Porn is everywhere — just look around you.
Good porn is searched for on the internet. Great porn is stumbled upon, quite by accident, in the middle of a sculpture garden, or during a Disney movie. That’s where we first learn desire — at high school soccer practice, in the locker room, reading Superman comics, or watching kids’ TV. Browse this list of accidental gay porn you need to look out for.
A word of warning from Alexander Cheves
My name is Alexander Cheves, and I am known by friends in the kink and leather community as Beastly. I am a sex-positive writer and blogger. The views in this slideshow do not reflect those of The Advocate and are based solely off of my own experiences. Like everything I write, the intent of this piece is to break down the stigmas surrounding the sex lives of gay men.
Those who are sensitive to frank discussions about sex are invited to click elsewhere, but consider this: If you are outraged by content that address sex openly and honestly, I invite you to examine this outrage and ask yourself whether it should instead be directed at those who oppress us by policing our sexuality.
For all others, enjoy the slideshow. And feel free to leave your own suggestions of sex and dating topics in the comments.
Hungry for more? Follow me on Twitter @BadAlexCheves and visit my blog, The Beastly Ex-Boyfriend.
When your teammate needs help stretching before the big game.
“Hey, bro! Can you push my leg back? I need to stretch my hamstring. I’m really tight.”
When your gym crush is doing squats.
If he’s squatting properly, he’s serving sweaty, arched-back, ass-out bubble butt on full display.
When you go underwear shopping.
So many queers first encountered desire in the underwear aisle. Who needs sex clubs when you can stroll through the whitey tighties? Smooth gentlemen with bulges smile at you from all sides. The best part? You can enjoy this accidental gay porn in front of everyone and his brother, passing as an invested shopper in need of chic, cottony jockstraps.
When you hit the showers after a hard workout.
Sometimes you stumble upon accidental gay porn. Sometimes you are accidental gay porn. The best accidental porn happens when your gym crush saunters in, towel barely clinging around his middle, and chooses the shower opposite you.
He leaves the curtain open and stands there for 20 minutes, turning at every angle so that no inch is left unwashed.
“La lucha eterna” by French sculptor Émile Peynot.
Art through the ages is filled with so much accidental gay porn that it’d be impossible to list it all here. I’ll just go through some of my favorites. I’m nixing purposefully homoerotic work and artists like Kake Comics (Tom of Finland), Warhol’s line drawings, Mapplethorpe’s photography, etc. This work is important, but its nod to gay porn isn’t accidental.
“La lucha eterna” (“eternal struggle between good and evil ") is made of white marble and located in the Palace of Fine Arts in Lille, France. Peynot did a similar one in bronze, currently located in El Ejido Park in Quito, Ecuador, but the French one is better. It is carnal and sexy and visceral. Two men crawl over each other in passionate battle. They’re “fighting.”
The Belvedere Hermes at the Vatican.
It’s true — the Vatican is filled with raucous nudity. My favorite is the Hermes at Museo Pio-Clementino. This god of athletes boasts a beautiful set of burly balls with a sculpted tuft of pubic hair on top.
Interestingly, the statue was originally called an Antinous, one of many sculptures with that name, since it was found around 1540 near the mausoleum of Emperor Hadrian. Because of its discovery spot, historians thought it was a statue of Antinous, Hadrian's young male lover (many sculptures have been made of the beautiful youth).
The sexual nature of their relationship is undisputed among scholars. In the book Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous, Royston Lambert writes that Antinous was "the one person who seems to have connected most profoundly with Hadrian.”
Hadrian didn’t like his wife, Sabina, and there are pretty reliable early reports of his interest in young men. The emperor admired the Greek tradition of pederasty: male homosexual relationships between privileged, high-class older men and boys in their early teens — relationships that typically involved education, mentorship, a degree of servitude, and sex.
Michaelangelo’s David.
Cultures the world over have objectified female bodies far more easily than male ones, so male nudity has an odd place in art history. The “heroic” male nude was a thing in ancient times. The Renaissance rebirthed that concept with totally gay pieces like Michaelangelo’s David. Young queerlings have ogled that small, modest cock and more for generations — that rocking body, that handsome furrowed brow, that piercing gaze (originally directed toward Rome as a warning glance from the smaller, outmatched, outgunned city-state of Florence).
Wilhelm von Gloeden’s photograph Terra del Fuoco.
Heroic depictions of the male nude died out again after the Renaissance and did not return until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when we had photography. And Wilhelm von Gloeden.
Warren Cup in the British Museum.
Last one about art, promise. But this one’s good.
Warren Cup (A.D. 5-15) at the British Museum features a reclined man penetrating his male lover up the ass. It’s gay sex caught in the act — or, rather, depicted on a cup literally 2,000 years old.
This qualifies as accidental gay porn because the hands that carved it were not creating naughty jack-off material. This was simply a common depiction of life in ancient Greek and Roman culture: a privileged older man with his younger (indicated by the lack of beard) male plaything.
American football.
Enough with art! Let’s move on. American football is the gayest activity you can partake in outside of sucking dick. All those tight pants, all that groping and grabbing, all that fumbling and fondling of balls. I have no idea what qualifies a “first and 10” or what a left defensive tackle actually does, but I love watching football games. It’s all very musky and exciting.
Swim meets.
Speedos! Enough said.
Pictured above: Britain's Tom Daley (left) and Daniel Goodfellow celebrate winning bronze after their final dive during the men's synchronized 10-meter platform diving final in the Maria Lenk Aquatic Center at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Wrestling matches.
I’ve never understood how we are allowed to watch this stuff. Does no one at wrestling matches not think it’s at least a teensy bit gay? I’ve never been to a wrestling match, truthfully, but I have rolled around on a floor in a singlet with another man. Sports!
Turkish oil wrestling.
If wrestling is hot, then Turkish oil wrestling will set your eyes on fire. And yes, the point is to get your hand down the leather pants of your opponent. But from what it looks like above, resistance is minimal.
Literally all sports.
The list goes on and on. Baseball involves tight pants too. Rugby, bless it, is the best accidental gay porn ever. Pants are always getting tugged down and everyone has legs for days.
A top’s favorite accidental gay porn is the lone jogger in the park, in the skimpiest shorts he can find, with what appears to be two basketballs competing for dominance in the back of his shorts.
When dad next door mows the yard. Shirtless.
Bless fathers who come home from a hard day at the office, rip off the shirt and tie, and mow the yard in nothing but gym shorts and boots.
The pool boy.
Cola-Cola’s funny, queer-positive ad that went viral recently shows just how much we love looking at the pool boy.
Construction workers.
Pausing between turns at the jackhammer, they lift their shirts to wipe their sweat. Oh, to be the cement.
Figure drawing class.
If you’re interested in capturing the male nude, perhaps you should take a figure drawing class. Get those proportions just right!
Drawing above by John MacConnell; see more of his work here.
The beach.
The most obvious accidental porn. The beach is really a fascinating thought experiment in culture norms. We spend our lives clothed and think nothing of it, and then we take our clothes off down to what amounts to underwear (and in many cases less than underwear) and also think nothing of it. It’s amazing to me that when we get around water and sand we suddenly accept being nearly naked around our family and friends.
That’s why the beach is such an implicitly erotic place — a mood and image saturated with images of romance, sex, intimacy. If you want to push the boundary of what is accidental and intentional gay porn, hit a gay-heavy nude beach like Pines Beach on Fire Island, Black’s Beach in San Diego, and the notorious Baker Beach in San Francisco.
Photo above by Ricky Cohete. See more of his work here.
Locker rooms. All the locker rooms.
Locker rooms are the easiest and most accessible accidental gay porn you can find, although depending what gym you go to, the sights may not be that accidental. I suggest a good cruisy gay gym for a better chance of seeing guys willing to walk around, gab about the day, and mix their protein shakes totally naked. If this is too easy — if you want to catch the occasional blue-collar worker or hetero businessman grabbing a lift before meeting his wife and kids — hit a gym outside the gayborhood and learn the art of stealing discreet, furtive glances.
All the accidental BDSM in movies you watched as a kid.
Here’s when I first got aroused at the idea of having my hands tied behind my back. It was when Captain John Smith gets taken prisoner in Disney’s animated classic Pocahontas.
Later, it was when the kid protagonist in the 1996 movie Dunstin Checks In got tied and gagged in a bathtub. Then — holy moly — when Robin (Chris O’Donnell) got tied and gagged (with duct tape!) in Batman Forever. Then Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) got handcuffed to a pole in Titanic. This list goes on and on.
Years later, I would learn why I got hot and bothered at all this accidental BDSM. Thanks, Disney.
