A little while ago, Terry Tenette asked me about the character The Great Gazoo (voiced by the comic actor Harvey Korman) in the animated tv series The Flintstones — because the character’s voice suggested gay to him. I’d stopped watching the tv series by the time this character appeared (in 1965), but I then watched a clip with Terry and heard what he was picking up on, which was not the famous gay voice, but something I’ll call the prissy voice. We were then both struck by the similarity of the Great Gazoo’s voice to that of the character Dr. Zachary Smith (played by Jonathan Harris) in the tv series Lost in Space (which, probably not coincidentally, premiered in 1965). And I was reminded of the famous film sissies (film sissies — the name conveying effeminacy, weakness, or cowardice — has become a widely used term in film history and criticism) and their deployment of the prissy voice.
The prissy voice
February 3, 2016Notes on male ballet dancers
February 2, 2016Two recent items passed on to me by Mike McKinley: one a photograph of young male dancers at the barre, the other a video compilation of dancer Joseph Gatti in an assortment of his roles. The photograph, found on a Facebook page (where it wasn’t identified in any way: where? when? who are they? who was the photographer?):
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The Gatti compilation can be viewed here; it has some remarkable stuff.
A visit with Colby Keller
February 2, 2016(Though there’s a substantial amount in this posting on art, books, and fashion, there’s also quite a lot about men’s bodies and man-man sex, in very plain language, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Posted on AZBlogX on the 31st, “X-rated Colby Keller”, with five shots of artist and gay pornstar Colby Keller (who appeared on this blog in a 5/7/13 posting “The protean Colby Keller”, about “mail art”, gay porn, and playfulness): three from Mike McKinley, which can be arranged in a sequence, though they were taken at different times: CK unzipping in preparation for sex, CK exhibiting his body, and especially his substantial hard cock; and CK with gay pornstar Duncan Black, immediately post-fuck. Then two from Chris Ambidge: one showing CK doing a stool-lift, exhibiting his very considerable strength and balance; and one with CK displaying a favorite art book (more on the book soon), which had to go on AZBlogX because that substantial hard cock of his is standing up right in front of the book.
Before I get into the art and the steamy sex, here’s a pleasant, somewhat eccentric shot of CK amidst a field of flowers in Maine in 2014:
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Be like Schwa
February 1, 2016From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, who got it from the All Things Linguistic site (maintained by Gretchen McCulloch, who’s appeared several times on ths blog), this punning instance of the new Be Like Bill meme:
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Only YOU
February 1, 2016Passed around on Facebook, this entertaining combination of image and text:
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Non-Americans might not get the joke here, since the figure of Smokey might not be familiar to them: he’s very much an American thing. Even if you don’t recognize Smokey the Bear (and his signature quotation, “Only YOU can prevent forest fires”), you might recognize the central figure in the composition as a monk, or a (religious) brother, that is, a friar (NOAD2: ‘a member of any of certain religious orders of men, especially the four mendicant orders (Augustinians, Carmelites, Dominicans, and Franciscans)’), and you might notice the vase of flowers (such as you would get from a florist shop) and suspect that they weren’t in the original painting of the friar, so that you could appreciate the composition (with its “florist friars”) as playful nonsense. But the monitory Smokey is crucial for real understanding.
Cruise Jogger
January 31, 2016… the item of PUMP! underwear featured in this sale ad from Daily Jocks yesterday. With my caption:
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Cruising in his Jogger, Joe
Enjoyed feeling himself up in those
Hot pockets, which
Drove the boys wildHe got one for
His guy Kev, so they could
Cruise as a couple. They loved
Three-ways, and the
Boys all wanted it
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mariscada
January 31, 2016The lunch special at Reposado (elegant Mexican in Palo Alto) on the 28th was billed as the seafood dish mariscada: some white rice in the middle of a plate, heaped with bits of seafood of many kinds (shrimp, mussels, lobster, and more) with some wonderful broth to keep it all from being too dry, enough to bring it close to being classifiable as a seafood stew, which is the label given to mariscada in many sources. Just fabulous. Here’s a version that’s clearly in stew territory:
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Toys for Twisted Boys
January 31, 2016(On sex toys for gay men, with illustrations of the devices, but not on or in actual bodies, so the visuals are strictly speaking not X-rated. Also about the names for these devices, so there’s some language stuff here. But there’s discussion of the way these devices are used in very plain language, so this posting is certainly not for kids or the sexually modest.)
A sale ad yesterday from C1R (mostly a company that makes and sells gay porn flicks, but they hawk other items for gay men as well), with the headers: “OxBalls Toy Sale! Get Dirty & Play Hard! Toys for Twisted Boys”:
Queen for a King
January 30, 2016Benita Bendon Campbell writes:
The dominant grocery chain in Denver – a subset of Kroger Foods – is called King Soopers. Their very popular market branch in the gayest neighborhood of our town is known (affectionately) as Queen Soopers. As you could have guessed.
Lovely. A few notes on Queen Soopers, then a re-play of some notes on queen as used by gay men.
Raiding the thesaurus
January 30, 2016Today’s Zippy explores several domains of English vocabulary:
rankled, perturbed, exasperated, plunged into despair
confused, confounded, disconcerted, baffled, placed in a quandary
From NOAD2‘s thesaurus:
upset, distressed, troubled, perturbed, dismayed, disturbed, unsettled, disconcerted, worried, bothered, anxious, agitated, flustered, ruffled, unnerved, shaken, unstrung, hurt, saddened, grieved
confused, bewildered, bemused, puzzled, perplexed, baffled, mystified, nonplussed, muddled, dumbfounded, at sea, at a loss, taken aback, disoriented, disconcerted, flummoxed, clueless, fazed, discombobulated