(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.
