Continuing the series of films using voice recordings, this time we have AIDS: The Unheard Tapes, a three-episode documentary that presents voice recordings from men with HIV during the 80s and 90s. What stands out about Unheard Tapes is the use of actors to lip-sync the recordings, giving a more rounded idea of the person behind each voice. In a topic that is frequently told by those who survived years following the outbreak, it is special to find material of those struggling with the virus at that time, with the information they had available, inner struggles, weird alternative remedies, and hopes.
A long time has passed since the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, to the point that it is hard to imagine the level of devastation it inflicted on the gay communities. The Unheard Tapes brings back, for a moment, the complex humanity of those often remembered as a number or a name.
We have been tracking Trade Center, Adam Baran’s short film recounting the stories of 5 guys who cruised in New York’s World Trade Center during the 80’s and 90’s, and we found that it is based on “Towers of Cum”, a text written by Todd Verow that is part of the film The End Of Cruising. If you have followed our series The Darkroom Review, you might know that we believe the grim state of gay apps in 2026 is unintentionally helping to grow the interest in real-life events, and tangentially, cruising. What we have experienced in the Netherlands is not even close to what we used to have when we grew up in Bogota, or what we have seen in Medellin or even Paris. Yet, something in the air is changing, and rather than calling for the end of cruising, the question should be what form cruising will have in a time of constant technological mediation and performance.
Anyways, here is a YouTube video (link??) of Towers of Cum (needs logging in), while we keep looking for Trade Center.
A rubber miniskirt, football socks, and platform boots were all he needed to walk confidently through Amsterdam Centraal. He dressed as lust for the day, a vision burnt into my retina to my deathbed. I was eating overpriced chicken wings while people-watching at the IJboulevard -my favourite place to draw in the city- and during Pride, a great spot to see how creative visitors’ outfits are each year. Bedazzled: in; pink: out. I have been hearing horror stories about how crowded everything has been the first two weeks of WorldPride in Amsterdam. From 4-hour lines at Club Church, 7-hour waits to enter the gay sauna, and more than 100 guys cruising at Vondelpark, to the point that, more than sexy, the whole experience has been declared uncomfortable and “sad”. So, here I am at Amsterdam Centraal, not only confirming that short shorts are still very much in vogue among gay guys, but also wondering whether parade day would be the climax of Pride, or an expression of exhaustion from an event that still has another week to go.
The day officially started at Cuckoo’s Nest, where, judging by the crowd outside, the youth appeared to be celebrating somewhere else. In the darkroom, things were a bit more diverse, with a mix of regulars and new people that made the room feel refreshing regarding the heat and humidity from the high number of bodies gathered in the same place. Not surprisingly, many activities were happening in public, with a single guy sucking up to 7 men, which I’m still undecided about whether it is a great skill or being plain selfish. I understand, from the blowee point of view, that it is a safer bet to go with the person showing what they’re capable of in real time, rather than risk choosing someone passively standing at the corner. But if after 20 minutes waiting to get a beer at the bar, you’re still willing to stand in line for a blowjob, maybe what really gets you off is waiting? I won’t comment about the hoarding bottoms, because the fair distribution of dick between gay men is a revolution I do not consider will see in my lifetime.
Most of my Cuckoo’s friends were enjoying the day and the new visitors. The Romanian guy I befriended during my last visit with Pepi was making a show with a cutie in one of the open cabins. He grabbed me to join, and we fooled around for a bit until I decided to move on because I did not feel the other guy was into me. By this point, I had dropped the idea of getting another drink at the bar, so I stayed in the darkroom where there was still a bit of space to breathe. I saw a shirtless black guy wearing elf ears, a leather bulldog harness, and a blue handkerchief -oral sex- together with a yellow tie hanging from the middle (… vers???) of the back of his jeans. Suddenly, a lady wearing a white outfit, more appropriate for a horse race than a darkroom during Pride, came downstairs guarded by a guy. She walked around, keeping a hand on her feathered hat, making very loud comments about everything she was seeing with his companion. As expected, it did not take long for them to get the first insult, starting a fight. I texted Y, telling him I was going to try to get into the Prik party while they were rushing off, exchanging swearwords with a tiny guy.
In reality, Pride is rather a predictable event. Specifically in Amsterdam, if you see the parade once, you have seen them all. It might lack some big corporate boat, depending on whether they are canceled at the moment or not, but the overall feeling is always the same. However, an area where the city shines is the big number of hot guys, part local from the Netherlands, and part international, called by the city’s reputation. Among this year’s beauty trends is the full embrace and display of back and shoulder hair, something we fully support at El Corruptor. Do the most of what you got rather than fit an ideal. After 30 minutes staring at the ass of the cute cowboy wearing a rope around his neck in front of me in line for the Prik party, I texted Y that it was not realistic to get inside. I decided to go to Dirty Dicks instead, one of my favorite cruising bars in the city.
Open from 20:00 to 3:00, Dirty Dicks is a traditional Bar de Timbre (Buzzer bar) in Warmoesstraat, once the heart of the city’s fetish scene, now turned into a crowded street of characterless stores for tourists due to its proximity to the Red Light District. Yet, during Pride there is no need to buzz because the place is so full that the door remains open to allow some ventilation. The routine at the bar demands that you leave your jacket -or clothes- at the wardrobe, and immediately order a drink. The mandatory drink eases the need for an entrance fee, which, if you are poor and in need, means you can afford as many dicks as you can get for the price of a cola. Some traditions must never die. Divided between two floors, the bar and social area are at the front of the venue, followed by cabins with gloryholes, a sling, sofas, an Andrew’s cross, more cabins, and a tube for watersports. The second floor has the darkest pitch-black darkroom in Amsterdam, and the creepiest mannequin wearing rubber gear any fetish locale has ever needed. Dirty Dicks is a place that upholds the old gay scene in the city, and where people go to fuck with what’s in hand, and make it rough.
Making sure nobody sleeps in DD’S Darkroom
“This is not very much my vibe,” said a guy to his friend in the middle of the darkroom. I related; it was so crowded that I did not enjoy myself for fear that, if there was a sudden fire, nobody would come alive from the place. I moved to the ground floor, where light and space increased by 10%, and drank my beer next to a couple arguing in the middle of the general orgy. “This is not about politics, it is about human rights!” said the guy who was originally from the US. “Shut up and kiss me already!” replied his Dutch partner. Looking around, I saw many people jerking off and giving blow jobs, a panorama that compels me to comment. I am, by no means, an expert cocksucker, but if one is going to bend the knee on a beer and who-knows-what-else wet floor to suck a dick, at least make an effort! Show some commitment, make it count! Common people, we can do better!
A beautiful guy I had been oogling was ready to make a move with another guy. While cruising, I am always curious to know who ends up with whom, and this beautiful guy with no body fat or defined muscle was rejecting everybody who dared to approach him. I saw him grab his bulge and slowly walk towards a guy next to me, who was very similar to the guy next to him, and when I checked the whole scene happening on my side, I realized the three of them had the same haircut, the same eyebrows, the same beard. The beautiful guy chose a muscular version of himself, who also could be any other muscular bearded guy at the bar. When both of them took their cocks out, first I noticed the beautiful guy had a huge one, second, that both had a Prince Albert. At that moment, I understood the feeling of cruising during WorldPride in Amsterdam: It felt like looking for a job on LinkedIn. Every dick has 100 candidates, and after a couple of thrusts, most holes decide to go with applicants whose skills more closely align with their current needs. The possibility of sex is high, but the quality is low, and the key, at the end of the day, is how to stand out from the crowd. The reason why the beautiful guy got my attention was that, in a sea of muscles, he had none.
A couple of years ago during a Lab.Dance party in Berlin, I was surrounded by hundreds of guys fuckings like there was no tomorrow, most of them traditionally handsome. To make the picture clear, I felt I was at a fitness convention or a Onlyfancers meet up. Nevertheless, from the whole night, the only person I remember to this day is one of the bartenders. I could draw him from memory. He had dark curly hair and was wearing a rubber apron with a frontal opening and a cock ring. He was thick, with the most marvelous ass I have ever seen. The whole experience of asking for a beer to him was as if the testosterone-filled ambient was boosting his already high sex appeal to fentanyl-level. I am not immune to muscle, but between all those similar bodies, I realized the power of being different. That night, I did not see a hot guy; I witnessed a natural wonder.
At the Hunger Games of WordPride at Dirty Dicks, some did what they could to get noted, but most people, as on LinkedIn, resigned themselves to the idea of trying and accepted that it might not happen. The beautiful guy with the Prince Albert, who after some interaction with his muscular counterpart decided they were not a match, was seated at the entrance looking at the street, checking the people coming in. I was almost done with my beer when I noticed a shirtless, skinny guy looking in my direction. He was rather feminine, carrying the energy of a siren turned human for a day. He was wearing leopard-print shorts and large mirrored earrings, and he was connecting with the guy immediately next to me: a tall, masculine redhead wearing a white t-shirt that said “let me smell your pits.” black leather suspenders, trousers, and a cap. I saw them walking toward each other, and without exchanging a single word, the redhead guy knelt down and submissively started sucking on the feminine guy’s cock. I knew that if I wanted to keep a nice memory of WorldPride, I should do it with an image of hope: a belief that cruising is alive, that it is sexy, unteachable, and an unspoken language living somewhere within whatever we call gay culture now.
I decided to leave the party then. Walking up Warmoesstraat’s mess and reflecting on the marketing lessons of WorldPride, I realized that next time, I really need to find my differentiating factor.
We are no fans of expensive supplies. Nothing more intimidating than fancy paper, paints, and pens. Hence, we try to keep it simple with the cheapest sketchbooks and pencils we can find; that way, we draw without the pressure to make it look good or achieve something. We got the current sketchbook for 2,29 euros, and it also works as a cutting mat. It smudges horribly, so we leave most of the construction lines on the drawings to avoid making a mess. The pencils are a bunch of leftover HB pieces that we shape right up to the very end. The truth is, this type of sketchbooks are more a decompression method late at night than anything else. Get a photo of a hot guy and construct around it. With time, we have become less interested in accurate representation and more interested in understanding form or pushing the shapes of the bodies. Withsomanygayartists sharingsketchesonline, it is quite hard to upload these without feeling they are the worst drawings ever. Then again, one of the most current comments we hear is that people barely know what we do… some have even said that they didn’t know we draw…..
We are not very knowledgeable about Kenneth Anger’s work. To us, he is an old reference point for homoerotic imagery that has been filtered through multiple reinterpretations, giving his work a mixed feeling of familiarity and avant-garde. An almost classical homoerotism that uses symbolism as a language tool that, for the Instagram brain, is quite the trip.
Yet, what we did not know was that Fireworks was directed by a 20-year-old Anger, who also happened to be the main actor -the guy who gets his ass kicked. Besides, he was very influenced by the philosophical ideas of Aleister Crowley, a hugely influential occultist figure, which explains why Anger’s film Lucifer Rising, is not about the actual Christian idea of Lucifer. In that sense, Fireworks could be seen as a transformative journey of death towards self-knowledge or liberation.
There is an increasing discourse about young filmmakers being “discovered” on YouTube, either to save Hollywood or social media as a whole, which makes us wonder: who are the twenty-something artists making experimental homoerotic cinema today?!
After years of working in marketing, social media, and content, our perception of Tech has slowly shifted from skepticism to outright disappointment, and what once seemed like tools with unparalleled opportunities now looks more like a not-so-smart tyranny of consumer surveillance. It is not a surprise, then, that our algorithm, always lost, just adds terms to the tag “hot guy” as the simplest way to grab attention within the randomness of our content consumption. Gay guys, we are simple. Yet we wonder whether, instead of educating, we have diskilled our YouTube algorithm to the point that it even considers showing material that we actively avoid, such as ASMR, a whole sensory world that we, slaves of the flesh, cannot physically tolerate.
Traumatic example number one: this video of a guy licking inside an ear.
This type of content was something we first encountered while researching anime girls streaming ASMR sessions, and we cannot find words to properly express the visceral reaction those sounds produce in us. Traumatic example number two: this video of a guy suggestively looking at the camera while making sloppy sounds.
We gag just by looking at that video, and don’t find the guy ugly. We like spit, sweat, and think blow jobs should be sloppy and gagging, but that video…. So, if our readers got the idea, ASMR is something we cannot tolerate. However, when our YouTube algorithm plunges into one of its sudden obsessions and we start seeing videos of men objectifying themselves while teaching human anatomy and doing ASMR, we must at least check them.
As we have mentioned before on the blog, one of the unexpected results of platforms pivoting to short-form video is that many corners of the internet started looking like a performance or video art class on assessment week. Using your body as digital matter -to monetize- is a reality for many in the current economy, and we can only wonder where all this is going when AI, most likely, rather than replace people is here to optomize their discoverability in the sea of content creators.
In the meantime, we can enjoy the oddity of a concept like ASMR you’re kidnapped by Himbo (forever), idea that, leaving the moral connotations aside, as Colombians, we find hard to imagine what is ASMRic about being kidnapped.
A couple of weeks ago, during a job interview, we were asked what was financially smart about applying to their position. While finding the proper HR answer, ignoring honesty, we only thought about how Himbo ASMR probably makes more with a video of him apologizing than we can make in months with our traditional jobs, insisting on using our mind rather than our body in this economy.
Full disclaimer: we couldn’t care less about superheroes, and we know nothing about video games. Yet, we have a huge respect for concept art and character design, top artists! So when we saw this video of the Gummy Surprise Venom’s skin, licking white glaze and twerking with a transparent iridescent miniskirt, we immediately knew we needed to investigate further.
Which led us down the rabbit hole of content analysis, objectification, and countless smash-or-pass tier lists about the game. It goes deep. Look, we might be too attached to actual flesh-and-blood bodies to develop parasocial romantic relationships with video game characters, but in a design world that feels increasingly grim, the idea of getting paid to make characters hotter and their asses bigger has us shout: how do we get that job?!
This is a rather basic one. As its respective subreddit demonstrates every day, who does not love a nice male pube? Lately, we have seen an increasing amount of pubes photos in the wild, outside the regular clusters of fetishists and horny enthusiasts. We took it as a sign to go back to the terabytes of images we have saved in the last decade, and make a small selection for the blog. However, the folder dedicated to pubes in our archive is simply too large; we could not even reach half of the images. As is often the case with image selection, the main problem is finding variety. This is partly the result of our own biases, algorithmic selection, and limited production of certain images. We did not want to make it an ode to the shaved abs wearing Calvin Klein briefs, yet the flat abdomen still dominates. Maybe if you want to see something different, you must look into the belly fetish territory?
Listened to this while working today, and as big fans of acid, we love it. Cool to see a friend of the house growing a evolving.
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