A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “Certified queer”, a riff on a t-shirt that I posted about in 2022; the message on it is the playful 100% Certified Queer, and it has the the label QUEER in it.
Today’s posting focuses on four tees recently acquired or on their way to me soon: three with labels on them — GAY, PANSY, FAIRY — and one with gorgeous pansy flowers, the label being merely implicit. The gang of four.
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).
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.
(Raunchy content, which some will prefer to avoid)
From WIRED on-line, “The Gooner Music Video Boom Is Here”, by Jason Parham on 6/26/26, in summary:
Porn music videos have circulated on the fringes of the internet for years. Featuring everything from narrative-driven stories to hypnosis, they are proliferating across X as “bate fuel” for gooners.
(warning: raunchy vocabulary, but surmounting the raunch is the point; still, over the line for kids and the sexually modest)
Well, a two-word phrase. Which I very carefully framed — in yesterday’s posting “Getting picked” — in this passage:
I’m a whoring faggot in deep disguise — also a lot of other, socially more decorous, things, but I’m that too
Now, that’s two incendiary words, both generally lobbed as insults, condemnations, or accusations: whoring ‘sexually promiscuous, esp. for payment’ and faggot. I want them back, and I’ll ding at them until they lose their power for other people as well as me. I’ve been working on faggot for decades and will continue to plug away at it. I have the Fuck Me Like the Whore I Am t-shirt — but have never worn it because that would be false advertising: whore, yes, with a rich history of many sexual partners, a lot of them classifiable as tricks of one sort or another (this is a rich and complex world); enthusiast for getting fucked, jesus yes; available to any random dick off the street, absolutely not.
So part of the program is normalization of various kinds of everyday and widespread sexual practices. But my goal is deeper than that.
The terminology of insult, condemnation, and accusation conveys two things: some root attribution of sexual desire, practice, or identity (for which there is less incendiary vocabulary) — PLUS some content that is genuinely reprehensible, worthy of censure: some bad stuff. And I say: show me the bad stuff. As a riddle: How is a faggot not like a gay man?
And people will tell you that faggots are the bad gays, the nasty gays, the obvious ones, the effeminate ones, with lisps, the ones that are too gay, flaunt their gayness, talk about sex too much, go on marches for butt-fucking, stick to their own kind, and so on.
In this world, then, what is a non-faggot gay? Be specific, give examples, you say, and what you get is men — or ideas of men — whose gayness is in fact completely invisible. Whose sexual desires, practices, and identities aren’t out in the world in any way. No-gay gays. This is social death, and no one should be subjected to it.
There are unpleasant, even wicked, people everywhere, including the gigantic world of male-male sexuality. But mostly there ‘s an extraordinary variety of ways of composing gay-sexual lives and integrating them with all the rest of our lives. Claim: faggots are in fact just gay men. Period. The word faggot does have more punch to it, thanks to the echoes of its nasty history, so I treasure it.
And I say, tongue in cheek, of being a faggot: not that there’s anything wrong with that!
From Wikipedia:
“The Outing” is the 57th episode of the sitcom Seinfeld. First aired on February 11, 1993 on NBC, it is the 17th episode of the fourth season. In this episode, a journalism student reports on Jerry and George’s close companionship, which becomes understood as the two of them coming out. The line “… not that there’s anything wrong with that” — as a reference to homosexuality — has become a popular catchphrase among fans.
Then, as with faggot, I’d say good things about whore and whoring. But not today; it’s been a long day. A really good day, but it’s over now.
One inspired by Aaron Broadwell, one by Steven Levine; I get a little help from my friends.
(talk on bodily functions and the vocabulary for them, sometimes in street language, so not to everyone’s taste; also more than you might want to hear about Arnold’s Wonderful Whizz World)
About my current medical regimen, which involves significantly large doses of the steroid prednisone, intended to treat serious kidney problems (resulting in fluid accumulations in several parts of my body, quite visibly in my feet and legs) while staying under the dosage that, historically, makes me (to put this in the plainest terms) crazy. It’s a balancing act.
Yesterday, when I was overloaded with household revisions (including a new computer and printer) and had little time to sip my green tea pleasantly, the tide turned: I began, as we say, pissing like a racehorse, really quite remarkable amounts (also, I have to say, enormously pleasurable). For years now, I’ve lived with urinals scattered everywhere, so I can take quick whizzes without disrupting whatever I’m working on (if I’m laser-focused on what I’m doing, I can go for an hour without a whizz, but that’s pretty much my limit).
(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.
(fellatial fun — and disrespectful of religion as well — so not for kids or the sexually modest)
Yesterday on the Facebook group soc-motss (for same-sex-inclined folk and their friends), Ellen Evans forwarded a 6/24 FB posting from Derekh Baruch Von Geiger on Facebook:
The ultimate source for this image is not identified; it could just be an invention, but it looks like a Christian church service borrowing from Jewish practices, in particular what’s customarily translated into English as the blowing of the shofar
