[4/25 disclaimer. In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]
That’s unbuttoned ‘relaxed, less inhibited’. There will be no removal of clothes.
This is a little human-interest piece reproducing postings (three of them) from past years reporting on Aaron Broadwell and me chatting as two gay men about cultural matters (pretty much negligently folding Gay Interest into everyday chat). The genre is a type of Friendly Conversation, in this case between two gay men who share a fair amount of background knowledge, have trust in and regard for each other, and are not pursuing any explicit goal beyond maintaining the bond of friendship, keeping in touch; it’s “just talk” — but it’s still structured in complex ways (which would become obvious if I offered parallel exchanges with other people of other sorts in different social contexts, and more strikingly, if I showed you exchanges that ran aground).
The background. From my 4/3 posting “The world is too much with me”:
a complex series of postings on LGBTQ people integrating sexual lives, relationships, and identities with lives of accomplishment, slowly focusing on the examples closest to me: gay men in linguistics.
[beginning with an announcement of the 4/1 Michael Gannon Lecture at the University of Florida, Gainesville by linguistic anthropologist Aaron Broadwell]
… [intending to go on] to distill many pages of a remarkable c.v. into something digestible, before moving on to the story of his relationship with the author Peter Marino (Aaron and Peter have been together for 30 years and were in the earliest group of gay people who got married in Massachusetts, in 2004, wow. Then to get back to the larger topic, with other examples of gay male linguists of substantial accomplishment and some words on why people should care about us, especially during a time when concerns about DEI mask a concerted attack on (among many other things) LGBTQ people and our rights
Three exchanges.
— from 9/17/21, in “Materials for a blog”
[AZ] Something else I might not get around to posting on: Roddy O’Nederland, aka “Dutch Roddy”, the Pride of the Low Country Irish [the Lowcountry Irish, in SC, are an actual thing, by the way] — what’s he famous for?
… [AB] Does he appear in an underwear advertisement with a low country shillelagh? … (AZ: shillelagh as phallic symbol)
— from 12/5/21, in “As butch as it gets”, a section on:
[AZ] Boyd McDonald’s zine S.T.H. (an acronym for Straight to Hell), … [which] publishes autobiographical stories of male-male sexual encounters, as submitted by the magazine’s readership
[AB comment] One of the issues of STH includes a letter from me, and another volume has a nude photo of my college roommate. (Our brushes with fame!)
— from 2/2/23, in “Angela goes to dance camp”, about AL-73, the 1973 Academy Awards show, starring Angela Lansbury:
[AZ] The critique of AL-73 through gay eyes. My eyes and Aaron Broadwell’s, on Facebook on 10/24/22. Two distinguished linguists and analysts of culture responding to that video. [beginning:]
— AB: This is the gayest thing I have ever seen — and I have seen a lot of gay stuff!
— AZ: Quite remarkable piece of camp. AL is a woman playing a dead-perfect female impersonator, and she’s totally inhabiting her part.
In the first, AB expands on the Roddy O’Nederland [Radio Nederland] joke with a sexual joke; one joke often cascades into others.
In the second, Aaron elaborates on a topic with a relevant story from his own life (I had personal stories of male-male sexual encounters, but they didn’t get into STH). Meanwhile, the occasional casual sexual encounter is not in itself of note, it’s the sort of thing that might happen to anyone in our shared world.
In the third, Aaron gives me an opening to embark on an extended analysis of AL-73, in a way familiar to both of us from our professional lives analyzing cultural texts, events, and practices, and drawing on our familiarity with drag shows. And we both got to appreciate Angela Lansbury’s acting.
Irrelevant bonus. While I was putting this posting together, I was coping with getting my dinner. Excellent Chinese delivered, which included a side of Chinese onion pancakes (delicious). And then of course fortune cookies, one of which was the goofiest I’ve ever encountered, and rather creepily had an onion in it:
Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else’s water lily.
I think I need an explication du texte. Water lily? (GDoS has British underworld slang water lily ‘oyster’ presumably referring to the bivalve and not to a vagina, phlegm, semen, or a testicle).
April 14, 2025 at 2:25 pm |
Your fortune cookie story reminds me of something I read about 17th-century tulip mania in the book ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’ (1841) by Charles Mackay. According to Wikipedia on ‘Tulip mania’:
The increasing mania generated several amusing, if unlikely, anecdotes that Mackay recounted, such as a sailor who mistook the valuable tulip bulb of a merchant for an onion and grabbed it to eat. According to Mackay, the merchant and his family hunted down the sailor to find him “eating a breakfast whose cost might have regaled a whole ship’s crew for a twelvemonth”; the sailor was supposedly jailed for eating the bulb. However, tulips are poisonous if prepared incorrectly, taste bad, and are considered to be only marginally edible even during famines. This directly contradicts Mackay’s claim that the tulip bulb had been “quite delicious”.
April 17, 2025 at 12:28 pm |
An exchange on Facebook:
— Heidi Harley: I interpret the fortune cookie as saying something like “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” — you may be thinking of this onion as a humdrum boring ingredient but to someone else it’s as special as a water lily. Now we need someone who knows something to tell us what it really means!
— AZ > HH: Well. “one man’s everyday onion is another man’s prize water-lily”. I think I have the answer, which depends on the fact that water-lilies (including the bulbs) are not only edible, but delicious. I had no idea.