Archive for the ‘Masculinity’ Category

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Steven Dashiell

May 28, 2024

From e-mail on 5/5 from interdisciplinary sociologist Steven Dashiell, who pursues research on discourse in male-dominated subcultures (looking at military men, gamers, barbershop patrons, gay men, and more) and has built on a posting of mine on the trope of the pizza boy in gay pornography in a recent essay of his own:

I love your blog.  I was introduced to the study of language in my doctoral program [at the University of Maryland Baltimore County], and I grew from a “social inequality sociologist” to a “sociologist of language who studies male-dominated spaces to understand inequality”.  It’s been a wild ride, because the study of language goes in so many different directions.  I’m glad to have some mentors who help me …

It’s a good day when admirable people like SD write me to tell me they love my blog — in this case, SD likes it because it’s linguistics linguistics linguistics and because it’s gay gay gay, and both of these things are important to SD. But now I’ve had some time to get acquainted with SD’s life history (that being one of my things) and the way he arranges his life now (that being another one of my things), and I can do a lightning survey of this landscape, to make a few general points. One of these being the extraordinary variety of homomasculinities.

Four cases: my own complex story, presented at great length in postings on this blog; Richard Vytniorgu’s story (one significant theme of which is his being a bottom, fem, and submissive — plus British and academic-literary); Troy Anderson’s story (whose life themes include his being a guy guy, a gigantic jock bear into leather, a corporate executive, and a Native American), and now Steven Dashiell’s story (another jock bear (not into leather), an academic, and Black). And this just scratches the surface; I’ve told other even more disparate stories.  Take these stories to heart if you’re inclined to spout generalizations about what gay men are like (or worse, about what men are like).

But now to SD.

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Posted in Academic life, Gender and sexuality, Masculinity, Race and ethnicity, Teaching | Leave a Comment »

My Life My Way

May 15, 2024

From Alexander Chee’s cheemobile Instagram page on 12/11/20:

My latest obsession: My Life My Way, a Japanese gay magazine published from 1977 – 1982, with a stunning visual style and illustrated covers all drawn by a single artist, Joji Takeuchi. I love the commitment to the humor and the style.

Insofar as we can tell, the men on the covers are American — natural models for a public gay life not easily available in the Japan of the period — so they are fantasy figures of gay masculinity, not portraits from life. I’ll exhibit four of the covers below.

As for the content of MLMW, I’ve found no sources on how it presented gay life in Japanese to a Japanese audience, or in fact on how issues of the magazine were distributed.

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Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Male art, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »

From the annals of attentional focus

May 14, 2024

The Zits strip of 5/12, in which Jeremy invests an enormous amount of time and attention devising a remarkable hammock leisure environment for himself — something really important to him — while neglecting to wash any of his dishes, not even rinsing out his cereal bowl — something routine and of no significance to him. His attentional focus in on the cool stuff, the stuff he cares about, while he neglects the everyday stuff, which he views as just a nuisance (well, to look ahead, it’s just a nuisance because it’s a woman’s job):

There seem to be (at least) five elements — they’re all of highly context- and culture-bound and they’re often at odds with one another — that can contribute to the personal value of a task to someone doing it and can therefore engage their attentional focus:

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »

Pizza boy moments

May 6, 2024

From Susan Fischer on Facebook today, a link to a very old (11/30/11) Dave Coverly Speed Bump cartoon depicting the Trojan Pizza Boy:


(#1) Pizza Boy wears a cap, and he comes bearing two pizza cartons (plus, we assume, a lot of concealed Trojan warriors)

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and sexuality, Language and society, Linguistics in the comics, Male art, Masculinity, Myths | 2 Comments »

Andrew Salgado

April 28, 2024

Coming past me on Pinterest yesterday morning, some really impressive portrait paintings with abstractionist interventions, along the lines of the one below, the left panel of two:


(#1) Andrew Salgado, The Painter’s Apprentice (2014)

Unlike many of the artists I’ve posted about on this blog, AS and his personal and artistic histories are widely available to the public; there’s a Wikipedia page, tons of stuff on his website, and plenty of open (in fact blunt and unapologetically opinionated) interviews that are both informative and thought-provoking. You don’t have to wonder about his childhood — he talks about growing up in Regina, Saskatchewan with enormous affection — or how his personal life, as, as he puts it, a “young gay white guy” with a longtime male partner, living a new life in working-class London, and so on, plays out in his work — he’s happy to reflect on all the stages he’s been through in ten years, and on being an artist as a business, an enterprise that requires planning and salesmanship.

So: not only are masculinity, sexuality, and social identity recurrent themes in his art, they’re also prominent aspects of his presentation of self: as a guy guy, offhandedly but also defiantly queer (like, don’t fuck with me, dude, or you’ll be sorry), and simultaneously working-class, practically minded, playfully imaginative, and genuinely erudite.

AS came to me as paintings I’d never seen before but was bowled over by, paintings with no context at all. I’ve already given you a lot of context, so I’ll jump right in with more paintings, recent ones (in many ways unlike the early painting in #1, and strikingly unlike this year’s work so far, mixed-media depictions of flowers — floral atlases crossed with Georgia O’Keeffe and Robert Mapplethorpe). Then to biography and art criticism.

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Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and plants, Male art, Masculinity, Music, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »

A Promethean hepatical

April 26, 2024

The liver. Patent medicine. Greek mythology. Advertising. The illustrator’s art. All together now.

In the hands of French illustrator Charles Lemmel (1899 – 1976), the task of devising a poster to advertise a hepatical (a patent medicine for maladies of the liver) somehow fixed on the myth of Prometheus, punished by Zeus (for having stolen fire from Olympus and given it to humans) by being chained, naked, to the side of a mountain and subjected to endless hepatophagy: every day, Zeus’s eagle feasts on the Promethean liver, which then regrows for the next day’s torture.

Not, you might have thought, an ideal theme for a medicine ad; but look what Lemmel did with the idea in the poster (from the 1930s):


(#1)  Lemmel presents Hepatior as a rest and relief from the pain of hepatic ailments, a pain like that of Prometheus’s aquiline torment; meanwhile, he elevates the real-life sufferer by depicting the suffering Prometheus as a hot hot muscle-hunk and also a curly black-haired Greek dude — who is smiling and winking at us through the ordeal, reassuring us that it’s all a joke

That’s quite an artistic performance, also soft porn at several levels (extravagant body display, proud masochism). I happen to think it’s deeply silly, but enjoyable in its crudeness.

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and medicine, Language and sports, Language and the body, Masculinity, Metaphor, Myths | 1 Comment »

Acting Corps: Robert Conrad

April 21, 2024

Viewed yesterday morning: S4 E7 of the tv show Columbo — “An Exercise in Fatality”, originally aired 9/15/74, with four members of the bank of reliable actors with prodigious portfolios that I’ve called the Acting Corps (four plus series star Peter Falk, playing Lt. Columbo) appearing in the early moments of the show, in which character Milo Janus is depicted as a cocky fraudster running a chain of gyms, confronted by one of his defrauded franchisees, Gene Stafford. It is quickly clear that one of these men will be murderer and one victim, but unclear which will be which: Janus richly deserves to get offed, but on the other hand, he’s bastard enough to dispose of Stafford as a mere obstacle in his path.

The plot is nicely balanced between these two possibilities, but I should have realized from the casting how the scene would play out; both characters were cast from the Acting Corps, but Janus is played by a high-recognition, star actor (Robert Conrad), while Stafford is played by character actor Phil(ip) Bruns, who had a supporting role, at one time or another, in virtually every American tv series there was then, so always seemed vaguely familiar but not identifiable.

The character Stafford was then doomed, because the actor playing him was dispensable. Not only was Robert Conrad a star, he was also an incandescent actor: body-proud (displaying his muscular torso and remarkable buttocks), high-masculinity (energetic and athletic, tough, frequently sweaty, giving off a whiff of testosterone), and intense. No director would kill off a property like that in the first few minutes of a 90-minute show.

I originally intended to post about four of the actors from this episode — Conrad, Bruns, Pat Harrington, Jr. (who I recognized and identified immediately), and Gretchen Corbett  (who was familiar but not identifiable) — but I quickly accumulated a lot of material about Conrad, so I’m giving him a posting all of this own; I’ll do the other three in a separate posting.

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Posted in Actors, Language and the body, Masculinity, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

It’s that actor again

April 18, 2024

If you watch television series — especially the dramatic series, like police procedurals and mysteries (which consume large numbers of cast members on a weekly basis) — you’ll see familiar actors again and again. Some of them are well-known (so you can enjoy celebrity spotting), but most are lesser-known working members of what I’ve called the Acting Corps. You might see them in dramatic film series and tv commercials as well, maybe also in off-Broadway productions or in Shakespeare in the Park or similar theatrical venues. Acting is what they do. They might also be comics or performing musicians or models, but they are likely to think of these jobs as just another kind of acting, of projecting a persona, role, or character for an audience.

In any case, one of these people will cross your field of vision, and you’ll find them familiar, but might not be able to place them, and unless you’re into the acting world or in this actor’s fan club — I’m pleased to say that there are such things — you won’t know their name. So you have the it’s that actor again experience. It happens to me a lot. Eventually, I’ll check to find out their names and learn something about their histories. If I have the time, post about them.

This is routine. In today’s posting, I’ll file a brief report on Rachel Dratch, notable for the goofy characters she portrays (in several different contexts). Her appearance in a recent American Home Shield commercial finally moved me to identify her.

While I was assembling these materials, my back-channel tv-watching brought me, in adjoining hours but in different programs on different channels, a familiar actor (whose name I didn’t know) playing a serial killer (a true monster) and then an FBI agent (with a good heart) — a juxtaposition that I found emotionally jarring, a whip-sawing of affect; during the second program, I kept fearing that the agent’s niceness would turn out to be mere cover for some grotesque and bloody obsession. But the experience did move me to identify Billy Burke and discover the huge body of his acting work (plus side gigs as a singer-songwriter).

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Posted in Actors, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Portmanteaus, Puns | 2 Comments »

Jack Hughes’s hooray for Hollywood

April 16, 2024

Caught via a Pinterest posting, the London-based illustrator Jack Hughes’s 2020 spread for Entertainment Weekly celebrating 18 LGBTQ entertainers:


(#1) top row, from left: Janelle Monáe, Freddie Mercury, Kate McKinnon, Ricky Martin, John Waters, Dan Levy; middle row, from left: Ellen DeGeneres, Rock Hudson, Laverne Cox, Lily Tomlin, Kristen Stewart, Lil Nas X, George Takei, Ryan Murphy, Cynthia Nixon, Marlene Dietrich; bottom row, from left: RuPaul, Elton John

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Music | Leave a Comment »

Urgently singing the hidden homoeroticism of cowboys

April 7, 2024

Poignantly noted on Facebook on Friday by Earl Jackson, a just-released video of Orville Peck and Willie Nelson joined in a moving performance of “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond Of Each Other”, which you can view here.

Actually, you should view it before reading on with this posting, even if — maybe especially if — you’ve never heard of Ned Sublette’s wry 1981 song, which has been something of a Willie Nelson project for two decades now (he recorded a version of it in 2006) and even if you’ve never heard of the young gay country singer who performs, masked, under the name Orville Peck. Enjoy the song — which is more complex than might at first appear — and the performance, with Peck’s warm, strong country voice paired with Nelson’s raspy but equally strong country voice (a real marvel for a 90-year-old), and Orville’s deep seriousness paired with Willie’s sweet but earnest smiles. So you should listen to their performance, but you should also watch it.


(#1) From the YouTube video: Orville and Willie under a tree, out in the middle of a fenced field, singing and strumming in celebration of gay desire and coupling — urgently conveying a social and political message

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Masculinity, Music | 2 Comments »

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