Briefly noted. Passed on by Evan Randall Smith on 6/6 on Facebook, this Liz Climo celebration of Pride month, featuring her congenial cartoon animals:
(#1) The color sequence — white, pink, light blue; brown, black; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple — reproduces the bands of the Progress Pride flag
(There’s a Page on this blog on my postings about Climo’s work.)
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit, busting out all over (as these prolific creatures are prone to do) for June
A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “Queens Pride”, about this digital composition:
(#1) Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, in the 7 ROY G. BIV, or Newtonian rainbow, colors, rather than the 6 Pride Flag colors — so the composition was probably not intended to celebrate the wonderful LGBTQ+ness of June; but let’s just disregard that
Well, QEII #7 is in purple, not violet. Then there’s #6, which should be indigo (a famously elusive color) but strays far from Newton’s rainbow band of that name, so provoking a Facebook exchange between Joel B. Levin (JBL) and me (AZ):
To mark the eve of Pride Month, this digital composition passed on by Steven Levine on Facebook today:
Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, in the 7 ROY G. BIV, or Newtonian rainbow, colors, rather than the 6 Pride Flag colors — so the composition was probably not intended to celebrate the wonderful LGBTQ+ness of June; but let’s just disregard that
Now, the composition supplies a number of tokens of the Queen Elizabeth II type, so I had to consider whether my title for this posting would be Queen’s Pride (one QEII type) or Queens’ Pride (many QEII tokens). This is a familiar sort of problem, cropping up annually when Mother’s / Mothers’ Day and Father’s / Fathers’ Day come around, and I’ve chosen the same solution for my title that I chose for those two commercial holidays: axe the damn apostrophe. It’s Queens Pride.
From Alaskan Chris Waigl on Facebook on 4/20, who commented “Great logo” (to which I assent):
SEAGLA (Southeast Alaska LGBTQ+ Alliance: “providing a supportive social network for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in Southeast Alaska”) announcement on 4/18 for Juneau pride week, June 14th – 23rd
Alaskan images, going through the rainbow flag from red to purple, with a few touches of pink. From the SEAGLA site:
We’re so excited to reveal this year’s Pride logo! It’s designed by Lillian Egan (@diamond.lils.art on Instagram) and Mel Izard (@thetoadstoes).
I had hoped to get a detailed inventory of the items in the logo, since they are supposed to characterize (southeast) Alaska, but will be seen by many outsiders (by me in particular, and now by my readers around the world); that is, they convey more than generic allusions to tall trees, wolves, porcupines, crabs, bears, and so on. What jellyfish? What caterpillar? What (two types of) mushrooms? But no responses so far.
Yes, they’re everywhere. But this one is on Halsted St. in the Boystown / Northalsted neighborhood of Chicago, an old established gay village, and it’s painted in muted colors on worn bricks. Not flashy, but solid.
An image posted by Uri Horesh on Facebook yesterday, when he made it his new cover photo
This is today’s Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting. Not dead, and in many ways in great good health, but severely afflicted by painful osteoarthritism that makes it hard for me to walk and my left hand almost useless.
… 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)
