Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Hunky male models in very little; lots of lexicography to come in later postings, but here lots of plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so not advised for kids or the sexually modest.)

The 3/37 Daily Jocks ad in e-mail — with the header Bottomless Shorts 😳 — now with a caption of mine:

(#1)

He navigated the
Corridors of the Blue
Boy Bar, savoring its
Pygian gloom, signaled
Red in the smoky
Dusk of desire, whispered
Shoot me, please,
Shoot the Moon

Who is he? He is Moon Moon Moon II, whose American father, né Moon Mullins, married first Keith Moon, then another wayward Englishman, Alfie Moon. (Ban-Ki-moon proposed, but Moon rejected him; Moon I was something of a kimchee queen, but he had an overwhelming weakness for bad boys like Keith and Alfie, so a secretary-general of the United Nations was way too good for him. ) Moon II, in contrast to his father (who was flamboyantly bisexual), lives a racy but apparently straight life, while being fully engaged in the subterranean world of secret gay sex, where, like his father before him, he is an eager bottom boy.

More on the characters in this family drama below, with a thrilling digression from Moon I’s early days in which Popeye screws him. (Those were the days, my friends!) And a note on Moon II’s little brother Cosmo (a naughty boy who has a nightly tryst with the moon he loves).

But first a little background.

Barcode Berlin. See my 8/14/18 posting “Butch fagginess” on the “frank homowear” from the Barcode Berlin firm. Then in the DJ mailing on the 27th:

The new mesh leather-look Moon Shorts by Barcode Berlin will be sure to have you turning heads.

Featuring premium black mesh side panels with a contrasting colored front and back.  The pouch and rear are extremely sexy, with see-through mesh and a window right below the waistband, these shorts are perfect for those daring enough to wear them!

Moon Shorts [come] in asphalt, red, yellow

(#2) Stunning in yellow

In a follow-up posting I’ll get to the complex word play in Moon Shorts, evoking moon shots and shoot the moon, with sexual allusions in moon and shoot/shot. And then in a second follow-up posting I’ll look at DJ’s use of bottomless for things like #2 on the left.

The Blue Boy Bar in Berlin.

(#3) The Blue Boy Bar, a gay bar in Berlin (Kleiststraße 7), in business for 40 years, open 24 hours

The Moons. On to the family, starting with Moon I. From Wikipedia:

(#4) Moon I in 1947; the boy is Moon’s street urchin kid brother Kayo

Moon Mullins is an American comic strip which had a run as both a daily and Sunday feature from June 19, 1923 to June 2, 1991. Syndicated by the Chicago Tribune/New York News Syndicate, the strip depicts the lives of diverse lowbrow characters who reside at the Schmaltz (later Plushbottom) boarding house. The central character, Moon (short for Moonshine), is a would-be prizefighter — perpetually strapped for cash but with a roguish appetite for vice and high living. Moon took a room in the boarding house at 1323 Wump Street in 1924 and never left, staying on for 67 years. The strip was created by cartoonist Frank Willard.

Then Moon’s first great love, the mercurial Keith Moon:

(#5) Keith in action

Keith John Moon (23 August 1946 – 7 September 1978) was an English drummer for the rock band the Who. He was noted for his unique style and his eccentric, often self-destructive behaviour. His drumming continues to be praised by critics and musicians. (Wikipedia link)

After Keith died in a haze of drugs, Moon Moon fell into years of intense aimless sex, with both women and men, before he found his second great love, Alfie Moon, a laddish petty criminal from London’s East End with a charming side. Just Moon’s type:

(#6) Alfie Moon as realized by Shane Richie

Alfie Moon is a fictional character from the BBC soap opera EastEnders, played by Shane Richie. [2002–2005, 2010–2016, 2018–2019] (Wikipedia link)

Moon Moon and Alfie Moon were married in a fabulous ceremony on Fire Island; Moon Moon took Alfie’s name, becoming Moon Moon Moon (“You can never have too many moons in your life”, he quipped); and Alfie took on the role of adoptive father for Moon’s two sons from his days of coupling with women. The first boy, Moon, they renamed after his father: Moon Moon Moon II, called Moooooon Two for short, and nicknamed Moonie. The second boy was already named Cosmo, after Moon I’s long-time fuck buddy Cosmo Topper (see the Wikipedia page on Thorne Smith).

Both boys are a bit odd. Moon II was never comfortable with his fathers’ flagrant public queerness and retreated into a shell of stiff heteronormative respectability, while secretly engaging obsessively in public sex, on an almost daily basis, with men in many cities. He’s particularly fond of Berlin, with its vibrant gay resources right in the middle of the city, so that he can move easily from ordinary straight life to back-room bars and sex clubs, where he can satisfy his intense desire for cock. Like his father before him, he adores getting fucked; sein Arsch is famous.

Cosmo is still a boy, and a strange, dreamy one, mooning about the house. His story has now been told in print, in Cosmo’s Moon by Devin Scillian (Sleeping Bear Press, 2003). The publisher’s description from Google Books, including an account of Cosmo’s nightly tryst with the moon he loves:

(#7)

Cosmo loves the moon, and the moon loves Cosmo. They both come to realize though that lots of things depend on the moon – the ocean tides, morning glories, and the dogs, who can’t stop howling. A magical book about the power of friendship and the nature of responsibility, Cosmo’s moon will charm everyone who’s ever been bewitched by the beauty of the moon. “Cosmo loved the moon. He had moon pajamas and a moon nightlight and stars and moons all over his bedroom. Every night, Cosmo’s [fathers] gave him a hug and a kiss and tucked him into his bed. But just as soon as they closed his bedroom door, he threw aside the covers, ran to the open window, and watched as the golden moon came into the night sky just above the sycamore tree. And as a gentle night breeze blew across the curtains, Cosmo would talk and the moon would listen.”

Who knows where this will lead.

Moon Mullins’s youthful straying down the primrose path. The tale begins with a social practice in our culture, an extension of the practice of double dating. From NOAD:

noun double date: a social outing in which two couples participate.

Classically, the couples are mixed-sex, and either the two women, or the two men, or both, are close friends. The people in these pairs offer each other psychological support in their dealing with the other sex on this occasion, which is a dating event, in which romantic or sexual pairing  is potentially on the agenda (and that may be the source of some anxiety).

Such occasions are planned; they are a species of appointment. But people can also affiliate in short-term pairs on a pick-up basis, especially for casual sex, and it’s not uncommon for someone engaged in a search for a sexual partner to do so in company with a friend of the same sex (who again is a source of psychological support, encouragement, and the like). So: buddies will look together for women to score with; and if they’re successful in finding two women, may go on to consummate their connections together, say in a hotel room. The presence of the other couple takes some of the pressure off each man — he’s not flying solo — while also providing some modeling, shared arousal, and a certain degree of friendly competition. Such a relationship between men is homosocial and involves sex, but it is not necessarily homoerotic (though it can be, especially for a man  who appears to be straight but experiences significant sexual desire for men).

In any event, this is a practice, or social routine, that straight guys (at least in some social groups in the US) have sometimes engaged in, for some time now; I have heard about instances from straight friends, and the practice is sometimes represented in fiction and the movies. If it has a name, I don’t know it.

All this is a build-up to representations of the practice in Tijuana bibles, cheap and usually crude pornographic cartoon strips circulated underground in the early-to-mid 20th century. See my 6/25/12 posting “Tijuana bibles”, with a link to two such “bibles” (a Mickey and Donald bible and a Donald bible) on AZBlogX here (the 6/28/12 posting “Disney Tijuana Bibles”).

As a very popular comic-strip character, Moon Mullins was worked into a considerable number of Tijuana bibles. One of them — “Stepping Out” (c1935) — pairs Moon and Popeye engaged in the practice of two buddies hooking up with two women for sex; the cover of the bible:

(#8)

My AZBlogX posting this morning, “Popeye screws Moon”, shows p. 7 of this sexual adventure, in which the man-on-woman sex is interrupted by an interlude in which Popeye the Sailor Man screws Moon Mullins — while Moon eats pussy and a second woman licks Popeye’s balls (obviously not a WordPressable image).

Otherwise, we have no visual record of Moon I’s predilection for taking it up the ass, so ths is a precious artefact.

With that, I leave the Moon family. In postings to come: moon shots and shooting the moon; and bottomless shorts.

 

This entry was posted on March 31, 2019 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Books, Captions, Categorization and Labeling, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Names, Sociocultural conventions, Underwear. 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.