BijouBlog

Every day for breakfast, except on weekends: a bowl of cold cereal. For me, the thrill of themed sugar cereals wore off quickly, even the Halloween-themed ones Count Chocula, Franken Berry, and Boo Berry (let's dump sugar and colored marshmallows in milk, yum!).    For a brief while I enjoyed eating Captain Crunch dry, out of the box, as

I, Madam Bubby, the author of practically all these blogs,  like to think not only our movies not just as “classics,” but some of our reviews.   One twitter follower recently complimented us on our movie descriptions, and in this more visually-oriented age, our reviews show the power of the word to give some in-depth insight into really

  A while ago on Facebook, I saw a picture of two hot young studs in uniform sitting together: happy and openly in love. Everyone loved the picture, rejoicing at the progress we've made, the liberation from the bondage of “Don't Ask Don't Tell.”    But gays serving in the military isn't exactly a newfangled development. In ancient G

  I enjoyed sex with this guy off and on for some time in the nineties (both “vanilla” and BDSM), and one time when we were making out in his van he began to blow in my ear. The action itself doesn't really get me a woody, but as part of the whole erotic foreplay it definitely added something to the experience as a whole.  Now, the ear i

We at Bijou carry back issues of Manshots magazines, which was, I think, in its heyday (the late eighties and early nineties), offered a sophisticated approach to gay porn; its video reviews were generally cogent and intelligent, even scholarly. It treated gay porn in all its variety of genres like something that deserved thoughtful analysis, espe

  In the recent funny and campy and touching movie Florence Foster Jenkins, Cosme McMoon, her naive waif-life closeted gay accompanist (played by the absolutely adorable Simon Helberg), is late to Madame Florence's infamous 1944 Carnegie Hall recital. Why? He claims breathlessly, implying perhaps post-coital euphoric exhaustion, he was “

I first encountered Gino Colbert in his youthful glory, in a spanking fetish film Bijou Video carries called Disciplining the Undisciplined Athlete. Gino, playing a short in stature boxer with a chip on his shoulder, and Michael Ryan spank each other. Little did I know Gino was also a phenomenal director and producer with a multitude of porn films

  Psalm 133:1-2 Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity! It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that runs down upon the beard, Aaron’s beard, that runs down to the hem of his garments. Why am I quoting a psalm from the Bible? We are just released a new porn compilation, Love a Man with a Beard

  The appeal of blonds. Flaxen hair, the color of wheat. Usually with blue eyes.  Blonde bombshells. Dumb blondes. Ditzy blondes. Marilyn Monroe!  Blond beach beefcake. Vikings. Nordic supermen.  Tab

  MARS: THE FIRST GAY LEATHER MAGAZINE   Chuck Renslow, gay activist and a pioneering figure of the gay leather community, founded Mars magazine in May of 1963. Renslow definitely pushed the homoerotic envelope of his time with this cutting-edge vintage gay physique publication that was instrumental in both creating a

  Bananas have become pretty much a staple food in America (and also a source of much sexual innuendo, see below), but they are a comparatively recent addition to food culture in Western civilization. It's obvious that before the opening up of the New World and global trade routes and technologies that bananas weren't easily accessible to Eur

Lately I've been spending too much time on ladders. Literally. I moved house, my next door neighbor and other friends have asked me to help them with projects that involve ladders, and the Bijou Video office moved. All that moving and packing and sorting and fixing and hanging up items usually involves some kind of ladder. Up and down, down and up

Long hair … when I was growing up in a white Catholic suburb where moms stayed home, produced multitudes of children, and hung up sheets outside on clotheslines, in the late sixties and early seventies, long hair on men was considered almost evil, a symbol of danger and rebellion. You know, those dangerous hippies downtown with their sex and drugs

“We kiss in a shadow,” sings Tuptim, slave-concubine in the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical and later movie The King and I, and her forbidden lover, Lun Tha. Both pay for their love. Lun Tha is found dead, and I'm not sure what happens to Tuptim.    In the book Anna and the King of Siam and the movie of that title (not a

  If one watches much porn, it seems like one is usually waiting for the cumshot, or, as some deem it, the money shot, as if one places a monetary value on the climax. More is more, and bigger is better. Or is it?  Now, as many readers by now have figured out, often times (more so in more recent porn, and I am showing my bias for Bi

Love bites, literally!  To clarify, in this blog, when I use the term “bites,” I don’t necessarily mean it in the sense of “bite me,” like someone saying something or someone “sucks.”  I repeat: Love bites, literally!  My cat who is probably the most spoiled creature on the planet lately has been getting into the habit of nipping at

  One totally awesome perk for working at the Bijouworld office (it isn't sex) is you never what you might find in the files.   Yes, files, think beige manila folders, not computer directories. We pretty much have anything, yes anything, related to gay sex dating to the beginning of the last century. Just ask! I was looking for a retrost

  In the 1970s, a youngish housewife in the west suburbs of Chicago dances to this tune on the green shag carpet. She gets her toddler to do it, swinging him by the arms. Her high school age son looks on with a combination of horror and embarrassment. More than 40 years later, at her grandson's bar mitzvah in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, Bubby Ru

When the Bijou Theater opened its doors in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago 46 years ago, let's just say that area was pretty much the Haight-Asbury of Chicago. Think hippies. Head shops. Art house cinemas. Think, according to one nostalgic online poster, a place where one might (and it did happen) actually see a woman walking a goat down the

    The narcissist in me sometimes peruses the M-M missed connections section in craiglist, wondering: did anyone notice me? Was that hurried glance the beginning of a cruise? Now, I’ve never been that perceptive about the cruise dynamic (I remember in college someone grinding their teeth in frustration, exclaiming, don’t you realize tha