… of very different body types. Things saved up for some time, now to put them out.

Sage Brocklebank (Psych); Jordan Gavaris and Dylan Bruce (Orphan Black); John Wesley Shipp and Grant Gustin (The Flash).

Brocklebank. If his stage name is Sage Brocklebank, you can pretty much bet that’s his real name (cf. Meryl Streep). From Wikipedia:

Sage Brocklebank (born January 14, 1978) is a Canadian actor best known for his role as Buzz McNab, a long-standing role on the comedy-drama Psych. He also produces movies and writes for theater and film.

He’s a tall man (6´5˝) with broad shoulders, clearly a hunk:

(#1)

He seems not to appear shirtless, but I can live with that.

On his Psych character:

Officer (Junior Detective (season 8) [his promotion is a very big thing]) Buzz McNab (Sage Brocklebank) is a member of the SBPD [Santa Barbara Police Department], who occasionally works with Detectives Lassiter [Carlton Lassiter, played by Timothy Osmundson] and O’Hara [Juliet “Jules” O’Hara, played by Maggie Lawson], as well as Shawn and Gus [the centra characters, Shawn Spencer (played by James Roday) and Burton “Gus” Guster (played by Dulé Hill)]. McNab is a naive, lovable cop who is always eager to please Lassiter, even though Lassiter doesn’t always treat him well.

The character just radiates sweetness. All the other characters are interestingly neurotic, but McNab is even-tempered, well-intentioned, and empathetic, though sometimes bumbling. Here’s Brocklebank in character:

(#2)

and in a scene with Harris Trout (played by Anthony Michael Hall):

(#3)

Harris Trout is a consultant hired by the mayor to whip the SBPD back into shape in “No Trout About It”. He was made the interim police chief at the end of the episode. He is fired as interim police chief at the end of “Someone’s Got a Woody”, due to his dangerous handling of a hostage situation.

In #3 it has come out that McNab has been moonlighting as a male stripper. The dialogue:

Trout: How about you, Magic Mike? [allusion to the male-stripper movie of that name]

Buzz: I actually dance by the name “Morning Wood”.

It’s good-paying, enjoyable work, and McNab has no problem with it. Note that he’s smiling in all three of these shots.

Earlier postings about the show: on 4/4/15, in a posting about Cybill Shepherd, this Wikipedia material:

Psych is an American detective comedy-drama television series created by Steve Franks and broadcast on USA Network with syndication reruns on ION Television… The series stars James Roday as Shawn Spencer, a young crime consultant for the Santa Barbara Police Department whose “heightened observational skills” and impressive detective instincts allow him to convince people that he solves cases with psychic abilities. The program also stars Dulé Hill as Shawn’s best friend and reluctant partner Burton “Gus” Guster [who is black], as well as Corbin Bernsen as Shawn’s father, Henry, a former officer of the Santa Barbara Police Department.

… Madeleine Spencer (Cybill Shepherd) is a police psychologist who is Shawn’s mother and Henry’s ex-wife.

And on 6/23/16, a posting on a moment in S1 E11 when Shawn advises “Lassie” (Lassiter), on attracting women by displaying sternum bush ‘chest hair’.

Orphan Black: Gavaris. Now for something completely different. The premise of the show, from Wikipedia:

Orphan Black is a Canadian science fiction thriller television series created by screenwriter Graeme Manson and director John Fawcett, starring Tatiana Maslany as several identical people who are clones. The series focuses on Sarah Manning, a woman who assumes the identity of one of her fellow clones, Elizabeth Childs, after witnessing Childs’ suicide. The series raises issues about the moral and ethical implications of human cloning, and its effect on issues of personal identity.

Tatiana Maslany [plays] Sarah Manning, and a number of clones …, all born in 1984 to various women by in vitro fertilization.

It’s Maslany’s show, a real tour de force. But there are several central male characters, one played by:

Jordan Gavaris as Felix (“Fe”) Dawkins, Sarah’s foster brother and confidant. He identifies as a modern artist and moonlights as a prostitute. He is the first person Sarah confides in about the existence of clones.

Canadian actor Gavaris (born September 25, 1989) is a hoot in his role as the flamboyantly gay Felix, also with an eerily convincing British accent of his own creation. (Gavaris has snapped back at critics who complain that his faggy character shows gays in a bad light, saying that it’s insulting to insist that queers must be presented only as “straight-acting”.) In one scene he’s tasked with baby-sitting his niece and nephew, and introduces them to the pleasures of cross-dressing.

Felix is a slim leather twink:

(#4)

And he loves to show off his body as much as he can. Here he is painting bare-assed (and a very cute ass it is):

(#5)

Orphan Black: Bruce. Then there’s

Dylan Bruce as Paul Dierden, an ex-military mercenary, who is Beth’s monitor and boyfriend.

Bruce is an athletic muscle-hunk (yet a third body type in this survey):

(#6)

His Wikipedia page tells us that he’s a Canadian actor born April 21, 1980, also known for his role as Chris Hughes on the CBS daytime soap opera As the World Turns.

The Flash. Now to the complexity of the DC Comics world. On the character, from Wikipedia:

The Flash is the name of several fictional characters appearing in comic books published by DC Comics. Created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Harry Lampert, the original Flash first appeared in Flash Comics #1 (January 1940). Nicknamed the “Scarlet Speedster”, all incarnations of the Flash possess “super speed”, which includes the ability to run and move extremely fast, use superhuman reflexes, and seemingly violate certain laws of physics.

Thus far, four different characters – each of whom somehow gained the power of “super-speed” – have assumed the mantle of the Flash in DC’s history: college athlete Jay Garrick (1940–1951, 1961-present), forensic scientist Barry Allen (1956–1985, 2008–present), Barry’s nephew Wally West (1986–2011, 2016–present), and Barry’s grandson Bart Allen (2006–2007). Each incarnation of the Flash has been a key member of at least one of DC’s premier teams: the Justice Society of America, the Justice League, and the Teen Titans.

Specifically on Barry Allen, from Wikipedia:

The Flash (Barry Allen) is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. Barry Allen is the second character to be known as the Flash. The character first appeared in Showcase #4 (October 1956), created by writer Robert Kanigher and penciler Carmine Infantino. His name combines talk show hosts Barry Gray and Steve Allen. Barry Allen is a reinvention of a previous character called The Flash that had appeared in 1940s comic books as the character Jay Garrick.

The Flash’s power consists mainly of superhuman speed. His abilities allow him to move at the speed of light, and in some stories, even beyond that real-world limit. Various other effects such as intangibility are also attributed to his ability to control the speed of molecular vibrations. The Flash wears a distinct red and gold costume treated to resist friction and wind resistance, traditionally storing the costume compressed inside a ring.

Barry’s classic stories introduced the concept of the Multiverse to DC Comics, and this concept played a large part in DC’s various continuity reboots over the years.

An early comic book version of the character:

(#7)

Out of all this, I’m posting here about two tv incarnations of the Barry Allen character. First, in the 1990 tv series:

(#8)

The Flash is a 1990 American television series developed by the writing team of Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo that aired on CBS. It is based on the DC Comics character Barry Allen / Flash, a costumed superhero crime-fighter with the power to move at superhuman speeds. The Flash starred John Wesley Shipp as Allen, along with Amanda Pays, Alex Désert, and Paula Marshall. (Wikipedia link)

And then in the 2014 tv series:

(#9)

The Flash is an American television series developed by Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg and Geoff Johns, airing on The CW. It is based on the DC Comics character Barry Allen / Flash, a costumed superhero crime-fighter with the power to move at superhuman speeds. It is a spin-off from Arrow, existing in the same fictional universe. The series follows Allen, portrayed by Grant Gustin, a crime scene investigator who gains super-human speed, which he uses to fight criminals, including others who have also gained superhuman abilities. (Wikipedia link)

Shipp and Pays appear in both series. My interest here is especially in contrasting two different ideals of masculinity as embodied in Shipp (Priapus, powerful maturity) and Gustin (Apollo, youthful beauty), and especially in exploring the Barry Allen character as developed for Gustin.

Shipp. The man, shirtless and intense, on Dawson’s Creek:

(#10)

John Wesley Shipp (born January 22, 1955) is an American actor known for his various television roles. He played the lead Barry Allen on CBS’s superhero series The Flash from 1990 to 1991, and Mitch Leery, the title character’s father, on the drama series Dawson’s Creek from 1998 to 2001. Shipp has also played several roles in daytime soap operas including Kelly Nelson on Guiding Light from 1980 to 1984, and Douglas Cummings on As the World Turns from 1985 to 1986 (which earned him his first Daytime Emmy Award). He portrays both Barry Allen’s father, Henry, and Jay Garrick on the current The Flash series on The CW network. (Wikipedia link)

Shipp is a square-jawed major muscle-hunk, and his version of the Barry Allen character is a hard-working superhero (with not a lot of emotional complexity).

Gustin. Gustin as a thin-faced agreeable Barry Allen — indisputably masculine, but in a different way than Shipp:

(#11)

And shirtless, lean, and playful:

(#12)

And a more direct counterpart to Shipp as the Flash in #8:

(#13)

(Note: all superheroes, whatever their body type, exhibit aggressive genital masculinity; they live in the land of jockstraps, dance belts, and codpieces. It’s in their contracts. More seriously, they embody fantasies of power and strength, of secret identities, and of transcending limitations.)

Thomas Grant Gustin (born January 14, 1990) is an American actor and singer. He is known for his roles as Barry Allen / Flash on the CW series The Flash and as Sebastian Smythe on the Fox series Glee.

… On November 8, 2011, he debuted on the television series Glee as Sebastian Smythe, an openly gay member of the Dalton Academy Warblers. Gustin won the recurring role of Sebastian, a promiscuous and scheming character. (Wikipedia link)

Gustin’s Barry Allen is sweet, earnest, and principled, but also an adult and a true hero (when a hero is called for). He reflects often about how to live as a good and decent man. His best friends are a black woman and a Hispanic man, and he helps his gay friends (definitely a modern young man). So he’s an admirable character, someone you’d like to get to know — and then there’s that really cool superspeed thing, and the messing with time and alternative universes. The series has all the DC gee-whiz stuff, but it’s also amiable and funny.

In the NYT Book Review on 3/5/1 7, under the heading “Walk on By” — subtitle (in print) “A tribute to the pleasures of aimless urban exploration, female style”, (on-line) “A Celebration of Women’s Pleasure in Wandering a City” — a review by Diane Johnson of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016).

(#1)

The cover art captures well Elkin’s reconfiguring the identity of the flâneur, for nearly 200 years the exclusive property of men, as a female identity, the flâneuse. Still urban and modern and primarily European in outlook, but now available to women (of independent spirit).

The male archetype that is re-dressed in #1, Paul Gavarni’s Le Flâneur (1842):

(#2)

On the older type, from Wikipedia:

Flâneur … means “stroller”, “lounger”, “saunterer”, or “loafer”. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym is boulevardier.

The flâneur was, first of all, a literary type from 18th century France, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. The word carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street. It was Walter Benjamin, drawing on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, who made this figure the object of scholarly interest in the 20th century, as an emblematic archetype of urban, modern experience. Following Benjamin, the flâneur has become an important symbol for scholars, artists and writers.

And then fron Johnson’s review:

As a student in Paris, Lauren Elkin loved to wander aimlessly in the streets, but she needed to adapt the existing word for a person doing that, flâneur — an idle stroller, killing time — to fit her own case: feminine. But the feminine form, flâneuse, implied sitting decorously on benches rather than anything more vigorous. One point Elkin makes in her absorbing new book is that although men had always enjoyed the practice of loafing through city streets with no particular object, just enjoying the scene [and, most important, assessing it and commenting on it], women had long been prevented, culturally and practically, from going out alone. Respectable women couldn’t make their way along the streets without being harassed, perhaps even assaulted or arrested. Young American travelers with Eurail passes will have discovered that this is still true in too many places. Try parts of Italy or Istanbul.

“The great writers of the city,” Elkin observes, “the great psychogeographers, the ones you read about in The Observer on weekends: They are all men, and at any given moment you’ll find them writing about each other’s work . . . . As if a penis were a requisite walking appendage, like a cane.” It was in the great cities — Paris, London, New York, Tokyo and Venice are her models — that women gradually asserted the privilege of walking around and, helped by the advent of department stores and tearooms, could begin to enjoy the pleasures of being flâneuses. Middle-class women, that is. Washerwomen and vegetable sellers had always had the freedom to go out to market their wares, and the same held true for prostitutes. They had a kind of invisibility, as if they were honorary men.

Nonetheless, once Elkin began to look for a sorority of flâneuses, she found them, among contemporaries and in history. She talks in detail about some distinguished sisters: Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, the formidable George Sand. And because this is a memoir as well as a history, we follow Elkin herself as she explores several cities, beginning with New York, then moving on to Paris, London, Venice and Tokyo, a restless spirit in love with flânerie [some writers opt for flâneuserie], finally coming to light in the city that gave her pastime its name.

Johnson concludes:

To be as good a flâneuse as Elkin also requires strong legs, sturdy feet, erudition and, above all, imagination, a way of being in touch with the ghosts who linger in recently visited spots. It will be up to booksellers to figure out how to categorize her pastiche of travel writing, memoir, history and literary nonfiction. A reader, flaneusing along the bookshelves, will find in it some of the pleasures of each.

(Until my joints turned against me, I loved to walk, anywhere, everywhere, even in places that weren’t particularly congenial to the enterprise (Los Angeles immediately comes to mind), but I especially enjoyed my aimless hours of thoughtful strolling in New York, San Francisco, Edinburgh, London, Brighton, and Vienna. And in many smaller places. Occasionally I’d encounter other solitary walkers in the city like me — but always, I think men. Couples, on the other hand, both mixed-sex and same-sex, were not uncommon; Jacques and I liked to walk together this way.)

An Avi Steinberg cartoon in the March 20th New Yorker, combining cavemen, clothing, and nipples:

(#1)

Cavemen: a cartoon meme. Clothing: one-shoulder garments for men. And of course men’s nipples. And then there’s Avi Steinberg, who’s a cartoonist+.

On the beach nipple patrol. My 2/25/17 posting “Displaying your nipples” — which treats men covering vs. revealing their nipples, nipple erections, nipple enlargement, and nipple worship –has one image (#2) of men baring one nipple in one-shoulder one-piece bathing suits.

One-piece bathing suits for men almost always have two shoulder straps and almost always cover the nipples. But some designers — mostly those inclined to the homoerotic — push the envelope. Here’s a Lake Style suit scooped so low that the nipples are exposed (though this image has been altered to downplay that):

(#2)

Basic black, but seriously sexy.

This Armani leather-look one=piece is specifically designed to accentuate the nipples:

(#3)

And this colorful one-piece nipple show is one-shouldered as well:

(#4)

It’s not just beachwear. Here’s a one-shoulder steampunk men’s brocade vest:

(#5)

— shown here over a shirt, but it could be worn alone as a decidedly sexy informal top, as this Rufskin Samurai top is here:

(#6)

Rufskin’s clothes (“crafted in California”) are unabashedly queer, dwelling lovingly on muscles, crotches, asses — and nips.

Still another genre of nipple-focused homowear is the wrestling singlet, scooped very low in the front to emphasize nips and crotches equally; discussion (and illustrations) in a 12/3/15 posting on this blog.

Cavewear. Cartoon cavemen wear one-piece garments of animal skins. Quite often these cover the nipples:

(#7)

(All the cartoon cavemen in this section are stock images.)

But someimes they’re topless, in which case they can be depicted with nipples, like real men:

(#8)

or without them, like cartoon animals:

(#9)

Or they can be shown in one-shouldered skins (like the guys in #1), again either with a nipple:

(#10)

or without:

(#11)

Avi Steinberg. He’s been drawing cartoons for the New Yorker for a while, but hasn’t previously appeared on this blog. Many of his cartoons have a language-related hook. Here are three, from 2014 (10/13), 2015 (4/27), and 2016 (8/8):

(#12)

(#13)

(#14)

But cartoons aren’t all there is to Steinberg. He’s also a writer, with two remarkable books published so far:

From “Books behind Bars: Avi Steinberg’s memoir of life as a prison librarian”, a review by Nell Porter Brown in Harvard Magazine, Jan.-Feb. 2011 (Steinberg is a Harvard alumnus):

An “earnest Yeshiva boy,” Avi Steinberg ’02 never thought he’d spend his days in prison. But in 2005, when offered the post of librarian at the Suffolk County House of Correction in Boston, he took it, glad to trade writing obituaries for the Boston Globe as a freelancer for a more secure job with dental insurance and a surplus of live, albeit caged, bodies. He was eagerly unaware of what was in store. “I knew this would be a stretch, and I went there searching for something,” he adds. “But I didn’t know what that was.”

For nearly two years he promoted books and creative writing to a range of students: pimps, prostitutes, junkies, thugs, robbers, con men, and even killers. His recently published memoir, Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (Random House), is a rich meditation on this wild experience and the related nuanced questions about morality and humanity that he confronted armed with little more than his own sensitivities and book learning.

From “Jewish writer travels across the world for ‘The Lost Book of Mormon’” a review by Ellen Fagg Weist in The Salt Lake City Tribune, 11/15/14:

In “The Lost Book of Mormon [subtitle: A Quest for the Book That Just Might Be the Great American Novel],” Steinberg recounts his 18-month literary quest to consider The Book of Mormon by traveling to places where its characters or its translator lived. He begins with this walks through Lehi and Nephi’s neighborhoods in Jerusalem, then takes off on a Land of Zarahemla tour with a Utah company to the Maya cities of southern Mexico and Guatemala. Steinberg later travels to upstate New York to take part in the Hill Cumorah Pageant, and finally to the Illinois jail where Smith was shot.

“The Lost Book” is the story of a winsome, questing narrator’s search for what it means to be a writer. He treats his fellow Mormon travelers with the tenderness of the formerly religious — as Steinberg says, he may not be an observant Jew anymore, instead choosing to observe from afar.

Steinberg is a funny and smart guide for the trip, and for the most part avoids mining the most common Mormon cultural clichés as he investigates the idea of publishing a sequel to the Bible. The Book of Mormon is of greatest interest to him as a book about writing a book. An important American book, that is, which is often dismissed in literary culture. The fact of that dismissal should prompt a re-evaluation, the writer says.

The writer ca. 2014:

(#15)

(Talk of sexual bodyparts and sexual acts, but with symbols rather than pictures of carnal reality.)

From the NYT‘s Fashion & Style section on the 14th, “Gaymoji: A New Language for That Search” by Guy Trebay, with the hot gay news from West Hollywood CA:

You don’t need a degree in semiotics to read meaning into an eggplant balanced on a ruler or peach with an old-fashioned telephone receiver on top. That the former is the universally recognized internet symbol for a large male member and the latter visual shorthand for a booty call is something most any 16-year-old could all too readily explain. [Maybe most any 16-year-old, but not a lot of older people; see below.]

As with most else in our culture, demographics define the future, particularly those describing an age cohort born with a smartphone in hand. That, at least, is the calculation being made by Grindr, the successful gay meeting app with ambitions to overhaul itself as an internet commons for a generation of young lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their pals.

And so, starting this week, Grindr will offer to users a set of trademarked emoji, called Gaymoji — 500 icons that function as visual shorthand for terms and acts and states of being that seem funnier, breezier and less freighted with complication when rendered in cartoon form in place of words.

One of the new emoji,  an image of semen / ejaculăte — jizz, spooge, cum, cream, spunk, etc.:

(#1)

Each emoji is a pictographic symbol, with a conventional name — usually, a description of the thing depicted — and a physical form (with a corresponding Unicode coding). I don’t know the names for Grindr’s gaymoji, but earlier emoji (released over a number of years) have names and forms collected in inventories you can find on-line. The names and forms don’t tell you, however, how the symbols are used to convey meaning. There are widely agreed-on meanings for some, but there are alternative forms for some uses, and alternative uses for some forms, considerable variation in local usage, and often creative deployments of emoji among small groups, and these usages are constantly in flux. You can think of the sets of emoji as like sets of slang vocabulary.

For sexting purposes, various emoji with relatively literal uses have become widespread conventional symbols for bodyparts and acts. For some time, the Eggplant emoji has been the conventional penis symbol, although recently it’s been challenged by two other emoji, Banana and Hot Dog. We’ll see plenty of Eggplants below, but here are the other two:

(#2)

(#3)

Then, there’s the Peach emoji, usually representing a butt or bottom (either buttocks or anus), but also sometimes used as a vaginal symbol, where it’s now in competition with the Taco emoji:

(#4)

Peaches are to come.

Specifically for the anus, there’s the Doughnut (or more outrageously, the Chocolate Doughnut) and the OK Symbol. For the testicles, Grapes. And for the breasts, Cherries. (There are other alternatives.)

The full range of penis emoji covers pretty much everything phallic, in addition to  eggplant/aubergine, banana, and hot dog: corncob, burrito, baby bottle, rocket, lipstick, unicorn, rooster (that is, cock; but the rooster is also used as a wake-up call), electric plug (can also convey ‘hook-up’), snake, mushroom, cactus, lollipop, joystick, elephant (can also convey ‘you’re not saying something that needs to be said’), gun (can also convey ‘insults fired’), soft ice cream, dagger, chili pepper, cricket bat, and field hockey stick. Three of my favorites from this set, Baby Bottle, Electric Plug, and Elephant:

(#5)

(#6)

(#7)

Back to the NYT story:

“Almost 20 percent of all Grindr messages” already use emoji, its creative director, Landis Smithers, said. “There’s this shift going on culturally and we need to follow the users where they’re taking us.”

That is, toward a visual language of rainbow unicorns, bears, otters and handcuffs — to cite some of the images available in the first set of 100 free Gaymoji symbols. An additional 400 are there for the unlocking by those willing to pay $3.99 to own digital icons arranged in categories like Mood, Objects, Body, and Dating and Sex.

The company’s founder, Joel Simkhai, said that in his own communications on Grindr he had often felt the need for emoji that were not previously available.

“Partly, this project started because the current set of emojis set by some international board were limited and not evolving fast enough for us,” said Mr. Simkhai, who in certain ways fits the stereotype of a gay man in West Hollywood: a lithe, gym-fit, hairless nonsmoker who enjoys dancing at gay circuit parties. “If I wanted to say something about going dancing, I would always have to use the red-dress dancing woman. I thought, ‘Why isn’t there a guy dancing?’ It was weird to me that I always had to send that woman in the red dress.”

Among the pitfalls Grindr faces by introducing a set of icons to represent a group no longer easily defined is that by replacing one set of hoary stereotypes, it may be introducing others just as clunky and unfortunate.

“One problem is, you have this common language that’s not being organically created by marginalized people,” as were secret hankie or hatband codes once used to signal identity in the era of the closet, said Doug Meyer, an assistant professor in the department of women, gender and sexuality at the University of Virginia. “The corporate element is a new part of this. Having a common corporate language created to benefit a business ends up excluding a lot of people and creating very particular and normative ways of thinking about sex.”

The point is not altogether lost on Mr. Simkhai, who noted that at a recent birthday celebrated just before he inaugurated the Gaymoji, he was given the bad news by colleagues that, at 40, he might have aged out of his own app.

As if to emphasize that assertion, a reporter combing through the new set of Gaymoji in search of something that would symbolize a person of Mr. Simkhai’s vintage could find only one.

It was an image of a gray-haired daddy holding aloft a credit card.

Ah yes, Grindr’s users tend very strongly to the young and fit, most of whom believe themselves to be butch, so the new gaymoji have little place for older men, bulkier men who don’t identify as bears, or fems. As far as I can tell, the only Grindr gaymoji for the extravagant amongst us is the Kiki character, seen here in a collection of new emoji:

(#8)

Row 1, emoji 3. From Wikipedia:

A “kiki” (alternately kiking or a ki) is a term which grew out of Queer Black /Latino social culture – loosely defined as an expression of laughter or onomatopoeia for laughing, which extended to mean a gathering of friends for the purpose of gossiping and chit-chat, and later made more widely known in the song “Let’s Have a Kiki” by the Scissor Sisters. [2012] [Scissor Sisters videos can be viewed here and here]

The Kiki world is extravagantly gay, also full of drag displays and general genderfuck. But the emoji that you’d expect to be used by guys who want to convey that they are noticeably gay — the Fire emoji, a picture of a flame, used for things that are “hot” in any of a number of senses

(#9)

— has sometimes been pressed into service to convey ‘flamer, flaming faggot, fem’, though (so far as I can tell) only in a negative way, to convey rejection (as in the old sex ad abbreviation NFF ‘no fats or fems’), with a red diagonal or cross over the flame, or in combination with a rejection emoji, Restriction or Cross Mark:

(#10)

(#11)

Row 1, emoji 4 in #8 has the Peach + Telephone combination mentioned in the NYT piece, conveying ‘booty call’. And in row 1, emoji 2, Banana + Hammock, referring to a men’s garment that cradles the man’s junk as in a sling, pushing it forward to show it off — as in a classic Speedo, so is often used to convey “Speedo swimsuit’. And in row 1, emoji 5, (Rainbow) Unicorn Head, which could be treating the unicorn merely as a magical gay creature; or could convey horniness (with the unicorn serving as a phallic symbol); or, remarkably, signify a bisexual woman available for three-way sex with a couple (why a unicorn? you ask — because such women are as rare as unicorns, to the point of non-existence).

The last two emoji in row 2 are clever ways of conveying ‘bottom’ (receptive) vs. ‘top’ (insertive) roles in anal sex, via a guy in the bottom vs.top bunk of a bunk bed.  In older systems of emoji, this “flagging” of bottom vs. top roles (managed in hanky and armband codes by displaying colors on the right vs. left side of the body) was achieved by down vs. up symbols: a down arrow or finger pointing down vs. an up arrow or finger pointing up (unfortunately the arrows can also be used to convey disapproval vs. approval or ‘no’ vs.’yes’).

Another display of Grindr gaymoji:

(#12)

Among other things, lots of eggplants and peaches. Also, in row 1, emoji 3, two guys in a men’s room stall, signifying tearoom / t-room sex. Meanwhile in row 3, Egglant + Ring used to convey ‘cockring’, Eggplant cock with a Prince Albert piercing, and Eggplant + Knife and Fork to convey ‘eat cock’.

Somewhat older intriguing emoji include Wind-Blowing Face:

(#13)

and Cheese Wedge:

(#14)

#13 conveys oral sex. #14 is sometimes described as a picture of a “hunk of cheese”, so that it could in principle convey ‘hunky man’ (the Grindr gaymoji include much more direct representations of such guys), but I don’t know if it’s been used that way.

Two gaps: hardly any semantics, hardly any syntax. The ordinary presentations of emoji for sexting give the visual forms and their names (or a description of the pictographs), but are remarkably coy about assigning meanings to them for use. This is like a slang lexicon without definitions. I’m not on Grindr — I don’t think I could get away with being a participant-observer (as I have been in looking at a number of other sexual practices of gay men), nor do I think it would be ethical for me to pretend to be guy looking for hook-ups on Grindr, in order to collect a corpus of emoji as used in actual interactions — so what I can glean about meaning in use is second-hand and imperfect (and mostly sanitized for presentation in newspapers, magazines, and blogs). It is clear that, as with slang lexical items, there’s a tremendous amount of variation here, and that the ways people use the emoji are enormously context-dependent. But I don’t have a grip on the variables, so I can only make some suggestive observations.

There’s an instructive comparison here to another type of system of visual forms with assigned names (and descriptions of the forms), but with what amounts to a semantics for the individual forms, namely phonetic symbols in various schemes of transcription. Pullum & Ladusaw’s Phonetic Symbol Guide (2nd ed., Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996) is an inventory of visual forms, each given a name and a description of its shape — but along with a description of the range of sounds the symbol refers to. Here’s one entry:

(#15)

It gets a name, we get the picture of its shape (and there’s a Unicode coding for the shape) — but we also get a semantics for the symbol (expressed in the technical vocabulary of articulatory phonetics.

For some sexting emoji, we get all of this. For instance, we get the name Eggplant and a picture of its shape (and there’s a Unicode coding for the shape) — and we also get a (rough and skeletal) semantics for the symbol, in an English gloss: ‘penis’. But the semantics is grossly impoverished: any use of the Eggplant emoji doesn’t just refer to a penis, it performs some speech act in which a penis plays a central role: in particular, the user is saying that he loves penises, or that he loves particular kinds of penises (uncut ones, or big ones, etc.), or that he’s offering his penis for sex, or that he’s looking for a penis to enjoy in sex, or that he wants to be gangbanged, or whatever.  To use the Eggplant successfully, you either need more material in your sext, or you need to believe that the person you’re sexting can supply the content of such material from context.

Somewhere in all of this, you need more than just a big bag of emoji, with their referents, floating in space: you need a pragmatics, and you probably need some syntax to organize the emoji into coherent larger units. There are useful emoji for this — for instance, the rejection emoji above, and emoji like Binoculars, conveying ‘looking for’:

(#16)

With some ingenuity, you can slap emoji together to get your hook-up message across. Your task is much like that of  speakers of mutually unintelligible languages who come into contact in a trading context; they come to share at least minimal lexical resources, and have to slap these words together into longer chunks, which (with the aid of gesture and facial expression) they can then use to get simple messages across. The process involves a lot of variability and indeterminacy, though the system can evolve to greater conventionalization and fixity — can move towards something more like an actual language, rather than an improvisational scheme for achieving simple goals.

Communicating via emoji (in sexting or for any other purpose) is different from communicating in a trade jargon context. Emoji texters share a lot of cultural knowledge; if they need to, they can fall back on regular texting in a language they share, or mix emoji and text (for a lot of texters, emoji serve mostly as a commentary on text or an expressive counterpart to it, much like prosody, gesture, and facial expression in speech); they will tend to treat emoji as an arena for playfulness, expressivity, and creativity; and they will see emoji as a medium for achieving great brevity and immediacy.

(Sex talk, but in mostly academic style. Still, definitely racy; use your judgment.)

This vision of shirtless high-masculinity turned up on Pinterest this morning:

(#1)

There will be another satisfyingly shirtless cowboy (these two images chosen from dozens, maybe hundreds, that are available), but the focus of this posting is on the saying

(1) Save a horse, ride a cowboy.

on its syntax, its semantics, and of course its allusion to positions for sexal intercourse.

(On a persnal note, I admit that I’ve chosen two cowboys whose body type — lean, well-muscled, long-bodied — appeals to me. Hey, it’s my blog.)

#1 appears to be from a site associated with the book “The Teenage Bucket List: 250 Things To Do Before You Turn 18” by Tammy Mitchell, a slim (34-page) 2014 book that seems to be nothing but that list of 250 things to do.

Here’s the second hunk, rather more interestingly dressed:

(#2)

This guy has on blue jeans (with a worn weather belt), with chaps over them. Chaps — see my 12/24/15 posting —  are crotchless, seatless leather pants that originated as workwear for cowboys, to protect their legs, but then came into fashion as fetishwear; the effect of chaps over jeans is to emphasize the cowboy’s basket (also his butt), so the chaps add an additional note of sexiness to an already sex-drenched image.

These cowboy images are, most of the time, designed to present the hunks in them for the delectation of women: women find them desirable, straight men identify with them as sex magnets (as attractive to women), and of course the images rope in gay men along with women. (There are also specfically homoerotic cowboy images, which a great many women find hot even though they’re not the intended audience.)

Ride that cowboy! So much for the sex that’s pretty much out in front in such images. Then there’s the allusion in the ride a cowboy part of the saying. From Wikipedia:

Woman on top, also called the cowgirl or riding position, is a group of sex positions in which the man lies on his back or sits, the woman straddles him facing either forward [cowgirl] or back [reverse cowgirl], and the man inserts his erect penis into the woman’s vagina or anus.

The cowgirl name derives from the image of the receiving partner “riding” the partner as a cowgirl rides a bucking horse. It is one of a number of receptive-partner-superior sexual positions, another being the reverse cowgirl position. It is fairly simple to achieve and maintain and pleasures both partners.

Man on man, this is Cowboy. From my 2/12/16 posting “Sex positions for gay men”:

something that came up while I was assembling a new AZBlogX posting “Liam Riley, power bottom twink”, with two images of Riley as bottom in what I’ve called sit-fucks (the bottom sits on the top’s hard dick): an in-facing (the bottom is facing towards his top) sit-fuck with top Dustin Gold and an out-facing one (the bottom is facing away from his top) with top Dillon Rossi. I then discovered, in comments on these performances that this was a named sex position, with a cute name: Cowboy for the in-facing variety, Reverse Cowboy for the out-facing. As a cowboy rides a bronco (or a bull), so the bottom rides his top’s cock.

On to the saying. The saying is variously punctuated: most commonly with a comma separating its two parts, as in #1; sometimes with a colon or dash as the separator; and, in these punctuation-shy times, with only a line division as separator, as in #2. In any case, it’s an instance of a two-part sentence construction in which each part is a V-headed constituent (a clause or a VP), with the two parts strung together without any sort of connective or subordinator:

[1: VP(BSE)] save a horse  +  [2: VP(BSE)] ride a cowboy

The mode of syntactic combination here is known technically as parataxis, a subtype of co-equal combination (with parts of equal syntactic rank): pure parataxis, in fact, with no overt coordinator. The other type of co-equal combination is (explicit) coordination, with a coordinator like and or or. Standing in contrast to co-equal combination is subordination (or hypotaxis), with an explicit subordinator, as in these alternatives to (1):

(1a) To save a horse, ride a cowboy. [with complementizer to introducing part 1]

(1b) Save a horse by riding a cowboy. [with preposition by introducing part 2]

Now one type of pure parataxis is in fact fairly common: the paratactic conditional, for instance:

(2a) You break it, you bought it. ‘If you break it, you bought it’; 2 is a result or consequence of 1

with its co-equal alternative:

(2b) You break it, and you bought it.

(Brief discussion in a 2/4/10 posting.)

Similarly, with clauses in both parts: He answers the phone, (and) you (will) die. And with BSE-form VPs in both parts (as in (1)): Learn to fish, (and) eat for a lifetime.

The example in (1) is different:

(1) Save a horse, ride a cowboy. ‘In order to 1, 2’: 1 is a reason or purpose for 2 (1 is a result or consequence of 2)

We might call this a paratactic preconditional.

The saying. Mentions of (1) refer to it as a “saying” or a “familiar saying”, but I haven’t been able to track it back very far. In fact, the trail seems to go back only to a 2004 song. From Wikipedia:

“Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)” is a song written and recorded by American country music duo Big & Rich. It was released in April 2004 as the second single from their debut album Horse of a Different Color. … The song received wide exposure when ESPN featured the song in commercials for its coverage of the 2004 World Series of Poker. It was also featured in the Boston Legal episode “Death Be Not Proud”.

On February 19, 2016, a parody release by artist Skinny & Broke was released entitled “Save A Wookie Ride A Jedi” by Sony Music Entertainment.

Big & Rich also released a remixed dance version of the song which appeared on their compilation Big & Rich’s Super Galactic Fan Pak. They performed this remixed version at the CMT Video Music Awards in 2005. The song was also featured in a Chevrolet commercial that was aired during Super Bowl XLI and the 49th Annual Grammy Awards.

The song appears on the game Karaoke Revolution Country, as well as in the 2012 film Magic Mike.

The song is a fusion of country rock and country rap. The first two verses detail “Big” Kenny Alphin and John Rich’s arrival into Nashville, going into a bar, “passing out hundred-dollar bills” and, “buying the bar a double round of Crown.” They vow that Nashville is “never gonna be the same.” They ride around Nashville on horses, while everyone else says to “save a horse” and “ride a cowboy.”

(#3)

The song is addressed to women, encouraging them (I think) to ride a cowboy.

You can watch the video here.

An extra. It was bound to happen, I suppose. Frat-boy humor from a meme site:

(#4)

(Sex talk, but mostly academic, analytically inclined. But still, talk about bodyparts and sex acts, so use your judgment.)

First, cowboys and beavers, via the paratactic preconditional

(1) Save a tree, eat a beaver.

(#1)

parallel to

(2) Save a horse, ride a cowboy.

Then some news about castorid, rather than genital, beavers.

Background on the paratactic preconditional in (2), a bit of racy double entendre directed to women: my posting of the 20th, taking it back only so far as a 2004 song; then my posting of yesterday, in which Peter Reitan took it back one year to a completely different song.

Then yesterday on ADS-L, Reitan took it back one more year, and out of the world of popular music:

November 19, 2002 – US Patent and Trademark Office – application for trademark status published.

SAVE A HORSE RIDE A COWBOY – for shirts, pants, hats, socks, underwear.

And Reitan added:

On the same day, they published this mark – for the same applicant:

SAVE A TREE EAT A BEAVER

While (2) is directed at women and alludes to intercourse in the Cowgirl position (metaphorically riding a penis), (1) is directed at men and alludes to cunnilingus, man on woman (metaphorically eating a vagina). (Yes, there are same-sex understandings for both.)

I don’t know what happened to the applications, but tons of merchandise have been marketed using both expressions, and both appear as humorous slogans (on e-cards and the like).

Beaver time. At the outrageous end of the scale, CafePress offers this women’s thong:

(#2)

(Not a great image, but then CafePress images are often not very sharp.)

On CafePress.com:

Save a Tree, Eat a Beaver Classic Thong: Do Mother Nature a favor and eat a Beaver. Ladies Thong Underwear …. 100% Ultra-fine combed ring spun 1×1 baby rib cotton. Size up for a looser fit. Super soft high end woven elastic trim

Yum.

Sometimes the cowboys and beavers are combined:

(#3)

And you can find a paratactic conditional version of (1) too:

(#4)

The lexical territory of beaver. Genital beaver is in a large set of terms for the vagina or vulva, some of them technical (anatomical) terms, many of them slang, some inventive one-offs, some of them taboo, some euphemistic. Along with the nouns go verbs for cunnilingus (primarily eat (out) and go down on, but also more colorful items like muff-dive).

GDoS on the noun beaver in the relevant (metaphorical) sense:

5 (orig. US) the female pubic hair, the vagina, esp. in commercial pornography [first cite 1927-41 G. Legman, Limerick: There was a young lady named Eva / Who went to the ball as Godiva. / But a change in the lights / Showed a tear in her tights / And a low fellow present yelled, Beaver!]

(Apparently the limericist pronounced Godiva with an /i/ — rhyming with Eva and non-rhotic beaver — rather than the now-standard /aj/.)

The noun territory of beaver includes (in rough order of offense to American ears)

box …. snatch … pussy … cunt

(with various differences in collocations: eat pussy, with M(ass) noun pussy, is routine, much more common than eat in combination with any of the others as M).

Plus two other sets of nouns, one taking off from cunt, the other from vagina.

On the first, some examples from GDoS:

cooze (also coose, coosie, cooz, coosee, coozey, coozie, cuze) (var. on cunt … mainly US) 1 the vagina [first cite c.1925; then by metonymy, a woman]

cooch (also cooch, cutchie) (abbr./euph. for cunt) 3 (US) the vagina; thus, by metonymy, a woman [first cite 1966]

On the second, from an 8/9/11 posting of mine:

The medical term vagina went into the general vocabulary some time ago, and then, predictably, many people started treating it as (to some degree) a taboo word, so that alongside older euphemisms (like lady parts, lady areas, and down below from BettyConfidential), vagina-based euphemisms developed: virginia and vajayjay …, vag

More sloganeering. Searching for (1) brought me a number of related slograns:

I Don’t Cook But I Do Eat Out (eat out ‘perform cunnilingus’); Nice Snatch (sexy woman catching a baseball); Real Men Eat Beaver; Real Women Suck Dick, Real Men Eat Pussy

Ah, we veer into the zone of the Real Men snowclone (one that apparently hasn’t been catalogued yet), with protypical examples of what real men don’t eat — Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche — or do eat or what they do or don’t do in general. The last of the examples above takes us to 69 territory, as in this Tumblr image (where I’ve fuzzed out the dick:

(#5)

More snowclonery. So far we’ve got two instances of paratactic preconditionals — both of the form VP(BSE) + VP(BSE), with save as the verb in part 1: save horse, ride cowboy; save tree, eat beaver. Both are sexual. But it turns out that there are non-sexual instances of the form. Two examples:

save dog/shark, eat Chinese: From HuffPo, “Save A Dog, Eat A Chinese’ T-Shirt Is A Disgusting Display Of Racism” (Save a Shark is also attested)

save alligator, eat/shoot preppie: “Save the/an alligator, eat/shoot a preppie”, as on this button:

(#6)

(with reference to the alligator logo on Lacoste polo shirts, shirts so much favored by preppies that is became the emblem of the social type).

save … eat looks like the historical seed for a snowclone, something like

Save X, VP(BSE) ‘to save X, VP(BSE)’ or ‘save X by VP(PRP)’

It might well have extended to verbs other than save in part 1. But in any case there surely are more examples than the ones I’ve found in the last couple of days.

And now for something completely different, but still involving beavers.

The news for castorid beavers. An item I’ve been saving for over a year. From the NYT Science Times on 3/1/16, by Erica Goode, (in print) “Invasive, but Not Always Unwanted”, (on-line) “Invasive Species Aren’t Always Unwanted”:

Invasive species are bad news, or so goes the conventional wisdom, encouraged by persistent warnings from biologists about the dangers of foreign animals and plants moving into new territories.

Conservation organizations bill alien species as the foremost threat to native wildlife. Cities rip out exotic trees and shrubs in favor of indigenous varieties. And governments spend millions on efforts to head off or eradicate biological invaders.

“I think the dominant paradigm in the field is still a ‘when in doubt, kill them’ sort of attitude,” said Dov Sax, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University.

But a growing number of scientists are challenging this view, arguing that not all invasive species are destructive; some, they contend, are even beneficial. The assumption that what hails from elsewhere is inherently bad, these researchers say, rests more on xenophobia than on science.

… The antipathy to foreign plants and wildlife is relatively recent. While the distinction between native and non-native species dates to the 18th century, the term “invasion” was first used in a 1958 book — “The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants,” by Charles Elton — that drew on the militaristic vocabulary of the post-World War II era.

… Beavers were common in Britain until they were hunted to extinction centuries ago. But when a group of the toothy dam builders took up residence along the River Tay in western Scotland several years ago, local farmers and fishermen greeted the animals with hostility, saying they posed a threat to farmland and salmon runs and were potential carriers of disease.

Scottish Land and Estates, an organization representing landowners, insisted that the beavers’ centuries of absence from Britain nullified their resident status, the Independent reported in 2010.

“It’s just silly,” [Ken Thompson, an ecologist and retired senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield in England, who wrote the 2014 book “Where Do Camels Belong: Why Invasive Species Aren’t All Bad.”] said, of the reaction to the Tay beavers. “I don’t think we would have ended up in this ridiculous situation if we hadn’t been so bombarded by propaganda about invasive species.”

Hats off for beavers!

In a photo from the story:

(#7)

In Spain, nonnative crayfish serve as prey for migratory wetland birds

Nightcharm.com is primarily a gay porn bundling site, offering “theaters” mostly from specific porn studios or featuring particular pornstars, but it also offers essays on topics of interest to gay men. And then there are the bonus theaters, of stuff that doesn’t fit into their main categories — so Nightcharm creates ad hoc categories with mostly playful names. A recent offer:

Alliteration in Bang Bang Boys, Tribal Twinks, Ricky Raunch, and Teens & Twinks. Allusions to formulas or titles in Amateurs Do it and Hot Desert Knights. Simple word play in cocksure. Offers of gay male “types”: amateurs, bears, Asians, twinks, straight guys. And fetishes: raunch, bukkake, gang bangs.

Two categories of special interest: Bang Bang Boys, BangBangBoys.com, offering “100% Brazilian beef” (an allusion to gauchos and the pampas) and covering the full range of Brazilian racial types; and Boykakke, which turns out to offer young Asian twinks in bukkake scenes, in which several boys shower another with cum facials. (Astonishing how many such scenes there are.)

On the last, note the very common re-spelling of Japanese bukkake (in the usual transliteration) to make it fit English orthographic conventions. The spelling bukakke is remarkably frequent, but bukkake still wins 22.5-to-1 in raw ghits.

(There will be plain-talking discussion of men’s bodies and sexual practices of several kinds, so this is not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The boulevard in question is Sepulveda Boulevard (my morning name for Friday), part of which is a piece of the Pacific Coast Highway, the locus of William Higgins’s 1981 gay porn flick of that name (PCH), starring Kip Noll. Meanwhile, what we know of Noll’s life involves a substantial career in all kinds of sex work, including a lot of work as a dance hall boy, that is, a male stripper for men, and almost surely work as an escort for men, that is, as a male prostitute or stud hustler — two occupations that fit senses of the label gigolo (originally the masculine version of a French term for ‘dance hall girl’, and then ‘prostitute’). Which brings us to “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, a song that refers to “gigolos and gigolettes” — male and female prostitutes — strolling on a Parisian boulevard. (This is in France, and in a pop culture fantasy, two places where hustlers and hookers are regularly construed as picturesque rather than socially dysfunctional; a similar example, the movie Gigolette, is to come below.)

These investigations wil eventually take us to picturesque locations in Spain (where the Sepulvedas come from) and also to “the dark, underground world of a New York City gigolo”, as presented in Michael Lucas’s penis-heavy gay porn flick Gigolos (2007). A long distance from the sunny surfer beaches of southern California, but Noll eventually danced his dick off (and probably sold it as well) on the mean streets of New York.

An entry point, a publicity shot of Noll from PCH (with his big dick cropped out; X-rated shots of Noll are collected in an AZBlogX posting here):

(#1)

Cheeky sultry sextwink, at the height of his career. I’ll get back to him in a while. But now I’ll ease into things by going on a road trip, through the fabled boulevards of L.A. — Hollywood, Wilshire, Sunset, Santa Monica, Westwood, Pico, Olympic, La Cienega, and, yes, Sepulveda (which is familiar to me through its proximity, at one point, to UCLA, where I frequently visited the linguistics department). A bit of the map, focused on this piece rather than the PCH piece further south:

(#2)

From Wikipedia:

Sepulveda Boulevard is a major street and transportation corridor in the City of Los Angeles and several other cities in western Los Angeles County, California. It is around 42.8 miles in length, making the longest street in the city and county of Los Angeles. Sepulveda Boulevard runs from Long Beach north through the South Bay and Westside regions, and over the Santa Monica Mountains at Sepulveda Pass to northern San Fernando Valley. It passes underneath two of the runways of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Portions of Sepulveda Boulevard are designated as Pacific Coast Highway (SR 1).

… Sepulveda Boulevard is named for the Sepulveda family of San Pedro, California. The termination of Sepulveda is on a part of the Sepulveda family ranch, Rancho Palos Verdes, which consisted of 31,619 acres  of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. In 1784 the Spanish land grant for Rancho San Pedro was issued to Juan Jose Dominguez by King Carlos III… A judicial decree was made by Governor José Figueroa which was intended to settle the land dispute between the Domínguez and Sepúlveda families. The rancho was formally divided in 1846, with Governor Pío Pico granting Rancho de los Palos Verdes to José Loreto and Juan Capistrano Sepulveda.

I’ll come back to the street name in a moment. First, a note on SR 1, from Wikipedia:

State Route 1 (SR 1) is a major north-south state highway that runs along most of the Pacific coastline of the U.S. state of California. At a total of just over 655.8 miles, it is the longest state route in California. Highway 1 has several portions designated as either Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), Cabrillo Highway, Shoreline Highway, or Coast Highway. Its southern terminus is at Interstate 5 (I-5) near Dana Point in Orange County and its northern terminus is at U.S. Highway 101 (US 101) near Leggett in Mendocino County.

(I’ve driven long stretches of the highway, pretty much from L.A. to S.F. Extraordinarily scenic, but a challenge for the driver; it truly hugs the (very irregular) coastline.)

Now: Sepulveda Boulevard is named after the Sepulveda family. Their family name, in turn, came from a Spanish place name, the town of their family’s origin. From Wikipedia:

Sepúlveda is a municipality located in the province of Segovia, Castile and León, Spain [halfrway between Madrid, 145 mi. to the south, and Bilbao, 142 mi. to the north]. The town lies next to the Hoces del Rio Duratón [Ravines of the Duratón River] National Park… A popular town within the province of Segovia to visit for cultural and gastronomic pursuits – a number of traditional restaurants serve roasted cordero [lamb] and cochinillo [suckling pig], with appealing views of the local sierra.

Of course, there is interesting local food!

A view of the town:

(#3)

And a map of Spain, showing the location of the town:

(#4)

So: from the street name to the family name to the place name, and there the trail gets cold: the etymology of the placename Sepúlveda is uncertain, at best speculative.

Back to PCH. From the typically effusive p.r. for the film Pacific Coast Highway (Laguna Pacific / Catalina 1981, directed by William Higgins):

Take a trip down the Pacific Coast Highway with Kip Noll and Jeremy Scott, and along the way join in their outdoor summer sexfest of cock munching and rump busting. When Kip, Jeremy and the guys aren’t at the beach or taking long hikes in the hills, they’re gettin’ naked and gettin’ down to some man-nasty sex action.

The fantasy and promise of the world resides in Southern California, where golden, godlike boys succumb to primal procreative [I think they meant sexual, not procreative; but maybe after the Gs of “golden, godlike”, the copywriters just wanted to score again with Ps] impulses locked in one another’s arms, flesh and mouths… tracing configurations of lust in celluloid. In gleaming succession eleven youths including superstar Kip Noll juxtapose one against the other’s affection, kisses and sweat in an ecstatic series of incensed seminal explosions.

Scenes include Buddy and Dan by a waterfall, Kip and Jeremy in a waterfall as well, Kip, Jeremy and Steve Richards in a jeep, J.W. King and Troy Richards by a stream, Steve Richards, Scott Anderson and Jeff Hunter in an explosive threeway on the beach and Troy Richards and Steve Savage making their own “pup tent” on the beach. This pair puts a new meaning in the term Brotherly Love.

(I have a fair number of Higgins DVDs, and I’ve seen this flick, but, alas, I don’t have a copy of it to re-view for this posting.)

On AZBlogX, #4 has the front cover of the DVD, #5 the back cover, and #6 the full shot of Noll  that’s abbreviated as #1 in this posting.

On Noll. Let’s start with Wikipedia:

Kip Noll, also Kip Knoll, is an American gay pornographic film actor-magazine model in the 1970s and 1980s.

Noll, who is a lean-muscled, shaggy-haired, free-spirited surfer type, achieved iconic status in the newly liberated gay culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. After he was introduced into the gay pornographic film industry, he became closely associated with director William Higgins who first had Kip appearing in a few silent film loops in 1977 [Noll’s first films were in 1975, when he was just 18]. Noll was cast as the supposed younger brother of actor Bob Noll, and rapidly became the popular “Noll”. After his video success, several other unrelated models were presented as his brothers: Scott, Jeff, and Mark Noll. By the early 1980s Kip Noll had become one of the first superstars in the gay porn industry, as well as being a regular performer at [several strip clubs; in these performances, he was famous for having sex with the patrons, out in the audience].

Sparse on details, even with my additions. Some of his films, worth listing just so we can enjoy the titles:

Boys of Venice, Pacific Coast Highway, Brothers Should Do It, Kip Noll & the Westside Boys, Try To Take It, Wild Young Fuckers, Class of ’84, Cuming of Age, Grease Monkeys, Room Mates

Some expansion on the Wikipedia entry, from a World News site on the films of William Higgins, “Kip Noll – The Legend” of 5/9/10:

Born in Greenwich Conn 7 Aug 1957, stripper, go go dancer, young Kip Noll became the first twink gay porn star ever. He was an inspiration for director William Higgins, he made of him a superstar of his time, creating the Noll brothers. He was very popular during the 70’s and mid 80’s

In #1 on AZBlogX you can view the roughly 18-year-old Noll, a skinny, shaggy, big-dicked little guy with a ferocious sex drive. He sucked a lot of cock (#2 on AZBlogX), topped a lot of guys (#3 there), and occasionally bottomed.

In time he became a more muscular cute twink, the guy you see in #1 above.

Further expansion on his history, from a gay porn fan site:

Thomas Earl Hagan b. August 7, 1957 in Greenwich, Connecticut. Kip passed away in 2001 [May 21] of a heart attack at the age of 43. His last days were spent in the Salt Lake City Mission.

The information here is from the IMDb site, and it has been disputed. While he was working in the business, his private life was, as far as I can tell, completely masked, and then he dropped out of sight entirely.

His public work persona, however, was sexy-wild, hungry for adoration. He liked to chat with fans, and also to have flagrant sex with them, in public. In any case, he was certainly a dance hall boy, and it would be a surprise if he didn’t hustle mansex for money (almost everybody did, to survive in the business financially). So he was (in a sense) a gigolo twice over.

On the boulevard. What took me to gigolos? Two things. First, Sepulveda Boulevard, which led to L.A. boulevards in general, especially the two most iconic, both running east-west: Wilshire and Sunset. Second, cruising for gay sex (as Kip Noll’s surfer twink character always is), along the beach or on the streets, the boulevards of sex, tricking just for pleasure or for money (turning tricks). That led me to a series of boulevard sex songs, most notably the 1933 bittersweet “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, with its gigolos and gigolettes.

A note on what makes a boulevard in L.A. A piece in L.A. Magazine tells us there’s a Los Angeles County Street Naming Committee in the Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning, according to which

Perhaps the most-used street designation in Los Angeles, a boulevard, is “a broad formally laid out paved public way, 100 feet or more wide, ornamentally illuminated or decorated.” Once meant to designate its hoity-toity, high-falutin status, “boulevard” now mostly designates its capacity

As for Sepulveda, it’s long, running from the PCH beaches way into the Valley, and that makes it useful, though not especially glamorous. In the (UCLA-focused) map in #2, you can see Sepulveda crossing Wilshire. In this (also UCLA-focused) map, you can see it (the white line next to the 405) crossing Sunset as well as Wilshire:

(#5)

So, first Wilshire, and then Sunset.

From Wikipedia:

Running 15.83 miles from Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles to Ocean Avenue in the City of Santa Monica, Wilshire Boulevard is densely developed throughout most of its span, connecting five of Los Angeles’s major business districts to each other, as well as Beverly Hills.

Wilshire is as close as L.A. gets to having a Main Street. And from its endpoint at Ocean Avenue, you get to, yes, the Pacific Coast Highway. PCH is the road of the day.

On Sunset, from Wikipedia:

Sunset Boulevard is a boulevard in the central and western part of Los Angeles County, California that stretches from Figueroa Street in Downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific Coast Highway at the Pacific Ocean.

Approximately 22 miles in length, the boulevard roughly traces the arc of mountains that form part of the northern boundary of the Los Angeles Basin, following the path of a 1780s cattle trail from the Pueblo de Los Angeles to the ocean.

The map in #5 shows the Westwood section of Sunset. Going west from there, the road takes you to Pacific Palisades and then, yes, the Pacific Coast Highway again (back in the 1960s, there was a fabulous abalone restaurant at the beach). UCLA in the map is just across Sunset from Bel-Air, and then going east from there, you get Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, and Hollywood on your way downtown. West Hollywood is the crucial gay stop; from Wikipedia:

West Hollywood, occasionally referred to locally as WeHo, is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Incorporated in 1984, it is home to the Sunset Strip. As of the 2010 census, its population was 34,399. It is considered one of the most prominent gay villages in the United States.

… According to Walkscore, a website that ranks cities based on walkability, West Hollywood is the most walkable city in California with a Walkscore of 89. Commercial corridors include the nightlife and dining focused on the Sunset Strip [along Sunset Boulevard], along Santa Monica Boulevard, and the Avenues of Art & Design along Robertson, Melrose, and Beverly Boulevard.

So, gay village, plenty of cruising. And it’s easy to walk around. And the Strip is really gaudy.

In any case, Sunset is the boulevard of gays and glamor.

Sex on the beach, sex on the boulevards. And beach music, hundreds and hundreds of songs. And boulevard music, dozens of songs. Three notable examples: from Green Day (with a direct Sunset Boulevard connection); from Alabama (shagging on the beach); and that 1933 song (set on the boulevards of Paris).

An artistic digression. About the artist Gottfried Helnwein; bear with me, this will immediately get relevant. From Wikipedia:

Gottfried Helnwein (born 8 October 1948) is an Austrian-Irish visual artist. He has worked as a painter, draftsman, photographer, muralist, sculptor, installation and performance artist, using a wide variety of techniques and media.

His work is concerned primarily with psychological and sociological anxiety, historical issues and political topics.

… Among his widely published works is a spoof of the famous Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks, entitled Boulevard of Broken Dreams [referring to Sunset Boulevard], depicting Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Humphrey Bogart [all four of them sex symbols, in four different ways]. This painting also inspired the Green Day song of the same name.

The painting (discussed along with other Nighthawks parodies in a 9/9/12 posting):

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Then on Green Day:

Green Day is an American punk rock band formed in 1986 by lead vocalist and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong and bassist Mike Dirnt. … Green Day was originally part of the punk scene at the DIY 924 Gilman Street club in Berkeley, California.

and on the song:

“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is a song by American punk rock band Green Day, recorded for their seventh studio album American Idiot (2004). … The song speaks from the point of view of American Idiot‘s main character, Jesus of Suburbia, and is a moderate midtempo song characterized by somber and bleak lyrics: “I walk this empty street / On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams / Where the city sleeps / And I’m the only one and I walk alone”

You can watch a video of the song here.

In a very different vein, there’s Alabama’s “Dancin’, Shaggin’ on the Boulevard”:

Dancin’ on the Boulevard is the seventeenth studio album by country music band Alabama, released in 1997 by RCA Records. It includes the singles “Dancin’, Shaggin’ on the Boulevard”, “Sad Lookin’ Moon,” “She’s Got That Look in Her Eyes” and “Of Course I’m Alright”. (Wikipeda link)

The shagging here is a style of dancing, and all that dancin’ and shaggin’ is goin’ down at Myrtle Beach SC. You can watch the video here. (The band is no doubt aware that the verb shag is also slang for ‘fuck’. More sex on the beach. More of the saltwater tang and smell of sex that suffuse PCH.)

And then back to 1933. From Wikipedia:

“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is a 1933 hit song by Al Dubin (lyrics) and Harry Warren (music), set in Paris. The narrator says “I walk along the street of sorrow / The Boulevard of Broken Dreams / Where gigolo and gigolette / Can take a kiss without regret / So they forget their broken dreams.”

The song appeared in the 1934 film Moulin Rouge and was sung in the film by Constance Bennett. However, Bennett never made a recording of the song. It was originally recorded by Deane Janis with Hal Kemp’s Orchestra on October 31, 1933, in Chicago before the release of the film

The song has been covered many many times. Probably most famously by Tony Bennett, who made it one of his signature tunes. You can listen to Bennett performing it here.

Now we’re face to face, mano a mano with gigolo.

gigole, gigolo, gigolette. From NOAD2:

noun gigolo chiefly derogatory a young man paid or financially supported by an older woman to be her escort or lover. ORIGIN 1920s (in the sense ‘dancing partner’): from French, formed as the masculine of gigole ‘dance hall woman,’ from colloquial gigue ‘leg.’ [OED2 glosses Fr. gigole ‘tall thin woman, woman of the streets or public dance-halls’]

First, she pays him as a dancing partner, then she pays him as a sexual partner.

In the real world, both women who are paid to dance with men (dance hall girls in one sense) and women who are paid to dance in public, typically for men (chorus girls, pole dancers, strippers — dance hall girls in another sense), sometimes double as paid escorts or outright prostitutes, so a word referring to a dance hall girl in either sense could develop another sense as ‘prostitute (serving men)’. Similarly, a word referring to a dance hall man in either sense could develop another sense as ‘prostitute (serving women)’ — which seems to be what happened with gigolo. With several provisos that are obvious in the Wikipedia entry:

A gigolo is a male escort or social companion who is supported by a woman in a continuing relationship, often living in her residence or having to be present at her beck and call.

The gigolo is expected to provide companionship, to serve as a consistent escort with good manners and social skills, and often to serve as a dancing partner as required by the woman in exchange for the support. Many gifts such as expensive clothing and an automobile to drive may be lavished upon him. The relationship may include sexual services as well, when he also would be referred to as a “kept man”.

The term gigolo usually implies a man who adopts a lifestyle consisting of a number of such relationships serially, rather than having other means of support.

(There seems to be no generally used term for a gigolo’s patronne.)

In any case, a gigolo is not just a guy who turns tricks for women. The relationship is considerably more complex than that, and it includes a substantial class component: both participants are, or present themselves to be, at least upper middle class.

There’s an issue about the etymology of gigolo that now impinges on my discussion. The OED‘s treatment seems to say that French gigole had itself developed a ‘prostitute’ sense but that gigolo was borrowed into English initially only in the ‘dancing partner’ sense and then extended in meaning in English. The Random House Unabridged and Collins dictionaries, however, posit a French gigolette ‘woman of the streets or public dance halls’, from which gigolo was derived in French by back-formation and then borrowed into English. That would be merely a matter of (mostly Fresh) etymology, decidable by examining French materials — except for the fact that gigolette appears in English in the text of the 1933 song and in the title of a 1935 American movie, where it clearly refers to a prostitute (or a certain sort, roughly the woman-serving-man counterpart of the man-serving-woman gigolo):

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Gigolette is a 1935 American romance film directed by Charles Lamont from a screenplay and story by Gordon Kahn. The film stars Adrienne Ames, Ralph Bellamy, Donald Cook, and Robert Armstrong.

Kay Parrish is the daughter of a former millionaire who lost everything in the stock market crash in 1929. She works as a waitress in a small country diner, where she meets Terrence Gallagher and Chuck Ahearn. Gallagher runs a speakeasy in New York City, where Ahearn works as his bouncer. Gallagher gives Kay his card, and tells him to look him up, but she scoffs at the idea. After they leave, Kay is told that her father has committed suicide. Determined to make something of her life, she travels to New York City to “make it big”.

Once in New York, however, she is unable to find a job. Desperate, she looks up Gallagher, who hires her as a “gigolette”, a young prostitute to entertain male clients at his club the “Hee Haw”. Not in love with her work, and having a budding romantic interest between her and Gallagher, she repeatedly attempts to get him to open a “legit” club. He refuses, and during her work, Kay meets the wealthy Gregg Emerson, who she becomes romantically involved with.

And on from there.

The term gigolette doesn’t get a lot of use in English, and it’s not in the OED, so maybe the 1933 song and 1935 movie occurrences are borrowings from French, and not creations in English at all. Still, the term names a recognizable social role, one more specific than simple prostitute.

A role that continues in significance, with a whole new set of terms invented to cover it and related concepts: the sugar X family of compounds, generic sugar baby, gender-specific sugar girl and sugar boy, both naming younger people serving an older sugar daddy or sugar momma. Discussion in a 4/9/13 posting.

Along with the sugar X family of compounds came sexuality-equal treatment: sugar babies can work for same-sex employers; in particular, guys can have sugar daddies (and they do, Blanche, they do).

Finally, back to gigolos: not only can they work for sugar daddies, but they can work as one-trick ponies and for any john who can front the money. In the context of mansex, gigolo can now function merely as a (somewhat euphemistic and high-toned) synonym for stud hustler. We are now in the world of Michael Lucas’s gay porn flick Gigolos. Information from the Lucas Entertainment site:

released 11/9/07; with Anthony Marks, Arpad Miklos, Ben Andrews, Erik Grant, J., Jason Ridge, Jason Sparks, Jimmy Trips, Kurt Wild, Michael Lucas, Ray Star, Scott Tanner, Spencer Quest, Zack Randall: The dark, underground world of a New York City gigolo is as cutthroat as it is kinky. Hustlers hit the streets hunting for their next john. Pimps demand their cuts. Loyalties are lost at the wayside. After the tragic death of his lover, ex-hustler Louis McMann (Michael Lucas) is thrust back into that sordid world in order to survive and gets caught in a web of deceit, lies… and murder. Sometimes life can become unbearable. Will Louis get his ultimate revenge?

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Lucas looking steamy and dominant on the DVD cover

The flick has the usual high production values of Lucas films, and there’s a ton of big dicks, engaged in very hot sex (Jason Ridge puts in especially fine performances), but the movie is in fact dark: there’s a string of violent, sleazy characters; the romance in it is between the protagonist and his recently dead lover, in sad retrospect, and the protagonist is murdered. I’m not giving anything away here: the movie opens with a shot of his dead body being examined by the police and then goes back to trace the path to his wretched end. Yes, it’s an homage to Sunset Boulevard, which opens with the body of Joe Gillis (played by William Holden) floating in the Sunset Boulevard swimming pool of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swansn), and then goes on with Joe relating the events that led to his death.

Yes, we’re back on the boulevards of L.A. If you look carefully, you can spot Kip Noll cruising the sunny Pacific Coast Highway by day and the steamy Sunset Strip by night.

It starts with this image from a “JoBros” Pinterest board (you post about a Jonas Brother, Pinterest knows where you’ve been and wants to take you back there):

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Nick, Kevin, and Joe, but especially Nick

I was going to just post this as a way to start the new week with a modest appreciation of male bodies (I’m unapologetic in these matters), but then I saw two directions for further comment: the Bros in JoBros, and the Jonases’ projections of masculinity (which is what leads to all those Pinterest boards and fan sites celebrating the three men, but especially Nick, who revels in displaying himself). And that will eventually take me to reflections on integrating a masculine identity with a gay one, made poignant by the gaybros movement.

(Note: I have a huge backlog of recent items to post about. My efforts to catch up were seriously impeded by two long and intricate postings I spent several days on: on the 24th, “The invention of the X job”, about the hand job / handjob and more; and yesterday, “On the boulevard of broken dreams with Kip Noll”, about the boulevards of Los Angeles, gay porn, gigolos, prostitution, and more. And now this. There’s plenty of gender and sexuality in here, but, I think, nothing to frighten the horses.)

The Jonas Brothers and their boy band. My posting on 10/4/14, in “Homage to Marky / Mark” looked at the Jonases, but especially Nick in a cheeky display in a magazine spread recalling the Calvin Klein golden days of Marky Mark. A four-panel image of Nick, “crotch-grabbing, abs-displaying, flagrantly challenging, and homoerotic all at once” (the pulled-down jeans were Nick’s own contribution to the scene, not in Marky’s original):

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But back to #1, which presents the three Jonas butts for our viewing pleasure. The first thing to say is that most of the Jonas sites are maintained by women, who admire the Jonas butts (among other things) because they are symbols of attractive masculinity: as I’ve noted before, men’s butts are notably different from women’s, so, like their faces, their torsos, and so on, they serve as powerful secondary signs of masculinity, available for objectification by admiring women (and by gay men, who get a double dose of objectification pleasure: the butt as a symbol of masculinity and also as an object of sexual desire).

The second thing to say is that Nick is a performer, and he welcomes, invites, courts the adoration of his audience. His body displays — which his brothers have been quite critical of — are one of his performances. They’re especially satisfying because he genuinely seems to embrace his audience (both female and gay male), showing no sign of the contempt for audiences that some performers express privately, and sometimes publicly. The larger point is that his body displays are performances of high masculinity (amiable rather than dominating masculinity, but masculinity nonetheless). Even displays like #2, with Nick playing a sexually challenging Marky, are in fact playful send-ups of a macho stereotype. (Marky played the Bad Boy; Nick plays the Boyfriend.)

A digression. The boy band is gone; the boys have grown up. As a boy band, they were enjoyable, but the genre is both narrow and shallow, and I was never a great fan (no squealing and wetting panties for me, but then I was never a teenage girl. )

Band names and the bro thing. There are three American bands of some repute named the X Brothers (not the X Brothers Band, so put the Allman Brothers Band aside here): the Everly Brothers, the Isley Brothers, the Jonas Brothers. All can be referred to for short as the Xs: the Everlys, the Isleys, the Jonases (a fair number of relevant ghits for all of these).

Separate from all this, Brothers in commercial names is conventionally abbreviated as Bros. in print (but not as /broz/ in speech, except as a joke): Smith Bros. cough drops, Hills Bros. coffee (plus my favorite, Firesign Theatre’s Ersatz Bros. coffee), etc.

And independent of that we have the rise of bro as the name of a sociocultural type, in an especially complicated way. From my 4/28/16 posting “Bad bro days”:

The story of the … term bro in relatively recent years begins with its use by black men to black men, roughly (but not exactly) like the widely used American buddy — a term of male affiliation [at first, only as an address term, then for referential use as well, as in my bro Jack, and then in an explosion of bromanteaus, like bromance]. It then spread into the wider culture, serving as a mark of male solidarity. This is what I called in a 4/12/16 posting “good”, positive, bro. But male solidarity tends to come with a dark side: rejection of anything perceived as feminine, played out as sturdy misogyny and homo-hatred in general; and the elevation of boys’ clubs (formed for whatever reasons) to boys-only clubs, aggressively hostile to women and to men perceived as inferior. When these guys use bro to address (or refer to) one another, then we’ve got what I called “bad”, negative, bro.

Regular use of bad bro between men in groups, for instance by fraternity boys and so-called brogrammers, has led to a steady pejoration of the term for people outside those male groups; bro is now a tainted term for many people, calling up unpleasant images of aggressive masculinity.

All these uses share a component of conspicuous masculinity (and a strong suggestion of relative youth), which in combination with the orthographic abbreviation opens up the possibility of abbreviating the X brothers (as the name for the three men or for their band) as the X bros (with “good” bro), at least if the brothers in question are young enough. Of the three bro-bands, only the Jonases are young enough to get this treatment, and this abbreviation is well attested, as here:

The restaurant is named after the Jonas bros’ great-grandmother Nellie, who passed away in 2011. (link)

There’s a further abbreviatory step possible here, creating what Ben Zimmer (in a 12/30/05 Language Log posting) called an acronymic blend (using blend ‘portmanteau), in which parts of a cmplex expression are clipped down to their initial syllables. The process very much favors the orthgraphic vowel O (usually /o/), as in HoJo (Howard Johnson’s), SoHo (South of Houston), froyo (frozen yoghurt). Jonas Brothers or Jonas bros just cries out for this clipping: JoBros. (For a variety of reasons, EvBros and IsBros aren’t nearly as satisfactory.

JoBros then manages to pack together masculinity, youth, familiarity, and informality in two syllables.

An aside. A nice find in my bro-searching. From Wikipedia:

Bros is an English [boy] band, formed in 1986 in Camberley, Surrey. The band consisted of twin brothers Matt and Luke Goss, and Craig Logan who all attended Collingwood School in Camberley. The band was managed by former Pet Shop Boys manager Tom Watkins. The band split up in 1992. It was announced in October 2016 that the band would reform in 2017.

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The Bros in 1988

You can watch the video here of their big 1988 hit “When Will I Be Famous?”.

In a cleft stick: the gaybros. As I said above, uses of bro share a component of conspicuous masculinity (and a strong suggestion of relative youth). What if you’re relatively young, see yourself as thoroughly masculine — but also identify as gay? Well, you have a problem. Here’s an OUT Magazine piece (on-line) from 8/7/13, “Meet the Gaybros: The guys who gab about gear, grub, and guns” by Mike Albo, about young men trying to negotiate this combination of identities:

“I’ll drink a beer before a mixed drink any day,” says Jon Allen, a 23-year-old rugby-playing graduate of Columbia College in Chicago. For people like Allen, there is now a place to talk about that.

“Gear, Grub, Guns, and Guys” is the tagline of Gaybros, a Reddit subgroup that has grown from 200 subscribers at the beginning of 2012 to nearly 28,000 today, with more than 3 million pageviews a month. For Allen, who joined the forum as a moderator just a few months after it was created, the site offers a community he can’t find elsewhere — a place where he and others like him can talk about anything, from sports to microbrewing to the military.

The group’s short statement of purpose: “Gaybros is a network of young men who come together around shared interests. Both online and through meet ups in every major English-speaking city on the globe, Gaybros create their man-cave corners of the world.” More from OUT, with a crucial bit bold-faced

“There isn’t necessarily a safe space for gay people to talk about these subjects, or for me to talk about how I love playing rugby,” says Allen, who grew up in Oak Park, near Chicago, and came out to his parents when he was 15.

… Many posters on the forum are moved to declare their alienation from the “gay scene,” rejecting it as an artifice of tropes and myths. “I had this picture in my mind of the gay scene, where you needed to be model-hot, financially successful, have a perfect body, and a variety of other cultural stereotypes to ever ‘fit in’ the gay community,” writes ArmyofOne86, in a comment that is fairly typical.

The same is true for Alex Deluca, who created the group shortly after graduating from Northeastern University.

Although out at the young age of 12 and, like Allen, the beneficiary of a supportive school and community, Deluca also felt under pressure to play a certain role. “It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I realized my interests and passions weren’t really aligned with the things I was actively taking part in, because I hadn’t met other gay guys who shared those interests,” he says. “That thought process was a spark that eventually resulted in the creation of Gaybros.”

… “There really aren’t that many places/groups that put a focus on the traditional ‘guy stuff,’ from my own personal experience,” writes Marc LaPlante, who lives outside Boston and, at 33 years old, is the oldest moderator of the group. “Gaybros gives an avenue, in my opinion, to talk about things that wouldn’t normally come up in a bar or a Grindr conversation or other, more traditional groups.”

It’s difficult to glean from the gaybros what exactly this “gay culture” is that they feel doesn’t speak to them. Is it Glee? Lady Gaga? Guys dancing shirtless to Rihanna? I wrote to Deluca, asking him if the people who gravitate to the forum feel there’s a stereotype or image promulgated by media (including gay organizations) about what being gay is. “I think that’s a fair analysis,” he replied. “But it’s important to note that there is nothing wrong for people who do identify with that image they see in the media… It’s just sometimes very specific and can be foreign to those who grew up in conservative religious families in Southern U.S. communities, for example. We’re not defining ourselves by saying we’re not that, we’re just coming together around different interests and presenting an additional group for people to identify with. We’re simply trying to broaden the spectrum.”

… As a rule, effeminacy is not part of the gaybro DNA, and that strikes a chord. “THIS IS ME!!” posted a reader in response to a gaybro article on Buzzfeed. “I spend most of my time at straight bars and hang out with my straight friends, who all tell me that I don’t seem gay at all. It is a huge disappointment to me that there are few guys like me who like camping, fishing, hiking, hockey, basketball, videogames, comics… And if I say that a fem guy is not for me, somehow that makes me self-hating. I wish I could find more guys like me.”

“I don’t feel comfortable with effeminate men,” writes another commenter. “I like hangin’ with my buddies… We enjoy our manhood — being masculine — and a man is fun and comfortable. What I don’t get is why out guys are prejudice[d] against us just because we feel comfortable not being obvious.”

Men like these often label themselves as regular guys or normal guys, and they say that they are just like straight guys except for who turns them on. Ok, man, dick makes you hard, and pussy doesn’t, but that doesn’t mean you have to check every single box on the multi-page Masculinity Form (it would be ok for you not to be into tools and building things, or to prefer tennis to rugby, or to prefer role-playing video games to action-adventure ones, or to have no interest in skeet-shooting; look, very few actual straight guys would check every box).

And you are defining yourself by saying what you’re not: you’re not into show tunes, or opera, or men’s fashion, or romantic movies, or cuddling, and dozens of other things that are tainted by being seen as feminine or queer — and you’re very much not into any guy you see as less masculine than you are (which is to say, anyone who you might find some femmy bit in, however small). Apparently, you’re not into such a guy even as a friend, or someone you might hang out with; you’re uncomfortable with such guys, threatened by them.

But ths is an obvious trap. If you find this God of Masculinity, what makes you think he’ll find you acceptable? After all, you could fail to be perfectly masculine in any number of ways, and all it would take is for you to fail on one of those boxes. Anyway, what if your God of Masculinity turns out to insist that you be submissive, let him call the shots in what you do together, bottom for him? (There are lots of guys like this. And they are all over the map on high-masculine vs. high-feminine interests.) Or would that threaten your identitity too much?

The thing is, you’re in a cleft stick here, at least if you continue to insist on Perfect Masculinity. Because masculine ideals (at least in the U.S. for some time now) are directly antithetical to queerness. Your task in negotiating life is to undercut both the stereotypes of masculinity (which you thinkingly accept) and the stereotypes of queerness (which you reject).

Sobering words from Michael Kimmel, from a 4/12/16 posting on this blog:

On to Michael Kimmel’s Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. Understanding the Critical Years Between 16 and 26 (2008), and in particular its chapter 3: ““Bros Before Hos”: The Guy Code”, which notes that the basic rules of masculinity – “the boy code” and “the guy code” – have scarcely changed at all for many decades; the first rule is that “masculinity is the relentless repudiation of the feminine” (p. 45).

And the central precept of the first rule is No Sissy Stuff!: avoid anything that might suggest homosexuality. The most wounding insult to a young man is to call him a fag(got), and “That’s so gay” is a powerful put-down among adolescent boys.

But beyond that: avoid women as friends rather than sexual conquests; avoid “feminine” interests (like the arts), avoid empathetic rather than competitive interactions (men improve one another, make one another into better men, by challenging each other agonistically), etc.

Also avoid “Mama values” (at the risk of becoming a “Mama’s boy”): cleanness, neatness, respectfulness, “proper grammar”, no “dirty talk”, etc. – including these values as policed by female partners (standing in for Mama), who are seen as “ball-busters” or “castrating bitches” when they perform this role: women as emasculating.

These are the demands of stereotypical masculinity, and they are enforced for boys by fathers, older brothers, coaches, and other male authority figures. If you’re queer, embracing them wholesale is a recipe for pain and sorrow and alienation. (If you’re straight, they’re no picnic either.)

Gaybros could in principle help young men out of this impasse (especially since the OUT reporter found the men he met less than 100% high-masculine themselves — not that there’s anything wrong with that), but the group appears to be reinforcing rather than subverting stereotypes of both masculinity and queerness. Well, at least Gaybros on-line seems to have a brisk traffic in hook-ups: regular guy seems same for boxing and a flip-fuck, or something like that.

(Well, it’s about gay porn, so not to everybody’s taste.)

Following my look at Pacific Coast Highway, I’ve been revisiting more William Higgins gay porn — just up, Members Only (1982), in which three L.A. buddies hang out in a hot tub, telling steamy stories about their sexual encounters (with, of course, a finale three-way indoors). The front cover of the DVD, much cropped (because it’s dense in dick):

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Cast (several of them already established pornstars in 1982): Jon King, Derrick Stanton, Greg Hanson, Rick Vega, Giorgio Canali, Bill Curry, Danny Scott, Marc Silver, Rick Peters. One scene has Scott and Silver flip-fucking, quite satisfactorily. Two things: I went to check on which guy was Scott and which Silver and what their careers were like, only to discover that Members Only seems to be the only porn flick that actors with those names ever appeared  in, and there are no images of or information about either of them that I could find. They are apparently porn ghosts.

One of them, playing the owner of a house that the other is doing landscape work on, struck me as immediately, recognizably, gay, even just in repose. And now I’m wondering what I’m picking up on.

Here’s a (very imperfect) screen shot:

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Disregard the pink A-shirt and the knowledge you have that this is a character in a gay porn flick.  Why do I look at this and say, “Whoa! That one’s gay!”? Well, yes, there’s the hair, but if I block that out I still get a big gay vibe.

Then he talks and moves, fully confirming my first impression. Actually, in my judgment he’s a really hot guy, and high-visibility fags are just fine with me. But where did my impression come from?

Two porn ghosts and the Mystery of the Big Gay Vibe.

(Mostly about food, but there’s a mansex interlude, so be warned.)

A couple days ago it was (thanks to Margalit Fox) the hologram-bunny (a hollusion) that comes to life to decorate homes and parties. I’m not quite sure why the idea struck so many people (including Margalit and me) as disturbing, but it was. Now comes an edible counterpart, but this time I think I understand the source of the unease that it arouses.

Reported by Kim Darnell, this is Delighted By (sometimes: delighted by) dessert hummus. On the grocery shelf:

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It comes in four flavors: Brownie Batter, Snickerdoodle, Orange Dreamsickle, Vanilla Bean.

Thing is, hummus is a savory food, and these flavors are all sweet (apparently, achingly so).

A refresher on hummus (treated in a 10/13/13 posting): it’s a savory dipspread consisting of mashed chickpeas blended with tahini [a paste of ground raw sesame seeds], olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and garlic. (Dipspread is my name for the category of foodstuffs used as dips or spreads.)

Fancier images (with hummus in conjunction with other foodstuffs), from the Delighted By website:

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To come: first, a digression about the company’s passionate, save-the-world, mission. Then a further digression on another company with a similar mission, this time involving performing fellatio rather than consuming hummus: eat hummus and save the world, eat dick and save the world (I am not making any of this up). Third, on the opposition of sweet and savory foods. Fourth, on foods that (like dessert hummus) violate this opposition: think clams with maple syrup, or strawberry jam on prime rib.

Dessert hummus will elevate the consciousness of humanity. From the DB company’s website:

DB MISSION: How we came about making dessert hummus isn’t nearly as important as why we do so. When people ask us why we do what we do, we simply respond with ”We’re just spreading our glitter.” Of course we source quality ingredients. Of course we refuse to use animal products, gluten, preservatives or GMOs. But what truly sets Delighted By apart is our mission to expand beyond just the nutritional component of our hummus. With DB’s purpose to elevate the consciousness of humanity, we bring additional focus to the energetic vibration of the food we create. From Day 1, our conscious production practices have set the tone for the impact we can and will have on the world. Our example in how we lead Delighted By is an invitation to others to live in full freedom and delight with us. Our INTENTION is to create such a high-vibrational product and brand that it reminds people of their Truth: Who they are, Where they come from, and the Light they possess within. We are DELIGHTED BY the opportunity to serve at such a high level in this lifetime. When our team, our product and our brand inspires humanity to spread their own glitter, that is when we are in integrity with the true DB Mission.

I’m going to let this statement of purpose just stand there on its own, in its glittery aura.

Another way to spread your glitter: Glitter and Be Gay (song title from the musical Candide). About the video Suck Dick Save The World, from Paul Morris’s Treasure Island Media (“Sucking cock and swallowing loads – it’s the best thing one man can do for the world”), on the company’s website:

(Starring: Jerry Stearns, James Roscoe, Marcus Iron, Sage Daniels, Nick Forte, George Glass. Directed & Produced By: Paul Morris) Some men say cocksucking isn’t really sex. In this Paul Morris Cocksucking Masterpiece it’s more than “just sex.” Cocksucking is a way of life.

“It’s a way of life,” says Paul Morris. “A means of communion and communication. Whether it’s in a room filled with a dozen buddies or in front of a gloryhole, sucking cock is life at its best. Sure, for some it’s a warm-up for fucking. But for many men — myself included — cocksucking is why we were born.

“So when I say, Suck Dick, Save the World, I mean it. And it isn’t just the world you’ll be saving — it’s yourself. Every session from this video is an honest and scorching example of the true art of sucking cock. My goal in making it is to inspire you to go out and suck off a horny man or to open your pants, pull out your cock and give a cocksucker the time of his life.”

On AZBlogX today, a posting (“Paul Morris’s dick frenzy”) with covers from the first SDSTW and from volumes 2, 3, 5, and 6, plus two front covers for Morris’s Drunk on Cum and DOC6. Phallic overload, phenomenal devotion. What could I add?

The opposition of sweet and savory. There’s the famous opposition of the raw and the cooked. Then there’s the sweet (sugary, often fruity, sometimes sour) vs. the savory (meaty, umami, usually salty or spicy),: two taste-based categories of foods that figure in a number of cuisines. (In English, the terms sweet and savory are used as category labels by food writers and the like, but aren’t necessarily understood as (semi-)technical terms by ordinary people.)

There’s a category of foodstuffs that are vehicles for fillings or toppings: soft flatbreads, tortillas, pancakes, waffles, crêpes, Indian dosas, Chinese bing. These are typically neutral as between sweet and savory (though they can incorporate ingredients that make them one or another). There’s no standard label for the category; here’s I’ll call them crepetillas. As neutral vehicles, they’re compatible with either sweet or savory, and discussions of particular crepetillas often distinguish the two uses.

For instance, a crêpes site gives separate lists of sweet and savory fillings for them. Summarizing:

sweet fillings: Nutella, peanut butter (commercial peanut butter is quite sweet with corn syrup), chocolate, fruit preserves or jam, fresh fruit (especially bananas, fresh peaches, raspberries, sliced cherries), sweetened ricotta, dulce de leche, roasted nuts (especially almonds, walnuts, pecans)

savory fillings: sautéed vegetables (mushrooms, caramelized onions, spinach, roasted red peppers), pulled pork or chicken (perhaps with barbecue sauce), eggs  (fried, poached, scrambled), cheese (goat cheese, blue cheese, shredded gouda, cheddar, feta), beans (navy, pinto, garbanzo, or black beans), pickled vegetables, sour cream or unsweetened ricotta

Two or more items from one category can be combined in one crêpe, but an item from one category generally can’t be combined with an item from the other, Nutella and blue cheese? Pulled pork and banana slices?

In a similar vein, ordinary tacos are tortillas filled with a combination of savory ingredients (beef, pork, chicken, seafood, vegetables, or cheese).  But a HuffPo piece lists “17 Tacos That Dare To Be Dessert”, which are filled with things like chocolate, coconut, ice cream, bananas, diced fruit, berries, and Nutella.

And in the waffle section of my 2/1/12 posting “Waffles and gnocchi”, I wrote about topping unsweetened waffles with either sweet stuff (maple syrup, jams, etc.) or savory stuff (dilled shrimp in cream sauce, saumon fromage, bits of chicken, beef, or pork in gravy, cheese sauce, sour cream, etc.).

Violations. If you’re trying to eat kosher, you don’t mix meat and dairy. And whatever your religious inclinations, you generally don’t mix sweet and savory (though there are exceptions, like various meats with sour fruit sauces or glazes — duck à l’orange, red wine cherry sauce for meat, Chinese sweet-and-sour dishes — and meat or poultry dishes with Mexican mole sauce, in which chocolate counteracts the heat of chili peppers).

Dessert hummus violates the principle, as do some of the dreadful combinations I’ve mentioned above in passing. And that brings me to #1 in a 6/15/14 posting featuring a Rhymes With Orange cartoon “Chocolates for Men: The Whitman’s Savory Sampler”, where the Father’s Day chocolate box offers:

General Tso’s Crunch, Shepherd’s Pie Parfait, Beef Tender Caramel, Nacho Cluster, Beer Cordial, Hot Wing Truffle, Pizza Crème, Bar-B-Chew

But then some people seem to think that anything tastes better with chocolate on it, or in it. And if you’re a real guy, beer goes with anything, including baklava, cherry pie, and chocolate cheescake.

Yesterdy, a posting on Michael Ontkean, who I’ve been re-watching in Twin Peaks, but who also played the central role in the 1982 movie Making Love — which led me to an earlier film with a similar plot device (a love triangle with a gay twist), 1971’s Sunday Bloody Sunday, and to reflect on three-person relationships — a subject of great interest to me, since I spent about eight years in a married triple.

The relationship in Making Love is of the sort often referred to as a love triangle, and though three people are involved, they are not connected in pairs: instead of a triangle, the relationship would be diagrammed as an inverted V, a caret, or (as I’ll say here) a tent, with one person at the apex:

(#1)

Zack is romantically (and sexually) involved with both Claire and Bart, but the other two aren’t involved with one another, except as rivals for Zack.

Wikipedia on Sunday Bloody Sunday:

Sunday Bloody Sunday is a 1971 British drama film written by Penelope Gilliatt, directed by John Schlesinger and starring Murray Head, Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch and Peggy Ashcroft. It tells the story of a free-spirited young bisexual artist (played by Head) and his simultaneous relationships with a female recruitment consultant (Jackson) and a male Jewish doctor (Finch).

The film is significant for its time in that Finch’s homosexual character is depicted as successful and relatively well-adjusted, and not particularly upset by his sexuality. In this sense, Sunday Bloody Sunday was a considerable departure from Schlesinger’s previous film Midnight Cowboy, which had portrayed its gay characters as alienated and self-loathing, as well as other gay-themed films of the era, including Boys in the Band, and Some of My Best Friends Are….

The film makes extensive use of source music including a recurring motif of the trio Soave sia il vento from Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte.

(#2)

Finch, Head, Jackson

The tent:

(#3)

SBS is a marvelous movie, also a landmark in film in English because of its famous kiss between Finch and Head, the first romantic kiss between men in a major studio production:

(#4)

You can watch the whole scene here. (Some people in audiences at the time were revolted by the scene: they gagged audibly and stormed out of the theater. The critics mostly liked it at the time, and soon it was being hailed as a masterpiece.)

Digression on SBS, just because I like it so much; there’s so much to talk about, but here are a few notes.  The film dwells a lot on a piece of Bob’s art, a big shimmering construction of transparent tubes, seen here in a still:

(#5)

And then there’s the achingly beautiful Mozart tercetto. You can watch a performance here  by Renée Fleming, Thomas Hampson, and Susan Graham. The words:

(#6)

Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch are very well-known actors, Murray Head not so. From Wikipedia:

Murray Seafield Saint-George Head (born 5 March 1946) is an English actor and singer, most recognised for his international hit songs “Superstar” (from the 1970 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar) and “One Night in Bangkok” (the 1984 single from the musical Chess, which topped the charts in various countries), and for his 1975 album Say It Ain’t So. [His brother Anthony Head played Rupert Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.]

Finally, on a personal note, a posting (lightly edited here) to the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss on 3/1/03, eight years after Ann Daingerfield Zwicky died and a couple of months before Jacques Transue, then barely in the world, was to die (we were an actual romantic and sexual triangle with, I suppose, me at the apex):

So I watched Sunday Bloody Sunday again last night, for the umpteenth time, and once again broke up at the end, when the Peter Finch character speaks into the camera and explains what he was looking for when he fell in love with the Murray Head character.  …

He speaks into the camera and says, “I only wanted someone courageous
and resourceful.”

And I weep. For the Peter Finch character, and for the Glenda Jackson character, both of whom want this, but who instead get the Murray Head character, who’s attractive and talented and congenial, but who is, unlike them, alas, neither courageous nor resourceful.

And I weep for myself, missing my man Jacques, who was both courageous and resourceful, impressively so, and also missing the other men I have loved, who were signally decent.  Yes, each of them was a hot guy (each in his own way), but it would never have worked if they hadn’t been good men, seriously good men.

I miss this desperately. I stare into the camera and say… “I only wanted…”

Love triangles in the straight world. Both in real life and in the worlds of fiction, straight people are massively given to attractions to more than one person at a time. While I’m on film, let’s go on to another classic. From Wikipedia:

Jules and Jim (French: Jules et Jim) is a 1962 French romantic drama film, directed, produced and written by François Truffaut. Set around the time of World War I, it describes a tragic love triangle involving French Bohemian Jim (Henri Serre), his shy Austrian friend Jules (Oskar Werner), and Jules’s girlfriend and later wife Catherine (Jeanne Moreau).

The tent:

(#7)

A poster:

(#8)

One woman, two men (though the men are friends rather than distant rivals). On to one man, two women (again, friends) — still classic, but this time in the comics:

(#9)

Betty, Archie, Veronica

From Wikipedia:

Betty and Veronica (also known as Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica) is an ongoing comic book series published by Archie Comics focusing on “best friends and worst enemies” Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge. Betty first appeared in Pep Comics #22 while Veronica made her debut a few months later, in Pep #26, as an immediate rival to Betty for Archie’s affections. Together the pair form the female part of the classic love triangle which has become a staple of the comic series since 1942.

Straights do it, gays do it too. From the tv series Glee, this tent:

(#10)

and a display of the three:

(#11)

Gustin, Criss, Cofer

On Glee, and on Criss specifically, see this 10/4/16 posting.

Gay threesomes — some tents, some true triangles — are not uncommon in real life.

From threesomes to three-ways. All the threesomes so far are relationships, not merely encounters. But in fact, pick-up sexual encounters — three-ways —  also occur with some frequency, both for swinging straights and for tricking gays, in porn and even in real life. From publicity for gay porn, this brief description of a compilation flick from Lucas Kazan Productions (2001-06) entitled, rather grandly and misleadingly, The Love Triangle: “Three’s not a crowd… it’s a love triangle. Director Lucas Kazan handpicks six unforgettable threesomes featuring fourteen stunning men for you to enjoy.” The DVD cover:

(#11)

Yes, 6 threesomes (actually, three-ways), 14 men, so some of these guys are doing at least double duty on the triple-love patrol. Well, they’re vigorous Eastern European studs.

Now at its height, this excellent cymbidium orchid, in a hard-to-describe shade of light peach or apricot, with yellow highlights and a dark red lip:

A caption with the flower personified:

He was a big man, Cuppy, with
Florid, juicy sexual parts and a
Passion for ripe peaches and
Apricots. His drag name was
Cymbidia.

(cymbidium <modern Latin < Greek kumbē ‘cup’)

On the colors:

Peach is a color that is named for the pale color of the exterior flesh of the peach fruit. Like the color apricot, the color called peach is paler than most actual peach fruits and seems to have been formulated (like the color apricot) primarily to create a pastel palette of colors for interior design. Peach can also be described as a pale, pinkish-yellow. (Wikipedia link) [as a color name, OED3 (Sept. 2005) has peach first in 1583]

Apricot is a light yellowish-orangish color that is similar to the color of apricots. However, it is somewhat paler than actual apricots. (Wikipedia link) [as a color name, OED2 has apricot first in 1562]

Wikipedia also tells us that in the gay bandanna code, peach means that you’re a bear or a cub looking for a bear, and apricot means you’re a chubby chaser. Cuppy take note.

(Lots of mansex talk in plain terms. Not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

You find that you’ve wandered into a gay porn flick and you’re on the road: in fantasy L.A., on Santa Monica Boulevard or on the Pacific Coast Highway along the beach or somewhere similar; or in fantasy Country & Western territory, maybe outside of Nashville or along Route 66 south of Bakersfield or on the West Texas plains or somehere similar. You’re either driving or hitching.

If you’re driving, there will soon be a hitchhiker by the side of the road, and he will your fantasy man, a William Higgins SoCal twink or a Joe Gage blue-collar hunk. When you pick him up, he’ll give you what you need. You do him, he does you, you trade, whatever. You get whatever you need.

If you’re hitching, there will soon be a driver along the road, and he will be your fantasy man, a SoCal twink in a red convertible or a blue-collar hunk in a dusty pickup. When he picks you up, he’ll give you what you need. Same deal: you do him, he does you, you trade, whatever. You get whatever you need.

One manifestation of the fantasy: grease-monkey boy in board shorts and ballcap. Curly hair, SoCal spread-lip smile. Ready to roll.

(#1)

(Most of the images, here and in an accompanying posting on AZBlogX, are from the “hitchhikers” album on the MenSmut site.)

To come: a note on hitchhiking; progressively more outrageous shots of hot guys hitchhiking; on porn director William Higgins; leading to two (of many) Higgins hitchhiking scenes; Joe Gage hitchhiking scenes (blue-collar C&W); C&W hitchhiking in literotica; and a hitchhiking note from John Waters.

Hitchhiking. From Wikipedia:

Hitchhiking (also known as thumbing, hitching, or autostop) is a means of transportation that is gained by asking people, usually strangers, for a ride in their automobile or other vehicle. A ride is usually, but not always, free.

Itinerants have also used hitchhiking as a primary mode of travel for the better part of the last century, and continue to do so today.

The hitchhikers’ methods of signaling to drivers differ around the world. Many hitchhikers use various hand signals…

In North America, United Kingdom and most of Europe, the gesture involves extending the arm toward the road and sticking the thumb of the outstretched hand upward with the hand closed.

… In 2011, Freakonomics Radio reviewed sparse data about hitchhiking and attributed the decline since the 1970s, at least in North America, to a number of factors including lower air travel costs due to deregulation, the presence of more money in the economy to pay for travel, more numerous and more reliable cars, and a lack of trust/fear of strangers. Fear of hitchhiking is thought to have been spurred by movies such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and a few real stories of imperiled passengers, notably the kidnapping of Colleen Stan in California.

Thumbs out. The guy in #1 is reasonably realistic. But once we enter fantasy Gayland, things quickly get out of hand. First, fly open, visible hard-on, in a cock tease:

(#2)

Now stripped down to underwear:

(#3)

A thumb and a tongue.

Then no clothes at all. Hand over the crotch:

(#4)

And in rear view:

(#5)

Then on AZBlogX, three full-frontal hitchhikers (though they all have the sense to wear shoes, unlike the two guys just above): #1 there, not completely naked, but jeans pulled down and dick hangin’ out (plus a ballcap); #2, completely naked (except for a bandanna, which is irrelevant to the crotch), cock only half-hard; #3, thumb out and cock out and hard, plus a ballcap and a really big suitcase.

William Higgins. Two recent postings on this porn director’s classic work (especially showcasing boyish characters in SoCal settings):

on 3/26/17, “On the boulevard of broken dreams with Kip Noll”, on (among other things) Higgins’s Pacific Coast Highway

on 3/27/17, “Members Only: two moments”, on Higgins’s Members Only

plus one on an ad for a C1R flick, offering bareback sex among hunky Eastern European men:

on 3/3/16, “Sex positions in action”, on the recent porn flick Uncut & Raw

From the Wikipedia entry quoted there (which has since been been cut down):

William Higgins (also “Wim Hof”) is a director of gay pornographic films. His first film, “Boys of Venice,” [Venice CA] was produced in 1979. He has since produced over 140 internationally distributed titles…

One of gay porn’s pioneers, William Higgins began making movies with a distinctive ‘”California look” in the 1970s and directed many of Catalina Video’s greatest hits for nearly two decades. With classic films like Pacific Coast Highway, The Young & the Hung, Sailor in the Wild, Class Reunion, Big Guns, These Bases Are Loaded, Brother Load, Beyond Hawaii, and French Lieutenant’s Boys.

Kevin Clark’s 2011 Porn from Andy Warhol to X-Tube: A Photographic Journey has a short interview (pp. 109-10) with Higgins that’s mostly about his Czech work. According to a Higgins site that’s been on-line since 2001, his production company is now based in the Czech Republic (headquartered in Prague), using models from Eastern Europe and Russia and producing lots of bareback videos. The best source of information I’ve found is in Jeffrey Escoffier’s 2009 Bigger than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore (from the evidence there we can estimate that Higgins was born in about 1943). A photographic reproduction of the relevant section (pp. 159-66), with some interpolations:

(159)

(160)

(161)

(162)

(163)

The reference on the page above to West Coast Highway is actually to Pacific Coast Highway — relevant here because of scene 3, in which Jeremy Scott and Jack Burke (acting under the name Jake Anderson) pick Noll up off the side of the road, and notable because the guys end up having sex on the car, rather than, as is usually the case, in it..

(164)

The next page introduces Higgins’s other great twink, Leo Ford (reputed to be Higgins’s favorite). Ford in a p.r. shot, looking pouty, erect, and ridiculous:

(#6)

Ford died, at the age of 34, in a motorcycle accident, on Sunset Boulevard.

(165)

(166)

This section of Escoffier stops before he gets to another Higgins movie with a roadside pick-up in it, The Young and the Hung:

(#7)

(Chris(topher) Lance on the cover.) The p.r. on the HisXpres website, with the crucial bit boldfaced:

Director William Higgins has so many bona fide “classics” to his name that some may be overlooked. “The Young & the Hung” shouldn’t be. This tale of college- age guys and their carefree sexual exploits is a marvel.

The star here is Chris Lance, a fetching sandy-blond with a tight, hairless little body. He seems to be at the age when boners happen almost instantly, and in his motel room one morning strips down, grabs his dick, and jacks off in a lovely opening segment.

On the road driving a truck, Chris picks up hitchhiker Grant Fagan. The sly Chris chitchats with Grant about skinny-dipping, women, and jack-off contests, before he tells Grant he has some porno mags in his glove compartment. Grant grabs them and gets visibly aroused through his jeans. Chris, being the gentleman that he is, offers to pull over and take care of that rise while he jacks off. When Grant doffs trousers, he pulls out a thick piece of meat that Chris almost eats whole on the back of the truck. Moving back into the driver’s seat, Chris has Grant feed him cock through the open window. What drives this pairing is Chris’ sheer lust and Grant’s relaxation under his partner’s wing. Chris finishes blowing Grant and has the hitchhiker sit on his face for a bit, then almost demands that Grant plow him. Grant stands and hoists his sausage into Chris’ smooth cheeks, and Chris doesn’t even whimper. This is obviously a position he has been in before. When Grant has thrust away to climax, he lets Chris be the first to mount his ass. Grant does seem a bit uncomfortable as Chris obliges, but soon warms up and lets Chris sink all the way in, before more cum-shots are blasted.

Chris goes home and showers, and realizes he has the munchies. Not long after he has gone inside the motel’s diner, he notices Brian Estevez playing pool. Chris practically drools as he looks at the cute brunet. He even rubs his crotch to get his attention. Brian is a bit startled, then leaves his game and heads to the john. Inside, he sits on a toilet, unzips and starts jacking an impressive dick. Chris stumbles in and grabs the next stall. They talk a bit and although Chris seems hesitant about playing in a public place, Brian assures him it’s okay. Through a glory hole they both get a taste cock, and the oral interaction is shockingly carnal. When they have sprayed their first loads, they hasten to Chris’ motel room where they go at it more heavily. As Chris rims Brian, Brian sucks his dick, leading to a moment where Brian rears his head, shifts his groin area forward, and has a seat on Chris’ erection. They screw in two positions, Brian bottoming both times in a heated encounter.

A watermelon is put to sound use. Tex Anthony, Ken Kerns and Michael Gere, three strapping lads with sex on their mind, bring said fruit into a barn. In the absence of a woman, they’ve decided to fuck it instead. As they punch holes into the watermelon and determine who gets “pussy rights,” it’s very funny. Ken whips out his hardon, jacks a bit, then grabs the watermelon and skewers it. As he grinds away excitedly, Michael Gere begins to fondle his pert ass. Ken doesn’t bat an eyelash — nor does he jump when Michael actually rams his dick up his chute. Seeing that he has been left out of the equation, Tex moves in, places himself in front of Gere, and takes some of Ken’s behind. This is a great three-way where the guys get more uninhibited as the night wears on. Soon, Tex has yanked down Michael’s skivvies and takes his ass, showing no subtlety to his friend. Ken, meanwhile, has proven to be as good a cocksucker as he is a fruit-fucker, sucking Michael with ease. Finally, they go to the comfy environs of a bed and take care of the last bit of unfinished biz — humping Tex. Tex gets on his back and lets Michael poke his silly, Tex masturbating the entire time.

Michael Gere later runs into college student Troy Ramsey outside, who has been traveling on his bike and misjudged the distance he was going. Seeing that it is nightfall, Michael invites Troy to spend the night in his barn, where he claims to have lived for years. Troy peels down to underwear and crashes. In a top bunk, Michael is unable to sleep because of the sight of those firms melons not far from him. No longer able to control himself, he gets up and moves to those buns. Gingerly pulling up Troy’s undies, he begins to lick the fuzzy bum, then grabs a knife and cuts the fabric so that he can have better access. Troy wakes up, but instead of anger he relishes the hot tongue. Troy takes Michael’s erection in his throat while Troy eats more butt. In a real surprise, it’s Troy who gets shafted, at first from behind then missionary with more aggressive strides. Troy is a very butch bottom who stays hard while penetrated.

Brian Estevez peeks into the bedroom of luscious Frenchman Papillon, a man who wanks thinking he is alone, even going so far as to faux-fuck his pillows before he, and Brian, shoot their loads.

Camping outdoors, J.T. Denver thinks he, too, is alone, and starts to fondle himself. Couple Jim Erickson and Terry Evans see him and giggle. They change into their leather gear and decide to have some fun. Grabbing a chainsaw, they attack J.T.’s tent and jump inside, scaring the guy silly. When J.T. sees who it is, he is calmer. The couple’s plan seems to be humping J.T., who is placed on hands and knees while Jim takes his muscled behind. These three are all gorgeous, especially the hard-driving Jim. What was supposed to be a lesson for J.T. then gets more equal opportunity, as the virile and mustached Terry puts his face near the ground and lets J.T. show his versatility on his cheeks. Terry is so horny he efficiently sucks off Jim as he himself is getting shafted by J.T. Cum-shots are plentiful in this loop, but the money-shot that registers the hardest is Jim’s orgasm right on top of, and into, Terry’s lips and mouth.

“The Young and the Hung” is sensational with the kinds of touches William Higgins has become known for — seduction, versatility, sensational camerawork and energetic models — and it all has been transferred to DVD handsomely.

I left the rest in because I found it enjoyable, especially the watermelon-fucking (the glory hole is good too).

Joe Gage. Higgins is — or, rather, was — boyish SoCal fantasy. Then there’s Joe Gage, the king of blue-collar C&W fantasy. (Plenty of hitchhiking in both.) In this case, I’ve written about Gage on this blog, and Gage has pretty much stayed closed to his blue-collar C&W genre. A recent (2016) flick, Stopover in Bonds Corner:

(#8)

Luke Adams, Dallas Steele

From the QueerMeNow site:

Dallas Steele hitchhikes across the desert after his Jeep breaks down. He gets picked up by Mitch Vaughn, who watches the stud relieve himself before hopping in. The driver makes a pit stop to his shop: “You kind of like showing off your equipment, don’t you?” The two stare at each other as they stroke their big cocks, then swap sucks as Mitch’s extended tongue begs for more. Dallas eats the smooth jock’s hole, then reams his ass (“Oh my God, your cock is so big!”) before offering his own hole. Mitch feeds the bottom his own cum, then bursts all over his face as Dallas begs “Shoot that load in my mouth!

And then from written porn: “The Hitchhiker”, by the bluntly pen-named HankSucksCock, on the Literotica site:

It was an incredibly long drive across Texas, through some of the most desolate country imaginable. My sales job took me all over the southwest. I’d been driving for hours and could count the cars I’d seen on one hand. Of course, this was somewhat by design; I didn’t care for interstate highways. I much preferred the two lane state routes. With so few cars to share the road with, I could get lost in my music or just my thoughts. Besides, all my customers lived off of these kind of roads.
I was on a particularly desolate stretch of road when I saw the hitchhiker up ahead. I remember thinking, “How does he expect to get a ride on a road with no traffic?” I believe you can easily divide people into two groups when it comes to hitchhikers, and I’ve always been in that group that will generally stop to offer someone a ride. It’s the samaritan thing to do, and besides, it’s nice to have a little company. I’d met some nice people that way, and had some very stimulating conversation. I had never once felt threatened, and had only regretted it once or twice (when my passenger had been too many days without a shower.)
As I got closer I could make out his stereotypical cowboy features… He was lean and lanky, with dusty jeans, a denim jacket over a white T-shirt, aviator sunglasses, a red bandana hanging out of one pocket, and a cowboy hat – the kind where the brim is bent at fairly sharp angles. I slowed as I passed him and he flashed a nice smile and a friendly wave. I pulled over and waited as he ambled up. He opened the back car door and tossed a dusty, well-worn, army surplus duffle bag into the rear seat before climbing into the front seat beside me.
“Thanks for stopping. I’m Brett,” he said and offered his hand. I shook it, noting his rough skin and firm grip.
“Hank,” I said. “Where you headed?”
“Houston,” he replied. I checked my mirrors and gunned it.
“I’m headed for Phoenix,” I said. “Happy to drop you off.”

[a while later] “Pull the car over so you can suck my dick.”
I was literally speechless.
“Pull the car over. Do it now!” He said with such authority that I bewilderedly began to brake and pull over.
“Look,” I stammered, “I-I-I wasn’t… I mean I’m n-n-not…”
“Right,” he chuckled. “Save it, Hank. You’ve been staring at my crotch ever since I got in the car. That’s alright. I get that a lot. I know what you want, Hank, and I’m going to give it to you. And maybe some more besides.”

About the site: (like the Nify site — posting here) it provides erotic stories from amateur authors, in a variety of categories. (The name is a portmanteau of literary and erotica; it’s an invention that has been made independently by others.) There are plenty of gay hitchhiker stories on both sites.

John Waters bonus. A little while back John Waters set out on a hitchhiking odyssey around the U.S., a project that resulted in his quirky 2015 book Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America. From p. 6:

(#9)

On to L.A. Tool & Die!

… the male model, in body-display, rather than fashion-display, mode — so only a little about language. On the other hand, this posting is, in word and image, at least technically SFW (though homo-steamy).

It begins with a Facebook comment from Ken Rudolph about image #1 in my “Hitchhiking” posting of yesterday:

(#1)

Ken asked:

Who is #1? And where did that still come from…it looks more like a regular movie than a porn.

Not any kind of movie, but a posed still done by a professional photographer (as are, I think, #2-7 in my hitchhiking posting, and the three photos in the accompanying AZBlogX posting). Meanwhile, a Google Images search led me to Saucier.

(The name Saucier is, no surprise, originally French. It comes, at least in part, to the U.S. from Canada, through Acadians who settled in Saucier, Mississippi, and no doubt other places as well.)

Proviso. There are two Corey Sauciers. Searching on the net leads you mostly to the one above, a Texan white guy still in his 20s, but sometimes to the Californian (went to UCSC, lives in L.A.) black guy, an HIV-positive writer and performance artist who’s now 40 — and also much more massive than the Texan model. His current profile photo:

(#2)

He too is given to shirtless photos, so on that score they could be confused.

The fashion model began appearing in print in 2010, managed by several agencies and modeling for DNA magazine and Calvin Klein, among others. A gay-gushy piece on the homorazzi site (portmanteaus are everywhere: homosexual + paparazzi), “where homos dish everything”: “Model Behavior: Corey Saucier”, by Donovan on 11/18/11:

For this week’s Model Behavior, I really wanted to give you one saucy beyotch [beyotch is a friendly version of bitch]. In this case, it’s pretty literal. Meet Corey Saucier. As his last name suggests, he’s definitely “saucier” than your average male model next door. Perhaps, it’s due to the fact he’s from Houston, Texas. They say everything grows bigger in the Lone Star state and this 6’1″ stud certainly lives up to that motto. I’d gulp down this tall tasty drink of sexy any day of the week. [Have I discussed tall drink of a man? Apparently not.]

The 23-year-old male model was raised in a Houston suburb – Spring to be exact. Growing up, he played numerous sports including football, baseball and basketball. He continued with both football and baseball all the way through til his college years at Texas State University. He majored in business management but dropped out to pursue a career in modeling after being urged by friends to give it a try.

Those friends definitely knew what they were talking about. Upon arriving in New York, Saucier quickly signed with AIG model management. In his relatively short career, Corey has caught the eye of gay the community thanks to his spreads in Out magazine, The Advocate and YVY Mag. With his extremely hot body its hard not to get noticed. He’s also caught the eyes of veteran photographers like Jeremy Kost, Greg Lotus and Eric Schwabel. Check out a few pics from these photogs and others of Saucer below. Be forewarned, you might need a cold shower from all the shirtless pics. Enjoy.

Homorazzi has a substantial photo display, as do a number of other sites from the period; Saucier has a big fan base, among women and gay men. I’ll start with a smiling shirtless pose (with lowered jeans as a bonus) that’s closest to #1 above:

(#3)

(The spread-lip smile is by no means confined to SoCal, though it’s a stereotype of surfer dudes there. Part of the stereotype is that it’s the source of the unrounded variant, [ʉ], of /U/ in good etc., there: those dudes smile, with spread lips, all the time, so they can’t manage to round their lips for /U/. Mysteriously, they round just fine for /u/, as in pool and cute.)

On the homorazzi site, a pubic hair cock tease (also conveying power via his muscular pecs and neck):

(#3)

On the Morphosis (Men’s Fashion and Music) site in 2011, a head and torso shot with hot nips:

(#4)

In a photo by Jeremy Kost for DNA on 12/1/10, we get an armpit display, plus low-riding jeans:

(#5)

Finally, two “Corey Saucier – Male Model Monday” photos on the SocialiteLife site (“Celebrity News, Photos & Gossp”, with a Shirtless album of men as well as a Bikini album of women) on 5/16/10, both decdedly homoerotic (steamy naked pit shot, Calvin Klein crotch grab):

(#6)

(#7)

Then recent news on the Ford Models Facebook page on 4/11/16:

Announcing Corey Saucier as our #MCM [Man Crush Monday]! Corey went to school for business in San Marcos, TX and joined the #FORDmen team soon after!

There’s a brief video interview with Saucier there.

Sexualized images of models are collaborations between photographer and model; #1 and #2-7 above are deliberate achievements, presenting Saucier’s body as sexually desirable, and the homoerotic appeal is deliberate. Meanwhile, Saucer works out regularly to maintain this body, and I’m guessing that he shaves his body as well as his face, to craft the image of one type of masculine beauty, maintaining a youthful smoothness that appeals to many women and gay men. At the same time, he’s got the boyish hair and a stock of varied facial expressions, and he projects a sense of physical power in reserve. Plus the flagrant cock teasing.

Like male models in general, in collaboration with his photographers, he’s using his body to sell himself and the clothes he wears. Of course, none of this says anything about his own sexuality — but he has to appreciate the homoerotic appeal he projects, be comfortable with it, and (to be really successful) welcome it, revel in it. Good job, Sauce Man!

Two items picked up on Facebook today: the Transgender Pride Flag (following on the death of the designer of the Gay Pride Flag, or Rainbow Flag, Gilbert Baker); and a remarkable bathroom sign that appears to be advertising a toilet for men with gigantic penises.

(#1)

(#2)

Transgender Pride. From Wikipedia:

Unlike within the wider LGBT communities worldwide which have adopted the Rainbow flag, the various transgender individuals, organizations and communities around the world have not coalesced around one single flag design.

… The most prominent of [the alternative flag] designs is known as the “Transgender Pride flag” which is a symbol of transgender pride and diversity, and transgender rights.

The Transgender Pride flag was created by American trans woman Monica Helms in 1999, and was first shown at a pride parade in Phoenix, Arizona, United States in 2000.

The flag represents the transgender community and consists of five horizontal stripes: two light blue, two pink, and one white in the center.

Helms describes the meaning of the transgender pride flag as follows:

“The stripes at the top and bottom are light blue, the traditional color for baby boys. The stripes next to them are pink, the traditional color for baby girls. The stripe in the middle is white, for those who are intersex, transitioning or consider themselves having a neutral or undefined gender. The pattern is such that no matter which way you fly it, it is always correct, signifying us finding correctness in our lives.”

Bathroom signs. I’m pretty sure the intention of the creators of the third symbol in #2 was to offer a room for nursing mothers. But in the very stylized image in #2, the baby looks like a roughly yard-long penis, suggesting that the third bathroom available is for men with unmanageably godlike phalluses.

(Not for kids or the sexually modest, unless they/you have a high tolerance for weirdness and obscene allusion. No naughty bits will be on view, no acts of penetration will be detailed in print, it will all be in your mind’s eye. But that might be quite enough.)

Today’s morning name: the verb blat, which led me through a thicket of associations (largely phonological) having to do with beer, bars, baseball bats (real ones, of ash wood, and metaphorical ones, of manmeat), the Platte River in Nebraska, and then (by thematic association) to chiropterans, Die Fledermaus, Bruce Wayne and his boy wonder, vampires, and a lot of mansex — oh, those damn superheroes and bloodsuckers, it comes with the capes, they’re always sliding into Fagotopia, the fuckin’ flits. Along the way there will be two episodes of deranged free verse, none of it in the least bit wholesome, and some disastrous spraying by the Demon Dr. of Whoville.

The two readings for today, from NOAD2:

The Old Testament, on /blit/: verb bleat (of a sheep, goat, or calf) make a characteristic wavering cry: the lamb was bleating weakly | figurative: handing the mike to some woman who starts bleating out rap rhymes | (as noun bleating): the silence was broken by the plaintive bleating of sheep.

The New Testament, on /blæt/: verb blat informal, chiefly N. Amer. make a bleating sound.

The lessons, again two:

The first parable: on the Old Goat, who

Blatted, braying for more from the
Tap at the Ash Bat Bar, another draft of
Blatz, piss-swill Pabst but cheap,
Chatted up the hard drinkers with his
Crap tales of banging his big wood,
Splat, round the bases on on a sweaty field by the
Platte – dirty, flat – sullen, muddy — with a
Satisfying snap.

The second parable: on Fruitbat Man, who

Brandished his
Batgun flamboyantly, angled to
Mount his Fledermäuschen, his
Sweet Vampboy. who just
Batted his dark eyes seductively and
Sucked his master dry.

The scroll from ancient times:

(#1)

Annotations on the scroll.

1.  Quick… the Flit! From Wikipedia:

FLIT [commonly: Flit] is the brand name for an insecticide.

The original product, invented by chemist Dr. Franklin C. Nelson and launched in 1923 and mainly intended for killing flies and mosquitoes, was mineral oil based and manufactured by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey before the company, now part of ExxonMobil, renamed itself first Esso and later Exxon. The Esso formulation contained 5% DDT in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before the negative environmental impact of DDT was widely understood. [See Rachel Carson, Silent Spring.] Later marketed as “FLIT MLO,” it has since been discontinued. A hand-operated device called a Flit gun was commonly used to perform the spraying.

In 1928 Flit, then marketed by a newly formed subsidiary of Jersey Standard, Stanco Incorporated, became the subject of a very successful long running advertising campaign. Theodor Seuss Geisel created the artwork for this campaign, years before he started writing the children’s books that made him famous as Dr. Seuss. [On Dr. Seuss on this blog, see the Page on his work.] The ads typically showed people threatened by whimsical, menacing insect-like creatures that would look familiar to fans of Dr. Seuss’s later work and contained the tagline “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” This advertising campaign continued for 17 years and made “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” a popular catchphrase in the United States.

2. flit ‘faggot’. From GDoS:

noun flit 2 ([< Standard English] flit, a flutter, a light movement; the stereotypical effeminacy of male homosexuals] (US) … a male homosexual. {first cite 1934. 1941 G. Legman The Limerick: There was a young fellow from named Oakum / Whose brags about fucking were hokum. / For he really preferred / To suck cocks and stir turd– / He was Queen of the Flits in Hoboken. 1951 Salinger Catcher in the Rye: … flits and lesbians… etc.]

3. Bruce in the title of this posting. That would be Bruce Wayne, aka Batman.  There’s a Page on this blog on Batman postings. And more on Batman below.

4. Gay Bruce. There’s a 1/27/16 posting on the man’s name Bruce as an Australian signifier. But the posting goes on:

From the United States, the name Bruce gained a different stereotype, being associated with homosexuality. The reasons are unclear, but one of the most popular theories is that it’s connected to the campy Batman television shows of the 1960s, as Batman’s real name is Bruce Wayne

Superhero Batman and faggot Bruce intertwined.

Annotations on the first parable:

1. The Old Goat is the one who blats.

2. The lexical items bat. Summarized from NOAD2:

noun bat 1 an implement with a handle and a solid surface, usually of wood, used for hitting the ball in games such as baseball, cricket, and table tennis.

noun bat 2 a mainly nocturnal mammal capable of sustained flight, with membranous wings that extend between the fingers and connecting the forelimbs to the body and the hindlimbs to the tail. [order Chiroptera]

verb bat flutter one’s eyelashes, typically in a flirtatious manner

All of them figure in the parables, as does the baseball bat as phallic symbol.

3. Bars and bats. blat to tap, as in a bar. blat to bat, in particular ash bat, ash being the preferred material for wooden baseball bats (and ash evoking ass: a meatbat for banging an ass). blat to draft, as in beer on draft. Now we’re into bats and bars.

From my 12/31/12 posting “The Dingburger bar bat, or barbat”:

The cultural associations between bars as drinking places and baseball bats are considerable, thanks to the fact that so many bars are locations of primarily masculine sociability, and even if such a bar doesn’t see itself specifically as a sports bar (note further interesting N-N compound sports bar, referring to a bar that offers multiple tv screens all playing sports events) it may offer some of the trappings of sports fandom as markers of masculinity, and baseball bats are especially potent markers, because of their phallicity

4. blat to Blatz (and Pabst). From Wikipedia:

The Valentin Blatz Brewing Company was an American brewery based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It produced Blatz Beer from 1851 until 1959, when the label was sold to Pabst Brewing Company.

Blatz beer is currently produced by the Miller Brewing Company of Milwaukee, under contract for Pabst Brewing Company.

(#2)

Blatz was famously cheap, and correspondingly insipid, definitely bottom-drawer stuff. Maybe still is.

A remarkable vintage ad:

(#3)

(The alcohol, malt, and hops were all viewed as beneficial to mother or child or both. Those were different days.)

5. blat to chat. Plus hard drinkers, guys who drink hard and drinkers whose dicks get hard.

6. blat to crap. Plus banging with big wood.

7. blat to splat. From NOAD2:

noun splat 1 a piece of thin wood in the center of a chair back. [ORIGIN related to split]

noun splat 2 informal a sound of something soft and wet or heavy striking a surface: the goblin makes a huge splat as he hits the ground. [corresponding adverb and verb] [ORIGIN related to splatter]

A piece of thin wood and the sound of soft, wet (and sweaty) impact.

8. blat to the Platte River of Nebraska. From Wikipedia:

The Platte River /plæt/ is a major river in the state of Nebraska and is about 310 mi long. Measured to its farthest source via its tributary the North Platte River, it flows for over 1,050 miles. The Platte River is a tributary of the Missouri River, which itself is a tributary of the Mississippi River which flows to the Gulf of Mexico. The Platte over most of its length is a muddy, broad, shallow, meandering stream with a swampy bottom and many islands — a braided stream. These characteristics made it too difficult for canoe travel, and it was never used as a major navigation route by European-American trappers or explorers.

The Platte is one of the most significant tributary systems in the watershed of the Missouri, draining a large portion of the central Great Plains in Nebraska and the eastern Rocky Mountains in Colorado and Wyoming. The river valley played an important role in the westward expansion of the United States, providing the route for several major emigrant trails, including the Oregon, California, Mormon and Bozeman trails. The first Europeans to see the Platte were French explorers and fur trappers about 1714; they first called it the Nebraskier (Nebraska), a transliteration of the name given by the Otoe people, meaning “flat water”. This expression is very close to the French words “rivière plate” (“flat river”), the suspected origin of the name Platte River.

(#4)

North Fork of the South Platte

blat and Platte to flat. Also muddy.

9. blat, crap, splat to snap. The snap of bat on ball or body on body.

Annotations on the second parable:

1. fruitbat. Now we’re in chiropteran territory. The fruitbat is a real creature. As is the fruit ‘faggot’.

2. The Batgun. From Wikipedia:

Batman’s utility belt is a feature of Batman’s costume. Similar belts are used by the various Robins, Batgirl, and other members of the Bat-family.

… Batline/Batrope/Batclaw/Batgrapple: A handheld grappling hook that shoots out a claw-shaped projectile on a retractable high-tensile cord, which grabs onto a surface. Then, this cord pulls Batman to his target.

… The grapple gun, which fired the Batline/Bat-rope (it had to be thrown manually prior to that), was first introduced in Tim Burton’s live-action film, Batman.

Notice that Batman brandishes his weapon — I shouldn’t need to reming you that guns are classic phallic symbols — flamboyantly. We are moving fast into gay Batman territory. From Wikipedia:

Homosexual interpretations have been part of the academic study of the Batman franchise at least since psychiatrist Fredric Wertham asserted in his [preposterous — AMZ] 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent that “Batman stories are psychologically homosexual”. Wertham, as well as parodies, fans, and other independent parties, have described Batman and his sidekick Robin (Dick Grayson) [of course, Robin’s real name is Dick] as homosexual, possibly in a relationship with each other. DC Comics has never indicated Batman or any of his male allies to be gay, but several characters in the Modern Age Batman comic books are expressly gay, lesbian or bisexual.

The number of gay takes on Batman and Robin is staggering.

3. mounting his Fledermäuschen. The allusion is the Strauss operetta Die Fledermaus, with Fledermaus ‘bat’ (but more or less literally ‘fluttermouse’), so Robin the Fledermäuschen is the little bat, fluttering and (again) flitting about his big bat Bruce. And being mounted by him (in an image from the comics):

(#5)

4. And getting the Batgun from Batman, in this repurposed image from the comics, rotated and captioned in Spanish:

(#6)

Robin: I hope that what I feel is the Batgun.

Batman: The Batgun, I’m going to give it to you, honey (lit. ‘lamb’).

(batgun is short, direct, tough; batipistola has the bilabials going for it, but it’s longer, sweeter, a whole line of music.)

It’s the joke trope “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me”, now for superheroes, in Spanish. On the trope in English, see my 2/4/13 posting.

5. Vampboy. At this point, the parable veers from one melding of pop culture and bat lore (in Batman) to another (in vampires), and Robin becomes the young vampire companion of the dark master who turned him.

The amount of literature about vampirism and homosexuality (in fiction and on-screen in movies and tv) is, again, staggering. It’s been exploited for laughs and for sexual heat a number of times. For both in the Michael Lucas parody porn flick Barebackula I posted about on 10/7/16. Way over the top:

(#7)

Then, mostly for laughs, in the movie Vampires Suck. From Wikipedia:

Vampires Suck is a 2010 American spoof horror film based on the Twilight film series and directed by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. It stars Jenn Proske, Matt Lanter, Christopher N. Riggi, Ken Jeong, Anneliese van der Pol, and Arielle Kebbel. The film … received negative reviews from most film critics.

(#8)

The plot is far too preposterous to try to summarize here, though the Wikipedia summary is a hoot. (As I sometimes point out, in modern movie and tv presentations of vampires and werewolves, the natural state of young men is shirtlessness — as  for the guy on the right above — and they’re gorgeous, some lean and muscular, some hunky and muscular, but all gorgeous.)

(Racy allusions, but nothing hardcore. Use your judgment.)

Yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad (with a caption of mine):

(#1)

Pink X marks the
Spot of furtive mansex in the
Shadow of the highway, a dirty
Substreet trickland, where
Simon worshipped daily until the

Boys bronzed him,
Wrapped his package in
Lime green and red,
Mounted him on the
Pink X as a symbol of their
Delicious depravity.

Not the first time an underwear model has been bronzed.

on 2/23/17, the posting “The beautiful immortal” (about another DJ ad):

(#2)

They looked upon him, found him
Wonderful, fabulous, a mighty man —
Unanimously accepted him as their
Prince everlasting — and
Had him bronzed.

He was indeed fabulous, a creature from another world, who could move in an instant through time and space:

(#3)

Then there’s the title of this posting, alluding to the St. Petersburg  statue of Peter the Great, the subject of Pushkin’s famous narrative poem The Bronze Horseman (1833) — see the  discussion in comments on my 3/1/17 posting “stans”. But also playing on horseman and whoresman. Simon the bronzed whoresman, so pretty in pink.

(The title tells the story. Racy topic, unquestionably alluding to hard-core mansex, but indirectly and playfully. Use your judgment.)

The Steam Room Stories video that came by me yesterday morning: “Trophy Boys”, in which two good-looking, ripped gay men complain about being treated as pieces of meat, as just their bulging muscles and big dicks. There are several twists in this short scene (which you can watch here), but here I’m going to focus on the title and on one of the men’s complaints about the men who pick him up as their trophy boy:

It’s dinner, drinks, and back to their place to park the beef bus in tuches town.

(referring to insertive anal intercourse). Playful alliteration in beef bus and tuches town, — the characters in SRS are given to fanciful indirect references to all matters sexual — and then there are the specific items beef, tuches, and of course trophy in trophy boy.

(#1)

On the right, two gay trophy boys commiserating; on the left, two straight guys who (eventually) bond over admiration for intellect rather than bodies

Trophy. A trophy is an award in a contest, displayed (for admiration) as a symbol of victory. Specialized in the idiom trophy wife. From NOAD2:

noun trophy wife: informal, derogatory a young, attractive wife regarded as a status symbol for an older man.

And then extended to other compounds of the form trophy X. OED3 (March 2014) on the noun trophy in a class of compounds:

C1b. Designating people or things regarded as a status symbol; esp. in  trophy wife: a wife regarded as a status symbol for a (usu. older) man. [1973 trophy-wives, 1978 trophy-husband, 1989 trophy wife, 1997 ‘trophy’ books, 2008 ‘trophy tourism’ , 2009 trophy dining]

An example of trophy wife in popular culture:

Trophy Wife is an American television sitcom that aired during the 2013–14 television season on ABC. … Trophy Wife premiered on September 24, 2013. On May 8, 2014, ABC canceled Trophy Wife after one season.

The series revolved around Kate (Malin Åkerman), a young, attractive, blonde party girl, who marries a middle aged lawyer named Pete (Bradley Whitford). With the marriage come Pete’s two ex-wives, the stern, perfectionist doctor, Diane (Marcia Gay Harden) and the flaky, flamboyant, new age Jackie (Michaela Watkins), as well as Pete’s three children: overachieving good girl Hillary (Bailee Madison), slacker Warren (Ryan Lee), and adopted Asian-American son Bert (Albert Tsai). The series explores the marriage and generation gap between Kate and Pete, along with the modern family dynamics between them, the ex-wives, and their respective children. (Wikipedia link)

(#2)

Extension of this to trophy husband (OED above) and also to trophy boyfriend; from Urban Dictionary:

Trophy Boyfriend: A boyfriend that a girl is proud of being with. She thinks a lot of him and in some cases can feel he is superior to most. She wants to go everywhere with him so everyone can see them together and she can “show him off”. – by KandysGurl 2/5/10

In these straight-world uses, a trophy husband or boyfriend is displayed primarily for the admiration of other women: the guy is a tool in the competition between women in the romantic and sexual marketplaces.

A parallel gay sense of trophy boyfriend or trophy boy would make sense — there is certainly a competition between men in the romantic and sexual marketplace, competition for desirable young men as partners — and no doubt these expressions have been used that way, but trophy boy seems to have been specialized still further, to focus on the purely physical: the young men’s muscles and penises: their meat, in two senses. And then uberqueer underwear designer Andrew Christian got his hands on the expression, and went for the dick (and, secondarily, the ass):

(#3)

The underwear comes as jock, brief, or boxer, all with generous big pouches. A brief boy:

(#4)

All the Trophy Boy models are deeply expressionless in the ads; they are nothing but prominent cocks and, oh yes, muscles. (They might well have been the inspiration for the SRS episode.) Then there’s the 2013 AC Trophy Boy twerk video, showing two gangs in an intense twerk-off contest, all aggressive butt-shaking and dick-jiggling; you can watch it on the Underwear Expert site here. (Like most AC videos it’s simultaneously a send-up and a sexual provocation, designed to make you chuckle and get a hard-on.)

Beef. The story of sexual slang beef is pretty much the story of sexual slang meat (in the US at least, beef is the central, prototypical item in the MEAT category). In particular, slang beef is prominently used to refer to muscles (hence, beefy as an adjective for a body type and the slang noun beefcake) and to the penis (so that the Wendy’s fast-food slogan “Where’s the beef?” from 1984 worked in part because of the double entendre). A summary of the GDoS entry for beef:

1 the vagina [first cite 1538] 2 (also piece of beef) a sexually appealing man or woman [first cite c1597 Henry IV Part 1] 3 (also beef-steak) the penis [first cite Measure for Measure] 4 human flesh 5 physical strength, power, muscles 7 (US) (also piece of beef) a well-built male; used by both heterosexuals and homosexuals; thus beef on the hoof, a number of such men [first cite 1929]

A sampling of the ‘penis’ cites:

1971 Frank Zappa ‘Latex Solar Beef’: All groupies must bow down / In the sacred presence of the latex solar beef.

1980 Edith Folb runnin’ down some lines: the language and culture of black teenagers: The penis is referred to as a piece of meat: beef, meat, or tube steak.

1987 Ice-T ‘Rhyme Pays’: But whether your names’s Lucy, Terry, Laura or Cindy / Ice got beef and this ain’t Wendy’s.

Searching on prime beef gets lots of cuts of meat, raw and cooked, but also a bunch of gay porn videos, with titles or captions like:

Prime Beef (Young and Old Muscle)
Italian raw prime beef [with raw ‘bareback, condomless’]
prime Chilean beef inspected at urinals
Fabio strokes the full 9.5″ of Prime Beef between his legs

Fabio Stallone in the last (prime beef between his legs not shown):

(#5)

Searching on beef hunk gets an even wider assortment, also including lots of photos of beefy hunks, plus cans of dog and cat food.

So much for the penis, the insertive participant in parking the beef bus in tuches town. On to the receptive participant, the anus, or (metonymically) the buttocks.

Tuches. This is the Yiddish English vulgar slang noun for ‘buttocks’ (also ‘anus’) usually spelled tuches in AmE — with many alternative spellings, though tokhes (with o representing the close, short and lax vowel [O]) or tukhes (with u representing the close, short and lax vowel [U]) are closest to actual Yiddish. In AmE the first vowel is pronounced [ʌ].

The medial consonant in Yiddish is a voiceless velar fricative [x], but in AmE it’s a [k], so that tuches in AmE is pronounced [tʌkIs] or [tʌkǝs], and the tuch part rhymes with fuck, a fact that makes tuches more satisfying in sexual contexts.

In the LGBT precinct of Facebook recently, this Jim Benton cartoon (eventually this posting will be about Benton, but first the folktale scenarios):

(#1)

The basic scenario is Beauty and the Beast: a beautiful maiden (that is, a virgin), often a princess; and a monster, a grotesque creature, either literally an animal (a gigantic ape, a dinosaur, a mutant lizard, a dragon, whatever — but male) or a man animalistic in form, sometimes in nature as well. The monster desires the maiden: to devour her (literally), to despoil her (sexually), or merely to love her (romantically).

A third character, the Knight, figures in an extended scenario: a hero, a handsome and virile young man, often in armor, often a prince, whose role is to challenge the monster in battle and overcome him, thereby rescuing the maiden — for himself; she is his prize. In the extended scenario, two males are rivals for the maiden.

In Benton’s version, the hero challenges the monster, demanding that the monster deal with him rather than the maiden. And so the monster does. Sometimes in a love triangle, the rivals become lovers. (Combat between men is sometimes a route to mutual respect, male bonding, and friendship; in this case, the relationship goes one step further.)

We have customary, rather elevated, language for talking about the monster, the maiden, and the hero. The monster proposes to devour the maiden, not merely eat her; devour is more elevated than plain eat, but it’s also more vivid (to devour is to ‘eat (food or prey) hungrily or quickly’ (NOAD2)). Alternatively, the monster proposes to despoil the maiden, not rape her. On the verb despoil, from NOAD2:

[with object] steal or violently remove valuable or attractive possessions from; plunder: the church was despoiled of its marble wall covering.

In the sexual use of despoil, the valuable or attractive possession that is stolen or violently removed from a woman is her virginity. It’s a metaphor, one (euphemistic) step removed from the ugliness of rape. But, again, despoil, with its imagery of violent theft, is more vivid than rape.

On the artist. From Wikipedia:

Jim K. Benton (born October 31, 1960) is an American illustrator and writer. Licensed properties he has created include Dear Dumb Diary, Dog of Glee, Franny K. Stein, Just Jimmy, Just Plain Mean, Sweetypuss, The Misters, Meany Doodles, Vampy Doodles, Kissy Doodles, and the jOkObo project, but he is probably most known for his creation It’s Happy Bunny.

Two more Bentons, with some limnguistic interest:

(#2)

He’s freed to continue working on being an asshole (by not acceptng the other man’s apology and by calling him homo).

(#3)

An ambiguity, as to which VP the adverbial so bad belongs to: the VP with head V want (the man’s intended interpretation) or the VP with head V kiss (the woman’s interpretation).

Benton’s humor is often crude (butts, feces, and sex often figure in them), and in the Happy Bunny cartoons we get outright insult humor (combined with self-glorification). From Wikipedia:

Happy Bunny is the name of a character in a series of stickers, buttons, greeting cards, posters, and other merchandise sold at novelty shops across North America. Designed by artist and writer Jim Benton, “who People Magazine called the most visible cartoonist in America, Happy Bunny is a small, smiling bunny, often varying in color, with an insulting slogan printed at its feet

Don Rickles as a cute bunny. Three examples:

(#4)

(#5)

(#6)

A little of this goes a long way.