From Bitty Ramirez on Facebook:
It is really unusual to have a K-12 lesson that allows discussion of dice and playing cards. This may be the first time I’ve encountered it. And I am finding it really disconcerting that the writer keeps dividing suits by color instead of by major/minor.
This was at first completely baffling to me: major/minor?
It turned out to be significant that Bitty is a bridge player, and I am not. Major/minor is a thing in bridge.
(Men’s bodies, mansex, and elaborate incest fantasies, discussed in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
The raw material for this posting is in two AZBlogX postings:
from 3/16/18 “On the fetish patrol: FamilyDick”, on a March 16th ad for the Michael Lucas FamilyDick line of inter-family gay sex porn
from 3/17/18 “Josman’s family”, on comics by the artist Josman depicting ecstatic interfamilial mansex
There’s a striking difference in the way incest is handled in filmed porn (like Lucas’s FamilyDick videos) vs. printed porn (written fiction as on the nifty.org website, comics like those by Josman), a difference that’s tied to the way gay porn treats identities — by tending to conflate the real-life actors, their pornstar personas, and the characters they portray in particular flicks. The result is that in filmed porn, the (fantasy) incest is only step-incest (typically, pairing stepfather and stepson or two stepbrothers), while in printed porn, the (fantasy) incest frankly and celebratorily pairs father and son or two brothers.
So, yes, this is about porn, but it’s also about the conventions of narrative.
The Zippy strip from the 5th:
(#1) Alfred Jarry?
A Muffler Man-style fiberglass figure: a lumberjack with an ax(e) slung over his shoulder.
(About lines between real life and invented life — as it happens, in the world of gay porn, using the model / actor Jason Phoenix as a case study, though genre clashes between non-fiction and fiction are pretty much unremitting. But there’s no getting around the fact that there’s a lot of talk here about men’s bodies and man-man sex, so the posting is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Jason Phoenix (hereafter, JP) has retired from gay porn, but he is revived, again and again — he is a phoenix, after all — by Channel 1 Releasing and its subsidiaries (most recently in a sale ad yesterday, noted in AZBlogX), including two managed by Dirk Yates and his associates. One has been filming
“Straight Military Guys Doing Not-So-Straight Things” for nearly 30 years. (link)
(the conceit is that the guys are straight amateurs doing it only for the money) and the other provides flat-out gay porn, performed by professionals. But the studio regularly blurs the line between the two enterprises by presenting the pros as military naifs off the street. JP is an interesting case because it seems he did start out as a military naif off the street.
From the NYT Magazine on Sunday (the 22nd), “My Dear, Dear, Dear Watson” by Jenna Wortham, beginning:
Part of the Internet’s beauty is the space it affords people to take an idea and run with it . . . and run with it and run with it, until they end up miles away from where they started. Among a subset of online superfans of the BBC show “Sherlock,” solving mysteries is mere window dressing for the real story: one about unrequited love between Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Dr. John Watson (Martin Freeman).
(#1)
(Sherlock (Cumberbatch) and John (Freeman) in situ in Sherlock.)
In the most recent (December/January) issue of the Advocate (the lgbt news magazine), a story “Where Slash Fiction Makes for Dangerous Words: Slash fiction arrives and thrives in China, despite the constant threat of government crackdowns” by Yuan Ren, beginning:
Earlier this year, during a nationwide clampdown on online pornography, some 20 writers, allegedly under contract with “illegal erotic novel Web sites,” were arrested in Henan province, China, and numerous Web sites with explicit written and visual content were shut down. Most of these writers were young women, many of whom, according to footage from Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong broadcaster, were in their 20s, oblivious to the fact that they were breaking the law. The incident followed a similar spate of arrests in 2011 — again of young female writers.
The women were all writers of gay fiction, known as dan mei, which over the past two decades has gained a vast and dedicated following in China, a country where homosexuality is still heavily stigmatized.
(Not much language in this one.)
The San Francisco Giants have been playing a series against the Arizona Diamondbacks; I watched the beginnings of the games Friday night and last night — both Giants wins, 2-0 and 4-3 — at Three Seasons (while consuming sushi). These games moved me to add Hunter Pence to my list of favorite Giants players — favorite as players and as wonderful men to look at. (Buster Posey and Tim Lincecum were already on the list.) After my adventures with shirtless actors and tennis players, I thought to check for shirtless Hunter Pence, and bingo.
It also occurred to me that Hunter Pence wouldn’t be a bad name for a pornstar. It doesn’t seem to have been taken, but a search did pull up a rich vein of steamy RPF (real people fiction) involving Giants players, in particular Hunter Pence and Brandon Belt (another good potential porn name) as lovers and Buster Posey and Madison Bumgarner as lovers. Oh my.
One more Sundance and Butch episode, about names and about language learning, on my X blog, here. Warning: high carnality fiction.
