Imported from my XBlog on Livejournal, to find a home here on my regular blog:
A short story, a piece of fictobiography, about kids and gyms and shower rooms. Nothing of linguistic interest. Nothing XXX-rated. Not even any jockstraps. Full text below the line. (Original version from 1991, posted to Livejournal on 8/17/2010.)
(Naked men, most with visible penises — but this is fine art and also fantasy, so it falls under the Fine Art exemption for public display of the male body. But if you find such things objectionable, this posting is not for you.)
One sample on Pinterest caught my eye yesterday, and that took me to the Singulart site on David Jester. The text:
« There in the painting was the pool I felt I belonged to: the pool of gay men, portrayed and honored, out in the open, not hidden or something to be ashamed of. »
David Jester is an exciting American painter who has exhibited his work in the US and Netherlands. His work centers around snapshots of the gay community as he has experienced it; themes include masculinity, discrimination, submission, love and joy. The distinctive painted pools act as metaphors for the pool of humanity, particularly within the community, and the characters that appear in the water represent lived and recognizable behaviors. Particularly focusing on the impact of online interactions between gay men, Jester ultimately asks questions about identity and belonging within the family he has chosen as his own.
The underwater setting allows the men — all totally naked and matter-of-factly drawn from a wide spectrum of physical types and racioethnic identities (their being gay is what unites them, the only thing that is truly important) — to float free of gravity and interact without the constraints their bodies might otherwise impose on them. They engage each other in an enormous number of ways: in a full range of acts of affection, dominance and submission, play, displays of support, exploration of one another, and self-discovery, and, yes. in frank sexual acts (fellatio and anal intercourse). Throughout, they are presented as persons, not as objects of sexual desire.
One huge painting depicts the advancement of AIDS in a series of men going deeper and deeper in the pool. Even with the fantasy context and the abstraction that Jester uses in presenting their otherwise beautiful bodies, it’s very hard to take, and I won’t reproduce it here.
Now four examples. And then a bit about Jester, who is open, articulate, and passionate about what he’s doing in his paintings.
It’s all about male faces and the great variety of masculinities — there will be six pictures — as explored by photographer Joseph Barrett (who I was first alerted to by a 7/24 Pinterest posting).
JB’s incredibly chaotic description of what he’s about, untouched by my hand (but with some elucidating comments of mine), from his website:
Joseph Barrett Photography: See more ideas about barrett joseph pennsylvania impressionist [a completely different artist from this Joseph Barrett]. Changing the masculine portrait. Finding the essence of man in portraiture [and Redefining the male gaze]
Joseph barrett photography. Freelance photographer at self employed photography freelance photographer at self employed photography norwich university of the arts. [Norwich University of the Arts, a public university in Norwich, Norfolk, UK] Traditional notions of masculinity have been thrown out of the window. In this interview he talks about breaking preconceived notions of masculinity in the context of the gender spectrum. … [barrett:] i think it is necessary for people to see photographs without implications of gender and sexual orientation for new masculinity
Just arrived in my e-mail, this entertaining Fourth of July sale ad for TitanMen gay porn:
An American flag + shirt-lifting, a biceps display, and a jutting crotch: patriotism plus a display of conventional signs of sexually desirable masculinity for guys who are into guys.
American Independence Day is what what I’ve called a masculine meat holiday (in my 6/17/22 posting “Be the Master of the Meat!”) — with the full weight of the double entendre on meat, so lending itself to exploitation in gay porn ads.
(This posting manages to (barely) skirt male genitals and man-on-man sex, without (almost any) street speech or explicit images, but the topic is daddy fantasies in gay porn, so it will not be to everyone’s taste)
For Memorial Day (and other American patriotic holidays), ads for gay porn play to fantasies of military men, while for Fathers Day, coming up rapidly (this Sunday, 6/18), they play to daddy fantasies (see the Page on this blog about my postings on Daddy-Boy encounters and DILFs, on the sexualization and various ritualizations of the father-son roles). With luck, pretty much the same material can serve for both holidays, as in the case of Papi Kocic (with his heavily loaded porn name) in MEN.com’s Norse Fuckers, who did ad duty on Memorial Day (in an ad for a porn emporium’s Memorial Day sale; see my 5/29/23 posting “Hordes of Norsemen insert themselves into a national holiday”) playing a military leader; and now appears in a porn-sale ad for Fathers Day in his guise as a hot daddy:
(#1) The ad, with genitals concealed (for WordPress modesty) and ad copy suppressed (so we can focus on the image and the porn-purveyors’ sentiment “We ❤️ Hot Dads!”)
(considerable talk about male genitals, man-on-man sex, masturbation, and excretion, mostly in street language — pretty much a dirty jackpot — so not for kids or the sexually modest)
In conversation with my caregiver Erick Barros on 5/18, he complimented me on my being well-groomed and smelling good; this was not mere pleasant social talk, but a significant professional opinion from an experienced employee of Bay Area Geriatric. Who has no doubt seen aged folk who have tended to disregard grooming and bodily hygiene in the face of pain and concern with more pressing matters of life; and especially some men who tend to see things through the lens of a normative masculinity that (as part of a rejection of anything that smacks of femininity) views disregard for grooming and cleanliness as an assertion of masculinity — the attitude that leads to all-male getaways where the guys defiantly don’t shave, bathe, or change into fresh clothing and generally behave crudely (as an escape from the strictures of women).
Of the form
V1 ya, wouldn’t wanna / shouldn’t hafta V2 ya (where V1 and V2 rhyme)
In a One Big Happy strip from the backlog on my desktop:
(#1) Ruthie and the tough neighborhood kid James trade taunts, until Ruthie’s mother drags her away from the encounter
This is a competitive performance of verbal skills, designed to insult without wounding. James’s first move is a pre-existing model, and then they go on from there.
(all about men’s bodies and sex between men, in street language, so entirely not for kids and the sexually modest)
The social lives of Ruff Dudes, including fashion choices and sexual practices. Specifically, on Fuck Me socks and fuck machines. In the fulfillment of a promissory note from my 10/21/22 posting “Neon jocks”.
A quirky little follow-up to my 10/9/22 posting “Manspreading on a couch” — a set of crotch-focused paintings by Michael Carson, of men manspreading on couches — going further into the artistic subgenre of men in chairs, with three examples unearthed on Pinterest.
A personal note: I’m just barely hanging on here, with extravagant hip pain and cramping up of my hands — both apparently connected somehow to the current weather — plus DoE (dyspnea on exertion) so severe that I’m exhausted by walking from the bedroom to the living room, and recurrent narcoleptic episodes with elaborate, hard-to-shake visual hallucinations.
But along came this remarkable image of Sean Connery as Zed in the film Zardoz, which despite being a Z-person (note boldface) and a longtime fan of Connery’s, I missed completely when it came out in 1974. Material from the film is being distributed in the mistaken belief that it’s set in 2023 — it’s actually 2293 — but this is what we get:
(#1) Connery, hot as hell and giggle-inducing too, hypersexual and, oh yes, ridiculous
