Archive for the ‘Social interactions’ Category

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The gay handshake

May 11, 2024

(It’s about men going down on men, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

A subtopic extracted from a posting (in preparation) on Stanley Stellar’s career in male photography (previous posting on this blog: on 5/8 in “Stanley Stellar’s couch”), during which he has amassed a trove of tens of thousands of photos, almost all set in NYC (and is still at it). One part of his work is devoted to depicting the beauty of the male body; for this he solicits men to pose for him (that’s why his e-mail address is on his website). These men are of various sexualities.

The remainder of his work he thinks of photographing the gay community:

— chronicling Pride parades (in all their complexity)

— showing street life in gay neighborhoods and at locations of gay sociability — both places populated by an assortment of lgbt+ people, plus some others

— and recording the places of cruising and tricking for men who have sex with men: what I’ve called the subterranean world of sex between men in public

This subterranean world: cruising spots in public parks, the famous trucks in NYC’s West Village back in the day, gay baths and sex clubs, t-rooms (mensrooms repurposed for sex between men), and so on — including Stellar’s special province, the West Side piers in NYC. All places where sex between men (especially cocksucking, which is quick and easy, and requires no special preparation or clean-up, so can be smoothly managed pretty much anywhere) is available in spaces that are in some sense public and are open to other like-minded men but are carefully concealed from outsiders (hence, subterranean).

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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and society, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Photography, Social interactions | Leave a Comment »

Dinos in bed

January 16, 2024

Now that I have the three Dinos books (Dinosaur Therapy, Dinosaur Philosophy, Dinosaur Friendship), I’ve found further poignant Dino strips about what I called deep friendship in my 1/8 posting “The best bits of me”. Deep friendship is also known as a kind of love: philia, the love that friends have for one another (as distinguished from eros, romantic or sexual love). That has brought me to strips in which two of the Dino characters are attached erotically as well as philically — notably, this delightful “big bed” strip from 2022, involving the two characters the creators refer to as red and blue (called Brn and Blu in my earlier posting):


(#1) Bed space is nice, but the embrace of your lover is even nicer

The creators of the comic have gone to some trouble not to gender the two characters; they differ in color, but otherwise they’re identical in appearance. This means that #1 can be — though it doesn’t have to be — understood as showing same-sex eros. With this remarkable result, as reported by the creators on Twitter (now called X) on 6/16/22:

this comic was too much for Instagram and they deleted it

Consequently, the strip didn’t come up in my earlier net searches, which turned out to depend on Instagram; I didn’t discover it until I got my copy of Dinosaur Friendship. I am offended.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Social interactions | Leave a Comment »

Slutty T-Rex

November 30, 2023

🐅 🐅 tiger tiger for ultimate November, also St. Andrew’s Day (Scotland’s national day); meanwhile, I bring you two dinosaurs trading ideas about popularity and sluttiness

A pair of Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics strips, coming in succession on 11/10 and 11/13, in which T-Rex rambles on to his buddy Utahraptor about a fairly well-known paradoxical-sounding phenomenon in social networks, the friendship paradox. Actually, it applies more generally, and I’ll talk you through the (apparent) paradox in the general case. Yes, I’ll get to the comics, and to the way T-Rex uses the adjective slutty, but first let’s talk about your lunch partners.

The symmetric-relation paradox. Brace yourself for some mathematician-talk, but don’t despair: I’ll work up a concrete example (about you and your lunch partners) along the way.

Consider a a set N (for example, the set of people in a social network) and a symmetric relation R between members of N; R might be being friends with, say, or having gone to grade school with or — my concrete example — having had lunch with. Then for any member m of N (like you, for definiteness), define m’s R:N-cohort to be the set of members of N that m bears R to (like, the set of all your lunch partners), and m’s R:N-index to be the size of m’s R:N-cohort (like, how many lunch partners you’d had). Then it can be shown that, on average, the R:N-indices of members of m’s R:N-cohort are greater than m’s R:N-index — like, on average, the number of lunch partners your lunch partners have had is greater than the number of lunch partners you have had. Yes, it sounds paradoxical. But it’s provably so.

Now, listen up: what the symmetric-relation paradox does not say is that (all) your lunch partners have more lunch partners than you do. That would be genuinely paradoxical. All it says is that the (arithmetic) mean of their lunch-partner figures is higher than yours, which is a great deal less thrilling (though it still has a whiff of the perverse about it). So let’s look at the special case, the friendship paradox, where N is a social network and R is the being friends with relation (which is where T-Rex starts in his Dinosaur Comics ramble, before he goes on to the having had sex with relation (parallel to the having had lunch with relation) and to sluttiness, having had many sexual (rather than lunch) partners.

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Posted in Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Mathematics, Metaphor, Slang, Social interactions, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs, Usage, Variation | 2 Comments »

Annals of home upkeep: again, the plumber

July 20, 2023

Two chapters in this story. One from 7/13, the other from yesterday, 7/19.

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Posted in My life, Social class, Social interactions | Leave a Comment »

A Levinstein street hustler

July 17, 2023

(Focused on stud hustlers, with one really racy but not X-rated photo, and text that manages to talk about the male genitals and man-on-man sex entirely in decorous language. But still, it’s about stud hustlers, so not to everyone’s taste.)

Encountered through a Pinterest posting, this photo of a young street hustler from a 2010 exhibition of Leon Levinstein’s urban photography:


(#1) Street Scene: Young Man Leaning against Shopfront Window, from 1972

Now, about the exhibition, and then about this hustler and his presentation of himself.

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Photography, Social interactions | 3 Comments »

The grocery order

August 17, 2021

A report from my grandchild Opal a few weeks ago, about one of their adventures as a customer service employee at a Redwood City Safeway supermarket / grocery store. In this event, they observed as another employee coped with a male customer who had come with a small but somewhat eccentric shopping list from his wife (who he had on the phone) and needed help in finding the items. (I’m telling the story from memory and no doubt have gotten some of the details wrong, and have embroidered on some of the others; an experienced story-teller always reserves the right to improve on their tales.)

First, some soap. Bar soap. Lavender bar soap. Possibly it had to be some specific brand. I’ve picked a very earnest lavender bar soap to fill this slot.

Then, Vaseline. The original petroleum jelly — once from Chesebrough, now from Unilever, still available.

Then a third item I’ll put off. It’s the clincher.

As it turned out, the store had no lavender bar soap, though stores very close to it carried some. And then, somewhat surprisingly to me, they had no Vaseline either, though neighboring drugstores did. Well, for a Safeway it’s not very big, and it’s in a shopping center with lots of well-stocked specialty shops, so it’s inclined to focus on, you know, groceries. Anyway, she wanted all three together: the order was coherent, serving a single purpose, not a random assortment of household items the woman needed (cat fd, loaf pumpernickel, tampons, grn chartreuse — that sort of thing).

Stop for a moment to reflect: what might unite the lavender bar soap and the Vaseline? (My friend and helper Kim got it right off, called it out, even before I got to item #3.)

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Posted in Language and the body, Social interactions, Stories | 6 Comments »

The rose parade

February 9, 2020

… with figurative roses. Recent gifts to me of many kinds: symbolic roses for me, in accord with a 1/29/20 posting of mine on a line from the Sacred Harp: “Give me the roses while I live” (SH340 Odem (Second)). I’m an old man, currently writing things under the Python Queen of Scots cry “Not Dead Yet”. Meanwhile, I have been given some excellent roses.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Argument structure, Books, Linguists, My life, Semantics, Social interactions, Syntax | 3 Comments »

Today’s art quiz: Skylunch III

June 28, 2019

Identify that Artwork, 6/28/19: a piece of conceptual art (what I’ll call Skylunch III) taking off on a sculpture (Skylunch II) reproducing a photograph (Skylunch I) showing construction workers eating lunch on a girder high in the sky. Skylunch II and III are mounted on trucks so that they can easily move from place to place.

Bob Eckstein caught sight of Skylunch III in NYC’s Columbus Circle this morning, on top of a pickup truck:

(#1)

Presumably just part of the composition (Skylunch I and II have 11 men, we see 8 here), and the photo is none too clear. I wondered who created it, when, with what materials, for what purpose, and why the men are — or appear to be — all clones of a single model.

Informed answers to any of these questions would be appreciated; comment on this posting, or send me e-mail. (Google Images is useless; it thinks #1 is a photo of a musical group.)

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Posted in Art, Music, Social class, Social interactions | 1 Comment »

You shouldn’t have done that

June 22, 2019

Today’s Zippy, with Mr. Toad’s chide … deride … upbraid — a one-line poem and an exercise in lexical semantics:


(#1) Mr. Toad condescends to the counterman at the Nameless Diner

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Posted in Argument structure, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Poetic form, Semantics, Social interactions | Leave a Comment »

The trail mixer

April 6, 2019

Maggie Larson cartoon in the New Yorker‘s 4/8/19 issue:


(#1) (Dried) fruits and nuts meeting and greeting, under the disco ball

A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau): trail mixer = trail mix + mixer. Combining two elements very much grounded in particular sociocultural worlds (plus that disco ball glittering overhead).

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the sexes, Linguistics in the comics, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Social interactions, Sociocultural conventions | Leave a Comment »

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