Having just done two little postings on brief subjects this morning, I’m now going to wade into a few somewhat meatier subjects that have the potential to explode into larger matters of some weight.
The first of these came to me in tv commercials for the Liberty Mutual insurance company, featuring a Struggling Actor character — all of which delighted me and made me laugh out loud. One of my favorites, “Biberty Bungle” (the one with the bubbles), you can view here.
(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.
(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]
Yesterday, in my posting “Sir, I bring you a token of my subservience”, a Zippy strip in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme. And there we have the two-strip set-up for today’s discussion:
(#1) [The 5/21/26] strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity
(#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy)
The crucial moment of today’s (5/21) Zippy strip, in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It’s hard to know where to start with this — and then it turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme.
(#1) Today’s strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity
(#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy)
Just to get the two strips on display, for discussion to come. My l life has been overfull, but almost entirely in wonderful ways, and that’s something else for me to talk about.
(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.
(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.
Spurred 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.
(well, yes, deeply about sex between men, considered analytically but described in the most direct street language, so entirely inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest)
Today’s topic combines the interests of my two previous postings
— on 3/24, “Luke Adams and the power bottoms of the pre-pandemic days”
— on 3/25, “The power of the normative gender binary”
and introduces as a side theme one of the overarching ideas of my work in both gender & sexuality studies and linguistics, that of pervasive variety / variability.
— as slogans: There are a great many homosexualities | There are a great many masculinities
Along the way, we’ll engage with four great bottoms from gay porn: Tannor Reed, Johnny Rapid, Kevin Wiles, and Trent Atkins.
From my 3/19/26 posting “Annals of derogation: homo”:
fairy-boy was the primary verbal abuse directed (inexplicably) at me in childhood, along with (equally inexplicable) accusations that I wanted to be a girl
The abuse was inexplicable to me when I was a kid, but though I was a canny child, there were ways of the world I did not yet appreciate, and among them was the power of the normative gender binary — whatever deviates from normative masculinity is necessarily feminine (and therefore unacceptable in a male person). Some material from this blog on the subject …
