American Social Health Association was founded in 1914 to deal with “social diseases”—what a great euphemism for STDs, eh?—and was frankly, a much needed intervention for an absolute epidemic of venereal disease in the US at that time. Some estimates submit that up to 80% of New York City men had already been infected with gonorrhea at some point. Early efforts of ASHA focused on prostitution and the military—a combination that has historically produced major sexual health crises—but by the 1960s, the focus shifted to the civilian population. 

Enter , “VD is for Everybody,” the most confusing sexual health campaign I’ve ever seen. Alongside the National Advertising Council, ASHA produced this 1969 short to emphasize the growing ubiquity of venereal disease—thanks, sexual revolution! I can only assume the spot is a surreal attempt at irony, because if one were judging from the song styling and video-editing alone, this PSA reads like an advertisement for VD. In fact, it kind of makes VD look awesome! Seriously—look at all those happy, attractive, seemingly healthy people! They’re doing ballet, riding horses, having babies…being babies?!?

I half expected it to end with, “Ask your doctor if VD is right for you!”
 

 
Imagine a man who gets up every morning and goes out to his local park or leafy sidewalk and humps his favorite tree. Well, if this video is to be believed here is that man.

According to the uploader on Live Leak who filmed this tree hugger, the man claims having coition with a tree “gives him pleasure.”

He does that every morning when he wakes up from bed. He also says that a tree doesn’t reject anything, he has full control over it. Just he says that if it was possible he’d take it back home lol.

“Lol” our culture’s answer to everything. Well that or “YOLO” which would also fit here, one would suppose…

The man may be mentally ill, lonely, or just a garden variety dendrophile, but he certainly seems unperturbed by the possibility of splinters, a dose of woodlice, or even total strangers filming his tree-loving activities.
 

 
H/T Daily Star

 
I have an uneasy solidarity with the New York City subway dancers. On the one hand, I appreciate most forms of public entertainment, including (but not exclusive to) mariachi bands, accordionists, cellos, operatic sopranos, those Chinese violin thingies and the rare special occasion when some one drags a whole damn marimba down the subway stairs. On the other hand, the Z train goes approximately 4,000 mph, and the presence of a flailing body on a crowded, high-speed car puts me in an anxious frenzy. On the other hand, proto-fascist “broken windows” policing techniques have facilitated a major crackdown on these (mostly black teen male) performers. On the other hand... limbs flying near my skull.

To really enjoy the charisma and artistry of subway dancers, I have to watch something like this little film for boutique clothing line Fair Ends, featuring the moves of three amazing subway dancers in hypnotic slo-mo. Here there is no danger of traumatic brain injury, and I don’t have to experience the vicarious anxiety of some one perpetually bracing themselves to witness a farcically unjust arrest. 
 

 
Via ANIMAL

 
“Casa Susanna” was the name of a house in Hunter, New York, a town that is a good hour-plus north of Poughkeepsie, which is itself a couple hour’s drive from NYC. The given name of “Susanna” was Tito Valenti, and he created a safe haven for heterosexual males who liked to dress as women, a setting where they could indulge something approximating their true selves, an act that would be scorned in the regular society in which the Don Drapers of the world operated.

Michel Hurst and Robert Swope discovered a trove of photographs from Casa Susanna at a flea market, an event that prompted them to do some research into these mysterious, charming pictures. It turned out that Susanna was a professional female impersonator—at least that was what the business card affixed to one of the photo albums suggested. A substantial group of cross-dressers enjoyed visiting on the weekends to play-act as housewives, tending to the tacky trappings and maybe playing some Scrabble.

I think these pictures are just great. You can see in the directness of the gaze a complete lack of self-consciousness that, maybe, can come only from the indulgence of a hard-won security. Everywhere in life these men had to put on masks and play roles they didn’t want to play—but not at Casa Susanna.

All of these pictures are © Michel Hurst and Robert Swope. You can purchase their picture book documenting the house from powerHouse Books—it’s called, appropriately enough, Casa Susanna, and it was first published in 2005 (the second edition came out earlier this month).
 

 

 

 

 

More pictures after the jump…..

 
Shel Silverstein was more than just a quirky, kid-friendly poet with whom we youthfully chuckled while leafing through Where the Sidewalk Ends or A Light in the Attic. Indeed, as your perfectly sensible dad choked back tears while reading to you about the relentlessly cruel passage of time lovingly explored in The Giving Tree, he might well have been unaware of the epically debauched lifestyle of the bittersweet story’s wild-man author.

No doubt about it, Silverstein was an amazing guy. Case in point: he won two Grammys and was posthumously inducted into the Nashville Songwriter’s Hall of Fame on top of being a celebrated children’s author selling over 20 million book copies and counting.  But he also smoked a metric shit-ton of weed, sang obscenely, engaged in legendary partying (often on a houseboat), wrote a lot of fairly bent plays for grown-ups and obviously spent a lot of time thinking, writing and drawing about smut. In fact, some of our readers might remember that Shel Silverstein spent several years as a cartoonist for Playboy Magazine.  They might also recall that not only did Silverstein pen the lyrics to “A Boy Named Sue,” a tune made famous by Johnny Cash, and for which he won one of his Grammies, but that Uncle Shelby also wrote a sequel to “A Boy Named Sue” in which Sue’s dad turns him into kind of a live-in housekeeper/sex slave. The list goes on and on, really.
 

 
So allow me, as a primer for the uninitiated, or as a walk down a rather raunchy memory lane for those of you already in the know, to take you on a perhaps enlightening, but by no means comprehensive tour of some of the more explicit Shel Silverstein content available on the world wide web.  The stuff that follows is, of course, all pretty chuckle-worthy and, while fairly tame when judged by the standards of other smut, is in no way safe for work. 

Take for example this passage from Silverstein’s long-form poem “The Devil and Billy Markham,” a Faustian ode to the hustler that pits a down-on-his luck Nashville songwriter (Billy) against the Dark Lord himself. After the devil beats Billy in a dice match, he damns him to your standard eternity of painful hell roasting. After a while though, Lucifer realizes that unending damnation isn’t quite as shitty if people don’t get a reminder now and then about how awesome life used to be. So he sends Billy back to earth for 13 hours during which time he is allowed to lecherously fornicate with anything that walks, “man or woman or beast,” and no one will say no.  To sweeten the deal, if anyone does happen to put the kibosh on Billy’s inevitable sexcapade, Billy gets to return to earth.  Of course, all good things come to an end, and the Devil sends Billy a 30 second last call for banging as it were:

And Billy Markham, he stops. . .and he squints at the Devil. . .and says. . .“Sucker. . .I’ll take you.”

“Foul!” cries the Devil. “Foul, no fair! The rules don’t hold for me.”

“You said man or woman or beast,” says Bill, “and I guess you’re all of the three.”

And a roar goes up from the demons of Hell and it shakes the earth across,
 And the imps all squeal and the demons scream, “He’s gonna fuck the boss!”

“Why, you filthy scum,” the Devil snarls, blushing a fiery red,
“I give you a chance to live again and you bust me in front of my friends.”

“Hey, play or pay,” Billy Markham says. “So set me free at last,
Or raise your tail and hear all Hell wail when I bugger your devilish ass.”

The clippings below come from Playboy Magazine and were created as part of a series in which Silverstein traveled all over the place looking for scenes from the fringes of society. They’re hardly scandalous, but perhaps offer a slightly different take on Silverstein if you’re only familiar with “Falling Up”:
 

 
More Shel Silverstein after the jump…

 
Edward Smith, a 63-year-old man from Yelm, Thurston County, Washington, told a live morning TV show that he had made love to over 700 vehicles, including Mustangs, luxury Jaguars and even an attack helicopter.

Smith made the admission on the British family television show This Morning, telling hosts Phillip Schofield and Amanda Holden that he was a mechaphile—someone who is sexually attracted to machines—and prefers making love to motors than women. Smith said he had sex with vehicles since first being attracted to his neighbor’s Volkswagon Beetle when he was fourteen, when he was tempted to give the vehicle a “gentle caress.”:

“It has to do with the body itself. I’ve not been attached to any sort of penetration, but petting and hugging and feeling the body. I like feeling the satisfaction—masturbation—that’s done with the car, next to it.

“When I hold them in my arms, I feel an energy that comes from them. There’s a very deep love.”

Smith admitted he had difficulties in forming relationships with women and had only ever had one girlfriend “by some chance” in San Francisco in the early 1970s. However, he found the relationship unsatisfying.

Edward now has a long term sex partner that’s still… er… driving him wild, “Vanilla”—another VW Beetle that he bought in 1982.

“I first met her before I got her and then had the local Jehovah’s Witness driving around in one. There was something about that white ‘74 Beetle, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her,” he said.

“On my own private property is where we get mostly intimate. I’m very respectful not to be seen in public. I greet her every morning along with my truck Ginger.”

 

 
Smith’s obsession of pulling up to the bumper (baby), and driving it in between tickles the Brits as he has previously appeared in the Daily Mirror last October, where he ‘fessed up to having sex with thousands of cars:

“Some guys look at boobs and bums on beautiful women. I look at the front and rear on beautiful cars.”

Then he claimed he was in an “open relationship” with his VW Vanilla and makes “love to his 1973 Opal GT called Cinnamon and a 1193 Ford Ranger called Splash.”
 

 

But Vanilla is ‘the one’ and Edward likes to woo the white-coloured hatchback with picnics and wine-fuelled dates.

He added: “When I hold Vanilla in my arms there’s a powerful energy that comes from her. I would say it is extremely satisfying but at times a little melancholy because I know she cannot talk to me. But overall I know she feels what I feel and its intense.”

He added: “If anything was to happen to her I would be more than heartbroken.”

Smith also admitted in October 2013 that he was occasionally tempted to stray but added:

“I know better now than to pursue other people’s private property without permission. I will not deny that I look at other cars on TV or at shows and still get those old impulses and desires - but those were the early days. Now I want to settle down with Vanilla.”

He added: “There’s something about her that I can’t fully express on an emotional level except it’s very powerful and very sincere. I’m never ashamed or awkward in my heart. I have never questioned myself - I just love her.”

Well, that’s okay then….
 

 
Via This Morning, Daily Star and the Daily Mirror

 
The Musée d’Orsay, the legendary museum dedicated to impressionist and post-impressionist art housed in the former Gare d’Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station in the center of Paris, has a big show on the legacy of Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade, coming up in a few days (show starts October 14). The show, called “Sade: Attacking the Sun,” will focus on “the revolution of representation opened up by the author’s writings,” according to the museum. The exhibit will feature presumably challenging and sensuous works by artists such as Goya, Géricault, Ingres, Rops, Rodin, and Picasso. De Sade’s groundbreaking works include Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue and 120 Days of Sodom, which was later adapted by Pier Paolo Pasolini as Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.
 

 
On its website, the Musée d’Orsay warns (in bold text), “The violent nature of some of the works and documents may shock some visitors.” A similar disclaimer might apply to the show’s promotional video, directed by video artists David Freymond and Florent Michel. In keeping with the Marquis’ licentious philosophy and writings, the video consists entirely of quick cuts of dozens of (mostly white) people engaged in group sex in a huge darkened expanse. The camera eventually pulls out to reveal that the bodies are configured to spell the word “SADE.”

Funny—the only orgy I was ever at, we spelled out the word “EXCELSIOR.”

The video is NSFW but that should be pretty obvious, and to be honest it’s pretty low-stakes smut…..
 

 
via Artnet

 
One of the many mystifying aspects of the 1970s was the American public’s seemingly unquenchable appetite for Burt Reynolds. The same decade that is widely considered the strongest for uncompromising American cinema, a decade that produced The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, and Nashville.... was also the decade that multiple times bestowed on Reynolds the title of America’s top box office star.

It isn’t so much that Reynolds is bad, exactly. It’s just that often his fame and celebrity success often seemed to come in advance of the cinematic accomplishments. If you look at Reynolds’ finishes in the “Ten Money Making Stars Poll” annually conducted by the Quigley Publishing Company, you get this:

1973: 4
1974: 6
1975: 7
1976: 6
1977: 4
1978: 1
1979: 1
1980: 1
1981: 1
1982: 1
1983: 4
1984: 6

Number one box office star—five years in a row. That feat was duplicated only by Bing Crosby from 1944 to 1948. If you look at 1973, the first year Reynolds made the list, he finished ahead of (in order) Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, and Paul Newman. At that point his primary accomplishments as an actor were being second lead in Deliverance (an admittedly excellent movie in which he is also very good) and a brief appearance in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). In addition, of course, Reynolds had starred in The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. For the next few years, it didn’t really matter what movies Reynolds starred in—the American public wanted more.

One of the most attention-getting episodes in Reynolds’ career was his hunkalicious nude appearance in the April 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan. Clearly, women were lusting after the cocky (ahem) and hirsute thespian and former athlete, a fact that leads us into the true subject of this post.

In 1972 Signet Books released a remarkable paperback, authored by Burt Reynolds, with the title Hot Line: The Letters I Get ... And Write! It was less a portrayal of Reynolds’ life as a man of letters than a kind of palatable, not X-rated version of his Cosmo pictorial.

Reynolds was not a man without a sense of humor, as can be seen in his confident, silly pose on the hand chair. (Yes, that’s right—hand chair.) The letters—who can say where these letters came from?—all acknowledge Reynolds’ fame and sex appeal as immutable facts and engage in some heavy double entendres—what one writer terms “Swahili.” Here’s a typical sample:
 

Dear Burt,

MAN, DO YOU EVER TURN ME ON! You’re great. When I told my husband how I love you, he said, “Well, just pretend that I’m Burt Reyolds.” To which I replied, “Nobody in the world has got that much imagination!”

I have to tell you this funny thing that happened at the office where I work. We have this 60-yr-old supervisor (lady). When we showed her the miniature picture of you from Newsweek, she said, “Well, that doesn’t turn me on!” The rest of us girls decided it would take all the men of South America put together to turn her on.

But you’re just the hottest! If I knew my tropic zone number I would use it rather than my zip code. (Sin)—Cerely

FAY IN FARGO

Dear Fay:

Why don’t you introduce your husband to the 60-year-old supervisor? Forget about your tropic zone number and bone up on your erogenous zones.

 
The pictures of these luscious babes literally draping themselves on Reynolds’ torso are a kind of visual corollary to the libido that the sexual revolution had just unleashed. You can’t exactly imagine Clark Gable doing this pictorial…. this was the new sexual frankness that would come to define the decade. In fact, you could argue that this stupid book, or the Cosmo pictorial, was the first thing that really reeked of the Seventies the way we think of it today. That hairy chest just needs a coke spoon to complete the picture.

Here are a few shagadelic scans from the book—I’m confident you won’t soon forget them.
 

 

 
More Burt Reynolds than anyone in this century could ever possibly want, after the jump…

 
This is something I never thought I’d be typing out in a million years, but here goes: There’s a Bob’s Burgers porn parody called Bob’s Boners. Now I know there are a lot of porn parodies out there like Golden Girls XXX, Gay of Thrones, Naporneon Dynamite, Down on Abby: Tales From Bottomley Manor, This Ain’t Curb Your Enthusiasm: Curb Your Orgasm, aaaannnd drumroll please… Scooby-doo XXX: The Mystery of the Missing Panties.

But Bob’s Burgers?! Really? There’s even a Tina Belcher character who moans her signature “Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” 

This one has me flummoxed. WHO would get off on seeing the Belcher family fuck? I have no words.

 
via Geekologie

 
Last week feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte tweeted an amazing piece of history: a brothel menu from 1912 curated by famed London madam and the owner of two parlours, Mrs. F.A. Tasse.

The menu is some straightforward shit. Read the paragraph below to see what I mean:

No discount for cash. Stink fingers and jerking-off matinees for young men under 21, every Wednesday from 2:30 to 4. Customers must enter with cash in one hand and tool in the other. If you are not a self-starter, stay at home and jack yourself off.

I can’t help but laugh at some of the options. I mean, this is something that would make even the Trailer Park Boys blush!

• Blowing in the asshole, new style… 1.70
• Finger fucking, with juice… .50
Sitting on prick, shoving in stones and all… 2.59

“New style”?

Some people on the Internet are saying this is fake. According to a few folks online this was something printed and sold in the vaudeville era to make people laugh. Kinda of like tourists merchandise. Others are saying, “Yeah, this is remarkably fake. Look at the font - it’s obviously a computer generated and printed font.”

Now I’m not going to type out all the specialties, but you can read a larger version of the menu here.