(An appreciation of gay pornstar Skyy Knox, so there’s plain talk about men’s bodies and sex between men — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

The hard-core visual is off in my posting yesterday to AZBlogX, “Skyy Knox”, where it’s #1. That posting was motivated by Knox (who turned up in Falcon Studios Hunt ezine Issue 237 on 9/18) having a body type that’s especially pleasing to me, because it was my man Jacques’s: nicely muscled but lean, with a long torso — a “swimmer’s build”.  Knox, with his dick cropped from the image (I’ll get to the dick in a moment):

(#1)

But then it turned out that there was a remarkable bonus, in a wonderful shot — deeply affectionate and extraordinarily sexy — from Falcon’s Head Play, with Knox paired with JJ Knight (also below). (Yes, I understand that this is all performance, not real life — intended to provide a fantasy that will be sexually satisfying to the viewer — but this is an admirable performance.)

Knox’s dick. From AZBlogX:

Note on his dick: pretty much a regular guy’s dick, on the high end of normal length and not remarkably thick, so not in the pornstar range; probably as a result, I haven’t found a site that reports a specific length, though one site labels it as “medium”. I find it entirely satisfying. (I did try to find a shot of him displaying his dick half-hard, a presentation I’m especially fond of.) It might be that  his non-porn dick is related to his wild enthusiasm for bottoming: in porn, and also in gay life in the real world, men with smaller dicks are inclined to gravitate to the bottom role in fucking.

The Falcon site on Knox. Mostly an inventory of his performances:

Montreal-based international superstar Skyy Knox, is a sight to behold! This 5′ 11″, 180 lb. power-vers [AZ: well, he’s a passionate bottom who sometimes tops] is well known for his electric performances using his delicious cock and showcasing his insatiable muscle-butt. Since stepping onto his first Hot House set back in 2017 for Blindfolded, Knox has since won countless awards and has starred in some of Falcon | NakedSword’s biggest productions. Most recently, Skyy headed to Austria with Falcon Studios to shoot their latest bareback feature, The Chalet, released last week. Previous to that, Skyy Knox was featured in the Falcon titles Bareback Ranch and Afternoon Affairs, as well as the NakedSword Originals release of the raw flick BARE: Big Dicks and Bubble Butt.

Knox in a characteristic posture, offering his muscular ass for fucking:

(#2)

Knox and Knight. More from AZBlogX:

Despite the fact that I find the man very attractive and admire his anal enthusiasm (which I resonate with), I might not have posted about him. Until I came across a notice of Falcon Studio’s Head Play DVD (released 10/17), in which Knox is paired with JJ Knight. It offers a nice contrast, between the lean smaller-dicked bottom Knox and the tall, broad-shouldered exclusively top Knight and his fat 9″ pornstar cock. And there is deeply moving shot of the two of them in the woods, both naked except for their dirty heavy boots — hey, it’s the woods, and anyway, really butch boots are pretty much de rigueur in gay porn — with Knox sitting on Knight’s lap and kissing him (I am a fool for same-sex kisses), while Knight steadies Knox with a hand on his lower back.

(#3)

And then you realize that Knox isn’t just sitting on Knight’s lap, he’s riding Knight’s cock, to the root. Knight’s pornstar dick is filling up Knox’s pornstar asshole, providing extraordinary pleasure for both of them.

On various occasions, I have taken both roles in Cowboy and find it, um, deeply satisfying either way. Well, never in the woods and never with boots on, but otherwise both riding and being ridden are wonderful, and you can kiss a lot and see each other’s faces, and the rider’s dick is easily available for his partner to jack him off. And even though the rider is technically the bottom (because he’s receptive), he’s largely in control of the encounter, so there’s a nice subversion of what are often configured as highly dichotomous sexual roles in favor of more complex sexual sharing. Which I also find deeply satisfying.

A note on identities and careers. More from AZBlogX:

A topic I post about every so often in discussions of gay porn. In many gay porn episodes, the actors are playing particular characters, with identities and backstories of their own. Meanwhile, the actors are enduring public characters of their own, with names, porn personas, and very often websites, public appearances in their pornstar identities, and the like.

Of course, the pornstars have personal identities, “real names”, and entire personal lives in these identities, all withheld from their fans. I have a long-standing interest in how these men balance their various identities, and I sometimes post about complexities of this balancing act. In the case of “Skyy Knox”, he’s explained in interviews that off the porn set he’s a professional dancer, mostly working in shows on cruise ships. It’s reasonably dependable work. (And for most men, porn acting is not.)

And even if you manage to put together a pornstar career, it’s almost always a brief one — new, fresh cocks and asses are always appearing to supplant yours, no matter how desirable yours might be — so you’ll need some other career to live on.

Two recent items about great progress in the acceptance of lgbt people in my country, with an alarm bell in the second about grave threats to us. First, a posting about a piece in Out magazine. Second, a comment on the Queer Linguist(ic)s Network (QLN) on Facebook.

Out magazine on Mike Ruiz. From my 8/20/20  posting “Hard-cruisin’ Daddy” (if you’re uncomfortable with the designator fag in my posting, substitute the noun queer)::

(#1) The Out cover showing hard-cruisin’ Daddy Mike Ruiz

[Out] 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.

It’s the offhand, taken-for-granted, openness about sexuality that’s so impressive.

The QLN comment. A comment of mine on Facebook on 9/17, reproduced here verbatim:

(#2) The QLN logo (no, I will not attempt to explicate it)

Today, on the Queer Linguist(ic)s Network on Facebook, a contributor wrote a request for assistance beginning: “I’m a queer Polish-speaking PhD researcher in sociolinguistics at the University of Sheffield.”

I am pleased to live in a world where there is a Queer Linguist(ic)s Network, with young linguists who can openly (indeed thoughtlessly) post things like the above. When I was this young man’s age, that would have been pretty much unimaginable. This part of the world has changed significantly, and for the better. (Yes, I feel seriously threatened again, as lgtb folk are being demonized, since demonization of minorities is the first step to pogroms — apparently friendly people become willing to murder those in a demonized minority; numerous 20th-century examples.) Still, it *is* an advance, and heartening.

A careful note about QLN, in its own words:

Intended membership: – queer* people who are linguists; – (any) people who study/research queer linguistics (past, present or future)

*queer here encompassing all non-normative/marginalised gender, relationship, romantic and sexual identities / practices / subjectivities/ embodiments and intersex (acknowledging that “queer” is imperfect shorthand with which not all those falling under such an umbrella may identify)

The threat: demonization and pogroms. Here, a (consequential) digression about my moral education as a child. The signal event was the uncovering of the truth about the Holocaust, in which people who had been folded into the social fabric were demonized by the authorities as Others and then destroyed in huge numbers, with the knowledge, and often enthusiastic partication, of a great many ordinary people, including many who had previously served as neighbors, friends, and even family of the victims.

(This pattern was then replicated many times thereafter, in Rwanda and Burundi, in several of the successor states to Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. Once a group was demonized, ruinous prejudice followed, often leading to campaigns of murder in which as many as half of those close to the Others turned on them.)

The thing was, as a child I realized that I was Other in every setting of my life. Even in my family; my parents were loving and incredibly supportive, but I was unlike any child they had experience of, and hugely far from their expectations. Fortunately, I was a sweet child, imaginative, forbiddingly intelligent, and creatively talented, also amiable and empathetic, and they treasured me despite their bafflement at my nature. My amiability and talents allowed me to find a place on the edges of many groups I was an Other in (though I was frequently harassed and openly despised, especially by male affiliative groups). Then and in the rest of my lfe.

The truth of the Holocaust came to me as an electric shock: my being an Other could make me subject to murderous rage, even by those I trusted and felt close to. It happened to the Jews, it could happen to me. This was a very hard lesson for an 8-year-old.

The larger lesson was that I had to be extraordinarily wary, fitting in amiably wherever I could, but looking to test whether apparent friends were in fact genuinely trustworthy.  With brutal simplicity: if I were publicly demonized, would they turn on me?

Very very few of my straight male acquaintances have passed this test, in my judgment. Now that I am genuinely old and don’t expect to live much longer, I wonder whether I should thank those guys for their friendship, which has lightened my life. (Although I’m a fag, my sexual identity is firmly male and my gender-role identification is firmly masculine — just my own brand of homomasculinity — so that fitting in with the world of men is in fact important to me, and these trustworthy guys are my precarious, and precious, connection to it.)

(I’ve always found it easy to establish close friendships with women — in grade school, that was one of the things that got me harassed as a fairy-boy; real boys don’t hang out with girls — and of course I’ve established a number of close friendships with gay men, including many who were never sexual partners. But even in those cases, friendship doesn’t guarantee trustworthiness; every relationship has to be scrutinized.)

And now demonization of lgbt-folk looms. Already well advanced in Poland and Hungary, and in my country it has never gone away among fundangelicals (who are perfectly capable of explaining to me, in superficially polite tones, that their god requires that I be put to death for my sexual practices, but that man’s pesky laws currently prohibit that). Now a new Supreme Court appointment threatens to undo not only Roe v. Wade but also Brown v. Board of Education and, significantly for my people, the series of decisions on same-sex relationships. (Jacques and I considered ourselves to be married-equivalent and looked forward to the day when we could make it legal. Alas, he’d died by the time that happened.)

And on that note. On Facebook, Phillip M. Carter, the notable sociolinguist at Florida International University, has just responded to the news that “A new Supreme Court justice could boost religious liberties at the cost of  LBGTQ protections” with an open and unsparingly honest account of the agonies of his coming to terms with his homosexuality as a child. Painful to read, and it made me cry.

Phillip was born 40 years after me, and I had hoped that by his time, things would have improved more than they had. But he managed to hack out a good life — and more important, a life of great service to others, involving not just the sociolinguistic study of hispanic and black communities in Florida, but also of active advocacy for the people in those communities and the nurturing of students at FIU. Deeply admirable.

[Digression. Along the way, he turned himself into an amazing muscle-hunk. That’s just the entertainment portion of the program (he posts a lot about his workouts), but it is fun to watch, mostly because he’s so enthusiastic (and entirely aware that he’s putting on a show). (I say this as someone who is normally deeply cool to bodybuilders.)]

Still, with Phillip, I have considerable anxiety about the way the government’s line is trending. A general climate of acceptance, especially if it’s been establishing itself for some time (roughly 50 years now for lgbtq people), can easily lead a minority group to think that demonization can’t happen here — but the sad record of history is that it can.

The Zippy from 1/30/20, which I’ve been saving for the appropriate occasion, which has now materialized, as a follow-up to a note in my posting earlier today “Great progress, grave threat”:

Zippy’s crucial observation, in the first panel:

Sometimes, the two-headed dog makes me feel more one-headed!

Roughly, if you are far from (what counts as) normal, then someone who is further out than you are can make you feel almost normal.

From my progress / threat posting, with the connection to my personal life:

The thing was, as a child I realized that I was Other in every setting of my life. Even in my family; my parents were loving and incredibly supportive, but I was unlike any child they had experience of, and hugely far from their expectations. Fortunately, I was a sweet child, imaginative, forbiddingly intelligent, and creatively talented, also amiable and empathetic, and they treasured me despite their bafflement at my nature. My amiability and talents allowed me to find a place on the edges of many groups I was an Other in (though I was frequently harassed and openly despised, especially by male affiliative groups). Then and in the rest of my lfe.

Central to my Otherness was the perception (by many) that I was unmasculine. As I explained in my 8/1/20 posting “Nuancy Nancy” (about, among other things, the slur nancy boy):

The … weapon of verbal abuse used against me as a child was fairy (boy): I was able to fend off physical abuse with crazed aggression against the bullies, but the verbal abuse rained down on me pretty much constantly for years. My offense was not actual effeminacy (at the age of 8 I had a flagrantly effeminate buddy, and I understood that our ways were very different — though he did give me an early appreciation of opera; his intense enthusiasm for women’s high fashion didn’t take for me, but then you don’t expect your friends to share all your interests), but failure to conform to normative masculinity: I was nerdy and academically oriented; artistic (all that classical piano); deeply unathletic; profoundly uninterested in sports fandom; unaggressive; and given to friendships with girls.

Boys form themselves into loosely organized gangs, which enforce norms of masculinity amongst themselves; and those all-male groups continue into male associations in adolescence and adulthood. I have never been acceptable to these male groups, though I’ve sometimes been able to patch together a spot for myself off to the side, offering expertise, entertainment, or amiability.

In any case, a male who doesn’t fit these norms of masculinity is perceived as feminine — this is a binary world — and treated as “no better than a woman” (the extraordinary devaluing of women is central to the whole business), which is actually quite alarming, since fems and fags and all the rest of us deviants are living exemplars of what could happen if you don’t satisfy the requirements of the male codes.

Note: not faggy, at least in appearance, movement, facial expression, or gesture; I can easily pass for straight. Nobody picks me out on the street as a fag unless I’m displaying defiantly queer slogans or symbols (which, of course, I do a lot). So that though I’m (metaphorically) two-headed, in comparison to many of my queer brothers I’m almost one-headed.

My presentation of myself is something I carry with me from my childhod, and I am comfortable in my skin, though a fair number of my queer brothers think that it must be an act, because they believe that the natural state of queers involves at least some outwardly visible indicators of their sexuality. Surely I could at least roll my eyes, they think.

I don’t pretend to understand how men come to their presentations of self, and I don’t believe that anyone else does either, though there are some useful partial proposals around (mostly inspired by studies of the “gay voice”). But I think that everyone should realize that there are many ways — many entirely authentic ways — of being queer, and we should  celebrate that.

[Digression. My man Jacques was considerably more normatively masculine in his appearance and behavior that I was, but, entertainingly, he could wield a killer cruise face when he was looking for casual hookups with men (mostly in gyms) — something I was never any damn good at, in any context. But then it turned out that he was pretty much unable to read other men’s signals; he was forever seeing amiability and friendliness as potential signals of interest in sexual connection. He never acted on these perceptions, unless he got a blatant signal from the other guy, like the guy rubbing his crotch or licking his lips. But on our walks together in Palo Alto, he often remarked on how many gay men there were out on the street, when what he was seeing was just random guys mirroring his projected amiability and mine. Such a sweet man.]

But back to the more clearly two-headed of my brothers. As I am what I am, they are what they are, but they pay a price for it: they end up bearing the public weight of homo-hatred and threatened violence. They take the shit for the rest of us, and for that they deserve our applause, our thanks, and our support. And they often combine the passions of their lives with charm, wicked humor, and outrageous performances. Plus, I’m inclined to think that faggy guys are hot, no doubt in part because one such man sweetly gave me my first fuck and altered my life; full story in my 8/29/20 posting “Take me, please”.

(About men’s bodies and sex between men, in very plain language — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

On AZBlogX yesterday, a posting “Raunchy Dirty Uncut Fucking”, about Raw Alpha Males gay porn, specializing in  dominance and submission.

From 4/15/20, an e-mail ad under this title (a fine line of trochaic tetrameter, by the way) for the Raw Alpha Males (subscription) site:

Cropped version of the mailer photo; on AZBlogX, the arresting full photo, captioned YOUR MASTERS AWAIT!, showing this master’s thick dick, with side images of sex between men (so, massively unsuitable for WordPress)

Some ad text:

alpha tops and sub bottoms
Ready To Get Rammed?
Join now and experience the RAW ALPHA MALES showing off their skills: fucking ass bareback, getting their cocks sucked by pig bottoms, and commanding guys to submit! The RAW ALPHA MALES take sex to the extreme by humiliating and pissing on their bottom slaves, getting their feet worshiped, and stretching holes to the max with huge dildos!

Commentary from AZBlogX:

This is of course fantasy, and it’s primarily aimed at vierwers who identify with the sub bottoms in the videos; the alpha tops are there to provide subs with the pleasures of being dominated, humiliated, abused, and used. These scenes are both ritualized and consensual; indeed, the bottoms participate enthusiastically. (In fact, in real life as in gay porn.) But I imagine that many men who enjoy the porn, imaginatively identifying with the subs in them, do not in fact engage in the practices of ritualized submission in their own sexual lives. Though of course lots of them enjoy getting fucked, just not with the trappings of dominance and submission.

Some remarks on the psychology of this role playing in my 2/25/13 posting on AZBlogX “Fetish/kink porn”:

An overarching theme in [masochistic practices] is Taking It: experiencing, and enjoying, pain, humiliation, and abuse … An exhibition of parodoxical masculinity, showing how much of a man you are by showing how much you can take from other men. But also Submission, an abandonment of will to another man, recognizing him as superior to you.

(Superior to you, but perhaps capable of providing you with some power, masculinity, etc. through your association with him. Hanging out with the X guys can make you more X.)

(References to sex between men in plain language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

The image from a steamy Daily Jocks ad on 9/28, with (under the fold) my caption.

(#1)

He dreamed
he got fucked
in his
Helsinki
Athletica
jockstrap

When Nikolas feels anxious, he
Pulls down his gym shorts and
Offers his ass, seeking the calm a
Solid fuck can give him

The first theme is that anxiety and stress can cause people to seek distraction and relief through sex — by masturbation, of course, but also with a partner.

The second theme is that satisfying sex leaves in its train a feeling of pleasurable relaxation.

And then there’s the allusion in the He got fucked… title. On that, from my  7/21/17 posting “Getting into harness”:

my caption … is a take-off on the long series of “I dreamed I Xed in my Maidenform Bra” ads from the 50s

For example:

(#2) Young women in their bras in all sorts of preposterous circumstances — here as a firefighter

On Facebook today, a Vadim Temkin gay male homage to the Belgian artist René Magritte and his 1937 painting La Reproduction Interdite (Not to be Reproduced):

(#1)

Whew!

The original:

(#2)

From the MoMA site on the painting:

Edward James, a British poet and patron of Surrealism, commissioned Magritte to make this portrait in 1937, titled Not to be Reproduced.

On the mantel is Edgar Allan Poe’s novel, The Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym.

The choice of the Poe novel (which Vadim has reproduced) is intriguing. Well, it’s Poe, so it’s strange. (I admit to not having read it; a whole Poe novel would be just too much.) From Wikipedia:

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) is the only complete novel written by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship called the Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym, including shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he is saved by the crew of the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters continue their adventures farther south. Docking on land, they encounter hostile black-skinned natives before escaping back to the ocean. The novel ends abruptly as Pym and Peters continue toward the South Pole.

The story starts out as a fairly conventional adventure at sea, but it becomes increasingly strange and hard to classify. Poe, who intended to present a realistic story, was inspired by several real-life accounts of sea voyages, and drew heavily from Jeremiah N. Reynolds and referenced the Hollow Earth theory. He also drew from his own experiences at sea. Analyses of the novel often focus on the potential autobiographical elements as well as its portrayal of race and the symbolism in the final lines of the work.

Yes, Hollow Earth. And then there’s the South Pole, the end of the world.

From Vadim Temkin on Facebook on the 14th:

One more homage to Magritte: Lovers II [now with naked men]. I think for now I have enough Magritte for a while

(#1)

Previously on this blog, two Zippy cartoons:

— on 7/21/13 in “More Magritte”: a Zippy, featuring three Magrittes: Not to be Reproduced, The Lovers, Golconda:

(#2)

with the originals of all three, including The Lovers:

(#3)

— on 3/10/15 in “More cartoonization”, with a Zippyfied cartoonization (by degrees) of the work:

(#4)

(Largely about men’s genitals and sex between men, in very direct street language, so entirely inappropriate for kids or the sexually modest.)

On AZBlogX, a 10/7 posting “Humongous Cocks”, with two images from a porn video ad. I’ll quote that posting at length, but shift the visual focus on this blog to the facial expressions and body types in those images.

Cropped versions of those two images, intended to highlight those two characteristics:

(#1) The smiling muscle-hunk

(#2) The swimmer’s body, a piercing Cruise of Death stare

The full story, from AZBlogX on “Humongous Cocks” (note: analytical and serious, but also full of intensely personal details; these two things are intimately related):

The subject line on a 10/6 mailing for a Falcon/Naked Sword Store sale, with two images, which I supply here for three things: the pornstars’ (contrasting) facial expressions, their (also contrasting) body types, and their (very similar) alarmingly long hard cocks (the point of the mailer of course — those cocks are samples of what’s available, in a set of humongous-cock videos, to stoke viewers’ jack-off pleasure).

Humongous Cock #1. At the top of the mailer, notable for the model’s nice smile (a very big plus for me), his beefy physique (not a turn-on for me, but not so bodybuilder-immense as to be an actual turn-off for me; others’ mileage will of course differ), and that very long cock (which I can easily fantasize taking up my ass, but not down my throat — I could happily play with his dickhead in my mouth, but all that shaft is purely ornamental and would be irrelevant to my cocksucking satisfaction).

… Humongous Cock #2. On a model displaying an intense cruise-of death facial expression (which I find entertaining, but not particularly seductive), with a lean swimer’s body (which suits me exactly), and his own very long hard cock (see comment above, though this one is line-straight, while #1’s has a cute bit of upcurve), notably hairy chest (a plus, though #1 is pleasantly lightly furred), and (in contrast to #1) lots of tats (which don’t move me either way, though they’re supposed to serve as symbols of toughness, of high masculinity).

Notes on cocks. Also from AZBlogX, but now focused on the cocks:

I’m on record as a great fan of dick, and even as an unapologetic cocksucker of faceless anonymous dick in t-rooms, but ideally dick comes with a guy attached, and he’s the real point. The raw dick is a stand-in for a whole person, and though it can be immensely satisfying on its own, it’s just the fast-food parallel to a real meal, with friends and conversation in a pleasant setting. By no means negligible, but a make-do. (The advantage of t-room sex is that guys can satisfy their urgent needs rapidly — most men, unconstrained, come within minutes — and without having to cope with the sexual attitudes of their partners, which might be dire.)

(#1 is offering a whole person, #2 a quick trick, so even though I prefer #2’s body type, I’d go for #1 in an instant. And I’d choose #1 to jack off to — though publicity photos don’t actually convey what’s in a video. What makes the porn videos work is the story they tell and how they tell it. Who knows what #1’s story is?)

But those cocks. Long and hard. Easy to take up your ass, and guaranteed to hit your button. (Long-ago annual medical with my (gay) family doctor, when I was 50 or so: “You have the prostate of an 18-year-old. Probably because it gets regularly massaged” — meaning that I got regularly fucked.) But down the throat, not so easy. (The same doctor, noting that my oral cavity is notably shallow: “Is that a problem for you in sex?” (cocksucking being everyday sex for gay men). I explained that I focused on my guy’s dickhead, and Michael (re)assured me that that was an excellent strategy.)

The point here is that length isn’t necessarily a draw in real life, though it serves as a measure of symbolic masculinity in porn. (My position here is that if you’ve got a dick, even if it’s small and soft, even if you’re faggy, you’re masculine, and that’s fine with me. All the rest is ornamentation.) What works symbolically for me is girth (even though in real life, thick dicks can be hard to manage in the mouth or up the ass). Give me a (fantasy) fireplug, any day.

Note on humongous. From my 1/28/20 posting “Humongous tops Adonis”:

Digression on humongous. From OED2 on the portmanteau adj. humongous:

slang (originally U.S.).  Extremely large; huge, enormous. [1st two cites:]

1970 Current Slang (Univ. S. Dakota) 4 19 Humongous, very large (a combination of huge and tremendous).

1976 New Yorker 16 Aug. 26/2 She uses expressions like ‘the whole megillah’ (meaning the whole long story) and ‘humongous’ (meaning huger than huge and more tremendous than tremendous).

The word has pieces of huge, enormous, and tremendous. It’s playful in tone, but with an ominous undercurrent that comes with the fearsomeness of extremely large things…

(This posting starts with a homoerotic Daily Jocks ad — nothing close to the line visually or textually, but you might still want to exercise your judgment — moves through Doan’s pills and ends with musician Rod Stewart.)

… but what story? They’re just pictures, after all, subject to many interpretations. Even when the creator’s intentions are clear, there are often two (or more) intended stories for the same picture — typically, one literal and one allusive (consider still lifes with moral messages). In any case, other viewers are free to see stories the creator did not. And sometimes the pictures have no clear interpretation.

Which brings me to the Daily Jocks mailing of 10/26:

(#1) At the gym, two hunks eye each other’s crotches with facial expressions that would be heavy sexual cruises if exchanged face to face

Well, it’s a menswear ad, and comes with no explicit clues as to how it’s to be interpreted — maybe just as a generic homoerotic encounter (certainly homoerotic). But still you wonder: what’s their story? Are they an established couple, shown here appreciating each other’s bodies for the camera? Or did they just come across one another in the gym and are now setting up a trick? Or maybe merely complimenting each other through their gaze and facial expressions, each conveying that he thinks the other is really hot? (Nice body, buddy.)

Background 1: the ad. From the DJ mailing:

Sport Training 2.0 shorts – dark teal: The new and improved Sport Training Shorts are made of breathable stretch woven fabric that is lightweight and anti-static to keep you cool and comfortable through your workout.

The new [Helsinki Athletica] Sports Training Collection is the ultimate combination of functional, sleek and sexy.

Note the sexy.

Background 2: the models. Except for the fact that both are wearing HA dark teal sport shorts, the models have been chosen to be as differentiated as possible (and posed differently).

Left Guy (sitting, legs spread, in a tank top, white socks and shoes) is dark-haired, with facial scruff and lightly furred body. Right Guy (standing, shirtless, black socks and shoes) has lighter hair, a smooth-shaven face, and a smooth body.

That is, they are presented as complementary, and so as an especially attractive (fantasy) couple. Complementarity is a very satisfying characteristic within a couple; each partner discovers new things from the other, and they learn from one another. For straight couples, the sex difference provides a kind of base line of complementarity (though it can develop many forms thereafter); same-sex couples seek other sources of complementarity (especially characterstics of personality, but also interests), which then help to cement their relationship.

(I’ve had one female partner and one male partner — and then, for some time, the two of them together. Each of them altered my life deeply, changed me, and I changed them in turn. Not always easy, but, as I said, satisfying.)

The saying. The short version, from the Cambridge Dictionary (on-line):

saying: every picture tells a story: said when what has really happened in a situation is clear because of the way that someone or something looks

More detail, with notes on the history, from Pascal Tréguer’s Word Histories site (the site is new to me, so I can’t fully vouch for it, but the material looks dependable):

The phrase every, or each, picture tells a story is used of images that are particularly significant, revealing, or suggestive of real or imaginary events.

His first cite is from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), with each; then a series of later cites; and finally:

In both Britain and the USA, the phrase was popularised in the early 1900s by the advertisements for Doan’s Backache Kidney Pills, in which the slogan Every Picture tells a Story appeared alongside the picture of a man or woman clutching the small of his or her back.

One of the first appearances in this use he found was from the Cambridge Daily News (Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England) on 12/18/1902 (the cites are all from local newspapers):

(#2)

The pills were a mild diuretic for the kidneys. They were later advertised as Doan’s Little Liver Pills. They are, in fact, still available (at your local drugstore) as pain relief medicine for backache:

(#3)

Rod Stewart. And the song. From Wikipedia:

(#4)

“Every Picture Tells a Story” is a song written by Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood and initially released as the title track of Stewart’s 1971 album Every Picture Tells a Story. It has since been released on numerous Stewart compilation and live albums

It’s rude, crude, and lyrically wonderfully complex. You can listen to Stewart performing it here (in a remastered version of the performance from The Definitive Rod Stewart).

(Another posting from my time in rehab in Palo Alto, this one  originally written up on 12/2. As before, it’s very much a bare-bones posting — there’s a lot about posting to my blog that is still a cognitive mystery to me, thanks to alcohol poisoning.)

(In addition, this posting talks about sexual acts in very plain language and so is inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest.)

I used to be pee-shy; which is to say, I was once a paruretic (paruresis ‘the inability to urinate in the presence of others’). See the rambling hilarious depiction of paruresis in The Mezzanine (1986), the astonishing first novel by Nicholson Baker.

No longer. I can now use a urinal — the porcelain fixture or the portable item — in front of anyone, in any circumstances (including noisy rooms with people going in and out). I can lie in bed peeing into the portable object under the covers while carrying on a conversation with a visitor, then pull out the urinal for emptying by an aide.

I have lost all modesty. I don’t care who sees what, though I don’t actually display my privates. My penis has always been small and unthreatening, but now it’s a fat old man’s penis, of no consequence to anyone, indeed scarcely noticeable.

I still have a very high sex drive, though not as urgent as when I started masturbating, at the age of ten. But those are private pleasures, for me alone. Occasionally, though, I marvel: 70 years of jacking off — not to mention other forms of sexual release — and still going.

[Added notes 12/6. Jacking off has been my entire sex life for more than 15 years now, and when I am generally good physical shape (which is very much not the case right now) I expect to jack off about three times a day — mostly quickies, the sexual equivalent of fast food or snacks, but sometimes in delicious drawn-out dick play fueled by satisfying gay porn: using the porn to pull me slowly along just short of shooting my load, while dirty-talking out loud, then backing off and repeating the routine with a different scene from the porn, until I finally let myself come. I miss the quickies and I miss the tantalizing dick play as well. Something to look forward to when I get further out from under the fog of the alcohol.]

… with Jacques and me in a bit part.

The publisher’s blurb for Genus Americanus: Hitting the Road in Search of America’s Identity, by Loren Ghiglione with Alyssa Karas and Dan Tham:

A seventy-year-old Northwestern journalism professor, Loren Ghiglione, and two twenty-something Northwestern journalism students, Alyssa Karas and Dan Tham, climbed into a minivan and embarked on a three-month, twenty-eight state, 14,063-mile road trip in search of America’s identity. After interviewing 150 Americans about contemporary identity issues, they wrote this book, which is part oral history, part shoe-leather reporting, part search for America’s future, part memoir, and part travel journal.

On their journey they retraced Mark Twain’s travels across America―from Hannibal, Missouri, to Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, New Orleans, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle. They hoped Twain’s insights into the late nineteenth-century soul of America would help them understand the America of today and the ways that our cultural fabric has shifted.

Their interviews focused on issues of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status. The timely trip occurred as the United States was poised to replace president Barack Obama, an icon of multiculturalism and inclusion, with Donald Trump, whose white-identity agenda promoted exclusion and division. What they learned along the way paints an engaging portrait of the country during this crucial moment of ideological and political upheaval.

p. 156:

At Haverford College, two miles southeast of Bryn Mawr [site of the previous interview], I met with Philip A. Bean, associate dean and dean of academic affairs, to discuss Haverford’s struggle to diversify.

I graduated in 1963, when the student body of 450 was still all male and a haven of heteronormativity (so far as I knew). Arnold Zwicky, the domestic partner of Jacques H. Transue, who started at Haverford in my class of 1963 [but graduated later] and died in 2003 [from radiation-caused dementia], called the 1960s “very bad for gay people.” Zwicky said most gay men hid their sexual orientation if they understood it at all. He said you could know you were attracted to men “but still not appreciate it as a defining fact about you, especially if you’re a man who likes women as people and friends and can be sexually responsive to women.”

Zwicky said Transue and he both felt “the considerable pressure to follow the life script — both of us looked forward to having children. It was  easy to marry [a woman] and have the appearance of a normal married life.” Zwicky, who, like Transue, married a woman, said regular sexual experiences in marriage could be “perfectly pleasant but not deeply moving.” Only when their continuing attraction to men moved from fantasies to real experiences did they fully identify themselves as gay.

Bean, the associate dean, who is openly gay, said that today, in contrast, individual students may silently struggle with real or perceived hostility from their families and hometown neighbors, but the climate at Haverford

p. 157:

for gay and lesbian students had long been ‘virtually a nonissue.”

Beyond gender/sexuality diversity, Haverford has changed in other ways, “Bean said students of color comprised 35 percent of Haverford’s entering class. Fifty-five percent of the once all-male student body was now female.” The college is also among the highest-ranked liberal arts colleges in its percentage of African American full-time faculty members.

Jacques would be so pleased.

From Ryan Tamares, a gay Xmas and pandemic-chasing card “Adam Likes Santa: Red Santa”, featuring cartoonist Bobo Nisi’s gay bear character Bobo-Bear (sometimes Bobobear or Bobo Bear):

(#1) The card

(Also demonstrating some newly recovered abilities of mine at formatting my blog postings.)

On the Bobo-Bear Facebook page:

A supermarket worker who dreamed to draw, bought some pencils, moved to London and now shares his art on t-shirts. Follow if you like bears [of the gay male variety]. Grrr!

Drawn by Bobo Nisi, a supermarket worker who dreamed to draw, said goodbye to the aisles, bought some pencils and imagined these gay sexy bears.

An overview of some Bobo-Bear characters:

(#2) Six characters

The Bobo-Bear site also sells merchandise (of course):

(#3) Shirtless Bobo-Bear modeling a mask

(#4) Bobo-Bear swimwear, with a butt bear

(Material that mostly appeared earlier on Facebook, now lightly edited and amended. Material with heading names or initials originally appared in FB.

The topic is decidedly adult relationships. No body parts or sexual acts, but unquestionably queer.)

The background: Living in almost complete isolation for many months now, I have been missing Jacques, painfully (though it was 1998 when we last shared a bed, and he’d been slipping into incompetence for years before that). I’m desperate to talk to him, embrace him, smell him, just enjoy the negligent pleasure of being with him and hearing his advice. He was a very good man.

(Early on in our relationship, I wrote his parents a letter about why I loved their son, which was all about his moral qualities, and they were totally charmed. We all understood that he was smokingly hot sexually, but that that alone would have been no basis for undertaking a life together, which is what we were doing.

In these awful times, I miss him terribly.

Our first sexual connection, initiated by an astonishing profession of his love for me — I was doing exercises at home, where he was visiting — when he picked me up in his arms, kissed me, and told me he loved me — was almost 44 years ago (in December), though we’d been friends for some time before that (he knew that I was gay — this was public knowledge — but I didn’t know he was, though I was immensely pleased to discover it).

Some years later we privately performed our own version of the wedding ceremony (uttering “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part” — but pointedly not committing to cleave only to one another or to have either of us obey the other). We viewed these words as a binding commitment. And so they were.

J. supposed he was committing to taking care of me, helping me in what he saw as a difficult and demanding life as a distinguished academic. As it turned out, I ended up taking care of him as dementia ate him away. But my commitment was just as firm as his.

And so the first photo, Jacques and me after having been declared domestic partners by the city of Palo Alto in 1996:

(#1) The domestic partnership photo

The photo was taken by our photographer friend Robert Emery Smith (aka ModBob), who did this as a gift to us. There was a ceremony at P.A. City Hall, attended by friends and family of the partners (many children; Elizabeth was there), and then a sort of party afterwards for us, with lots of socialization (a number of us were into our second or third domestic partnerships — these being entirely symbolic — but we were generally agreed that this was the best one so far).

Bob just said, “Look at one another”, and so we did and we were so happy in the moment and connected to one another, and lightly holding hands, so it was all done in a couple of takes. Long ago I posted about this photo, and its depiction of us as very close to being equals (I held all the power in the outside world, but he was far more powerful physically (and two inches taller than me)), but we adjusted to achieve as even a balance as possible, because respect for one another was central to our relationship.

The photo was extravagantly admired by many readers.

J dancing with the kids. Jacques, this time as a sweet dad, horsing around with his son and his nephew:

(#2) My favorite photo of J ever

Hana Filip: J’s son is the little guy in the red sweater, right? All three are adorable.

No, the really little one. (Kit’s been following these threads, but I’m sure he doesn’t remember this occasion in (I think) Maine. A side pleasure in all of this is that Kit and I (and his wife Adrienne Shapiro) are now adult friends (I note that Kit is now 52).) But yes, they’re all totally adorable.

AZ: Pure joy. Also: note those calf and thigh muscles. J was lean but astonishingly strong — he could casually throw me over his shoulder and carry me around.

Michael Covarrubias > AZ: I came to the comments to remark on that definition between the vastus medialis and the adductor longus. impressive.

AZ > MC: I forgot that you’re a bodybuilder, but of course you would be attentive to the details of his muscles. And the definition was indeed impressive. We did work out together, daily for years, not to craft our bodies, but to get the work-out high and to keep fit. (J’s body seems to have been mostly a gift of nature, though his family’s preoccupations with tennis and sailing might have helped some.)

AZ: And J liked to cruise guys in the locker rooms for sex. I remind you that we didn’t include the “cleaving only” clause in our commitment ceremony, because we didn’t expect that. We had both come to gay identities through the subterranean world of gay cruising for sex, and that was a source of pleasure for both of us, which we recognized and respected (my cruising grounds were mostly t-rooms and the gay baths). And I remind you again that people are very complex, and that there are many ways of crafting decent and honorable lives.

MC > AZ: your memories of respect, admiration, and joy are incredibly touching. they feel very present.

Back to photo #2: J’s pleasure in the company of kids was one of his signal qualities. I love to watch sweet dads with their kids — this isn’t a sexual thing, but a reflection of the pleasure I got from being raised by a sweet dad, who treasured me despite the fact that I was unlike any child he’d ever experienced in his life, and consequently helped to provide me with a warm and happy childhood (when other fathers might have rejected me and allowed me to wither and die).

Julian Lander: Relevant to fathers and their kids: I was out walking today on the Lower East Side, and I saw this perfectly enormous man (not fat, but well over 6 feet with shoulders in proportion) walking hand-in-hand with his very young –probably not yet 3 years old — daughter. Both the difference in size and the attention has was paying to her brought a smile to my face.

AZ: Oh yes, it’s dads and their kids, not just their boys. Remember that I have only one child, a daughter, who I treasured as a child. And a grand-daughter.

JL: I remember. I’m very sentimental about parents and their children. I am in the happy position of having a niece (she’s 10) with whom I am as close as one can be given that we don’t see each other in person very often (she lives too far away). But I keep track of what’s going on with her–I talk to my sister a few times a week, and I generally speak to my niece about once a week–and she accepts me as another loving adult in her life. (Which I realize sounds like not much, but I take it as a sign of our closeness that my presence in her life is not remarkable to her.)

AZ: On the other fathers: even as a young child, I observed fathers who rejected sons they judged to be unacceptable and abused them (and then drove then away or abandoned them). Sad lesson: that could have been me. (Little kids notice a lot more than you think they do.) However he came to it, my own dad totally failed to understand these men who tried to beat masculinity into their sons — and then rejected them if the lesson didn’t take. He allowed me to grow up secure that I was a boy, in fact a good boy, just my own kind of boy. It took me decades to get some insight into these dynamics, and by then, my father had died. But along the way I did get to thank him for giving me a happy childhood, and he thanked me for giving him a second son (Jacques, who became his friend), and, astonishingly, when he needed a buddy to talk to about sexual matters, he turned to me, and I was genuinely helpful, which pleased both of us no end.

Two more photos, showing J in action in the classroom and then just looking lean and handsome, in a head shot and in the male nude photo the head shot is taken from:

(#3) J teaching a syntax class

Ron Butters: Devilishly handsome man.

AZ: Yes, wonderful planes in his Southern French face

(followed by much more appreciation of J’s looks)

(#4) The head shot

Isolating just those planes, and a sweet half-smile.

(#5) J on the beach

The audience for this posting: I should note that my postings about my late partner Jacques (missing him painfully in these terrible times) have attracted extraordinary numbers of views — no doubt because they’re about love and life together, when there’s very little human warmth available at the moment. Not my original aim, but I’m happy to have provided this service.

People then began to speculate on what it would be like to assemble all these commenters in one place.

Gadi Niram > AZ: I’d even dress up for it.

AZ> GN: I would expect no less from you. It’s a wonderfully mixed group. Linguists (of all sorts) from all over the world, lgbtq people ditto, some family (including the family I inherited from Jacques), and, surprisingly, people who long ago went to school (grade school or high school) with my daughter. Just to pick out three prominent clusters. It pains me that I will almost surely never see any of them again.

NCOD and our anniversary. 10/11 is National Coming Out Day, which Jacques and I chose to celebrate as our anniversary — that was his brilliant idea, both that we needed a day to mark our union and we should choose a day that wasn’t entangled with national holidays or other family celebrations (like Elizabeth’s birthday), so he fixed on NCOD, which suited us perfectly. Out and proud, together.

And then to J’s son Kit, who also posted to his friends about NCOD and why it’s important:

AZ: I realize that I present myself now now as a proud queer warrior, but I had decades of shame and guilt and hiding — as did your father, Kit. (For me, these included serious episodes of deep, soul-destroying depression. I didn’t contemplate suicide, but I desperately wanted not to be any more.) I am truly sorry you didn’t get to know him as an adult friend, as you and I have gotten to know one another. As I’ve said, I fell in love with him not because he was smoking hot sexually — hot tricks are easy to find — but because he was an earnest, admirable person: a very good man. So I’m sorry you didn’t have the chance to get to know that person. (Not possible when you were an angry teenager, and then, while you were becoming the person you are now, he disintegrated.) Take pleasure that you are now the sort of son he would have wanted. And, in fact, sexual orientation aside, very much like him.

On commitment and devotion, kicked off by Walt Wolfram:

WW: Nice story and wonderful commitment.

AZ: Thanks, Walt. I have complex feelings about the commitment/devotion. As Elizabeth sometimes said, acerbically, when people commented on our commitment to caring for J through all those years he was dying: “What’s the alternative?” (meaning, should we just have abandoned him? I know that plenty of partners — especially men — when faced with traumatic brain injury or dementia, do exactly that, but that was just unimaginable to us. And I note that Elizabeth had already had her mother die, when she was still in college, so she wasn’t likely to write off another parent.) I know, Walt, that you could never do that to [your wife] Marge, or she to you, if you guys were up against something like this. There’s nothing particularly noble in this commitment to care: it’s the only imaginable moral course of action.

There were of course practicalities in caring for J. After I gave up caring for him on my own (with the assistance, eventually, of a great many friends; towards the end, he couldn’t be left on his own), we had an excellent but expensive dementia care facility to pay: roughly an even division between J’s long-term care insurance, his parents, and me. Oh god, American medical care. But we did it.

Still to come. J’s son Kit has now sent me a small stash of photos reflecting my guy in various aspects of his being, incuding hot trick and sweet dad, which I will display in another posting (Kit has given his permission). But yes, (in response in Michael Covarrubias above) J feels suddenly very present in my life, very alive. Part of this is no doubt the effect that distance provides; I can skip back to the time before he degenerated.

And also, in a separate posting, some very touching comments on the details of J’s and my sexual life, definitely not for kids or the sexually modest, though there’s a nice lesson in all of this. His abilities to engage in sexual acts degenerated and came undone, long before the blessing of anosognosia erased his knowledge of these things; so he was painfully aware of the progressive loss of these abilities, some of which were straightforwardly physical , though some were psychological (he would simply lose focus on what he was trying to do). All of this was deeply mortifying to him, but he never lost his concern for my satisfaction as well as his own.

I should note that J was, like any of us, imperfect in various ways. In particular, he was a mass of destructive self-doubt, which prevented him from finishing most projects that would have been to his advantage — though he was a demon at completing projects on other people’s behalf. Teaching was the perfect career for him, because he was always working to help the students (and he was, in fact, a fabulous teacher); research, more problematic.

My earlier posting — “Images of Jacques”, from 12/11/20 — showed four facets of my guy: as my loving partner (photo #1); as a loving and joyful parent (#2); as a linguistics teacher (#3); and as a handsome hunk (in #3, in a head shot in #4, and in a full male nude in #5). (A gay saying I quote every so often: you might be a wonderful human being, but you’re also a piece of meat. In J’s case, a piece of French movie-star meat. Charmingly, J seemed to have no sense whatsoever that he was really hot; I never saw him preening or cruising aggressively with his body. Instead he used his wonderful inviting smile.)

Now, thanks mostly to his son Kit, I have more photos in most of these categories; also I have, in my own collection, a few photos of J the athlete (spanning most of J’s life).

J the handsome hunk. From my posting of 11/24/19, “Him, 55 years ago”:

(#1) J’s 1964 Haverford yearbook photo (from Virginia Transue, J’s sister-in-law); J entered with the class of 1963 but graduated with the class of 1964

Virginia described [this] as “one of the dreamboatiest photos” she’d ever seen, a judgment I’m inclined to agree with (but then I’m wildly prejudiced).

It is the product of a commercial photographer working in a particular genre, which smoothes and genericizes the subject’s faces. The interesting angular planes of J’s face are gone, as are the crinkles that accompanied his talking and smiling. The somewhat Mediterranean tint of his skin has turned to generic American cream, and since this is a b&w photo, we don’t see the attractive gray-green of his eyes. But the guy in the photo has gorgeous eyes, and a long lean face of masculine beauty. A dreamboat, as Virginia says.

Yearbook photographers are inclined to push their male subjects to present themselves with serious expressions, rather than smiling. A great shame in this case, because J had a truly wonderful smile. Here (from my collection) he is as a young man, with a squirrel he had more or less tamed:

(#2) J and a wild friend

Then, from Kit, just the smile:

(#3)

Also, from Kit, J smiling broadly while reciting the mantra Om mani padme hum next to a pile of freshly cut wood (no, I have no idea why):

(#4)

This one also gives us, for more hunkiness, a view of J’s muscled and startlingly lean torso.

Then, also from Kit, J focused on physical work, without the smile but with a more extensive view of his torso:

(#5)

J immensely enjoyed the satisfactions of physical labor and was always up for hard work. In Columbus, he enthusiastically raked and bagged our leaves and shoveled snow from our sidewalks, and then usually went on to do the same for a variety of neighbors, especially the older ones and the ones with young children. And of course he and I did all sorts of garden work together — including building some stone walls together, which we found surprisingly rewarding (well, you pick stones out of a big pile and fit them together, without mortar, to create a solid and attractive structure, which is really cool).

When he began to decline seriously, I was much concerned about his devotion to climbing up on ladders to clean the gutters and repair the roof and prune trees. Fortunately, a self-protective mechanism kicked in: at this point he regularly formed the intention to do the job, but somehow there was always a reason he had to put it off (so Arnold the acrophobe gritted his teeth and did the task, or, most often, hired someone to do it).

Unfortunately, he had no self-protective mechanism governing how far he’d be able to walk in one go, so he would conceive a desire for something from a local shop — usually a hamburger, he loved hamburgers — and then his legs would give out on him partway through and he’d end up helplessly, miserably, on the ground. Fortunately, we lived in a genuine neighborhood, where everyone knew who he was, and someone would take care of him — either get him inside and give him something warm and nutritious to drink until he recovered his facilities and could walk home on his own, or else bring him back to my house so that I could take care of him. (The idea was not to constrain him unnecessarily, but to let him have a sense of agency and control for as long as possible — but clearly I sometimes miscalculated.)

Eventually, someone had to be with him every minute and he became an increasingly difficult charge, so I could scarcely just ask friends to take him on: he became a full-time job for me (I took early retirement from Ohio State). At that point, our family doctors (one in Columbus, one in Palo Alto: we had two of everything) said that for his sake and mine he had to go into a dementia care facility. There was an excellent one not far from the Palo Alto house — so in 1998 I sold the Columbus house and moved full-time to Palo Alto (where I bought a second condo to house most of the belongings from Columbus, the Palo Alto condo being way too small and already fully furnished, since we’d been spending winter quarters there for over a decade.

Eventually, Elizabeth and I visited him for (roughly) an hour a day, every day, but at the beginning I had to spend a good bit of time at the facility, easing him into a new life. This involved things like giving him showers and personally overseeing his medications, until I could get him to accept others as performing these tasks. There was never really a stable routine, since fresh alarming medical conditions kept appearing all the time. Oh, my poor beautiful man, brought down so low. He died early in June 2003.

J the sweet daddy. Two photos from Kit. The first of which is with a tiny Kit — still with baby fat, before he became lean like his father:

(#6)

The second with J taking a whole bunch of kids on a sled ride:

(#7)

J the athlete. Spanning his life. From his family’s collection, J essaying waterskiing in 1965 and reveling in it:

(#8)

And then, in what I think was his last athletic foray, walking the 7 miles across the San Francisco peninsula, from the bay to the ocean, with me in the 1965 Bay to Breakers. Here we are at the finish line (with a handsome stranger just behind and between us, to add to the visual interest of the photo). You might be able to see that J is absurdly pleased at his achievement. What you can’t see is that he’d been totally aphasic for much of the last mile: a transient ischemic attack, brought on by heat and dehydration, one of a number he suffered at this time.

(#7)

The participants were shunted to a stadium in Golden Gate Park, where there was shade, and also people prepared to apply cold compresses and supply water to drink.

In a few minutes, J had recovered and could talk about how pleased he was that we’d gone on this adventure together and about the serious runners and the people in absurd costumes, those who did the race in wheelchairs, and the large number of hunky guys. Within 20 minutes, he’d become completely unaware of the aphasic episode — this is characteristic of TIAs, they vanish from memory — and when I was solicitous to him about his physical state, he accused me of having made the whole story up. But all in all, it was a grand morning out, and I was glad we’d done it.

Some backstory. J and I weren’t runners, individually or together, but we were fierce walkers, exploring all of Palo Alto on foot together, and fairly often making long jaunts, 5 miles out and 5 miles back. J had an eye for small details, like particular plants (we were both gardeners) and architectural points, so he was an excellent companion.

What J excelled at was racquet sports. His family all played tennis (they had their own courts in Maine), and he picked up other racquet sports as they came his way.

Meanwhile, I had never become even minimally competent at any sport or game; it would be impossible to exaggerate the depth of my athletic incompetence. With J’s encouragement, I did take up working out at the gym. And then J realized that the newly revised gym at Ohio State came with racquetball courts: another racquet sport for him, and one we might be able to enjoy together (wisely, he’d never tried to press tennis on me), if he approached matters in the right way, as a source of the kind of pleasure we got from working out together — feeing invigorated and feeling competent.

And so he gave me a very great gift. We learned to play racquetball together, as a collaborative rather than competitive enterprise. There was no concealing that he was competent at the game in no time at all, while he drew me along slowly. He did me the honor of never holding back: he would play full out, and he  won every game we played, usually by wide margins, until he disintegrated from dementia, but he emphasized small achievements and the physical joy of the game: when a game is going well, it feels like you’re flying. It’s exhilirating.

For us, the score was never important. Though in the end, J brought me along to a high level of competence, eventually encouraging me to play in tournaments, a number of which I won.

We played racquetball in clubs in Columbus and in Sunnyvale CA. Sometimes every day.

Eventually I too lost my physical abilities, through a series of afflictions, some godawful. Racquetball is far back in my past (and, alas, I have no photos at all). But it was a very good thing; as I said, J gave me a wonderful gift, out of love. I suppose I was the great work of his athletic career.

It starts with a photo that came up in a slideshow of things from Elizabeth Daingerfeld Zwicky’s image trove: Steven Levine and me, both in flannel shirts, in a time and a place and on an occasion that neither of us could identify — and EDZ wasn’t any help.

(#1) The flannel guys

Steven put it at roughly 20 years ago, because the shirt he’s wearing is one that he wore lovingly to death some years ago (cue Donovan singing “I Love My Shirt”). I still have my shirt, however, because it was one of a set of 5 or so L.L.Bean flannel shirts I bought late in the last century and have been carefully rotating over the intervening years, to make them last through as many winters as possible (I do love those shirts; among other things, they are lined).

Ned Deily then cracked the case. First, he extracted a date stamp from the file: 2004-02-15. Then, in his own words:

I was momentarily at a loss to place it when I saw it but quickly realized it must have been at a Bay Area shape note singing. [Both Steven and I are shapenote singers.] Consulting my calendar archive, I see it was indeed: at Carolyn Deacy’s house in San Francisco [in the Glen Park neighborhood]. I think Steven was likely serendipitously in the area on business: from the calendar he was in town for at least 10 days. And earlier that same Sunday, there was a certain baby shower held at the home of Diana Smetters.

The shower would have been for the forthcoming Eliot Ozaki, now a junior in high school. Diana was a school friend of Elizabeth’s, and then as an Ohio State undergraduate took mathematical linguistics from me. We all still keep in touch: the information about Eliot I got from this year’s Christmas card from Diana and her husband Yoshi (They now live in San Carlos CA, not far from me and EDZ.).

Adventures in Flannel Land. Flannel shirts are both warm and durable, so they serve as excellent workshirts, associated stereotypically with (among others) lumberjacks and cowboys —   the macho working class of fantasy.

(These associations with masculinity have led to flannel shirts being viewed as characteristic clothing — a kind of uniform — for dykes.)

They are also very often made in plaid patterns (see Steven and me, above), sometimes associated with the tartans of Scotland and designed in gorgeous colors, so that the shirts can also be fashion objects. And that makes them available for flagrantly way-gay apparel, as in this “gay guy flannel levis jeans white socks” figure (with a big mix of gay signifiers, including a pecs/nipples display made possible by the severely cut-back open-torso shirt) available in many places on the net:

(#2) Beat this, bitch!

And, this somewhat less flagrant, but still way-gay, bear flannel:

(#3) Just an ordinary flannel shirt, but fully open for a torso display

(You can now find on Twitter plaintive cries about how hard it is to distinguish lumberjack/cowboy/country flannel from gay flannel — from straight guys trying to protect their flannel fantasies from the faggy stuff.)

Now, back to #1. It happens that Steven and I are both gay, but that doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with our attractions to flannel shirts. On the other hand, any man, gay or straight, might take pleasure from the routine associations of these shirts with masculinity — just feeling comfortable in your skin when you’re wearing one of these shirts. (Every so often, I have to remind people that I might be a fag, but I’m also a guy, and that both of those things are important to me.)

Bonus: Flannel Underground. Yes, a band — think Velvet Underground — and they do indeed perform in flannel shirts. From their Facebook page:

Playing (mostly) 90’s rock by bands such as Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, STP, Rage, RHCP, Smashing Pumpkins, Alice In Chains, Weezer, Bush and many more.

Then there’s their logo, which suggests that the band’s name might have been carefully chosen for its in-you-face values:

(#4)

Nice plaid.

(Entirely inappropriate for kids or the sexual modest. Playful, but raunchy, really raunchy.)

The trigger is a cute “Horny for the Holidays” ad for a TitanMen 2020 sale on gay porn movies, for which I’ve supplied a song parody:

Been good, gonna get much better

Oh, there’s no doubt I’m horny for the holidays
My hard-on is raging for a home
I hear that you’re an amazing lay —
For the holidays, you’ll get my rock-hard bone

The model for the parody. “(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays”, with chorus:

Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays
‘Cause no matter how far away you roam
When you pine for the sunshine of a friendly gaze
For the holidays, you can’t beat home, sweet home

On the song, from Wikipedia:

“(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” is a popular song, commonly associated with the Christmas and holiday season.

The music was composed by Robert Allen, while the lyrics were written by Al Stillman. The song was published during 1954.

The best-known recordings were made by Perry Como, who recorded the song twice, both times accompanied by Mitchell Ayres’ Orchestra and the Ray Charles Singers.

Other takeoffs on “Home for the Holidays”. The obvious play — “Homo for the Holidays” — has been perpetrated a number of times, notably in a (poignant) Will and Grace episode of that name: S2 E7, aired 11/25/99.

This is the first part of three telling a story about Jacques’s and my sexual lives together. All parts of the story are entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.

This part — “Manual labor” — is about a project of J’s, to become (in effect) the world’s authority on how to please me by masturbating me.

An enterprise that involved studying, at great length, how I jacked myself off, then reproducing my technique as faithfully as possible — but since the sensation of being jacked off by another man can’t be identical to the sensation of jacking yourself off (in fact, it has the potential for being even more satisfying, since the two-man act, versus the solitary act, is an occasion of genuine sexual connection), J also experimented with small variations in his techniques of jacking me off, until he could reliably supply a thoroughly satisfying experience for me, often subtly different on different occasions. (And all this was amplified by exchanges of facial expressions and verbalizations of many kinds.)

J’s project was an expression of great love, magnificently achieved. I have never felt more intensely attended to.

Part two of the story is, alas, “Decline”, in which J’s sexual abilities disintegrate, fairly rapidly, to zero, though he still sometimes recalled his intense desire to please me. Even jacking me off eventually failed; his attention wandered, and once, to his mortification, he just fell asleep mid-act and didn’t know where he was when he came to (or why he had my dick in his hand).

In part three, “Superbowl Sunday”, J transcends these failures of the body and mind to give me one more great gift of love.

(I remind you that all this is also about sweaty, noisy, animal sex.)

Meanwhile, this first part provokes some extended posting — mostly in separate postings — on male masturbation, the linguistic usages associated with it, and its functions in the world of men who have sex with men.

Let’s jack off. I have already described J’s project of manual labor. Here, a bit of setting it in context, from a 12/9/12 posting of mine, “Coming back to life” (about my return, after hip-replacement surgery, to a program of regularly, and happily, jacking off.). First, however, a musical interlude, Prince’s “Jack U Off”.

The Pansy Division version

If you’re looking for somewhere to go
Thought I’d take you to a movie show
Sitting in the back and I’ll jack you off
I can’t give you everything you want
But I can take you to a restaurant
If you’re not hungry
I’ll jack you off.

(The song was originally addressed to a woman, but this part can be read either way. And Pansy Division just treats it as celebratorily addressed to a man.)

From “Coming back to life”:

[medical people] probably have very little sense of just how central jacking off is for gay men. (Listen to Pansy Division rolling through Prince’s “Jack U Off!”) (On my part, it took me a great many years to realize just how profoundly little I knew about the sex lives of straight guys, beyond the most superficial understanding.)

… in the larger sexual world of gay men, jacking off plays a whole series of roles. In cruising for casual sex, jacking off (slowly and intently) works as an offer of your dick to other men, a lure for everything else that might come. In intimate relationships, jacking off is at the least a companionable connection with another man, sometimes the main sexual event on its own. Guys jack off together, face to face (giving a tinge of male competitiveness and challenge) or, an old favorite of mine, side by side, with plenty of kissing and stroking and verbal appreciation. (Jacques and I used to do that fairly often, when we had the luxury of being sexually available to each other most of the day and night, so we were under no particular pressure to make every connection a world-class suck or fuck.)

And of course gay guys jack each other off, simultaneously or (as many guys prefer) taking turns, so that their attention is undivided at each point. That’s an especially intimate act, since each man has his own jack-off style, developed and practiced from childhood; satisfying another man deeply means you need to get into these preferences and techniques. ([As I wrote above,] Jacques had my number perfectly …  and I was pretty good for him, though I had to take special care not to chafe his uncut cock. His was the first uncut cock I was close to on a daily basis.)

And lots of guys finish off other kinds of sex by jacking off (themselves or their partner) — either for the sake of supersafe sex (no coming in your man’s mouth, or in a condom in his ass, since condoms do break) or, more often, just for the theatrical show of shooting your load for your man.

(Another follow-up to today’s “Manual labor” posting, and like it, thoroughy unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)

These are extracts from previous masturbation postings, focusing especially on my sexual and affectional life with my guy Jacques.

— from 3/24/13 in “Cyanide & Happiness roundup”:

most people have a preferred hand for masturbation. The JackinWorld website (“The ultimate male masturbation resource”) assumes that the masturbation hand is the dominant hand, as in this discussion:

What is your favorite position to masturbate in?

Notes: Between 80% and 90% of those responding favor lying in bed on one’s back or sitting in a chair in front of a computer or TV. The availability of Internet pornography has driven many right-handed people to shift to using their left hand for masturbation to leave the right one free to maneuver the mouse. Other positions for masturbating included lying on one’s stomach while humping a pillow or mattress, hanging upside-down, masturbating in front of a mirror, standing (usually in a shower), and with legs over the head to maneuver the genitals closer to the person’s face.

But many right-handers use the left hand for masturbation — left-handed jacking off is way more common in gay porn than the incidence of left-handedness in the population — and in some cultures the left hand is prescribed for masturbation as well as wiping the anus, since the right hand is prescribed for eating. (The left hand is then the “dirty hand”.)

J used his right hand, for himself and for me, while I use my left hand for myself (and have since 1950, I have no idea why) but used my right hand for J.

— from 12/29/14 in “Santa jack”, two things. First, about the social context of jacking off:

jacking off can be private or public (public in the sense of having an audience — jacking off for someone — or in the sense of acting in concert — in what’s sometimes called a circle jerk, though group jerk would be a better term); it can be directed at someone (jacking off on someone, as in bukkake, but not only there); it can be celebratory, flagrant, or matter-of-fact. The jack-off in

A goofy guy in a Santa cap, in an immediately post-masturbatory moment

is without an audience or co-actors, directed back at the guy jacking off, and celebratory. All these distinctions are important to men who engage in jacking off (which is virtually all men), but none of the activities have customary names.

J and I jacked off with one another (often, while sharing the pleasures of gay porn flicks that suited both our tastes) and for one another (to provoke hard-ons or to show off) and, sometimes on one another (a complex act with many possible meanings, of which one is claiming the other man’s body as your territory by coming on it).

Also in the “Santa jack” posting, a discussion of jack-off clubs:

A jack off club is a sexy situation, but jerking off together is not technically a sex act. There’s no penetration or feelings of love between the participants, so it is not particularly gay or straight in itself. It’s just sexuality, plain and simple, which is one of the attractions. If you desire to jack off with gay or bi men only, there are certainly some jack off clubs with strictly gay or bi memberships, but unless you want to suck and fuck other men in addition to jerking off, it doesn’t really matter what their sexual orientation is.

The view here of these clubs as primarily for a celebration of masculinity, a kind of male bonding, echoes accounts by MSMs (“men who have sex with men” but explicitly do not identify as gay or bi) of what they get out of their sort of down-low sex.

J and I both had networks of male friends, some straight, many gay, with whom we enjoyed the pleasures of affiliation; meanwhile, when we were hunting for sex, we weren’t interested in male bonding. We were both wary of classic MSMs (sensing that many of these guys were in fact homophobic to some degree). And jack-off clubs offered nothing of interest to us; what we were after was in fact sexual connection, indeed connection with a specific person (maybe just a quick trick, but a specific person).

— from 3/24/17, in an AZBlogX posting “Hand jobs”:

Hand jobs and frottage (aka rubbing) are the non-penetrative forms of mansex and, as such, are often discounted — treated as mere accompaniments to other sexual acts (it’s common to jack off a guy you’re fucking, for example, but the fucking is the main event; and in group sex in gay porn, a cocksucker will often work a cock in one or both hands, but the blow job is the main event) or foreplay to penetrative sex (rubbing is a common lead-in to fucking, hand jobs to blow jobs and possibly on from there to fucking). There’s an attitude that if nobody takes a dick into his body, it’s not really sex — an attitude that, on the plus side, makes hand jobs and rubbing more acceptable as buddy play (or bro-play), something straight guys could easily get into — just helpin’ my horny buddy out, helpin’ him to get of — without veering into fag territory.

Whether you identify as straight or gay, you can give or get a hand job for its own sake; it’s friendly sex, literally non-invasive, and safe sex (but it is sex, since shooting your load or his is the goal), and it’s easily combined with other kinds of body play, especially kissing. If you’re frankly gay, it can be the vehicle for affection, love, and romance. It can be configured as one guy serving another guy’s cock (for pleasure on both sides) or as a mutual exchange (easier to manage than 69ing, because there’s less sense of divided attention: mutual hand jobs are just like jacking yourself off — you use your hand to stroke, you get the pleasurable sensations of being stroked — with the bonus that you get another guy’s body to appreciate).

It’s usually said that to give a really satisying hand job, you should watch how your guy jacks himself off; if you can reproduce his style, then you’re pretty much guaranteed to be doing a good hand job. But his style is whatever he chanced on because it once worked for him as boy, so it’s familiar, but that was years ago, and he might now appreciate novelty instead of familiarity. Guys differ in these things: some need the familiar routine, but others can be pleasantly surprised. [I see that when I wrote this, I was somewhat under the sway of sex advisers bent on getting guys to try out new stuff.] Stimulating the glans and frenulum provides the most intense sensations; but fisting the shaft can give a man the feeling of raw power; playing with his balls or asshole can magnify the experience; and there are several satisfying options for moving hand on dick (with two fingers vs. whole fist; up and down vs. rotary; etc.).

One of the lessons of the gay porn that J and I used to watch together was that the range of styles for jacking yourself off is truly enormous. “Wow!, J once marveled, “Hard-driving two fisted jacking! Who knew?” The orgy scenes that are such a common feature of gay porn provide tons of opportunity for studying these things. A further lesson is that though the orgiasts will try out an assortment of techniques on one another, they seem very firmly fixed  in what they do for themselves.

At this point, there’s a small terminological issue: how to refer to the participants in a hand job, a guy who jacks another guy off and a guy who gets jacked off by another guy…. The crucial fact here is that in a mansex hand job, one guy supplies (metonymically, is) the hand, and one guy supplies (metonymically, is) the dick — so that when the context is guys and handjobs, the compounds handman and dickman will do just fine.

[On my X blog] I’ve selected five scenes from gay porn that show hand jobs pursued for their own sake (at least at the point in mansex shown in the photos). From professional rather than amateur gay porn, because the pros — directors, cameramen, and actors — really are better at what they do, and they tend to produce much more satisfying images.

— from 1/28/20 in “Humongous tops Adonis”:

recreational gay porn can be enjoyed with a like-minded partner. You can comment on the action and on one another’s responses to it, and maybe move on to man-on-man sex. You get a lot of sensory input: your own hard-on, what you’re doing and saying, his hard-on, what he’s doing and saying, and everything that’s happening on-screen. You’re floating together in this hot fog of sexual feelings. (In the long-distant past, this worked nicely for Jacques and me.)

Interestingly, gay porn is, or at least used to be, a major thing at gay sex clubs. Its function there is to help as many guys as possible maintain their hard-ons while they’re advertising themselves for whatever kind of sex they want. If you start to slide towards coming, you can just take your hand off your dick and look away from the screen, to recover your composure.

I have seen guys maintain hard-ons this way for an hour or longer, until the very specific thing they were looking for came along. (If he didn’t, they finished themselves off in private.) J had no interest in sex clubs or the gay baths — they struck him as jangly sensory overload; he was amazed that I could cut through the waves of demands on my attention to make satisfying one-on-one connections. (I don’t think I ever told him about the occasions on which I was gangbanged; gangbang porn was very much not to his taste, so he surely would have found my experiences distasteful.)

In fact, J was aware that I was vastly kinkier than he was sexually (I’m not sure he could be said to have been kinky at all — just really really queer, into your basic sucking and fucking and kissing and so on), and warned me away from talk about, and gay porn featuring, sexual acts he found distasteful. (For a long time, a lot of gay porn has very prominently featured watersports, that is, piss play, which I used to enjoy on occasion. J was at some level aware of this, so told me that if that was something I liked, he didn’t want to hear about it — and didn’t want to see it in the porn we shared.)

Reflecting on this now, I’m guessing he didn’t want his rather idealized view of me damaged by knowledge of my down and dirty side (even when he could guess at what that side might be like). That would have been loving (though rather unrealistic). In any case, I of course fully respected his wishes.

The second part of three telling a story about Jacques’s and my sexual lives together. (Warning: all three parts are entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)

The first part — my 12/30/20 posting “Manual labor” — was about a project of J’s, to become (in effect) the world’s authority on how to please me by masturbating me. J’s project was an expression of great love, magnificently achieved. I have never felt more intensely attended to.

This part of the story is, sadly, “Decline”, in which J’s sexual abilities disintegrate, fairly rapidly, to zero, though he still sometimes recalled his intense desire to please me.

The story turns out to be more complex than I thought at first; there will be periodic digressions into significant related topics.

First digression: pleasing him and pleasing yourself. It would be a mistake to think that J’s pleasure in jacking me off was entirely, or even primarily, a matter of pleasing me. J was, after all, a queer guy, and queer guys are characterized by being aroused by dicks (rather than, as our straight brothers are, by pussies). Dealing with dicks — handling them, stroking them, enjoying the texture of hard dicks, their smell, their mouth-feel, the power of their ejaculations — all these are intense pleasures on their own for queer guys.

Sex is a two-way street. J gave me the pleasures of his attentions to my dick, and I gave him full access to the pleasures of my dick. (And he did the same for me)

Medical matters I: erectile dysfunction. The first event I don’t have a record of, but I’m guessing it was in the early 1990s. I would characterize it as profound erectile dysfunction, a label I’ll explain in steps.

Digression: erectile dysfunction (ED). The name of a symptom: a man’s inability to achieve or sustain a stiff erection, of the sort required for fucking. According to the Wikipedia article,

Causes of or contributors to ED include the following: … Aging: It is four times more common in men aged in their 60s than those in their 40s.

Medications: The PDE5 inhibitors sildenafil (Viagra), vardenafil (Levitra) and tadalafil (Cialis) are prescription drugs which are taken by mouth. As of 2018, sildenafil is available in the UK without a prescription.

This is what I think of as the ED of aging, which I view as a frequent, and entirely normal, concomitant of aging in men, annoying though it might be for some. I myself have had the ED of aging for ten years or so, with almost no consequences for my life: I haven’t had any sexual contact with another person for nearly 20 years now, so I have no call for stiff hard-ons (and if I did, the PDE5 inhibitors are available for the occasion, though I’d be wary of mixing one of these drugs with my other medications).

Significantly, the ED of aging interferes in no way with my daily routines of jacking myself off, which I can regulate as fast or slow with my hand, and which provide me with very satisfying ejaculations. That is, the only thing affected is the stiff hard-ons.

I go into such detail about my personal situation because what happened to Jacques was quite different from this — what I’ve come to think of as profound ED. And its onset changed the character of our sex life.

J’s profound ED. Over a short period of time, J lost essentially all of his sexual response — not just the stiff hard-ons that played a key role in the fucking that provided the two of us with such pleasure (he fucked me beautifully, indeed was (justly) proud of his ability to drive me to sexual ecstasy with his dick inside me), but all of his response to my jacking him off or sucking his cock (or, in fact, to my fucking him; occasionally that had been exactly what he wanted, and it pleased me to give him the experience). Very suddenly he was inert.

At the time, new and alarming neurological symptoms were beginning to appear with some frequency in J’s life, all of them baleful consequences of damage to his brain from the radiation treatments that had saved his life years earlier. I’m not sure why I didn’t take notes (in the medical history that I kept for his doctors) on his profound ED; possibly I thought it would have shamed him if I’d talked about such deficits to other people — as, indeed, it would have.

Meanwhile, from my medical notes:

And then a surprise. Next, J became deeply listless. I reported this in a 1997 conversation with his Stanford family doctor, adding that J had quite suddenly ceased to have a smell. (Scents, especially bodily scents, are very significant to me, and J’s sex scent was deeply satisfying to me. Suddenly it was gone.)

The doctor looked grave and said he was getting us an appointment, immediately, with an endocrinologist. And so we discovered panhypopituitarism. From Wikipedia:

Hypopituitarism is the decreased (hypo) secretion of one or more of the eight hormones normally produced by the pituitary gland at the base of the brain. If there is decreased secretion of one specific pituitary hormone, the condition is known as selective hypopituitarism.  If there is decreased secretion of most or all pituitary hormones, the term panhypopituitarism (pan meaning “all”) is used.

… Most pituitary hormones can be replaced indirectly by administering the products of the effector glands: hydrocortisone (cortisol) for adrenal insufficiency, levothyroxine for hypothyroidism, testosterone for male hypogonadism

Essentially, the radiation treatments had damaged J’s pituitary gland, and the damage accumulated over the years, to the point where his pituitary eventually ceased to function at all.

So, for the rest of J’s life, regular replacements of all three of these hormones, which brought some energy back to J and restored a shadow of his sex scent, just a bit of tang.

To come. In part three of this story, “Superbowl Sunday”, J transcends these failures of the body and mind to give me one more great gift of love.

This is the third and final part of a set of postings about my guy J’s and my sexual and affectional lives: yes, about our loving relationship, but (as I repeatedly stress to people) also about about sweaty, noisy, animal sex, so that it’s entirely inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest.

Previous installments in thumbnail form:

— my 12/30/20 posting “Manual labor”, about a project of J’s, to become (in effect) the world’s authority on how to please me by masturbating me.

— my 1/4/21 posting “Decline”, in which J’s sexual abilities disintegrated, fairly rapidly, to zero, though he still sometimes recalled his intense desire to please me.

In today’s installment, J gives me a great gift of love.

The texts here come from two 1996 postings on Superbowl Sunday that year (about a visit to the gay baths in San Jose CA); the texts are as I posted them on AZBlogX on 10/3/10, with various bits of commentary from me today:

— AZBlogX on 10/3/10: “Superbowl Sunday (Part I)”

— AZBlogX, on 10/3/10: “Superbowl Sunday (Part II)”

Superbowl I.

somehow this year I know that the Superbowl (which I have figured out is a football game) is in Tempe, Arizona, at Sun Devil Stadium … I even know that the Steelers were involved, and suspect (on the basis of the name) that they are based in Pittsburgh.  I’ve already forgotten the other team (ok, just looked it up, the Dallas Cowboys)

… Jacques decides to watch the game. I am itchy for sex, which (long sad story) my sweet man has been unable to engage in for some time now [this is the profound ED noted in my 1/4/21 posting “Decline”, the onset of which I estimated in that posting to be the early 1990s — a dating now supported by this 1996 note that J had been unable to engage in sex for some years then], and I want to escape to the gay baths for, frankly, dirty debauchery, for play outside the envelope of this discouraging real world. [In this 1996 posting I castigate myself for being a selfish shit for abandoning J for an afternoon so that I can get the sexual pleasures he was no longer able to provide for me , though now in 2021 I’m inclined to be somewhat less hard on myself]. I tell Jacques (who’s still able to manage on his own at home for a while, though just barely) where I’m going [before J came apart, we continued some sexual practices established in the days before we came out and became a public couple, of cruising for sex with men in the subterranean worlds of gay sex — J finding tricks primarily in gyms, me finding tricks in t-rooms and the gay baths, the two of us sharing brief reports on our adventures] he wistfully kisses me, says he hopes I find a nice man, he’ll watch the game, I drive off .

The crucial part:

(NICE1) I tell Jacques … where I’m going, he wistfully kisses me, says he hopes I find a nice man

The easy bit: sharing brief reports on our sexual adventures with other men. Brief, so as not to be threatening to our relationship. It turned out that I seem not to understand how jealousy works, so J could tell me in great detail about his sexual adventures, and that merely entertained me and aroused me. J, however, was more insecure, so I had to edit what I told him fairly carefully (though he was fascinated by my postings on the complex social order of the gay baths and often asked me expand on my stories).

In fact, my visits to the baths came when I was in other cities for academic responsibilities or came during the summer, when J was off with his family in Maine, so these adventures of mine weren’t matters of my choosing to trick with other men — say, on a Sunday afternoon at the baths — when I could instead have enjoyed sex, or just a companionable time, with him. Even so, my reports were pretty carefully edited.

The hard bit: so NICE1 wouldn’t have happened at all if J had still been sexually competent. But he wasn’t any longer and, sadly, he was (still) entirely aware of that. I could have lied about where I was going — there was almost always work I could have been doing at Stanford  that I could have used as a cover story — but I chose instead to tell him the truth. which in unvarnished terms was that I was going off to get something he could no longer give me (this is the selfish shit part).

The remarkable thing is that he didn’t respond with hurt or anger, but with loving concern for me, with the wish that I would find someone who could provide me with what he no longer could. It’s possible that I was counting on that, expecting him to behave as the sort of loving partner who (recall) would decide to become (in effect) the world’s authority on how to please me by masturbating me. In this case, he was looking out for me by hoping I could find a guy who woud fuck me the way he knew I loved to be fucked — and who would also treat me with the kind of affectionate regard that J himself held for me. (No more sex, but we slept curled up around one another, enjoying the feel and scent of each other’s bodies.)

If I was counting on that (frankly remarkable) response from Jacques, well, then, I was one lucky bastard, because that’s what he gave me. A great gift of love.

Superbowl II. Meanwhile, back at the baths, I had just the sort of experience J was hoping for me: a long satisfying encounter with “Mark Ericson”, who fucked me repeatedly and beautifully; we were loud, dirty-talking faggots, both given to very publicly audible outbursts of sexual ecstasy, putting on a flagrant show for other men in the baths.

And then in the private sexual after-time, wrapped in each others arms under the sheets, talking in low voices only for one another, we exchanged life stories with one another — telling our stories of trying to fit our gay natures into an often hostile and threatening world.

First the sex, then the becoming acquainted.

Usually these after-sex moments are sketchy but nevertheless revealing; I have learned an enormous amount about the outlines of gay lives vastly different from my own, and used this information in my writing about sexuality. However, the sex with Mark established an extraordinary level of mutual trust, leading us both to pour out, at great length, the details of our lives and our feelings about our histories. I realize that this isn’t the sort of thing most people imagine happening at the gay baths, but there it is.

Oh yes, with the mutual trust comes the affectionate regard J was hoping I would find.

Then from the 1996 postings, Part II:

More aftermaths. Jacques actually watched the game. Well, tried to; the cable system went on the fritz at the end of the first quarter. He wasn’t able to figure out which team was which, though, and when I got home he asked me – long before he asked me where I’d been – what the colors of the two teams were. He was dismayed that I hadn’t a clue [I am basically a sports idiot]. And still amused that I was mildly ashamed to know the little bit I did, about team names and all that.

Eventually, he thought to ask where I’d been (he’d forgotten, of course; new things don’t stick in his mind very long). When I told him I’d been to the baths, he asked if I’d found someone nice, and I said yes, very nice (trying not to sound too appreciative), his name is Mark and he lives in San Francisco. He said he was glad, and kissed me, partly because he likes to kiss me, partly to reassure me that it was ok for me to have hooked up with another man, partly (I think) to find Mark’s taste in my mouth.

The crucial bit:

(NICE2) When I told him I’d been to the baths, he asked if I’d found someone nice, and I said yes, …  his name is Mark and he lives in San Francisco. He said he was glad, and kissed me, …  partly to reassure me that it was ok for me to have hooked up with another man

As I said, a great gift of love.

I then made a stir-fry dinner for J and me, and a little while afterwards we curled up in our bed together.

Soon thereafter, J’s memories for any of this were gone, and he was deviled by hallucinations and delusions. After spending one last summer in Maine in 1998 (during which I sold the Columbus OH house and moved full-time to Palo Alto), J returned to Palo Alto and soon afterwards I transferred him to a dementia care facility in Menlo Park. Then I no longer had a man, even a severely damaged one, in my bed. The scent of his body lasted a little while in our bed, and then literally disappeared in the wash.