Since then, that way of looking at men has continued to evolve through “Looking for Light,” an ongoing series that brings together Stuart’s desire to understand and explore the male body, masculinity, and intimacy through light.

Now, we share another installment in the project, which has become something of a record of Stuart’s evolution behind the camera. The things he notices have changed. So has his understanding of vulnerability, his relationship with nudity, and his willingness to let quieter moments come through in his images.

In this first-person essay for Gayety, Stuart reflects on the continuation of “Looking for Light,” the individual men who have shaped the larger project, and why, after years of photographing the male body, he’s increasingly interested in moments when men can pose without needing to perform.

Looking for Light By Stuart Carruthers

When I made the first “Looking for Light,” I don’t think I knew I was beginning something I might spend my whole career returning to.

At the time, it was a way of bringing together photographs I had made of different men. I knew things connected them — light, the male body, intimacy, masculinity — but I don’t think I fully understood what the project was asking yet.

Three volumes later, I think I understand it a little more.

The title has always been literal. I’m obsessed with light. I’m constantly watching what it does to a body: how it catches skin, disappears into shadow, changes someone's shape, or makes a tiny detail suddenly the most important part of the photograph.

Subscribe now

But “Looking for Light” has gradually become about what I’m looking for in people too.

Connection. Tenderness. Desire. Vulnerability. Confidence. Awkwardness. Sometimes just a moment when someone stops thinking about being photographed and simply exists in front of me. I’ve said before that I don’t like categorizing my photographs too much. I still don’t. I’m a gay man photographing men, often nude men, so of course desire can be present. I’m not interested in pretending that it isn’t. But desire is only one part of how I look at men.

A man can be desirable and vulnerable. Masculine and incredibly soft. A photograph can be erotic and tender at the same time. Those contradictions have become much more interesting to me than trying to decide what category an image belongs to. Perhaps that is also why I’ve never wanted “Looking for Light” to become a series of disconnected shoots.

One person can’t represent everything I’m interested in about men, and neither can one photograph. Every person I photograph changes the conversation slightly.

When I start bringing the photographs together, things happen that I couldn’t have planned during the shoots. Two men who have never met can suddenly seem connected. A hand photographed years ago can echo a gesture in a photograph I’ve just made. A very confident image can sit beside something much quieter and completely change how I read both of them.

That’s when the project becomes particularly exciting for me.

The photographs start having conversations without me.

Alongside “Looking for Light,” I’ve also been making the individual zines — Alberto, Michele, Charles, Kramer and others. I’ve previously described those as chapters in a longer conversation, and I think I understand their relationship to “Looking for Light” more clearly now.

They’re the same inquiry at different distances. “Looking for Light” is me stepping back. The individual zines are me moving closer. With the main volumes, I’m looking across different men, bodies, encounters, and years. With an individual zine, I can stay with one person and really look.

That matters because there are so many different versions of someone within a single shoot. Someone can appear completely assured in one frame and vulnerable in another. Their body can be sexual, sculptural, awkward, powerful, or incredibly tender. There are tiny gestures and expressions that might disappear when I’m selecting a handful of photographs for a larger collection, but when I give one person an entire zine, those quieter images have space to become important.

I don’t have to choose one photograph and say, this is who this man was.

I can let him be contradictory.

And I think that has changed the way I make “Looking for Light” too. When I started photographing nude men, nudity itself probably felt like vulnerability to me. There is obviously trust involved in taking your clothes off and allowing someone to photograph you.

But I’ve learned that nudity and vulnerability aren’t the same thing.

Someone can be completely naked and give you very little of themselves. Someone can reveal an enormous amount through a hand, a glance, the way they sit, the way they touch another person, or simply by being still.

I think I’ve become much more sensitive to those moments.

Share

I’ve also become less interested in asking someone to perform masculinity for me. Most of the people I photograph aren’t professional models, and I’ve always loved that. I’m not looking for the perfect pose or the perfect body.

Increasingly, I’m looking for the point at which the pose disappears. There is no need to perform. That phrase appeared in Charles, but I think it has quietly become a philosophy running through everything I make.

For “Looking for Light: Vol. 3,” I can see that I’m more comfortable with that philosophy than I was when I made the first volume. I’m more willing to let photographs be quiet. I’m more interested in fragments of bodies, touch, closeness, and the spaces between people. I don’t feel the same need for every photograph to announce itself.

I trust the quieter images more now. I trust the people I’m photographing more too. And maybe I trust myself more.

Each “Looking for Light” volume has become a record of that change. Volume 1 contains the photographer I was then. Volume 2 already looks at men slightly differently. Volume 3 isn’t an attempt to replace either of them. It simply shows where my eye has traveled next. That’s why I don’t think the project has an ending.

I’m going to get older. My relationship with my own body will change. My understanding of desire, intimacy, masculinity, and queerness will change. The men I meet will change. The things I notice about them will change.

So the photographs have to change too.

Maybe years from now I’ll look back at Volume 3 and realize I still didn’t completely understand what I was looking for.

I actually hope that’s the case. Because “Looking for Light” was never really about finding an answer, it’s about continuing to look.

Want to see more from Stuart?

Follow him on Instagram and explore more of his photography, projects, and shop on his website, where you can order all three volumes of “Looking for Light,” individual zines like this one, and prints of Stuart’s work.

Leave a comment

As a choreographer, he has created work for ballet companies across the United States and around the world, developing an intimate understanding of how bodies communicate through movement. Photography began as an extension of that world, but over time, it became a new, distinctly different outlet.

Behind the camera, Trey isn’t interested in perfecting an image, particularly the images featured here, all of dancers. There are no repetitive shots to perfect or movements to rehearse. He is interested in what happens when that control disappears.

“I love to be quiet during a photoshoot,” he tells us. “In the dance studio, I spend so much time being exacting with detail. I am, in essence, coaching someone in how to be perfect in a way that is repeatable. In photography, I am allowed to capture a single perfect moment … once.”

The collection Trey shares with Gayety spans roughly 12 years and brings together nude portraits of dancers he has photographed throughout that time. Some were already collaborators. Others were men he met while traveling. Together, the photographs offer another way of looking at the bodies Trey has spent much of his life studying.

Share

Beyond the Tights

Trey’s relationship with dance began when he was 11 years old in Wichita, Kansas. A musical theater kid who struggled during dance auditions, he enrolled in tap and ballet classes and quickly discovered that his real interest wasn’t necessarily performing the movement. It was creating it.

“I was a very creative kid; I took to choreography right away,” he says. “I just started making up steps.”

That interest would eventually take Trey around the world. He spent his dance career with Houston Ballet before pursuing choreography full time, creating work for companies across the United States, Europe, Asia and South America.

But dance was never his only creative interest. Photography, filmmaking, writing, singing and drawing have all become different ways of exploring many of the same ideas.

Photography became more serious after he retired from dancing at 25. Then, while rehearsing at White Oak Plantation, he went swimming with several dancers in the St. Marys River. He noticed how the dark, tannin-rich water changed color against their skin, moving from clear and gold to orange, rust, and eventually brown as their bodies disappeared beneath the surface.

He had a camera with him, and they began experimenting. That experience changed how he thought about photographing the body from then on.

“It really got me thinking about the body in relationship to dance and how intimate and naked the life of a dancer is, yet we wear tights to cover up,” he says. “It started to feel like saying, ‘the body is beautiful, but only so beautiful.’”

Removing that final layer introduced something he hadn’t experienced in quite the same way through dance.

“There was a psychological liberation that came both for me as the witness and for dancers to be seen and accepted without clothes on.”

No Perfect Position

That relationship between control and freedom runs through this collection's visual narrative.

Trey’s earliest photographs grew out of existing relationships with dancers he was choreographing. When working with Benjamin Freemantle on a ballet at San Francisco Ballet, for example, the two decided to take photographs together as another way to explore their collaboration.

That shared vocabulary gives Trey a shorthand with the dancers in front of his camera, but photography also allows both of them to let some of that training go.

“I do my very best not to pose anyone, but rather to create constructs that someone can feel clear within to explore,” he says.

Instead of prescribing an exact position, he might give a dancer a physical exercise, an emotion, or a simple idea and allow him to determine where it leads.

Subscribe now

“My main goal is to help someone get out of their head and feel like they have to control ‘looking good’ and just have an experience,” he says. “The onus is on me to make a beautiful photograph.”

For dancers accustomed to spending hours refining every movement, the freedom to stop thinking about how their bodies look becomes part of the exercise.

The photographs may record those moments, but for Trey, what happens between photographer and subject matters as much as what eventually appears on the page.

“I care more about the journey of the person and the human interaction of a shoot than I do about the end result,” he explains. “Something has developed over time where a photoshoot can be a place of discovery on more of a spiritual level than anything else.”

To see additional uncensored images and continue reading our interview about the complicated relationship between sexuality and exploitation, the stories behind several photographs in the collection, and how photography has changed Trey’s approach to choreography, subscribe to Gayety today.

Read more

Since then, he has continued that practice with one creative concept that has followed him from city to city.

Whenever traveling some…

Read more

Living with a hearing impairment from a young age complicated his relationship with sound and, he believes, strengthened his connection to his other senses, particularly sight. “Not having control over one of your senses really develops the others,” Ariel tells us. “So from very early on I was looking at things pretty closely.”

By his pre-teen years, Ariel tapped into an alternative language. He picked up a camera and began documenting the scenes that surrounded him, paying close attention to how the world communicated visually. How something would move in and out of focus, or how light could completely shift the mood or tone of the story being told.

In college, Ariel took a class called “Picturing Sexuality,” which reframed the way he thought about photography and what he wanted to create. “There was always a strong reciprocity between the questions I was facing in my personal life and the images I felt compelled to make,” he says.

Those questions eventually led Ariel to create Association Libre (“Free Association”), a self-portrait series exploring sexuality, masculinity, and the ways both shape desire and identity.

Association Libre

Ariel developed Association Libre as a “typology of sex,” where his collaborators could create visual narratives surrounding their own personal sexual stories, but translating something so intimate into photographs required a level of trust that went beyond stripping down for the camera.

For some of these men, being recognized could have real consequences as aspects of their lives were incompatible with their sexuality or being publicly associated with the images, Ariel explains, and they “had a lot to lose if these pictures fell in the wrong hands.”

That presented Ariel with an interesting challenge: How do you photograph something so personal while protecting the person sharing it?

His solution was to make himself the subject of his erotic images.

“I needed to make the photographer/subject relationship more horizontal,” he says.

Using his face and body allowed Ariel to protect his collaborators’ identities without relying solely on anonymous bodies, an important distinction to him when developing a series surrounding gay sexuality. “We all know how pervasive headless nudity is in gay culture,” Ariel says. “It was important for me to not make images that harkened to hookup culture, or that could be confused for porn.”

And not because Ariel has anything against porn. He’s quick to recognize pornography's importance in visual culture, but wanted his photographs to exist elsewhere. And they do, both in context and in creation.

Creating the images was painstaking by design.

Working with analog equipment while serving as photographer and subject left little room for error, and the project's intimate nature required careful communication between Ariel and each collaborator. Even with proper planning and preparation, nothing was guaranteed, and Ariel might walk away with only one or two usable images.

The demanding process eventually led Ariel to end the series. “I believe the difficulty in achieving the images was on some level a necessary part of the process,” he says.

Sex, Power and Masculinity

While Association Libre includes sex, kink and fetish, Ariel isn’t necessarily interested in making the images intentionally arousing. Some, he says, are “unsexy, or unsettling.”

Instead, he’s interested in what our sexual interests can reveal about desire, masculinity and power. Kinks and fetishes, Ariel explains, can replay or subvert the same power dynamics people experience in their everyday lives, making them useful for understanding how desire is formed.

Ariel’s interest in how power and violence show up in our sexual relationships has continued beyond Association Libre.

More recently, he’s been exploring masculinity and sexual violence between men, something he describes as an enormous blind spot in both straight and queer communities.

Despite the years of work behind Association Libre, Ariel says he’s had few opportunities to show it. He’s been told the photographs are too difficult, too easily confused with pornography or unlikely to reach a wide audience. That’s part of why he wanted to share them with Gayety.

“What does it mean to desire men today?” Ariel asks. “How are our sexuality and desire formed? How do we relate to each other, and is that still queer?”

To see uncensored images from Ariel’s Association Libre, and continue reading our interview, subscribe to Gayety today.

Read more

Somewhere between learning the settings and wandering around with a camera in his hand, the assignment became a new way to experience the world around him. “It quickly stopped being an academic task and became a way of expressing myself,” Geronimo says.

Photography came and went in the years that followed, and over time, its place in his life has shifted between a hobby, a side hustle, and a career. Ultimately, he decided to keep this creative outlet for himself, protected from the pressure and expectations of turning passion into profit.

Read more

This time, BATE CRUSH explores the vulnerable space between physical intimacy and emotional connection through a cinematic photo series featuring creators Phoenix and Marz.

Together, they examine the awkwardness, chemistry, and unexpected intimacy that can emerge when a one-night stand doesn’t end the next morning.

Now, BATE CRUSH shares the inspiration behind the series before speaking with Phoenix and Marz about their experience of bringing the story to life.

The idea behind this story was a one-night stand that neither person was quite ready to end. Two people meet on a night out, feel an immediate attraction, and go home together.

The sex is the easy part. The awkward part comes the next morning, when both people want the other to stay but neither wants to be the first person to admit it.

That was the moment I wanted to explore.

People can be incredibly direct online about sex and what they want, but telling someone in person that you actually like them can feel much more exposing. There is the fear of rejection, but there is also this pressure to play it cool, not come on too strong, and act less interested than you really are.

The short video introducing the series sets up that moment.

One of them is getting ready to leave while the other is trying to work out how to ask, “Do you really have to go?” Once he agrees to stay a little longer, the Instax images continue the story and show what happens next.

I had photographed Marz and Phoenix individually before, but this was the first time I brought them together. They had never met before the shoot. I paired them because they both have a quality that I love photographing: confidence.

They are confident in their bodies, take direction extremely well, and are completely open to the process. They both know how to give a lot to an image without overthinking it.

We photographed the story in Phoenix’s bedroom. It is a very personal space, and visually it already felt like the right setting for the morning after. The scenario was directed, but I wanted to leave enough room for them to react to each other and allow the chemistry to develop naturally.

The images move between sex, sensuality, and affection, but the physical side is only part of the story. I was more interested in everything happening around it, the hesitation, the eye contact, the humor, the affection, and the point where two people who have only just met begin to feel comfortable with each other.

Marz and Phoenix are not a couple, and they were not friends before the shoot.

Their relationship exists inside the story we created together. For me, that is what makes the photographs interesting. They explore the possibility that something intended to be casual could feel different in the morning when someone finally decides to ask the other person to stay.

This is their experience, in their own words.

To see the uncensored images from Phoenix and Marz’s erotic morning after and continue reading this interview, subscribe to Gayety today.

Get 50% off for 1 year

Read more

If you’ve been following Gayety for a while, you may remember our previous feature on Slava, who became the first journalist granted political asylum in the United States on the grounds of homophobic persecution. For more than three decades, his work has explor…

Read more

Gym cruising, to be specific. Whether or not you've ever sought out a steam room hookup, understanding the history, etiquette, and unspoken codes of cruising offers a window into how generat…

Read more

At first, the photos almost behave themselves. Almost. There are sailor hats, ropes, studio props, glossy thighs, flexed torsos, and the kind of lighting that makes every vein pop. Then your eyes drop, because of course they do, and there it is. The cock is not hidden, suggested, or politely tucked away. It is hard, semi-hard, heavy, framed, lit, and absolutely part of the point.

Welcome to Bruce of LA’s so-called “erection collection,” a group of vintage male nude photographs where the models are erect or close enough. And beneath all that full-frontal tension, it is also a fascinating piece of queer visual history.

Subscribe now

Bruce of LA was the working name of Bruce Bellas, one of the major figures in mid-century American physique photography. He helped shape the way generations of gay men saw the male body before gay desire could safely exist in public. His work lived in that tricky space between bodybuilding, art study, private fantasy, and let’s be honest, jerk-off material with excellent lighting.

That is what makes this collection so good. It doesn’t pretend the viewer is only there for the composition. Yes, the lighting matters. Yes, the pose matters. Yes, the archival context matters. But let’s be honest, the hard-on matters too.

Who Was Bruce of LA?

Bruce Bellas was born in Nebraska in 1909 and eventually became one of the most recognizable names in physique photography. Before the camera became his ticket into queer history, he worked as a teacher. Then he headed west, found Los Angeles, and started photographing the kind of men who looked like they were built by sunshine, dumbbells, and someone’s dirtiest little daydream.

By the 1940s and 1950s, Bellas was shooting bodybuilders, sailors, cowboys, athletes, soldiers, and all-American hunks who could be sold to the public as “fitness studies” while privately doing much more interesting work. His photographs were polished and playful, with a strong sense of character. His models were rarely just naked. They were staged, costumed, lit, and given just enough story to make your imagination start misbehaving.

Related Posts

That is the Bruce of LA magic. A sailor is not just a sailor. He is a sailor with his pants gone, a cap still on, and a cock that appears to have joined the Navy too. A model with rope is not just posing with rope. He is suddenly somewhere between a classical study and a bondage fantasy.

Bruce knew exactly what he was doing. His photos wink at you. They flirt. They pose like art, then quietly put a hand on your thigh.

Read more

In “Uncensored: My Year Behind the Scenes with Michael Lucas and His Models,” published by Salzgeber Buchverlage, Kenneth captures the world of Lucas Entertainment. Not to document the sex, but to photograph everything surrounding it: anticipation, exhaustion, friendship, humor, and the surprising sense of calm that exists when the cameras turn off.

The project began with an unexpected Instagram message from adult film pioneer Michael Lucas: “Beautiful work. Would love to be photographed by you.”

Rather than shooting a dedicated portrait session, Kenneth proposed something much more ambitious: a year-long photographic essay documenting Michael and his performers during the in-between moments, never while the camera was rolling.

That decision built this book.

To see more fully nude, uncensored photos from “Uncensored,” subscribe for free and unlock this post.

*Offer valid until midnight August 4, 2026

Read more

David’s latest ongoing series trades solemnity for a world that is simultaneously glamorous and trashy, erotic and absurd. Drawing inspirati…

Read more

Known for his cinematic, hyper-saturated images that blend camp, fantasy, and homoeroticism, Romain has spent nearly a decade building elaborate worlds th…

Read more

The book features four years of photographs exploring attraction, vulnerability, and the space between admiration and obsession, where eleven straight men from Europe and the United States are fully exposed both physically and emotionally.

At first glance, it may look like any another collection of male nudes.

But the deeper you get into the book, the more it reveals itself as a deeply personal love letter to the straight men who have shaped Ohm’s life. “I certainly can’t explain why I adore straight men!” he writes. “My life is a beautiful tragedy. I am complicated and often misunderstood. I long for love, yet I am too scared to embrace it — so I only observe, quietly, from a distance.”

An honest admission that gives every photograph a deeper sense of longing.

And rather than relying on elaborate sets or exaggerated sexuality, Ohm keeps the focus where it belongs: on the men themselves. Familiar spaces become quiet backdrops rather than distracting sets, allowing each portrait to feel surprisingly personal.

To see exclusive images from this book, become a Gayety VIP.

Upgrade your subscription and receive a complimentary copy of Desire: Straight Men in My Bedroom.

*Limited to the next two (2) new Gayety VIPs.

Get 50% off for 1 year

Read more

In the collection he shares with Gayety, the French artist takes us into apartments, bedrooms, kitchens, and quiet everyday spaces, where intimacy naturally unfolds.

Rather than constructing idealized fantasies, Marc photographs real people in familiar environments, embracing the individuality of each body and the ordinary moments that make desire feel authentic.

Marc’s work is about more than documenting nudity.

It’s about documenting people. Through carefully composed portraits of the men he loves, he creates an ongoing archive of queer life where tenderness, freedom, and connection are key to preserving real moments.

Reality Is the Ideal

Looking through Marc’s photographs, it’s difficult to separate the people from the spaces they inhabit. Nothing appears overly styled, including the body, and that’s exactly the point. Beds remain unmade. Kitchens are lived in. Bodies are unretouched.

“I often try to photograph my models in their own homes,” Marc explains. “Their interiors allow me to stay as close to them as possible, and above all, I am interested only in reality in photography. Reality is, most often, my ideal.”

It’s a consistent philosophy throughout the collection.

For Marc, intimacy isn’t something that’s created for the camera. It’s already there, waiting to be noticed. “I often find direct observation to be highly erotic.”

Even when Marc introduces constructed elements, whether through handmade backdrops or photocopied posters, they remain connected to the individual standing in front of the camera rather than distracting from them.

That same commitment to authenticity extends to the way Marc approaches nudity.

Rather than smoothing away imperfections or editing bodies to fit a particular standard, Marc embraces the natural differences between the people he photographs.

An approach that extends to the objects that find their way into his photographs.

Phones, text messages, and selfies aren’t merely props but reflections of how many people experience intimacy today. “I really like staying grounded in reality,” he says. “These objects are useful to me. They are also a sign of the times, of an era.”

An Archive of Queer Life

Although Marc’s photographs feature a wide range of bodies, ages, races, and expressions of masculinity, he says diversity has never been something he consciously set out to document. It’s simply a reflection of the people he loves.

“To be honest, in this work I try to show people I love,” he says. “And I have always loved bodies, ages, and skin tones that are very different.”

That personal connection gives the work a tenderness that often cannot be manufactured.

Rather than treating his subjects exclusively as models, Marc builds relationships with many of the people he photographs. One of those relationships is with fellow artist Anton Sibenaler, who has become a frequent collaborator and close friend.

Whether Marc is capturing a new friend, or longtime companion like Anton, the relationships are just as important as the photographs themselves.

Get 33% off for 1 year

Read more

For his latest collection with Gayety, the Berlin-based photographer presents a series of tightly cropped male nudes inspired by Caravaggio's dramatic light and shadow.

Rather than revealing the entire body, each photograph isolates individual details, where skin, texture, light, and composition become as alluring as the nudity itself.

But for Florian, the work is about more than photographing the male body.

After surviving encephalitis in 2007 and experiencing significant memory loss, photography became a way to preserve the moments he feared forgetting. Today, that experience continues to shape his work, creating photographs that leave just enough untold for the viewer to complete the story themselves.

Looking Closer

For Florian, zooming in on the body is instinctual. “It’s essentially how I look at life,” he says. “My eyes are naturally drawn to details, and I sometimes have to force myself to zoom out.”

And those close crops aren’t created in editing; they’re photographed that way from the very beginning. To achieve that level of intimacy, every session begins long before anyone steps in front of the camera.

Florian meets each subject beforehand, over coffee or for a walk, to build a relationship grounded in familiarity and trust. “I don’t want to photograph people I don’t know,” he explains. “The more I know in advance, the better I can take care of them during the shoot.”

Once the camera comes out, his direction becomes surprisingly minimal.

Rather than dramatic poses, his adjustments are subtle. A slight movement of the hand or shift in posture. Small refinements that allow the photograph to feel natural.

It’s also why he believes photographers can only create intimacy by accepting a certain amount of distance.

“As a photographer, distance is inevitable,” Hetz says. “I need that distance in order to create intimacy. Every photographer gives the viewer permission to look. I simply give them permission to look much closer.”

To see more of Florian’s uncensored images and to continue reading our interview, subscribe to Gayety today.

Get 33% off for 1 year

Read more

In his earliest work, the body was positioned for perfection. A sexualized object to be voraciously consumed. Now, his work is interested in saying something, not just showing something.

That intention continues in the collection he shares with Gayety, which showcases recent work as he experiments with analog photography and prepares the fifth volume of his NSFW photography zine.

We got to chat with Kike about his creative evolution and why authenticity became more important than perfection.

From Hobby to Identity

When Kike reflects on his early interest in photography, he says, “I think the ability of creating imagery was what captivated me. I grew up scrolling Tumblr like a maniac during my college years. I’d stay up on a Friday night listening to Sky Ferreira and looking at editorials from Ellen Von Unwerth online, thinking, ‘This is what I want to do.’”

Related Posts

So, while studying in Venezuela, Kike spent two semesters learning the fundamentals of photography before continuing his education with courses in portrait and nude photography, but even with formal education and years spent refining his work, he hesitated to fully embrace the title of photographer.

“I always looked at it as a hobby,” he says. “Looking back, I think it was a defense mechanism. I always felt like the label ‘photographer’ was too big for me, but that was just impostor syndrome.”

Today, that uncertainty is gone.

“The real Kike is not the one who works 9-to-5 in a marketing agency. The real Kike is the one who walks around with his camera in his tote bag on a random day and snaps people. Photography is my creative outlet.”

Moving Beyond the Perfect Nude

That confidence and self-assuredness have changed more than how Kike views himself. It’s changed how he views and captures others.

“I’m more interested in eroticism versus pornography. I don’t care about a hot naked body on a terrace. Any gay photographer can, and does, do that. I’m more interested in showcasing real intimacy, flaws, giving you a postcard of a real human moment.”

And his work has seen more than an emotional shift; there is a technical change as well.

Subscribe now

Kike has moved away from the immediacy of digital photography for analog, which requires a slower, more intentional approach. He carries his camera everywhere and photographs people in everyday situations rather than producing elaborate shoots, and lets real life direct his work.

Using Photography to Start Conversations

Kike knows his evolving perspective has the power to shape meaningful conversations within the queer community, particularly around the unrealistic body standards many gay men continue to navigate.

As his work has evolved, so has his understanding of what queer photography can do. For Kike, the camera isn’t just documenting sexuality. It’s creating an opportunity to talk about it.

“Creators and artists have the power and even the responsibility of tackling certain hard topics through their work,” he says.

Those conversations extend well beyond aesthetics. Kike believes photography can create space for honest discussions about sexuality, social media, chemsex, and the realities of queer life.

Subscribe now

“Being unapologetically ourselves is the most political thing we can do,” he says. “But that doesn’t strip away the fact that we should also talk about uncomfortable things we’re facing as a community.”

That evolution has also changed the people Kike photographs, and the stories he wants to tell. A shift that reflects a broader change in his priorities as an artist.

“I used to be so focused on showcasing imagery that would appeal to people,” he says. “Now, I want people to hear me out, whether they like it or not.”

That desire to be heard isn’t merely about thought provocation. It’s about encouraging a little more empathy for ourselves and for one another, especially in a community that can be quick to reward “perfection.”

For Kike, that’s ultimately the hope behind this collection. Not simply to create images that arouse, but to encourage viewers to think a little differently about what they’re responding to in the first place.

For more from Kike and to see additional uncensored images from his collection, subscribe to Gayety today.

Read more

The first thing you notice is the cock.

Not because the photographs are careless. They are not. Not because the images are crude. They are too deliberate for that. The cock is there because, for decades, it had been the problem. The evidence. The line America kept drawing, erasing, redrawing, and prosecuting.

In this Target Studios collection, the cock is not hidden behind a posing strap, Greek urn, towel, shadow, sword, or fake bodybuilding excuse. It is centered. Lit. Claimed. Sometimes hard. Sometimes casual. Sometimes treated like another piece of the set, like boots, denim, rope, leather, or a mustache.

Because by the time Target Studios emerged in the 1970s, gay erotica was no longer simply asking, “Can we show this?” It was asking something bigger and more dangerous: “What kind of men do gay men get to imagine themselves as?”

For Target, the answer was hairy, masculine, staged, direct, and unapologetically horny. Men in boots. Men in leather. Men with thick mustaches and heavy bodies. Men who looked like they fixed trucks, worked docks, rode motorcycles, fucked hard, came harder and did not apologize afterward.

It was fantasy, obviously. But fantasy has always been one of the ways queer people survive.

Target Studios was not just selling photos of naked men. It was selling a world where gay desire did not flinch.

And that world arrived through the mail.

The Archive Gets the Story Wrong Sometimes

Jim French and Lou Thomas did create something monumental together: Colt Studio, founded in 1967. French worked under the name Rip Colt. Thomas was his business partner and part of the New York leather world. In French’s own later telling, he and Thomas set up Colt that year, then parted company after several years. Thomas went on to start Target Studios. (Advocate.com)

Archival records from ONE Archives and the Online Archive of California sharpen the timeline. Colt moved toward Southern California in 1974, and French bought out Thomas’s share, freeing Thomas to form Target Studios. Another ONE Archives finding aid says Lou Thomas founded Target in the early 1970s after leaving Colt, with a clear eye toward “ultra masculine” types and themes. (OAC)

Target was not Colt with a different logo. It was Lou Thomas’s answer to a changing gay market.

Colt had the polish of a studio system. Target had more sweat in the walls. Colt could feel like idealized masculine sculpture. Target leaned into leather-daddy gravity, mustaches, rougher sex fantasy, and scenes that felt closer to a back room, a hayloft, a garage, or a half-remembered trick from a bar you were too nervous to enter alone.

But Target’s genius was making the setup feel less like art class and more like trouble.

Before the Full Frontal, There Was the Pose

To understand why these pictures hit so hard, you have to go back before Target. Before Colt. Before the 1970s. For much of the mid-20th century, gay male desire had to wear a costume.

It could be bodybuilding. It could be “physical culture.” It could be classical Greece. It could be art study. It could be health. It could be wrestling. It could be two men in tiny posing straps pretending the camera was there for muscle symmetry and not the obvious heat between their bodies.

This was the physique magazine era.

Those magazines were not always openly gay because they could not afford to be. They operated through codes. A column, a warrior pose, a strategically placed hand, a sword, a shadow, a smile that knew too much. Readers understood the signal. Censors often did too. Recent reassessments of physique photography have emphasized how these images masqueraded as fitness or classical art while clearly speaking to gay male desire. (The Guardian)

Bob Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild was one of the major engines of that world. Mizer founded AMG in Los Angeles in 1945 and later published Physique Pictorial, a magazine that helped circulate male images through a coded gay network. ONE Archives notes that Mizer’s work did more than entertain. It helped build awareness and community among gay men, even as mail censorship made the circulation of “obscene” material risky. (One Archives)

The Bob Mizer Museum describes AMG as a studio, social hub, and sanctuary, and says Mizer’s Physique Pictorial introduced and championed artists including George Quaintance and Tom of Finland. (Bob Mizer Museum)

That was the old grammar. The body could be seen, but not fully named. The ass could be worshipped, but with plausible deniability and the cock was the red line.

And every gay man knew it.

Read more

“I was never technically a great photographer,” he says. “And that’s exactly what fascinated me.”

For Lauro, the creative endeavor was never about mastering every aspect of the craft. It was about capturing images and finding a way to communicate feelings that didn’t always have an obvious outlet elsewhere.

And more than a decade after picking up a camera, that instinct continues to inform his work.

The Brazilian photographer has built an archive centered on the male body, but his photographs rarely document the body at the surface level. Instead, they focus on reshaping, adding texture, and experimentation.

Sometimes that means wrapping a body in foam. Other times, it means incorporating clothing, textiles, or geometric forms that build the body into something new.

The Space Between

One of Lauro’s most recognizable series is “Comfort,” a project that emerged during a particularly uncomfortable period in his own life. This collection is a Gayety exclusive and continuation of that work and the emotions that influenced it. When discussing this installment, we discuss how art often imitates real-life feelings; in this case, his personal discomfort. Lauro says, “I wanted my images to express the opposite.”

A contrasting intention that helped create one of his most personal works.

Throughout the series, comfort takes on many forms.

Sometimes it’s found in softness and texture. Other times, through concealment, abstraction, or the relationship between the body and the objects surrounding it.

The conversation Lauro started around comfort would extend beyond his immediate audience when his work was featured by WGSN, a forecasting platform that identifies everything from emerging materials and textures to larger shifts in consumer culture years before they reach the mainstream.

A shift that is always about finding balance between structure and softness.

Without Naming the Subject

Even when his photographs feature full nudity, Lauro is often more interested in anonymity than identity.

“It intrigues me more to tell the story and create these sculptures without naming the person,” he says. “We are telling a story meant to connect with everyone.”

Subscribe now

And as his work evolved, so did his perspective. He found himself becoming less interested in showing everything at once and more interested in what could be suggested instead.

“I realized that the sensuality of what is hidden can feel more erotic than revealing everything at once.”

That sense of curiosity and wonder extends beyond the image and into the people Lauro chooses to photograph.

For years, he actively sought out individuals who had never posed nude before, as the vulnerability and uncertainty of the experience often brought something unexpected to the work, saying “that sense of novelty really inspires me.”

And despite already having more than 60 unpublished editorials, he’s intentionally creating room for new experiences. “I need to release them and create space for creative idleness so that new ideas can emerge,” he says.

Whether he’s experimenting or searching for inspiration in unexpected places, Lauro’s work remains driven by the same curiosity that first drew him to photography. Not a desire to perfect the process, but a willingness to see where it leads.

For more from Lauro, be sure to follow him on Instagram or check out his website!

To see additional uncensored images from Lauro’s collection, subscribe now.

Read more

Before the police arrive, someone is knocking. Nobody seems worried enough. The music keeps going. Men keep drifting through rooms. Bodies stay close, hands stay busy, and the apartment keeps holding its secrets like a mouth that knows exactly when to stay shut. In Noel Alejandro’s RAID, the party is not just a party. It is a sex space, a comedown, a memory, a warning, and maybe a crime scene. It is the kind of place where gay desire looks gorgeous until you notice the dread pooling in the corners.

Alejandro has never been interested in making porn that simply gets the job done. That would be too easy. Too clean. Too fucking boring. His films live somewhere between the beautiful and the uncomfortable, where the sex is real, the bodies are real, and the emotional damage around them matters just as much as who is fucking whom. With RAID, now complete in four installments through Bedtime Stories, he pushes that language into darker territory. This is horny cinema. It is also political cinema. It asks what happens when pleasure becomes escape, when escape becomes ritual, and when the spaces queer people build for freedom become targets.

Noel Alejandro Does Not Make Disposable Porn

The first Gayety piece on RAID caught the project as it was beginning to reveal itself. At that point, Alejandro was already talking about the series as a break from his previous work, not because it abandoned sex, but because it refused to make sex behave. He described this as the first time he was not explicitly putting his cinema in service of sex positivity. Instead, he wanted to observe scenes he had witnessed in queer spaces across Europe with darkness, black humor, and no easy judgment.

Now that all four chapters are out, that idea feels sharper. RAID is not here to cleanse desire. It is here to sit in the mess. The sex is raw, gay, sweaty, distracted, impulsive, and emotionally loaded. It does not arrive as a reward. It does not solve the tension. Sometimes, it makes the tension worse. That is the point. Alejandro understands something many adult filmmakers avoid: queer sex can be liberating, stupid, dangerous, tender, selfish, sacred, and obscene all at once.

From Porn to Art, Then Back to the Body

Alejandro’s career has always resisted neat labels. His press materials describe him as an independent filmmaker and adult art-film director working in Berlin, driven by taboo-breaking and by a desire to push erotic storytelling beyond the pre-set boundaries of the adult industry. That mission matters because his work does not treat pornography as a lower form that needs to be rescued by art. Instead, he treats porn as a language that can hold more: fear, sadness, politics, shame, tenderness, humor, and lust.

That is why his films feel different from mainstream gay porn. The fucking is explicit, but it is not isolated from life. His camera does not treat bodies like interchangeable product shots. It lingers on the hesitation before the kiss, the breath after the touch, the strange emotional weather that gathers when men want each other but do not know what that want will cost. Alejandro is not trying to make sex respectable. Thank god. He is trying to make it honest.

RAID 1: Guardian Angels

The first chapter, RAID 1: Guardian Angels, stars Lars Skov, Sunny Mike, and Jonzu, and it begins in a bathroom with a problem nobody can elegantly solve. Felix and Tomas are trying to care for a friend who has passed out in the bathtub. The room is cramped, tiled, humid with worry, and charged with the kind of attraction that arrives at the worst possible time. They are meant to stay focused. They are meant to be responsible. Instead, their attention starts slipping.

That is what makes Guardian Angels so effective. The erotic charge does not come from fantasy perfection. It comes from bad timing, moral friction, and the awful human truth that bodies do not always wait for the correct emotional conditions. Desire enters the room like another person. Suddenly, care, distraction, lust, guilt, and danger are all breathing the same air. Alejandro turns the bathroom into a miniature version of the whole series: a confined space where responsibility and raw gay sex fight for dominance, and neither comes out clean.

Get 50% off for 1 year

Read more

During our initial interview, Yves described himself as a storyteller first and a photographer second. Someone more interested in building visual narratives than creating standalone images.

That hasn’t changed. If anything, his series, “Bring the Boys Back Home,” reinforces this idea. But before discussing the work itself, Yves would like to clarify one thing:

“The depiction of uniforms in this work is not an idolization of any military ideology, nation, or political position. The uniforms originate from different countries, periods, and contexts, precisely to avoid tying the work to one specific conflict or belief system. They function as symbols rather than historical statements. The uniform is not the subject of the work. The human being inside it is.”

An important distinction to keep in mind as you experience the collection.

Beyond the Uniform

The idea for “Bring the Boys Back Home” began while Yves was researching looted artworks during World War II and exploring themes of displacement.

Not just the displacement of people, but also the displacement of objects, images, and cultural history. Over time, that research merged with another recurring interest: the body and the narratives society projects onto it.

Related Post

In this series, the uniform became a natural extension of that idea.

A uniform immediately tells us who someone is supposed to be. It suggests allegiance, identity, rank, authority, and belonging.

For Yves, the more interesting question was what happens when those assumptions are challenged. “The series asks what happens when we look beyond the uniform and encounter the individual underneath,” he says. “What connects us once ideology, rank, nationality, and symbolism are removed?”

The Human Inside It

Although the work references military imagery, Yves says the project was never really about war itself, but rather vulnerability.

Throughout the collection, uniforms remain visible, but the body language feels contemplative rather than authoritative. The figures appear emotionally exposed and fragile.

Many of the poses draw inspiration from religious paintings, saints, martyrs, and classical art rather than traditional military portraiture. The collection creates a deliberate tension between the uniform and the person wearing it.

Yves says, “By placing those readings next to one another, I hoped to create a space where viewers might question their own assumptions and encounter the individual behind the symbol.”

That tension extends into the way Yves approaches the nude male body itself.

For centuries, the male nude occupied a central place in Western art. Today, he believes viewers are often quicker to assign sexuality, discomfort, or shame to those images than vulnerability or contemplation.

“The body itself is simply human,” he says. “It is often the viewer who projects desire, discomfort, morality, ideology, or identity onto it.”

For Yves, nudity isn’t about removing clothing. It’s about removing everything else. A way to free ourselves of labels, expectations, and assumptions. Perhaps that's why “Bring the Boys Back Home” is ultimately more interested in humanity than the soldiers themselves.

Read more