Archive for the ‘Facial expressions’ Category

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“I want to suck your socks off”

November 5, 2021

(The title alone should be enough to signal that this posting is totally inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest, as are three others to follow it. But a lot of this material is stunningly raunchy and also personal, so I’m issuing an especially strong warning. Two of the following postings merit a warning about heavy linguistics as well — phonology in one, syntax and semantics in the other, but even they are fugues on the vocabulary of fellatio, so men’s genitals and sex between men will be with us all the way through.)

Not a morning name exactly, but a quotation I woke up to a couple of days ago, a quotation bringing with it the recollection of an encounter from 40-some years ago that was so intensely pleasurable that I came to consciousness smiling and chuckling, with morning wood just a stroke short of a happy ending.

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Posted in Clothing, Facial expressions | 2 Comments »

Seven faces

October 29, 2021

Seven portraits of men (from 1875 through 1910) by John Singer Sargent, evoking character and state of mind, or celebrating male beauty, or both. Spurred by the appearance on Pinterest of this extraordinary charcoal sketch (from 1900-1910) of the young Italian man Olimpio Fusco (with his address on it!):


(#1) Fusco appears in at least one other drawing of Sargent’s — more explicitly sensuous —  in which he’s lying, naked, on his back in bed; these two drawings have led critics, with great caution, to describe Fusco as perhaps a “romantic interest” of Sargent’s

Put that aside for a moment, while I add that Sargent can fairly be described as having been a compulsive artist — always ready to dash off  a sketch or draft of pretty much anything he saw that caught his eye: colorful flowers, children playing, women’s clothing, faces (all kinds of faces, but especially men’s), street scenes, landscapes and seascapes, whatever. He did this sometimes with an eye to developing the sketches into works that could be exhibited or sold, but often just for his own pleasure. Sometimes for his very private pleasure, as in a large body of male nudes (many quite sensuous) created over the years, a selection of which were published finally in 1999, in this volume of John Esten’s:

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Posted in Art, Facial expressions, Gender and sexuality | 4 Comments »

Fireworks! Bang!

September 22, 2021

This posting originally came in two parts, united in fact by a sheer accident of timing, that two celebratory — fireworks! bang! — things happened  during a July weekend in the US: the first is a personal celebration, of an honor from the Linguistic Society of America that marks me as officially a kind of famous faggot (I happily embrace faggot); the second is the 4th of July holiday, an occasion as American as baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie, but capable of being hijacked for raunchy purposes. But in the interests of getting something posted while I still live, I’m putting the second part off, to appear as a separate posting (which will require a warning of  irredeemable raunchiness; this part dips into sexual topics with some frequency, no surprise, but needs, I think, no more severe a warning than that).

Notes: I do love fireworks, because there are occasions when only excess will really do the trick; but like a stereotypical queer, I am at best lukewarm on sports (though I have an enthusiasm for the San Francisco Giants when they’re in the World Series — go figure); I enjoy eating the occasional hot dog (for its taste and texture as well as its phallicity), but it has to be kosher (I had my ritual Independence Day Hebrew National wurst on the 3rd); and I also enjoy eating apple pie, but my preference is for Julia Child’s Tarte aux Pommes (another faggy enthusiasm).

The other thing about holidays, the Fourth of July notably among them, is that they are occasions for elaborate advertising campaigns hawking homoware: men’s premium underwear (including oh my, jockstraps), steamily presented, and gay porn videos (not to mention sex toys for gay men), all of these items that I view both as sources of deep personal satisfaction (which I am happy to talk about in detail, in the plainest of street language) and as objects of academic analysis, on several levels.

And then I have contrived to make a more than accidental connection between celebrating my recognition as an LGBTQ+ linguist and celebrating the Fourth of July, by selecting a holiday porn ad that turns on the ambiguity of N and V bang, as referring to noise-making or as referring to sexual intercourse: consider this exemplary text, the Falcon Big Bang 2021 sale ad (for gay porn) that came in my e-mail on July 2nd:

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Posted in Awards, Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language of sex, My life, Style and register, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Cockateal crotches

September 18, 2021

(Male bodyparts, sex between men, visually right up against the line, so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)

From yesterday’s “Materials for a blog”, reporting on my asking, puckishly, in Facebook:

What happens in the romantic popular song “Teal for Two”? If it’s set in a tealroom, whazzat?

Answers to these and other questions are forthcoming, but first the spur for my silly queries: a Daily Jocks ad for PUMP! men’s underwear, a display of PUMP!’s Activate homowear collection, in teal (with deep purple and white), with four teal studs in four different moose-knuckly garments, displaying four different cruise faces: We’re looking at you, buddy, cause we know what you need!

Ad copy:

Your favourite brand is back with a new collection for 2021. The PUMP! Activate collection comprises … a Trunk, Brief, Jock & Sidecut Brief, all made with premium materials to achieve unmatched levels of comfort and style.


(#1) Cockateal crotches: Cockateal, cockatool! / A-wand’ring I will go

Men’s underwear, a bird, a color, a sportive allusion to cocks of the phallic, rather than avian, sort. As in my 8/15/21 posting “Jock robin”, about Cock Robin and a jockstrap in robin’s egg blue.

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Posted in Color, Facial expressions, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language play, Movies and tv, Music, Phallicity, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

A stone solid pro

August 31, 2021

(Largely about male prostitution, so distasteful to many, but not, I think, actually over any lines.)

A stone solid pro, a street hustling boy, plying his trade for a better grade of customers, comfortably indoors, in his sexy Water Briefs, at a pool bar:


(#1) [from the Daily Jocks e-mailing of 8/30; ad copy:] Skip through the beach club line ups and go straight to the pool bar in the new PUMP! Water Briefs. The wide waistband on this low-cut cut brief gives you comfort at the waistline. The customised multi layered leg elastic offers the ultimate support and accentuates the butt.

You don’t see an impudent cruise face like — not his real name — Joe Dallesandro’s every day. For the use of his body and his company, you pay $400 (cash) an hour (extra for a few special services), plus the cost of a hotel room at the beach club’s hotel and the expense of a background check on you (he’ll give you references from his regular clients, and, as part of the background check, he has ways of getting references from your previous escorts — JD’s an independent contractor, and a sharp businessman; don’t let that boyish face fool you).

Most high-end hustlers make contact with new johns electronically, but, having come up from working the street as a sassy teen — risky  but thrilling — JD still prefers the physicality of face-to-face negotiation. That also allows him to show his skills at figuring out your desires and fashioning himself into the man who will satisfy them. The cruise of death is just an opening gambit, a kind of best guess as to what you need; experience tells him that most men, especially successful and powerful men, want to be dominated and used.

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Posted in Art, Facial expressions, Gender and sexuality, Idioms, Male art, Movies and tv, Music, Parody, Photography | Leave a Comment »

Fox and friends I

June 4, 2021

(Much about men’s bodies and sex between men, in plain language, with photos, so not at all for kids or the sexually modest.)

The fox in question is Sean Ford, a model and gay porn actor and observer of the worlds of homosexuality, sex work, love between men, and identities and personas. The friends are Angel Rivera, his partner in a scene (both sweet and hot) in the recent porn flick Lips Together; and Peter Berlin, a famous object of gay sexual fantasy in classic porn and the fox’s partner in a 2020 Interview magazine piece on performing gay sex.

It started with a 5/27 e-mail ad (from Game Link Gay, for a  Memorial Day sale) featuring shots from videos on sale, including a Rivera Fucks Ford shot (from the CockyBoys 2020 DVD Lips Together, Six Feet Apart) that is notable for both the men’s facial expressions and their position in the sexual act (both recurrent topics on this blog).

In this posting: on the shot, the facial expressions, the sex position, the video and the two actors. Then in a second installment, to come: on an interview with Ford, on eroticism, intimacy, and love. And on an interview with Ford and Berlin, on jealousy and monogamy, and on aspects of working in the gay porn business: managing a porn persona, getting work, continuing in the business, earning enough to live on (all aspects of the business I’ve touched on in postings on the blog).

To start things off, the shot cropped to isolate the men’s facial expressions:


(#1) An Ecstatic face on Ford (on the right), intense focus on Ford’s face by Rivera (on the left) — a version of a Good Buddy face

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Posted in Facial expression, Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

With knitted brows

May 3, 2021

(Significantly about sex between men, often in street language, so thoroughly unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)

On 5/1, e-mail from HUNT magazine (which hawks gay video porn) featuring a new bareback release, Show Hard, all about t-room / tearoom sexual encounters — a recurrent theme on this blog (there’s a Page on postings about sex in public, especially focused on t-room sex). I’ll take up the flick (and its name) later in this posting.

But on viewing the still from the first scene of Show Hard in the mailing — muscle hunk Beau Butler getting pronged on a mensroom sink by equally hunky Sean Maygers — what really caught my eye wasn’t the sexual action, arousing though that is, but the expression on Butler’s face. One that is so common that we have a name for it in English: knitted / knit (eye)brows. It turns out that there’s more than one physical gesture that is so called; and also, unsurprisingly, that this family of gestures can convey a variety of affects. Also that there are a number of other closely related gestures, with a collection of vocabulary that refers to them; it’s a rich domain of meaning.

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Posted in Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Idioms, Language of sex, Metaphor, Metonymy, Slang | 3 Comments »

smouldering

April 11, 2021

Recently received: Almost Completely Baxter: New and Selected Blurtings (New York Review Comics, 2016), a collection of absurdist cartoons by the artist Glen Baxter. There will be more drawings from the volume; today, one (p. 30) about smouldering:

(#1)

From NOAD on the verb smolder / smoulder:

[no object] [a] burn slowly with smoke but no flame: the bonfire still smoldered, the smoke drifting over the paddock. [b] show or feel barely suppressed anger, hatred, or another powerful emotion [AZ: notably including sexual desire and sexual invitation]: Anna smoldered with indignation | (as adjective smoldering): he met her smoldering eyes. …

Clearly, #1 illustrates sense a, but some might see the burning as also an eruption of a powerful emotion (sense b) — and, since Hank is a handsome young man putting on this display for an assortment of cowboys, rough older men, you might see that emotion as sexual (and some commenters on the cartoon have seen it as camp humor).

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Posted in Ambiguity, Facial expressions, Gender and sexuality, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »

Two pornstar smiles

February 19, 2021

(About affectional and sexual relations between men, with some discussion of sex in street language, so this posting is not suitable for kids or gay men.)

A sale ad from Lucas Entertainment (the gay porn studio) yesterday (2/18) shows an affectionate couple, both smiling, but in different ways:


(#1) (The photo has been cropped, for WordPress modesty; but not only is the man on the left significantly taller than this partner, his dick is significantly longer and (especially) fatter than his partner’s)

On the left, an assured half-smile, directed at the viewers; on the right, an adoring (and adorable) half-smile. The men are presented as a b/t couple (in the terms I use for roles in gay male relationships): the t man is in charge, indicated by (among other things, his firm proprietary hand on the b man’s neck, while the b man is nestled against his partner, resting on his chest.

The b man often takes the bottom (receptive) role in anal sex, the t man the top (insertive) role — hence, the labels b and t — and that’s very much the case in the porn episode this still is taken from, but things are much more complicated than that.

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Posted in Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality | Leave a Comment »

Celebrating Valentine’s Day 2: the gay porn actors

February 12, 2021

(This posting — with its depictions of and street-language descriptions of, sex between men — is totally unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

An ad, both very carefully and pleasingly composed and also goofily absurd, for the HUNT eZine gay porn sale for Valentine’s Day 2021, plays on movie clichés of tango or flamenco dancing, in which a red rose (symbolizing sexual passion) is held between the teeth of one of the dancers in a couple, most commonly the woman, but sometimes the man. (Note: roses, of whatever color, between the teeth play no role whatsoever in actual tango and flamenco.)

The ad shows two men who are fucking, not dancing, but the top (exhibiting a fiercely ecstatic facial expression) has a red rose clenched between his teeth, as a symbol of his overwhelming desire for the bottom (whose eyes are closed and whose mouth is half open, in receptive ecstasy):

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Posted in Dance, Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays | Leave a Comment »

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