The Amazing Colossal Men: Astounding Gay Porn Transformations

To transcend the body.

It's become a central human -- and especially, American -- dream.  We're conditioned to desire to surmount the limitations of the human body, to change what is natural, to become what we're not.  Alice changes her size with some medicinal help in order the get through that door into the beautiful garden.  Zeus alters his form so he can get with all those comely mortal ladies.  Myra Breckinridge becomes the embodiment of a Hollywood-obsessed movie critic's greatest fantasy through the magic of the scalpel. 

We live in a Before & After world where virtually every fitness product or dietary supplement trades on the buzzword "transform," (note how in the above graphic famed muscle guru Charles Atlas looms god-like over his 90-lb weaklings as if they were homunculi created from clay), celebrities don't have their original parts, and yes, porn models manage to jump the evolutionary scale.

Gay porn is more mutable now than it ever was, meaning that more and more models bear little resemblance to their former selves after they make their debuts.  Steroids, human growth hormone, cosmetic surgery -- the days of the Boy Next Door getting into blue movies and remaining cute, approachable, and obtainable have fallen by the wayside as he's been supplanted by earthbound Olympians who fall somewhere between Captain America and The Frankenstein Monster.   It is possible to pull off these metamorphoses with epic results, but take care in dreaming too big.  Testosterone poisoning can send you hurtling back to earth. 

I'm sure that everybody has their favorites (and there's no shortage of examples), but here are my notable picks:

Skye Woods

Skye Woods takes a lot of guff from viewers for his appearance -- So gross!  Too out of proportion!  Those Chola eyebrows! -- but I have to admit that he does something for me.  Like the great Tom Katt, he does have some lady in him, and the fact that he's morphed into a jacked-out Samwise Gamgee ready to take on a horde of goblins just makes him more appealing.  He also has an odd tendency to refer to both himself and his disparate features in the third person, but whatever.  No doubt a wonder of chemical engineering -- his sheer mass is downright cartoonish -- and perhaps therein lies his allure.  I find that I like his previous physical incarnation just as much:  a bleached-out He-Man with great eyebrows who, as Prince Adam, is duty-bound to moonlight as a Chippendale dancer.

Spencer Reed

As children, we're raised by being read classic fairy tales in which someone or something less than perfect shifts form into someone or something highly idealized.  For better or worse, human beings equate heroism with physical superiority  Let's face it -- there aren't many spindly superheroes, male secret agents can always pass for international fashion models, put-upon ugly duckling geeks blossom into graceful swans in teen movies, and gay porn models alter themselves into the gay male ideal like Bruce Banner becoming The Hulk.  I have to give Spencer Reed credit for managing to pull off a bodily transfiguration that took him from daytime soap bad boy to all-out Herculean heartthrob.  If he'd mugged me in broad daylight as the former, then turned up in a lineup as the latter, I'd never be able to identify him.  Even the shape of his eyes is different.   Shall I credit this to the mere presence of hormones...or the power of black magic?

James Jamesson

The Greek sea god Proteus would up and morph into a new form if you annoyed his ass; titian-tinted James Jamesson can certainly be described as protean in terms of his ability to switch up his look.  He's also not unlike a male variation on Barbie, considering that he has a different hairstyle and general image from feature to feature.  Boy Toy James!  Gym Rat James!  Roustabout James! Collect them all! I actually hope that he has his own Dreamhouse and a band.  Every so often porn will employ a player who boasts an almost preternatural ability to adapt to his environment -- remember how Dallas Taylor could go from Beach Blanket Bingo to full-on Marlboro Man at the drop of a hat? -- and Redbeard here is nothing if not chameleonic.  It's not that his size has changed.  His manliness just seems to have kicked into hyper-drive, so he's rather an outlier in this line-up.  I'm not sure how I feel about his current Paul Bundy embodiment (I don't hate it, though), and yet I feel that he was holding himself back as a baby-smooth-type.  Mayhaps the mid-range is his best target.

Brad Kalvo

With the exception of Zeb Atlas, it's hard for me to name another model who so manages to divide and polarize his viewership.  It's as if one side is officially sick of the ubiquitous Sean Cody look while the other dreads the prospect of men growing out of their Underoos.  I personally fall somewhere in the middle, meaning variety doesn't put me off.  During his Colt period, Brad truly struck me as looking like a mainstream action movie star, although thanks to all the steroid cycles, Hollywood can turn any actor into Rambo long enough to wrap shooting.  He's noticeably taller than most men in the porn medium as well, which for many is a novel change.  Now Brad reminds me of Patrick Warburton (a good thing), and that seems to have won him just as many admirers.  Go figure.  Any way that you slice, the man is the physical definition of the descriptor "virile," and I can't say that he's lost any of that charm.  If you've ever been characterized as "beefy" and not flipped out about it, you get what I mean.

Zeb Atlas

They say that you can't ever be too thin, but I would argue that you can, and conversely, you can get too damn big.  This isn't so much an aesthetic concern for me as it is just a purely biological one; I just think that the male body can only bear the burden of so much musculature.  When you force it to carry more, health problems will ensue.   I love those '50s science fiction drive-in movies wherein tarantulas, crabs, or chicks in lingerie are exposed to gamma rays and grow to enormous stature, but I remember reading that such a thing isn't actually physically possible because the muscular system would grow at a much faster rate than the skeletal structure, so the body would ultimately collapse inward upon itself and suffocate.  Zeb Atlas has seriously packed on the mass, so much so that it seems to have limited the range of motion of his arms.  The image of an enraged Zeb scaling a skyscraper and swatting down planes is seeming more probable by the year.