(well, yes, deeply about sex between men, considered analytically but described in the most direct street language, so entirely inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest)
Today’s topic combines the interests of my two previous postings
— on 3/24, “Luke Adams and the power bottoms of the pre-pandemic days”
— on 3/25, “The power of the normative gender binary”
and introduces as a side theme one of the overarching ideas of my work in both gender & sexuality studies and linguistics, that of pervasive variety / variability.
— as slogans: There are a great many homosexualities | There are a great many masculinities
Along the way, we’ll engage with four great bottoms from gay porn: Tannor Reed, Johnny Rapid, Kevin Wiles, and Trent Atkins.
Intro on Boy vs. Daddy, roles in an enduring relationship. From my 7/4/22 posting “I am a good Boy for you, Daddy”, about the
sharply counterposed characteristics for boy vs. daddy (yes, yes, you will see here the ghostly echoes of the normative gender opposition feminine vs. masculine):
— youthful, playful, inexperienced, younger vs. mature, serious, experienced, older
— accommodating, cooperative, supportive, submissive vs. assertive, competitive, in control, dominating
— twinkish or athletically lithe body type vs. bearish or muscle-hunk type
— sexual bottom vs. sexual top
— hence, callipygian presentation (boy offers you his beautiful fuckable ass) vs. calliphallic presentation (daddy offers you his handsome big hard dick to jack off, suck, or take up your ass)
… Bottom men frequently find the sensation of being filled up by their partner’s dick very satisfying physically (“Fill me up with that big cock!” is the sexcry), and on occasion, also experience having another man’s body inside their own as an emotionally intense union with the other man, figuratively sharing each other’s masculine power and multiplying it (“Gimme that big cock!” is a sexcry that covers some of this territory: make your cock mine!). Still other bottoms on occasion experience the raw intensity of getting fucked as a test of strength and endurance, a chance to show that they can, figuratively, take it like a man, and they’ll cry out to get fucked harder and deeper. [“Real men take it up the ass” is the slogan here] Still other bottoms on occasion configure getting fucked as a service to another man, giving him a warm wet hole to come in, and they might then beg him to shoot his hot load in their assholes.
There’s more, quite a lot more, but the point of these examples is that these emotional meanings for bottoms — there’s another big collection for tops — can’t be conveyed visually; if they’re to be expressed at all — in the heat of the act, in anticipation of it, or in recollection of it — that has to be in words.
So most of the emotional content of the act is simply inscrutable in gay porn. For porn, that’s largely a good thing, since it allows the viewer to import his own emotional meanings into the acts on screen, up to the constraints in the rough sketch of the film (gangbang, romance, watersports, Daddy – Boy, first time, t-room, S&M, whatever). Even in real life, even if you’re the sort of guy who reflects on and analyzes his inner emotional life (a great many men are not at all given to this kind of thought), you might not want to reveal these feelings to others.
Tannor Reed and more. From my 9/27/21 posting “Carnival for catamites”, on Tannor Reed:
Reed is young (born 5/22/98; he got into the porn business in 2019); very much twink-sized (quite slender, short — 5ʹ6ʺ — and lightweight, at 130 lbs.); with a standard porn-sized dick (ca. 7 inches, which looks really big on his frame), cut, sometimes attended to manually by his sexual partners. His sexual taste goes beyond mere bottoming to a kind of identity as a receptive (he just loves to get fucked), and a submissive as well (he offers his body for sex with other men and then pretty much does whatever they want of him).
In photos, however, he generally doesn’t read as gay — just as cute, adorably cute. But in a QueerMeNow interview on Vimeo (of 7/9/19), he comes across as way gay, in facial expression, gesture, and speech style; and he explains enthusiastically that he loves being watched, loves collecting huge numbers of fans, and really loves getting guys off. Living pretty much totally immersed in the gay porn business seems to him, right now, like a wonderful dream. Well, he’s young and energetic. But I worry about his future, wonder whether he ought to be thinking about what comes next — there’s surely no way for him to get back on track to going to med school, but something.
[Digression, from my 3/20/21 posting “Johnny Rapid evolves”, on the careers of twinks in gay porn:
While Johnny Rapid has moved from twink bottom boy to daddy-style top, many great twinks just leave the business when they’re no longer credible as twinks, or shift their porn persona from twink to devoted bottom. Great twink Kevin Wiles in a sense did both: he had a long (roughly 10-year — mid-80s to mid-90s) porn career, in which he transitioned to devoted bottom, and then he retired from the business.
I’ll get back to Kevin Wiles in a bit, but here I note that Tannor Reed came into the business as a sort of super-devoted bottom, already presenting himself as intensely receptive and submissive, so it’s not clear where he would go from here — certainly not with a Rapid-style switch to daddy top, which seems totally out of his personal sexual range.
Let me also flag the awkwardness of trying to talk about these sexual identities and presentations of self in terms of a small number of pre-established categories (twink, bottom / top, daddy / boy, receptive / insertive, submissive / dominant, etc.).]
… The variety of sexual identities, personas, communities, and practices within the world of male sexuality is truly enormous, but we’ve grown accustomed to paring most of this complexity down to a binary gender split between masculine and un-masculine (the latter usually labeled effeminate, or, baldly, feminine) — where the label masculine picks out those aspects of behavior and thought that are normative for males in a particular society at a particular place and time. Quite often the gender categories are viewed not as crisply binary but instead as spread along a scale from the masculine to the un-masculine — so that violations of normative masculinity come in lesser or greater degree. But that’s only a small fix to a conceptualization that is grossly inadequate to start with and that invites the valuing of certain ways of being over others according to their consonance with prevailing normative masculinity: normative masculine good, un-masculine defective.
I have more reflections on this topic than I can pack into today’s posting, so I’ll put most of that off to a future posting, though I’ll note here that on this blog I’ve been urging talk of masculinities (plural), and especially homomasculinities — clearing the way for talking about fagginess as just another variety of homomasculinity. (Recall that I’m the guy who’s been writing a lot about butch fagginess.)
Here I’ll continue with some particular cases, from real life as well as gay porn, noting that these cases — Tannor Reed and Kevin Wiles from porn, and Richard Vytniorgu in his own life, plus the Arnold Zwicky of around 30 years ago, when I was sexually active with other men — all diverge significantly from current normative masculinity by not only by taking it up the ass (by “getting fucked like a woman”, as contemptuous straight guys sometimes say) but by welcoming, in fact desiring, the receptive role: we all love to get fucked. Then, when you look at things more closely, it turns out that we represent several different styles of receptive. (Richard V. has suggested to me that Tannor Reed’s and his own submissive styles are even more violative of normative masculinity — hence more likely to arouse animus and contempt — than Kevin Wiles’s and my own active-engagement, power-bottom styles of receptivity. That strikes me as perceptive.)
In any case, a few more notes.
Kevin Wiles. On gay pornstar (and power bottom) Kevin Wiles, in the last section of my 2/9/16 posting “Morning names: wiles, Wiles”:
I’ve been reflecting on KW’s take on cocksucking and bottoming. In both cases, he goes well beyond mere willingness (after all, anyone can learn to perform these acts at least competently) and beyond enthusiasm, into something deeper and more intense, amounting to a kind of sexual orientation of its own, in which he submits with pleasure to another man by taking that man’s cock into his body (into his mouth or into his asshole) and worships it by having it become, in his sexual imagination, part of his own body. He absorbs that cock, as a symbol of the man it represents and the essence of his masculinity, and becomes one with it. He is deeply oriented towards cock (and consequently towards cum), as (I now say) an ubercocksucker or uberbottom (or both, as in KW’s case).
In my case, once I had my partner’s cock filling my ass I was consumed with pleasure both physical and emotional — and then negotiated with my body to get just the kind of pleasure I most wanted from my fucker, while providing him with the kind of pleasure he wanted. Not submissive at all.
Trent Atkins. From my 3/4/16 posting “Trent Atkins, a great bottom”:
IMDb notes on the actor:
Trent Atkins participated in gymnastics for ten years before switching to springboard and platform diving. In 1997, he received a scholarship to Indiana University for his athletics. He never finished his stint there and went to Los Angeles where he became an adult film actor. While working in the adult industry, Trent managed to contact a diving coach in Hawaii, where he attended The University of Hawaii at Manoa and earned a BA in Economics.
(He was born 12/27/78 in Minot ND but grew up in San Diego CA. He sees himself as something of a California beach boy.)
He took a break from gay porn for a time while he was working on his degree, but is now back at work. Interviews suggest that he sees his porn work as a serious job, a profession even, that requires commitment much like that needed to train for gymnastics and diving. (He’s also a licensed massage therapist, by the way. A body man in a whole lot of ways.)
As for his sexual orientation, he is frankly gay. Well, he might say that his orientation was as a bottom, and the same-sex desire, gay self-identification, and involvement in gay culture followed from that. (I wonder if there are any gay-for-pay porn actors — men who identify as straight — who are total bottoms. As far as I can tell, all the celebrated bottoms in gay porn have been frankly gay, though a few, like Joey Stefano, have been sadly conflicted over their desires, ashamed of them.) That is to say, Atkins has a kind of deep emotional commitment to bottoming; he’s what I’ve called an an uberbottom.
(Like so many gay pornstars, Atkins loves to display his body for an audience, and he has a high sex drive.)
In his presentation of self outside of his porn roles, he comes across as clearly gay (also as sweet, smilingly amiable, funny, thoughtful, and smart): he has a light (rather than deep) voice (so do I), and, more important, he has a modestly gay voice (with some of the phonetic properties of the GV — which I do not); especially when this is combined with his facial expressions and gestures, I don’t think you’d miss that he was gay, but he doesn’t come across as exaggeratedly so. (Obviously, I find him very attractive.)
… his long-prevalent visual presentation, with light brown hair in a masculine buzzcut, here in The Velvet Mafia, Part 2 (Falcon, 2006):
A bit into this scene, Atkins is supine, ankles in the air, getting Missionaried by his top, Brock Penn, when Penn slaps Atkins’s ass — and Atkins orders Penn to slap him more, and harder (and Penn does, reddening Atkins’s ass to the bottom’s satisfaction). An arresting moment: Atkins doesn’t have control of his body at all, but he’s still calling the shots.
Two interviews. There’s a brief video interview on Lucas Raunch, which you can view here, where you can see and hear the man. In his early 30s then, but still (to my eyes and ears, anyway) definitely cute as well as pleasantly gay.
Then a nice print interview from 2011, with Atkins doing shop talk: on G4P (gay for pay), on taking enormous things up his ass, and on dick size, among other things. Excerpts:
Interviewer: If there was one thing you would change about the business, what would it be?
Atkins: If I had my own company I wouldn’t use gay for pay models. I like working with guys who are into me, and I like to watch porn where you can see a definitive chemistry between two people.
… I honestly hate to work with so called gay for payers. They take forever, complain a lot, and tend to have more attitude than I care to deal with. I come to every job believing that nobody is better than anyone else. I don’t care who you think you are. We are all paid to do the same thing. If you can’t be professional, show up on time, and follow the rules then you shouldn’t be there.
Interviewer: Your on screen [persona] is a bottom who can handle any size … dick. Does that translate into your personal life? Have you ever been presented with a dick that was just too much?
Atkins: I never say too big. I’m flexible, so things seem to just slide right in. Ha! Ha! I think I was just born to bottom. [“born to bottom” – wonderful phrase, should be made into a song, or maybe a whole movie]
In my personal life though, I prefer ’em all sizes. Some of my best lovers have had smaller dicks. Sometimes when a guy has a huge dick, he thinks that’s all he needs to be a good fuck. Guys with small dicks know they are small, so they pay more attention to love making. That’s just my own personal experience though. I think huge dicks are fun to look at, and smack around, but [for getting fucked] I prefer anything from 5 to 8 inches.
xx
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