🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate August, also (US) 🔧 Labor Sunday 🔨 (everything — September, Labor Day, even World War II, 86 years ago in Poland — breaks tomorrow); meanwhile, it’s all gay banter about green beans, a little festival of G+B
Aric Olnes, on Facebook with his daily alphabetic horticultural message for 8/27 (on these messages, see my 8/17 posting “Miss Marple, with murder on Michaelmas”), a biliteral delight, in G+B:
graceful bushy Green Beans grow briskly generously bequeathing grand bounty
A long, thin object — like a green bean / string bean — can symbolize a tall, thin person (a skinny person); or someone’s long, thin legs; or of course a long penis — so as an enthusiastic phallophiliac, I went with the penises in my response:
— AZ> AO: Those are mighty long beans you got there, pardner!
This is gay banter (itself a G+B expression); AO and I are old friends, both gay, and can exchange personally-directed lubricious remarks that turn on the shared assumption that gay men fantasize about big dicks (whatever their own penises are like and whatever sorts of penises they favor in actual man-on-man sex) and the shared belief that such fantasies are both powerful and ridiculous. This is an instance of banter without an edge, serving to express what we share — also what sets us apart from most people around us — and to reinforce the bond of our friendship. But banter between men, and more specifically between gay men, comes in many forms, ranging from a light touch with just a bit of an edge, to teasing and to more aggressive kidding. What’s going on depends on who’s doing the bantering, to whom, and in what circumstances. So I’ll have some words about that.
And then some appreciation for AO’s ingenuity in constructing his alphabetic titles, in this case for G+B expressions about the seedpods of Phaseolus vulgaris, the common bean. To which I will contribute a long playful list of G+B expressions for anyone who’d like to riff further on green beans / string beans / snap beans.
Bantering. From NOAD:
noun banter: the playful and friendly exchange of teasing remarks: there was much singing and good-natured banter. [with the derived verb banter]
Compare the more friendly banter with the more aggressive tease and kid (again from NOAD):
verb tease: 1 [a] make fun of or attempt to provoke (a person or animal) in a playful way
verb kid: [a] informal deceive (someone) in a playful or teasing way
The crucial point about banter is that it’s friendly as well as playful; no offense or imposition is intended. Teasing and kidding are weaponized. They can serve as ways of dominating, insulting, hurting, degrading, or humiliating their object, behind a veneer of playfulness designed to make it impossible for the object to counter the attack effectively. Especially among men, they can provide a scheme in which these weapons are used to “toughen up” up your buddies so that they can learn to “take it” in a world in which men are in fierce competition with other men.
It’s important that these ways of behaving have typical uses (what you might even think of as their intended uses), but, at root, as I like to intone every so often:
They’re just stuff
and can be deployed for any number of purposes and have a great variety of effects. As an outsider to normative masculinity, a guy rejected by almost all male groups I’ve encountered, I experience even everyday male banter (with its component of teasing) as assaultive; then, of course, I’m dissed and dismissed as over-sensitive — unable to take a joke, as they say. But — happy news — there turn out to be plenty of good guys (from all over the spectrum of sexualities) who can do banter without an edge and can recognize when I’m doing it, as I was in my response to AO’s Green Beans photo.
It’s always pleasing to be the bearer of happy news.
Materials for G+B riffs. Now, for the playfully inclined among you, an enormous list of G+B expressions — a sampling of the G+B Bank, of what’s available for riffing on the seedpods of Phaseolus vulgaris:
gobble, gabby, gamble, gimbal, grumble, Gumby, gibbous, Garbo, gibbon, garment bag, Game Boy, glam band, golden brown, gorse bush, gym bro, Great Britain, goodbye, goat butter, Glendale Boulevard, gumball, god-blasted, George Bush, gigabyte, gene bank, Glitter Bomb, graybeard, gravy boat, Gwendolyn Brooks, gang bang, grocery boy, Greater Boston, golf ball, greenish blue, grosbeak, Gutzon Borglum, gorblimey, good boy, Grand Banks, goofball, gooseberry, Gary Busey, gayboy, grunge band, grand ballroom, Gordon Biersch, greaseball, grab bag, German beer, goddam bitch, glamor boy, greasy balls, grilled burgers, Go Bears!
(Yes, it was a lot of fun sequencing the list.)
August 31, 2025 at 3:27 pm |
And here’s the riff list, set as (mostly) long-line free verse; it needs a tune:
I’m especially pleased with line 5 of the 10, the Gwendolyn Brooks gang bang line.