Worlds & Time

Monday, June 25, 2012

Hot Guys Shirtlessly Lipsyncing on YouTube

I'm just saying, this is a great, great trend.  I meant to put together one of these posts when it was just Sexy And I Know It by LMFAO, but why limit it?  Especially after the Abercrombie Boys did Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen:



Yeah, can't argue with that one.  But there are lots of other beautiful options.

Here's "Call Me Gaybe", another Call Me Maybe cover:


Here's Chi Cho, Snyz, BJ Smiles, and Laces' cover, which is kind of low quality video, but the guys are great:



Here's a version that I hadn't seen until I started looking for this post done by "The Boys of GG20" i.e. members of the Gay and Gorgeous Twenty-something group on Facebook.



And the final shirtless Call Me Maybe is the Weho Queens version, which features at least one porn star . . . and it looks like he has personality as well:



And the honorable mention for Call Me Maybe goes to the Harvard Men's Baseball team for their cover, which doesn't feature nearly nearly enough shirtlessness but makes up for it with some cute guys:


And then we move on to covers of Sexy And I Know It By LMFAO.  First one up is my favorite by SpandyAndy, and basically the guy who kicked off this entire idea:


And then the unbelievably hot Tom Daley and "Team Great Britain" diving team doing it.  These guys are amazing:



And the next one is the "Banned" US Air Force Academy version:


Here's some hot, presumably Russian, guys doing a stage version:



The best, and by best I mean most shirtless, parody of this song that I can find is this version of what I think is "I'm Jewish and I know it" filmed last year:



And of course, the happy runner up has to be the original version from LMFAO, which sadly can't be embedded.  So here's a link instead.

There are some runner up songs as well.  Some of my favorites include California Gays (a parody of California Girls by Katy Perry):



How about Take it Off from Ke$ha, done by the Boys of Boston:

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There's the awesome Daft Punk Harder Better Faster Stronger "Male Version."  It isn't really lip syncing, but it's hot anyway.


Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Erik Rhodes

Erik Rhodes was a gay porn star.  He was also unhappy, and by unhappy I mean depressed, much in the same way that I'm depressed.

There aren't very many similarities between us after the homosexuality and the depression.  Erik was gorgeous and he was gorgeous through hard work.  He worked out often, although he used steroids to bulk up.  He was, as I already mentioned, a gay porn star and unlike most of the time when people use that phrase he actually fit the "star" part.  He was, in the limited circles of gay porn fandom, really well known and did a lot of work for many years.  He also would go to events and parties that raised his profile beyond just porn.  He did drugs.  He drank.  He was an escort.  He liked music.  He was, apparently, very outgoing and could be funny and nice to almost anyone.  He was, for a porn star, a really excellent actor.

Erik died earlier this week of a heart attack at age 30, presumably of complications resulting from overuse of steroids.  He earned a NYT obituary which can be found here.

His real name was James.  If you don't mind, I'm going to continue calling him Erik, although I'd prefer if you don't forget that James is a real person and I'm sure his loss is devastating to people who actually knew him.  My sympathy goes out to them.

Erik was one of my favorite porn stars.  Not necessary because of his body type.  He was more muscular than I normally like.  I don't remember seeing him for the first time, nor do I remember how many times I saw him before he was recognizable to me.

But eventually he became recognizable and through the magic of the internet and the fact that I recognized him and his porn name, I eventually was linked to his blog where I learned about his exceedingly deep depression.  He put a lot of himself out there on that blog, and by reading there I was able to see some of the disconnect between media stars and their fans.  When you put yourself out there like Erik did, people that you've never met connect to you and they end up with feelings about you.  Good, bad, sexual, they build this one-sided relationship in their heads that makes it basically impossible for the media star to ever connect with.  You care about them, but they can't care about you. That star doesn't know you, and they'll never understand the emotional connection that you, the fan, had with them because they weren't there as it was built.

So, as I understand it, Erik was alone in his head.  Mostly.

I desired him.  He wasn't perfectly my type, but don't get me wrong, I thought he was hot even so.  I intellectually know that probably made actually getting to know him impossible but when I started reading his blog and found out that he was depressed my first instinct was to reach out to him.  To try to let him know that even if he couldn't see it, that there were people that cared about him.  I wanted to try to explain how impressed that I was by the work ethic demonstrated by his body.  How good I thought his life was and that if all he needed was people that cared for him that those people were there.  How I thought he was, in some sense, a role model for the people that couldn't understand that a gay guy might also be a masculine guy.

I remember offering to buy him lunch when I lived in New York City as well.  I left it as a comment on his blog.  I don't know if he ever saw that post or any of the few other comments that I left, but I was just one more creepy overly familiar voice on his website.  I would have ignored me too, probably.

But between reading his blog, living in the same city as he did for a while and seeing flashes of him at various events he switched over from someone that doesn't really exist in my world to someone that could exist in it.  I'll never meet the Pope, but I thought some day I could at least meet Erik.  Maybe give him a hug.

It's weird to think of Erik as dead.  It means that I won't ever get to meet him, that whatever that situation would have led to is impossible.

I assume that this is the way that some people feel when celebrities die.  That they've built this tree of possibility in their heads, and the person dies and the possibilities all die with them.  It leaves a gap.  Something that should be there but isn't anymore.

I don't think that Erik or James ever found happiness or even peace, which is sad but not unexpected.  People's lives don't usually get closure, and when you're 30 and seemingly in great health I don't thing most people try to provide that emotional "we care about you" that you get with a lingering illness.

Erik died last Thursday.  A week ago tomorrow, as I type this.  I don't think, when I first found out, that I could have realized exactly how much his death would affect me.

I was in the middle of typing that previous paragraph when I looked up his obituary to check what day he died.  I've linked it up above where I think it fits.  And then I read it.  Yeah, I already knew his name was James, but I didn't know that he was HIV positive.  I didn't know that he was still an escort.  I didn't remember that he was romantically linked to Mark Jacobs and I didn't know that he knew Jake Shears.  Does it make it better than I knew him so little and that he knew me not at all?

I don't know.

My thoughts go out to his family and especially his brother in what must be a difficult time for them.

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