(The text veers into sex of a number of varieties, including hard-core mansex, with references in very plain terms to both female and male sexual parts, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
In one scene of the 1998 gay porn flick Logan’s Journey, the protagonist Logan spends a night in a cheap hotel called El Nido. Two young men in the adjoining room have noisy ecstatic sex with one another, culminating in enthusiastic flip-fucking. The film is set in a gorgeous mountain-West landscape, where there are plenty of Mexican Spanish speakers.
Nearly every one of these details is relevant to understanding what it might mean for the hotel to be called El Nido (Sp. ‘The Nest’). The name is surrounded by a gigantic cloud of potential interpretation — of literal meanings, fresh metaphorical understandings, conventional metaphorical understandings, conventionalized slang, allusions to all sorts of cultural practices, transfers of conceptual frameworks for heterosex to mansex, all of this in two languages and a number of (sub)cultures.
Some of this was surely intended by the makers of the film — this particular El Nido is a love nest — but much of it is mere potential, wisps of penumbral interpretation in that cloud, visible to some viewers but not others, and barely within focus to many of those.
Out in the far reaches of my consciousness, there appeared the Spanish phrase su pajarito en mi nido (lit. ‘his little bird in my nest’) — or better, su pinga en mi nido (‘his cock in my pussy’) — and I was seized by a pointed desire to be fucked (alas, only in my imagination) by the Cuban American pornstar Damien Crosse, who grew up in Miami — even Miami, as it turns out, is relevant in all of this, as is the fact that Crosse favors porn scenes that are both fully democratic sexually (well, remember the flip-fucking) and also affectionate (Logan’s Journey is a love story). And then there’s the more obvious stuff, with the little bird in a nest.
Eventually, there will be poems, and a Cubano-inflected song, about encounters in love motels and lounges.
The porn flick. From my 12/17/10 posting “Cocks and cum”:
(#1) The cover of the 1998 DVDLogan’s Journey, a film in the love-story subgenre (versus the purely episodic subgenre), in which there’s a story arc for the whole film, framed by some initial scene-setting (in this case, involving the man Logan, played by Logan Reed, and his buddy Mark, played by Cutter West) and a final climactic hot-sex scene with professions of love, with plot complications for the two men in between and with inserted sex digressions involving other men, barely tied into the larger plot.
Early in the story, Logan is thrown out of the house by his violent father, and flees to the El Nido hotel in town for a night, which is where we get the scene of the two young men in the adjoining room having noisy ecstatic sex with one another, culminating in enthusiastic flip-fucking.
Into the cloud. Some flagged words and concepts and the swirl of associations around them:
A the name of the hotel (El Nido ‘The Nest’)
B a nest as a place of refuge or shelter
C the hotel as a love nest
D metaphorical uses of nest for any bowl-shaped depression, including as a fresh metaphor for a vagina, or a conventionalized one, or lexicalized as slang in this use, in both Spanish and English (with possible varying degrees of crudeness; some sources translate Spanish slang nido as pussy, but some uses seem more playful than that), and then
E a term with vaginal reference transferred, in nonce usage or conventionally, to anal reference: in particular, ‘male anus viewed as a sexual organ’, as pussy and cunt have come to be used in English gay slang
F fucking, which incorporates or evokes a reference to dicks, even if they’re not on display, but in fact they’re flagrantly on view in the El Nido episode of the flick
G the Spanish slang pajarito (lit. ‘little bird’) for a penis, sometimes translated as dick (though most occurrences seem to be even milder than that)
H el pajarito en el nido, combining the two bits of slang; men as inconsiderate fuckers
I love hotels / motels as cultural institutionalizations of the love nest
J the (now-demolished) notorious love motel of Miami, the El Nido
K the poetry and songs of love hotels, love motels, and hook-up cocktail lounges and bars: poems by AZ and Tom Chandler, Afro-Caribbean cowboy music by Ned Sublette
(and as a final bonus, Miami-Cuban pornstar Damien Crosse gives me su pajarito en mi nido, as anticipated above)
A: the name El Nido. I recognized this immediately as ‘The Nest’, with nido from Latin nidus ‘nest’. From Merriam-Webster on-line:
Nidus literally means “nest” in Latin, and some of its relatives in English suggest this connection in a straightforward way. For example, we have nidification, for the process of building a nest, and nidicolous, meaning “reared in a nest.”
And the noun nidus in English, from NOAD:
chiefly technical [a] a place in which something is formed or deposited; a site of origin. [b] Medicine a place in which bacteria have multiplied or may multiply; a focus of infection.
B: senses of the English noun nest. From NOAD:
1 [a] a structure or place made or chosen by a bird for laying eggs and sheltering its young. [b] a place where an insect or other animal breeds or shelters: an ants’ nest. [c] a bowl-shaped object likened to a bird’s nest: arrange in nests of lettuce leaves. [d] a person’s snug or secluded retreat or shelter. 2 a place filled with or frequented by undesirable people or things: a nest of spies. 3 a set of similar objects of graduated sizes, made so that each smaller one fits into the next in size for storage: a nest of table
All four subsenses of sense 1 swirl in the El Nido cloud, but d, the refuge or shelter, applies immediately to Logan’s holing up in El Nido. And b, a place for breeding, to the young men’s fucking in the room next door.
C: the hotel as love nest. A bit of the web of NOAD entries:
— noun love nest: informal a place where two lovers spend time together, especially in secret
(#2) From the FAMPAR LiveJournal site: “Love Nest”, yaoi manga by MINADUKI Yuu: “After being heartbroken by his crush from college, Hoizumi ventures into the world of homosexuality. After frequenting a certain gay bar, he becomes friends with the master there. Tired of living in his apartment with the noisy children above him, Hoizumi has some luck and the Master of the bar offers to let him live in his second home. However, Hoizumi doesn’t find out until after he moves that he will have a roommate named Asahi. Can these two new roommates overcome their differences and become friends? Maybe even something more?”
— noun lover: a person having a sexual or romantic relationship with someone, often outside marriage.
— adj. romantic: 1 [a] conducive to or characterized by the expression of love: a romantic candlelit dinner. [b] (of a person) readily demonstrating feelings of love: he’s very handsome, and so romantic. [c] relating to love or to sexual relationships: after their romantic relationship ended they became great friends | her romantic adventures | romantic fiction…
D: vaginal nest and nido. Metaphorical extension from the bowl-like depression use of these words. From GDoS:
noun nest: 1 … the vagina (20C+ usage US) [1st cite 1600 from Shakespeare’s As You Like It; 1969 cite from Chester Himes, 1987 from Robert Wright Campbell]…
I was unfamiliar with this use of nest in English, but there it is. As for nido, it’s given the slang sense ‘pussy’ (among many other senses) in Mexican Spanish in the tureng Spanish-English dictionary (and elsewhere).
E: vaginal > anal transfer. Conventionalized in English for a number of items, notably pussy and cunt. But also poon, as in my discussion in the 7/24/19 posting “The Dickson Poon School of Law”, which has some discussion of sense developments:
From GDoS:
noun poon-1 [abbr. of poontang]: 1 the vagina; also the male genitals. [1st cite from the 1968 novel M*A*S*H] 2 a woman or women in general when seen purely in a sexual context. [1st cite in Shulman’s Rally Round the Flag, Boys!] 3. (US gay) the anus. [in Rodgers Queens’ Vernacular] 4. sexual intercourse. 5. general term of abuse. [Showing in 2 the common metonymy from sexual bodypart to person as a whole; in 3 the common metaphorical transfer from female sexcavity to gay male sexcavity; in 4 a common metonymy from bodypart to a characteristic activity in which it’s involved; and in 5 the common generalization from a person (female or male) viewed as a sexual object, hence negatively, to a general slur or term of abuse (‘worthless person’ and the like).]
I haven’t found cites for the anally transferred sense for either nest or nido, but that’s not really the point — which is that vaginal terms are always available for nonce transfers. GDoS has attested transfers for a number of words that must be extremely infrequent in the transferred sense (gash, muff, quim, snatch, twat) and no attested transfers for some others (box, cooch, slit, vag), but you could, given some context, get away with any of them.
F: fucking. The video of the hotel fucking is plentifully provided with dicks, so they’re right in the center of the cloud. (But just a mention of fucking will license definite reference to dicks, the way the mention of of a room will license definite reference to doors. Joe fucked Albert. His dick [definite NP] leaked cum for some time afterwards. So if fucking is in the cloud, dicks are too.)
G: dick slang. And then terms for referring to the penis are floating around in the cloud too. Cuban pinga, for instance. Or the infantile slang pipi. Or, in Mexico, the very mild slang (el) pajarito lit. ‘little bird’. From The Local site (“Spain’s news in English”) on the word:
It is also one of many slang words for the male genitalia, and one of the least offensive and more usually used with children, translating as weenie or willy (depending on whether you are from US or UK).
H: nido and pajarito, together at last. Birds and nests are highly related thematically, and the words bird and nest (in English), and pajaro and nido (in Spanish), are highly likely word associates. Meanwhile, dicks and sexcavities (pussies or assholes) are highly related thematically, so it’s no surprise that Spanish sexual slang pajarito and nido should be joined in discourse as well.
So, from the racy and bisexually-focused adult romance story “Mi Jugador Favorita” (“My Favorite Player”), part I, chapter 47, we find a young woman complaining:
la mayoría de los hombres sólo se preocupan por meter su pajarito en el nido lit. ‘most men only worry about putting their little bird in the nest’
conveying the opinion that most men only care about sticking their dicks in a pussy (and have no concern about pleasing their partner). (Note that using the childish pajarito also expresses contempt for these men and their little dicks. Un nido is weighty, un pajarito is trivial.) On that topic, from my 2/18/20 posting “Saluting the presidents”:
at least at the outset, men fucking anything are inclined to be extraordinarily selfish sexually; the notion of considerate lover doesn’t come naturally
I: love hotels and motels. El Nido in the porn scene is certainly serving as a love nest for the young men. But the suggestion, reinforced by the choice of El Nido as the name, is that it doesn’t just happen to be the locale for the young men’s assignation, but is instead a place devoted to such liaisons: it’s a love hotel — where love is a more decorous way of referring to sweaty sex; such places are sometimes bluntly referred to as fuck hotels. From Wikipedia:
A love hotel is a type of short-stay hotel found around the world operated primarily for the purpose of allowing guests privacy for sexual activities.
… In the United States and Canada, certain motels in low-income areas often serve similar functions as a Japanese love hotel. Colloquially known as “no-tell motels” or “hot-sheets joints”, these are becoming scarce as local laws increasingly require renters’ identification information to be recorded and given to law enforcement agencies.
The places often have bland names, inconspicuous entrances, and few if any windows. Gay sex hotels, on the other hand, are often open and celebratory about their function. Some are managed as resorts; of these, probably the most famous in the US is the Parliament House in Orlando FL — a fuck hotel resort with drag shows and a celebrated gay bar. From Wikipedia:
(#3)
Parliament House is a gay resort on the Orange Blossom Trail in Florida, United States that includes several bars and hosts performances such as drag shows. There are 112 rooms in the complex, which encompasses ten thousand square feet, including an outdoor stage, a swimming pool, and a dance floor. The resort was established in 1975, and eventually became the most well-known gay resort in Orlando.
Fuck motels (straight, gay, or any which way), on the other hand, being easily accessible on the street or along the highway, are generally sleazier places.
J: El Nido of Miami. The notorious fuck motel, on Calle Ocho ((SW) 8th St.), which is its own distinctive neighborhood within Little Havana, next to downtown Miami. A flickr photo by Phillip Pessar, posted on 1/1/11:
(#4) “Love Motels, Calle Ocho Miami: El Nido and Tops: Where you rent the room by the hour. Definitely not for tourists. Update: They are both now closed.”
Note the date. Four years later, on 5/12/15, Pessar posted a demolition photo, with the caption:
The most infamous of the pay by the hour sex motels in Miami. The end of an era.
K: poeticizing fuck places. Three poems about getting sex in places devoted to this purpose — specifically, cocktail lounges, bars, and motels (leaving the poetry of sex clubs, baths, t-rooms, cruising in parks and woods, and so on for another occasion). I originally posted them on AZBlogX on 8/26/10, in “Lounges and motels”, back in a time, ten years ago, when I thought material with serious sexual content had to be hidden from WordPress. But now I’m making it generally available.
The posting much as it appeared then, with some reformatting and the addition of some audiovisual Ned Sublette (just to note Sublette’s wry 1981 song “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other” — written during the Urban Cowboy fad while he was living next to a gay country bar on Christopher St. in the West Village called Boots and Saddles, and covered by Willie Nelson in 2006 and by others):
…..
Lounges and motels
Three poems about getting sex in lounges, bars, and motels, starting with the the briefest of encounters and working up to regular assignations on the down low.
First, my “Quick Trick” from November 2005:
Quick Trick
In the lounge, Alex, or
That was the name
He offered,
Bought Kevin, or that’s
Who he said he was,
An absurd vodka drink
To match his own.Their jeans brushed
Carelessly against
One another,
They stared gravely into
Each other’s
Eyes, at
One another’s
Crotches, and came in
Their pants.
Then the marvelous “To the woman at the Red Edge Motel” by Tom Chandler (from Sad Jazz (Lincoln RI: Table Rock Books, 2003)):
To the woman at the Red Edge Motel
Some tourist of love
in his cheap suit of longing
will elbow the bar
in the lounge of no last names,
dip his cuff accidentally
in our seven & seven
and ask you to dance
to the faint moan of muzak,
perfume your earrings
with breath mints and gin
as the lights grow yet dimmer
as his hand on the switch
hovers inches away
from the slick red edge
of your hungover heart
with its faded no vacancy sign.
[worth it just for “cheap suit of longing” and “lounge of no last names”]
Finally, some song lyrics (my transcription), the first of three parts of Ned Sublette’s “Cheaters’ Motel” (from Cowboy Rumba, 1999); you can listen to the track here (#5), though I should warn you that it tends to be earworm-genic:
Cheaters’ Motel
Sixteen ninety eight
That’s the day rate
They don’t ask questions
Or write down your license platesIt’s out of the way
And I’ve come to know it well
The afternoon shift
At the Cheaters’ MotelIt’s not the Waldorf
But it’s all right I guess
I don’t pay much attention
To the decor I confessNobody brings a suitcase
And no one will tell
That you spent your day
At the Cheaters’ Motel
And soon I’ll lay you down in sadness
I’ll lay you down in tears
I’ll lay you in my lovin’ arms
The way we’ve done for yearsWe could never live together
We knew that a long ago
These four walls are only
Home we’ll ever knowTomorrow at one
It can’t come too soon
And we’ve spent another
Bittersweet afternoonOr nothing in my life
Can ever excel
Our four hours
At the Cheaters’ MotelThose four hours
At the Cheaters’ Motel
[“Sometimes you just gotta keep it on the down low” comes in the more free-form second part, before a Spanish version. And, yes, a long ago for standard long ago / a long time ago gets some ghits.]
(#6) Background: the bar in a no-name cocktail lounge
(#7) The cover for Sublette’s Cuban-influenced album of Afro-Caribbean cowboy music
“Quick Trick” lacks the sad resonances of the other two. Perhaps because though I’ve had my times at cheaters’ motels, they were high-end places largely devoted to conventions and tourists (still, the staff didn’t look askance at two men checking in for a few afternoon hours, at the “day rate”), and the occasions were, oh my, far from sad. It does share with “Red Edge Motel” the theme of no last name. (For me in real life, as for the narrator of “Cheaters’ Motel”, my afternoon lover was someone I knew.)
Bonus: su pinga en mi nido. Ordinarily I’d ask for su pinga en mi culo, but we’re in pussy territory in the cloud at the moment. The bearer of the highly desirable pinga is Cuban American, Miami-born (but now Barcelona-resident) gay pornstar Damien Crosse, the subject of frequent postings on this blog. Among them, this December 2015 cluster::
— on 12/20/15 in “Odds and ends 12/20/15”: Will Helm and DC in Lucas’s Men in Love
— on 12/23/15 in “X-rated Damien Crosse”
— on 12/24/15 in “More harnesses”: DC in a shoulder, or holster, harness at the Folsom Street Fair in S.F. in May 2010
(#7) The FSF photo; DC has really beautiful eyes; he also smiles a lot; sexually he’s incredibly energetic and beyond mere versatility
— on 12/25/15 in “More Damien Crosse”: an appreciation of DC (Cuban-American, born 2/11/82, 5′ 8″, stocky and muscular, 8.5″ uncut cock, versatile); a follow-up to the 12/23 AzBlogX piece
In section G we got to dicks, and DC’s approaches PWD (Porn World-Class Dick) status. At the other end of the scale from a pajarito, past your standard pinga to un pingón, past pito to un pitote. Surprisingly, though Crosse is only 5′ 8″, it doesn’t seem out of scale with the rest of his body, perhaps because of the context provided by his broad, solid shoulders.
I hope to get around to posting, on AZBlogX and this one, on DC’s porn films (especially for Raging Stallion) in which he seems to have insisted — probably working with pornstar and director Steve Cruz and other staff — that all the scenes be jam-packed with fucking, but framed as really energetic “sweet sex”: sexually democratic and celebratory (everybody fucks, but more importantly, everybody gets fucked, they’re all eager for it, and they all express deep pleasure in the act), and also (while the characters are nearly unhinged with desire and arousal) sexually considerate and attentive (not selfish). Mostly, it’s also noisy sex: a good bit of ritual dirty talk (both top-talk and bottom-talk, in shouts and growls, gasps and pleas), and a huge range of ecstatic vocalizations (rough breathing, hard breathing, panting, moaning in many keys, catches in the throat). It’s wonderful stuff to watch. (And the photography and direction are impressive.)
It’s what I want for the afternoon when DC, posing as a handsome cowboy who (uninventively) calls himself Chico, no last name, swoops me up at the bar of El Nido, and takes me upstairs to a nondescript room where he lovingly rams su pingón en mi dolce nido — and then asks me to scissor-fuck him gently, while I whisper in his ear what a gorgeous dirty bitch he is. His kisses are sweeter than wine.
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