Archive for the ‘Gender and sexuality’ Category

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Urgently singing the hidden homoeroticism of cowboys

April 7, 2024

Poignantly noted on Facebook on Friday by Earl Jackson, a just-released video of Orville Peck and Willie Nelson joined in a moving performance of “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond Of Each Other”, which you can view here.

Actually, you should view it before reading on with this posting, even if — maybe especially if — you’ve never heard of Ned Sublette’s wry 1981 song, which has been something of a Willie Nelson project for two decades now (he recorded a version of it in 2006) and even if you’ve never heard of the young gay country singer who performs, masked, under the name Orville Peck. Enjoy the song — which is more complex than might at first appear — and the performance, with Peck’s warm, strong country voice paired with Nelson’s raspy but equally strong country voice (a real marvel for a 90-year-old), and Orville’s deep seriousness paired with Willie’s sweet but earnest smiles. So you should listen to their performance, but you should also watch it.


(#1) From the YouTube video: Orville and Willie under a tree, out in the middle of a fenced field, singing and strumming in celebration of gay desire and coupling — urgently conveying a social and political message

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Masculinity, Music | 2 Comments »

La machine à comprendre les femmes

April 5, 2024

From Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook yesterday, this Tintin panel (whose specific source I do not know), in which Tintin and Capt. Haddock finally reach the famous machine for understanding women:


bon sang!, Capt. Haddock exclaims (literally ‘good blood’, used as an exclamation covering a range of high affect: roughly ‘Damn it!’); and Tintin prefaces his announcement of their amazing find with alors voila enfin ‘here it is finally’

La célềbre machine is a monster of science-fantasy invention, the sort of unimaginably intricate device that might revivify corpses, transport people through time, or launch a fleet of rocket ships to destinations light-years from the earth. But this one is devoted to understanding women, as if this project were on a par with revivifying corpses, transporting people through time, and launching a fleet of rocket ships to destinations light-years from the earth.

Men! I cry out, peevishly, at the ways of normative masculinity. As women and gay men are given to doing (often together, since many of our annoyances are shared).

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Posted in AI, French, Gender and sexuality, Language and the sexes, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity | 2 Comments »

The pictures of Dorian Todd Yeager

April 3, 2024

[Sexy guy. scarcely clothed, so not to everyone’s taste.]

Visual artists — at least those who think of themselves as Artists, creating fine art (for its own sake), in the art world — tend to be elusive folk: hiding behind pseudonyms, performing elaborate presentations of themselves, concealing biographical information in the belief that they should be judged on their art alone, producing accounts of what their art is about that are either bafflingly abstraction-laden or sophomorically jokey, giving their works unhelpful titles, making information about their works hard to come by, and so on. (In my experience, illustrators, cartoonists, and craft artists are considerably more approachable.)

Which brings me to the subject of my 3/27 posting “With hooves and horns” (assembled after considerable wrangling with sources), which looked at

the male art of the young NYC artist Todd Yeager … Especially devoted to faun / satyr / goat-god Pan images …, male buttocks and penises, and loving male couples …. Also to self-portraits of many kinds; well, he’s a good-looking hunky young man who can do pensive or flagrantly sexy, as it suits him. Here’s a sexy one: boots, buttocks, and profile. ..:


(#1) Self-portrait in jockstrap and boots (not dated)

The painting shows a young man I judge to be in his 30s. Meanwhile, the young man categorization comes from Yeager writing about himself in the Advocate magazine website on 2/16/21  — only three years ago — in “Spring Brings Hooves and Horns From Todd Yeager”:

Todd is a working artist in New York City who has been exhibiting in galleries for a surprising number of years considering what a young man he is.

But then the age thing started to unravel.

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Posted in Argument structure, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Lives | 2 Comments »

PAW days

March 31, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate March (3/31) and for Princeton University (from the 19th century, the Princeton locomotive cheer “Rah rah rah! Tiger, tiger, tiger! Sis, sis, sis, boom, boom, boom, ah!”), plus 🐇 a rabbit for Easter (no doubt soon to be devoured by the tigers — though it will be succeeded tomorrow by a tougher trio of rabbits inaugurating the month of April, who might be foolish but have the power of three)

And so I turn to the Princeton Alumni Weekly (which is a monthly publication, but try not to dwell on that) — PAW, from now on — and my relations to it in recent years. While noting that when I die, PAW is the only place where I’m sure to get an obituary, though my Stanford department’s weekly newsletter, the Sesquipedalian, will have a notice, as will the news bulletin from the Linguistic Society of America (the LSA), and friends will say something on Facebook; otherwise, I expect my death to go publicly unremarked (and I encourage my daughter and grandchild not to spend their money on paid announcements), so at least in the death department, PAW looms large.

Now: I’ll re-play (with little further commentary) some history from the past three years in which PAW has been involved, ending with a section from my class notes in the issue that arrived in the mail yesterday (with rather more commentary).

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Posted in Awards, Death notices, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, My life, Princeton | 4 Comments »

The three Larrys

March 16, 2024

A complex tale that begins with a follow-up to my 3/1 posting “The grace of lovers”, about the sharing of enthusiasms with my first male lover, Larry (the pseudonymous Danny Sparrick in my writings about my sexual life). That’s Larry1. There are gripping stories about our time together and his life now, but the tale of the three Larrys is fabulously intricate as it is, so I’ll put off posting about these parts of Larry1’s life for another time. And focus on our exchange of enthusiasms, which will lead, circuitously, to Larry2 (in NYC, some years after Larry1). And then, a recent posting about a French conference on interjections, in which a 1982 dissertation on discourse particles I directed at Ohio State brings us Larry3, who wrote it.

There is still more, a epic of geographical (and social) wandering for both Larry1 and me; he grew up in Del Mar, a beach community in San Diego County, and ended up in provincial Japan; I grew up in little suburbs of Reading, in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, and ended up on the San Francisco peninsula; in between these terminal points, he and I more or less wandered the world (we both taught in China along the way, but not in the same place or at the same time; we both lived in England at one point and were able to get together in London then; and once we rendezvoused in Washington DC). Perhaps these odysseys will make another posting — but, again, too much for today.

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Posted in Books, Discourse organization, Gayland, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Interjections, Music, My life, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

The final 5 Hot Days of Christmas

March 5, 2024

(Very heavy on gay content, with a number of raunchy allusions, so not to everyone’s taste.)

I’m well aware that Christmas was over two months ago, but this is a complex posting and  my life’s been full of, um, challenges. In any case, I’m finally finishing up Dean Allemang’s series of AI-generated Christmas-card designs for the 12 days as in the carol, all of them sent as titillating presents for me. The early ones had one hot hunk, an object of gay sexual desire (Dino and I share a sexual orientation, and in fact a sexual history), as a central figure, with multiples of the gift of the day (birds or those golden rings) as accompaniments; but from there on it’s multiple men: for days 6 and 7, in my 1/11 posting “Hot Days of Christmas: geese and swans”, the dudes are figurative birds; for days 8 (maids a-milking) and 9 (ladies dancing), Dino just switched sexes (milkmen, laddies dancing); the last three days have male gifts in the carol (10 lords a-leaping, 11 pipers piping, 12 drummers drumming), but Dino has found fresh, jokey, interpretations for all three.

(Note: once things shifted to multiple hunks, Dino’s prompts for suitable images tended to turn up clone-like variants of the same basic guy, just differently posed and dressed. So we’ll be seeing a few of these studs again and again; some people find this effect creepy, some find it really hot, I toggle back and forth between the two reactions.)

Now: for background, a look back at the turning point in this carnival of images, the geese a-laying (day 6) and swans a-swimming (day 7). With some comments from Dino about the craft of prompting for suitable images (which can then be further massaged with image-processing software); there’s a lot of art in all of this.

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Puns, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »

Today’s Gaze Downward

February 25, 2024

(Underwear models in, well, nothing but underwear, with plain talk about their bodies, so not to everyone’s taste.)

From the folks at Daily Jocks in yesterday’s e-mail, this ad for the company’s racy DJX underwear:

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Posted in Art, Gaze, Gender and sexuality, Stance, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Jack Spicer’s California summers

February 24, 2024

Yesterday, in my posting “Poet to poet”, I gave you extracts from a Billy Collins poem on the poet Jack Spicer and promised a posting on the poets Spicer and Frank O’Hara. I’ve posted a good bit of O’Hara on this blog over the years, but Spicer has gone unsampled. Looking ahead to the next posting, Spicer and O’Hara share four notable things, beyond their being extraordinary poets: they were almost exact contemporaries (and at one point in their lives went out drinking and dancing together); both their lives were cut off early (at the age of 40; Spicer drank himself to death, O’Hara was killed in a freak accident); they were both openly, defiantly gay (in the 1940s to 1960s, yet); and they both pursued their craft doggedly, compulsively, as if it was something they couldn’t not do.

Their poetry came to me together through the same route, my first male lover, and it was a great gift, but the two men could hardly have been less similar. O’Hara was ebullient, gregarious, self-assured; Spicer was unsure of himself, inclined to depression, a natural loner (who also, however, craved social connections of many kinds). O’Hara’s poetry is famously spontaneous, improvised in the moment, while many of Spicer’s poems were reworked and elaborated over time, though he also longed for poetry that would just come to him through the air, like radio waves. Yes, a bundle of contradictions.

Spicer’s life history is so restless, complex, and fascinating that I’m posting most of the Wikipedia article on him, below. After that I offer you just one, fairly long, poem, “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy” (from the late 1940s), framed as a session between a (maximally laconic) therapist and a patient who’s spinning out a shimmering sensuous vision of California summers that just might never end.

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Posted in Awards, Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

The discouragements of old age

February 21, 2024

As regular readers will have noticed, things have not been good for me in recent days — physically just hanging on, barely getting through the days; spirits so low I’m almost frozen in discouragement. Many things have no doubt contributed to the fix I’m in, but one part of the story has to do with the late-career recognitions that sum up the accomplishments of the most significant academics: publication of their collected works; a Festschrift from colleagues and students celebrating the influence of their works; honorary degrees; and prizes or awards. I travel in circles where such recognitions are common, but never expected to get them myself: I have genuine talents, with teaching and research ranging over a huge array of topics, and I can pull off an engaging style of presentation, but my achievements are modest.

I’ve had plenty of career recognitions  — a University Professorship at Ohio State; election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the presidency of my learned society, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA); the Sapir Professorship at an LSA Linguistic Institute; an assortment of  grants and fellowships — but these are, as a Stanford dean once explained to me, more than a little haughtily, in what I think of as Harvard Talk — merely what Stanford expects of its faculty members, nothing at all special.

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Posted in Academic life, Awards, Gender and sexuality, My life | 6 Comments »

The overture to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro

February 19, 2024

First came the moral monster Don Giovanni being dragged down to hell for murder and a career of sexual imposition, with a restorative operatic appendix in which the people of Seville sing to his downfall. Then a delightful Mozartean orchestral interlude, apparently the brisk scherzo movement of a symphony (dominated by woodwinds and brass). And then we’re back in Seville, where Figaro is measuring the space for the bridal bed he and Susanna will soon share, while she’s trying on her wedding headpiece; hovering over the couple is the specter of Figaro’s literally rapacious employer Count Almaviva. Yes, it’s a comic opera about sex and power, and it’s a masterpiece.

That’s what brought me to consciousness and a new day at 2:15 am — my life has been deranged in so many ways that I no longer know how to report on it, except for the MQoS announcement that I’m not dead yet — and, yes, I did recognize that the orchestral interlude was in fact the overture to Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro [‘The Marriage of Figaro‘], capturing the spirit of the work without using any of its music, getting us into the proper mood for the opera without disclosing any of its thematic material. Not even a whiff of Figaro’s aria “Se vuol ballare (signor contino)”, which is the essence of the opera plot distilled into a dance tune. (If this were a Broadway musical, “Se vuol ballare” would be the main theme of the overture. With Figaro’s aria to that amorous butterfly Cherubino, “Non più andrai (farfallone amoroso)”, as a contrasting second theme.)

Expanding now on three things: the overture as a free-standing orchestral composition; “Se vuol ballare” as Figaro‘s theme song; and a note on Figaro as an ensemble opera. Plus an appendix flagging an intricate topic in g&s (gender & sexuality) studies that’s central in the plots of both Don Giovanni and Figaro.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Music, My life, Social class | 2 Comments »

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