(Crude, but not actually X-rated; but the title is HOT PANTS HOMO, so it won’t be to everyone’s taste)
From Chris Ambidge on the Facebook group soc-motss on 8/10:
[CA:] I must have done something wrong — I’ve never seen a book like this on a bookstore shelf. Maybe I didn’t have enough Ovaltine™?
CA alludes to vintage ads for Ovaltine, notable (these days) for their use of the adjective gay ‘light-hearted, carefree’, e.g. “To Wake Up GAY in the Morning! Just Try this at Bedtime Tonight!” (see my 7/20/17 posting “Ovaltine mornings”).
The cover of Hot Pants Homo summarizes the crucial plot point:
BISEXUAL … HE TOOK ON MALE AND FEMALE ALIKE
This is about our hero’s choices of sexual partners: who he prongs. But then above:
IT TOOK HIM YEARS OF AGONY TO REALIZE THAT HE WANTED A MAN
And that’s about his desires: who arouses him. That’s something else. And now we’re in the giant can of worms of my 8/14 posting “Three prolegomena to a giant can of worms”, summarized this way:
[Prolegomena:] 1 is about the Bloomsbury artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell; 2 is about affectionate relationships between gay men and straight women; 3 is about me and my wife, Ann.
[Theses, ending with:] — there’s a bunch of (distinct) concepts that could fairly be labeled bisexuality, but none of them was under discussion above; it’s a gigantic can of worms
We are now creeping up on the complexities of concepts that maybe could be fairly labeled as kinds of bisexuality. But how much pronging, when and in what contexts? Desire manifested in what ways and in what contexts? And so on.
Then we’re quickly driven back to the question of what these various categories of bisexuality are for. The point of categories is that, if they’re useful, they’re information-rich: the properties of their members are clustered, so that one of them will frequently implicate others. I’m not at all sure that any of the categories of bisexuality have this property; they look to me like isolated facts about people’s social and psychological lives. Lives that are enormously varied in almost every imaginable detail. So that taken as a whole the scene is a rat’s nest.
But of course specific people can have identities that turn significantly, for them, on their engaging sexually with both men and women, and they will want to assert bisexuality as their sexuality. So they get their spot in LGBT and its further expansions.
Meanwhile, as always with everyday concepts / categories, the boundaries and borders will be fuzzy in various ways.
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