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.
[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).
(images that aren’t actually XXX-rated, but get as close to the line as possible while serving WordPress modesty — so some readers may choose to avert their eyes)
Briefly noted. For charging up the senses — big jolts for someone of my inclinations — on a quiet Sunday, Daily Jocks has sent out a mailer ad for thongs this morning (8/30) celebrating the male body as sexual object, close up, fore and aft:
From the New Yorker issue of July 6 & 3, 2026, under the heading “A critic at large” (on-line, 6/29/26, “What happened to your face: How the human countenance become something to study, edit, optimize, and scan”; in print, 7/6/26, “Regression to the mien: How mirrors, selfies, and surveillance have changed what we make of our faces”) by Cal Revely-Calder (with some subheads added by me):
🐇🐇🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August, with a leporine shout-out to remember 1291, the traditional date of the formation of the Swiss federation: Hail, Helvetia!
Now to dive into today’s topic in medias res, with this 7/30 Facebook greeting from Pietro Giovanni to Aaron Broadwell on the occasion of AB’s 64th birthday, somewhere around that time:
Many returns of the day to my favorite linguist
AB is George Aaron Broadwell (known as Aaron Broadwell), Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at the Univ. of Florida (Gainesville). PG is AB’s husband Peter Marino under the pseudonym Pietro Giovanni. For further complexity, since there are a regrettably large number of men named Peter Marino, some of them famous in their fields, Peter Marino uses the nickname Piet as his professional name; Piet Marino is the author of young adult novels (Dough Boy and Magic and Misery):
(#1) The Piet Marino logo
(time for some bad-taste Headline News for Penises, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
It starts with the at least superficially modest advertising slogan (underlined below), in a Facebook pitch for Creed Fragrance that came by me on 7/12:
Aventus by Creed. Bright fruits and smoky woods, crafted into an unmistakable signature.
My dinner for June 27 was delivered by a courier bubbling over in delight about the coming Fourth of July, which he identified as my national day (adding that he was Peruvian and his national days came at the end of July — surprising details below). I suppressed my complex reservations about American Independence Day (some of which I will unload later) and chose not to add that we were at the eve of one of my people’s celebratory days — Stonewall Day, June 28 (the tank top I was wearing had a rainbow flag on it) — though I did point to my gym shorts, whose white cross on red is in fact the Swiss flag, adding that Swiss national day was coming in August (August 1, to be precise). I didn’t develop the theme of my absurd pride in the remnants of Swissness that cling to me, most especially the egalitarian, aristocrat-free ideals the federation has espoused since the original alliance was formed in 1291, over 7 centuries ago; there is nothing like it in all of Europe.
After he left, I checked out the Fiestas Patrias peruanas, or Peruvian National Holidays, which officially are celebrations of Peru’s independence from the Spanish Empire (Wikipedia entry here), but in fact have become an entire holiday season, in character very much like the secular Christmas season (at, however, the end of July). It sounds delightful.
(Significant amounts of sexual crudity, so not for the eyes and ears of kids or the sexually modest)
Niall Maher’s New Yorker daily cartoon for 6/15/26:
(#1) To make any sense of this wonderful cartoon, you need to have detailed knowledge of two different events: from 5/19/1962 (I was just a month away from graduating from Princeton); and from 6/14/2026 (essentially, now), with a glance forward to 7/4 — events celebrating the birthdays of two different US Presidents (John F. Kennedy then, our overlord Grabpussy now), through two different renditions of the song “Happy Birthday”: in 1962, in a potent haze of female sexual desire and sexual desirability (by Marilyn Monroe, in as close to naked as she should get while being in principle fully and elaborately clothed), but in this week’s cartoon, by a muscular machine of male aggression (who doesn’t look at all ready to deliver an adoring serenade to this particular President)
And now: backstory, tons of backstory.
The 6/1 Zippy strip celebrates a vibrant life on the side of the road, in drive-in joints offering comfort food and in flashy highway motels, in the lost days of mid-20th-century America (think HoJo’s clam strips):
(#1) Stunned by signage: an octogenarian’s bulletin from the golden days; the cartoonist Bill Griffith was born in 1944, I was born in 1940, so this was the time of our youth
Remembrance of lost time: L-Ken’s Drive-In Restaurant in Colonie NY (a northern suburb of Albany, the state capital) was demolished on 4/20/17; the Tucson Inn, in Arizona’s second city, was demolished in April 2025. Both were famed for their neon signs (cartooned above).
