Archive for the ‘Gender and sexuality’ Category

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And now: a real award

May 12, 2025

Just posted on, a fabricated award from Google Gives Back, and then an announcement from the Linguistic Society of America, seeking nominations for its actual awards, a list that now begins, in alphabetic order (so for once the last shall be first):

Nominations due on June 30, 2025:

— Arnold Zwicky Award: recognizing LGBTQ+ scholars and those whose work in linguistics benefits the LGBTQ+ community.

— C.L. Baker Award: recognizing mid-career scholars in syntactic theory.

The description of the award (now in its fifth year) named after me has been slightly altered (to satisfy current law); but I continue to be moved that an award on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community was established in my name, and while I was still alive. My joking description of this honor is that I am now officially a Famous Faggot; in the circles I care about, that’s a great honor indeed.

I included the second award from the list because it has a special meaning for me: Lee Baker was my first PhD student, some 60 years ago: a sharp and thoughtful linguist, a remarkable teacher, and a good man, taken from us way too young.

 

Posted in Academic life, Awards, Gender and sexuality | Leave a Comment »

Appliances in therapy

May 7, 2025

Today’s Bizarro is a Psychiatrist cartoon done with common kitchen appliances: a tea kettle and a coffee percolator sit on a couch in couples therapy, with a toaster therapist:


(#1) Wayno’s title, “Mutual Irritation Society”, takes appliancehood for granted and focuses on the relationship issues (the annoying noises the two partners make); if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page

The cartoon identifies the percolator as male (presumably on the basis of its phallicity); if we stick to symbolic values, then the mammillary kettle is female (though it could be that the kettle is a pocket bear — a smaller, more compact man-oriented man who’s burly and hairy; the world of gender and sexuality is huge and diverse, full of surprises).

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Posted in Comic conventions, Furnishings and tools, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Mammillarity, Phallicity | 1 Comment »

Sol is secretly queer

May 5, 2025

🇲🇽 It’s Cinco de Mayo today, but this posting has precious little Mexican content; don’t let that keep you from your celebrations, whatever they are.

I had intentions to cook up a homey Mexican pozole  (any occasion is a good one for pozole, in my book, and I always have a can of white hominy in the cupboard, just in case I want to assemble the materials for one), but the main fresh ingredient I had on hand was an big order of Chinese (mung) bean sprouts, so I chopped them up; added a can of lentils (another household staple), with their liquid; splashed in a dose of sriracha sauce; thickened the broth with a container of hummus (ground up chickpeas); and produced a rich, spicy, and crunchy  Chinese / Middle Eastern / Southeast Asian three-legume soup, heated in the microwave. It was fabulous. I might do it again, on purpose this time.

But this posting is a reaction to a card I got from Kathryn Burlingham in Portland OR roughly a month ago — I move sloth-like through my social responsibilities —  about (among other things) the toll of the closet for queer people. Trying to write out and then mail a physical card is, however, gravely difficult for me, while typing at my computer’s keyboard is merely somewhat painful, so this is my response to KB, which turns not so much on the closet — coming out, accepting myself, was heart-breakingly difficult for me, but I spent almost no time in the closet — but on the actual card that KB sent me, the Jahna Vashti greeting card (“vibrantly printed in [yes!] Portland OR on a sturdy, uncoated card stock”) “Brother Sun”:

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food, Music, My life, Phallicity, Signs and symbols | 5 Comments »

Well, nobody’s perfect

May 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for the first of May, and hordes of aroused bunnies are streaming in the streets, aggressively singing “L’Internationale”

Meanwhile, I had a wonderful dream last night, starring — a dream first — my grand-child Opal Armstrong Zwicky, who in real life is just about to graduate from the University of Pittsburgh. In the dream,  Opal and another young woman wrote a zany hit musical show in both English and Spanish. During the flurry of production, I met the grandfather of Opal’s collaborator, a charming man with whom I developed a friendship. My clothing, in the dream as in real life, clearly conveys that I’m gay, so this man, not wanting to be leading me on, admitted, gently, “You know, I’m straight” — to which I replied, quoting one of the great films of all time, “Well, nobody’s perfect” — a line I use frequently in my postings, after I celebrate some good friend, woman or man, whose nature runs contrary to tight gender norms, explaining that they’re straight, but, well, nobody’s perfect.

The movie is Some Like It Hot, and it’s a French farce given a distinctly American twist, with mobsters and eccentric millionaires. I am astonished to see that I haven’t ever written it up on this blog. But now its day has come. It seems to afford no place for the Industrial Workers of the World, but, well, you can’t have everything.

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Posted in Actors, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Movies and tv, Music, Quotations | 3 Comments »

Rest day

April 25, 2025

🐧 🐧 🐧 whoop whoop whoop it’s World Penguin Day, 4/25, and I have been pleasantly besieged with penguiniana from friends; as my contribution to the day, I offer a t-shirt with a double strength gayguin on it;


The bird’s coloration is rainbow-gay, and then it’s waving a rainbow flag as well

And then there’s the reductive mid portmanteau gayguin (gay + penguin), like liger, brunch, or smog — but with a whole word, rather than an initial word-part, as its first contributor (see my 4/22/25 posting “The tin portmantax man” on types of portmanteaus)

Today was supposed to be a rest day, in between a Thursday visit from my caregiver J (in which we got lots of housework done) and weekend work on a ton of blog stuff that has piled up dramatically. And a chance to tell you about the improvements in many small but significant aspects of my medical state, which my pedicurist and my caregiver (who observe me closely) have commented on with some amazement and delight. But all that was blanked out by endless hassles in trying to fix business stuff, by emergency academic matters, and by really foul weather (including a long spell of low barometric pressure that made it hard to use my hands at all).

Despite my not being able to get around to doing any of the things I’d planned for the day, I found pleasure in other, unexpected activities. Apparently, unreasonable equanimity in the face of unpleasantness goes along with the mysterious improvements in my physical state (J thinks that the attitude shift caused the physical improvements, and he might be right). But now I really have to get dinner and go to bed.  See you tomorrow.

 

Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, My life, Penguins, Portmanteaus, Rainbow | 1 Comment »

Unbuttoned chat

April 13, 2025

[4/25 disclaimer. In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]

That’s unbuttoned ‘relaxed, less inhibited’. There will be no removal of clothes.

This is a little human-interest piece reproducing postings (three of them) from past years reporting on Aaron Broadwell and me chatting as two gay men about cultural matters (pretty much negligently folding Gay Interest into everyday chat). The genre is a type of Friendly Conversation, in this case between two gay men who share a fair amount of background knowledge, have trust in and regard for each other, and are not pursuing any explicit goal beyond maintaining the bond of friendship, keeping in touch; it’s “just talk” — but it’s still structured in complex ways (which would become obvious if I offered parallel exchanges with other people of other sorts in different social contexts, and more strikingly, if I showed you exchanges that ran aground).

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Posted in Conversation, Discourse, Gender and sexuality | 2 Comments »

Mollified about Monaghan

April 5, 2025

Sweet Gee (an alter ego of Gadi Niram’s) wrote on Facebook yesterday about a character in the delightful Hetty Wainthropp Investigates tv show, who I took to be the character played by the adorable Dominic Monaghan, but turned out to be Joe Peluso’s. I wrote:

Ah, I am mollified. I’d completely forgotten JP. Meanwhile, I know that mollify has to do, etymologically, with softening, but I couldn’t help thinking of it as Molly-fy ‘make into a Molly’, presumably by getting into drag.

Two clusters of things here: the Wainthropp show and DM; and the verb mollify and the noun molly / Molly.

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Posted in Actors, Effeminacy, Etymology, Gender and sexuality, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Switzerland and Swiss things | 1 Comment »

GBTQ guys

March 28, 2025

[In this posting, among many other things, sex between men discussed in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest]

The background is complex. From 3/26, in my posting “A gay life”:

A re-play of some material about my first male lover, Larry [Schourup], as background for two other postings: one about him right now (well, as of yesterday); and one about GBTQ guys and how they fold their sexual desires, practices, and identifications into lives of accomplishment, as Larry has done — and as the linguist Aaron Broadwell (celebrated in the second posting) has done.

But then my attention was diverted by the firehose of appalling actions by my government, so that I wrote on 3/27, in my posting “You were dead, you know”:

My intention was talk about integrating sexual lives, relationships, and identities with lives of accomplishment (like LS’s teaching and published research in linguistics) and value, with a bow to the poet Frank O’Hara (who LS introduced me to many years ago … [but] I’ve trimmed this post down to its other aim, which is to report on the last year or so of the LS/AZ correspondence

culminating in the joyous discovery that, contrary to my fears, LS had not died, hence the Candide quote in the title of that posting.

But now to start that first posting, of two, all over again, with material from my 3/1/24 posting “The grace of lovers”:

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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and politics, Language of sex, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

You were dead, you know

March 27, 2025

The first follow-up to my posting yesterday “A gay life”, which had material about my first male lover, Larry Schourup, from earlier postings of mine. About 55 years of the loving friendship that succeeded our original relationship, a lifelong conversation carried on through enormous changes in our lives. LS ended up in Japan, with a long-time Japanese partner, Isao; they had to conceal their homosexuality and their relationship for many years, until recently it became possible for them to live openly, and to apply for domestic partnership in Kyoto (which I now have learned was granted on 5/29/24, wonderful thing).

My intention was talk about integrating sexual lives, relationships, and identities with lives of accomplishment (like LS’s teaching and published research in linguistics) and value, with a bow to the poet Frank O’Hara (who LS introduced me to many years ago). I am, however, overwhelmed by the firehouse of fascism being sprayed on a daily basis by the overlords in my country, which needs a variety of responses, all of which take time — so I’ve trimmed this post down to its other aim, which is to report on the last year or so of the LS/AZ correspondence.

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Posted in Death notices, Gender and sexuality, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »

A gay life

March 26, 2025

A re-play of some material about my first male lover, Larry, as background for two other postings: one about him right now (well, as of yesterday); and one about GBTQ guys and how they fold their sexual desires, practices, and identifications into lives of accomplishment, as Larry has done — and as the linguist Aaron Broadwell (celebrated in the second posting) has done.

(more…)

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Linguists, My life, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

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