A few days ago, Chris Ambidge re-posted a version of this remarkable image of a Hello Kitty Superhero, pretty in pink, as a little gift for Leith Chu (it’s a Canadian panda thing):
(#1) CA’s image — which he first posted for LC 13 years ago — came with some identifiers as to its source, while the image above, with no meta-data at all, is the one I found on Pinterest yesterday; I found Pink Hello Kitty Superhero delightful, admired his attitude, enjoyed the earnest heroic stance, the sheer cuteness of Hello Kitty and that pink bow, and the pink and red superhero costume, gorgeous in its triumphant fagginess
I had hoped to track down the source, through those identifiers, but as I was preparing to copy CA’s version to my computer, it vanished, poof, from FB — and, it turned out, from CA’s files. So all we have is my image from Pinterest (which is utterly uninformative, but apparently safe from meddling), which I’m posting on my blog but not on FB, just in case it too is in danger of being disappeared.
Before I go on to discourse on butch / macho fagginess, so nicely illustrated in #1, a few words on why I’m so bent on posting this bit of fluff today.
Dispossession and its discontents. I am several weeks into the Great Dispossession, reducing the many thousands of things in this house — which is my office and also the repository of all the remaining things of my life and also a gigantic art show, with the vertical surfaces fully covered with interesting stuff to look at, many of my own creation — to what will fit into a small apartment in an assisted living facility (still to be identified). The payoff for me is supposed to be the lifting of a huge burden of managing innumerable arrangements of daily life (at which I’ve become ingenious), so that time will be freed for me to do my work, writing the daily essays for this blog; for everyone else, the point is that I will be in a place where I can get care when I, inevitably, turn into a vegetable. I am wary that I’ll get screwed in this deal, but I don’t really have a choice, so I’ve been spending almost all of my days abandoning most of my previous life, with as much grace and good will as I can summon, though I weep a lot, occasionally despair, and once in a while flash in anger. And then because this work is physically difficult, my arthritic fingers are periodically reduced to excruciated immobility. And all this will go on for months.
Meanwhile, yesterday I abandoned around 30 prospective postings based on material I’d saved from various publications, and now I’m winnowing down some 50 or 60 postings that I had started computer files on — but there are a fair number I have some obligation to finish, because of promises I made on this blog. Then I got a message from an old friend (and distinguished colleague), call them F, who sent me a story lead, meanwhile asking how I was, since they no longer followed me (having moved to bluesky). A great wave of anguish enveloped me, as I realized how much my readership had declined, especially among linguist colleagues, so that the reason I got no responses at all from many of my postings was that my colleagues were treating me as having left the field, so not worth reading: I was professionally dead. I should have realized that that happened decades ago, that I really was now an intellectual entertainer and had to learn to accept that fully; it is, after all, an enjoyable and satisfying place in the world. Have to accept having shed the old shell. I’m working on it. (Meanwhile, I unloaded my unhappiness on poor F, who now deserves an apology.)
What this moment needs is something light and fluffy, something tonic. Like Pink Hello Kitty Superhero. There’s even a sociocultural point to be made.
Butch fagginess. From my 8/14/18 posting “Butch fagginess”, about some “frank homowear from Barcode Berlin”:
the models project muscular masculinity — solidly butch — but the tees also convey sociosexual messages in teasing and boastful ways that echo the open banter of queer men amongst themselves, acting faggy: faggy minus fem(me), butch fagginess).
Or, if you prefer, macho fagginess. An illustration, from the world of men’s fitness magazines rather than premium men’s underwear: from my 10/13/24 posting “James Bidgood”:
On Pinterest this morning, this arresting cover of the magazine The Young Physique (men’s fitness and muscle-building for a gay male audience), from 50 or 60 years ago:
(#2) A symphony in fluffy pinkness, showing the model’s callipygian charms (glutes are good)
Macho fagginess, on the hoof.
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