This afternoon my grand-daughter Opal arrived at my house (dutifully standing about 7 feet away and wearing a mask (as I was) to deliver two items: the DVD of Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run (“It says GUB”), which she’d borrowed from me, oh, three years ago; and a celebratory Pride t-shirt from my daughter Elizabeth, whose bold NSFW message in Pride rainbow colors I defer to under the fold.

(#1) Complete with a smiling cupcake with a, um, cherry on top; design by Angela Tarantula on threadless

It’s a fair cop, guv.

(I assume the shirt was entirely a present for Pride Month, and not in any way associated with Fathers Day (this coming Sunday), a holiday Elizabeth and I both view with rolled eyes.)

GAY AS FUCK is available as a slogan on an extraordinary number of t-shirts, in all sorts of presentations, on a variety of types of shirts, in many colors. Two I found especially fetching:

(#2) Especialy intense; from Trending LGBT Tees on Amazon

(#3) Gay cat; Rainbow Cat Purride (don’t blame me!) LGBT Shirt from Pop Shirt

On the expression, from my 12/27/17 posting “Expletive syntax: I will marry the crap out of you, Sean Spencer”, a cataogue of grammatical constructions (or idiom clusters) crucially involving fuck, shit, hell, etc, in the section on Postmodifiers:

7a. AF: Adj as expletive ‘really, extremely Adj’.  Comparative as fuck/ hell /shit.

Linguists are inquisitive as fuck.

(You start with Onan, you’re going to get genitals and sexual acts. Not for kids or the sexally modest.)

The morning name for 6/22, a whole VP — which led immedately to the biblical character Onan and thus to levirate marriage and to onanism, in two different senses (masturbation and coitus interruptus, not to mention figurative uses as, roughly, ‘self-gratfication’, as in intellectual onanism). And from that to remarkably hostile attitudes towards masturbation in Christian churches, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. And, ultimately, through the work of scholars of masturbation, to Hollywood goddess Hedy Lamarr, doing an orgasm in a 1932 Czech film.

And then there’s the source of that VP in my subconscious mind, almost surely a result of my having just spilled — spread, broadcast — birdseed on the ground of my patio, in an attempt to lure birds to my new bird feeder (details in my 6/27 posting “Meet the Jays”).

Background: the text. Genesis, in the KJV, with the crucial bit boldfaced:

38 And it came to pass at that time, that Judah went down from his brethren, and turned in to a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah.

² And Judah saw there a daughter of a certain Canaanite, whose name was Shuah; and he took her, and went in unto her.

³ And she conceived, and bare a son; and he called his name Er.

⁴ And she conceived again, and bare a son; and she called his name Onan.

⁵ And she yet again conceived, and bare a son; and called his name Shelah: and he was at Chezib, when she bare him.

⁶ And Judah took a wife for Er his firstborn, whose name was Tamar.

⁷ And Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord; and the Lord slew him.

⁸ And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother’s wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother.

⁹ And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.

¹⁰ And the thing which he did displeased the Lord: wherefore he slew him also.

Those were mighty tough days.

Background: from Wikipedia.

Onan … is a minor biblical person in the Book of Genesis chapter 38, who was the second son of Judah. Like his older brother Er, Onan was slain by God. Onan’s death was retribution for being “evil in the sight of the Lord” and disobeying a direct order from the Lord by being unwilling to father a child by his widowed sister-in-law.

Biblical account: After Onan’s brother Er was slain by God, his father Judah told him to fulfill his duty to his brother by entering into a levirate marriage [Latin levir ‘husband’s brother’] with his brother’s widow Tamar to give her offspring. Religion professor Tikva Frymer-Kensky has pointed out the economic repercussions of a levirate marriage: any son born to Tamar would be deemed the heir of the deceased Er, and able to claim the firstborn’s double share of inheritance. However, if Er were childless, or only had daughters, Onan would have inherited as the oldest surviving son.

When Onan had sex with Tamar, he withdrew before his orgasm and “spilled his seed [or semen] on the ground”, since any child born would not legally be considered his heir. The next statement in the Bible says that Onan did evil and that God slew him.

(#1) Onan and Tamar: 1892 painting by Alexandre Cabanel

Early Jewish views: One opinion expressed in the Talmud argues that this was where the death penalty’s imposition originated. However, the Levitical regulations concerning ejaculation, whether as a result of sexual intercourse or not, merely prescribe a ritual washing, and remaining ritually impure until the next day began on the following evening.

Classical Christian views: Early Christian writers have sometimes focused on the spilling seed, and the sexual act being used for non-procreational purposes. This interpretation was held by several early Christian apologists. Jerome, for example, argued:

But I wonder why he the heretic Jovinianus set Judah and Tamar before us for an example, unless perchance even harlots give him pleasure; or Onan, who was slain because he begrudged his brother his seed. Does he imagine that we approve of any sexual intercourse except for the procreation of children?

Clement of Alexandria, while not making explicit reference to Onan, similarly reflects an early Christian view of the abhorrence of spilling seed:

Because of its divine institution for the propagation of man, the seed is not to be vainly ejaculated, nor is it to be damaged, nor is it to be wasted. To have coitus other than to procreate children is to do injury to nature.

Roman Catholic views: The papal encyclical Casti connubii (1930) invokes this Biblical text in support of the teaching of the Catholic Church against contracepted sex.

Early Protestant views: Making reference to Onan’s offense to identify masturbation as sinful, in his Commentary on Genesis, John Calvin wrote that “the voluntary spilling of semen outside of intercourse between a man and a woman is a monstrous thing. Deliberately to withdraw from coitus in order that semen may fall on the ground is double monstrous.” Methodism founder John Wesley, according to Bryan C. Hodge, “believed that any waste of the semen in an unproductive sexual act, whether that should be in the form of masturbation or coitus interruptus, as in the case of Onan, destroyed the souls of the individuals who practice it”. He writes his Thoughts on the Sin of Onan (1767), which was reproduced as A Word to Whom it May Concern on 1779, as an attempt to censor a work by Samuel-Auguste Tissot. In that writing, Wesley warns about “the dangers of self pollution”, the bad physical and mental effects of masturbation, writes many such cases along with the treatment recommendations.

Lexicography of onanism. From OED3 (June 2004), the first cite in English is the remarkable:

1600 I. R. Most Straunge, & True Disc. To Rdr. sig. A3 The sinnes of Incest, Onanisme, Whoredome, Adulterie & Fornication, with other Sodomiticall sinnes of vncleannesse & pollutions, do so outragiously raign.

The writer I.R. has not been identified, and it turns out that the publication was primarily directed at incest and picks up onanism and the rest as a kind of bonus. The full title of the publication (from the Univ. of Michigan Early English Books site):

A most straunge, and true discourse, of the wonderfull iudgement of God. Of a monstrous, deformed infant, begotten by incestuous copulation, betweene the brothers sonne and the sisters daughter, being both vnmarried persons. Which childe was borne at Colwall, in the country and diocesse of Hereford, vpon the sixt day of Ianuary last, being the feast of the Epiphany, commonly called Twelfth day. A notable and most terrible example against incest and whoredome.

And then two later figurative uses:

1820 Ld. Byron Let. 4 Nov. (1977) VII. 217 His [sc. Keats’s] is the Onanism of Poetry — something like the pleasure an Italian fiddler extracted out of being suspended daily by a Street Walker in Drury Lane.

1977 P. Rooney in D. Marcus Best Irish Short Stories II. 141 The onanism of the language, a phrase masturbated without hope of final clear expression.

A note on levirate marriage. From Wikipedia:

Levirate marriage has been practiced by societies with a strong clan structure in which exogamous marriage (i.e. marriage outside the clan) was forbidden. It has been known in many societies around the world.

The details vary from society to society, of course; some survey in the Wikipedia entry.

Attitudes towards masturbation. The Christian tradition for a long time seems to have primarily focused not on masturbation as self-gratification but on masturbation as the spilling of seed — the waste of semen outside of procreative sex. But then there was a shift.

Two book-length accounts of the history make for harrowing reading.

First, Jean Stengers & Anne Van Neck, Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror (tr. by Kathryn Hoffman from 1998 French original, Histoire d’une grande peur, la masturbation) (NY: Palgrave, 2001). This is a serious work of scholarship that the publishers of the English edition decided to market with light-hearted jokiness. From the publisher’s jacket copy:

Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror is a funny and frightening look at the attitudes towards masturbation throughout history and how they have affected the sex lives of anyone living and breathing today. The French biologist, Tissot, was the original spoil-sport who turned masturbation into the scourge of young men everywhere [in a series of editions of works on onanism, in 1758 (in Latin), in 1760 (in French, as L’Onanisme), in 1764 (in an expanded French edition), and in multiple editions after that]. Saying that a little self-induced pleasure caused wasting, insanity, and finally death, Tissot put the clamps (literally, in some cases [AMZ: the photographs of torture devices intended to prevent the wearer from masturbation are hard to take] on the greatest relaxation inducer known to humankind. From Tissot’s work to the punitive postures of the German courts to the surgical preventatives of continental Europe and England to the handbook of the Boy Scouts of America, spanking / wanking, yanking / choking, and other assorted diddling became the big no-no. Stengers and Van Neck give us the whole story and it isn’t pretty, but it will fascinate everyone who agrees with Woody Allen when he said “Hey, don’t knock masturbation! It’s sex with someone I love.”

The turning point came in the mid-20th century. From Stengers & Van Neck, p. 163:

What did more than anything else to sweep away the language of “cure,” “bad habit,” and “vice,” [as late as 1940 a candidate for admission to the Naval Academy at Annapolis was rejected when a doctor discovered he had masturbed] and what playe a decisive role in the shattering not only of some traditional ideas relating to masturbation but also the near-totality of traditional thought on the subject, was the startling revelation that masturbation was an extremely common, widespread, and banal phenomenon. From common, banal, and widespread, there was a natural transition to the notion of what was normal.

This startling relevalation came primarily from the Kinsey report [on sexual behavior in the human male, in 1948], which profoundly marked the field. One might almost say — admittedly by grossly simplifying things — that our history of masturbation began with Onania [in the early 18th century] and Tissot and ends with Kinsey.

This new world is the one I report on in my postings on this blog — links, with annotations, in a Page on this blog on masturbation — which explores (among other things) techniques of masturbation and masturbation in its sociocultural setting, especially among gay men: yes, it’s a “private” act, but like all such acts even if it’s entirely solitary it must be folded somehow into the daily practices of social life — and, in fact, it’s very often incorporated into routines of social connection, by masturbation of others or by masturbating in the company of others.

My own writing on masturbation is often celebratory — I have a high sex drive, and I estimate that my ejaculations per day over 70 years of a sexual life average out at around 2, most from masturbation. (This isn’t a boast, or a confession, or a recommendation; it just is, and I maintain that it’s harmless and banal.)

This does lead me to post fairly often about guys jacking themselves or each other off, and in capturing these occasions in images. In principle, the point of male masturbation is the release of ejaculation, but the actual practices are much more complex than this; guys can masturbate lazily, with no particular end in mind, just to appreciate the sensation, and in some settings, as in sex clubs and gay baths, guys can keep a hard-on going by masturbation for surprising lengths of time (easily up to an hour) while they are waiting for a suitable sexual partner to turn up. (You might even argue that the long public display of their hard-ons is the point of the exercise, and that shooting their load is just the cherry on top of the sundae.) (Oh yes, if a suitable partner doesn’t materialize, you finish yourself off. I have done this, in an earlier life.)

Still, getting off is the ideal, and the spray (or dribble, as is actually more common) of cum is the visible sign of satisfaction. Usually, that’s accompanied by an ecstatic O-face, but some guys carry the Man at Work facial presentation right though to the end (see the Page on this blog on facial expressions in mansex), as in this (nicely framed) image lifted from porn (intent face, though he does have a slack mouth):

(#2)

Back to scholarship, with Thomas Laqueur’s monumental (501-page) Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (NY: Zone Books, 2003). From the publisher’s cover text:

At a time when almost any victimless sexual practice has its public advocates and almost every sexual act is fit for the front page, the easiest, least harmful, and most universal one is embarrassing, discomforting, and genuinely radical when openly acknowledged. Masturbation may be the last taboo. But this is not a holdover from a more benighted age. The ancient world cared little about the subject; it was a backwater of Jewish and Christian teaching about sexuality. In fact, solitary sex as a serious moral issue can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history; Laqueur identifies it with the publication of the anonymous tract Onania in about 1722. Masturbation is a creation of the Enlightenment, of some of its most important figures, and of the most profound changes it unleashed. It is modern. It worried at first not conservatives, but progressives. It was the first truly democratic sexuality that could be of ethical interest for women as much as for men, for boys and girls as much as for their elders.

The book’s range is vast. It begins with the prehistory of solitary sex in the Bible and ends with third-wave feminism, conceptual artists, and the Web. It explains how and why this humble and once obscure means of sexual gratification became the evil twin ― or the perfect instance ― of the great virtues of modern humanity and commercial society: individual moral autonomy and privacy, creativity and the imagination, abundance and desire.

And on the cover, we get Hedy Lamarr in the 1932 Czech film Ecstasy:

(#2)

First, the film, from Wikipedia:

Ecstasy (Czech: Extase, French: Extase, German: Ekstase) is a 1933 Czech erotic romantic drama film directed by Gustav Machatý and starring Hedy Lamarr (then Hedy Kiesler), Aribert Mog, and Zvonimir Rogoz.

The film is about a young woman who marries a wealthy but much older man. After abandoning her brief passionless marriage, she meets a young virile engineer who becomes her lover. Ecstasy was filmed in three language versions – German, Czech, and French. It is perhaps the first non-pornographic movie to portray sexual intercourse and female orgasm, although never showing more than the actors’ faces.

And on Lamarr, a truly remarkable character, from Wikipedia (with a geek bonus at the end):

Hedy Lamarr born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler (November 9, 1914 – January 19, 2000), was an Austrian-American actress, inventor, and film producer. [She held Austrian citizenship from 1914 through 1938, was stateless (because of her Jewish parentage) from then through 1953, and then became a US citizen.] She was part of 30 films in an acting career spanning 28 years, and co-invented an early version of frequency-hopping spread spectrum.

Lamarr was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, and acted in a number of Austrian, German, and Czech films, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933). After this brief early film career, she fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris in 1937 and then onward to London. There she met Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood, where he began promoting her as the “world’s most beautiful woman” [A glamorous film career ensues; details on Wikipedia.]

.. At the beginning of World War II, Lamarr and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes, intended to use frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. She also helped improve aviation designs for Howard Hughes while they dated during the war. Although the US Navy did not adopt Lamarr and Antheil’s invention until 1957, various spread-spectrum techniques are incorporated into Bluetooth technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of Wi-Fi. Recognition of the value of their work resulted in the pair being posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

She was beautiful, Hollywood-glamorous, a creation of visible arifice, in a way that just doesn’t exist any more. And really tough.

(Largely about men’s bodies — not crudely, but the topic will be uncomfortable for some readers, so be warned that skin and bulges are on the agenda.)

From Romania, through the fabled sensuality of Greek islands in the Aegean, to you: men’s swimwear that embraces playful pinkness while pushing enhancements of male genitals forward. The Elia swimwear company, in a series of ads on the Daily Jocks site.

Starting with the DJ ad from 6/8, for the Kos Titan Swim Short in the Beach Unicorn pattern:

(#1) Real men flaunt their stuff in pink, with little ducks

Color notes. The now-conventional association of pink (in various shades) with femininity (and therefore queerness) means that a man who sports pink clothes — especially in high-masculinity contexts like gymwear and swimwear — will be seen as conveying an identity statement. Either he’s straight and so secure in his heteromasculinity that he doesn’t care what people might think, and might well be asserting his confident heteromasculinity. Or he’s gay and so secure in his homomasculinity that he, too, doesn’t care what people think, because he’s defiantly and openly queer.

Enhancement. In a 6/24 DJ ad, we get an amazingly steamy fantasy hunk rutting on the beach, wearing nothing but the tiny but protuberant Kos Enhancing Swim Brief:

(#2) He stares at you with narrowed eyes and knitted brow; he offers a high-butch haircut and mustache, facial stubble, hairy forearms and thighs, plus those muscles — are you man enough for him? Could you be him?

This ad doesn’t highlight the most salient feature of these swim briefs. This you can appreciate in this display from the company, with its accompanying ad copy:

(#3) “The Kos Enhancing swim brief is a low rise brief featuring front removable enhancement cup. With lifting and accentuating front crotch shaping, as well as a flattering rear shape, this brief with its bronze trim details is one of the sexiest swim briefs to come to market.”

Note that the company doesn’t shrink from potentially faggy colors like Candy Pink and Cherry Red, but enthusiastically embraces them and combines them with protruding stuffed pouches. Another variant of  butch fagginess (first posted on in a 8/14/18 posting here, with a number of follow-ups).

Pouch enhancement. A recurrent theme on this blog. For instance, on pouch-enhancing underwear: “The Xmas package 2” on 12/17/10, “Bulges” on 4/17/11. For many kinds of men’s underwear, the idea borders on the silly. If you’re displaying an apparently big package to attract a sexual partner, then you’re in trouble when the underwear gets pulled down and you turn out to have been wearing a falsie (in the plural, slang referring pads of material in women’s clothing used to increase the apparent size of the breasts; now extended to similar enhancement of the male genitals).

Men’s swimwear is, in general, different, since its bulges are mostly part of a high-masculine presentation of self in public, rather than an immediate sexual advertisement.

One more item of Kos Enhancing swimwear from Elia — the Neon Jungle pattern — in a 6/30 DJ ad:

(#4) Not primarily pink, but with a really obtrusive bulge

The pattern is not, however, without its pink highlights:

(#5)

Elia and Kos.The Elia company is Romanian, mostly providing really hot swimwear for women, but with a parallel line for men.

Now, Romania has its beaches, on the Black Sea, but the company has chosen to situate its men’s underwear in the warmer waters of the Aegean Sea, on an actual Greek island, treated here, however, as a fabulous sensual paradise.

On Kos, from Wikipedia:

Kos or Cos is a Greek island, part of the Dodecanese island chain in the southeastern Aegean Sea. Kos is the third largest island of the Dodecanese by area, after Rhodes and Karpathos; it has a population of 33,388 (2011 census), making it the second most populous of the Dodecanese, after Rhodes. The island measures 40 by 8 kilometres (25 by 5 miles).

(#6) Kos on a regional map; you will see that it’s one of the Greek islands right up against the Turkish coast

… Tourism is the main industry in Kos, the island’s beaches being the primary attraction. The main port and population centre on the island, Kos town, is also the tourist and cultural centre, with whitewashed buildings including many hotels, restaurants and a number of nightclubs forming the Kos town “barstreet”. The seaside village of Kardamena is a popular resort for young holidaymakers (primarily from the United Kingdom and Scandinavia) and has a large number of bars and nightclubs.

Kos is not one one of the famous gay Greek island resorts, but it’s certainly gay-friendly, and it does have, or has had, a flat-out gay bar, with a sex club on an upper floor. All the amenities.

Meanwhile, you can live the fantasy in Elia swimwear. Go for the hot pink; you know you want to.

(Material in very plain language about men’s bodies and mansex, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

This began as a brief follow-up to my 7/7 posting “Navy flamingos and roseate spoonbills”, about enhanced-cup swim briefs (seen in front view) from the Elia company, in the Navy Flamingo pattern: navy-blue with pink flamingos — but it moves into other territory (heavy on anal intercourse). In any case, yesterday the Daily Jocks sale offer featured the Elia enhanced pouch swim brief “Midnight Tropics” (in rear view):

(#1)

A handsome pattern, including the pink flowers (pink is a subtheme in Elia swimwear for men), and clearly designed to highlight the sexual desirability of the wearer’s buttocks (which, in this case, seem eminently pregnable already).

I was initially struck by the image in #1 because the main selling point of this swimwear line is the sexual desirability of models’ genitals, exaggerated by the cup enhancements, so that they’re usually presented in front views — as here, for the Midnight Tropics swim brief:

(#2)

Plain talk. In street talk, #1 frames the model as having a really hot ass, eminently fuckable. Language familiar to me from my days in the sexual marketplace, decades ago, where my really hot, fuckable ass — arse, butt, whatever — was my big draw. Men told me so, and then they fucked me, to our mutual satisfaction, since my sexual preference, as an enthusiastic bottom (well, really, a bitch in heat), fit so beautifully with my physical attractions.

My face is sweet but nothing to draw men in, and I’m far from classically butch, and I have what counts in the gay world as a little dick (a major minus in the sexual marketplace), but my ass brought in the business. If, as often happens in the gay world, my fucker stayed around after the sexual main event, to luxuriate affectionately in our joint post-coital haze, and exchange names and brief bios and talk about our lives, then we came to develop a short-term friendship, in which the qualities of my mind and character, not just my fuckable ass, came to the fore. Two of them fell in love with me — and then of course we did a lot more fucking, meanwhile honing our understandings of each other’s bodies and feelings, which is a great pleasure in itself.

(And, I should add, from experiencing all this and talking to my sexual partners, I collected a lot of information about gay lives and attitudes, which I’ve used for my academic purposes.  No place to stash my famous little notebook while my ass was up in the air taking a cock deep within me and shouting fuck me please oh please fuck me — but I wrote things up not long afterwards.)

But my ass as a desirable bodypart. As it turns out, I have never seen anything like a photo of my ass in its heyday (I now have an 80-year-old wrinkled ass, so that’s irrelevant). I have no idea what its draw for other men was, though I can fantasize that it was something like other wonderfully fuckable asses I’ve posted about (I’m working on collecting a Page on them).

I realize now that my man Jacques, who was pretty serious about his photography, took a lot of photos of me, and was a great fan of my fuckable ass (most of our sex was just gay men’s routine sex, namely cocksucking, but fucking was a special-occasion pleasure). But he never even suggested photographing my body — I suspect he felt that that would have been too intrusive — and it didn’t occur to me to ask him to; I’ve always felt insecure about my body. I’m sorry now that I didn’t, and also that I never got him to pose for nude shots. After all these years — we last shared a bed in 1997 — the memories of his body are fading away.

As close as it gets. What I do have is a delightful photo of me and Gadi Niram (and DC motsser Ed Ricketts) at the 1995 motss.con in Washington DC:

(#3) Ed, me (in an OUT In Linguistics t-shirt), Gadi (playfully in costume for the To Wong Foo Party at the RAMA A Inn)

My comment:

Sorry about the glare off my glasses, cause this is otherwise a pretty good photo of me (I hate almost all photos of me). Damn hot for a 56-year-old guy, if I do say so myself. [Gadi was then 25.] And I manage to look significantly gay, but maybe that’s just by assimilation to Gadi’s character. (Hanging out with a guy dressed like this either causes you to absorb waves of big ol’ fagginess or to present as stone-hard butch, in contrast. I don’t think gay macho is even achievable for me, so what you see is my greybeard fag persona.)

I’ll say more about the occasion, but for my immediate purposes what’s important is my hairy, muscular thighs, as close as we can get to what was then my hairy, muscular ass. This towards the end of my 30 Years of Getting Fucked, which ran from 1966 through roughly 1996. A good run.

Then, two Facebook messages from Gadi.  From 2/26/20:

Today’s my 50th birthday. Something Aric [Olnes] posted reminded me of the 1995 DC .con. I had been on soc.motss for about two years by then, a wet-behind-the-ears little gayling. motss has given me friends, access to knowledge I never would have imagined, flamewars, in-jokes, social venues, a boyfriend or two, and a sense that I belong to a wonderful, insane, intense, intelligent, witty, infuriating, captivating, marvel of a community. Here’s to the next 27 motss.years!

Note that the community embraces men and women, from many parts of the world, of many ages (my 56 to Gadi’s 25 in #3), and so on.

Then from 3/21/20, with the photo in #3:

And me with the splendid Arnold Zwicky!

Strange as it may seem to those who know me well, I am widely regarded as having thrown the best hotel party in all of recorded history [at the 1995 DC Con]. With considerable help from the incomparable Derik Cowan.

It was indeed memorable. And I even managed to work in giving a linguistics paper at Georgetown during the weekend. (Oh yes, and no sex, just friendship. I’d been a regular at the Club Baths for Men in DC for years, but not on this occasion; hanging out with friends was much more important than getting fucked.)

The coincidental juxtaposition of two things: yesterday’s Zippy strip about the drink Yoo-hoo; and the annual occasion, today, of Teddy Bear’s Picnic Day. Yes, one thing leads to the other, and the crucial link is the American baseball player Yogi Berra.

(#1) Zippy goes to his Kelvinator, and it calls “Yoo-hoo” to him

Background: Kelvinator. From Wikipedia:

Kelvinator was a United States home appliance manufacturer and the namesake of the company, although as a company it is now defunct, the name still exists as a brand name owned by Electrolux AB. It takes its name from William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, who developed the concept of absolute zero and for whom the Kelvin temperature scale is named. The name was thought appropriate for a company that manufactured ice-boxes and domestic refrigerators.

(#2) A 1940s Kelvinator

Kelvinator was founded on September 18, 1914, in Detroit, Michigan, United States, by engineer Nathaniel B. Wales who introduced his idea for a practical electric refrigeration unit for the home to Edmund Copeland and Arnold Goss.

The Kelvinator brand joins such other colorfully named American refrigerator brands as Crosley Shelvador (shelves in the door!) and Frigidaire.

Yoo-hoo. In my 12/15/18 posting “Yoo-hoo, Aargau!”, material on the bottled American chocolate drink Yoo-hoo, the exclamation yoo-hoo!, and more:

(#3)

Yogi Berra. In the fourth panel, the chocolatey Yoo-hoo calls to Zippy and connects him to the American baseball player Yogi Berra — because of Berra’s 1950s ads for the drink, like this one:

(#4)

About Berra, and his famous malapropisms: in my 10/3/15 posting “Yogi-isms”.

Yogi Bear. The baseball player’s name was then riffed on for the name of a bear in a Hanna-Barbera animated cartoon: Yogi Bear. From my 8/1/17 posting “Zippy and Griffy on the Hanna-Barbera diner tour”:

(#5) Yogi and his crew

The plot of most of Yogi’s cartoons centered on his antics in the fictional Jellystone Park, a variant of the real Yellowstone National Park. Yogi, accompanied by his constant companion Boo-Boo Bear, would often try to steal picnic baskets from campers in the park, much to the displeasure of Park Ranger Smith. Yogi’s girlfriend, Cindy Bear, sometimes appeared and usually disapproved of Yogi’s antics. (from Wikipedia)

Teddy bears. And then from one kind of fictional bear to another — to the stuffed bear as a toy, and the musical enshrinement of teddy bears in the song “The Teddy Bears Picnic”. From my 7/25/10 posting “Bear music”:

On my iTunes, there’s “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” …, which is older than you might think, with a melody from 1907 and words [by Irish songwriter Jimmy Kennedy] from 1932.

Then from my 11/17/18 posting “Teddy Bears’ Picnic Day”, we get a gay connection:

(#6) “[Thanks to the bear as a gay male type, the] song has been used as a theme for … gay-tinged performances [– for example] the “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” (adult comedy) performance piece at the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.”

(Yes, he’s a naked bear.) Now, there‘s a performance for today.

Via Pinterest today, a story from the Messy Nessy site, “Hiding Homosexuality on the Cover of America’s Magazines a Century Ago” from 2/5/19, about illustrator and commercial artist J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951), with more examples of his work beyond the ones that have already appeared on this blog.

Three steamy high-masculinity examples follow:

(#1) JCL1

(#2) JCL2

(#3) JCL3

From the Messy Nessy site:

One of the first things you’ll start to notice about Joe Christian Leyendecker’s work is that his women were never quite as good-looking as his men, who were devastatingly handsome. He gave us the elegance of Gatsby 20 years before F. Scott Fitzgerald had even invented him. … Leyendecker created more than 400 magazine covers during the Golden Age of American Illustration, painting a picture of the new 20th century male and influencing millions of Americans, few of whom knew he was gay. Over a century later, as LGBT advertising is only now just starting to find a place in mainstream media, let’s take a look at the pioneering artist who in retrospect, hardly seemed to be hiding his sexuality at all.

… A master depicter of oiled-up hunks, J.C’s ads appeared all across mainstream publications from the early 1900s right up until the Second World War.

… The magnum opus of his work … is “The Arrow Collar Man”, a character created for a shirt company who became one of the early-20th century’s biggest male sex symbols. “[He] had about as large a place in the pantheon of hotness as Rudolph Valentino, Elvis, and the Marlboro man,” explained Vogue’s Laird Borrelli Persson.

(#4) Two Arrow Collar men enjoying each other’s company: models of style and masculine elegance

… Americans were swooning, as was J.C., and with good reason: the model behind the Arrow Collar Man was none of the than the muse and love of his life, Charles Beach

Leyendecker lived with Charles in a splendid house in New Rochelle, New York, where they threw party after party in true Roaring Twenties glory, embodying the decadence of the era and indulging in their own real-life Gatsby fairytale thanks to the artist’s success.

If Leyendecker’s sexuality was understood in the industry, it was kept quiet from the audience. But his work did all the talking, albeit in coded messages; suggestive side staring, a preference male-centric environments like locker rooms, clubhouses and tailoring shops. It’s as if Leyendecker was trying to communicate with a gay audience through secret glances and homoerotic undertones. Wartime was also a good space for homoeroticism to hide in plain sight and J. C. painted numerous recruitment posters for the United States military and the war effort.

And on this blog.

— on 1/22/11 in “J. C. Leyendecker”: 5 examples

— on 8/6/17 in “Words as weapons, images as ideas”: #4 is a JCL homoerotic war poster

(#4)

and #10 a Liberty Loan poster;

His specialty was commercial illustration, mostly for men’s fashion, and he produced many subtly or not-so-subtly homoerotic illustrations

— on 11/28/19 in “All thanks to HomoEros”: #1 is a JCL homoerotic Thanksgiving Saturday Evening Post cover:

(#5)

(Some discussion of the symbolism here in that posting.)

(All I need to tell you is that this posting takes off from a line of Cumdump jockstraps offered by the Breedwell company in deliberately provocative ads, and you should see that it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest.)

A Daily Jocks ad from 11/4/19 shows us the jock in red, with a model presented faux-naturalistically as a tough working-class guy in a blue-collar setting (a railyard, shipyard, or truckyard). Ad copy for the jock:

The new Breedwell Cumdump Jock [available in white, black, red, yellow, and blue] is a take on the classic, old-school woven jock.

Features a black centre patch with the Breedwell logo and signature “Dirty By Choice” motto. The back of the jock features ‘Breedwell’ across the entire back.

(#1) The Breedwell Cumdump jockstrap, leading to notes on:

underwear ads as porn; this underwear ad as hard(core) porn; the sodomacho (sodomite + macho), or high-butch receptive (like the guy in the ad), as a brand of homomasculinity; plus linguistic reflections, on various scales with hard denoting the high end of the scale and terminology for referring to intermediate values, especially those near the high end (hard, firm).

Underwear ads as porn. Extended background from my 11/20/19 posting “A regular festival of ambiguity”:

The Regular Guy is a stock character of advertising, where he is especially devoted to selling things directed to men, like tools, sports equipment, shaving accessories, and men’s clothing, in particular swim suits and underwear (both highly gendered). This last category is of special interest to me, because such apparel can be invested with not only gender content but also carnally sexual content: the display of the nearly naked male body is available as a source of pleasurable response from suitably minded viewers (of either gender), no matter how innocently it might be intended.

In brief: underwear ads are always available for service as soft porn (for straight women and gay men) — this is not even slightly a novel observation — and models presented as regular guys have figured in such advertising for a long time …

(#2) Daily Jocks ad for Supawear from 10/27/17: Note the seductive facial expression and inviting open mouth

… Despite all this effort to present the figure of a guy in his underpants as an object of commercial but not carnal desire — you were supposed to want to buy the underwear, not do the model — these ads had a long history of functioning as soft porn for gay boys and men; after all, they showed attractive men in their underpants, their desirable genitals just a thin layer of fabric away.

… Then came the time of the Underwear Gods, as Don DeLillo labeled the giant public-display figures advertising sex-drenched underwear, especially men’s premium briefs (a label easily extended to the models and to the genre of advertising)

… the world shifted, as you can see by looking at my Page of links to underwear postings on this blog; in certain districts of the underwear universe, all the constraints on RG depictions have been thrown out the window, and we now have things like [#2], and crotch-tease shots like [#1, I dreamed I cruised for blue-collar tricks in my hot-red Breedwell Cumdump jock]

Yes, Breedwell is the brand name, “Dirty by Choice” (on the waistband) its motto, and Cumdump the model name; the intention behind the model name is that the wearer is advertising himself as an indiscriminate bottom [a mere cumdump] — for barebacking, if the brand name [with breed ‘fuck bareback’] is to be taken at face value. [more on Breedwell etc. in an appendix below]

#1 is pretty much as close to hard(core) porn as you can get. So I’ll move in a little while to the hardcore/softcore distinction.

Brands of homomasculinity. The model in #1 is presented as a high-butch anal receptive, a macho pussy-ass.

He’s located in a blue-collar environment, a conventionally macho locus, and he’s strongly macho in appearance. But his jockstrap cries out: I want, need, to be fucked, bareback, by a lot of guys, as many as possible; I want, need, my pussy filled with cum.

(This is of course a fantasy, but it pleases me to see it represented and celebrated so openly in advertising. It is, of course, something of a trope in gay porn: Real Men Want to Get Fucked. In particular, muscular body-building types beg for cocks up their asses.)

The combination of conventional masculinity with men enthusiastically taking what is conventionally viewed as the “feminine” role in fucking, and hence as acting “faggy”, is one form of what I’ve called butch fagginess. As in my 10/16/19 posting “Adventures in homomasculinity: the pink jock”, with a wider view (intersections of styles of masculinity with styles of homosexuality). The special case here is what I think of as sodomachismo — a macho presentation of self combined with a preference for the pleasures of being sodomized.

Play on hard/soft. From my 11/18/19 posting “Hard/Soft”, about a:

highly sexualized soft porn DJ ad (for CellBlock 13 Covert jockstrap), but stressing the contrast between the hard polyurethane shell of the jock pouch and the softness of  its “extra-soft fleece” lining:

(#3)

On to the hard-core lexical stuff. Wow, a really big grab-bag, illustrating sense developments of many different types. From NOAD (AHD5 has much longer list of senses):

adj. hard: 1 [a] solid, firm, and resistant to pressure; not easily broken, bent, or pierced: a hard mattress | ground frozen hard as a rock. [b] (of a person) not showing any signs of weakness; tough: the hard, tough, honest cop. [c] (of prices of stock, commodities, etc.) stable or firm in value. 2 done with a great deal of force or strength: a hard blow to the head. 3 [a] requiring a great deal of endurance or effort: stooping over all day was hard work. [b] putting a lot of energy into an activity: he’d been a hard worker all his life. [c] difficult to bear; causing suffering: times were hard at the end of the war | he’d had a hard life. [d] difficult to understand or solve: this is a really hard question | [with infinitive]: she found it hard to believe that he could be involved. [e] not showing sympathy or affection; strict: my father is no longer the hard man he once was. [f] (of a season or the weather) severe: it’s been a long, hard winter. [g] harsh or unpleasant to the senses: the hard light of morning. [h] (of wine) harsh or sharp to the taste, especially because of tannin. 4 [a] (of information) reliable, especially because based on something true or substantiated: hard facts about the underclass are maddeningly elusive.[b] (of a subject of study) dealing with precise and verifiable facts: efforts to turn psychology into hard science. [c] denoting an extreme or dogmatic faction within a political party: the hard left. [d] (of science fiction) dealing with technological advances which do not contravene currently accepted scientific laws or principles: a hard SF novel. 5 [a] (of liquor) strongly alcoholic; denoting distilled spirits rather than beer or wine. [b] US (of apple cider) having alcoholic content from fermentation. [c] (of a drug) potent and addictive. [d] (of radiation) highly penetrating. [e] (of pornography) highly obscene and explicit. 6 (of water) containing mineral salts that make lathering difficult. 7 Phonetics (of a consonant [letter]) pronounced as c in cat or g in go.

5e is the sense in hardcore (vs. softcore).

(In passing, I note that NOAD is missing the sense ‘(of a penis) erect, tumid’ (in AHD, sense 14 of 21).)

More specifically, there is, from NOAD, the:

noun hard core: [a] the most active, committed, or doctrinaire members of a group or movement: there is always a hard core of trusty stalwarts | [as modifier]: a hard core following. [b] popular music that is experimental in nature and typically characterized by high volume and aggressive presentation. [c] pornography of an explicit kind: (as modifier hard-core [or hardcore]): hard-core porn.

The world of hard vs. soft core is a graded one: there are clear examples of hard core material (in my postings, the visual stuff has to go to AZBlogX, though, at least for the moment, I can say pretty much anything on WordPress; Facebook, in contrast,  is erratically, and often extremely punitively, censorious) vs. soft core stuff (like the 1970s newspaper underwear ads), but of course the lines won’t be clear. Sociocultural categories are virtually never sharply discriminated, though for legal or administrative purposes their names might be rigidly defined.

The hard/soft scale. The list of senses of hard provides a rich source for specializations in a great many contexts, all of them conceived in scalar terms. Four examples.

Example 1. Being the person I am, I’ll start with dicks.

From my 8/14/15 posting “Annals of phallicity: the hardness score”, about the:

5-point Erection Hardness Score (developed by specialists in sexual medicine), from 0 (soft, not enlarged) through 4 (“completely hard and fully rigid”); 3 is “hard enough for penetration, but not completely hard”

With some discussion of the British tv show Cucumber, Banana, and Tofu and its 4-point scale: tofu, peeled banana, banana, cucumber.

Example 2. Memories of a scientific childhood. The 10-point Mohs hardness scale for minerals, an absolute hardness scale based on the hardness of diamonds (as #10), with talc on the soft end as #1:

(#4) Discussion in my 10/24/18 posting “Three exercises in cartoon understanding”

Example 3. Sleep comfort. In a jokey Bizarro cartoon about ascetic monasticsm, also from  the “Three exercises” posting:

(#5)

In the same posting, mattress ratings and the like, with firm as the top end of the scale, mattress companies not actually offering boards or board-like beds.

Example 4. Cake textures. Yes, even there. From a food column in the 11/3/19 NYT Magazine (in print), “The Welcome Distraction of Chocolate Cake: Inspired by the one at Landeau Chocolate, in Lisbon, this cake is as simple as it is bold” by Dorie Greenspan; on-line, 10/30/19 as “The Chocolate Cake That Saved My Vacation”:

(#6) (photo: Sarah Anne Ward for The New York Times)

The crucial quote is about cake texture:

Each forkful is a complete composition: The textures go from firm to feathery, the flavors building in intensity.

The cake scale of hardness: from firm to feathery.

The Breedwell cumdump appendix. Some background postings .

— on 1/11/18 in “Electric underwear”:

(#7) Red glow shoulder harness, plain black pouch

The name of the firm (like so many of its garments) can be read as insertive or receptive: with agentive active breed (as in He breeds his boyfriend’s ass / his boyfriend well / with gusto); or with midde-voice breed (as in Joey breeds well ‘Joey is satisfying / easy to breed, Joey is a great fuck’).

— on 5/20/18 in “Blue light special”, with more on Breedwell homowear, including:

(#8) Glowing blue fetish fuckwear

— on 6/2/18 in “Annals of gangbanging: anonymous in Brooklyn”, about a Brooklyn gay sex club with reduced entry price for tops:

(#9)

The ad is intended to attract tops — all the cumdumps you can breed, for one low price — for the benefit, the pleasure, of a corps of bottoms. It’s a scheme to make the (man)sexual marketplace work for everybody.

with cumdump ‘person regarded as no more than a repository for cum (orally, vaginally, or anally)’

In recent gay usage, a cumdump appears to be a man regarded as nothing more than a bareback bottom, used as the object of a gangbang. Hence the verb breed (used for bareback anal sex) in the poster. And the blindfold, worn by gangbanged men who enthusiastically give up control to the tops who use them for sex.

A tour of contrasting, also complementary, ideals of male beauty, and hence of male desirability, as they are played out in the fantasy world of gay male pornography. Apollo (or Adonis) vs. Dionysus (or Bacchus or Priapus), Ganymede (the prototypical catamite) vs. Zeus (the prototypical inseminator), beautiful boy vs. powerful man, worked into conventional forms of porn for men, and then complexly subverted by role reversals in which Apollo penetrates Priapus.

Yes, there’s a site (Twink Top) for that — there’s specialist porn for pretty much every fantasy — as well as at least one site (Fun Size Boys) intensifying and celebrating the boy/man dichotomy (featuring little guys taken sexually by really big guys).

This posting is drenched in mansex discussed in street language and so is utterly inappropriate for kids or the sexually modest.

So, advance notice: thanks to the sites I’ll be talking about, this posting is laser-focused on guys fucking guys up the ass, even though that’s far from the central sexual feature of most gay men’s experience; as I regularly point out, in real life almost everyone sucks cock and gets their cock sucked, and that’s everyday sex, achieved easily in almost any setting and requiring no special preparation or clean-up. (I’ve never really taken umbrage at being called a cocksucker. I mean, well, of course; most guys are pussy-fuckers, a few of us are cocksuckers, who knows or really cares why.)

But no doubt because of its obvious parallel to pussy-fucking, male-male ass-fucking plays an outsize role in the imaginative construction of mansex. (If you think like a straight person, this is what gay sex has to be.)

It’s certainly what Twink Top — ‘big-dick twink-top boys topping men’ — is, relentlessly, about.

Exemplars. It started with a mailing from the Twink Top site advertising its Masc Bottom Tag Team video, with this striking image (which doesn’t show any dirty bodyparts, but is obviously about ass-fucking):

(#1) The boys Cole, Marcus, and Austin lined up to take turns at Coach Landon; the locker-room setting is a standard, but the sport involved is, so far as I can tell, never specified (what’s important is the relationship between the older, far more masculine, authority figure and his cute boys; all the other details are irrelevant, so are suppressed)

In another video, Twink Top Training, we get a one-on-one:

(#2) “[The trainer Dolf] Dietrich was a tall, handsome man who never had a problem getting laid, but given his size and his appearance, he’s always been the perfect fantasy of a daddy to the young men he encounters. As much as he loves giving his bare cock to a hungry bottom, he loves the idea of getting plowed by a little guy with a monster member [in this case, Austin Young]”

The twinks are presented as experienced and enthusiastic bottoms for big muscular men, boys (always with big dicks) who become attracted to the idea of switching roles and fucking those men.

The usual scenario appears to involve the twinks getting fucked first, then turning the tables. So, a role reversal, but one presented as temporary. The general world order — man fucks boy — is preserved, with these boy-on-man occasions as a kind of Carnival, once-a-year,  excess.

One snapshot, in absurdly overheated prose, from the Masc Bottom Tag Team video:

The older man couldn’t resist giving him more than just his tongue, sliding off his shorts as he plunged his girthy manhood deep into the young jock’s hole.

Cole and Austin watched on as their friend got bred by the bare cock of their coach, stroking each other’s cocks and making out as the air became thick with their masculine pheromones. But as Coach Landon thrust his cock into Marcus’ hungry hole, they couldn’t take their eyes off the older man’s smooth muscular ass.

… [a bit later:] Coach Landon smiled as Cole positioned himself behind him, watching on his back as the beautiful, young man pressed his thick cock between the coach’s cheeks. Marcus provided a string of spit on his hole to help ease it in, and with a gentle push, Coach Landon felt the hot jock fill his ass…

The other boys watched on, rock hard and stroking their cocks as Cole pounded the older man with his bare cock. Each eager to feel their cocks cum inside the hot daddy’s ass!

Meanwhile, the Fun Size Boys site —

Gay size difference! Fun Size Boys has giant guys (tall big dick tops) and tiny guys (tiny little bottoms), and puts them together!

— takes the man-on-boy theme to an extreme; one boy character is presented as explaining his sexual desires in these terms:

He loves being around very tall men and feeling like their pocket-sized play thing.

(Note that this is not a slam on bottoms. Decades back, when I was sexually active, I was an enthusiastic bottom, fairly describable as a pussy-ass. I loved getting fucked. On the other hand, I never got the big-guy thing at all, and disliked being treated as just a hole to be used. But taste is taste, and Fun Size Boys clearly has its audience.)

The roles that are being reversed. From my 1/28/20 posting “Humongous tops Adonis”:

The Adonis style of beauty is the Apollonian: the ideal type of Boyish Masculinity, as opposed to the ideal type of Mature Masculinity — an opposition sometimes cast as Apollo vs. Priapus (or Dionysus / Bacchus). Apollo smells like fresh herbs, or sandalwood; Priapus smells like musky sex sweat.

(This is not a brief for Apollo or for Priapus.)

(A note in passing that I have always smelled like Priapus: a sexual partner once described my sex sweat — very strongly musky — as smelling like a distillation of locker room. A lot of guys (including, fortunately, my guy Jacques) have thought this is fabulous, but there were occasional guys who were really put off by it. Oh yes, Jacques smelled like Apollo, just amazing, Jesus I miss that.)

Then, on Ganymede, a parallel story, of the beautiful youth Ganymede, taken carnally by the powerfully priapic Zeus. From my 4/15/16 posting “Ganymede on the fly”:

On AZBlogX, some images from the Ganymede series on Priapus of Milet’s blog, showing (a version of) the youth Ganymede’s encounter with the God Zeus, told as an elaborate story in photographic images. Very accomplished stuff, also wonderfully erotic.

The conventional script is of the twink (young, innocent, boyish in build, small, smooth, beautiful, effete) taken by the macho man (older, experienced, hairy, muscular, big, aggressive, butch, tough).

All of this is obviously tinged by a reinscription of feminine vs. masculine in male-male terms.

(Obviously not for kids or the sexually modest. In fact, it’s deeply, unimaginably, not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Another chapter in the big book of positions for mansex, about a type of three-man encounter. From my AZBlogX posting of 3/31/13, “Threesomes and more”:

A gay spitroast, or spitroasting — or taking it at both ends — involves a man being fucked by one man while sucking another man’s cock. The metaphor is to the spitroasting of meat (pork, lamb. chicken)

… Spitroasting is not particularly hard to pull off, and if you’re the fortunate pig on the spit, the thrusting of the guy fucking you can push your mouth onto the cock of the guy you’re sucking, making the three of you a single sexual engine. In my wild younger days, I was the pig a number of times; it’s a total cockpig experience.

This assumes the canonical gay spitroast, in which the pig’s body is horizontal, and facing downward (so that his ass is easily available for fucking). Yes, there’s also an upward pig variant, and a vertical pig variant too. Illustrations on AZBlogX (in the 8/11/20 posting “Spitroast chronicles”), since hardly any of them could be cropped for this blog; after all, the practice is all about dicks, so its representation in gay porn abounds in penises.

A canonical spitroast, from Titan’s Swelter (carefully cropped here):

Participants: fucker Bryan Slater (on the right), pig Gio Forte, suckee David Anthony (on the left); with Slater also engaged in finger-sucking — finger-sucking serving as displaced or symbolic cocksucking, so Slater is giving his cock to Forte while symbolically taking Anthony’s cock in his mouth, making Slater simultaneously (and satisfyingly) insertive and receptive

(On finger-sucking and finger-fucking, see my 3/5/18 posting “fingerwork”, with the hard-core photos in my 3/5/18 AZBlogX posting “Fingering”.)

From here, I’ll follow the AZBlogX posting “Spitroast chronicles”.

Canonical spitroasts. An assortment of canonical examples, from gay porn — starting with my 3/31/13 posting here, “Threesomes and more”.

(1) A gay spitroast from SeanCody.com, with participants Oscar, Calvin, and Jamie; the pig, on his knees, has raised his head to reach the cock offered for him to suck (and consequently arched his back, which is really hot)

(2) Everybody standing; from Titan’s Dust Devils, David Anthony fucks Dario Beck sucks J.R. Matthews

(3) The full photo from Titan’s Swelter, cropped on my regular blog; Bryan Slater fucks Gio Forte sucks David Anthony

(4) From Titan’s Criminal Intent: everybody standing again, while Alessio Romero fucks Will Parker sucks David Anthony

Well, all of this is gayporn athleticism, designed to show maxmum cock. In real life, pigs mostly hump up their asses while lying prone on a horizontal surface (classically, a bed), inviting one cock from behind and accepting a second one from a guy crouched in front of them, or standing at the end of the bed. It’s easy and uncomplicated, and it’s all about the pig, who is getting a double dose of the psychological satisfactions of having another man’s cock within your body, infusing his masculinity with yours and magnifying both. My own experience (not necessarily shared by other men) was of achieving a feeling of enormous, overwhelming power, with two other men inside my body and yoked with me. I use the metaphor of describing myself in those days as a pussy-ass faggot, but it’s a metaphor, not an identity, and the experience was neither feminizing nor submissive, quite the contrary. (Understand that other men undergoing this experience do in fact perceive it as feminizing and seek it out for exactly this reason, and that still other men welcome submitting themselves to another man, for the complex satisfactions of being humiliated and, indeed, abused by them. Back in the day, I was mostly a pussy-ass faggot, but on occasion I also did my service as a top for men who deeply needed these other experiences. Hey, tricks are short-term events, you adapt to the circumstances on the ground.)

One more canonical spitroast:

(5) Part of a gangbang scene, with more cocks in line to replace the two the pig is serving; but very easily acheved — the pig bends down to suck the cock of a sitting man, while another man, standing, takes him from behind

Upward pig. What I think of as “spitroasting the hard way”. The pig is supine, lying on his back; he is fucked missionary-style by one man (knees up, Mother Brown!); with his head dangling over edge of a surface (so largely immobilized), he gets face-fucked from behind by a standing man (alternatively: he’s face-fucked by a man crouched over or standing in in front of him).

(6)  The pig is frogged up for a missionary fuck; the fucker, meanwhile is jacking the pig off (the idea is that everybody should get off); the face-fuck is awkward for many men, but these guys seem to be ecstatic (this is also a fine composition of bodies)

(7) A balancing act for the pig, and very hard on his neck muscles, unless his face-fucker supports his head with a hand on it; the pig here has to jack himself off (and he’s taking a remarkably thick cock up his ass, which takes some training to be managed comfortably)

Upward pig is more favored in gay porn than in real life, in my experience — in gay porn, because it easily provides three visible hard cocks. More dick is always better.

Vertical pig. The pig is sitting up, in fact sitting on his fucker’s cock (Cowboy time!), while sucking the cock of a man standing in front of him. The basic set-up allows for some freedom in how the three bodies fit together. Three examples from gay porn:

(8) In the midst of an orgy (carefully composed for the camera), a basic vertical pig spitroast, displaying, to maximum advantage, both of the cocks the pig is taking into his body

(9) That moment of intense heart-pounding anticipation just before both cocks enter the pig (technically, that’s Reverse Cowboy, rather than the usual Cowboy, as in (8) and (10)

(10) Pornstar Johnny Rapid impaled at both ends (with more cocks in reserve), but still, characteristically, focused on us, his audience

As for me, despite my professed wild enthusiasm for getting fucked Cowboy style and my experience as a pig in spitroasts, I  somehow never combined the two. Alas, there are lacunae in every life.

(Totally unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)

From the Raging Stallion gay porn studio, the 2020 flick Cake Shop, focused on cake ‘buttock’ and especially on cum as a culinary ingredient. The cover of the video, with the naughty bits fuzzed out:

(#1) At the top: Devin Trez, Jake Nicola, Wade Wolfgar — Trez and Wolfgar with long pendulous half-hard cocks you can view in an AZBlogX posting “Cake Shop” — and  below them, Beaux Banks and Donnie Argento, cupcakes in their mouths, their cakes (‘buttocks’) offered for fucking

There is much play on cakes ‘buttocks’ and on eating cum (that’s a queer thing).

Background: cakes and cum. Previously on this blog, in my 7/18/20 posting “Buttocks IV: cake(s) and tail”, on cake, cakes (and tail) as buttocks references:

both PL C[ount] cakes and M[ass] cake are slang of long standing, having been attested for at least 50 years

The posting then has a survey section on the usages.

Also, two postings on cum, seminophilia, and cum in or as food:

— on 5/22/18, in “The cumless cake”, on semen and seminophilia:

Actual cupcakes or larger cakes with a cum garnish or with a creamy topping of cum are sometimes depicted in porn, and maybe also composed in real life

— on 3/18/19, “Cum, sweat, and broccoli”, on cum in or as food, and on the magical properties of cum

Raging Stallion’s cake shop. The Raging Stallion summary of the flick is itself an over-the-top romp in advertising copy and porn talk, quite entertaining. The p.r. text (with some bits of porn-talk register highlighted in boldface):

Raging Stallion’s busy, bareback bakery ‘Cake Shop’ takes you on a behind the scenes look at two guys, a gay bakery dream and some very special ingredients! A sexually intense, gay porn comedic romp written and directed by award winner Steve Cruz, ‘Cake Shop’ delivers a hilarious group of all-natural, creampie kinksters who drop a lot of icing on each other’s cakes. Ex-lovers Wade Wolfgar and Jake Nicola set up shop, and their bareback bakery starts booming.

(#2) An amiable, high-macho Jake Nicola with a tiered tray of cupcakes (Jake happens to be one of my fantasy-men’s sex names; and Nicola comes with a furry chest, furry forearms, and furry thighs that stir my faggot desires — but that’s just my taste. Gay porn tries to supply something for everyone, of course, but this is a bingo for me)

Filling a special order for Donnie Argento’s first anniversary cake for his husband Sharok, Jake Nicola gets nasty with a raw three way right on the countertop. Donnie squats on a delectable dessert and Jake and Sharok bury their faces in the frosting, till their hardcore vers[atile] three way leaves Jake glazed in cum. Wade hires an assistant, sexy smartass Beaux Banks, who sneaks huge hung fuck buddy Devin Trez thru the back door to pound his back door. In the spirit of equality, the ‘Cake Shop’ caters to couples with differing beliefs, like a fictitious MAGA supporter played by Ricky Larkin and his antivax bride — till Beaux sabotages their big day and the new cashier, Draven Navarro, has to assuage the rage of the horned-up Ricky and drain his bull balls with a wet mouth and hot hungry hole. Health inspector Cain Marko pops by for a surprise visit, and Wade will do anything to make up for their code violations, including violating the inspector on the kitchen counter. With his job on the line, Beaux cooks up a scheme to ditch the cake shop for good. He calls up bad boy Romeo Davis for some booty call baby batter. As the health department finally puts an end to the rainbow confections, Draven Navarro comes up with a plan to save the business — by turning it into a porn studio with big dick stud Jason Vario fucking the daylights out of him. Jake and Wade face a bright new future, proving you can have your cock and eat it too, only at Raging Stallion’s ‘Cake Shop’!

The description of scene 1, which is even more over-the-top; I don’t recall having seen perky hole for a type of asshole before (many decades ago, when I had a side career as a sweet and easy fuck, I got a number of compliments on the attractions of my asshole, but never perky. Definitely a gigglicious adjective.)

Cake Shop’ owner, Jake Nicola greets his old flame Donnie Argento, who wants to surprise his husband, Sharok, with a special cake for their first anniversary. The secret ingredient he wants to add is his own jizz as the cream filling. Donnie is hot to trot and wants to extract it with Jake’s help, but the chef wisely suggests that they include his man. Sharok arrives, and the horny trio convene in the bakery for a three-way, bareback flip fuck with Donnie nude in position on the counter: rock hard cock, beefy butt and perky hole at the ready. Jake and Sharok strip down and take turns eating his ass, especially after Donnie squats down on the special dessert and gets his own cakes covered in frosting. Licking him clean, the boys get him primed and ready for a raw, deep-dick fuck as Jake’s thick prick pries Donnie’s ass open, and Sharok’s huge tool gets in for sweet, sloppy seconds. Donnie gives as good as he gets and he fucks his hubby hard, then climbs on the counter to sit on Jake while Sharok bangs the baker. Sharok blasts his seed in Jake’s hairy hole till Jake blows a load on his furry belly, then guzzles Donnie’s jizz in a cum-thirsty finish.

(Maybe perky is just part of ornamental adjective-talk in the gay porn register: horny trio, rock hard cock, beefy butt, perky hole, thick prick, huge tool, hairy hole, furry belly.)

On the matter of the construction of gay male sexual lives in porn (rather than the language used), I  remind you that the porn world is unrealistically fuck-oriented (sucking cock and getting sucked are the central features of everyday gay life; a fair number of men have no special interest in fucks, and for others they’re special events). But in gay porn, the slogan is pretty much:

Real Men love taking it up the ass.

It would actually please me if this attitude spread more widely (not just because when I was sexually active, I loved taking it up the ass), if only because it would help to subvert the intense misogyny that attends on women’s being the receptive partners in fucking, and then spreads to deep contempt for gay men, who are seen as utterly failed men, because, like women, they take dick (in their mouths or in their assholes, but anyway into their bodies).

(Totally steeped in queerness, with some really steamy male photography, but it’s mostly about culture and art, and only incidentally about men’s genitals or mansex — so caution advised for kids and the sexually modest.)

It started with a blow-in card that fell out of the most recent issue of Out magazine:

(#1) Hard-cruisin’ Daddy: an abstastic  Daddy type, displaying a Cruise of Death face, with narrowed eyes and intense gaze — Boys faint on the street from the sheer intensity of his combined sexual desire (for them) and sexual desirability (by them) — while modeling a remarkable suit from a high-fashion designer

It then turns out that there is even more here than meets the eye, because the model is in fact presented as knowing — not actually just  a very hot guy (if this is your taste) caught cruising for (gay) sex on the street, but a model engaged in a performance for his viewers, deliberately projecting a specific sexual persona. (Male photography is full of photos of men presented as captured in fleeting moments of inadvertently displaying their bodies or engaging in various kinds of intimacy with one another, but there’s also a huge genre of self-conscious posing, and #1 is solidly in the latter genre.)

The blow-in card is taken from the cover of the April/May 2020 issue of Out —

(#2)

where it accompanies  the piece “Celeb Photographer Mike Ruiz Is As Interesting As His Subjects” by Richard Pérez-Feria.

And then there’s more. As I said above, the whole thing is steeped in queerness. Just as the Firesign Theatre once proclaimed, in the title of their fourth comedy album (1971), the wonderfuly surrealistic I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus, the theme of #1 can fairly be said to be

(I think) we’re all faggots on this ferry (and that’s a really wonderful thing)

The magazine’s core audience is fags (like me); virtually all of the male editorial staff are fags;  in particular, the writer of this piece, Richard Pérez-Feria, is a fag; the photographer for #2, Rick Day, is a fag; the subject of the piece, Mike Ruiz, is a fag; the designer of the suit Ruiz is wearing in #2, Franco Lacosta, is (quelle surprise! a gay fashion designer!) a fag. All of them quite open in their sexuality. This is all fabulous to me; when I was struggling so painfully with my homosexuality as a young man in an intensely homophobic place, I could scarcely have imagined that anything like this would ever be possible.

[Digression 1. The label fag. I use this to refer to a homosexual / gay / queer man, and if it offends you, you can do a global substitution. But I choose the label carefully. Originally, it was to reclaim a slur, as gay and queer had previously been reclaimed. It’s uncomplicatedly a C[ount] noun — one fag, two fags — and it’s refreshingly in your face (we’re here. we’re fags, get used to it), so it’s easy to use.

More important, fag has repeatedly been used to refer disparagingly to the most obvious of my brothers, the femmy guys that nobody could mistake for straight — the “bad gays”. But they’re the leading edge: they are as they are (for whatever reason, really, who cares?) and they’re not in a position to blend in, as guys like me did for years without thinking these things through. They stick out, and they get the shit intended for the rest of us heaped on their heads. They are our public saints (rarely, alas, our leaders), and they deserve to be  celebrated.

(Besides, I think faggy guys are just hot. But then I have a complicated sexual history.)

In any case, I want to stand with the faggy guys. (I note that in their sexual interests, faggy guys are all over the map.  And that when I was sexually active with men, I was a pussy-ass faggot — that is, I loved to get fucked.) Whatever you might have seen in the way I presented myself. I now think it’s especially important for me to say this — it’s a kind of moral duty, in my view — clearly and repeatedly, to people who know me as an earnest scholar and as an amiable and empathetic friend): I am, in a significant way, just like the faggy guys so many people deride as sick and worthless. Judge them as you do me.]

[Digression 2. Blow-in cards. From Wikipedia:

In advertising, an insert or blow-in card is a separate advertisement put in a magazine, newspaper, or other publication. They are usually the main source of income for non-subscription local newspapers and other publications.

… Bind-in cards are cards that are bound into the bindings of the publication, and will therefore not drop out. [AZ: most magazines come to me with both types of cards.]

Background: the magazine. Very briefly, from Wikipedia:

Out is an American LGBTQ news, fashion, entertainment, and lifestyle magazine, with the highest circulation of any LGBTQ monthly publication in the United States. It presents itself in an editorial manner similar to Details, Esquire, and GQ.

All of this is accurate, but the focal audience for Out has always been fags, and still is.

The story, beginning:

The first time I laid eyes on Mike Ruiz, back in 1997, when he walked into my office to show me his photo book for a possible assignment, I remember thinking, He’s the photographer? We should be shooting him. But there he was, looking like a Tom of Finland illustration come to life, but smiling and giggling like a 9-year-old. It was then, as it is now, a contradictory cocktail of tough and sweet. Who could resist? Oh, and the fact that he’s among the very top tier of American celebrity, fashion, and portrait photographers isn’t just icing on the cake — it is the cake. Ruiz is here to slay, brothers and sisters, and I’ve been rooting for him since our very first encounter.

About  the writer, who has become the new editor in chief of the magazine, from a news release on 2/29/20: “‘Out’ and ‘The Advocate’ Magazines Announce New Leadership”:

Pride Media, the country’s largest LGBTQ+ media company, announced a new and innovative leadership structure with the appointment of several editors Friday.

CEO Diane Anderson-Minshall will serve as executive editorial director of all five brands: Out, The Advocate, Plus, Pride, and Out Traveler, overseeing 15 editors, three social media experts, and five creative arts staffers who each work across the brands.

Richard Pérez-Feria [born 9/4/64 in Boston MA] has been named Out’s new editor in chief. A gay Latinx man, Pérez-Feria is an award-winning New York-based journalist who is currently editor in chief and CEO of Saratoga Living. He began his career at Esquire before moving on to 7 Days. Early in his career, Pérez-Feria was the founding editor in chief of Poz, the National Magazine Award-winning publication for people living with HIV. He later was editor in chief at Time Inc.’s People en Español, the country’s largest magazine for Latinx and Spanish-speaking readers. He’s also been editor in chief for numerous magazines and websites, including Elliman, 7×7, Vegas Inc., HudsonMOD, Celebrity Style, Gym, Music Choice, Shape’s Fit Hollywood, Burn!, Teen Celebrity, TennisMatch, Brash, PersonalMD, NowItCounts, and, most recently, PuraPhy and Saratoga Living.

Pérez-Feria is a sports and fitness guy, among all those other things.

About the subject of the article. From Wikipedia, the bland details:

Mike Ruiz (born December 8, 1964) is a Canadian photographer, director, television personality, former model, spokesperson, creative director, and actor

(#3) Daddy-meat Ruiz porning for the Modus Vivendi homowear company: displaying his extremely gym-toned body in a pitsntits pose, plus a prominent package thrust out, a modest cock-tease in his MV skivvies, and of course the Cruise Face (those overdeveloped glistening muscles are a real turnoff for me, but then for some of my friends this is come-in-your-pants hot; each to his own)

Ruiz, who is of French Canadian and Spanish Filipino ancestry, was born in Montreal in 1964, but raised in Repentigny, Quebec, Canada. He moved to the United States at age 20 to pursue a career in the entertainment industry. After modeling for a decade he moved to Los Angeles to study acting. In 1997, Ruiz appeared in the independent film Latin Boys Go to Hell.

At the age of 28 Ruiz began in the field of photography…

[Digression 3. Latin Boys Go to Hell. From Rotten Tomatoes on the 1997 film:

Spurned by his heterosexual cousin Angel, distraught photograher’s assistant Justin falls into the eager arms of model Carlos [played by Ruiz], thus enraging Carlos’s insanely jealous occasional lover Braulio whose girlfriend Andrea in turn falls for Angel. Beginning as a straightforward melodrama, the story eventually becomes a parody of popular Latin American telenovelas.]

Back in the real world, Ruiz was (of course, openly) partnered with Martin Berusch for several years, until Berusch suddenly died in 2016; Ruiz then married Wayne Schatz in May 2019.

Note that Ruiz has been both the topic of male photography and also the photographer of other men’s bodies. This is not uncommon: many fags can move back and forth easily between being objects and agents. It’s the way we live.

About the designer. The remarkable suit Ruiz is wearing in #2 is by Franco Lacosta New York. Again, I start with the bland Wikipedia version:

Franco Lacosta born in New York City, New York is a Puerto Rican television personality, producer and fashion designer. He has worked with networks such as ABC, NBC, CWTV, Bravo, and NuvoTV. He is best known for his on-camera appearances for TV shows including America’s Next Top Model, Model Latina, The Bachelor, and The Bachelorette. Lacosta’s menswear designs are presented by New York Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week.

… In 2013, Franco launched his namesake line [of men’s fashion], Franco Lacosta New York.

More informatively, from his own website:

Franco Lacosta is an international high fashion model turned photographer and menswear designer. Born in New York, raised in Puerto Rico, Franco studied Art History at Pratt Institute. During these formative years in college, Franco had the opportunity to meet the master Italian couturier Gianfranco Ferre, who offered him an internship at his design house in Milan.

This gave Lacosta the opportunity to learn and understand the business of fashion and opened the door to his career, which encompassed multiple aspects of the fashion world – starting as an intern, becoming a model, brand ambassador, designer, collaborator, beauty expert and photographer – providing a full spectrum of experiences in the industry and the ultimate knowledge necessary to creating a successful brand. Throughout the years, Lacosta worked in Italy with Gianfranco Ferre where he was featured in Italian Vogue; in Paris as brand ambassador with Yves Saint Laurent, in London with the likes of style patron Isabella Blow, and lastly in New York, where, amongst others, he has been capturing the exceptional designs of Naeem Khan in his photography. Additionally, he captivated the audiences all across America in the original content that he has co-produced and created for the TV network NBC Universal, while being featured in shows such as Model Latina and America’s Next Top Model.

Lacosta currently resides in Chelsea, New York, where his studio is also located. After having gathered vast experiences in the fashion and beauty world, he is now establishing a progressive menswear and accessories lines.

(I note with irritation that Lacosta seems to have gone to some trouble to conceal his age.)

Before I go on to appreciate Lacosta’s presentations of himself as a hot fuck, and to puzzle at the attractions of his men’s clothing, I note that Lacosta has a husband of 20 years and that the couple have a daughter; the family is remarkably sweet. Lacosta himself is keenly, painfully, aware of the social and political context he works in; from an interview on the DuJour site:

“As a gay [person], you’re bullied as a child,” adds Lacosta.  “Most [of us] are. And all of a sudden you realize there’s great power in being who you are. So you’re no longer a victim. You’re a victor.”

We are all fags on this ferry. And we’re not going to take it any more.

Lacosta presenting himself as simultaneously a hot piece of meat — I WANT YOU! — and the designer of very quirky men’s fashion:

(#4)

I appreciate the hot-guy part, but I’m perpetually baffled by most of what happens in high fashion, especially for men. The jacket in #4 looks to me like a playful joke, but I can’t imagine paying great chunks of money for it, much less wearing it in public; maybe it’s just a runway thing, not meant for the real world. Meanwhile, back in #2, Ruiz is modeling what strikes me as a totally preposterous Lacosta suit; it made me giggle. (Ok, I’m a rube. I suppose I actually am a rube, despite the extensive veneer of my amazing education.)

Yes, we are all fags on this ferry, but that doesn’t mean I’ve given up my faculties of judgment.

About the photographer. And then there’s the fag who took the pictures. Again, I’ll start with Wikipedia:

Rick Day (born July 30, 1962) is an American photographer based in New York City. His work concentrates on advertising photography and video.

… Day published his first [homoerotic] coffee table book, Players, in 2008. His second book, Pioneers, released in 2010, debuted at number one on the Amazon.com best-selling erotic book list. Players Two was published in 2011, and All Players was released in 2012. To date, all of Day’s books have been released through publisher Bruno Gmünder Verlag.

I have the first two books (Players and Pioneers), both frankly and celebratorily homoerotic. Like all of Day’s work, knowingly so. The models are posing for us (by posing for Day), enjoying our gaze and inviting us to get off on them, if that’s our pleasure. But they’re also abstract objects of male beauty, to appreciate on those terms.

As the Wikipedia piece recognizes, all of his earlier work was published by Bruno Gmünder Verlag, the premier outlet for male art of many kinds. For whatever reasons, this commercial arrangement ceased to be satisfactory to Day, so he’s struck out as an independent operator, using Kickstarter appeals to fund his new books.

From his Kickstarter appeal, with a colorfully hard sell:

My last book “Castings” was a playful musing on my social media, a kind of journal of my daily life.  A fun, cheeky, sexy collection of images featuring top agency models and instagram ‘celebrities’. Uninhibited, daring and fun.

(#4) What can I say? Pantingly sexual, and very carefully composed

This new book ‘Carnal’ however has been inspired by the puritanical forces that are taking over America. These forces are finding their way into selective censoring of social media. The erasure of erotic art, to me, represents a crisis point of culture, of democracy.

I don’t need anyone telling me what I can and cannot see.

Art empowers when it’s transgressive, scandalous, nude, erotic. Art is where minds are opened, ideas challenged, viewpoints explored, where one can be free, even if for a minute.

You can sweep carnal longings under the rug but you cannot get rid of carnal cravings.

It will always be there.  ALWAYS.

So please help me bring this book to life by supporting my Kickstarter.

It is the most racy book that I have ever published.

Your hunger will be quenched

(#5) From the book

And that’s the news from Fag Central.

(About men’s bodies and mansex, in very plain language. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The trigger is an e-mail ad from the gay porn company Falcon Studio for their recent video I Spy — shown here in a cropped version, though Devin Franco’s penis is a significant part of the story. The posting is about body types and “having a type” in sexual attraction, and Devin Franco is here because he’s very much one of my types, since his body so much resembles my man Jacques’s:

(#1) Devin Franco displaying his body: a nicely muscled swimmer’s body, with a long torso, just my style; plus extravagantly erect nipples, for extra hotness

The whole shot, with his very nice dick, can be viewed on AZBlogX, in the 8/23/20 posting “Devin Franco”.  (Well, one reader got that posting without the image, I don’t know why, and I’m finding it desperately hard to get through these days of high temperatures and fires and I don’t know how to fix any of this. All I can offer in these terrible times: if you can’t view the image, send me e-mail and I will send you the image by e-mail. One reader by one.)

Franco’s cock is cut, while Jacques’s was not, but then nobody’s perfect. Franco also has a pornstar cock, signficantly longer than the mean; however, it’s nicely thick and fits the rest of his body well (rather than looking like a huge protrusion from his body) — all in all, a handsome cock, so I find the photo very pleasing. Look, I’m into dick, unapologetically. (I haven’t engaged with one in any fashion for more than 15 years now, and surely never will again, but even an old man can indulge his imaginative pleasures.)

[I haven’t viewed Falcon’s I Spy and probably never will, so its story line is pretty much beside the point (though Franco is not), but the Falcon p.r. release is in my AZBlogX posting.  It’s clearly intended to be one episode in a multi-part video. Though it is relevant that Franco the pornstar loves to get fucked.]

Franco the actor. Just to remind you, there’s “Devin Franco” the actor in gay porn, and there’s the character he plays in I Spy, and there’s a guy with a totally different name whose occupation is as an actor in gay porn and leads a life we know absolutely nothing about (and who might share with the other two the ( to my mind) admirable pleasure in getting fucked, though that’s not a sure thing).

About the actor, in p.r. from the Lucas Entertainment site:

model Devin Franco:  position: bottom/versatile, dick size: 8”, height: 5’10

Devin Franco is known for his woodworking skills — and no, that’s not a cheap sex joke. Devin builds custom furniture at his Albuquerque home as a profession. But he also spends a lot of time at the gym and is working toward a personal trainer certification. Devin believes in working hard, and that’s one of the reasons why he performs in the adult industry — he’s not going to waste any of his assets, and that includes his boyish good looks … More specifically, Devin enjoys an audience when he’s with men: “I like to show off… I am a bit of an exhibitionist. I also love getting fucked and pleasing hot muscular guys.”

(that last tossed-off sentence is just wonderful)

The man photographed by Jesse Ashton in DNA Magazine on 9/13/18:

(#2) Front view, about as close to the line as you can get (in gay porn, no matter how much of a bottom you might be, you have to offer a hard  porn dick to your audience, and deliver it)

(#3) Rear view, offering the main attraction

Types. Beyond #1, there are other male types I’m pretty much spontaneously attracted to: short compact men, especially with dark hair; athletic black men; and more. Then … if you’ve had an especially satisfying sexual experience with someone, their body type is likely to get added to your hot list — which is how chunky Mexican guys got on my list, thanks to a very sweet trick at the baths with the character Hector (from a sex-at-the-baths posting from 8/30/10 on AZBlogX, recalling a much earlier occasion. The text is frankly and intimately sexual, in very plain language:

New world San Jose

I am lying, naked, on my stomach on the bed in a mirrored room, my face turned towards the open door to the narrow hallway. In principle, this means I’m offering my ass to be fucked, but in fact the signals are more complex than that. Men passing by will read my exposed ass in combination with my outward gaze as a general openness to sexual connection, including but not limited to a willingness to be fucked. If I turned my face away from the door, I’d be making one request – fuck me – not any kind of offer. If I lay on my back and contemplatively stroked my cock, it would be understood that my ass probably wasn’t on the program. If I sat up stroking my cock, offering it, then it wouldn’t even be clear that I was interested in other guys’ cocks. If I used my towel to cover my crotch, I’d be presenting a puzzle and a challenge.

I always lie naked on my stomach, eyes towards the door.

Several men have paused at the door, checked me out, and walked on. A few have leaned against the doorframe and asked me how things are goin’;  when I rolled onto one elbow, they scoped out my cock, and said they’d be seein’ me.

I have learned that there really are size queens in this world  [my cock is on the lower end of normal in length so in America I count as having a small, and therefore undesirable, cock], though not nearly as many as you might have supposed from the surface of gay male discourse, so I persist, and I don’t take these rejections to heart.

One guy – short, broad-shouldered, solid and rectangular – gives me a big Pancho-Villa-moustachioed smile, closes the door behind him, sits on the edge of the bed… and pulls me up to kiss him, in a new variation every ten seconds or so, for minutes on end. Hector and I have half-hard-ons, but somehow that’s not what’s important. I lick the ends of his long moustache; he rubs his nose against my neatly clipped one. He smells and tastes delicious, completely unlike me, cinnamon and chilis. He tells me I smell sexy, dirty but good (this would be my muskiness), nibbles my ears delicately, one after the other. I run my tongue slowly, systematically, between his teeth and lips, top first, then the bottom.

We take a break, exchange  c.v.’s. Hector is a gardener, for a small family service, him and his brothers and a couple of cousins (“All estraight”, he adds, pulling an unhappy face.) I demote myself to a schoolteacher, junior high, not wanting The Professor to freeze this nice man up, wanting to locate myself in an occupational world he understands, can continue to feel comfortable with (as I am comfortable in his daytime world of soil and mulch and pruning shears).

We fall to a bit of childish silliness, comparing our very different bodies. His neck is short, thick, powerfully muscled; mine is longer, thinner, shows off my adam’s apple (which he kisses, delicately). He has very little hair on his body, while mine is moderately furry; each of us is slightly repelled, and also much aroused, by this gross difference in the surfaces of our bodies. His cock is only a bit longer than mine, but quite thick (a perfect mouthful), uncut (before Jacques came into my sexual life, I had no particular preference on this dimension, it was just another way for cocks to be, but now uncut cocks remind me sweetly of him), and darkly veined.

Hector is astonished to see my flow of pre-cum, the petit orgasm he has already given me. I tell him that my lover is utterly dry beforehand but leaks for ten or fifteen minutes afterwards, and that my boyfriend Tim, like Hector, saves it all for the main event. He is suddenly withdrawn, sad, confronted with a world where one can not only have a lover but boyfriends as well. I would like to lend him Tim, ship Danny back from Japan for him. I want to introduce him to Jacques, but Jacques is three thousand miles away.

I lick his ears (compact, like all the rest of him), with just the tip of my tongue. In the low yellow light of this room, they are golden brown. His spirit returns; he wraps his arms around me (does he understand how thrilling I find this sensation of power in reserve?),  kisses my eyebrows, then gently closes my eyes by kissing my eyelids. He sighs deeply. He might, or might not, just have come, it’s not important.

My crotch is soaked with pre-cum, from one petit orgasm after another. I feel distraught, angry, that a gay bathhouse is apparently the only place in the world where this earnest, dignified man can find someone to hold him and tell him how desirable he is.

We hold each other, sharing the warmth of our bodies, for a few more minutes, then part without good-byes. At the door, with the knob in his hand, he raises one eyebrow, and I nod my head. He opens the door all the way, walks off down the hallway.

I lie back on my stomach, enjoying the wet spot under me, courtesy of Hector.

The crucial part is in boldface, and I am still fucking angry. And of course chunky Mexican guys are now totally hot for me. But I have worried for years how Hector — his sex name, surely not his real one, just as my name was Alex — ever managed his life, without bringing terrible consequences on himself.

(When I remember this event now, I recall that Hector and I traded blow jobs, as is everyday custom for gay men, but I see now that neither of us took the other’s cock into his body; if he had wanted to fuck me, well, that was what I was advertising,  and if he had wanted me to fuck him, I would have given him that, but I see now that neither of us even sucked cock. It was all about intimacy and connection, and that was enormously pleasing. A moment of sexual grace.)

(All about men’s bodies and mansex, described in street language, so utterly inappropriate for kids or the sexually modest. As usual, I have more general points to make about sex, gender, and sexuality, but there’s no getting around the flagrant raunchiness of the content.)

An e-mail ad yesterday for a Daily Jocks sale, promoting their DJX fetishwear, specifically their very handsome harnesses and jockstraps, that comes as close to being flat-out gay porn as possible. A beautifully (but not extravagantly) muscled male body, lying prone on the silky sheets of a bed — simultaneously tough and high-masculine and also sumptuously queer — with his knees drawn up to offer his very muscular male buttocks for sex.

The ad:

(#1)

The photo has been doctored to smooth out the buttocks shot, so that we don’t see his actual asshole — that would definitely have been over the porn line — but do get to appreciate the promise and potential of his asscleft. It’s a Fuck Me shot, with a substantial tradition behind it.

And it’s beautifully done (credits to the photographer and editors). Look, when I was sexually active, I was mostly an enthusiastic bottom (like the character presented in #1), though nowhere near as butch-gorgeous, but still I find the presentation in #1 moving enough to make me fantasize about doing him, rather than being him; it got me hard. Of course, the point of the ad is to sell the goods, and the DJX people understand that their prospective customers mostly fantasize about being him and getting fucked in DJX fetishwear, but they’re offering both perspectives.

Fuck Me shots. From my 4/2/20 posting “Astride the jockstrap trail”:

a regular feature of this blog: advertisements for premium men’s underwear that treat men’s bodies simultaneously as the engines of vigorous athletic pursuits and as the loci of hot sex between men. And, correspondingly, that view the underwear — especially the quintessentially masculine undergarment, the jockstrap — as simultaneously a piece of sports gear and a vehicle for sexual advertisement, displaying a man’s package prominently in front and his bare buttocks behind.

… from my 12/30/18 posting “Sexual displays > offers: prone, supine, lateral”, in a section on prone displays of the naked male body, focused on the model’s buttocks (this is a version of a more explicit AZBlogX piece):

Many gay men, responding to their predilections and desires, would look upon these butts and find them arousing, would be inclined to view them as implicit offers; but they’re just posed bodies. Sometimes, however, the offer is explicit: the subject spreads his legs and humps up his ass, making his asshole available (and his cock and balls visible), as here…

(#2) Richard Vytniorgu, spread and humped up…

Spread and humped up, … in a variant of the prone position, but now offering his body. He could be easily fucked in this position, or he could raise himself up on his knees, offering himself for a doggie fuck

Vytniorgu is a twink, slim and adorable, and frankly presents himself as faggy (in my world, this is not a criticism); the hunky male model in #1, on the other hand, is presented as really butch, but as equally sexually receptive. They are both delicious, each in his own way.

In fact, the model in #1 is one step past Vytniorgu above: he has drawn up his knees partway, so that his ass is seriously humped up. Just one step from the sexual litany of oh fuck me fuck me please fuck me.

Notes on getting fucked. After getting hard, one of my first reactions to #1 was to think that the model really could have used some support under his crotch, to make it more comfortable for him to take a cock up his ass. I say this from personal experience as a pussy-ass faggot (in a previous life).

A great many years ago, I had come to appreciate (with enormous shame and pain) my desire for cock, and explored sucking guys off, often inexpertly and with great awkwardness, but I persevered. At the same time, I had appreciated my asshole as a source of pleasure from my earliest teenage years, regularly fingering my hole while jacking off. Eventually I realized that, well, I really wanted to combine these two themes and get fucked.

I bought a obvious gay sex magazine — Mandate or something like it —  in a shop in Boston’s Combat Zone (long gone) and took it a few blocks to Boston Common, sitting on a bench and displaying it prominently in the hope that I would attract a man to fuck me.

A very sweet man sat down next to me and  told me that I was doing something dangerous, there were guys who preyed on boys like me (well, I was 26, but the definition of boy is elastic), and flat out asked me if I wanted to be fucked. If not, he’d go away; if so, he could provide me with what I wanted, it was what he did for young men and he was good at it. He was both sweetly concerned and electrifyingly direct.

Here I note several important things: J was not only significantly older than me, he was also black and very prissily faggy — a gay auntie, in some people’s terms. I had no problem with either of those things (in fact, after the event, they both became sexually charged for me, thanks to J), so he took me to his flat on the back side of Beacon Hill, where he had a setup to engage in what he referred to as “annual intercourse” with his boys.

He was a hospital attendant at one of the big local hospitals. His setup included a gurney, well cushioned and at its lowest height (also, crucially, very stable) and it came with a hospital cushion to put under his boys’ asses so that they would be comfortable when he fucked them (there’s the connection to #1 above).

He then gave me an expert blowjob, explaining that that would relax my asshole and open me up for his cock (an excellent idea),  and he lubed my hole and finger-fucked me while he sucked me off. I came incredibly fast, and then me moved up on the gurney to mount me.

He slid his cock into me very slowly and carefully, not wanting to hurt me, asking me to tell him how it felt along the way, so he could give me what I needed. At some point I disintegrated into moaning, and then I was giving him what he wanted and he came, with an oh-fuck-fuck shout, inside me.

I don’t think this could have been more perfect. The hospital equipment I had not imagined, but otherwise this was my fantasy first fuck, and it was unimaginably, devastatingly, pleasurable.

Devastating because before that moment I thought I was just a very kinky straight guy who liked to suck cock sometimes and fantasized a lot about men, but now I appreciated that I was truly a fag, this was home and it was deeply satisfying, and somehow I would have to work out how to try to live a decent life in this identity.

Of course, it was a long hard slog, poisoned by shame from within me and hatred from outside.

In any case, in my experience, a pillow or cushion under your crotch when you’re getting fucked is an excellent idea.

On masculinity and getting fucked. The standard view in the straight world is that a guy who gets fucked is feminized by the experience, is in fact expressing a feminine identity. I know that there are guys for whom this is true — I’ve interviewed a few of them at some length, and I think I appreciate their sense of feminine identification and also think it should be honored — but it isn’t the way things have worked for me at all.

When I have a man’s cock inside me, I feel vibrantly masculine, like I have all of mine and he is sharing all of his with me; we are guy-squared, we’re juicing each other up. It feels astonishingly powerful. The physical sensations are complex and very satisfying (though they can be achieved with sex toys), but the emotional satisfactions are far beyond what I imagined when the 13-year-old Arnold played with his asshole while jacking off.

That was one of the lessons of getting fucked for the first time by J (see above), and I totally was not prepared for the possibility that J wasn’t just going to satisfy my anal itch (wherever that came from, who knows), but that he was going to take me to a fresh state of being, just by giving his dick to me. (I remind you that J was nobody’s ideal of masculinity, but he had a dick and he shared it with me and generously gave me his cum, the physical essence of his masculinity, within my body.)

Yes, I know. Earlier postings might have told you that from earliest childhood I was perceived by others as being insufficiently masculine — not nearly aggressive enough, deeply aversive to playing sports and to sports fandom, artistic and nerdy instead, given to close friendships with girls, and so on — though my own perceptions were that I was just a guy, but an unusual species of guy. Well, yes, it turned out I was also queer, which amplified other people’s perceptions that I was a failure at masculinity. But I continue to feel that I’m both male and masculine — just with my own brand of (homo)masculinity.

But there’s no way I was deaf to all these outside opinions about my failures as a man. It actually seems reasonable to me to think that I’ve responded to these negative views by seeing sex with other men as a way of taking their own masculinity within me (both figuratively and literally). My pleasure at getting fucked might have its roots in a kind of mutually reassuring trade: you give me your masculinity, buddy, and I’ll give you mine.

Thinking about it this way, I say, well, that’s not a bad deal. So what if my intense pleasure at getting fucked might have originated in my anxieties about my masculinity? Why should anyone care? It works for everybody involved, it harms no one, it doesn’t frighten the horses in the street. Why mess with that?

I do not, of course, think I am alone in my feelings. So I’m talking to other guys here. Pretty clearly, there are lots of us. In fact, we fuel much of gay porn, the part devoted to the proposition that

Real Men Take It Up the Ass

(examples all over my blogging on mansex). A defiant assertion of shared masculinity though fucking.

You should probably see this (very strong) Real Men theme of gay porn as reassurance to its customers that their desires to be fucked are not only acceptable, but both customary and laudable. (I’m not disagreeing with that.)

Yesterday on Facebook, Jeff Shaumeyer with a currently hot meme:

Inexplicably, there are still people in America who believe this is always true!

HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED
THE POLICE LEAVE YOU ALONE IF YOU
AREN’T DOING ANYTHING ILLEGAL

A chain of responses followed (including a long unhappy response by me). Highlights below (reproduced here with permission).

— Jeff Bowles: Sure. If you’re white.

— Jeff Shaumeyer: Which, I suppose, is why it’s white people who keep saying this.

— Julian Lander: Is this where I note that I have no memory of any interaction with the police that was in any way adversarial? And my interactions with them otherwise have been exceedingly rare, if you omit those on traffic details and such. I’m not sure I’ve spoken to an on-duty policeman in my life. [This is not a claim of moral superiority but an assertion of ignorance.]

(In a separate mailing, JL added: I’m concerned about being misinterpreted. I hope you understand that my statement was an explanation of why I lack perspective in this area, and am hesitant to claim expertise.)

— Jeff Shaumeyer: This is why, when AOC [American congressional representative Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez] was asked what an America without police would look like, she said “a white suburb”. Most White people have very little experience with police. My experience has been about once every 45 years.

— Christopher Walker: In my earlier years I was more visually identifiable as a gay person. My one (non-traffic) experience with on-duty policemen was having two of them not interfere while a small gang of zealots spat on me.

I was still a white person, so my life was not in danger

— AZ: I’m white but gay, and my experiences with the police here in Palo Alto have been, with only one exception, fraught. (Though nothing like the experiences of my black friends, virtually all of whom have been picked up and aggressively grilled by the cops for just being some place the cops thought they don’t belong.)

A while back I reported a burglary, and as soon as the officer entered my house and saw that was a fag’s place he became quite hostile and tried very hard to make the burglary my fault (suggesting that I had allowed friends — meaning other queers — into the house). Fortunately, he had a rookie cop with him, who was young and sympathetic and did some careful mediation. But I’m truly sorry I reported the burglary.

(Back some years, I got regular death threats on the phone for being a faggot, and never even considered reporting them to the cops; it would have been a disaster.)

The one occasion when I escaped the hostility involved a homeless man, quite drunk, who collapsed on the sidewalk outside my house. When the cops came to my report I was outside on the street and wore nothing that smelled of queerness, so they just treated me as an ordinary concerned citizen. Remarkable because it was unproblematic, what white people generally expect.

Back in Columbus [when I taught at Ohio State, 1969-98] it was much much worse. Because of the political activism of my household and my gay activism, the cops tapped our phone and surveilled my activities, assembling a giant collection of materials that they hoped to use against me (I discovered this from an Ohio State colleague in criminology who was astonished to see the collection at police headquarters and warned me about it.)

So no, cops are not my friends. I view every one of them with grave suspicion. (Of course there are decent cops, like that rookie above, but the default assumption has to be that they’re persecutors, not protectors.)

I say again that my experiences are minuscule in comparison to what my black (and latino) friends regularly encounter, and the experiences of my friends, who are middle-class professionals, are minuscule in comparison to what working-class black and brown folk encounter on a daily basis. Whitefolk just have no idea.

— Jeff Shaumeyer > Arnold Zwicky: thanks for the comment, and your fortitude. When most [straight] white folks shout their desire for “law and order”, they have no idea what “keeping order” really means for people who are not like them.

— Jeff Bowles: Here’s a simple example: twice or three times, in my 20s, I “got off” or “got away with” something that a policeman pretty much warned me and sent me home. One involved teenage college drinking, another involved pot. I’ve even written a short story about one of the events.

Then I realized, years later: I was some white, clean-cut college kid.

What would those “lucky outcomes” have been, if I had been something else?

What indeed?

And then, another piece of the story: from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Ga. officer fired for posting ‘absolutely intolerable’ meme, comments on Facebook” by Stephanie Toone on 6/23/20:

A Georgia police officer has been terminated after her Facebook post and comments received complaints for being deemed racially insensitive.

The Butler Police Department officer has been terminated after posting about police activity on her personal Facebook page, according to news station WRBL. On Monday, the officer was placed on administrative leave, but department officials decided to terminate the officer after investigation Tuesday.

… The unnamed officer’s Facebook post included a meme with the caption written on it that reads: “Have you ever noticed that the police leave you alone if you’re not doing anything illegal?

In a NYT Magazine piece on Grabpussy Jr., an arresting mid-page teaser quote:

I searched my mental banks for relevant senses of winger, working my way through wingman first, eventually discovering that the intended sense was the one I came to last. You really have to have the context: in particular, who is speaking, for what purposes.

The NYT piece is “[REDACTED] Jr. Is Ready. But for What, Exactly?: Of all the president’s children, he has the strongest connection to the politics, voters and online disinformation ecosystem that put his father in the White House. What will he do with it?” by Jason Zengerle on-line 8/24/20; in print 8/30/20. The relevant passage:

To those who know [REDACTED] Jr., his attraction to politics was not surprising. “He was the only family member who talked politics before his dad ran for president,” the person close to him says. “He’s the only one of the kids who would have found a way into politics if the dad hadn’t run for office.” And those politics have always tilted hard to the right. Speaking to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018, Stephen K. Bannon, the [REDACTED] adviser who had run the right-wing website Breitbart, said, “I’d describe Don Jr., who I think very highly of, as a guy who believes everything on Breitbart is true.” Or as Sam Nunberg, an adviser to [REDACTED]’s 2016 campaign, says, “Don’s a real winger, and I mean that as a compliment.”

The relevant lexical items, from NOAD:

noun wingman: 1 [a] a pilot whose aircraft is positioned behind and outside the leading aircraft in a formation. [b] a man who helps or supports another man; a friend or close associate: I thought he might need a wingman — he was quite tired and emotional. 2 another term for winger (sense 1) .

noun winger  1 an attacking player on the wing in soccer, hockey, and other sports. 2 [in combination] a member of a specified political wing: a left-winger.

winger sense 2 is the intended sense in the quote from Steve Bannon: Grabpussy Jr. is a committed right-winger.

On sense 1 (which is the one I retrieved first, to my considerable puzzlement), from Wikipedia:

In certain sports, such as football, field hockey, ice hockey, handball, rugby union, lacrosse and rugby league, winger is a position. It refers to positions on the extreme left and right sides of the pitch, or playing field (the “wings”). In American football and Canadian football, the analogous position is the wide receiver. Wingers often try to use pace to exploit extra space available on the flanks that can be made available by their teammates dominating the centre ground. They must be wary however of not crossing the touchline, or sidelines, and going out of play. In sports where the main method of scoring involves attacking a small goal (by whatever name) in the centre of the field, a common tactic is to cross the ball to a central teammate.

Wingman. A piece of the American sociocultural world that combines two different sets of practices: the conventions of close male friendship (buddies, in the vernacular); and those of the heterosexual marketplace, in which young men compete for sexual access to or romantic attachment to young women.

From Wikipedia, where the relationship is carefully described in (unrealistically) gender-neutral terms, though the history is of a male practice:

Wingman (or wingmate) is a role that a person may take when a friend needs support with approaching potential romantic partners. People who have a wingman can have more than one wingman. A wingman is someone who is on the “inside” and is used to help someone with intimate relationships. In general, one person’s wingman will help him or her avoid attention from undesirable prospective partners or attract desirable ones, or both

The term originated in combat aviation in various international military aviation communities shortly before and after the advent of fighter jets. Pilots flying in formation, especially when in combat training or in actual aerial combat, refer to the pilot immediately next to them (traditionally on their right, sometimes on either side) as their “wingman” (the man on their wing). In actual aerial combat pilots are often trained to attack and defend in pairs watching out for each other, thereby making the term even more clearly demonstrated.

The term is also very commonly used in combat aviation on longer range aviation patrols which are often carried out by only two fighter planes, sometimes manned by only two pilots depending on the type of aircraft. On these two plane patrols (Air Force) or “watches” (Naval Aviators flying protective patterns around surface vessels on timed intervals) referring to the pilot that an aviator is teamed with on patrol as their “wingman” is very common.

In 2007, sociologist David Grazian [“The Girl Hunt: Urban Nightlife and the Performance of Masculinity as Collective Activity”, Symbolic Interaction 30 (2): 221–43] interviewed male students at the University of Pennsylvania on their dating habits, and postulated that the wingman role was part of collective “girl hunt” rituals that allow young men to collectively perform masculinity. Grazian writes:

“the wingman serves multiple purposes: he provides validation of a leading man’s trustworthiness, eases the interaction between a single male friend and a larger group of women, serves as a source of distraction for the friend or friends of a more desirable target of affection, can be called on confirm the wild (and frequently misleading) claims of his partner and, perhaps most important, helps motivate his friends by building up their confidence. Indeed, men describe the role of the wingman in terms of loyalty, personal responsibility and dependability, traits commonly associated with masculinity…”

… The term ‘wingman’ was popularised by its use in the 1986 romantic military action drama film Top Gun, in which US Navy pilots are shown in a bar pursuing women in pairs, similarly to their in-flight tactics. Nick ‘Goose’ Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards) is the best friend and wingman to Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell (Tom Cruise). In a much-quoted line from the end of the film, Maverick’s former archrival, Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky (Val Kilmer), shows his respect to Maverick when he says, “You can be my wingman anytime.”

Component 1: the buddy. Close and supportive same-sex friendships are a significant phenomenon in a great many cultures, especially important for young unattached people, where they can serve as a buffer against same-sex competitiveness over social dominance and against the stresses of negotiating the sexual marketplace.

For American men, this relationship goes under the label buddy; your buddy is someone you can confide in safely and will dependably support your interests, and you do the same for him. Having a buddy is especially important for young unattached men, more so for such men in threatening or unfamiliar circumstances, as in the military (where the significance of having a buddy is so great that men will often disregard differences in class and race and ethnicity and religion and so on that would ordinarily keep them far apart, in order to forge a deep and mutually supportive friendship).

The wingman is an American specialization of the buddy relationship.

Component 2: negotiating the sexual marketplace (for straightfolk). A risky, possibly humiliating, sometimes even dangerous undertaking for the participants. Which is why people  are inclined to enlist the help of friends in the process. Friends who can help scout out the territory, smooth the negotiations, and provide emotional support.

The wingman is (again an American) rather elaborate conventionalization of this role for young men negotiating the (straight) sexual marketplace.

(Well, it’s a gay porn ad, so of course there’s plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so it’s inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest.)

On AZBlogX yesterday, the posting “Labor Day 2020”, a Falcon Studio gay porn ad for Labor Day, with two smiling affectionate men (playing construction workers). The ad, cropped here to make it penis-free for WordPress and to focus on their physical affection:

In the background, construction sites (construction workers being high-masculine players in the fantasy world of gay porn).

Cropped in this version are a collection of truck tires at the bottom (more symbolic working-class masculinity), and of course the pornstar dicks — one fairly thick and straight, one long and upcurved. (Every dick is beautiful, in its own way.)

But the centerpiece of the photo is affection between the two men, both smiling with pleasure as one wraps his arms around the other’s shoulders. (For me, that could only have been better if they were about to kiss — but then they’d be looking at each other instead of at us.)

Fond as I am of cocks, as objects of desire, I agree with many straight women that what makes men hot are the the other physical indices of attractive masculinity (their faces, shoulders, torsos, and characteristically masculine buttocks); sweet inviting smiles; and projected affection.

I know it’s just a posed ad with two gay porn actors, but it’s moving and pleasing to me, a little Labor Day gift from Falcon in difficult times.

(Well, it’s about perfumerie, but it’s Gaultier, he’s flagrantly homoerotic, and he’s going to take us to men’s bodies and mansex. So pieces of this posting are definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Tim Evanson on Facebook today, with an image from a pharmacy window in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland:

(#1) Poster for Jean Paul Gaultier’s men’s fragrance Le Male, featuring a decidedly homoerotic shirtless sailor (credit: FotoFling Scotland)

Tim: Goodness, what ARE they selling?!?!?

AZ: They are selling sailors. Drenched in masculine scents. At very high prices.

McDonald Jason Richard: The best cologne for men in the world.

Background: sailors and sodomy. Sailors — virile, physically tough, young men living in very close quarters, traditionally in all-male groups away at sea — are classic fantasy figures of gay male sex, the fantasy being that they would turn to one another for sexual release, especially through sodomy. Correspondingly, in real life, sailors on leave were often cruised for sex by gay men, especially those who wanted to be fucked.

Records are sparse and undependable, but the reality seems to have been that though there was a certain amount of sodomy in various navies, it was never widespread. On the other hand, Hello Sailor! The Hidden Histor of Gay Life at Sea by Paul Baker and Jo Stanley (Kindle edition, 2003) tells the story of a sexual sub-culture of camp and drag on cruise ships:

(#2) caption from the TV Tropes site: “You come up on the poop deck often?”

From the publisher’s description on Amazon:

Estimates of the number of gay staff on cruise ships between the 1950s and 1970s hover around 30-40 per cent, while on some passenger lines (P&O seems to have been the gay-friendliest employer) the concentration may have been as high as 90 per cent.

The sailor-sodomy association then plays a significant role in the homoerotic power of the image in the Gaultier poster in #1. Gaultier thinks sailors are way hot, and he doesn’t shrink from the sodomy connection, but instead (as we’ll see) celebrates it and revels in it

Background: Gaultier and Le Male. On the designer, from Wikipedia:

Jean Paul Gaultier (born 24 April 1952) is a French haute couture and prêt-à-porter fashion designer. He is described as an “enfant terrible” of the fashion industry, and is known for his unconventional designs with motifs including corsets, marinières, and tin cans. Gaultier founded his eponymous fashion label in 1982, and expanded with a line of fragrances in 1993.

(Gaultier is openly gay; his male partner died of complications of AIDS.)

On the fragrance, from Wikipedia:

Le Male is a men’s fragrance created by Francis Kurkdjian for Jean Paul Gaultier in 1995. It has been manufactured by Puig since 2016, and was previously manufactured by Shiseido subsidiary Beauté Prestige International from 1995 until 2015. The fragrance was developed as a counterpart to the women’s fragrance Classique, which was introduced in 1993.

… Le Male is described as an oriental fougere men’s fragrance, a classification which is identified by the combination of “warm, woody, and spicy notes” and aromatic notes. The fragrance contains top notes of artemisia, mint, cardamom, and bergamot; middle notes of lavender, orange blossom, cinnamon, and cumin; and base notes of sandalwood, vanilla, cedar, tonka bean, and amber. Kurkdjian stated that the fragrance was simple to develop because “with vanilla, you don’t have to be as technical, whereas floral fragrances are very complex and very difficult to pull off.”

Kurkdjian described the Le Male bottle, a male torso wearing a marinière [see below], as “a motif to put it in the ‘Gaultier universe'” that represents “[Gaultier’s] idea of what men are about – being seductive, being sexual, [and] being adventurous.” The fragrance is packaged in an aluminum can, a motif Gaultier has used in his collections since 1980

The ads. A Le Male ad with even more naval symbolism, but with the model in a shirt:

(#3) A play on the recruiting slogan “Uncle Sam wants YOU”; note the bottle

The shirt in the ad is not just any sailor-style shirt, but a Gaultier design: La Marinière. From his site (in English):

(#4)

(#5)

Gaultier has used a large number of male models in his ads. From Attitude magazine, “A picture-based history of Jean Paul Gaultier’s ‘Le Male'” on 7/28/20

Everyone knows the iconic Jean-Paul Gaultier ‘Le Male’ fragrance bottles.

Emblazoned with the sailor-stripes motif that is synonymous with the designer and his brand, the bottle in the shape of a supersculpted man’s torso has been through many wonderful iterations [beginning in 1995].

Out of all these, the classic Gaultier model surely is the one introduced in 2000, seen in #1 and #3 above and now here:

(#6) (Attitude caption; photo from Jean-Baptiste Mondino): “The designer’s legendary sailor was brought to life by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, who shot many of the Gaultier advertising campaigns and filled them with robust, lusty sailors that made our mouths water.” (note the can)

The thing about Mondino is that he can project a wide range of sexual personas, from the very butch (a robust, lusty sailor) to the openly faggy, as in #6; often he presents himself as metrosexual.

Embracing sodomy. Note that in #5 Gaultier directly connects La Marinière to Fassbinder’s Querelle. From my 8/29/13 posting “Kissing the rose”, which has a section on Jean Genet and receptive anal intercourse (which the novelist  famously craved in real life), including the novel Querelle de Brest, prominently featuring sailors; the novel formed the basis for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last film, Querelle (1982).

(Well, it’s Tom of Finland, so it’s all about men’s bodies and mansex, and not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

On the Advocate site on 9/14, “Happy 100 Years: The Tom of Finland Biography”, on a new book on ToF:

(#1)

ToF is flagrantly about huge penises and muscular buttocks, and about intense sex between men, but (more important) also about the emotional relationships beween those men. It’s all extravagant fantasy, but also a celebration of gay male desire and affiliation in all of its forms, and so it has provided reassurance to untold numbers of gay men who scarcely resemble the fantasy sexually heroic figures of ToF — we are, variously, indetectable in the straight world and effeminate and dorky and little-dicked and horse-dicked and insecure and out-and-proud and full of shame — but can find in these figures validation of their desires and practices (notably, receptive anal intercourse: Real Men Take It Up the Ass). Plus, a lot of it is funny.

(Note that the foreword for the book comes from the designer Gaultier — see my 9/7/20 posting “Le Male, the men’s fragrance”.)

From the Advocate:

Tom of Finland: The Official Life and Work of a Gay Hero

Tom of Finland (born Touko Laaksonen, 1920–1991), was an iconic and groundbreaking artist who rose to cult status in the international queer community and beyond for his work celebrating the male figure and masculinity during a time when being gay was taboo. “Although he never attended a march or waved a banner at a demonstration, in the second half of the 20th century no one did more for the furthering of gay pride than Tom did,” said F. Valentine Hooven, III. “Many may have forgotten, or never knew, the shameful stereotypes of queer people that were once damn near universally believed and which Tom deliberately combated with each stroke of his pencil.”

The piece includes quite a few illustrations of ToF’s work (none of them X-rated). One example:

(#2) Untitled, 1962, graphite on paper

Tom’s favorite character, “Kake”, was always just as willing to get his hole plowed as he was to do the plowing and clearly sent the message out that sex between men is just plain manly – no matter what position one takes. By his characters’ actions Tom showed unbridled sexual passion between men and, afterwards, a brotherhood and camaraderie. His drawings also encouraged guys to experiment and push boundaries, to do anything to turn your partner on and get him off.

(Note: the Finnish name Kake has two syllables, accented on the first, roughly [káke]. It has nothing to do with cake, but a lot to do with cock ([kak]).]

(Men’s bodies and sex between men, in street language, totally not for kids or the sexually modest.)

He’s never early, he’s always late
First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait
I’m waiting for my man

(from Lou Reed’s “I’m Waiting for the Man”)

Today’s Daily Jocks ad, for a jockstraps sale, has yet another model posed as offering himself for anal intercourse, something of a DJ specialty; these ads show really handsome male buttocks, minimally clothed, and right up against the line with porn. In today’s case, I’ve chosen to spin a whole sex story (in free verse, as a caption) about the man in the ad. Under the fold.

(#1)

The ritual

Keyed up in anticipation,
Joe waited, eyes down in
submission for his
mystery trick,
posing on the sofa to display his
muscular body and offer his ass,
hoping to
please his nameless fucker,
who would then
brusquely push his head down,
force him to
hump his ass,
draw his legs up,
open his asshole to
receive the blessing of a
hard cock
within his body

Just to note that this scenario does happen in real life: men contract to be used sexually by strangers they don’t even lay their eyes on. (It’s the fuck equivalent of various schemes for anonymous cocksucking.) Here I’ve emphasized the ritualistic character of such encounters. And also, of course, the great pleasure a bottom experiences from having his top’s cock within his body.

Previously on this channel. Flirting with fucking in DJ goes back some time– see the Page on this blog on buttocks displays —  but recently it’s been something of a theme. I’ve posted about a pair of these ads:

— on 8/29/20 in “Take me, please”:

(#2)

A beautifully (but not extravagantly) muscled male body, lying prone on the silky sheets of a bed — simultaneously tough and high-masculine and also sumptuously queer — with his knees drawn up to offer his very muscular male buttocks for sex

— on 9/3/20 in “Take me, please (supine version)”

(#3)

What’s for sale here is some brightly colored festishwear, what could fairly be described as hot garments (harnesses, jockstraps, socks) to get fucked in)

… Today’s DJ ad has the same model in the same gear in the same silky bed, but supine, with his legs frogged up for getting fucked in the “missionary position”

The model in #1 is a different one, but also presented as highly masculine — way butch —  with lots of tats, that severe buzzcut, and the facial scruff. Plus the gigantic watch.

Waiting for the man. About the Lou Reed song. From Wikipedia:

“I’m Waiting for the Man” (sometimes titled “I’m Waiting for My Man”) is a song by the American rock band the Velvet Underground, written by Lou Reed. It was first released on their 1967 debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico.

The song is about waiting on a streetcorner in Harlem, near the intersection of Lexington Avenue and 125th Street, in New York City and purchasing $26 worth of heroin (equivalent to $211 in 2019), sung from the point of view of the purchaser, who has presumably traveled to Harlem from another part of the city; the “man” in the title is a drug dealer.

It’s a haunting song. You can listen to the Velvet Underground recording here.

(Already you can tell that this posting is going to be about anatomical features and sex between men and is entirely inappropriate for kids or the sexually modest.)

Over on AZBlogX, a posting from earlier today, “Cocks and assholes”, about two different presentations of the engagement between a cock and an asshole: submissive receptivity in a Say Uncle ad; active enthusiasm in a Hot House Studio ad (featuring Marc Dylan in the video Pack Attack 6)

There are three images from these ads on AZBlogX, but there’s absolutely no way I could fuzz them out or crop them for this blog; the ads are crucially, and vividly, about cocks and assholes. All is not lost, however; I can at least show you the cover for Pack Attack 6, since it’s innocent of raunchy bodyparts:

 

A man and his gangbangers

And I can take you through the discussion from AZBlogX, because merely verbal offensiveness gets a pass (otherwise I couldn’t be reminding you every so often how much I used to enjoy getting fucked up the ass).

The Say Uncle ad. A Lucas Entertainment site advertised by mail on 7/12/20, in a carefully composed image of a big thick cock and a naked man, facing submissively away from the cock he’s waiting for (not turned to appreciate it and engage with his fucker), resting on a pillow that pushes up his ass to expose his asshole fully for his fucker, who might in fact be a complete stranger that the hole never sees. It looks like the scene described in my 9/16/20 posting “Waiting for my man”, in which men contract to be used sexually by anonymous strangers; the posting emphasizes the ritualistic character of such encounters.

At this point, image #1, captioned “Waiting for my fucker”.

Say Uncle is a subsite in the Lucas family of gay porn sites. It embraces a number of “premium” series, mostly involving men in relationships of unequal power [AZ added for this AZBlog posting: unequal power and also many taboo-breaking relationships]:

Family Dick (in step families); Missionary Boys; Brother Crush (step brothers); Yes Father (church leaders); Latin Leche (Latin boys doing g4p); Young Perps (loss prevention officers and male shoplifters); Black Godz (powerful gay black men and their male subs); Dad Creep (stepdad/stepson); Stay Home Bro (bros quarantined together)

The Pack Attack 6 ads. From the Hot House Studio of the Falcon Studios Group. The Pack Attack 6 video shows a bukkake/gangbang encounter with Marc Dylan as the target. The cocks and Dylan’s asshole don’t appear together in a single ad, but are separately featured in two different ads.

Nothing cool and distanced about these scenes. Dylan is wildly enthusiastic about sucking cock and begs to take it in his asshole.

First, the cocks.

At this point, image #2, captioned: “Dylan hungrily licks the shaft of one hard cock (not notably long, but very satisfyingly thick), while a second awaits him, and two more of his gangbangers can be seen in the background”

This presentation of the cock is designed to supply maximum dick visibility, for the appreciation of the customers, but it also shows some of the variety of ways in which an enthusiastic cocksucker can engage with the object of his desire: licking the shaft, sucking his man’s balls, burying his face in his man’s sweaty crotch, as well as playing with his man’s cockhead in his mouth.

Then, the display of the asshole and the plea to get fucked.

Finally, image #3, captioned: “The gangbangers examine the merchandise, appreciating it before clinching the deal”

(There is a Page on my regular blog about postings on group sex, including gangbangs, gangsucks, and bukkake.)