I've heaped abuse on the porn-with-pretensions of gay coffee-table photography (see p. 37), and now it's Greg Kucera's turn. It's the shaving he can't abide. "All these models are tweezed and plucked and shined up like apples in a supermarket," he rants. "I think, God, give me a man." Amen. Kucera's gallery is hosting a one-night exhibition that will separate the men from the boys: 90 "male photographs" held by a Seattle collector known to Kucera only as Charlie. After 22 years of gathering images, Charlie is selling them, sending part of the proceeds to Gay City Health Project.

Men (a sampling): Horace Bristol, whose anonymous model was an American naval gunner who stripped, jumped into the water near Papua New Guinea to rescue a fellow soldier under siege by the Japanese, and returned to his gun position wet and naked; Humphrey Spender, who captured a leering older man lighting a nude younger man's cigarette in a dark British locker room in 1938; the fearless Robert Mapplethorpe, of course (though what's here are two fairly standard classical portraits); and Margaret Bourke-White, the first American female photojournalist in Russia (1930), immortalizing the hard-bitten expression of a bricklayer in a fur cap.

Boys (a sampling): Robert John Guttke, whose Perry is pulling his pants down, arching his back, and trying to get the water splashing down from some unseen tap to fall on his bulging pecs rather than in his eyes; and Herb Ritts, whose Fred with Tires is a steroidal grease monkey with the pseudogravitas of Conan the Barbarian.

What's the difference? Oh, everything. But for a start, brains. To be fair, the blue-chip-to-beefcake ratio is good in XY: A Rare Collection of Male Photographs. The roster reads like the Metropolitan Museum's collection list and the dates stretch back to the earliest photography. (I hope buyers for local museums will be on the lookout.)

Sally Mann's dusky 1990 portrait of an ecstatic boy, At Charlie's Farm, and Gay Block's 1980s inversion of Goya's scandalous paintings of the same woman nude and clothed are exceptions to the show's mostly male-artists rule. There are icons: Avedon's stark frontal view of a tense, naked Rudolf Nureyev on a white background; Henri Cartier-Bresson's folksy, grinning boy carting bottles of wine under his arms; Larry Clark's speed-addict friend David Roper in the days just before both men lost all innocence.

Best of all are discoveries that hint at a world behind mainstream masculinity. Ken O'Brien's nonchalance in portraying his naked male cousins while the men are outside society, in the remote safety of a Texas campsite in 1937, is touching. The bedroom eyes of a jaunty, uniformed pilot were first directed at the Scottish photographers Hill and Adamson in 1845; according to the ownership history listed for the 7-by-5-inch print, that tiny, sexy secret of an airman also belonged to Mapplethorpe.

Advance tickets can be purchased at www.gaycity.org.