(images that aren’t actually XXX-rated, but get as close to the line as possible while serving WordPress modesty — so some readers may choose to avert their eyes)
Briefly noted. For charging up the senses — big jolts for someone of my inclinations — on a quiet Sunday, Daily Jocks has sent out a mailer ad for thongs this morning (8/30) celebrating the male body as sexual object, close up, fore and aft:
My right hip joint is now a metallic wonder, a titanium replacement in 2012 for the joint nature gave me, which had excruciatingly degenerated from osteoarthritis. I love the name titanium: it trips off the tongue, and as a proud gay man and an enthusiast of MND (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in several of its incarnations, I choose to understand the name as a reference to Titania, Queen of the Fairies — silly faggot, titanium is for ur-deities.
Now to unpack all of this.
Having just done two little postings on brief subjects this morning, I’m now going to wade into a few somewhat meatier subjects that have the potential to explode into larger matters of some weight.
The first of these came to me in tv commercials for the Liberty Mutual insurance company, featuring a Struggling Actor character — all of which delighted me and made me laugh out loud. One of my favorites, “Biberty Bungle” (the one with the bubbles), you can view here.
In the last few days, I’ve returned to two movies from long ago that gave me great pleasure then and have just brought me fresh joy. From 1953 (when I was in high school, in Pennsylvania), Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck (which came up on a free classic movie channel on my cable service). And from 1963 (when I was in grad school, in Massachusetts), Tom Jones, starring Albert Finney and a cast of wonderful character actors (which I had just gotten the DVD of in the mail).
(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”).
It’s mid-August, and still hot summer in Palo Alto, but the nights are now cool (quilt time is upon me) and it’s cool when I get up (around 3 am), moving me to put on a thick flannel shirt and gelling the coconut oil I use to treat my body (it becomes a thin clear liquid in the heat of the day, but the gel is what you want if you’re using it for skin and hair).
(frank discussion of sex, of various kinds, some of it in street language — so not for kids or the sexually modest)
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.
(warning: raunchy vocabulary, but surmounting the raunch is the point; still, over the line for kids and the sexually modest)
Well, a two-word phrase. Which I very carefully framed — in yesterday’s posting “Getting picked” — in this passage:
I’m a whoring faggot in deep disguise — also a lot of other, socially more decorous, things, but I’m that too
Now, that’s two incendiary words, both generally lobbed as insults, condemnations, or accusations: whoring ‘sexually promiscuous, esp. for payment’ and faggot. I want them back, and I’ll ding at them until they lose their power for other people as well as me. I’ve been working on faggot for decades and will continue to plug away at it. I have the Fuck Me Like the Whore I Am t-shirt — but have never worn it because that would be false advertising: whore, yes, with a rich history of many sexual partners, a lot of them classifiable as tricks of one sort or another (this is a rich and complex world); enthusiast for getting fucked, jesus yes; available to any random dick off the street, absolutely not.
So part of the program is normalization of various kinds of everyday and widespread sexual practices. But my goal is deeper than that.
The terminology of insult, condemnation, and accusation conveys two things: some root attribution of sexual desire, practice, or identity (for which there is less incendiary vocabulary) — PLUS some content that is genuinely reprehensible, worthy of censure: some bad stuff. And I say: show me the bad stuff. As a riddle: How is a faggot not like a gay man?
And people will tell you that faggots are the bad gays, the nasty gays, the obvious ones, the effeminate ones, with lisps, the ones that are too gay, flaunt their gayness, talk about sex too much, go on marches for butt-fucking, stick to their own kind, and so on.
In this world, then, what is a non-faggot gay? Be specific, give examples, you say, and what you get is men — or ideas of men — whose gayness is in fact completely invisible. Whose sexual desires, practices, and identities aren’t out in the world in any way. No-gay gays. This is social death, and no one should be subjected to it.
There are unpleasant, even wicked, people everywhere, including the gigantic world of male-male sexuality. But mostly there ‘s an extraordinary variety of ways of composing gay-sexual lives and integrating them with all the rest of our lives. Claim: faggots are in fact just gay men. Period. The word faggot does have more punch to it, thanks to the echoes of its nasty history, so I treasure it.
And I say, tongue in cheek, of being a faggot: not that there’s anything wrong with that!
From Wikipedia:
“The Outing” is the 57th episode of the sitcom Seinfeld. First aired on February 11, 1993 on NBC, it is the 17th episode of the fourth season. In this episode, a journalism student reports on Jerry and George’s close companionship, which becomes understood as the two of them coming out. The line “… not that there’s anything wrong with that” — as a reference to homosexuality — has become a popular catchphrase among fans.
Then, as with faggot, I’d say good things about whore and whoring. But not today; it’s been a long day. A really good day, but it’s over now.
