Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Not much language in this one.)

The San Francisco Giants have been playing a series against the Arizona Diamondbacks; I watched the beginnings of the games Friday night and last night — both Giants wins, 2-0 and 4-3 — at Three Seasons (while consuming sushi). These games moved me to add Hunter Pence to my list of favorite Giants players — favorite as players and as wonderful men to look at. (Buster Posey and Tim Lincecum were already on the list.) After my adventures with shirtless actors and tennis players, I thought to check for shirtless Hunter Pence, and bingo.

It also occurred to me that Hunter Pence wouldn’t be a bad name for a pornstar. It doesn’t seem to have been taken, but a search did pull up a rich vein of steamy RPF (real people fiction) involving Giants players, in particular Hunter Pence and Brandon Belt (another good potential porn name) as lovers and Buster Posey and Madison Bumgarner as lovers. Oh my.

My guys in Friday’s game and last night’s: on Friday, Buster Posey had an RBI double in the first inning, and Hunter Pence followed two batters later with a run-scoring single; yesterday, Posey hit a home run.

On the pleasures of gay baseball fandom, from a posting of mine on December 12th:

I did … get caught up in Giantsmania, for the playoffs and the Series, this year as in 2010. People sometimes express surprise that a gay man would be interested in baseball (or any other strongly masculine-ethos sport), as if getting your Queer Card™ meant you had to cleave only to conventionally faggy tastes, when in fact the Queer Card gives you license to cleave to whatever faggy tastes suit you and to reject whichever imperatives of hypernormative masculinity don’t suit you, while preserving the ones that work for you. Plenty of gay men are enthusiastic sports fans, into football, hockey, basketball, or, yes, baseball; and some are serious players. (Some can segue from the NFL to opera to cooking while cruising in a leather bar. I think that’s just splendid.) Others, of course, think of pro sports as silly, childish, and deeply boring.

In addition, if you’re a gay sports fan, you — along with straight women — can get the extra pleasure of thinking of athletes as sex objects — pieces of meat, as one friend of mine puts it. You can in fact get the double view, identifying with male athletes the way straight guys do and (privately) lusting for them the way straight women do. (A note on the queering of interest in the Giants in my “Halloween Giants” posting, here.)

On to outfielder Hunter Pence. Here he is in uniform, with a nice (but slightly goofy) smile:

(#1)

(I like smiles a lot, especially on hunky jocks.) And here he is mostly out of uniform:

(#2)

Emboldened by this success, I thought to search for other favorite Giants players shirtless, with less success. None for catcher Buster Posey, but here’s a shot of the man in action and one featuring his sweet smile (I said I liked smiles):

(#3)

(#4)

(Buster’s 26, but sometimes he looks 16. I’ve tried to find pictures in which he looks like a grown man.)

There are tons of photos of starting pitcher Tim Lincecum smiling, as here:

(#5)

But shirtless is tough. Tim has a huge fan following, and others have scoured the net for shirtless photos of him, coming up with only a couple not very good ones, like this shot of a young Tim:

(#6)

From my source for #6, this observation :

THINGS I’VE HEARD: ‎”If you need to shave, and you still collect baseball cards, you’re gay. If you’re a kid, the cards are keepsakes of your idols. If you’re a grown man, they’re pictures of men.” [I suppose much the same is true of collecting photos of baseball players.]

Looking for shirtless Giants did lead me to a webpage (by Gamer Babe Carmen Kiew) devoted to just that, and there I found a twofer, of relief pitcher Sergio Romo and outfielder Angel Pagan (properly, Ángel Pagán), shirtless together and smiling broadly:

(#7)

Serious abs on Pagan.

A final note on the type of slash fiction known as RPF, from Wikipedia:

Real person fiction (RPF) is a type of fan fiction featuring celebrities or other real people. In the past, terms such as actorfic were used to distinguish such stories from those based on fictional characters from movies or television series.

Telesilla, the creator of baseball RPF with Belt/Pence and Bumgarner/Posey (and starting pitcher Matt Cain with Posey as well), describes herself as

a 40something, twice-divorced, disabled, lesbian, pagan, polyamorous, fannish, MMORPG playing, world building, liberal, geeky, writer

who lives in Sacramento with her wife and two cats. Her Giants RPF involves kissing, hand jobs, blow jobs, fucking, dirty talk, rough sex, a chastity device, sex toys, bondage, humiliation, dominance and submission, and more.

This entry was posted on July 21, 2013 at 10:10 am and is filed under Fiction, 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.