… and we have cats. So it is in this postcard I got yesterday from a gay bookperson friend (who has a cat) in celebration of Pride Month: très gai legal librarian Ryan Tamares (now ably serving Stanford from Hackensack NJ):
(#1) Library Cat in purple (from red shelves through purple) by TaylorRoss1 at redbubble.com
The design is available in a variety of forms; this is the portrait postcard version, but there’s also a landscape postcard, a t-shirt, stickers, and who knows what else. (more…)
Advice for Pride Month this year, when forces of hatred and fear, wielding harassment and intimidation, seem increasingly arrayed against LGBT+-folk, threatening our celebrations, attacking the symbols of our communities, spreading malicious disinformation about us, and acting to curtail our rights — so that we have to confront these forces publicly and fiercely. An image of resplendent, powerful, ferociously sharp-toothed pride for the occasion, covering the spectrum from intense red to vibrant purple:
(#1) From my 6/27/15 posting “Gay Pride”, with my comment: rather more adult males than you’d expect in a pride of lions — but then these are gay lions, so they bond with pleasure
(Already back then, 8 years ago, the image was clearly memic, distributed from hand to hand from an original source no one knew (or cared about); some creator crafted this remarkable image and paired it with the punning title Gay Pride — a gay pride for Gay Pride — but we’re almost surely never going to be able to identify the source. It came to me again yesterday, through another acquaintance who found it on Facebook.)
From #1 a fortuitous find enabling an associative leap to a famously savage leonine diorama. And then in another associative leap, to feasting with panthers, to big cats in general (especially those of the genus Panthera), and to gay men who are beautiful, powerful, and fierce.
Today’s Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, mostly courtesy of Tim Evanson posting on Facebook. Tim posted this photo of three gay park benches:
(#1) TE: Forest Hill Park, Cleveland Heights. Yesterday.
They had one rainbow bench. It was vandalized. Now there are three.
Yesterday, the posting “Watch this space”. I’m still away meeting a writing deadline, and I have a medical appointment too. So this posting is another Mary, Queen of Scots notice that I am Not Dead Yet. Meanwhile, I offer you, as entertainment and for Gay History Month, a recent Daily Jocks ad featuring a rainbow bandana worn as a sexual-advertisement hanky (on the right, or receptive / subordinate, side):
(#1) Take me, I’m yours
(OED3 (June 2022) takes bandana to be the primary spelling; OED2 had bandanna, and for a long time that was my orthographic practice. But it’s clear that bandana is now far and away the most common spelling.)
Plus its use as an actual bandana (here in a unusual, but pectorally satisfying, barechested deployment):
(#2) I pulled my harpoon from my sparkling rainbow bandana…
In related developments (not illustrated here): rainbow bandanas as headbands and as dog bandanas.
Meanwhile, none of my sources on the meaning of colors for gay hankies says a thing about rainbow bandanas. Of the six colors in the Pride rainbow (R O Y G B P), only three seem to have been used with any frequency as hanky colors:
R for fisting; Y for watersports, light B for oral sex, dark B for anal sex
(Some sources on the other three say: O for anything (on left) / nothing (on right), G for hustling, P for piercing. Completely out of my experience, though I have seen black for S&M, and heard of brown for scat. You would have thought that one of the characteristically gay-signaling colors, like pink, lavender, or purple, would have been pressed into service to convey (generally) servicing a penis — wanting mine serviced (on left) / wanting to service one (on right) — but no. The elaborated hanky code is, or was, more an exercise of imagination than a practical scheme of communication.)
As reported in my 82nd birthday posting “Three greetings for 9/6/22”, while I was holed up at home in severe and debilitating heat misery on the day, some friends e-mailed me delightful greetings — visual, verbal, and musical — and a hundred or so of them wished me a happy birthday, mostly via Facebook. Meanwhile, I ordered up some coffee gelato (it was also National Coffee Ice Cream Day, and that’s my favorite ice cream flavor) and a carrot cake (which is, well, cake, but very flavorful and chewy and not terribly sweet, and it comes with a lovely cream cheese frosting, all of which suits my tastes). I found no way to honor the Marquis de Lafayette (born 9/6/1757), though here I’ll give my summary from the Lafayette section of my 9/7/19 posting “Big sexy prime birthday gay ice cream”:
A man of enormous physical courage who took up the family military career at the age of 13 and later pursued an extraordinary public career devoted to advocating for democracy and human rights in two countries [mine and his], and managed somehow to live to the age of 76.
Then on the day after came sweet messages from people apologizing for having missed the day itself. But as I said to one of these (an old friend, an admirable person, and one of the small core of my regular readers — so someone whose good words were especially important to me):
I’m inclined to view my birthday as a fairly large region in time, not just one day. The net congratulations largely achieve the purpose of maintaining and reinforcing relationships, and that doesn’t have to happen on just one day.
And from one of the Aging Life Care of California folk (who, among other things, take me to medical appointments, of which I have a great many), who recently began reading this blog. Full of apologies for having missed the actual day, which I countered with the Region Theory of Birthday Time (above), and then bearing a gift box of four Sprinkles muffins, from the company’s Palo Alto store (in Stanford Shopping Center). A box notably including
dark chocolate (Belgian dark chocolate cake with bittersweet chocolate frosting, in curls)
carrot (walnut-studded carrot cake with cinnamon cream cheese frosting)
They are deadly, those jaws. Deadly sins. Gay deadly sins. Decked out in Red …… Orange ….. Yellow …. Green … Blue .. Purple . Omigod Gay Pride!
From Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook today: the Life of Sharks cartoon for 6/1/22, to inaugurate Gay Pride Month:
(#1) The current menu of Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath, Sloth; waiter, I’ll have Gay Gluttony for starters , Gay Lust for the main course, and Gay Sloth for afters
In the bon appétit e-mail yesterday (6/10), Taiwanese noodles for Gay Pride Month. From the e-mail:
Big Queer Cold Noodles: These noodles have a special place in the heart and stomach of BA contributor Jessie YuChen, who styled the recipe after a beloved late-night dish from a hole-in-the-wall neighbor to Taipei’s only lesbian bar. It’s perfect for Pride parties all summer long.
A cold salad of (mostly) vegetables in rainbow flag colors, plus of course the cold noodles. Missing the color blue, which is not available in any common vegetable. Instead of yellow bell peppers or squash for yellow: beaten eggs cooked in sheets and then cut into strips. And with the six colors not quite in their canonical order red – orange – yellow – green – (blue) – purple; going clockwise from the red bell peppers, the orange carrots are out of order. But then why should a celebration of the gay and queer have to adhere to a normative ordering?
‘Cause today is Belgian Pride Parade day in Brussels!
From Johan Rooryck (in Brussels) to Facebook today:
So what do you do when you have misjudged the size of sprinkles containers you ordered online, and have come to own more sprinkles than you can eat in a lifetime? You just make a load of cakes for Belgian Pride Day, is what you do. Andrea did, that is.
This is the day. It’s the 2nd Monday of October: Indigenous Peoples’ Day / Columbus Day in the U.S.; and Thanksgiving in Canada. And it’s October 11th: National Coming Out Day; and Jacques and Arnold’s Anniversary (celebrated) — the actual moment would be 45 years in December.
Mostly this posting will be about J&A Day, with affection, silliness, and a certain amount of playful raunchiness (just to warn you, there will be tiny chocolate penises, in Pride Flag rainbow wrappings). I will have a few words on Columbus Day, Thanksgiving holidays, and NCOD, before the main event. But to establish the main context, here’s the Robert Emery Smith photograph of Jacques and me after having been declared domestic partners by the city of Palo Alto on Valentine’s Day in 1996:
(#1) The two husband-equivalents, in their cymbidium garden (the plants themselves being gifts of love)
The third, and most emotionally significant, of our domestic partnerships. The first two were administrative procedures, at Ohio State and Stanford, while this one, though entirely symbolic, was designed to be as much like a conventional wedding as possible: there was a public ceremony and a celebration in front of City Hall, with friends and family in attendance; people wept with happiness; and the city issued a certificate. More below.
One more rainbow for the season, in my USPS mail yesterday: from Stanford QUESTer Ryan Tamares, wishing me Happy Pride Month, this LGBT Lives Matter postcard (with the “LGBT Lives Matter” legend abstracted away from the postcard):
(#1) Logo designed and sold by AthleticHeroes on redbubble.com
Note the POW, or PUNCH, lines surrounding the central image, a drawing of a raised clenched fist, with a long (presumably polished) thumbnail — either female, or gender-nonconforming male.
