Lavender Lounge Review
Date: January 20th, 2007
Score: Full 4/5
Niche: Gay, Vintage men
Main Draw: There is a rather large collection of vintage men photos featured here. Wrestlers, beefcakes, hippies, and other hot and sexy guys from the 50s and before show their stuff off here. Now, here's a quick disclaimer: I'm not really into the gay niche, but a few readers here would love to see old time gay porn. I figured I'd get that one out of the way ahead of time.
Design: The design is colorful and bright, with some neat toons on the welcome screen. There's a lot of personality infused in just the design alone.
Navigation: : You access most sections via the sidebar. There's a photo gallery section, video galleries, the VIP lobby, Site News, New Photos, Upcoming Photos, New Videos, and Upcoming Videos. There is also a blog and model search at the bottom of the main area. Photo galleries are handled by standard gallery navigation.
Pictures: The pictures are divided into several categories, so let me run down each category and how many sets are in them: Paparazzi Pics are candid public photos of gay and sexy men, with an emphasis on parades and events. There are 23 sets in this section. Muscle Bear Cub has 15 sets that feature younger bears with big muscles and hairy chests. Groovy Guys (ie the section I'm running to first!) has named sets of hot vintage beefcake men, nude wrestling, and vintage gay yumminess. There are 29 sets that are mainly from the 50s to the 70s, although there are a few that date far before this. The pics are high quality scans and are very clear.
The next section I look a look at was Punks. This had 9 sets of alt and goth looking guys. Moving on, I hit the Twinks section with 10 sets, Straight Guys with 17 sets, Hunks with 9 sets, Faeries with 4 sets (I never heard this term before, it means a modern day free spirited hippy), and Belly Worship with 4 sets. You can rate the pics or sit back and enjoy them with a slideshow. Most of the pictures are very nice quality (including the vintage pics!).
Movies: This area is divided up into several sections: Exclusive Videos, Gay Video Cafe, Falcon Movies, and Naked Sword Movies. I was having a few issues before I switched over to IE, so I'm not sure if it was an issue with my setup or if it was something else. The videos are mainly in Quick Time format. The Exclusive Videos section features videos you won't find anywhere else (and it has a vintage movie from 1954 in it!) plus other videos, but the other sections were a disappointment, since they looked to just be samples and not full movies.
Speed The speed of the site was acceptable.
Originality As far as I know, the majority of this collection is exclusive.
Overall Ease of Use The site itself was pretty easy to use, although the movie problem was getting on my nerves.
Updates The site is updated frequently (looks to be daily).
Extras: There's a live chat section, with CamboysXXX who puts on a live show for VIP members every night. Unfortunately with my schedule I didn't get a chance to stick around and see how that went. Sigh. The other extra would be their blog, although I don't think you need a subscription to check that out.
Annoyances The sections that have more than 20 sets have the page navigation on the sidebar (instead of the bottom where I normally look for it). This made me miss the extra sets the first few times through.
Is It Worth it? This one is hard for me to judge, because it's more of a general gay site with a nice and hefty gay vintage sex section. I really am not familiar with how other gay sites stack up, since this is the first I've taken a look at. It seems slightly content light in certain sections, but I did enjoy myself on the whole.
Price: 19.95/one month (9.95 recurring)