Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Holiday silliness, gender and sexuality, but not much language. Risqué but not actually X-rated.)

For the sixth day of Christmas, Daddy Kissing Santa Claus. I’ll get to that soon, but first a few of this year’s crop of hot guys in Santa gear (but minus Daddy).

Last year I posted (in “Late entries in the gay Santa sweepstakes”, here) two particularly steamy images: a photo of a guy advertising for the gay hook-up site Squirt (not a lot of subtlety there, but the name is informative) and a Tom of Finland drawing of one of his hypermasculine characters pulling on his big black Santa boots. Photos for this year: Hunky Santa in his furs and Underwear Santa:

Plus a drawing of Condom Santa (an image from the London design firm Sonar) — hunky hairy Santa with his bag full of condoms (be safe at Christmas):

And then from real life, a photo from one of the Santa Speedo Runs, charity events held in various North American cities (among them, Albany, Annapolis, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Madison, San Francisco, Tampa, and Toronto), plus (at least) London. Runners are both male and female, gay and straight, of all ages and body types, but concentrated heavily among the really fit, like these two men in Boston:

(Something for enthusiasts of smooth male bodies.)

On to Daddy and Santa Claus (and Gay Santas in general). The dreadful novelty Christmas song, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” was bound to spawn a same-sex counterpart. And here’s one version, from the cover of the most recent TLA Gay Video catalogue:

Good kid! Maybe Santa will bring you a second Daddy. Or stick around to take on the task himself.

A greeting card version from Zazzle:

Note that Daddy’s getting his hand into Santa’s pants. Sex is entering the picture. One step further, with Santa kissing a young man who’s probably not anybody’s father or father-equivalent (but might conceivably be Daddy to a Boy, though your first guess would be that if he’s into roles, he’s a Boy). Take me Santa, pant, pant:

It’s a short step to the seamier side of gay sex, encouraged by the ambivalent feelings so many people have towards department-store Santas, who function both as benevolent figures and as potential Dirty Old Men. Here’s DOM Santa, trolling for t-room sex at the urinals (link):

And that brings me to a piece of music I haven’t been able to find a performance of: the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies’ “Butch the Gay Santa Claus” (on the Kevin & Bean album Santa’s Swingin’ Sack, which has some other tracks that might be of interest to students of deranged Christmas music):

Butch The Gay Santa Claus, filled with Christmas cheer
Butch The Gay Santa Claus, his beard tickles your ear
All the children at the mall wait for their surprise
It’s not just Rudolph’s nose that’s red when they sit on his thighs
Oh

He squeezes down your chimney, greased up with frankencense
With bulging gifts for little boys leave dangling ornaments
Butch The Gay Santa Claus, filled with Christmas cheer
If you’re very good he might come more than once this year
More than once this year
More than once this year
(lyrics link)

The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies are a swing band, specializing in songs that regularly veer into “dirty” territory (website here, Wikipedia page here). Frequently not for the kiddies.

Return with me now to the eye-winking faux-innocence of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”. The nutshell description from Wikipedia:

“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” is an American Christmas song with music and lyrics by Tommie Connor.

The original recording by Jimmy Boyd, created on July 15, 1952 when he was 13 years old, reached No. 1 on the Billboard pop singles chart in December 1952, and on the Cash Box chart at the beginning of the following year. The song was commissioned by Saks Fifth Avenue to promote the store’s Christmas card for the year, which featured an original sketch by artist Perry Barlow, who drew for The New Yorker for many decades.

The song describes a scene where a child walks downstairs from his/her bedroom on Christmas Eve to see his/her mother kissing “Santa Claus” (persumably his/her father in a Santa Claus costume) under mistletoe.

The grating little-boy voice of Jimmy Boyd contributes a lot to making this a supremely repellent Christmas song. Here it is, awful words, saccharine musical arrangement, and that dreadful voice, all together (maybe I should note that I was myself 12 the Christmas this song swept the charts, and I took it as a personal affront):

Everybody and their cousin did cover versions. Ultimately we get a Daddy variant, in one or the other of two approaches, the first illustrated by Dr. Demento’s version (and also seen in Kip Addotta’s cover):

Here, when the clothes start coming off, it turns out that Santa Claus is just Mommy in disguise. Heteronormativity is saved. Queers cry “Cheat! Cheat!”

It was left to RuPaul to cast heteronormativity aside and treat Daddy’s dalliance with Santa as a steamy moment on the down low, right there by the sacred Christmas tree, where Mommy might have walked in on the scene:

Bless you, RuPaul.

The idea of a gay Santa hasn’t struck everyone as an entertaining, if not actually positive, development. Here’s a dyspeptic cartoon on the topic by Ken Pyne in the Punch of 12/2/81 (back in ancient times when there still was a Punch):

(The CND was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.) A sour blast at multiculturalism, lefty politics in the U.K., and the dreadful spectre of Political Correctness.

This entry was posted on December 30, 2012 at 10:52 am and is filed under Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Music. 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.