Arnold Zwicky's Blog

[Gender and Sexuality posting. I’m now using flags to mark the beginnings of some postings that are mostly on themes other than language. (Yes, the categories are listed at the end of postings, but that’s a long way from where you are now.) This one, a revision of some postings I made to soc.motss in 2005, is in the gender and sexuality category, under a larger category of essays on culture, and concerns itself with masculinity and with gay life.]

Act I: Made for Each Other.

Back in December 2005 Ned Deily and I were watching a bit of the documentary Shooting Porn when porn star and director Blue Blake appeared on screen, talking about the business. I found him charming  — articulate, funny, self-aware (and sweetly gay) — and then checked his filmography, which is huge (both as actor and as director), and realized that I didn’t have a single one of these films (and I have quite a collection of gay porn). Why was that?

By this point in Shooting Porn Blake was on the job, getting fucked in the classic face-to-face legs-up position, on a bed in the background, while in the foreground director Gino Colbert was advising Blake calmly and professionally: “Ok, hang your head over the edge of the bed, Blue” — which for some reason I found tremendously funny.

Here’s ex-Royal Marine Blue Blake, in full smile and with his pants on, on the cover of his 2008 book:

Well, the problem (for me) is that Blue Blake is one of the Truly Huge, an extreme bodybuilder, of dimensions of hard muscularity drastically exceeding  those of normal men.

You might not appreciate this in the picture above, because his body is well-proportioned. If I could show you him along with a man of more normal size, you’d appreciate this, but it’s hard to find such a picture in which the guys have their pants on. By the way, he’s not tremendously tall, just above 6′, nor is his dick, reported to be 7″ so it’s almost surely a bit under that, remarkable (he’s virtually dwarfed on both dimensions by some other stars of gay porn, for instance Ryan Idol); it’s just his muscles that make him Truly Huge.

Among the other Truly Huge in the gay porn world are Caesar, Ty Fox, Billy Herrington, Tom Katt, and Matthew Rush.

And the films he directs feature men like him. This is not a body type I find at all arousing, nor do I identify with guys like this; if i don’t want to do him or be him, there’s not much in it for me, so I generally avoid the genre of the massively ripped. So I missed Blue Blake, with the intense blue eyes that gave him his stage first name, his amiable manner, and his enormously sweet smiles.

Parts of some of these films I do find enjoyable. I’ve had the Billy Herrington Playing With Fire 2 flick for some time, and parts of it work fine for me, in a sense; they aren’t tremendously arousing for me, but they’re still enjoyable. These are the scenes in which two of these giants of muscularity go at it with one other, in a performance of mutual admiration, attentiveness, and testosterone-soaked lust. The thing is, what the big guys in these scenes project is an intense enjoyment in one another, and it’s hard not to find that likable. They’re having so much fun while they’re getting each other off; you can’t help smiling.

All three Playing With Fire films — I’ve now gotten the other two — have several scenes of this sort. Typically, they start with the two giants cruising each other, showing off their carefully created bodies to each other.  In the central scene of Playing With Fire 3 (with Caesar as the hugest of the huge), they pose for one another, in what is both a competition and a mutual admiration society (they smile at one another in approval; actually these guys smile at one another a whole lot, all the way through the scene). Then they get together to explore those massive bodies, stroking, grabbing, licking, slapping lightly, and eventually punching those rock-hard pecs and abs, testing and verifying each other’s muscular development, meanwhile exchanging  smiles and kissing, extravagantly and repeatedly.

Eventually they move on to actual sex: cocksucking, with lots of breaks for kissing; and then fucking.

They are totally into hard-ripped bodies, and they are remarkably affectionate with one another.

This is, well, awfully nice, though niceness was doubtless not what the director was aiming for. (I’m sure other gay men respond to these scenes differently than I do.  I can see how someone could find these scenes fabulously hot, even though I don’t.)

Eventually we get close and extended views of the two guys’ assholes, and what remarkable assholes they are. Gay porn provides you with many more opportunities for studying men’s assholes than you’re likely to get in real life, and it turns out that, like any other part of the body, they vary enormously.

In this case, the first one presented to us, as the other man licks it and plays with it with his fingers, has very long, vertical external lips — a true manpussy — and it’s remarkably placed, right at the base of this guy’s balls, so that he has essentially no perineum. When they switch places, the other guy turns out to have what amounts to an anal antechamber, a huge deep pit with the actual asshole down there at the bottom of the pit, and that is one great big pucker, obviously a hole that can accommodate a lot. It is, however, normally located.

Playing With Fire 3 begins with an unusual scene for the Truly Huge genre. The premise is a staple of gay porn set in some men-only locale: the new guy (in this case, the rookie at the firehouse) who has to be initiated into the boys’ club — via man-man sex, of course.

A related premise has a guy in such a setting complaining to an authority figure about the messing-around that goes on and confessing discomfort about the way the other men are looking at him. He is then taken in hand by the authority figure and shown the true way, which is the Manly Gay Way. Enthusiasm and gratitude follow.

What makes the Playing With Fire 3 initial scene so unusual is the rookie character: a pouty, willowy young man with white-blond-bleached hair that is moreover fancily styled, and with an extravagantly effeminate manner. Pretty much the least likely firehouse rookie in all the world. Hell, his uniform looks way too big for his thin body. In no time at all, he’s draped over the edge of a desk, pantingly taking a muscular giant’s dick up his ass.

I can see two readings of this scene, not necessarily inconsistent. In one reading, the scene says that even small and faggy guys (like, one supposes, a certain number of viewers of films like this one) can be desired, intensely, by Superman — and the truly huge guy is, in fact, presented as being uncontrollably hot for little faggy guy’s body. That’s the reassuring reading.

Or you can read the scene as making the truly huge guy seem even more masculine than he already is, by contrast to little faggy guy. In the world of straight guys, masculinity-by-contrast works mostly by juxtaposing a man with a woman, but a parallel effect can work for two gay men together (and can still be ok for the less masculine man, so long as the relationship has other rewards that are important for him, like being desired).

As a matter of fact, masculinity-by-association is the more usual dynamic, for both straight and gay guys. Straight men in groups routinely engage in displays and performances of types of masculinity they deem appropriate, one goal of which is to increase each man’s masculinity by jacking up the others’.  (Hanging with the cool kids makes you cooler; hanging with real men makes you more of a real man.)

Meanwhile, gay men often seek out, as sex partners, boyfriends, or husbands, men who are (roughly) as masculine as they (believe they) are, sometimes articulating the aim to “celebrate masculinity” together (or to “be regular guys” together, or however they frame this goal). In any case, if they find the right guy, everybody wins, by getting extra masculinity points for associating with a guy who has sufficient masculinity points already. In a sense, you make each other better men, just as straight guys do for each other in “loci of high masculinity” (frat houses, sports teams, mostly-male work spaces, and so on).

Act II. Dan Savage and the Truly Huge (or: Gay sex columnist meets Brad the Bodybuilder).

It’s the last chapter (“Welcome to Gomorrah”) in Dan Savage’s Skipping Towards Gomorrah. Our hero has been researching the Seven Deadly Sins in present-day America. Now he’s trying to commit them all in one NYC weekend. He’s hired Brad, a straight bodybuilder who escorts only gay men who want to worship his body.

Brad takes off his shirt. “He stood there for a second, letting me take him in, all rippling shoulder muscles, abs, and pecs. He slapped his abs with his hands and then held his palms out, palms up, as if to say, ‘Solid, huh?’  I was transfixed–but not by lust, unfortunately. Brad was about as far from my type as men get; I like slightly sissy guys. [Later Dan explains that all of his boyfriends had been shorter than he was and skinnier than he was.] Brad, towering over me, was none of those things.  He was massive, a human SUV.”

“Brad reminded me that he was straight, and that he only did muscle worship.  Then he asked me what I wanted to do–and he called me dude.” [Dan just hates being called dude.]

Dan realizes that he hadn’t thought this through, and asks just to feel Brad’s muscles. Brad says he’s just been to the gym, and offers three choices: he can take a shower, with Dan watching; they can shower together; or Dan can have him all sweaty. (“It’s good, clean sweat, dude. I don’t smoke or drink, so my sweat is clean. Dudes tell me all the time that they dig it.”) Dan opts for door #1.

Dan: “He looked amazing naked, and I was amazed that this sort of beauty could be ordered up to my hotel room like a bucket of ice. He was one of those body builders with hugely broad shoulders but a very narrow waist.”

Après-shower: “He walked to the edge of the bed, stood right in front of me, and began to flex and pose.”

Brad: “Come on…  Feel my body dude. You know you want to.”

“Actually, I didn’t want to–but I didn’t want Brad to know that I didn’t want to, so I began running my hands over him. He was male, and he was beautiful, but he was so far from my type that running my hands over his chest and shoulders and arms wasn’t having much of an effect on me. Brad felt like an enormous armoire that someone had stretched turkey skin over, popped in the oven and roasted to a golden brown. I wasn’t turned off, but I wasn’t turned on.”

Eventually Brad sees that things are not going as usual with this client, so he offers to take the lead and “do what most guys like”, which turns out to grinding Dan’s face into his enormous chest (giving him a bad case of stubble burn; Brad, of course, has his body shaved), calling him “faggot” a lot (though Dan observes that “the tone of his voice was oddly tender”), telling him to call him “a god” in return, and telling him to get down on the floor and kiss his feet.

At this point, Brad closes his eyes and starts jacking himself off.

Dan, at his feet, is fully clothed, keeps his dick in his pants, and isn’t at all aroused, mostly just waiting for it all to be over. Soon Brad comes, and Dan is released.

Later, when Dan asks Brad how come he, the straight guy in this scene, was turned on by it, Brad muses a bit and concludes, “I guess humiliating other guys makes me horny.”

Nice mix of sex, power, and masculinity (at the very least, masculinity-by-contrast) here. I’m guessing that Brad wouldn’t get the same charge from humiliating a woman.

Brad doesn’t seem to reflect on what his clients might be getting out of being humiliated. But then he’s not much on introspection.

When gay men who fancy the sub role in humiliation scenes, and the men who relish taking the dom role in these scenes, talk about the experiences, the emotions they describe range over quite a bit of territory, but for many, on both sides, humiliation as an ordeal or test is a major, or even the paramount, the defining, aspect of the dom-sub encounter: the sub proves himself as a man by successfully undergoing the humiliation, by “taking it like a man” (just getting fucked by another man has this resonance for many men at least some of the time, even if they don’t explicitly configure getting fucked this way, and of course subs in b&d and s&m feel this way, proud of what they can endure).

And afterwards the sub’s inner fears about his own worth have been, paradoxically some would think, allayed. Indeed the sub has become “a better man”: not only does he get a shot of masculinity-by-association, he also becomes comfortable with, indeed proud of, his identity (not merely his role in a short-lived encounter) as a faggot. (Not to mention his ability to get another guy to give him what he wants, what he needs.)

On the dom’s part, he gets not only masculinity-by-contrast and a power rush, but also the satisfaction of a job — as a kind of therapist, or spiritual guide even  — well done (giving the sub what he needs).

And of course, both guys get themselves off.

Big Boy Brad does a brisk business, apparently.

(I especially enjoyed the armoire-turkey-skin thing.)

This entry was posted on July 19, 2010 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Gender and sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.