(It’s about men going down on men, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
A subtopic extracted from a posting (in preparation) on Stanley Stellar’s career in male photography (previous posting on this blog: on 5/8 in “Stanley Stellar’s couch”), during which he has amassed a trove of tens of thousands of photos, almost all set in NYC (and is still at it). One part of his work is devoted to depicting the beauty of the male body; for this he solicits men to pose for him (that’s why his e-mail address is on his website). These men are of various sexualities.
The remainder of his work he thinks of photographing the gay community:
— chronicling Pride parades (in all their complexity)
— showing street life in gay neighborhoods and at locations of gay sociability — both places populated by an assortment of lgbt+ people, plus some others
— and recording the places of cruising and tricking for men who have sex with men: what I’ve called the subterranean world of sex between men in public
This subterranean world: cruising spots in public parks, the famous trucks in NYC’s West Village back in the day, gay baths and sex clubs, t-rooms (mensrooms repurposed for sex between men), and so on — including Stellar’s special province, the West Side piers in NYC. All places where sex between men (especially cocksucking, which is quick and easy, and requires no special preparation or clean-up, so can be smoothly managed pretty much anywhere) is available in spaces that are in some sense public and are open to other like-minded men but are carefully concealed from outsiders (hence, subterranean).
Man-on-man sex in such places is not just an encounter between men, but is a social experience as well, a form of homosociality, and it’s socially regulated; every place has its customs, and the loci of subterranean sex between men are no exceptions. Beyond the regulation, such places are significantly celebratory, involving shared delight in what takes place in them — the sort of celebration experienced by crowds at rock concerts, fans at sports events, enthusiasts at the opera, and the like. Note also: shared delight; in such places, men join with others, maybe even share bits of their lives and feelings with them; they are places of social experiences.
The trope of the blowjob as gay handshake. And so Stanley Stellar views the sexual encounters at the piers, which (like those in t-rooms) are very largely blow jobs, as routine social enjoyments, roughly analogous to catching a burger and a beer with a buddy. This way of looking at things turns the received wisdom of straightfolk on its head: it’s not that gay guys are obsessed with sex, especially with giving and getting blowjobs; it’s that they think of blowjobs as a casual bonding ritual among men — pleasant and gratifying, but ordinary and of little consequence. Stellar and plenty of men who have sex with men hold this view as one piece of their social construction of reality; and it has found expression in the trope of the blowjob as gay handshake.
The trope finds its hyperbolic flowering in bits of gay male folk wisdom offered to me not long after I sucked my first cock:
Straight guys shake hands, gay guys trade blow jobs
A blow job is a gay man’s way of saying hello
And here, from GoNakedMagazine and Travels, on the Medium site, “The Gay Handshake: 5 Reasons Why Blowjobs [Are] Good for Your Health”, beginning:
I am a gay man, and in my world, oral sex is basically the “gay handshake.” It’s something we do casually and willfully, without putting too much weight or pressure into it. For us, it’s more of a bonding ritual or time saver than anything else. But did you know that giving or receiving head can actually be good for your health? Here are five reasons why … [continuing requires creating an account on the site, which I wasn’t willing to do]
with this wonderful photo of a handsome young Latino man enjoying an especially long and thick churro filled with vanilla cream:
(#1) The GoNaked poster gives no source for this photo, and a Google image search turns up absolutely nothing, not even repostings; I want to give credit to the photographer (and to the model as well), so if anyone has a clue as to where the photo comes from, let me know; it deserves credit just as a fine piece of food photography (it made me genuinely hungry for a churro, though my fantasy cravings were for something less orally challenging than the monster in the photo)
And then, as a working-out of the trope in real life, just one Stanley Stellar photo from his piers collection:
(#2) Boyfriends leaving The Morton Street Pier, NYC August, 1981
These two hunky young men (who could easily have posed for Stellar’s beautiful-men collection, but as it happens they were caught on the street) are emerging from the subterranean world, where they’ve just enjoyed a blowjob break (hooking up with whoever turned up that day; always nice to meet new people). Together, so that they can continue with their shared activities of the day (it looks like some gym time is part of their program). Maybe chat about the dicks and mouths on offer on the pier.
Think of this scene as the analogue of two straight buddies just emerging from catching an inning of the day’s Yankees game together at a NYC sports bar.
Leave a Reply