The US congressman, in today’s news because his pointed criticisms of Our Overlord Grabpussy have netted him a retributive charge of mortgage fraud, but I was about to post about him as an exemplar of liberal political critique (along with, among others, Rachel Maddow, Pete Buttigieg, and Joyce Vance) and also of nice-guy masculinity (masculinity being one of my perennial topics), with a note on a presentation of himself that employs both informal dress and facial scruff — the latter being a conventional advertisement of masculinity and toughness.
Archive for the ‘Masculinity’ Category
Eric Swalwell and his facial scruff
November 14, 2025The flannel frontier
October 9, 2025The 10/7 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), multifariously playful, cleverly goofy. Something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times.
(#1) It’s all about the original Star Trek tv series (if you have somehow missed learning about the show, the cartoon will be incomprehensible to you); the top-level joke is in the title: the flannel frontier, a silly pun on the final frontier — but there’s a lot more (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
Gay banter: great big green beans
August 31, 2025🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate August, also (US) 🔧 Labor Sunday 🔨 (everything — September, Labor Day, even World War II, 86 years ago in Poland — breaks tomorrow); meanwhile, it’s all gay banter about green beans, a little festival of G+B
Aric Olnes, on Facebook with his daily alphabetic horticultural message for 8/27 (on these messages, see my 8/17 posting “Miss Marple, with murder on Michaelmas”), a biliteral delight, in G+B:
graceful bushy Green Beans grow briskly generously bequeathing grand bounty
A long, thin object — like a green bean / string bean — can symbolize a tall, thin person (a skinny person); or someone’s long, thin legs; or of course a long penis — so as an enthusiastic phallophiliac, I went with the penises in my response:
— AZ> AO: Those are mighty long beans you got there, pardner!
This is gay banter (itself a G+B expression); AO and I are old friends, both gay, and can exchange personally-directed lubricious remarks that turn on the shared assumption that gay men fantasize about big dicks (whatever their own penises are like and whatever sorts of penises they favor in actual man-on-man sex) and the shared belief that such fantasies are both powerful and ridiculous. This is an instance of banter without an edge, serving to express what we share — also what sets us apart from most people around us — and to reinforce the bond of our friendship. But banter between men, and more specifically between gay men, comes in many forms, ranging from a light touch with just a bit of an edge, to teasing and to more aggressive kidding. What’s going on depends on who’s doing the bantering, to whom, and in what circumstances. So I’ll have some words about that.
And then some appreciation for AO’s ingenuity in constructing his alphabetic titles, in this case for G+B expressions about the seedpods of Phaseolus vulgaris, the common bean. To which I will contribute a long playful list of G+B expressions for anyone who’d like to riff further on green beans / string beans / snap beans. (more…)
The pink Hello Kitty superhero
July 29, 2025A few days ago, Chris Ambidge re-posted a version of this remarkable image of a Hello Kitty Superhero, pretty in pink, as a little gift for Leith Chu (it’s a Canadian panda thing):
(#1) CA’s image — which he first posted for LC 13 years ago — came with some identifiers as to its source, while the image above, with no meta-data at all, is the one I found on Pinterest yesterday; I found Pink Hello Kitty Superhero delightful, admired his attitude, enjoyed the earnest heroic stance, the sheer cuteness of Hello Kitty and that pink bow, and the pink and red superhero costume, gorgeous in its triumphant fagginess
I had hoped to track down the source, through those identifiers, but as I was preparing to copy CA’s version to my computer, it vanished, poof, from FB — and, it turned out, from CA’s files. So all we have is my image from Pinterest (which is utterly uninformative, but apparently safe from meddling), which I’m posting on my blog but not on FB, just in case it too is in danger of being disappeared.
Before I go on to discourse on butch / macho fagginess, so nicely illustrated in #1, a few words on why I’m so bent on posting this bit of fluff today.
Bad history II
July 22, 2025Following up on my 7/20 posting “Bad history”, the terrible tale of necrotizing fasciitis (caused by MRSA) in 2003 — now with details that have come out through discussions on Facebook (FB still works, but you have to delete most of the stuff that comes your way to get to actual postings by real friends). Material from these discussions, edited and amplified.
Maggie Tallerman (in the UK) opened the exchanges:
— MT > AZ: You didn’t say if the MRSA was a hospital-acquired bug, which is known for being a thing in this country (hopefully uncommon). I hope it wasn’t. Appalling.
— AZ > MT: It definitely was not. Probably acquired through garden soil — unexpected perils of being a gardener! — though that’s not sure. Not from a hospital or through sexual contact, in any case, since both were absent from my life between June 2003, when my man Jacques died, and November, when the NF suddenly appeared. It is, however, likely that my immune responses were muted by extravagant grief (and, before that, the toll of dementia caregiving).
In a sense I survived through the diagnostic skills of my family doctor, who reckoned, in a phone call, that there were three things that might be the cause of the symptoms that had suddenly appeared, that one was very rare but extremely dangerous, so just in case I had to meet him at Stanford Hospital immediately (and was delivered there by my department’s administrator). Within an hour I was in surgery, and so my life was saved.
Mollified about Monaghan
April 5, 2025Sweet 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.
The homoerotic lure
January 17, 2025From 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-on: informal 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:
The naked scribe
December 8, 2024From 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.
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.
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.