Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(This posting is about homoeroticism — for Thanksgiving, but still — and though the language isn’t raunchy, I’ll be writing about men’s bodies and mansex, and that isn’t suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

Just when I’d fallen to musing that the net was bringing me nothing fresh from the bounty of its homoerotic resources to be thankful for this Thanksgiving — both men’s premium underwear companies that traffic in borderline-hardcore images in their ads and also gay porn companies that offer every manner of flat-out celebratory mansex in theirs were doing replays of their best hot stuff from past years, all of which I’d already posted about here — just then, Lucas Entertainment (high-end gay porn guys) came up with a totally new hot item, released just three days ago, for its Black Friday sale; and almost at the same time, Tim Evanson posted to Facebook with J. C. Leyendecker’s cover for the Saturday Evening Post for Thanksgiving 1928, framed as a bit of history-clash humor (Puritan soldier, weapon on his shoulder, and a modern warrior, a college football player in a holiday game, confront each other aggressively) but also giving off a cascade of homoerotic undertones.

Both the Leyendecker cover (below) and one of the ads (also below) for Lucas’s Barebacking in Public — in which (according to the publicity) “Dan Saxon pounds Gabriel Phoenix on Fire Island”, before they go on to flip roles — turn crucially on the intense content of the men’s facial expressions. These are gifts.

All thanks to HomoEros, who rules the domain of intimate connection, affectional and sexual, between men, and has granted us these gifts.

The Leyendecker.

(#1) Thanksgiving, 1628/1928 by J. C. Leyendecker, the cover of the Saturday Evening Post issue of November 24, 1928

I posted about the artist on 1/22/11, in “J. C. Leyendecker”, with a number of his illustrations; from a later posting: “A significant American illustrator and commercial artist, creator of (among other things) influential images of American masculinity, Leyendecker was a gay man whose very popular illustrations were often unobtrusively homoerotic.”

In fact, not always unobtrusive, as you can see by looking at those illustrations.

And then there’s the intense gaze in #1. At first glance it looks like antagonism, but it can be read as dominance sparring in the sex-tricking script: the two men trade aggressive gestures, establishing that each one desires the other and that each one is desirable to the other (is suitably tough and masculine as a partner in sex, in either role). You can smell the testosterone and sense the waves of need. Fascinating to watch (as I have done a number of times in real life).

Here Aric Olnes wrote on Facebook:

With the stiff shouldered pilgrim’s gun as a metaphor for waving his profoundly large male genitalia about & the torn-clothed vulnerable receptivity of the blonde receiver, the homoeroticism is downright blatant.

My reading is that this seems clearly to be there, but there’s more. It’s sexual dominance sparring and it’s also Horny Soldier Comes Upon Disheveled Slave Girl. And, in fact, it’s also penis (the weapon) partnering with testicles (footballs). Plus, the football player is the one with the really gigantic hands and feet, signifying a really big penis. The mixture of conflicting symbolisms makes any one of them deniable, lets the whole thing be intensely homoerotic while being superficially simple, entirely a bit of history-clash humor rather than a sexual tableau.

Barebacking in Public. There’s no such subtlety in the Lucas ads for the Saxon-Phoenix scene released on 11/25 (the Australian surfer dude Saxon’s gay porn debut, according to the company). The first ad I saw was totally X-rated, showing Gabriel Phoenix mouthing the tip of Dan Saxon’s alarmingly large penis (while Saxon smiles broadly at the camera and makes a double thumbs-up sign); the cropped version of this photo:

(#2) Phoenix (left) focused on his work, Saxon (right) exultant for his fans

Crude and graceless in content, but the ad with the actual offer in it (with lettering in celebratory Pride colors) is more interesting. It treats the two men equally: both naked, facing the camera, and slipping into sexual heat, with faces of abandoned receptivity — heads tilted back, mouths slackly half-open, eyes narrowed in arousal:

(#3) Saxon (left) will go on to mount Phoenix (right), then vice versa, and they will then perform as focused craftsmen, but here they’re still shifting from ordinary consciousness into sex mode

This, to my mind, is wonderfully homoerotic. The mountings and poundings are flat-out hot and homo, but this is homoerotic. Though with a very different tone from #1; in the domain of HomoEros there are many provinces, each with its own customs.

This entry was posted on November 28, 2019 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Art, Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Signs and symbols. 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.