BijouBlog

Someone on the “anything gay” website Datalounge responded to a question about what gay porn star of the past influenced them the most. The name Brian Maxon (also known as Brian Maxx), came up. 

Given that I work in a veritable Pornopolis, I thought I could perhaps contribute to the discussion. Yes, we at Bijou are all things porn, but other than his cameo in Giants (and yes, it is giant) and his starring role in our title Two Handfuls, I didn't find out too much about this massive blond stud. 

I pulled the folder, and the pictures gave me a woody. What a bulge, and the his eyes entice you, but also communicate, “you can come so far, you've got to earn an approach to my godhood.” 
 

But who was he? Where was he born? Where's the backstory?

I did find out his penis size is seven inches, cut, and he weighed 220 pounds. But here's the clincher: he was 6 foot 4 tall inches. That's tall in my book. I like them big but also tall. 

I also found out that in 1985 he starred in a groundbreaking bi movie calledThe Big Switch. 

He stopped making movies in 1999. 

That's it. 

Inquiring minds want to know. 

Anyone got any more information on this awesome retrostud? 

 

Of course, the Olympics is a major turn-on for gay men, but you should also remember that the Greeks who originated the games approved of homosexuality (and they played the games naked).

And don't forget all those statues of muscular gods like Apollo and Hercules. 

Much later, after millennia of social repression, gays in the 1950s started to gingerly make their presence known through homoerotic muscle magazines like Grecian Guild Pictorial. 
 

 

"I seek a sound mind in a sound body," was the Grecian Guild Pictorial's credo or mission statement. The word "Grecian," however, could easily be read as an underground code for "gay." Grecian became a coded word for gay during the time period of this magazine (1950's-1960's): those guys who like the male body, the "body beautiful," resembling the "Grecian ideal in its muscularity, symmetry, and grace." The association with the more openly homoerotic and bisexual culture of ancient Greece (and not just the physical aspects, but the emphasis on art and health as well as physical strength) was intentional. 

In fact, several issues of Grecian Guild in late 1960 and early 1961 devoted contained articles specifically on the history and culture of the Olympics.

 Perhaps it's time for me to explore my Grecian identity. I'll start with those athletic bulges.   

Bernarr Macfadden founded Physical Culture in March of 1899.

It was the forerunner of health/muscle/fitness magazines, many of which since the 1950s eventually morphed into today's gay pornographic magazines. Macfadden's ideas about health, nutrition, and even sexuality, though themselves not that revolutionary because they were rooted in the New Thought and naturalistic/Darwinian movements of the late nineteenth century, were expressed in a way that many readers considered obscene, especially the photos of both men and women (including Macfadden himself) wearing minimal or even no clothing. 
 

The first issues of the magazine focused on bodybuilding, but he soon added articles about nutrition and natural foods and homeopathic methods of medical treatment. The magazine became a bestseller, unlike the fourteen books he had written on health before. He also published a magazine for women called Beauty and Health. 
 

In 1904, Macfadden began to organize and promote bodybuilding competitions in which men and women competed.

 

In 1905, Anthony Comstock, the self-appointed smut exterminator and originator of the later to be controversial Comstock Laws against obscenity in the media, brought legal action against Macfadden to have him arrested and a second exhibition scheduled in Madison Square Garden cancelled on the grounds that it was lewd and obscene.

 

Macfadden was given only a suspended sentence, and because of the publicity, the crowds filled the arena and people had to be turned away. People (men, presumably) who came to the show hoping to see a display of female flesh were disappointed. 

All the female participants were modestly attired in union suits. But I wonder about those male participants and the mostly male audience that paid their good money to also admire the men. Apparently overt female sexuality wasn't the only show on the menu.

What about the unspeakable taboo of homosexuality? It must have been an obscene sight for Mr. Morality himself, Comstock, to behold all those male hunks parading their masculinity before the lust-filled raw of the crowd. 
 

I always wondered what the phrase “skeletons in the closet” really meant. I found out it was coined in England in the 19th century. Since then the word “closet” has become used primarily in England to mean “water closet” that is, lavatory - a possible hiding place for a skeleton I guess, but not one with much potential! 

Now, lest you think my secret is about some shameful sexual peccadillo (which, given I work for a porn site, really wouldn't be much of secret anyway), it isn't. There is a secret, in a sense here, because how most people don't know about the drowning of 800 people on the Eastland, one of the deadliest maritime disasters in United States history. 
 

Why? The story itself can't compete with all the hype about the Titanic, as the lives of the rich and famous supposedly make better copy. The people who drowned on the Eastland could be your neighbors or employees, the people who pick up your garbage, make your light bulbs, or mop the floors at night in office buildings. And one of these people was my grandfather's sister. 

On Saturday, July 24, 1915, the employees of Hawthorne Works, Western Electric in Cicero, Illinois, and their families and friends, boarded the S.S. Eastland in downtown Chicago, for the annual company picnic.

Every year Western Electric, at that time one of the largest manufacturers of electrical engineering equipment, including telephones, hosted a massive celebration involving a boat ride to Michigan City, Indiana, and, once there, a picnic, a parade, and related festivities.

These hardworking people didn't possess the means to take vacations. For many of them, Bohemian, Polish, German, Italian, and Irish immigrants, this was the only time they ever left the neighborhoods where they lived and worked. 

According to the Jay Bonansinga in The Sinking of the Eastland, the Eastland had already experienced some problems with balance or “listing,” and the replacement of the original deck flooring with concrete added problematic extra weight. The excited picnicgoers boarded, all 2,572 of them, to the point where the boat was at full capacity.

At 7:28 a.m., the Eastland, still moored to her Chicago River dock, began to list to one side. Attempts to stabilize the boat failed. With one sickening, swift inexorable movement, the boat rolled onto one side: 

“The noise shook the riverfront: the chorus of screams ringing out along the dock, the pitiful splashing of those who had been tossed from the deck into the water, and the frantic rush of the quicker-thinking onlookers. It was though a vast bucketful of people—helpless babies included—had been emptied into the water...Even skilled swimmers had a hard time of it.” 

In 1915, the heavy layers of clothes these women wore (they were all dolled up in their Sunday finery) especially did not help matters. Many people at that time did not know how to swim. Even though this was the case in some instances, many of the victims did not actually drown, but actually suffocated, not because of the clothing, but from the weight of the bodies falling on top of each other and from debris. 

Even more disturbing, according to Bonansinga's account, chivalry died that day. Men pushed drowning women out of the way. The women, however, often sacrificed their lives so their children might live.  

Bonansinga's account tells of one woman who managed to place her baby on a crate, blew it a kiss, and succumbed to the filthy, poisonous waters of the Chicago River. 

There so many bodies that they had to lay them out in Marshall Field's. 

As I mentioned above, my grandfather's sister, one Katarzyna Grochowska, drowned that day. With the assistance of the Internet, I found her record on the passenger list. What was really interesting is that she did not even work for Western Electric. She worked for a candy factory. I would guess she was attending the big event with one of her friends.

And based on what I garnered from the limited oral history of our family and from a couple of websites, she was seventeen and extremely outgoing and popular, and had not one but two nicknames, Kat and Kitty—her death remains truly heartbreaking. 

As I noted above, despite the tremendous loss of life (neighborhoods in Cicero were devastated as whole families literally disappeared), the event still remains strangely tied to its local, working class origins. Some national publicity occurred when the employees of Harpo Studios of Oprah fame, formerly the site of the Second Regiment Armory which served as a temporary morgue for the victims, reported hearing moans, seeing women dressed in their 1915 Edwardian finery, and smelling their flowers and perfume. 
 

The Eastland was finally scrapped in 1947 after being used for some time as a training vessel for the U.S. Navy. The Hawthorne Works Western Electric plant closed in 1983.

A new wave of immigrants from Latin America now live and pursue the American dream in the bungalows of Cicero, doing much of the same types of work their predecessors did. 
 

 

For more information on this event, check out the Eastland Disaster Historical Society website.

July 20th was the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. I vaguely remember watching it on a black and white television set at my mother's urging, not realizing the import of what happened. 

Now, looking back in hindsight, I remember being fascinated with astronomy and science fiction UFOs and ancient aliens even at that early age, perhaps prefiguring my desire to escape the mundane world. I even told my parents, much to their horror, after watching the made-­for-­tv movie about the famous Betty and Barney Hill UFO abduction with Estelle Parsons and James Earl Jones that if a UFO descended, I would say, “Take me away!” 

And then I remember reading astronomy books from the 1950s which predicted by the year 2000 we would be living on Mars or Venus or in floating space colonies. (Hasn't happened ... and let's not get into flying cars on The Jetsons.) 

We've landed on the moon, one of the Voyagers is now outside the solar system, and there was an article about prediction by NASA that we will find alien life on planets with earth­like conditions in about twenty years. 

I've often wondered if such a discover may transform even further our views about sexuality. Now most sci fi sex (at least the type I remember) is pretty much pumped­up heterosexual sex in revealing costumes. Think Barbarella. Or Captain Kirk fucking every beautiful stacked cosmic computer priestess on the original Star Trek. 
 

And now that we are discovering that sexuality exists on a complex spectrum that doesn't conform to traditional or heteronormative gender binaries, perhaps we could hypothesize that life on other planets is just as diverse sexually. 
 

Could a planet's ecosystem have developed three sexes? Or perhaps like the sea horse, males carry children and give birth? Or, and this would really be breaking boundaries, perhaps one planet thrives on some kind of interspecies sex?

(Remember, that's how Spock came to be!)