(A personal posting, not about language, and only glancingly about gender and sexuality.)
From Virginia Transue today, the photo of my man Jacques H. Transue (1942-2003) from his Haverford College yearbook in 1964:
Virginia had just discovered that tons of yearbooks were available on-line, so she searched and found this — which I had never seen before. Virginia (the widow of Jacques’s older brother, Bill) described it as “one of the dreamboatiest photos” she’d ever seen, a judgment I’m inclined to agree with (but then I’m wildly prejudiced).
It is the product of a commercial photographer working in a particular genre, which smoothes and genericizes the subject’s faces. The interesting angular planes of J’s face are gone, as are the crinkles that accompanied his talking and smiling. The somewhat Mediterranean tint of his skin has turned to generic American cream, and since this is a b&w photo, we don’t see the attractive gray-green of his eyes. But the guy in the photo has gorgeous eyes, and a long lean face of masculine beauty. A dreamboat, as Virginia says.
I’ll leave it at that, using this as today’s Not Dead Yet posting — NoDY being a project in which I intend to rise above the physical afflictions and the anxieties and preoccupations of my daily life, to produce at least one posting to this blog each day (an intention not always achieved), just to show that I’m not dead yet.
(Meanwhile, a posting on the modern English preposition come — yes, you read that correctly — is simmering.)
November 25, 2019 at 10:00 am |
He was handsome, Arnold.
November 25, 2019 at 3:16 pm |
[…] Zwicky shares a photo of his handsome late partner Jacques Transue, taken as a college […]
November 25, 2019 at 6:13 pm |
Those eyes!