BijouBlog

Posted by Madam Bubby   We’ve been seeing the word pandemic as we encounter at varying levels one throughout the world. A Greek root in the word, “pan,” means all. It’s interesting how we have created many words with this root. The most famous example is pandemonium, a word the poet John Milton created in his epic Paradise Lost

Posted by guest blogger Miriam Webster   This is a follow up on last Sunday’s blog on some of the simpler remastering processes we go through when preparing classic gay porn films for DVD and streaming release. Many of the movies that wind up more straight-forward to work on turn out beautifully (best illustrated in last week’s example, Hot T

  Greetings P(r)icksters! Hopefully this finds you hunkered down until this Covid-19 virus crisis is over. The state shut down the bars in Illinois on March 16th and just today extended the closure order thru April 30th. So much for the Bloody Mary and Rusty Nail drink specials for Easter weekend. It’s kind of hard to talk about what’s going

Posted by Madam Bubby   I was born into a world where baby boys were routinely circumcised, whether they were Jewish or not. Hygienic purposes. (These were also the days when nurses wore caps, which were later deemed to be unhygienic. Go figure.) These were also the days when women at least in middle class white America were knocked out in or

Posted by Madam Bubby   According to the holy haters, the coronavirus lockdown is turning an already sinful nation (its sins are reproductive rights and the fact that LGBTQ persons are allowed to exist, not robbing and cheating the widow and the orphan) in Masturbation Nation (and in their “minds,” that means Pornography Nation). According to

    Greetings P(r)icksters, You’d think since Touché is closed due to the Covid-19 virus, I would have lots of free time and be on top of things. But it’s just the opposite. I have no set schedule – don’t have to be at work at any set time, don’t have to work so many hours. Just meandering through my days here. Oh, I have been busy. Take

Posted by Madam Bubby   The word posing can evoke images of runway models and persons on instagram (including celebrities famous for simply being famous). But there's more to posing than duck lips and giving the finger. Posing has been an integral part of the bodybuilding world, a specific part of contests, and I might add, one can view many

Posted by David Boyer   We still relive the past. I read Time magazine. Last month they put out a special issue honoring 100 women of the past century to mark the anniversary of women's suffrage in the US. (I could go on about having to allow women, minorities the right to vote but I'll leave that for another time.) Sometimes, I get

Posted by Madam Bubby   When I journeyed to New York for the first time in 1994 for the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, I ended up the night before the parade at a wild sex/play party with a hot leather BDSM top I had just met at a dance in the Armory. The location of the party was in some area of the East Village, I think. When I sa

Posted by Madam Bubby   Usually a “mad scene” specifically refers to a particular scene from an opera written by bel canto composers of the early 19th century, such as Donizetti and Bellini. A soprano, usually suffering from a romantic love crisis, goes insane, and expresses her insanity, paradoxically, in difficult, complicated coloratura pa

  Greetings P(r)icksters! Really in a weird space this week. We should be gearing up for 6 big crazy nights for the coming Memorial Day weekend. But we are still shuttered here in Chicago. For the past 40 years, the International Mr Leather Contest took over our Memorial Day weekend bringing 1,000s of visitors to town. Which made us very busy

Greetings P(r)icksters, Still sitting here with an idle shot glass. Illinois just moved to Phase 3 on reopening which allows for some businesses to reopen, restaurants to serve outdoor seating. Phase 4 will permit fuller openings, indoor dining and bars to open with strict limits on the number of patrons we can have at one time. Here in Chicago, w

Posted by Madam Bubby   The current national anthem of the United States is extremely difficult to sing. As someone who has done some professional singing and is now currently trying to rejuvenate his voice, trust me on this one. It keeps plunging down into low notes or what some vocal pedagogues call chest register, which can drag the rest o

Posted by Madam Bubby   25 years ago, Chicago experienced a deadly heat wave; 739 heat-related deaths occurred in Chicago over a period of five days. Most of the victims of were elderly, poor, and parallel to the demographic of the victims of coronavirus death toll, people of color, who could not afford air conditioning and did not

posted by guest blogger Miriam Webster   Richard Locke - the sexy, confident, bearded daddy, with a hip tattoo of a butterfly and a physique naturally toned from working outdoors (or, as he claimed, from jerking off in front a a mirror for thirty minutes a day) - was one of the first to establish mature men as potent sex symbols in gay porn.

Posted by guest blogger Miriam Webster   I wrote a couple of blogs last spring (Part 1 and Part 2 can be read here) about my work process at Bijou on remastering vintage porn movies for re-release on DVD and streaming. We had a slower period during the first year of covid, when we weren't able to put out as many new releases as usual, th

Posted by Madam Bubby   Vinyl is still around and actually thriving, especially in indie music and hipster circles, but I the same revival hasn't quite happened for the VHS, which means those old video tapes one sees in thrift stores may end up in landfills or supporting window air conditioners. According to this source, Japan's Funai Electri

posted by Madam Bubby   A while back, when going through our extensive collection of gay porn history files, I discovered a Playgirl magazine from as long ago as April 1979. Yes, Playgirl, the magazine for women and gay men. But what's particularly fascinating and exciting about this issue is the centerfold: Robert (Bob) Curtis Blount, aka Ll

posted by Madam Bubby   A friend of mine told me he used to sneak into gay porn movie theaters in the seventies and eighties. At that time in New York City, where he lived, such establishments were plentiful. Specifically, he remembers first seeing Fred Halsted in leather in the movie L.A. Plays Itself (newly restored by MoMA and re-rele

posted by Madam Bubby   I remember on this Canadian sex advice show Talk Sex With Sue how the host encouraged a woman to give her husband a hand job (while he watched porn). Her advice seemed eminently sensible; one, because rather than the woman complaining her husband watched porn and masturbated, she could participate in the event, and two