May has long been celebrated as Masturbation Month, but few platforms embrace the occasion with as much unapologetic enthusiasm as BateWorld. This year, the world’s largest online masturbation community for men returns with the fifth season of its wildly popular reality competition series, The Great BateWorld BateOff!, a show that blends erotic performance, personal exploration, and community interaction into one undeniably horny spectacle.

There’s a moment that happens, sometimes on a stage, sometimes in a dungeon, sometimes in the quiet honesty of a conversation, when someone decides to stop shrinking. To stop apologizing. To stop waiting for permission. This issue of PROUD & Kinky Magazine lives squarely in that moment. From the velvet-draped rebellion of Las Vegas burlesque to the carefully negotiated fantasies of kink and roleplay, every story in these pages asks the same essential question: What happens when we show up fully, authentically, and without shame?

What's in a name? For some, they'll have only one: the name their parents gave them at some point in life's early moments. Others might change names as the seasons do, adopting new ones to suit their various moods, phases, or simply as it pleases them. I've found myself at an interesting crossroads lately, as I am realizing that while I have many names depending on how close we are, what stage in life you've met me, and the degree to which we might be kinky together...and that one of these names is starting to feel more like "me" than the others...and it wasn't the one I was given by my mom at birth; but it is close.

In a world where art often tiptoes around discomfort, Cosimo Cavallaro has built a career on walking directly into it—barefoot, unflinching, and deeply human. His latest work, Passion of the Crust, is no exception. A life-sized chocolate sculpture of a transgender Jesus slowly melting over the course of hours, the piece is as much a performance as it is a meditation on identity, embodiment, and what remains when everything we cling to dissolves.