Girls get naughty for the cameras

Imagine having your very own girl for every month of the year -” then imagine you could replace her with a simple flick of your wrist.

The commitment-phobe’s dream will be possible in the format of the much-anticipated Miss Behaviour 2009 girls calendar.

The naughty queer cousin of the standard garage and grease fluff girl calendar is here. Dispensing with the soap suds and car lolling, the pictures are inspired by ’50s pin-up sirens … and these women are all class.

Behind the lens are award-winning photographers Travis de Jonk and Ross Brownsdon, creators of the very successful saucy boys calendar, Bad Behaviour.

De Jonk said he drew inspiration for much of the style of images after watching a film about the life of famed pin-up and bondage model Bettie Page.

The calendar flips the traditional cover girl image on its queer head. Not that this is in any way a Ralph magazine-style -œlesbian special -” de Jonk was adamant women and their sexuality be given power rather than being merely titillating.

The project took a year from the initial concept to post-production, and the calendars are now ready to fly off the shelves in time for Christmas.

De Jonk said shooting the girls was much more difficult than the boys because of the level of work involved with costuming, make-up and overall -œlook.

-œThe boys are a bit more rough and ready, you can sort of sit them down and say, -˜OK pose’, but you can’t really do that with the girls. It’s definitely more involved.

Which leads to the next question -” how do gay men know what’s hot and what’s not for gay women?

-œWe thought maybe we shouldn’t, because we’re boys, what business do we have making a girls calendar? So that was a concern, but we just couldn’t resist it because we love girls and we love working with girls and we had all these ideas and we thought we just have to do it, said de Jonk.

Unlike the usual plucked and preened skeletal beauties you usually find in the annual fluff date reminders, Brownsdon and de Jonk photographed a mixture of friends, work contacts and people they met in daily life.

-œI’m interested in featuring people who are magnetic. Some people have this sort of wonderful sort of X-factor, a quality about them and they’re the sort of people I’d like to photograph.

Behind the scenes things were also pretty relaxed. Many of the shots were taken in Brownsdon’s lounge room, which was converted into a makeshift studio, helping put the models (and the crew) at ease.

-œEveryone has that bit of anxiety, especially because some of the people in the calendar haven’t modelled before … but it’s amazing how, in the right environment, people just relax and do a great job, de Jonk said.

-œThe main thing for us was we wanted to make sure it wasn’t demeaning in any way like a Ralph magazine would be, he said.

He thought it helped that he and Brownsdon are gay because they -œtend not to sexualise women.

-œI still know what’s sexy, but I don’t sort of think about it as necessarily sexy for my pleasure, he said. -œIt’s sort of more instinct. I think if I was a girl looking at this, how would this make me feel.

One of de Jonk’s personal favourites is the girl on the carousel.

-œ[The model’s] a very good friend of mine and she never thought she could do it … at the end of it she saw the picture and had a tear in her eye and said -˜Oh my God, I’m beautiful’ and I said -˜Now you see what I see’.

The calendar is loosely themed around the pin-up girls of the ’50s and ’60s and seems to have a cinematic thread, though de Jonk insisted this was unintentional.

-œSome of the girls who modelled for us come from a burlesque troupe and they all do look like ’50s film stars when they get together, he said.

-œI didn’t necessarily intend that but I guess we used a lot of pop culture references so film references slip in there as well.

Certainly one of the most recognisable is naughty November’s firm nod to Quentin Tarantino’s film, Kill Bill.

January’s whips and suspenders ensemble is a direct Bettie Page-inspired -œnaughty housewife thing.

Those who missed the cover image sunglasses reflection should also take another look. The image is a remake of the boys catalogue to keep a cover theme. De Jonk sat through half an hour of lesbian porn to choose the image.

-œIt’s the idea of voyeurism, the calendar’s about looking, so it sums up the energy of it.

The fine line between titillation and exploitation is one de Jonk said the pair trod around carefully, and chose to stick to the publishing guidelines road.

-œIt’s not because we’re prudish or anything, but I think that the challenge is to not do something obvious.

It’s so easy to make someone naked or to show a hard-on but it’s difficult to say things in a clever way, to insinuate and make a sexy statement, he said.

info: Miss Behaviour 2009 is available at Hares and Hyenas and other queer retail outlets, as well as
www.badbehaviourpublishing.com