(An politico-sexual riff, with steamy underwear photos, on BoJo, the MP for Bone Juice and South Blowjob and the Man Who Would Be PM; you should be able to tell from this description that this posting is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Passed on to me on Facebook by Dean Calbreath on 7/20, a link to a Business Insider article, “Boris Johnson called gay men ‘tank-topped bumboys’ and black people ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles'”, by Adam Bienkov on 7/12/19.
Boris Boy
(#1) Ya hev yer Borstal Boys, thin ya hev yer Boris Boys, all poofters, slants, an wogs —
the Boys of Boris Beauville
The thriving metropolis of Belleville has Les Triplettes, who sing, but the Beauville slums, where BoJo’s roots are planted, has Les Prostitués, who screw, and they all belong to Boris the Panderer. For Boris, you see, is dirty to the bone.
(#2) The Flamingo Hustlers of Beauville: poofters, slants, and wogs, all pretty in pink
(BoJo says faggots, Chinks, and niggers, of course, but on this blog we’re more refined.)
Here ends the riff. Now come the footnotes.
Note 1: the Business Insider article. I’d quote from it, but since I block ads, the site is unavailable to me. Great headline, though.
Note 2: the underwear photos. The Supawear model in #1 comes from a recent Daily Jocks ad for a sale on jockstraps. His extraordinary muscularity isn’t remarkable in a premium underwear model; his solid blackness is, however. He seems to be new at Supawear; let’s see if they use him some more.
Of course, he’s presented for sexual objectification in this ad, and some might be uneasy about a black man, especially a dark black man, being used in this way. But that’s the function of all premium underwear models; their bodies (and the personas they project) are being used to sell stuff. In that context, it’s surely a socially good thing (for both the models and their viewers) that the models represent a range of races and ethnicities.
As in #2, which comes from my 8/21/18 posting “Jo Flamingo”, where I observed that in addition to the East Asian model on the left and the black model in the center, with their gazes averted from the viewer’s, there’s the impertinent white guy on the right, staring directly at the viewer:
The languidly seductive guy on the right has a supertight butch haircut and facial hair — but all in pink, like his lips. These guys are definitely not your grandfather’s underwear models.
Note 3: the riff, from BoJo into LSD. The caption in #1 starts out using BoJo’s words, more or less, and then morphs bit by bit into a travesty of the lyrics from “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (though I’m not entirely sure whether a parody of psychedelia can be fairly described as a travesty). From Wikipedia:
(#3) LSD (remastered 2009)
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was written primarily by John Lennon and credited to the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership. Lennon’s son Julian allegedly inspired the song with a nursery school drawing that he called “Lucy – in the sky with diamonds”. Shortly before the album’s release, speculation arose that the first letter of each of the title nouns intentionally spelled “LSD”, the acronym commonly used for the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide. As a result, the song was the subject of a BBC radio ban. Lennon repeatedly denied that he had intended it as a drug song, although he got the inspiration from an LSD trip. He attributed the song’s fantastical imagery to his reading of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books.
The Beatles recorded “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” in March 1967. Adding to the song’s ethereal qualities, the musical arrangement includes a Lowrey organ part heavily treated with studio effects, and drone provided by an Indian tambura. The song has been recognised as a key work in the psychedelic genre.
Note 4: Belleville and Beauville. In the body of this posting, these are fantasy places, strongly gendered. In the real world, there are many places with these names, in France and elsewhere. In particular, there’s a small village of Beauville roughly halfway between Bordeaux and Toulouse.
Note 5: BoJo’s slurs. From Boris, the stereotype or trope of gay men in tank tops, plus the homophobic slur bumboy (not discussed here before); and the racist stereotype or trope of watermelon eating, plus the racist slur piccaninny / pickaninny (also not discussed here before).
Start with gay men in tank tops, like these two guys:
(#4) Rainbow kissing, in tank tops (the way bumboys do it)
Or like this guy, solo, but nevertheless sending heavy homo messages:
(#5) From Aliexpress.com, a (i) shirt-lifter with a (ii) crop-top (iii) tank top (iv) in faggy colors: four homo signals in one compact package (if they hadn’t airbrushed that nipple, they could have given him (v) an erect pencil-lead tit)
Then from GDoS:
noun bum boy [also bum-boy, bumboy] [< BrE slang bum ‘the posterior, buttocks, anus, rectum’ + boy] ‘male homosexual’ [attested from at least the mid-20th century, probably in use for a century before that]
Like sodomite, bumboy in principle can refer to either partner in anal intercourse between men — the sodomizer (insertive), who desires to penetrate a man’s bum, or the sodomized (receptive), who desires to have his bum penetrated — but in the absence of context, there’s a strong tendency to take it to refer specifically to the bottom in such encounters: metonymically, the boy is his bum. (Contributing pieces of (misconceived) folk sexology: the notion that in anal intercourse, only the bottom is truly queer — well, any man might get a kick out of fucking another man, the theory goes, but only a faggot likes to get fucked — and the belief that all queer guys like to get fucked.)
(Since the BrE slang bum is regularly used to refer to the posteriors of infants or young children, it can have connotations of cuteness, so that bumboy will strike some people in some contexts as, well, a kind of sweet way to refer to a catamite, and Boris’s foaming about tank-topped bumboys will just sound silly rather than harsh and cutting.)
On to racial nastiness. Again, pickaninnies with watermelon smiles, though offensive in fact and offensive in intent, flirts with cuteness, in a way totally unlike, say, niggers with fat jungle lips (which might have been what Boris was really, in the darkness of his heart, aiming at).
First, the watermelons, which have come up on this blog before, in fact with reference to a Supawear promotion (like #1 above). From my 4/4/16 posting “The watermelon files”, about
this startling ad from the Daily Jocks firm
(#6)
… Startling, because it shows a black man in a field of watermelon slices — an image that will evoke a racist stereotype, no matter what the intentions of the creators were.
(Much more on the watermeon trope and its history in that posting.)
With the watermelons come the kids. From NOAD:
noun pickaninny (also picaninny or chiefly British piccaninny): offensive a small black child. ORIGIN mid 17th century: from West Indian creole, from Spanish pequeño or Portuguese pequeno ‘little’, pequenino ‘tiny’.
Part of the litany of anti-black talk, sent up in the song “Colored Spade” (from the musical Hair), which begins:
I’m a
Colored spade
A nigra
A black nigger
A jungle bunny
Jigaboo coon
Pickaninny mau mau
Pickaninny mau mau, BoJo, pickaninny mau mau.
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