For reference in an upcoming posting about small worlds: brief accounts of Larry Kramer and John D’Emilio, two (justly) celebrated and very public gay men, of extraordinarily different natures, who I happened, once, to get linked with as a member of that category. (Blame it on my man Jacques, who knew the complexities of my nature but still managed, in his love, to think of me as genuinely heroic.)
Archive for the ‘Homosexuality’ Category
Two celebrated gays
July 21, 2026National days
July 2, 2026My dinner for June 27 was delivered by a courier bubbling over in delight about the coming Fourth of July, which he identified as my national day (adding that he was Peruvian and his national days came at the end of July — surprising details below). I suppressed my complex reservations about American Independence Day (some of which I will unload later) and chose not to add that we were at the eve of one of my people’s celebratory days — Stonewall Day, June 28 (the tank top I was wearing had a rainbow flag on it) — though I did point to my gym shorts, whose white cross on red is in fact the Swiss flag, adding that Swiss national day was coming in August (August 1, to be precise). I didn’t develop the theme of my absurd pride in the remnants of Swissness that cling to me, most especially the egalitarian, aristocrat-free ideals the federation has espoused since the original alliance was formed in 1291, over 7 centuries ago; there is nothing like it in all of Europe.
After he left, I checked out the Fiestas Patrias peruanas, or Peruvian National Holidays, which officially are celebrations of Peru’s independence from the Spanish Empire (Wikipedia entry here), but in fact have become an entire holiday season, in character very much like the secular Christmas season (at, however, the end of July). It sounds delightful.
Fathers Day, the survey
June 21, 2026(about the holiday, and masculinity, and enough man-on-man sex to make this posting out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)
First take: the long pan. From my 6/16/19 posting “On this day in 2019”:
(US) Fathers Day. For some of us, this is a day to remember our fathers with affection. I’m one of the lucky ones; I’ve written about mine several times, most extensively in my 1/30/11 posting “It Gets Better / Wonderful dad”.
It’s also an American commercial holiday that might better be labeled Masculinity Day, aimed at selling things stereotypically associated with high masculinity in either the upper middle class or the working class; elaboration on this point in my 6/10/18 posting “Gearing up for Fathers Day”. [AZ: I am largely alienated from American normative masculinity, have been as long as I can remember, so have gone my own way, on a path of homomasculinity, where both my sociocultural affiliations and my sexual desires take me off the broad highway and into the steamy jungle underbrush]
And then through its role as Masculinity Day and through complex associations involving gay men and fathers, Fathers Day is also a high holiday for gay porn, with at least three different themes: sex between father and son; Daddy-Boy relationships; and sex involving older men — called daddies — especially, very muscular ones. [AZ: of the three themes, only Daddy / Boy works for me, and that’s a recent discovery: in this world of sexual fantasy, despite my advanced age, I turn out to be, as we say there, a very good Boy; there is, apparently, always space for pleasant surprises]
A faggot with a Tony
June 20, 2026In the New Yorker‘s 6/15/26 issue, a “Talk of the Town” piece “The Boards: Like Willy Wonka” by Zach Helfand on the theatre director Michael Arden experiencing indoor skydiving at a facility in Queens (in preparation for his latest show, “The Lost Boys”, which includes actors in intricate flying sequences). Then:
In his acceptance speech for his first Tony, in 2023, Arden recounted being a bullied queer theatre kid in Texas, and then said, “All I can say is that now I’m a faggot with a Tony.” Post-flying, Arden said, “I was more nervous making that speech [than flying indoors]. That was terrifying.”
In Arden’s I’m a faggot with a Tony, I hear a mixture of urgent defiance and anxious fear that’s familiar terrain — I’m a pussy-boy in the American Academy — that I passed through first as a child.
Key lime cheese ball
June 15, 2026(fairly quickly detours into phenomenally raunchy free verse and then swivels again — but in there’s some stuff that’s way out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)
I was roused from my pastoral torpor this morning by a Facebook ad from the Tastefully Simple® website offering basic preparation directions for Key Lime Cheese Ball Mix. And I immediately fell into a Zippyesque seizure of onomatomania, moved to chanting Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball. Then, being the sort of person that I am, I entertained a delightful reverie of citrus-juice-sharp, aged-cheese-ripe testicles and on from there, culminating in that unseemly verse. Then from there I speculated some on why some forms of sensuous pleasure have become particularly poignant for me these days.
Now to spool through all of this. Beginning with the ad.
The legions of BD
May 23, 2026(genitals and sex acts discussed in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
From the Monty Python fandom wiki:
Biggus Dickus is a fictional character in the Monty Python film Life of Brian, portrayed by Graham Chapman. He is a Roman nobleman and officer. He is married, according to his friend Pontius Pilate, to Incontinentia Buttocks.
BD’s sexual-onomastic legions have advanced throughout modern media, where they have a particularly powerful role in gay male pornography; some productions are staffed almost entirely by raunchily named performers, their names travesties on those of masculine icons; louche plays on vivid everyday words; and vocabulary smeared with the X, XX, and XXX of obscenity.
Two striking examples that have come by me recently: a man who does business as Feral Fux or Feral Fuxxx; and another who performs as Fabio Stallion or Stallion Fabio.
Taking pleasure
May 16, 2026(men’s bodies and sex between men, sometimes described in street language, so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
Two gay porn scenes in which the partners take evident pleasure in their sex, as shown by the exchange of broad smiles during their acts (of enthusiastic manual, oral, and anal sex); each is experiencing pleasure himself and the satisfaction of pleasuring someone else, and together they are sharing socio-pleasure, the enjoyment of the company of others.
The gift of your body
May 12, 2026(tales of man-man sex, some of it in very plain street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
A story from my times at the gay baths, this one not previously reported on. From 1980, at the Club Baths of Toronto, a night out during the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association in Toronto, at which I gave a paper (“Internal” and “External” Evidence in Linguistics) in a symposium on “The Problem of Data in Linguistics”, now viewable on-line here.
The story has a poignant sequel in my current life as a solitary 85-year-old gay man with a lifelong high sex drive, which I’ll put off for a later posting because this one will be lengthy.
REX&M graphic art
May 8, 2026Spurred by Max Vasilatos’s show-n-tell at the most recent (5/3) soc.motss get-together on Zoom, some material on the S&M graphic artist REX, assembled from material in his Wikipedia entry; the summary paragraph:
REX (1943 – March 2024) was an American visual artist and illustrator closely associated with gay fetish art of 1970s and 1980s New York and San Francisco. He avoided photographs and did not discuss his personal life. His drawings influenced gay culture through graphics made for nightclubs including the Mineshaft and his influence on artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe. Much censored, he remained a shadowy figure, saying that his drawings “defined who I became” and that there are “no other ‘truths’ out there”. REX died in Amsterdam in late March 2024.
assless (also: amply assed)
May 8, 2026(much talk of men’s bodyparts and some of man-on-man sex, much of it in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Background: from Benjamin Dreyer on Facebook yesterday (5/7), about assless:
— BD: My gosh, I’m in the dictionary.
(#1) From Merriam-Webster online
And my comment:
— AZ: why do I find no citations (anywhere I can see) of hyperbolic bodypart assless ‘having minimal buttocks’, esp. in assless Irishman (used ruefully by some Irish American men I know)?