Archive for the ‘Moral worlds’ Category
September 25, 2026
Terrible things happen: the people we love most, and those that we especially admire, sicken and die; our highly competent bodies are overwhelmed by an avalanche of painful disabilities and disfigurements (I can no longer play the piano or assemble collages, among many other things).
But it’s possible to cope with these disasters — not with the blaring of trumpets in resurrection, but in the more modest unfolding of loss, longing, and resolution: Tod und Verklärung on a human scale. In this posting, I’ll wander through several examples from my current life, starting with some things I see out of my big window here at Avant.
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Posted in Art, Collages, Death and dying, Dreams, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Moral worlds, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »
September 15, 2026
The first of two postings about message-bearing t-shirts. This one is a riff on a tee that I posted about in 2022; its message is the playful 100% Certified Queer, and the label QUEER in it turns out to be a many-layered thing.
The posting to come later focuses on four tees recently acquired or on their way to me soon: three with labels on them — GAY, FAIRY, PANSY — and one with gorgeous pansy flowers, the label being merely implicit.
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Identities, Language and politics, Moral worlds, My life, Signs and symbols, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
September 11, 2026
[I started this posting a few days ago, but was balked from moving ahead by bad juju in both Facebook and WordPress. The curses magically lifted on 9/9. So I’m back on task now, but it’s 9/11 (25th anniversary) and apparently I’m going to be weeping non-stop all day, while I plug away at my work. Life lurches on]
Yet another birthday present for me, small but touching: two small enamel lapel pins: one in the form of a flag, one a plain rectangle (both are just an inch across):
(#1) The flag pin
(#2) The rectangle pin
Both of them from the program director Manalee Shukla here at Avant (a friend I’ve posted about several times, because we share a pleasure in the culture of her native land, India, and because she appreciates my injecting a note of gay spice into the Avant experience (meanwhile, I’ve warned her that her two bicultural kids are about to finish a transformation into entirely American boys; I have plenty of sociolinguistic stories from personal experience as well as the literature — all that professional preparation turns out to be genuinely useful in daily life).
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Posted in Clothing, Events and occasions, Flags, Gifts, Homosexuality, Logos, Moral worlds, My life, Penguins, Quotations, Rainbow clothing, Signs and symbols, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
August 30, 2026
(all the way at the end, we get to some sexual street talk, which I think has exactly the right shock value for its context; but if s*cking c*ck offends you, skip the next-to-last sentence)
It starts with Steven Levine — a sparkling vehicle of joy, enthusiasm, and congeniality — roused to anger and protest, as I reported in the 8/3 posting “Two notes on gay moral purpose”:
SL breaks out in a combination of, on the one hand, genuine pride in occasions of humane concern and (to put it grandly) moral purpose in the gay world and, on the other, righteous anger at a long-standing tradition in psychology, sociology, and medicine of blanketly treating homosexuality as dysfunction and disease. With, as sideshow, celebration of the raw sexuality in homosexuality — recognizing the physical and emotional pleasures of the associated sexual practices — in the wonderful BIG FAG t-shirts created by Steven (which he’d been distributing with abandon at Amsterdam Pride).
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Posted in Art, Clothing, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Moral worlds, Music, My life, Poetry, Social interactions, Social life | Leave a Comment »
August 25, 2026
This morning, I went to get a bunch of lab tests done at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (for a nephrologist consultation tomorrow) and discovered that a lot of the phlebotomists recognized me, greeted me enthusiastically by name, and asked about my life since they had last seen me. The thing is, I’m really visible (well, I also remember them, and facts about their lives too; they’re interesting people, and the question “How did you end up working here?”, while they are drawing my blood, elicits some extraordinary stories). Almost always wearing stunningly gay clothes (today, rainbow-flag track shorts and a honking big rainbow-colored DEI t-shirt).
(#1) The DEI shirt
The PAMF staff find these clothes cheering, which is indeed one of the things they’re for.
This makes me happy.
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Posted in Clothing, Connotation, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Moral worlds, My life, Rainbow clothing, Social life, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
