From Susan Fischer on Facebook today, a link to a very old (11/30/11) Dale Coverly Speed Bump cartoon depicting the Trojan Pizza Boy:
(#1) Pizza Boy wears a cap, and he comes bearing two pizza cartons (plus, we assume, a lot of concealed Trojan warriors)
From the Linguistic Society of America’s Secretariat this morning:
Arnold Zwicky Award: This award, given for the first time in 2021 [as the 2022 AZ Award], is intended to recognize the contributions of LGBTQ+ scholars in Linguistics and is named for Arnold Zwicky, the first [openly] LGBTQ+ President of the LSA. The Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics (COZIL) is pleased to announce that Professor Lal Zimman is the LSA’s 2024 Arnold Zwicky Award recipient [AZ: to be formally awarded at the 2024 LSA meeting in early January in New York City].
Lal Zimman, an Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Santa Barbara, is recognized as a global leader in the area of trans linguistics. His research on trans language has had a significant impact on sociocultural linguistics, sociophonetics, inclusive pedagogy, and social justice- and community-based linguistics. Zimman has also been active in advocating for trans inclusion in the discipline and the academy, and he has been a mentor to many trans students. He now directs the Trans Research in Linguistics Lab (TRILL) at UCSB, which is dedicated not only to studying trans linguistics but also holistically supporting trans students and scholars.
Yes — a Z to a Z!
From my old friends Bonnie and Ed — Benita Bendon Campbell and her husband Edward Campbell — a Jacquie Lawson birthday e-card for me in which the Biglin Brothers (two muscular young men in a Thomas Eakins painting) row (on the Schuylkill River, the river of my childhood) for the prize of a birthday cupcake (with a purple banner) — to a noisy band rendition of “Happy Birthday”. Deeply satisfying.
(#1) The Lawson version of the Biglins
And now: the Biglins in real life, and (with a dose of homoeroticism) the painter Eakins.
(Man-on-man sex, with a photo that just barely doesn’t have any genitalia in it, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
Today is the Saturday of the US Labor Day weekend — the actual holiday is on Monday — and so there are sales on almost everything imaginable, including of course gay porn. This year TitanMen is offering a holiday pun — Labor Gay — for the occasion, in an ad showing two pornstars hard at work, laboring at their job:
Advice for Pride Month this year, when forces of hatred and fear, wielding harassment and intimidation, seem increasingly arrayed against LGBT+-folk, threatening our celebrations, attacking the symbols of our communities, spreading malicious disinformation about us, and acting to curtail our rights — so that we have to confront these forces publicly and fiercely. An image of resplendent, powerful, ferociously sharp-toothed pride for the occasion, covering the spectrum from intense red to vibrant purple:
(#1) From my 6/27/15 posting “Gay Pride”, with my comment: rather more adult males than you’d expect in a pride of lions — but then these are gay lions, so they bond with pleasure
(Already back then, 8 years ago, the image was clearly memic, distributed from hand to hand from an original source no one knew (or cared about); some creator crafted this remarkable image and paired it with the punning title Gay Pride — a gay pride for Gay Pride — but we’re almost surely never going to be able to identify the source. It came to me again yesterday, through another acquaintance who found it on Facebook.)
From #1 a fortuitous find enabling an associative leap to a famously savage leonine diorama. And then in another associative leap, to feasting with panthers, to big cats in general (especially those of the genus Panthera), and to gay men who are beautiful, powerful, and fierce.
Alienizing, scapegoating, and cleansing (ASC) — what was intended as a very complex posting following on two occasions: the shootings at the Colorado Springs gay bar Club Q just before midnight on Saturday 11/19; and yesterday’s Harvey Milk Day, remembering the 11/27/1978 assassination of SF Supervisor Harvey Milk, killed because he was the driving force behind the city’s first gay rights bill.
Over the Club Q shootings I was consumed by fits of red-hot rage combined with body-wracking weeping sorrow, not to mention fear over where events are taking us. As I said yesterday in my posting “Lest we forget”, about Milk’s assassination,
I would say NEVER AGAIN — but it is far far too late for that.
The social mechanisms at work in these wrenching cases involving homosexuals — what I’ll call alienizing, scapegoating, and cleansing — reappear with other groups, in particular Jews and Blacks, leading to murderous assaults on the locations of supportive and protective community, on “safe spaces”. At, for example:
— the Pulse (gay, leaning Latino) nightclub in Orlando FL in June 2016
— the Tops Friendly Market (in a predominantly Black neighborhood) in Buffalo NY in July 2022
— the Tree of Life synagogue, in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood (about 40% Jewish) of Pittsburgh PA in October 2018
Meanwhile, my life is a mess. At the moment, much of every day is consumed by narcoleptic sleep, and my many disabilities cause me to take about five times as long to do everyday tasks as a fully able-bodied person would, so I’ve been having trouble finding the time to put the ASC posting together from the materials I’ve been assembling.
My solution is to post, as often as I can, collections of some of these materials, hoping that eventually I’ll be able to knit it together. (Some of these materials will be surprising to you. My first collection will probably be one that starts with Donald Sutherland screaming. Yes, it’s relevant.)
(Men’s bodies, steamy man-on-man sex, all in raunchy street talk, as you will see immediately, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Effeminacy in the animal world, first in yesterday’s (3/28) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) Not only elephant effeminacy, but also a cosmetic anagram, a rouge and peasant salve (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
And in one of my academic collages, with mice in the lab:
(#2) Continuing the theme of makeup for males
E-mail yesterday (4/13) to the Linguistic Society of America’s COZIL (the Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics) mailing list from Archie Crowley:
June and Pride Month are just around the corner, and COZIL is excited to curate our Pride Month blog post series on the LSA website! If you haven’t checked out the COZIL Blog and any of our Pride month posts from last year, check it out here!
(#1) Queer logo from Boon Yong, “Queer Linguistics and Queer Theory”, a posting on the Open Source Studio (at NTU Singapore) site on 4/3/18We are excited to create more queer linguistics content for this Pride Month [June], and we are looking for people who would like to contribute to the blog. Blog post submissions are due May 1st and will be scheduled to post throughout June. Anyone who is an LSA member is eligible to submit, and we would love a wide range of perspectives!
From Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook on 11/3, this cookbook find — the butch cook book, by Lee Lynch, Nel Ward, & Sue Hardesty (Perfect Paperback, 2008) — at his favorite local thrift store, which moved him to wonder whether anyone still uses butch as a noun:
(#1) Adventures in cooking and in the language of sexuality: the title is intended to be read as ‘cook book for butches’ (rather than ‘cook book which is butch’) (JS’s phoro)
