In the last few days, I’ve returned to two movies from long ago that gave me great pleasure then and have just brought me fresh joy. From 1953 (when I was in high school, in Pennsylvania), Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck (which came up on a free classic movie channel on my cable service). And from 1963 (when I was in grad school, in Massachusetts), Tom Jones, starring Albert Finney and a cast of wonderful character actors (which I had just gotten the DVD of in the mail).
Archive for the ‘Homosexuality’ Category
Two favorite movies
August 19, 2026Cool nights
August 17, 2026It’s mid-August, and still hot summer in Palo Alto, but the nights are now cool (quilt time is upon me) and it’s cool when I get up (around 3 am), moving me to put on a thick flannel shirt and gelling the coconut oil I use to treat my body (it becomes a thin clear liquid in the heat of the day, but the gel is what you want if you’re using it for skin and hair).
It’s a mistake to rile a gunslinging faggot
August 15, 2026— an arresting dictum from Sundance Kidd, in my short story “The interview” (from my XBlog on 3/15/11 — edited from several 1996 drafts); the piece serves as a kind of vertiginous magic-realist summary of my Sundance and Butch saga (Sundance denies that his book is magic realism, but this isn’t that book, although it is in part a story about that book), alluding to many details of the two men’s lives that you will just have to fill in from what Sundance says.
This isn’t exposition, Mr. Bond; this is a 150-foot waterfall.
Tom of Finland — Touko Valio Laaksonen — famously got off enthusiastically on his own homoerotic drawings, and good for him. In turn, I still find parts of this piece achingly funny and am pleased no end at having written them.
Occasionally, Sundance tosses out something that looks like genuine insight. Well, he may be fictional, but he’s no fool.
Then, yippee, I get a cameo appearance, as a Stanford professor named Alex — Alex Adams being my principal pseudonym and Alex Adams a complex alternative identity.
The 2011 version, with only minor editing…
Three prolegomena to a giant can of worms
August 14, 2026(frank discussion of sex, of various kinds, some of it in street language — so not for kids or the sexually modest)
1 is about the Bloomsbury artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell; 2 is about affectionate relationships between gay men and straight women; 3 is about me and my wife, Ann.
le mot juste
August 13, 2026(warning: raunchy vocabulary, but surmounting the raunch is the point; still, over the line for kids and the sexually modest)
Well, a two-word phrase. Which I very carefully framed — in yesterday’s posting “Getting picked” — in this passage:
I’m a whoring faggot in deep disguise — also a lot of other, socially more decorous, things, but I’m that too
Now, that’s two incendiary words, both generally lobbed as insults, condemnations, or accusations: whoring ‘sexually promiscuous, esp. for payment’ and faggot. I want them back, and I’ll ding at them until they lose their power for other people as well as me. I’ve been working on faggot for decades and will continue to plug away at it. I have the Fuck Me Like the Whore I Am t-shirt — but have never worn it because that would be false advertising: whore, yes, with a rich history of many sexual partners, a lot of them classifiable as tricks of one sort or another (this is a rich and complex world); enthusiast for getting fucked, jesus yes; available to any random dick off the street, absolutely not.
So part of the program is normalization of various kinds of everyday and widespread sexual practices. But my goal is deeper than that.
The terminology of insult, condemnation, and accusation conveys two things: some root attribution of sexual desire, practice, or identity (for which there is less incendiary vocabulary) — PLUS some content that is genuinely reprehensible, worthy of censure: some bad stuff. And I say: show me the bad stuff. As a riddle: How is a faggot not like a gay man?
And people will tell you that faggots are the bad gays, the nasty gays, the obvious ones, the effeminate ones, with lisps, the ones that are too gay, flaunt their gayness, talk about sex too much, go on marches for butt-fucking, stick to their own kind, and so on.
In this world, then, what is a non-faggot gay? Be specific, give examples, you say, and what you get is men — or ideas of men — whose gayness is in fact completely invisible. Whose sexual desires, practices, and identities aren’t out in the world in any way. No-gay gays. This is social death, and no one should be subjected to it.
There are unpleasant, even wicked, people everywhere, including the gigantic world of male-male sexuality. But mostly there ‘s an extraordinary variety of ways of composing gay-sexual lives and integrating them with all the rest of our lives. Claim: faggots are in fact just gay men. Period. The word faggot does have more punch to it, thanks to the echoes of its nasty history, so I treasure it.
And I say, tongue in cheek, of being a faggot: not that there’s anything wrong with that!
From Wikipedia:
“The Outing” is the 57th episode of the sitcom Seinfeld. First aired on February 11, 1993 on NBC, it is the 17th episode of the fourth season. In this episode, a journalism student reports on Jerry and George’s close companionship, which becomes understood as the two of them coming out. The line “… not that there’s anything wrong with that” — as a reference to homosexuality — has become a popular catchphrase among fans.
Then, as with faggot, I’d say good things about whore and whoring. But not today; it’s been a long day. A really good day, but it’s over now.
Getting picked
August 12, 2026The gay sex news from 60 years ago. It started with an e-mail exchange with my first male lover (Larry Schourup) about the course of our relationship back then. I’m pleased at having dredged up so much, but it is of course largely imaginative reconstruction, fictobiography, not bald narrative — I post often about the fragility of memory and the undependability of it due to its constant alteration over time — but I think I got a lot of emotional tones right.
I then wondered whether he invited me or whether I had simply advanced on him (something that later in life I rarely did). And got a wonderful reply, which I quote from here with LS’s permission.
Faces of fulfillment
August 8, 2026(all about sex between men, described largely in street language, and utterly inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest)
Two engaging images of faces, both conveying pleasure, during man-on-man sex. What is it that these guys are so satisfied about?