BOYS OF BEL AMI, THE [Paperback]

It is surprising, as I find, that the wonderfully and skillfully photographed young male nudes of the Bel Ami series of books seem to have so little popularity in English Canada (no longer regularly available even from that paragon of gay literature distribution, Little Sisters in Vancouver, from the few times that I have checked that firm's WWW site in 2005 and 2006), but, thankfully, Bel Ami's products remain fairly easy to find in major gay-populated Québec cities as Montréal, and but, thankfully, Bel Ami's products remain fairly easy to find in major gay-populated Québec cities as Montréal, and perhaps in the United Kingdom, where I never have travelled, and in the United States, where I have not visited for many years. The youthful men, in their teens and early twenties, photographed very often in full frontal nudity, are equisitely lithe, graceful, lovely, and agreeably or outright impressively "well-hung", each memorably good-looking in his own way that varies from one to another, some "lean and lanky" while others more sleekly and/or heavily muscled in a more forthrightly macho way, still others, by contrast, more endearingly pretty (sweetly juvenile, lovely, and tender), yet others just a bit raffish or lovably gangly rather than so classically handsome as many are, yet all of Bel Ami's lads being memorably appealing.

This book takes a memorable selection by George Duroy (who was filming these lads for one of his moving images projects) of Bel Ami's achingly beautiful young males to on what Howard Roffman, the photographer, refers as "eight glorious days [in 2004 at an holiday spot in] ... the lush seaside resort city [of] Capetown, South Africa" where they appear singly, as couples, and in groups, often interacting variously as posed or behaving spontaneously for the camera, by turns affectionately, and/or playfully, usually delectably "buck naked" (but occasionally lightly and sexily partially clad). These photos make an even greater impact in their larger format in the hardback edition than they do in the paperback reprint of smaller page size.

Whether one prefers Roffman's book or Benno Thoma's also copiously large collection for Bel Ami, entitled Around the Globe (which features among Thoma's naked lads some of the same male models in Roffman's book) probably is largely a matter of taste, e.g. a preference for mostly colour photography (Thoma's) or entirely black-and-white camera work (Roffman's), or for the sensibility of one photographer over the other's; both books and the young men posing mostly nude therein, are exquisitely lovely examples of erotic photography at its best.

While I prefer some of Bel Ami's youths (e.g. the Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy "kid look-alike" whose photos appear only occasionally in some of the books, but, alas, not here in "The Boys of Bel Ami", or, as it also bears a longer title, "Howard Roffman Meets the Boys of Bel Ami") to others of them, all have their undeniable charms. One hopes that the market for these books, for this one and others, especially those in the original series (there being a "new generation" of Bel Ami models that, to me, on the whole is marginally less appealling) is not so poor that they all will disapper from print, as seems to be the fate of the various Bel Ami videos. All of the Bel Ami series, not least this title, deserve a gay man's attention and will generate sheer wonder at the beauty of the naked male form in the full flush of youthfully post-pubescent early maturity, posed and photographed splendidly. There is a welcome avoidance in the book of raw, lasciviously explicit "action" photos that mar the often potentially equally serene beauty of such young male models as posed in more pornographic output of other producers, the sort of sheer lewdness Bel Ami (at least its books) rightly shuns.

This generous (over 280 pages) book features fifteen of the young men of the Bel-Ami erotica business, including two of their most admired: Lukas Ridgeston & Johan Paulik. This book is the result of photographer Howard Roffman spending 8 days with the boys in Cape Town, South Africa while they were out on a Bel-Ami film shoot. The images here are culled from 457 rolls of film used,and features rich & atmospheric black & white photography. The boys are shown at the poolside,in bed,at breakfast,in the shower, or simply posing & fooling around. There are scenes showing everything from a warm embrace,to more explicit sexual images. A simple shot showing two of the men gazing at each other,is so superbly composed & lit that it could easily look at home in an art gallery.There are many pages like this. Great attention to detail is evident.Because there is the luxury of having so many pages to fill, the images form an excellent impression of what it would be like to spend a week with fifteen handsome young men in sunny Cape Town.
This book is a wonderful record of, and a fine tribute to male beauty.