Archive for the ‘Language and the body’ Category
August 12, 2026
The 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.
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Posted in Effeminacy, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and race, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life | Leave a Comment »
August 10, 2026
(man-on-man sex, riffed on in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
I have tons of news, much of it truly wonderful, some of it just eccentric bits of stuff I’ve come across, but all postponed after an exhausting day yesterday that turned, for me, on six exhausting hours of one thing after another going terribly wrong. Still organizing my thoughts about it all — so now for something completely different, inspired by my playing the 60s-generation music channel on my Xfinity tv. Which got me to thinking about the 60s, which was exactly my 20s, and I seem to have stumbled through a whole multi-ring circus of lives (here an acrobat on a trapeze, there a sword-swallower, over there some clowns) in those ten years. Everything happened at once.
More or less in order, insofar as that’s possible (but starting in 1958):
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Posted in Effeminacy, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Race and ethnicity, Social class | Leave a Comment »
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?
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Posted in Acting, Actors, Facial expression, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of advertising, Language of sex, Movies and tv, My life, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
August 3, 2026
One inspired by Aaron Broadwell, one by Steven Levine; I get a little help from my friends.
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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguists, Lives, My life, Photography, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
August 1, 2026
🐇🐇🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August, with a leporine shout-out to remember 1291, the traditional date of the formation of the Swiss federation: Hail, Helvetia!
Now to dive into today’s topic in medias res, with this 7/30 Facebook greeting from Pietro Giovanni to Aaron Broadwell on the occasion of AB’s 64th birthday, somewhere around that time:
Many returns of the day to my favorite linguist
AB is George Aaron Broadwell (known as Aaron Broadwell), Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at the Univ. of Florida (Gainesville). PG is AB’s husband Peter Marino under the pseudonym Pietro Giovanni. For further complexity, since there are a regrettably large number of men named Peter Marino, some of them famous in their fields, Peter Marino uses the nickname Piet as his professional name; Piet Marino is the author of young adult novels (Dough Boy and Magic and Misery):
(#1) The Piet Marino logo
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Posted in Academic life, Conversation, Events and occasions, Friendship, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Indigenous peoples, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguists, Logos, Marriage, My life, Phallicity, Professional names, Pseudonyms, Speech acts, Switzerland and Swiss things, Teaching | 3 Comments »
July 25, 2026
(Extensive reference to men’s private parts, occasionally in street speech, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
From my 7/23 posting “Small worlds”, in an anecdote (from 1990) about my man Jacques and me:
to reverse the usual slogan, [Jacques] treats me as not only a great piece of meat but also as an especially wonderful human being. This is ridiculously sweet. Unrealistic but sweet.
The usual slogan is about men as meat. Some details.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Slogans | Leave a Comment »
July 18, 2026
I am reduced to reporting on the minutiae of daily life; everything else is overwhelming. (Half an hour this morning finding out where something I was absolutely sure had been moved had been stashed in my new place. At least I did actually find it. View this as a cautionary tale. I’m getting very little done, very slowly, and not very well, but it’s the best I can do, so I plug away.)
It’s taken me a whole week to figure out how to walk through doors here. Well, the extremely heavy (because astoundingly sound-proofed) front door to my place — negotiated from a walker, so that mere strength is not sufficient for the task.
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Posted in Language and the body, My life | 2 Comments »
June 26, 2026
(fellatial fun — and disrespectful of religion as well — so not for kids or the sexually modest)
Yesterday on the Facebook group soc-motss (for same-sex-inclined folk and their friends), Ellen Evans forwarded a 6/24 FB posting from Derekh Baruch Von Geiger on Facebook:
The ultimate source for this image is not identified; it could just be an invention, but it looks like a Christian church service borrowing from Jewish practices, in particular what’s customarily translated into English as the blowing of the shofar
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Posted in Jokes, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Metaphor, Puns, Taboo language and slurs | 3 Comments »
June 17, 2026
(Significant amounts of sexual crudity, so not for the eyes and ears of kids or the sexually modest)
Niall Maher’s New Yorker daily cartoon for 6/15/26:
(#1) To make any sense of this wonderful cartoon, you need to have detailed knowledge of two different events: from 5/19/1962 (I was just a month away from graduating from Princeton); and from 6/14/2026 (essentially, now), with a glance forward to 7/4 — events celebrating the birthdays of two different US Presidents (John F. Kennedy then, our overlord Grabpussy now), through two different renditions of the song “Happy Birthday”: in 1962, in a potent haze of female sexual desire and sexual desirability (by Marilyn Monroe, in as close to naked as she should get while being in principle fully and elaborately clothed), but in this week’s cartoon, by a muscular machine of male aggression (who doesn’t look at all ready to deliver an adoring serenade to this particular President)
And now: backstory, tons of backstory.
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Posted in Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Understanding comics, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
