people were expecting the fuck of their life to come walking down the stairs next. “You are bad at sucking dick” he said after he came. “I am sorry, I am not the fuck of your life!” When I went to the bathroom to freshen up, I realized that he not only insulted my skills but also gave me a hickey. I guess it’s dickhead night at the Cuckoo’s Nest.
I went looking for Pepi to say goodbye. The same people we saw when we arrived were in the same formation, still not interacting with each other. I finally found her being the Lucky Pierre of the hot circuit couple. I pushed myself between her audience and waved goodbye to her. She sent me kisses with her right hand while keeping up the show. What a blessing to have extrovert sluts like Pepi in this world, or we wouldn’t have anything to comment on from the darkrooms. When I was leaving, I saw a DJ at the bar playing for an audience of 5 people. It is almost eleven, and the other sleazier and more naked bars in the city are opening, triggering a migration of all the guys who are still looking for the fuck of their life, that one that would make all the time waiting, all the steps walked, worth it.
We try to draw daily, even a short set of quick poses. For us, drawing is like working out, more of a habit that is part of your life than an activity that requires a special moment. We wake up, work out, work, walk the dog, cook lunch, do the dishes, and draw. It is part of the routine, and just as your body misses movement when you have been still for a long time, we miss drawing when we have not done it for a while. In that sense, we are not particularly precious about our drawings, because there are tons of them. So it was a big surprise to realize that many people who have followed the project for years didn’t know that we draw… which is on us, we are currently working on our communication. Hence, we started publishing a selection of the sketches we’ve done during the week every Sunday at 3 pm on Instagram. We are going to start sharing them in the blog too, taking advantage of the fact that here we can go full naked
We became familiar with CharlesFred’s through Tumblr, where their photos of Turkish wrestlers were common material shared by accounts dedicated to publishing images of hot guys. Since then, the 272-page Flickr account has turned into an important source of reference photos when we feel like drawing men with different facial features, far from the boring homogenization of what’s considered beautiful on platforms like Tumblr or Instagram. With an increasing presence of AI-generated hot guys, CharlesFred’s photos feel like the product of another time, almost refreshing. Here is one of his series dedicated to what we think are Turkish wrestlers showering after a match.
We do not know much about the authors. We assume they are a couple living in Amsterdam, maybe of British origin, and frequently travelling to the Middle East, which draws attention to the type of men is usually portrayed in their photos. We’ve lived in the Netherlands long enough to know that there are certain types of features that Western Europeans find attractive on Middleaster men. This account is a perfect example of that gaze. Do people in Oman find those men also attractive? We don’t know. Yet, we have to thank CharlesFred for shamelessly taking hundreds of photos of all the types of men they were horny for.
There are few more satisfying sensations for us than running our hands on the back of a freshly shaved neck. The nape might not be the most eroticized part of the body; still, by being overlooked, it provides a chance to focus on what is important when appreciating bodies: to admire the shape without trying to fit it into ideas of beauty. To feel the shape, a nicely formed neck, a pattern of hair, how the ears frame it. There is also a mystery factor. Don’t know what’s gonna be on the other side, a revelation? a disappointment? Boredom? We might be wrong, but the main character in Borstal Boy used to admire the back of the neck of the guy in front of him while walking in circles, so we know we are not alone in the nape fetish
This is a selection of our photo reference archive. Unfortunately, we lost the author’s names.
Most people know Snax as the biggest party taking place twice per year at Berghain. What most people don’t know is that Snax preceded and shaped what later became Berghain. Long story short, Norbert Thormann and Michael Teufele organized parties in the Reichsbahnbunker Friedrichstraße (current Boros Foundation), combining fetish sex with techno called Pervy Party by Snax Club. Later, the party found a permanent location called Lab.Oratory, eventually expanding into two adjacent spaces: Osgut and Panorama Bar. When those buildings were demolished, the club moved to its current location, Berghain.
Much can be said about what is arguably the most famous and institutionalized club in the world, but one must admit that they are good at what they do. As a sex club, Lab.Oratory is very nicely designed. The bar, the slings with long chains, the lightning, the pissoir, and the candle holders (nobody talks about the candle holders), you can tell someone took their time to think about details. Thus, it is no surprise that the same rigor is applied to their flyer. When we found this lovely flyer for the 2015 easter party by Benedikt Rugar, we couldn’t help but fall into the rabbit hole of Snax’s flyers.
Love how it translated the mix of an industrial atmosphere and sex
Olga Zolotaryova
The futuristic post-nuclear underground bar
Berghain releases a monthly program of its parties, also inviting artists for each issue. Here is an example by Nicola Napoli
Although hot guys working out is an established genre in the current world of content, it usually follows certain rules of lightning, sound, hooks, and duration that are expected of videos to be engaging on social media. So, when our YouTube algorithm went on one of its fixations with Kevin’s Personal Hell, a handsome guy showing himself doing one exercise, with overhead lighting, no intention to explain or educate, in the most arid and straight-decorated space, we were drawn to it.
There is a lot to unpack here, literally. Considering the prevailing ideas in what people call the ‘manosphere’, we are aware that the main reason Kevin’s channel gets traction in the algorithm is that he fulfills the beauty standards of what is considered a masculine body. Yet, there is an unpretentious way to show off, to present himself as an object of desire, that reminds us more of the beefcake models in the 60’s photos, than the super-efficient, enhanced social media fitness model. We might be intentionally ignoring the problematic side here, but we are trying to say that maybe guys in general should show themselves more and enjoy their bodies, regarding shape or a clear goal??
Our favorite video is the watermelon challenge. We’ve seen an increasing amount -especially in some subgenres of porn- of videos that bring us back to our Art School days. Things that can perfectly be video art or a performance (or are already art). We can see it being displayed on a small screen, to make it more voyeuristic, on a wall of a huge, dark gallery room. Also, the channel is called Kevin’s Personal Hell; it cannot be more Sisyphean!
