Richard: On the upside, thanks to careful washings in cold water (and one teaspoon of vinegar– ancient Chinese secret!), Tom’s 100-count Peruvian slipcovers and throw pillows look just as woodsy and joyless as the day he bought them with his first post-college paycheck from the National Parks Service in 1992. Tom’s posters, bought two weeks later from the same Wal-Mart, also appear to be in great condition.

On the downside, while I appreciate Jerry’s attempt to recreate an Ewok village in the living room, I think their Return of the Jedi costumes are a little weak. And let’s be honest: Leia was always a top.
 

Steve: Mr. Martin Mills knew that his new master bedroom would need to be so much more of a special, personal shrine than the synthetic wooden panel and painted cinder block assemblages of the uninspiring rented spaces from less prosperous years.

A lifetime of saving, and a lucky investment in U-Bake dildo kits, provided the necessary funding for the kind of opulence that only the super-medium-rich dream of.

A professional sponge-paint artisan was brought in to delicately apply a subtle patina of orange and umber to the once-stark honey brown walls.

Matching designer hotel lamps were purchased at nearly full price to frame and honor the sacred bed space.

Nearing completion, the room was personalized with framed holograms of popular battle scenes from the Franco-Prussian War, and a fashion throw featuring four distinct thread colors to depict the stylized image of a majestic white Persian.

The final touch was an acrylic mural of the proud home-owner — as he appeared before Thanksgiving. Wise to cost and benefit ratios, Mr. Mills used immigrant labor to fill the lines with a realistic peachy rose hue, reserving the bulk of his $250 for Houston-based erotic artist Selene, who spent over three days with a broad-tipped Sharpie to bring the rendering to life.
 

David: OK, so here’s the thing people — everything is working in this room. You’ve got a theme and a color palette that supports it. Great! Work it. The 24/7 homage to Chuck Jones? Why the fuck not? Hell it beats a room full of Chuck Norris dolls. All’s well here until the eye drifts over to the lower right hand corner of the photo and we notice — what? A giant porcelain rabbit and a mirrored disco ball. Oh no. Thematic symmetry shattered. The senses balk. The mind spins. Quick! Cue Britney’s new album — in its entirety — because you’re getting ready to … Blackout!
 

Shawn: This could easily be a rejected CD single cover for Club 69 or The Pet Shop Boys. The term “an embarrassment of riches” is apt here. I’m sure the sheets are Egyptian three hundred thread count and the bed itself is not unlike Raquel Welch’s from Myra Breckinridge. His client must’ve hit the jackpot with the lottery or made a fortune selling DeLoreans; the whole layout comes straight from the New Money design handbook.

The brocade walls are what I dream every fashionably upscale mental institution catering to fucked-up L.A. families like the Sedgwicks or the Menendezes has in their rubber rooms. I never really believed that anyone chugged champagne and ate chocolate-covered strawberries outside of a Euro-softcore Emmanuelle movie, but I stand corrected. Either Victoria Gotti couldn’t get a date to the Golden Globes or this is her eldest son Fernando making his late nite Cinemax debut. With the aviator shades circa Top Gun and his Morrissey do’, our stud clearly has a Big 80s predilection. His designer underwear and fab slave bracelet make a statement: “Yeah, I got it goin’ on. And it’ll cost ya…bitches.”
 

David: Thanks to everyone for stopping in and making this one of the most popular gay blogs circulating the posh new realm of Web 2.0 (whatever in the fuck that is.) Please keep sending in your catastrophes — because, well, without them we’re nothing.

Oh, too, thanks for voting for us in Cybersocket’s Best Adult Blog category. We’ll mention each of you when we accept our award in Hollywood next month.

David K.
 

David: What’s fabulously meanspirited about this picture’s composition is how the photographer is forcing our attention onto his wreath collection and not so much on the model’s rearing ass. Our future porn star senses that he’s not the center of the spread — which explains his exasperated expression. You can hear him yelling back at the photographer: “Fuck the goddamned garland and show what’s important: My suffering for art — with this cockring ripping my ballsack off at the root!”

Beyond the chaotic menagerie of wall art (a stuffed fish anyone?), we’ve got the one defining element that turns this entire room into a genuine “happening” worthy of Lurid Digs. That luxurious faux mink bedspread, swelling like a wave that’s ready to crash through our monitor. Again the model is upstaged by the setting. He seems precariously placed on the shifty spread, an afterthought almost, easily tossed aside so the room might bloom bigger and brighter with all its festive splendor.

Hat tip to Wayne for this fabulous Christmas moment.
 

Shawn: I feel nothing but sympathy for this guy. He probably figured taking up with those kindly old ladies would be a sweet deal. How could he know they were actually elderly pornographers who target skid row hustlers, lure them back to their respectable-looking suburban split-level and ultimately coerce them to don glittery Santa attire for their web-based smut ring? The dainty, lacy curtains belie a yuletide off-to-grandmother’s-house-we-go warmth and conceal the organized crime within. The chintzy dime store vase has a very “Mama’s Family” rerun vibe while the fakey flower arrangement at once invites you to have a sugar cookie and pay no attention whatsoever to the hidden camera.

Richard: “So, do you like it? It was a total rush job — grandma stepped out of the house for, like, ten minutes, and it took me almost that long to dig out the Naughty Santa costume she’d worn for Halloween. Then I had to set up the tripod and the camera in the living room — I mean, I didn’t even have time to do the red-eye thing. Still, I think it’ll make a nice Christmas card, don’t you, Uncle Jim?”

John: Heaven’s Portals are now open for business. That mural, first of all, then the holy water fount, then the banker’s lamp with the faux stained glass. And back to the mural again. This is what it means when the senses reel.

Gods, cupids, angels — and meaty buns … hard-as-granite meaty buns … please-be-seated meaty buns. I need to lie down now. Medic the room is spinning.

An angel with singed wings (brilliant touch) swoops down with … what, a hula hoop?… no, surely a crown (could that be, of thorns? oh, puleeze!) for our buzz-cut art-lover and damaged altar boy.

Storm clouds part, a …. god? goddess? mermaid? … lifts an elegiac arm, and all the heavens hail the momentous revelation of a perineum in thong, pulled open for full penetration.

Even the clothes, lying willy-nilly, suggest that a blinding manifestation has whirlwinded though the room, stopping only to smoke a Kools from the cigarette pack on the table. And by the way, what is that color scheme… papaya? The lime-skin shutters, the orange-pulp walls?

No matter. The message is clear: Damaged altar boy seeks same, liturgical-acting only.
 

Shawn: I’d describe this setting as a blue movie take on a Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe epic from the early 70s called The Mounting of Morella or The Bitchfinder General.

His Faustian Van Dyke and bicep bat tattoo are icing on the cake. If it’s possible to fuse Neo-Goth with Country Primitive, this guy has pulled it off.

High props for the velvety deep green draperies and tablecloth. Both items would seem pretentious and “bordello” were it not for the glossy wood chairs and matching chandelier — two items that could be set interiors on Twin Peaks.

I think the candelabra may be the linchpin of the whole affair. Very Interview With The Vampire. No one really needs one of them, yet he’d lose some of his mystique without it.

The bonus is the treeny Home Sweet Home-style wall mount in the background that adds a cozy air to the whole affair.

Sure, he’s probably going to exsanguinate you or perform some sort of diabolical sex rite upon you while you lay dazed and powerless, but he’ll serve you a nice homemade apple crisp first.

We’ve all had worse.
 

Richard: Under normal circumstances, I could be content writing about the unrelenting beigeness of this interior, or perhaps the unearthly “hand toned” landscape dangling above the classy sleeper sofa, but I haven’t had my coffee this morning, and I’ve got post-Kung Pao indigestion, so I’m gonna go for the jugular and talk about the guy.

I’ll go out on a limb and guess that Romeo-in-Waiting here is a mathematician, or at least the kind of person who excelled at algebra. Which is not to say that I hold a deep-seated grudge against men who can solve for X, but let’s face it: they tend to be a little “left brain”.

It looks like Poindexter caught half an episode of Trading Spaces (which is all anyone should be exposed to, anyway) and ran straight to Sam’s to pick up grosses of votive candles, side tables, and ID lubricant. Which is fine, but whereas a right-brained geometry enthusiast would’ve arranged his new wares in a random pattern to interest the eye, this poor zhlub has chosen fearful, fearful symmetry. Still, we needn’t lavish him with all our pity — we ought to save some of it for his Manhunt blind date.

John: Thank you, Richard, for reminding us that the Beige Lifestyle is a choice; nobody is born that way. But I think Poindexter — for that surely must be his dream name, as Bezuzu was Linda Blair’s dream name in Exorcist II — I think he’s making an epic effort to break out and go gay.

It is not lost on me that he has coordinated the room to pick up the colors in that remarkable paint-by-the-numbers above his bed. I recognize it as Mountain Idly #267, and I suspect P did it, as I did mine, during art therapy at the rehab. It could have been worse. One girl in my class — like so many of us, another showkid in recovery — did the whole ballet series (#430 - 440) and now her bedroom is a pink-striped candy box, with lamps that look like they’re wearing tutus.

So kudos to Poindexter, for going nuts with the forest green bedsheets and matching under garment — alas, it’s too modest to be really called underwear. See that there is the problem: those swim trunks you’re wearing plus the lined-up candles plus the pull-out sofa bed — they’re all too psychically beige to be a true break with your tragic lifestyle.

One suspects that even after chatting up a man for hours online and then meeting him in a coffee shop to check out the goods and then driving him back in a fever to your den of beige sin, you still end up having profoundly anonymous sex — if mutual handjobs can still be called sex.