Author, and friend of the podcast, Tammy Middleton stops by to discuss this year’s Autism Awareness Month Auction, which kicks off on April 1! Jeff and I review movies like Kong: Skull Island and Beauty & the Beast. I wax philosophic about how much I love the classic beefcake coffee table book collection AMG: 1000 Model Directory. All this and more can be found at BigGayFictionPocast.com.
I take it you guys have seen BEEFCAKE, Thom Fitzgerald’s film about Robert Mizer and AMG? It’s one of my all-time favorites, though really hard to define. It’s got a lot of documentary footage and interviews (including Joe D’Allesandro and a bunch of the unknown models), but tonally it sort of veers between screwball comedy (with a musical sequence) and melodrama. You learn a ton about the censorship of male nude images (and the homophobia that went with that) in the era, and to top it off, there’s scads of full-frontal male nudity. (I like to say it’s what the MAGIC MIKE movies should have been.) The DVD extras are worthwhile: Fitzgerald’s commentary is really entertaining (well, except maybe the part where he takes a phone call from his boyfriend and doesn’t step away from the recording), and there are some vintage AMG films included. I’d love to know what you think if you see it…