Accompanying this hazy snapshot posted on Facebook on 12/22 by John Wells —
Juicy scavenging on the green slopes of (I assume) Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands; the fully ripe fruits fall to the ground and ferment there, where the local iguanas can feed on them
— was his caption, the donée for a poem in trochaic tetrameter (with a couple leading unaccented syllables), the most common meter for folk poetry of all kinds in English:
An iguana feasts on fallen mangoes
(This posting devolves fairly fast into oral sex between men, so it is, alas, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)
Musical overture: the chorus and verse 2 of the 1960s song “Chapel of Love”:
[chorus]
Goin’ to the chapel
And we’re gonna get married
Goin’ to the chapel
And we’re gonna get married
Gee, I really love you
And we’re gonna get married
Goin’ to the chapel of love[verse 2]
Bells will ring, the sun will shine,
I’ll be his and he’ll be mine
We’ll love until the end of time
And we’ll never be lonely anymore
Save this thought. In the original, written for a girl group, the narrator is a woman writing about her man. A later version was performed by a guy group; the narrator is a man writing about his woman. Finally, we get performances by Elton John singing to his husband David Furnish (they got a civil partnership in 2005, were married in 2014).
(hard-core man-on-man sex action, so totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
Yesterday, in my posting “Surfing like bunnies”:
In this morning’s crop of gay porn ads, in a TitanMen store mailer, the charmingly titled (and apparently single-entendre) Joey’s Surf Vacation, with a dvd cover featuring a porn actor new to me, the boyish twink Joey Mills (paired with a familiar muscle twink, Dean Young, in a scene I’ll write about in a later posting).
— with the cover of the 2024 dvd (released 9/24/24) from MEN.com, showing Joey Mills with a third actor from the video, Troy Daniels.
This is that later posting.
The title (taking off on As the World Turns) of today’s (10/27/25) Zippy strip, in which Griffy and Zippy balance the pros against the cons for our planet:
(#1) Griffy sez: what makes the world go round isn’t love, but greed, lust, denial, and (of course) the conservation of angular momentum
But wait! We’ve seen this strip before.
🏳️🌈 👨❤️👨 🏳️🌈 National Coming Out Day, and also J&A Day, Jacques and Arnold’s wedding-equivalent anniversary (some explanation of that cooccurrence in an appendix to this posting)
The 10/8 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), complex, and cleverly goofy (like the one in my 10/9/25 posting “The flannel frontier”); something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times:
(#1) A phonologically perfect pun (Caesar the salad punning on Caesar the emperor), the pun-like Holy Roman Empire (a German political entity) playing on Roman Empire (governed by the Caesars of Rome), and a phonologically imperfect pun (romaine the salad green punning on Roman) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
(The two salad puns are Wayno’s; Holy Roman Empire as a pun-like play on Roman Empire is an invention of the Roman Catholic church in Germanic lands in the early Middle Ages.)
The cartoon shows a Caesar (with laurel leaves) appearing before his people, cradling a humongous bowl of salad and waving a pair of salad servers like a weapon (Julius Caesar is often portrayed in Western art as wielding a sword). Next to him, a soldier utters a variant of the ceremonial greeting Hail Caesar! — celebrating not Caesar, but his salad.
My life has recently been extraordinarily difficult and extravagantly painful, but at the moment my fingers are up to a small amount of typing, so here’s an odd mishearing to amuse you. This posting is way gay and attentive to male bodies, and there’s a photo (hunky rather than raunchy, but it does involve ostentatious shirtlessness featuring prominent six-packs), so it will not be to everyone’s taste.
In a Facebook short reel that came past me this morning — I’m in need of distractions from the pain — we see two gay guys (both hunks in swimsuits, though of two very different body types), with gay guy A interviewing gay guy B:
What’s a bedroom move that makes a man go crazy? Show me with your hands.
The scene:
A surprise on my Pinterest this morning: a sinesagittal St. Sebastian from Texan artist RF. Alvarez (who offers tender, communal gay machismo, which is Tex-Mex to boot):
(#1) Alvarez, St. Sebastian (2022), aka “Meet me under the pomegranate tree, St. Sebastian” (a self-portrait of the strikingly handsome RFA in the St. Sebastian pose, with a vulnerable but unharmed body, and steadily meeting the viewers’ gaze, conveying neither agony nor ecstasy); the figure here is hooking up with St. Sebastian, and he’s also mirroring St. Sebastian (with his hands behind his back, perhaps tied to a tree, only a bit of drapery barely covering his genitals)
But why a pomegranate tree (not part of Christian legend)? And the deep orange suffusing the figure’s entire body and filling all the background behind him and the tree — another pomegranate allusion (though pomegranate fruits and juice are garnet-red, not citrus-orange)? An allusion to the Greek myth of Persephone and her pomegranate seeds?
I’ve now looked at quite a lot of RFA’s paintings, and this one stands out from all the others, including his other self-portraits (for instance, Self-Portrait with Grandfather’s Hat (2023)). So it cries out for some explication.
The message from my fellow QUESTer — another Queer University Employee At Stanford — Ryan Tamares, on a postcard mailed to me on 6/19, in the middle of Pride Month:
Happy Pride !
Pride always ! !
— RESIST —
The holiday moment has passed, but now we’re in a world where we have to actively resist, on a daily basis, against the brownshirts and blackshirts serving our overlords. And join with the drag queens and thrown-away club kids who, in one of our foundation tales, fought back against the cops who came to ruin their lives, and ours.
[Sex work, naked boys, nude statuary (classical in theme, but, yes, full frontal) — generally not suitable for kids or the sexually modest]
Das wäre Ihr Mädchen, Herr Jakob Schmidt
… Ach, bedenken sie was man für dreißig Dollar kriegt— Weill & Brecht, Havanna Lied (from the 1930 opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny)
How is a man to choose? He could have that one for $30. But then the other one looks eager to please. And the third one looks really hot naked.
That was Jakob Schmidt in the imaginary city of Mahagonny — part America, part Weimar Germany — but then this morning Pinterest brought me another man, call him Alex, picking one of three for sexual services, under the watchful eye of an arranger, the clever and mischievous H, in a painting by Cornelius McCarthy:
Und die einen sind im Dunkeln, und die andern sind im Licht, doch man sieht nur die im Lichte, die im Dunkel sieht man nicht
— Bertholt Brecht, Die Dreigroschenoper
Over the past six days I suspended a complex series of postings on LGBTQ people integrating sexual lives, relationships, and identities with lives of accomplishment, slowly focusing on the examples closest to me: gay men in linguistics. I intended to begin with one specific example that came my way a while back, in this announcement (with special emphasis on a passage I’ve boldfaced; read it in conjunction with the Brecht quote above):
The George A. Smathers Library [of the University of Florida, Gainesville] cordially invites you to the Michael Gannon Lecture on Tuesday, April 1st, from 4:00 – 5:00 p.m., featuring linguistic anthropologist George Aaron Broadwell [AZ: called Aaron], Ph.D., the Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at University of Florida. A booksigning will be held immediately following the event.
“Reading Florida’s First Native Authors: Towards an Understanding of Timucua Literature”
This talk introduces the public to some of the most interesting passages of Timucua literature and discusses the techniques that our team has used to read and interpret Timucua texts.
Having assembled a host of texts written in Timucua, the native language of the inhabitants of northern Florida from around the twelfth century into the eighteenth century, Broadwell has spent years working to translate what the writers were recording. Through his own efforts, work with colleagues, and assistance from students Broadwell has reconstructed substantial parts of Timucua vocabulary, in some cases interpreting previously untranslated texts, and also offering new revelations about those with Spanish corollaries.
His work has revolutionized understanding of the conquest and colonial eras in Florida, giving voice to the people who lived under Spanish rule and revealing what their letters and writings say about dramatic changes taking place in their lives and world. The topic is especially appropriate for a lecture in honor of [historian, educator, priest, and war correspondent] Michael Gannon [(1927-2017)], who included in his own discussions of Florida history an example of the Timucua-language version of the Lord’s Prayer.
Alas, the world has been too much with me, so I now bring you the news of this excellent event after it has taken place; I’ve been posting little things to show that I’m still alive, while I try to cope with the threatening turmoil instigated by President Putinitsa and her sidekick Evilon (two monstrous buckets of pathologies, of different sorts); my current mantra is Stand Up and Stand Out, and I’ve been doing my best to be pointedly offensive. Meanwhile, I have a complex personal and medical life, with much I’d like to report on (I visited my department at Stanford this morning, first time in years, and showed some of the delightful campus to my caregiver J — who then showed me that I will need to post about Antigua Guatemala, all new to me).
In any case, I have tons of stuff to say and feel overwhelmed. But I intend to move on to Aaron Broadwell, and try to distill many pages of a remarkable c.v. into something digestible, before moving on to the story of his relationship with the author Peter Marino (Aaron and Peter have been together for 30 years and were in the earliest group of gay people who got married in Massachusetts, in 2004, wow. Then to get back to the larger topic, with other examples of gay male linguists of substantial accomplishment and some words on why people should care about us, especially during a time when concerns about DEI mask a concerted attack on (among many other things) LGBTQ people and our rights — one of a number of bullshit smokescreens spread by Putinitsa and Evilon in their program to establish domination over a cowering and compliant populace.
Poetic note. “The World Is Too Much With Us” is a sonnet by William Wordsworth, first published in 1807; in it, the poet maintains that industrial society has damaged the connection between people and nature and replaced it with getting and spending.
