The One Big Happy from the 24th:
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Ruthie wasn’t familiar with the word synchronized in the conventionalized composite synchronized swimming, so she interpreted t as best she could, and so it became sink-n-cries, which makes a lot more sense (as her father notes).
(About art and sexuality. Not much language in it.)
Terry Castle, my Stanford colleague (in English literature), has been using Pinterest to compose a kind of history of modern art in pictures, specializing in drawings, paintings, and photographs of lgbt interest. Most recently, two photographs by George Platt Lynes, a photographer of (among other things) male nudes, from the 1930s-50s:
A photograph of a trio of men from Lynes’s artistic (often labeled “magical realist”) and homosexual (the term they used at the time) circle, George Tooker, Paul Cadmus, and Jared French:
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And then a photograph of a “dancer in costume with animal skull headpiece” (as it is described by the Metropolitan Museum of Art):
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(A number of gay pornstars, but no man-man sex and just a bit about male bodies, so somewhat racy but probably not a danger for kids or the sexually modest.)
I start with a gay pornstar whose performances I enjoy, for several reason: Tommy Defendi shown here in a porn publicity shot (back on 7/23/11, he was featured in flagrante in an AZBlogX posting):
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Here I’m primarily focused on faces and evaluative judgments of them. Defendi’s face is certainly attractive; he’s a good-looking man, but the question is: in what category of masculine attractiveness? And what label to apply to it? — at the high-masculine end, ruggedly handsome or just rugged; or handsome; or beautiful; or cute; or at the low-masculine end, boyishly cute or just boyish. I’d label him cute, along with some other pornstars, some male models, and a fair number of mainstream actors (all men whose livelihood depends of their faces and their bodies, among other things).
To come: very brief notes on Defendi. Comments on categories and labels in the domain of male attractiveness. Further examples of cute gay pornstars, of a variety of types. And a note on cute male actors outside of porn, notably Matt Damon.
Today’s Bizarro, on categories in the domain of sexuality and gender:
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(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Some brief introductory words on homosexual, gay, and queer. Then on LGBTQ. And on to a recent NYT Magazine article on queer. Which leads, remarkably, to the Penrose triangle (of interest to scholars of both perception and art).
(Not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Today’s Daily Jocks ad, offering 2eros Black Label items (with my caption):
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The Insolent Brothers
Offer themselves
On the altar of Eros to
Needy faggotsBuddy White more
Welcoming, Bro Black more
Contemptuous; off work they’re
Tight with one another but
Certain they’d never ever
Switch teams to joinThe Ecstatic Sisters, the way those
Queers Mikey Bono and
Lennie Vance did
A follow-up to yesterday’s posting on “oiks, yobs, and prats”, about British social slurs, especially in the tv series Midsomer Murders: Facebook comments from John Wells (on the slurs in my posting, plus chav) and Don Steiny (on the status of cunt in British (also Australian) English).
(The X-rated images are on AZBlogX, but, still, there’s some plain talk about male-male sex here, so probably not for kids or the sexually modest.)
It starts on AZBlogX, with a posting “The T-formation blowjob”, taking off from a Bound Gods image (#1 there) illustrating the pleasures of bondage, submission, and humiliation, but viewed on my blog primarily for the carefully aligned bodies of the two men engaged in a complex sexual act: the submissive, bound and gagged, man entirely vertical, including his hard cock, the dominant man (edging him) leaning over at right angles to him, making a visual T. A similar T-formation blowjob appears in #2 there, in a carefully posed scene (from gay porn) of group sex, with its central feature a fellated man (again making a strong vertical) aligned at right angles to his fellator (bent over at his task), with two flanking men (nearly vertical) serving as bookends, so to speak.
The larger topic is the alignment of bodies in photography, painting, and drawing: alignment to one another and to features of the physical context, and the direction of gazes in these scenes.
The Daily Jocks ad for the 4th, featuring their very own patriotic underwear, worn by a decidely worried-looking model (with my caption):
Hank was always
Up for the
Hot-dog eating
Contest, but he was
Anxious about exploding
Fireworks in his pants
Three offers still out that have had no takers and will go away on Monday the 11th (the first to a local donation site, the other two to the trash heap):
#8 gay music (here)
#4 mix CDs (here, described in detail below), now in a special offer
#1 X-rated gay collages, mounted for hanging (here), also in a special offer described below
I’m giving special offers on the last two because they’re the work of my own hand and I hate to just throw them away.
You pay only shipping expenses. To request an offer, SEND E-MAIL to me (arnold.zwicky@gmail.com), with your mailing address, and Kim Darnell (drdcrunk@gmail.com) will get in touch with you about mailing and payment.
(Not about language, but about holidays, advertising, and gay pornstars.)
In my e-mail for the Fourth of July weekend, porn studio Channel 1 Releasing’s patriotic ad (“Red White & Tattooed”) for this year:
Aside from the ridiculousness of the ad — something you expect in porn ads for holiday sales, and often a trigger for giggles — the model looks druggy and disheveled, and I’m put off by the pistol tattooed on his right hip. These things are a matter of taste; still, I judge this lad to be not the prettiest stallion in the stable.