Archive for the ‘Masculinity’ Category

Mollified about Monaghan

April 5, 2025

Sweet Gee (an alter ego of Gadi Niram’s) wrote on Facebook yesterday about a character in the delightful Hetty Wainthropp Investigates tv show, who I took to be the character played by the adorable Dominic Monaghan, but turned out to be Joe Peluso’s. I wrote:

Ah, I am mollified. I’d completely forgotten JP. Meanwhile, I know that mollify has to do, etymologically, with softening, but I couldn’t help thinking of it as Molly-fy ‘make into a Molly’, presumably by getting into drag.

Two clusters of things here: the Wainthropp show and DM; and the verb mollify and the noun molly / Molly.

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The homoerotic lure

January 17, 2025

From Tim Evanson on Zuckie’s Playroom this morning, this snapshot from the superhero archives:


It’s a come-on, promising surprises, offering to show the boy delightful things; homoeroticism shimmers beneath his words

The lexical background, from NOAD:

noun come-oninformal a gesture or remark that is intended to attract someone sexually: she was giving me the come-on.

And then the great homoerotic come-on to a boy in film:

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The naked scribe

December 8, 2024

From Tim Evanson on Facebook yesterday, this cover art by J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951): The Literary Digest of 6/12/1909:


(#1) Homoerotic soft porn in the style of classical sculpture (complete with a laurel wreath for the author au naturel); the laurel wreath identifies the writer as an incarnation of Apollo, the god of poetry, who is often depicted with a laurel wreath (recalling his desire for Daphne, a nymph who was transformed into a laurel tree to escape the god’s advances); meanwhile, the writer is nude, because he’s a god (the model for this drawing was JCL’s favorite model, also his partner in life, Charles Beach (1881-1954))

I’m a writer (among other things), and I mostly work in my underwear, but I don’t write commando. Well, I’m no Charles Beach, and certainly no Apollo.

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A second look at a shirt-spreading Beau Butler

October 28, 2024

(Entertaining and enlightening, I hope, but definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Yesterday, in my posting “Beau Butler’s shirt” (about shirt-lifting as sexual invitation, and gay porn actor Beau Butler as a practitioner), I ended with a photo of BB engaged instead in shirt-spreading (or -opening), to display his muscular torso (muscular but not ripped like a bodybuilder’s):


(#1) [from the caption there:] … a suave but intense BB

An unusual presentation for BB; he’s characteristically earthy, cheerily (even playfully) crude, brazenly shirtless, bearing with him an aura of powerful male sweat. But the guy in this photo is, as I said, suave — with styled hair (oh! much browner than in other photos, where it’s definitely black), elegant eyebrows, very light facial hair, and (another oh!) piercingly blue eyes. Meanwhile, the handsome light lavender shirt he’s spreading is much more stylish than the t-shirts BB wears when he’s not going shirtless. Even the shirt-spreading gesture is a smoother move, less overtly sexual, than the shirt-lifting of BB’s other photos in yesterday’s posting.

The anomalies pile up. Is this, then, actually BB, or is it a simulacrum of him, presumably AI-generated?

Almost surely a simulacrum, as I’ll argue in a bit. But first, one more (genuine) photo of BB — there are tons of them, mostly with him naked or minimally clothed, available in copies all over the net; most of them are clearly from studios he’s worked for — with him, wearing only boots and socks, doing a crude tush push, jokily advertising his availability as a really fine fuck.  Managing to be really goofy and really arousing at the same time. To compare with #1 above.

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Beau Butler’s shirt

October 27, 2024

(Waist-deep in gay porn, so it strays into sexual territory that’s definitely off-limits for kids and the sexually modest)

A HuntForMen (from Falcon | NakedSword) membership ad — gay porn you can subscribe to — this morning has as its central element this pose of gay pornstar Beau Butler, performing the most modest level of shirt-lifting (exposing only a bit of belly):


(#1) His jeans are open, suggesting that the pose is a sexual invitation rather than just a musclehunk’s body display

Two things: the levels of shirt-lifting, and the charming, also hard-working, muscle bottom BB.

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Was Abraham Lincoln gay?

October 26, 2024

From The Economist, “Was Abraham Lincoln gay? A controversial documentary [Lover of Men: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln (2024)] re-examines the president’s relationships with men”, on-line on 10/1/24 (and in the print issue of 10/5). An article behind a paywall, but I’m reproducing it here in full (I have a subscription), so that I can, first, express my dismay at the way the label gay is used there and, second, juxtapose this treatment with my careful analysis, originally from 2005, reacting to similarly dismaying discussions of Brokeback Mountain, the story and the film. And add some further material on male friendship, normative masculinity, and male attitudes towards women and femininity.

Meanwhile, I note that as I write this, I’m wearing this t-shirt —


(#1) GAY AS FUCK in big rainbow letters

— fully understanding that its message is an affirmation of an identity that is both highly localized in time and place and social setting, and also a kind of umbrella identity, accommodating a wide variety of “gay people”.

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The ecstasy of oral pleasure

October 26, 2024

(The title is a warning; this posting is about men fellating men, and while the language mostly rises above raunchy street talk, the topic is clearly not for kids or the sexually modest)

I begin with a severely cropped image of one gay porn actor fellating another, a picture that manages to have no penis in it, despite the fact that the unseen penis is the emotionally central element of the act for both participants. Because what struck me about the image was, instead, the fellator’s state of being, as evidenced in his facial expression:

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van Burgst’s world of men

October 24, 2024

(Paintings of men, viewed sexually, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)

On my Pinterest feed this morning, this painting, a modern-impressionist portrait of a male couple, by an artist unfamiliar to me:

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James Bidgood

October 13, 2024

(Definitely faggy content, which will not suit everyone, but nothing I’m obliged to keep kids away from)

On Pinterest this morning, this arresting cover of the magazine The Young Physique (men’s fitness and muscle-building for a gay male audience), from 50 or 60 years ago:


(#1) A symphony in fluffy pinkness, showing the model’s callipygian charms (glutes are good)

The Young Physique was a large-format color magazine founded in 1958 by Joe Weider; it featured drawings by gay artist George Quaintance, and creative sets designed by the gay photographer James Bidgood, sometimes (as here) magazine covers photographed by him

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JCL for Hump Day

September 18, 2024

In recognition of Wednesday as Hump Day, I offer you (from today’s Pinterest mailing) a brief notice of some hump-worthy (verb hump: … 3 [with object] vulgar slang have sex with (NOAD)) young men in a vintage ad by J.C. Leyendecker (who appeared most recently on this blog in my 9/2 posting “Leyendecker Labor Day”):

A JCL ad for Ivory Soap, set in an athletic homosocial space, the locker room showers (note the male buttocks, a recurrent object of JCL’s artistic — and presumably also personal — engagement).

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of checking-out going on in that shower room. No doubt dwelling on those “muscles … in perfect trim” and the “sweating skin” that has been cleansed “under the rushing water”.