Private Moments

Bel Ami by Howard Roffman

Bruno Gmünder

ISBN 9 783867 870375

This is what used to be called a ‘coffee table’ book – they tend to be ‘art’ books or big fat books about graphics, dance, the cinema and such like.  This one contains a couple of hundred pages of photographs of young men (mostly, probably, in their teens) naked.  Or at least not overdressed.  The ‘private moments’ include doubles, trebles and foursomes.  In the Bel Ami manner the boys are not extraordinarily handsome.  They aren’t plug-uglies either.  Some have ‘interesting’ rather than blandly ‘handsome’ faces.

The ‘private moments’ aren’t intensely sexual either, though the target audience -Gay men – almost certainly, wouldn’t mind interposing their own bodies between some of these.  They mostly aren’t ‘muscle Mary’s’ either.  Though a boy in the first set of ‘moments’ has the look of a jolly young Hercules.  Some of the boys pictured within look quite fragile.  There are only three people with dark hair – and only one with darkish skin – I realise this is not a sociological study… but.  One of the dark haired boys is something of a Nicholas Hoult look-alike.

The facial expressions range from the cheeky, to slightly shy (even holding another chap’s virile member) to boys who obviously ‘fancy themselves’.  Most are just charmingly friendly – unlike a lot of Gay porn.  The membra virile look as if they are attached to human beings — unlike the air-brushed items one sees in (mostly, American) porn.  Some of the boys are ‘well made’.  Nobody is particularly weenie.

It is clear in some cases that not much is really happening on the sexual front.  In one picture, one boy is clearly not sucking off the other — but that may have to do with the photographer enabling the spectator to imagine himself in the place of the other, crouching, boy.  But the book is not ‘raw prawn’.  There is some mild[ish] porn in some wanking scenes.  The fact that the boys are masturbating themselves is slightly alienating – though one (twenty-something?) boy looks, apparently, rather longingly at his fellow-poser’s cock.  There are a number of pages showing two very attractive boys engaging in mutual masturbation.

Howard Roffman in some of the outdoor scenes produced an effect of deep perspective, as in paintings.  (Jim Sweeney of Gay’s The Word bookshop suggested I should have something ‘arty’ in a review.)  The individual pictures are beautiful.  The human figures in them do help, quite a lot.  It is useful if Aunt Megs (the one with the money) discovers it in your grisly gaff – it is ‘art’ after all.  Roffman used a digital camera to produce these genuinely exquisite images.  I have decided I am deeply in lust with a chunky boy with longish dark hair.  (Sad, really, isn’t it?)

If you have a mate who likes photography, loitering about art galleries and attractive boys with no clothes on – buy him this book.  Or buy it for yourself – you’ll enjoy it.

Seán McGouran