[In this posting, among many other things, sex between men discussed in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest]
The background is complex. From 3/26, in my posting “A gay life”:
A re-play of some material about my first male lover, Larry [Schourup], as background for two other postings: one about him right now (well, as of yesterday); and one about GBTQ guys and how they fold their sexual desires, practices, and identifications into lives of accomplishment, as Larry has done — and as the linguist Aaron Broadwell (celebrated in the second posting) has done.
But then my attention was diverted by the firehose of appalling actions by my government, so that I wrote on 3/27, in my posting “You were dead, you know”:
My intention was talk about integrating sexual lives, relationships, and identities with lives of accomplishment (like LS’s teaching and published research in linguistics) and value, with a bow to the poet Frank O’Hara (who LS introduced me to many years ago … [but] I’ve trimmed this post down to its other aim, which is to report on the last year or so of the LS/AZ correspondence
culminating in the joyous discovery that, contrary to my fears, LS had not died, hence the Candide quote in the title of that posting.
But now to start that first posting, of two, all over again, with material from my 3/1/24 posting “The grace of lovers”:
about my 12/25/11 posting “Poet among the painters”, on the poet Frank O’Hara:
The piece goes on about his extraordinary intelligence, the aura of electric enthusiasm that surrounded him, his great talent for friendship and collaboration, his advocacy of artists he admired, his outflowing of short poems every day, and his enormous passion for sucking cock (the last famously celebrated in his poem “Une Journée de Juillet”, a little hymn to the pleasures of gangsucking and to its restorative powers).
From an appreciation by Peter Schjeldahl:
O’Hara’s life was measured out in a sort of endless homage to his heroes — the great exemplars of personal and artistic integrity like Pollock, Franz Kline, and especially Boris Pasternak; the revolutionaries of poetic attitude and style like Apollinaire and Mayakovsky, and the forms of emotional identification, the movie stars like James Dean, Carole Lombard, and so many others, whom he celebrated brilliantly without embarrassment and with only the slightest, functional trace of irony.
You might not have imagined that a poet of pop-cultural frivolity and sexual excess would also come with a passionate commitment to moral principles — nobody expects Boris Pasternak, the ethic of his work [as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art], or his devotion to friends and colleagues — but there it is, … urgent and earnest … In any case, a lover’s gift to me not only of some amazing poetry, but also of a moral model, someone to learn from.
To refresh your memory, from Wikipedia on Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), born to a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family in Moscow:
poet, novelist, composer, and literary translator … author of Doctor Zhivago (1957), a novel that takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the First World War. Doctor Zhivago was rejected for publication in the USSR, but the manuscript was smuggled to Italy and was first published there in 1957.
Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, an event that enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize.
To which I juxtapose a note relevant to O’Hara’s enjoyment of casual cock-sucking (something I am on public record of having taken pleasure in myself — as a Distinguished University Professor and t-room queen), from my 5/11/24 posting “The gay handshake”:
[Photographer Stanley Stellar’s] subterranean world [of sex between men in public:] 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
Now I remind you that the world is complex, in particular, that there are a great many ways for a GBTQ man to live his life, including his life as a sexual being (and that these ways can shift over time and vary according to the sociocultural context). All the GBTQ men I’ll be talking about in these postings — from Larry and O’Hara and me and my husband-equivalent Jacques on through a number of men I’ll be celebrating as excellent linguists and teachers and admirable people have indulged in casual sex with other men. Not every GBTQ man has done this, but it’s very common; consider the folk wisdom. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that t-room sex and similar multiple sexual encounters in public are a minority activity; some of the GBTQ men I’ll celebrate had their days as t-room queens (note: I embrace the label, which denotes a preference; there’s another lexical item queen denoting an identity or persona that’s not mine, though I have plenty of friends who are queens), but most did not (Jacques didn’t, and I don’t think Larry did, either, though maybe he’ll tell me).
And here I rest for the day; I am accumulating side topics to post about at an alarming rate.
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