(Some male body parts, depicted and discussed in plain, but not raunchy, terms. So not squarely in the Sex Zone, but not tasteful either. Caution advised for kids and the sexually modest.)

For me, it all started with a recent ad on Facebook for suit sets (sleeveless tank tops with bikini underpants) from the Fabmens company in a variety of intriguing patterns, including a (more or less) rainbow “color block” pattern seen here from the rear:

(#1) The design of the underpants strikingly accentuates the wearer’s ass / butt / bum  cleft / crack / cleavage, in a way that in my queer fashion I (at least) find decidedly hot

The Fabmens suits sets. In many handsome or entertaining patterns, pretty much all gay-oriented: rainbow sets on many themes; lips; hot dogs; peaches (see the emoji for buttocks ); an anchor (the Village People’s “In the Navy”); gingerbread men (so good to eat); bananas; a butterfly; coconuts (for men: pecs, testicles, or buttocks); and more.

A vocabulary note. Though I have occasionally remarked on notable assclefts in my postings, and assembled some photos on AZBlogX — notably, in my 8/5/13 posting “Assclefts” — I haven’t posted about the relevant anatomical terminology, which turns out to be various. Here I’ll use intergluteal cleft, because (a) it seems to be the prevailing standard; (b) it has a straightforward derivation; and (c) intergluteal has a great metrical pattern, which I’m soon going to exploit. From Wikipedia:

The intergluteal cleft or just gluteal cleft, also known by a number of synonyms, including natal cleft, anus slice, butt crack, and cluneal cleft, is the groove between the buttocks that runs from just below the sacrum to the perineum, so named because it forms the visible border between the external rounded protrusions of the gluteus maximus muscles. Other names are the anal cleft, crena analis, arena interglutealis, “cleftal horizon”, and rima ani. Colloquially the intergluteal cleft is known as bum crack (UK) or butt crack (US).

(Lat. rima ‘chink, fissure, crack, cleft’ — “sometimes rude” according to one dictionary, without saying which of the attested anatomical uses they had in mind. As in butt crack, or as in love crack ‘vagina’?)

From a fantasy Eastern Europe. And now, free verse from a fantasy Ukraine (or wherever), which you can think of as an elaborate caption to this asscrack photo from the AZBlogX posting I cited above:

(#2)

The Treasure of Rovno

once a year, on
Exhibition Day, the
Treasure of Rovno is
put on public display

А – на – то – лій!
А – на – то – лій! they
chant, shouting for the
Treasure-Bearer, who

steps into the
cavernous stadium,
slides his faded jeans
down his narrow hips,

exposes the
elegant, vulgar,
perfect, raunchy,
cleft of his ass

— and the crowd
erupts into the
Treasure Chant —

IN TER … GLU – te AL!
IN TER … GLU – te AL!

wild-eyed teens
making rude gestures
break into a
cha-cha-cha that

winds around
Anatoliy while crowds
scrutinize his body

silently he stands,
Lord of Carnival,
Object of Reverence,
could go either way

could be getting gangbanged,
could be getting massaged with
scented oils infused with
mood-enhancing drugs

you never know, but it’s all good,
Anatolij’s the keeper of the Treasure,
he adapts to everything

Note 1. The two Rovno Gubernyas. The history of the real Rovno (now in Ukraine, now with the name Rivne) — in Rovno Gubernya (gubernya ‘province’), named after its major city —  has, over the centuries, been administratively under the control of Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine (in various orders). The real Rovno has a certain amount of fame from the musical Candide (largely the creation of Leonard Bernstein) via the wonderful song “I Am Easily Assimilated”, performed by The Old Woman (born in what was then Poland and is now Ukraine), who is at that point in the show in the process of becoming Spanish:

I was not born in sunny Hispania,
My father came from Rovno Gubernya [as did Leonard Bernstein’s father].
But now I’m here, I’m dancing a tango!

(You can watch a performance of the whole song by the fabulous Patti LuPone, backed up by the Westminster Symphonic Choir & the New York Philharmonic, here

Then there is another Rovno that suffered all the warfare, conflagrations, suppressions, migrations, and invasions that the real Rovno did, but had all of its records destroyed in the process, so that all that remains are rather fantastical tales of the history, passed around orally — tales like the story of the Treasure of Rovno, the Treasure Chant, and the cha-cha-cha for dancing to this chant.

[Digression on the cha-cha-cha, from Wikipedia:

Styles of cha-cha-cha dance may differ in the place of the chasse in the rhythmical structure. The original Cuban and the ballroom cha-cha-cha count is “one, two, three, cha-cha”, or “one, two, three, four-and.” A “street version” comes about because many social dancers count “one, two, cha-cha-cha” and thus shift the timing of the dance by a full beat of music.

(You can watch a performance of the line dance “One Two Cha Cha Cha” danced to a Hindi song, with choreography by BM Leong, here.)]

Note 2. Crowd chants. Central to the story are the crowd chants in it — first the simple chanted repetition of a name (here in the Latin-alphabet spelling):

А – nа – tо – lіy!  (S W S W)

Then, the more complex Treasure Chant, with its cha-cha-cha rhythm:

IN TER … GLU – te AL! (and three levels of accent: S S | S W S, with superstrong S);
as a cha-cha-cha: 1 2 | CHA cha CHA

You might recognize this rhythm as similar to the simpler rhythm of this political crowd chant:

Hell, no! We won’t go! (S S | S W S)

(with a slogan conveying resistance to the draft for the Vietnam War).

Note 3. Crowds. Breaking things down: first the noun crowd, from NOAD:

noun crowd: [a] a large number of people gathered together in a disorganized or unruly way: a huge crowd gathered in the street outside. … [c] informal, often derogatory a group of people who are linked by a common interest or activity: I’ve broken away from that whole junkie crowd.

In sense a, we have a physical aggregation of people in some place; they happen to be together, to catch a subway train or gawk at an accident or whatever. In sense b, we have a social aggregation of people, united by some identity or interest, which causes them to act in concert (even if they don’t appreciate their commonality). The classic account of the dark side of crowds in sense b, from Wikipedia:

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is an early study of crowd psychology by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841 under the title Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. The book was published in three volumes: “National Delusions”, “Peculiar Follies”, and “Philosophical Delusions”. Mackay was an accomplished teller of stories, though he wrote in a journalistic and somewhat sensational style.

The subjects of Mackay’s debunking include [warning: this is a kind of giant grab-bag] alchemy, crusades, duels, economic bubbles [three chapters on these alone], fortune-telling, haunted houses, the Drummer of Tedworth, the influence of politics and religion on the shapes of beards and hair [more generally, infuences on the spread of fashions], magnetisers (influence of imagination in curing disease), murder through poisoning, prophecies, popular admiration of great thieves, popular follies of great cities, and relics.

(Much more could be added to this list; moral panics and scapegoating would be high on my list, as well as all-encompassing mass movements, conspiracy theories, and the spread of disinformation.)

But the crowds that are relevant to the tale of the fantasy Rovno are a cross between crowd in sense a and crowd in sense b: they are large physical aggregations of people united by some shared identity or interest, which provides them with an intense, even physical, sense of belonging that causes them to act in concert. These are the crowds at athletic events, political rallies and demonstrations, and rock concerts.

Note 4. Repeating expressions. The pleasure and power of repetition is all around us, in music, dance, poetry, religious ritual, and more. And just in everyday playfulness, as celebrated again and again in the Zippy the Pinhead cartoons. In my most recent posting on Zippylicious repetition, from 10/2/20 in “goon squad goon squad goon squad”:

the phrase goon squad appeared and seized my attention, so that I repeated it like a mantra. I was in the grip of onomatomania

… From my 11/27/19 posting “At the onomatomania dinette”:

Zippy compulsively repeats a phrase he finds in some way attractive or pleasing, starting with the name of the diner he’s in: Do-Nut Dinette... This repetition, treating the phrase as a kind of mantra, has come up in Zippy strips under various names; see my 10/3/17 posting “Repetitive phrase disorder”, with several alternative labels for “Word attraction extended to the phrase level and made into a satisfying (though compulsive) verbal routine.” — of which onomatomania is my current favorite.

(the full set: found mantras, onomatomania, phrase repetition disorder, repetitive phrase disorder)

(An appendix to this posting has an inventory of Zippy postings on the topic, from 2009 on.)

Note 3 on crowd chants (continued). In crowd chants this pleasure and power is harnessed to acting out an identification with a sports team, a political cause, or a rock group. Here I have to confess that I’d intended to include some recorded examples, but it seems to be virtually impossible to make out the words in the recordings, which are (unsurprisingly) incredibly noisy. (The chanting of “Hang Mike Pence” and “Bring out Mike Pence” during the 1/6/21 crowd invasion of the U.S. Capitol, for example, was quite clear to those who were at the scene, but not easy to make out in the videos.)

Writing about crowd chants seems to be almost entirely about their content and the contexts in which they’re used. There is, however, some linguistic literature on the expressions that are adapted for chanting: on their prosodic properties, and the ways in which their prosody is adapted. I am working on unearthing this material and will report later on what I find. But in the interest of (temporarily) finishing this posting, I’ll put off that report for a bit.

Note 5. The ritual of Exhibition Day. You might think that the fabled exhibition of the Treasure of Rovno is a preposterous ritual. But it’s really no more absurd than many attested cultural rituals: the running of the bulls at Pamplona, the presentation of debutantes to “society” at a ball, the Japanese Penis Festival, or the giving of Easter egg baskets, just to choose a few easy examples.

Appendix on Zippylicious repetition. Postings on this blog from 2009 on (for a variety of reasons, my notations of prosodies are rather unsystematic and improvised):

— from 9/30/09 in “Phrase repetition disorder”:

Every so often, Zippy and Zerbina get into a groove of repeating phrases. This time it’s Zerbina, stuck on the remarkable phrase “post-prandial sneeze disorder”

—from 2/20/10 in “Zippylicious geographical names”:

Zippy is in love with words — beautiful words, somewhat ridiculous words, peculiar words, they’re all delicious to Zippy (a manifestation of word attraction). Names especially so. Here he is savoring two geographical names from Montana: Grundy Gulch and Zortman

(savoring them by repeating each — S W S and S S, respectively — three times)

— from 3/3/10 in “Mantra of the moment”:

Zippy and his acquaintances are given to picking up and chanting “found mantras”, expressions that they find satisfying to repeat — in episodes of what Bill Griffith calls onomatomania or phrase repetition disorder, here)

remote control bathtub jet ski (simplified: WS WS | SW SW)

— from 3/31/13 in “Sticky expressions”:

a Zippy with the “found mantra” Vampire Manga Dog condo [simplified: SW SW | S SW] — an expression that lends itself to obsessive repetition. Such sticky expressions are a recurrent theme in Zippy

— from 5/7/17 in “Words, words, words” two Zippy cartoons, one on “battology: the excessive repetition of a word or phrase”, a (WS WS) word that Zippy then repeats three times; the other on Zippy repeating recidivism (W SW SW?)

— from 10/3/17 in “Repetitive phrase disorder”, a Zippy on “the tetrametrical mantra turtle-headed sea snakes” (SW SW S S)

— from 10/6/18 in “Twisting in the wind”, a Zippy on “the mantra-like repetition of pneumatic wiggly thing (iambic trimeter)” (WS WS WS)

— from 10/19/19 in “Another Griffithian mantra”, on “the hypnotic pleasures of mantric repetition, a favorite theme of Bill Griffith’s”, with cosmic catnip alpine scratcher (SW SW SW SW)

— from 11/27/19 in “At the onomatomania dinette”, a Zippy on Do-Nut Dinette (SW WS)

Two late July developments: the latest in a series of ever-shorter buzzcuts (with Kim Darnell wielding the clippers), finally reaching a minimal one that satisfies me thoroughly. Shorter than the crewcut that carried me through my late high school years, and requiring no stying. A bit shorter than the easy-care buzzcut my dad settled on in the last years of his life.

Huge hoary linguistics professor, wearied but smiling with pleasure — note the smile lines at the corners of the eyes — at his buzzcut and at the pink neon claim (both amiable and outrageous) to social space for his kind (photo by Kim Darnell)

From NOAD:

adj. hoary: 1 [a] grayish white: hoary cobwebs. [b] (of a person) having gray or white hair; aged: a hoary old fellow with a face of white stubble. …

(Hairy as well as hoary; note chest and forearms. And once whorish as well. But that was in a different time. Though I have considered getting a GAY SLUT t-shirt to honor the memory of that time.)

There will be more t-shirts. I’m in an outrageously amiable apparel phase.

This particular t-shirt goes a step beyond my friend Steven Levine’s plain white BIG FAG tee — a gift to him from some admiring Irish lads a few years back. Steven vigorously accumulates all manner of friends, often by wooing them with energetic song.

Yesterday’s posting — “Big Fag in a buzzcut” — had a photo both impromptu and soulful, plus that cheeky, rather unsettling slogan. Today’s photo is posed and more magisterial (though still amiable), and the slogan is the plain rainbow “Faggot”:

(#1) “I am Professor Faggot and I’m a hell of a lot queerer than you imagined, so put aside your contempt, listen up, and I’ll guide you through things” (photo by Kim Darnell)

Below the fold, some material that’s not appropriate for kids or the sexually modest.

Faggot and what it stands for. A big topic, which I now find too overwhelming to tackle properly here. Except to note that faggot has come to be used by some within the gay community as a term of opprobrium or outright contempt for “bad gay men”, men whose actions and behaviors would tend to embarrass the community. Notably, what I’ve come to call f-gays: effeminate / fem / femme men, various characterized by critics as

flamboyant, flaming, faggy, faggot, fairy, campy, mincing, prissy, nelly, stereotypical, gay-acting, too gay

And a devaluing of men who prefer the receptive role in anal intercourse: guys who like to get fucked, in brief. (Once again the attitudes represent a flight from (perceived) femininity in any of its forms.) Though I tend to read as straight, I am very much RAI-oriented in desire and fantasy, so I have a dog in this fight, and am happy to flaunt my desires. From my 8/11/20 posting “Mansex positions: spitroasting”:

I use the metaphor of describing myself in those days as a pussy-ass faggot, but it’s a metaphor, not an identity, and the experience was [for me] neither feminizing nor submissive, quite the contrary.

So I work to normalize and celebrate (rather than condemn) ass-fucking in general — it’s just a way for men to have pleasurable sex — and getting fucked in particular, and of course sucking cock (that’s just everyday sex) and men who present themselves as fem, or who merely read as gay (cheers for them; they are the visible face of the gay male community, and they often take a lot of shit for that). As I noted in a posting a while back, I very much admire this t-shirt, and men who wear it:

(#2) Celebrating bottoming and promiscuous sex

I don’t wear this t-shirt, because it makes an offer I’m not prepared to follow up on; the sentiment is merely historical (I haven’t been fucked since some time in the last century) and aspirational (it’s a powerful fantasy, but one that’s not going to be realized in life). Along the same lines, I don’t wear the shirt in #3, though I admire its plain speaking:

(#3) T-shirt from Cafe Press (in light blue here, also available many other colors); Cafe Press also offers a shirt with the slogan: I ︎ SUCKING COCK

More buzzcut t-shirts to come…

(Sexually edgy topics — what do you expect from gay dinosaurs? — so you might want to exercise caution.)

Yesterday it was a rainbow FAGGOT in block letters (in the posting “Today’s garment faggotry”); today it’s all visual: a rainbow tyrannosaurus, a poignant symbol of gay obsolescence:

(#1) Yesterday I was standing in front of a bookcase, at the helm of my indoor walker; today I’m in my work nest with my Window on the World (on my plants, birds, and squirrels) behind me, sitting in my outdoor walker, which doubles as a sturdy chair (photo by Kim Darnell)

Behind me is a crocheted FUCK square, a tribute to Jesse Sheidlower and The F Word; and a postcard tribute to the male art of Tom of Finland. Just above them, not visible here, is a copy of Jump, Paradise Cove, 1987, a Herb Ritts photograph of four men disporting themselves on the beach (see my 9/9/16 posting “Herb Ritts”). Otherwise, it’s reference works on one side, my work table (with visible mouse, on its rainbow-Z mousepad) on the other.

On the shirt, see sense 2 in this NOAD entry:

noun dinosaur: 1 a fossil reptile of the Mesozoic era, in many species reaching an enormous size. … 2 a person or thing that is outdated or has become obsolete because of failure to adapt to changing circumstances.

Sigh.

Gay dinosaurs have an odd press. There’s the work of Chuck Tingle, preposterous brief tales of men’s sexual submission to rapacious gay dinosaurs. There’s a small set of dinosaur jokes, the apex of which is this terrible pun, reproduced in hundreds of variants:

(#2) A gay greeting card from QueerWorld on Etsy, with cutesy dinosaurs illustrating the Big Mega-Sore-Ass (for Megasaurus) Joke

(For the record, a fair number of gay men don’t engage in anal intercourse, and of those who do, a sizable proportion are exclusively or primarily tops. And — I speak here as an enthusiastic bottom in a long-ago life of sex with men — if it hurts or makes you sore, your top is doing it wrong. I can’t recall ever getting a sore ass from sex, not even the first time; the guy who broke me in was fabulously good at it.)

But #2 comes from Joke World, not the real world, and in Joke World, gay sex is not only sick, icky, and contrary to God’s Word, but also painful (as it ought to, given that it’s sick, icky, and contrary to God’s Word). Yee haw, those stupid faggots, taking it up the ass, they deserve what they get!

Speaking of S, I, & C 2 G W, the other really popular gay dinosaur visual is, I hope, also a joke, a broad mockery of fundangelist spewing against faggots: satanism, violence, and sodomy! (Door #3 for me, please.) A mockery, rather than the actual vile thing:

(#3) Triple threat: saurianism, satanism, and sodomism

Coming soon: GAY AS FUCK (large type edition). And then, some Helvetiana, as Swiss National Day looms.

The last in the series of pairings of my new buzzcut with impudent gay t-shirts new to my wardrobe (earlier: BIG FAG on a pink shirt, rainbow FAGGOT in block letters, and, yesterday, a rainbow tyrannosaurus):

(#1) Posed in front of part of the Zwicky GSU (Grammar, Style, & Usage) collection, now housed in my condo, where the piano used to be, and supported by my indoor walker (which sports new purple walker balls, not illustrated here)

The t-shirt is a new version — bigger, bolder, more intense — than my first GAY AS FUCK shirt, below, which has worn over time until the colors are muted and delicate and the fabric is pleasantly soft. I see fatal holes in its near future.

(#2) Catalogue photo, not of me. With an (entertaining) asterisking strategy for taboo avoidance, unlike the flat-out FUCK of #1

Books. In the great dispersal of my library that took place some years back, small pockets got saved (in somewhat random fashion), to live in my little condo — which is consequently jam-packed with books (and faggiana; I am who I am). Three collections of some size were preserved essentially whole: GSU; books of cartoons; and a considerable collection of books of male art (photography, drawings, and paintings). (These, too, will be dispersed, but after I die.)

Epithets. From my 12/27/17 posting “I will marry the crap out of you, Sean Spencer” (yes, it’s actually Shawn Spencer):

English expletives occur in many very specific idioms (a fuck-up, raise hell, shitgibbon, etc.), but they’re also central elements in a number of syntactic constructions. Coming up below: a brief inventory of some of these constructions.

in the Postmodifier section of the inventory:

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

And then in the Premodifier section:

3a. PreEx: premodifying expletives. A versatile use of the expletives (god)damn and fucking (and BrE bloody, and perhaps a few others), with a variety of heads.

The last of my buzzcut photos: #5, in honor of Swiss National Day (August 1st), with occasion-appropriate t-shirt and athletic shorts:

The wearied old professor, squinting into the sun in Ramona Birdland (where the squirrels and, alas, roof rats also play), at the controls of his excellent — maneuverable and very sturdy — outdoor walker (photo by Kim Darnell)

The basket has a niche for the string bag that holds my Oxo flatware, so that I have utensils I can actually hold when I’m eating out (I have another, inside, set); and a space for the little black bag that contains other important things for going out, like my wallet. Underneath the seat is a storage space for transporting things, like small purchases. The wheels can be easily locked in place so that the seat can serve as a chair, for resting when I get out of breath from exertion (my mystery dyspnea) and for eating at a table (when stationary it’s analogous to a wheelchair).

You can see a variety of bird feeders, all of which are subject to depredation by the squirrels (even though the tray and various piles of seeds and nuts are put out for them and refreshed daily — if there’s food anywhere, the squirrels crave it, even when they’re standing literally knee-deep in prized food. Yes, even the feeders on the window: in, oh, 50 to 100 attempts, a squirrel can learn how to leap from the fencing onto a feeder; or how to leap from the ground, hang into the doorknob in the windows and from there leap up on an angle onto a feeder. I keep getting new generations of squirrels, each having to learn these tricks on their own, so I’m guaranteed an almost constant supply of squirrels falling from the sky in abortive attempts to scale Windowland. Until they succeed, and then perfect their performance.

To the right of the big tray, you can see just one edge of one of the few plants whose foliage the squirrels and rats will not gnaw on: a big pot of wild strawberries, with lush foliage spreading in the shade, and intensely fragrant little fruits that the animals used to eat as soon as they ripened, but (unaccountably) no longer touch, so that I get them, hah!

All of this, of course, is an elaborate exercise in getting by in drastically constrained circumstances. I spend many days in which I see my helper Kim for maybe half an hour at 6 a.m. and then go through the rest of the day isolated, with only what I see out that window for company. Though I’m gradually venturing out, masked and distancing, with great trepidation, for other contacts — in particular the Saturday morning breakfasts with my daughter Elizabeth and grand-child Opal (who is now at the end of their first full-time job, in customer service for a Safeway, stories to come, and then off to college at Pitt — exactly what I did when I graduated from high school, also at the age of 17, though I was a copyboy for a newspaper and went to Princeton (and got to return to work at the paper as a reporter on all my holidays from school).

I have also been back to the local very high-end Greek restaurant Taverna, in company with the admirable and always unpredictable — pet portraits and lost-wax casting! — Max Vasilatos (down from the City), where we were fussed over by one of the managers and one of the servers, both of whom seemed genuinely delighted that I was alive and back at their much expanded and pandemically redesigned restaurant (“We were worried about you”, they murmured; “I’ve been sick”, I replied, omitting for their sake all the awful details of near-death and misery, “but I’m really happy to be back”. Oh, happy indeed.

Swiss National Day. This morning Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, who once lived and worked for part of every year around Neufchatel, told the story of a visit back to the city on her company’s business on Swiss National Day, which she had not previously experienced. Quite startling, and strikingly un-Swiss: wild, chaotic, painfully noisy celebrations, with people setting off fireworks every goddamn where, even on children’s playgrounds. (In contrast, in E’s village outside Neufchatel all the churchbells tolled at 10 p.m., signalling that there was to be no noise — no playing of music, no merry-making, no running of washing machines, nothing — until the morning.)

I have not celebrated Swiss National Day with any sort of Carnivalesque disorder, though I did decide to acquire a mid-sized Gay Pride flag to display at my condo, now that one of my neighbors in the complex has somehow surmounted the HOA ban on such displays with a big rainbow flag on a balcony and a Black Lives Matter sign on the street.

Meanwhile, though Palo Alto is now a complex of the outrageously privileged, tons of ordinary people work here, serving the needs of the elite, and I get to chat them up. I go out, an old disabled, barely dressed, fat man (see photo above), seriously dripping with faggot semiotics (but not on Swiss National Day), so of course no one could possibly take me for one of the rulers of this universe, and people are mostly pleased to talk to me, if somewhat startled. It’s good to have a hobby in old age.

(Seriously off-color and sometimes tasteless, so not to everyone’s liking.)

aka Quack in a Tank Top:

(#1) Tank top from UniTee International (through Etsy); (very light) orange duckbill mask (N95 surgical mask) from the Halyard Co.; model AZ photographed by Kim Darnell at AZ headquarters; behind model, resting on the A-E volume of GDoS (open to the page for bang), the 2015 documentary Do I Sound Gay? (the answer to which is “Well, queer as fuck”)

Advised, in the face of the Delta variant, to move up to surgical masks, I searched on Amazon for properly certified masks from American suppliers. Orange the next day, or white in two to three weeks, so orange it was. The orange turned out to be a lighter shade than in the pictures; it also turned out to be a duck’s bill. But it’s very comfortable, and my glasses don’t fog up. However, I’m so spectacularly maladroit that I haven’t yet learned to put it on by myself; but I’ll get a tutoring session tomorrow.

The tank top came in a set of three shirts from UniTee; vowing to abandon my modeling career, I’m showing you photos of the other two from the company (they come in a variety of colors and sizes):

(#2) Yes, yes, but where were you certified, and how? And what does your facial expression mean? What do you think of Hugo Wolf? Do you believe in fairies? Can you help me into this harness? Does the smell of leather get you hard? Where do you think I’m going with this?

(#3) Tasteful simplicity in pastel pink

After some thought, I passed up I LIKE DICK. I do in fact like dick, but not Dick; I didn’t exactly dislike Ike, but Ike ran in 1952 and 1956 with that dick Dick as his running mate, and anyway I really did like Adlai.

Also passed up BUTCH QUEEN. I could more easily cop to BUTCH QUEER or BUTCH FAG, but I don’t think I could really get away with passing myself off as butch (stop snickering, you kids in the back!). Certainly not as a queen. I do, of course, admire the idea of butch queens.

Now, back to wrestling with my bill.

(Jockstraps and plays on cock ‘male bird’ vs. ‘penis’, but no more than that.)

A note from the annals of (homo)masculinity, inspired by this Cellblock 13 Tight End jockstrap in robin’s egg blue, offered relentlessly on my FB page recently:

(#1) In design and material, an entirely conventional jockstrap, calling up your standard locker room, but in a very pretty color (robin’s egg blue), which seems to make it homowear, rather than than gymwear

Sometimes a guy just wants to look pretty, but apparently a robin jock — especially from Cellblock 13, which specifically designs for and markets to gay men — marks you as a fag. A tough, muscular, athletic fag, perhaps, but a fag nonetheless; in that case, you’re a butch fag. (I post fairly often on butch fagginess; frankly, I enjoy the mixed signals, which many read as dissonance.)

(Of course, you could also be a straight guy who likes pretty clothes and doesn’t mind being taken for queer, so you might well turn to Cellblock 13 for your jockstraps (and more).)

Classic jockstraps come in “natural” (cream), white, black, and maybe gray or very dark navy. “Colored” jocks in very dark colors are still offered as athletic rather than fashion apparel: other dark shades of blue and even dark purple, as in this ActiveMan jockstrap in the International Jock catalogue:

(#2) From the ActiveMan specs for the style: “Available in many colors to match your sports uniform” (the conventionally “gay” color purple is ok if it’s dark and serves as a team color)

But jocks in what now count as conventionally “gay” colors — lavender and pink, especially — are marketed as fashion items for queers.  Also from the International Jock catalogue:

(#3) Modus Vivendi mesh jockstrap, a gay confection in lavender, from MV’s Net Trap collection: “Wear for a playful romp in the bedroom or on an intimate getaway” (I would seriously recommend against wearing this one in the locker room)

And then on pink jocks — pastel pink, neon pink, what have you — see my 10/16/19 posting “Adventures in homomasculinity: the pink jock”.

Cock Robin. A jock in the color robin gets us jock robin, a play on Cock Robin — with cock ‘male bird’ inevitably calling up cock ‘penis’ and associatively latching onto the jockstrap as the cradle of a man’s cock (and balls).

The original Cock Robin, from Wikipedia:

“Who Killed Cock Robin” is an English nursery rhyme

… The earliest record of the rhyme is in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, published in 1744 … [but] there is some evidence that it is much older.

… The theme of Cock Robin’s death as well as the poem’s distinctive cadence have become archetypes, much used in literary fiction and other works of art, from poems, to murder mysteries, to cartoons.

One version of the rhyme begins:

Who killed Cock Robin?
I, said the Sparrow,
with my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.

Who saw him die?
I, said the Fly,
with my little teeny eye,
I saw him die. …

and goes on through the roles of various other creatures in the robin’s death, plus the telling of various sequelae to the event (there are a vast number of variants, some set to music).

I was unable to find a video of the rhyme that didn’t set my teeth on edge. Most of them are kiddy-cutesy, while I was looking for a version that was earnest enough to capture some of the darkness in what amounts to a murder ballad.

Artists, however, have seen the darker side as well as the playful side. John Anster Fitzgerald, in particular; from Wikipedia:

John Anster Christian Fitzgerald (1819 – 1906) was a Victorian era fairy painter [I love that there’s an artistic genre called fairy painting; see the Wikipedia page] and portrait artist. He was nicknamed “Fairy Fitzgerald” for his main genre. Many of his fairy paintings are dark and contain images of ghouls, demons, and references to drug use; his work has been compared to the surreal nightmare-scapes of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel.

… He produced a major series of paintings on the Cock Robin theme — among others, Who Killed Cock Robin?, Cock Robin Defending his Nest, and Fairies Sleeping in a Bird’s Nest (the last furnished with a frame made out of twigs).

(#4) Fitzgerald’s Who Killed Cock Robin?, dense with characters from the rhyme and with allusions and symbols

The name Cock Robin has been borrowed for the name of any number of things — for instance, Cock Robin, the American pop rock band; and Cock Robin, the now-vanished chain of fast food restaurants (23 at one time) in the Chicago area. As with all occurrences of cock ‘male bird’, these names are likely to trigger snickers and off-color joking.

(Well, yes, jockstraps, depicted and described, with attention to their contents, so not to everyone’s taste.)

In a comment on my 8/15 posting “Jock Robin” (a posting about jockstraps in beautiful colors, masculinity, and sexuality), Mike McManus  noted the relevant novelty song “Harry’s Jockstrap” (a jock that’s pale blue, suggesting that Harry is a fairy),  a burlesque on the French nursery rhyme (and round) “Frère Jacques”. I had somehow missed “Harry’s Jockstrap”, but here it is, in all of its pale blue fairy glory:

Harry’s jockstrap, Harry’s jockstrap
It’s pale blue, it’s pale blue
They say that he’s a fairy. But Harry is so hairy
So are you, so are you

(Call this verse HJ.) The burlesque goes on and on through many more verses; I’ll give you a transcription and a recording of the whole thing — but first, some background.

Jockstraps. Jocks figure in all this because they are garments devoted to holding and protecting (and therefore to displaying) the male genitals; as the cradles of the primary male sexual characteristics, they then serve as symbolic representatives of masculinity. For men in general, loci of both pride and anxiety; for gay men, the primary loci of desire as well.

As a result, images of jockstrapped men, like images of nude men, are often stripped to their symbolic core: just the jockstrap, just the genitals, in effect disembodied crotches. Or, zooming out for a wider view that takes in more of the body, just the torso (still limbless and faceless). Or, zooming out further to take in at least the face, providing the jockstrap or bare genitals with a personality, an intelligence, a fully human presence. (All three presentations are used in ads for men’s underwear and gay porn, and even in male art.)

The 8/15 jockstrap was a Cellblock 13 — a company frankly aimed at gay men — Tight End — suggestively named — jockstrap in robin’s egg blue, in a crotch shot (just the package, man):

(#1)

The image is strictly focused on the jock as garment and on its color, downplaying as much as possible the carnality of its contents, with only its bulge as a hint of the raunchy sexual flesh inside. It’s a tribute to the symbolic power of the male genitalia for gay men that so many of us nevertheless find this stripped-down and actually rather decorous presentation, um, moving.

In fact, the symbolic power of the jockstrap extends even to the garments by themselves, uninhabited, lacking any suggestion of a pubic whiff or phallic heft; they can still serve as triggers for fantasy pleasure. Sticking to the blue theme:

(#2) 3 -pack of Papi all-cotton jockstraps in three shades of blue from the Pricepulse company

But now zooming out from things like #2, we get this Hustler Blue jockstrap from the Coyote company:

(#3) A guy with legs, torso, arms, and most of a face; despite the hustler in the name, an entirely decorous bulge

Zooming out a bit further, a young man (touching his body and gazing at us with a complex facial expression — this guy has eyes) wearing an ActiveMan jockstrap in baby blue from the International Jock catalogue:

(#4) Now seriously sexualized — in particular, with the visible outline of a half-erect and uncircumcised penis

On Being Blue. (A bow to William H. Gass’s On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1976), described by Brian Dillon in a 3/15/14 Guardian review of its reissue as “a catalogue of sorts containing blue things, desires, concepts and usages”.) From my 4/28/17 posting “Faces follow-up 1: Master Beckford”, about William Beckford and much more:

Not long after this artistic activity [including Gainsborough’s Blue Boy], the English word blue picked up a new use. From OED3 (March 2013), for the adj. blue 10. colloq.:

a. Coarse, obscene; (esp. of a joke, story, film, etc.) having sexual content, pornographic. Cf. blue movie [first cite 1818]
b. Of language: characterized by obscenities; coarse or offensive. Cf earlier blue streak [first cite 1832]

(I have no good source on the mechanisms of this semantic development. But it then puts the color blue into competition with red as the color of sex. The associations of red with fire and thus with heat — high temperature, spiciness, enthusiasm, lustfulness — makes red a natural symbol of sexual desire and sexual activity, but I don’t at the moment see the route for blue.)

This development adds a possible sexual tinge to Blue Boy.

Then, in a separate development, in the U.S. in the 20th century, it seems primarily through clothing marketers, pastel pink came to be associated with girl babies, pastel blue with boys, and then pink came to be seen generally as a feminine color and blue as masculine, which meant that pink things for men came to connote effeminacy (and therefore homosexuality — as a result, some men are still wary about dressing in anything pink) and blue things assertive masculinity — which in combination with blue connoting sex makes blue available as a color for gay macho.

Put that together with Gainsborough’s Blue Boy as a well-known figure of confident young manhood, and I suppose it was inevitable that in an age of increasing sexual freedom, there would appear a magazine for gay men called Blue Boy (or Blueboy). And so it happened.

The blue that came to symbolize masculinity in the US is no namby-pamby pretty pastel (like the bottom jock in #2),  but plain-talking real-man shoot-from-the-hip “true blue” (like the middle jock in #2; the top jock is dark navy, nearly black); like all pastel colors (light in color and unsaturated), pale blue on a man is suspect, as feminine and therefore faggy.

(HJ suggests that Harry’s hairiness shows that he couldn’t be queer, presumably because, the singer believes, significant body hair is a sign of masculinity, and that’s incompatible with homosexuality. The whole thing is silly beyond belief; the world is rich in hairy fairies*, of whom Mike McManus, a notable gay bear, and I are two. Though I do understand that hairiness as a litmus for straightness is a widely held folk belief, a consequence of the powerful folk theory that homosexuality is literally sexual inversion, so that gay men are, by definition, feminine, in fact a species of female. *Note: I don’t usually call myself a fairy, because that was the epithet I was so painfully taunted with by other boys as a child. But the rhyme hairy fairy is delicious, and, in any case, now I am a man and should put away childish hurts: time for me to embrace the slur matter-of-factly, or even joyfully, as I did above.)

In line with this, many gay men — some macho, some femme, some markedly neither — embrace pale blue as well as true blue, and happily wield it as a defiant sign of their queerness, or just because they like the color. As I recall, Blue Boy / Blueboy, which showed in its pages many hypermasculine studs vigorously performing canonical acts of mansex with one another, was actually fond of displaying pale shades of blue in its magazine design.

Notes on English vowels. Well, there’s the hairy – fairy (perfect) rhyme — from HJ: They say that he’s a fairy / But Harry is so hairy — which is just fun to play with. Then there’s Harry, and that’s something else.

In almost all English varieties except for those in a swath of Middle America, Harry and hairy are not homophonous (and Harry isn’t a perfect rhyme for fairy). For me, Harry has [æ], while hairy and fairy have [e]. The larger phenomenon is often discussed under the marry / merry / Mary heading; the question is how many distinctive vowels these words have for Americans: three (merry with [ɛ]; that’s my variety); two (merry and Mary both with [ɛ]); or just one (all with [ɛ]). The point in HJ is that for many Americans, Harry and hairy are homophones (BrE speakers typically just flat-out fail to credit that this could be so, [æ] and [e] being so phonetically distant from one another; for them, as for me, Harry and hairy are half-rhymes); these speakers then see HJ as a big play on words in [ɛri].

As it happens, the singers on the original recording of HJ (from NYC) spoke a conservative variety of American English in which Harry and hairy are distinct.

The model for the burlesque. About the French nursery rhyme / round Frère Jacques. Both words in the title are usually monosyllables, but in the variety in the rhyme their final “mute e” (“e muet”) is pronounced, as a schwa, so that in HJ both words are disyllables, accentually SW.

The French original (call it FJ), which is parodied in HJ:

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,
Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?
Sonnez les matines! Sonnez les matines!
Ding, dang, dong. Ding, dang, dong.

(matines ‘matins’, referring to a service of morning prayer, is also usually a monosyllable, but here is SW disyllabic.)

The traditional English translation (call it BJ) is a considerable adaptation, but of course preserves the metrical pattern of FJ:

Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping?
Brother John, Brother John,
Morning bells are ringing! Morning bells are ringing!
Ding, dang, dong. Ding, dang, dong.

The poetic form of FJ and BJ (preserved almost exactly in HJ). The verse is a trochaic tetrameter quatrain, unrhymed; each line is a repeated two-footed (dimeter) base, which is repeated exactly:

base for line 1, SW SW; full line SW SW SW SW

base for line 2, SW SR (where R is a rest); full line SW SR SW SR

base for line 3, double-time SWsW Ss (where s is a reduced-accent S)

base for line 4, SW SR (like line 2)

Lines 1 and 2 are routine tetrameter (with a little twist in line 2). Then line 3 erupts into double time (suddenly rushing forward), while preserving the trochaic meter; in fact, each of the two feet in its base is itself a bit of trochaic dimeter: trochaic dimeter embedded within trochaic dimeter, all of it sung at double tempo to get all those syllables into one sung line. That is, the full line 3 is

SWsW Ss SWsW Ss (with 8 strong syllables instead of 4)

All of this metrically regulated, but after the metrical pattern of the poem is clearly established in the first two lines — the first line straightforwardly trochaic, the second varied by rests instead of the W syllables 4 and 8 — it breaks out in real complexity in line 3, and then returns in line 4, in closure, to the simple pattern of line 2.

So in only four lines the poem runs through the full scheme in Arnold Zwicky & Ann Zwicky on “Patterns first, exceptions later” (Channon & Shockey, To Honor Ilse Lehiste, 1986): establishing a pattern, then deviating from it, then return to it as a gesture of closure.

To return to Harry and his jockstrap, HJ follows the pattern of FJ and BJ, with one small twist that’s a common variation in front-accented metrical patterns: an initial unaccented syllable

[line 3 in HJ:] Thĕy say that he’s a fai–ry / Bŭt Har-ry is so hai–ry (accented syllables, whether S or s, are underlined)

In addition, line 3 is more complex in content: not two identical half-lines, but two different but rhyming half-lines (as above, with more to come); the effect is of two distinct tetrameter lines — call them 3a and 3b — banged together.

Dickie Goodman and “Harry’s Jockstrap”. From Wikipedia:

Richard Dorian Goodman (April 19, 1934 – November 6, 1989), known as Dickie Goodman, was an American music and record producer born in Brooklyn, New York. He is best known for inventing and using the technique of the “break-in”, an early precursor to sampling, that used brief clips of popular records and songs to “answer” comedic questions posed by voice actors on his novelty records. He also wrote and produced some original material, most often heard on the B-sides of his break-in records.

The original material included a fair number of parodies or burlesques, of the sort that Stan Freberg and Allan Sherman produced around the same time. I don’t know when “Harry’s Jockstrap” (sung by Dickie Goodman and Sadie) was first recorded, but it was included in the 1964 album of Goodman’s greatest hits:

(#5)

You can listen to the whole thing on YouTube here.

The transcription; I’ve added section labels in all caps.

____

Harry’s Jockstrap

Hello, Sadie? – Speakin’
Did you hear about Harry? – Yeah

— VERSE 1

Harry’s jockstrap, Harry’s jockstrap
It’s pale blue, it’s pale blue
They say that he’s a fairy. But Harry is so hairy
So are you, so are you

— VERSE 2

Harry’s jockstrap, Harry’s jockstrap
It’s brand new, it’s brand new
It looks kinda skimpy, Harry’s walkin’ gimpy
So are you, so are you

— VERSE 3 BEGINS A STORY

Harry’s jockstrap, Harry’s jockstrap
Itches too, itches too

— LINE 3 DIALOGUES

What about some powder? – Made him holler louder

Did he see our doctor? – Grabbed a nurse and hocked her

How about Penicillin? – That nurse was not so willin’

She give him an injection? – It gave him an erection

What about some ointment? – He tried it and his joint went

What about his sex life? – He’ll save it for his next wife

How about when he yentzes? – He won’t take no chances
[Yinglish verb yentz ‘to have sexual intercourse’]

Do you think it’s catchin’? – Well, I can’t keep from scratchin’

Stay away from me, then – So give me back my key, then

Can he get a new one? – He just loves his blue one

— LINE 4 FINALE

So do you, so do you

— THEN AS A ROUND

Harry’s jockstrap, Harry’s jockstrap
It’s pale blue, it’s pale blue (Harry’s jockstrap, Harry’s jockstrap)
He’s scratching like all the time now (It’s pale blue), He’s scratching even mine now (It’s pale blue)

I got it too, (you both must be allergic)
I got it too, (to the same detergent)
I got it too, (you got it too)
I got it too, (you got it too)
I got it too, (you got it too)

(Generally on the raunchy side, though not actually obscene — but too heavy with sex toys (including some truly alarming dildos) and anal talk for kids and the sexually modest, who should stay away.)

Very late for one of my favorite holidays, National Underwear Day (8/5), this Daily Jocks ad on 8/25:

(#1) [ad copy:] Get party ready with the DJX Trough Jockstrap. Featuring a dual-layered breathable pouch, which is as soft to the touch as it is enhancing. You won’t want to take these off. [oh honey, yes you will, yes you will]

First, some AMZ verse; then an olla podrida of neon pink jockstrap-related topics.

To PNJM in his partywear

Oh, Pink Neon Jock Man!
I will root like a slut pig in

the softness of your pouch, in
the boldness of its color, in
the heft of your sweet penis,
the scent of your big balls

I will rip away your jockstrap
with my teeth and swallow you

Butch fagginess. Not the first neon pink jock on this blog, but an especially fine example of its kind; when worn by a muscular, conventionally masculine-looking man, as here, such underwear flies the flag of butch fagginess, where queer and macho elements mesh. (Given the brightness and saturation of neon pink, it would be fair to describe the queer element here not merely as faggy, but as screaming queeny.)

Queer jockstraps as items of decor. I have long admired such garments, mostly from afar. A great many years ago, I had a candy pink jockstrap — really more for my man Jacques to appreciate than for me to use. I never belonged to any gym where I thought I could have gotten away with such a thing, but I was much less outrageous then. Now I’d wear pretty much anything — freedom is another name for nothing left to lose — but I’m disabled and fat and long past my gym-going days.

It did occur to me yesterday that I could just buy the damn thing and add it to the huge collection of variously decorative, intriguing, and screamingly queer items strewn about my house. (One of the sadnesses of my living in isolation for so long is that I don’t get visitors who might appreciate the environment I’ve constructed.) Now that I think of it, there’s a spot that just cries out for a neon pink jockstrap. (Stay tuned for the French pink dildo — I am also past my dido-wielding days, alas — now ordered with a similar rationale.)

Hairy chests, of a sort. Having recently posted several times on body hair, especially chest hair, in men, my keen eyes noticed the manscaped chest hair on the model: trimmed so that he wouldn’t look like a Hairy Man with a chest rug — that would be too crude — but would still have a lightly furry chest, as a symbol of masculinity. I appreciate the delicacy of these calculations, but as someone who used to burrow his face in men’s chests on pleasurable occasion, I shrank back from the spikiness of clipped body hair. (If it’s your coarse body hair that gets clipped, it itches — but I guess that’s just what men have to suffer for their pursuit of beauty.)

Troughs. DJX Trough in the ad, slut pig in my verse. From my 5/24/19 posting “The ballet of Mango Meshman”:

The trough in the [DJX Trough collection] ad will suggest pigs feeding, and gay sexual excess [that is, sex pigs]

Partywear and the libfix –wear. Get party ready with DJX Trough: the jockstrap isn’t gymwear, it’s partywear — for gay dance parties (or perhaps for partying in the bedroom with another gay guy) — or, more generally, homowear, intended as a fashion statement or a sexual advertisement.

From my 7/7/21 posting “Lounge shorts”:

Labels of commerce: Xware and Xwear. Note the profusion of apparel types with semi-technical commercial labels in –wear (alluding to the function of the garments): loungewear, sleepwear, gymwear, sportswear, outerwear, and so on. (Underwear is, exceptionally, a long-standing piece of everyday vocabulary.) The usage has been extended to fetishwear and, in my writing on underwear aimed at a gay male audience, to homowear (referring to underwear designed to display the male body for the pleasure and arousal of this audience).

This terminological move echoes a similar move for categories of artefacts in the domain of food preparation and consumption — categories with Xware names [discussed in cited postings].

Underwear is no doubt the model for the other –wear words.

DJX actually has a category labeled partywear (for dance parties), comprising: crop tops, party shorts (most with clearly defined pouch), wrestling suits, party socks (knee-length athletic socks). (Even I am struggling to imagine such a party, but it clearly has a Sports for Queers theme.). Jockstraps, even those for parties, are in a different DJX category.

Shades of pink. Musing on shades of pink led me to look at French rose ‘pink’, which led me to sources on what that French pink might be. In particular, to Wikipedia‘s “Shades of pink” entry, where I found a list of “computer web color pinks” (pink, light pink, hot pink, deep pink), plus a list of 49 “other notable pink colors”. And there I found French pink:

(#2) “the color French pink, which is the tone of pink that is called pink (French: rose) in the Pourpre.com color list, a color list widely popular in France.”

Being the person that I am, I immediately associated the label French with fellatio, noting, however, that the color in #2 is far darker and more saturated than the skin color of “white” penises, though it does turns up as a fantasy color for dildos (more on that below). Meanwhile, French rose leads to the anus and its color, which is again considerably lighter than French Pink (more on that below, too).

In any case, I’d hoped that French pink for fellatio would be paired with Greek pink for anal intercourse, but Wikipedia has no listing for that. (Still, see the anus connection for shades of pink, still to come.) (On the geographical theme, the list does have Chilean, Mexican, Persian, and Spanish pink, and also New York, Congo, and China pink.)

Next I noticed Fairy Tale pink (which of course is associated with fairies the sprites rather than fairies the gay men — though in the popular mind, practically any shade of pink could call up fairies like me):

(#3) “the color Fairy Tale [which I prefer to call just Fairy], a pale and soft purplish pink color resembling typical fairy outfits in fiction. It is similar to orchid pink but slightly paler and more purple-toned.”

(I note that this shade approximates the color of some anuses.)

Finally, continuing with the gay slang, queen pink:

(#4) “a pale shade of pink. The color name queen pink first came into use in 1948.”

I haven’t been able to find out more about the history, which I presume involves some specific queen. Not Queen Elizabeth II, since she didn’t become queen until 1952.

The anal connection. From my 8/29/13 posting “Kissing the rose”, about a sensuous painting, The Soul of the Rose (1908) by John William Waterhouse:

The woman is smelling the rose, but she’s close to kissing it, close to treating it as a romantic partner (in which case the rose is a  symbol of the lover’s mouth). Other, more carnal, interpretations are available to modern audiences, for whom the rose can serve as a symbol of either the vagina or the anus.

The posting has cites for rosette ‘anus’ (a simple metaphor). And GDoS has cites for rosebud ‘anus’ (also metaphorical). (And, yes, the posting covers The Miracle of the Rose.)

The pinkness of penises. Finally, having invested in a neon pink jockstrap as an item of decor, I went on to hope that neon pink penises — in the form of dildos — would be available for similar use. And so they were, even in an uncircumcised model (to remind me fondly of my man Jacques — though if J’s penis had ever turned neon pink, we both would have been extraordinarily alarmed, that can’t be healthy); but the uncut model was heavily textured for anal pleasure, so that it looked like a monster lizard phallus, which would never have done for decorative purposes.

As it turns out, simple pink dildos are all the rage. Because they’re so feminine! Meant primarily for women to use, they don’t suffer from the gigantism that attends dildos for gay men — small enough to slip into your purse, some of the pink dildo ads say. For comparison, here are some fantasy penises for gay men, from the catalogue of the gay-supply firm Circus of Books (text unedited from the original):

(#5) [top:] “This Rascal Best Seller is a massive 12″ dildo [to get the shaft length subtract an inch or so for the testicular base]. It is big, thick and just waiting for an incredible experience! It has a firm and thick shaft, a whopping 9” in girth! It’s realistic throbbing veins and head are waiting to devour. Inspired by the famous Chi Chi LaRue’s Black Balled gang bang series [of gay porn].” [bottom: two smaller dildos, still significantly larger than normal for penises (most are in the 4-6″ range)]

(Side note: BBC — big black cock — is a conventional abbreviation for ads of all sorts meant for gay men.)

My anus and intestines ache sympathetically at the sight of these monsters. Oh, the excesses of the male fixation with penis size!

But dildos for women, whether realistic or fanciful (nothing says a device for vaginal pleasure has to look like a penis), come in much more suitable lengths (and girths), with shafts in the normal range.  Like the Adam and Eve company’s Lollicocks Slim Stick 7 (here in pink; it’s also available in astonishing blue and purple):

(#6) [features list:] flexible 7” PVC dildo, 6” insertable [shaft length]; lifelike shape with raised head and vein details; textured balls give you a great feel and grip; satisfying and flexible 1.5” wide shaft; secure stick suction cup base; in see-through PVC in fun colors

Despite all that realism, this is definitely a “fun color” penis-simulacrum, in a fantasy pink not known to man (approximately French pink, above).

I look forward to installing it on the desk in my bedroom. The obvious name for it would be Pinkie, companion to the gay icon Blue Boy, but I’d be happy to entertain alternatives.

Caught in passing on tv, a reference to heinous crimes in which the /h/ of /hénəs/ was so brief that the pronunciation came very close to /énəs krájmz/ anus crimes. I reflected for a moment on what those might be, passing over the obvious and distressing possibility ‘anal rapes’ to consider merely improper alternatives, like farting in public, or crimes that were only figurative, like anal bleaching, that crime against fashion.

But then my attention was caught by the rhyming phrase heinous anus, and I fell into musings about meanings for the expression — see below — until Famous Amos hit me (notes on Wally and his celebrated cookies further below). Oh my, now I had

the Famous Amos heinous anus

and my day was complete.

heinous. I’ll start with the most conservative definition, the one most evocative of the etymology in roots meaning ‘hate’. From NOAD:

adj. heinous: (of a person or wrongful act, especially a crime) utterly odious or wicked: a battery of heinous crimes.

The Cambridge Dictionary online softens this a bit, to ‘very bad and shocking’.

Then you can find cites for a substantial further softening, to merely ‘bad’:

She recently recovered from a heinous skateboarding injury that took more than nine months to heal. (link)

Or less grievous than that. From Vocabulary.com:

A heinous crime is very evil or wicked. Of course, some people only use the term as an exaggeration, claiming that their parents’ requirement that they write thank you notes after their birthdays is a heinous form of torture.

No doubt some have used it to convey ‘very good’, with switched polarity of affect (along the lines of US black bad conveying ‘especially good, wonderful’).

heinous anus. I was hoping to find at least a few examples of the phrase, but unearthed neither literal ‘wicked anus’ nor slightly euphemistic examples using anatomical anus instead of vulgar asshole ‘stupid, irritating, or contemptible person’ (NOAD).

But … a fair number of examples of heinous assholes (with the the vulgar slur asshole rather than the bodypart asshole). Two from Twitter, plus The Guardian citing Trevor Noah:

[Twitter] So *that’s* why I liked dio despite him being a heinous asshole [from Wikipedia: Dio Brando [also known simply as DIO] is a fictional character appearing in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Hirohiko Araki. … As the series’ most prolific villain, his defining trait is his staunch ambition, which manifests in a peerless desire for power, no matter the cost.]

[Twitter] I have been actively fighting not to die for the last 3 yrs and choose not to watch everything to do with the heinous asshole in the White House.

[The Guardian of 2/11/21, “Trevor Noah: ‘Nobody expected that [X]’s lawyers would be so terrible’] [Lawyer Bruce] Castor’s teammate David Schoen, meanwhile, went with what [Seth] Meyers called the “heinous asshole” route, with hyperbole such as: “This trial will tear this country apart, perhaps like we have only seen once before in our history.”

Wally and the cookies. From Wikipedia:

Famous Amos is a brand of cookies founded in Los Angeles in 1975 by Wally Amos, a former talent agent with William Morris Agency.

Wallace “Wally” Amos was born in Tallahassee, Florida, United States, on July 1, 1936. In 1948 he moved to New York City to live with his aunt, where they often baked cookies together. As an adult, Amos, an Air Force veteran who worked as a talent agent with the William Morris Agency, would send his home-baked chocolate chip cookies to celebrities to entice them to meet and perhaps sign a deal with his agency. Amos hit a plateau working for the William Morris Agency and decided to strike out on his own.

On March 10, 1975, Amos took the advice of some friends, and with $25,000 from singers Marvin Gaye and Helen Reddy, he opened a cookie store at 7181 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, in Los Angeles, California, naming it “Famous Amos”. … The store proved so popular that the “Famous Amos” brand eventually branched out to sell cookies in supermarkets, a move that would later be emulated by other specialty stores such as Baskin-Robbins, T.G.I. Fridays, and Starbucks.

(#1) Early Amos: always a hat, always a theme shirt; plus the handsome creased face, the trimmed stache and beard, and the big entrepreneurial smile

(#2) Later Amos and some of his famous chips: different headgear and (matching) shirt, more deeply creased face of age and experience (he’s still alive, about 4 years older than me), grizzled stache and beard, still the entrepreneurial smile (though he no hasn’t controlled the company for many years)

… Between 1988 and 2001, the Famous Amos company went through more than five different owners. … The brand is [now] a part of Kellogg’s.

It’s a sad commentary on the state of my country that there are so very few black entrepreneurs like Amos; it takes someone with extraordinary energy and commitment (plus a flare for publicity) to succeed. So of course he moved into an extra career of motivational seminars and books; and is celebrated as a monument of black achievement, a model for others to follow. But there should be many many more.

(On something completely different. I am an appreciator of faces — I post about memorable faces on this blog every so often — and Amos’s (especially with its crowning headgear) has long been one of my favorites (though his red and green hat is too goofy even for me).)

It started with an ad (on my Facebook page yesterday) from the Ron Dorff company (previously unknown to me) that struck me for its reserved erotic message:

(#1) [from the accompanying text:] The very first fragrance by Ron Dorff [Paris – Stockholm] Discipline Sport Pour Homme: Fresh, clean, and refreshing, the perfect reinvigorating scent after a tough session at the gym. Get $10 off the full-size bottle.

Notes on the photo. A handsome, “naturally” well-muscled (rather than gym-ripped) young man, shot in soft focus, wearing only a standard white gym towel, resting his arms against his legs (touching his body — this is significant). His haircut is conventional. His face is very lightly scruffy, his body utterly smooth and dry, almost ethereally beautiful: an idealized beautiful male body. The towel, however, is fastened to make a V pointing towards his crotch; and a small bottle of Ron Dorff Discipline Sport is tucked into it, pointing up, so that it mimics an erect — reinvigorated — penis peeking above the towel.

The model’s facial expression is open but neutral, calm: no hint of either seductiveness towards or aggressive advance on the viewer. Everything is understated.

The name of the fragrance echoes the company’s current slogan:

DISCIPLINE IS NOT A DIRTY WORD

where discipline means ‘(self-)reserve’, not an externally imposed regimen, as in army discipline; and certainly not the discipline of B&D, bondage and discipline. In fact, discipline (in this sense) is the company’s watchword (NOAD on the noun watchword: a word or phrase expressing a person’s or group’s core aim or belief: the watchword for the market is be prepared for anything).

In any case, the overall effect is of calm, composed eroticism. The model is physically attractive but there’s nothing urgent in the way he’s presented — merely quietly inviting. Try my cologne, he suggests: maybe you could be (someone like) me, maybe you could have (someone like) me.

Further note. It then came as a surprise to me that in the Ron Dorff world the ad in #1 is what counts for outrageously flagrant in its erotic appeals. The company’s main product line for men is sportswear that is absolutely, solidly masculine, but in remarkably unobtrusive, understated ways; the company offers masterpieces of conspicuous unconspicuousness. Apparently designed to offer no flash of peacock self-display — nothing macho — and no erotic appeal whatsoever.

The company in effect denies that it’s in the fashion business at all, that would be unmasculine, it’s all sportswear and underwear for men (apparently, no jockstraps, presumably because they would be too carnal) — for a man who sees himself, in the things you can get printed on the company’s amazingly expensive t-shirts and sweatshirts, as:

DAD, GENTLE MAN, HOME BOY, GOOD NATURED

(I note that most of sportswear also comes in stratospherically expensive cashmere versions. Sometimes a man just wants that softness against his skin.) The Ron Dorff Man is, first, a Guy Guy (he needs that sportswear for working out at the gym with the other guys), but also a Good Guy (an earnest, family-oriented man with a sweet disposition).

The maximally racy Ron Dorff  Underwear Man. (Ads for other apparel have more expressive leeway.) One photo, for Y-front briefs, will do. They all look like poses for medical records: neutral lighting, stiff frontal pose, expressionless faces, hands at sides away from the body (no touching himself). The underwear is simple, functional, with no visible identifying label. Its pouch is as sexless as possible. What makes this one racy for the territory is that it’s pink — well, the palest pink imaginable, really just a kind of off-white:

(#2) RD very slightly pink briefs: self-effacing

Ad copy:

Make up your own Y-Front Briefs Weekend Kit [$100] including 3 iconic, no frills, no logo Y-fronts inspired by the model developed for the Swedish Army in the 70s. Choose among 7 different colors [white, pink (very pale), grey melange, black, Arctic blue (very pale), khaki, navy]. Designed with a tapered fit and cut in the finest Jersey cotton with a hint of elastane for a guaranteed fit wash after wash. Elastic waistband covered by fabric for ultimate comfort and reinforced top stitching. Only sign of recognition, the two discrete, embroidered RD eyelets tone-on-tone. The Weekend Kit comes in a chic black box with a functional magnetic closure.

Libfix note. One of the RD categories of menswear is homewear, a subcategory of underwear, along with briefs and boxers:; homewear includes shorts, underwear tank tops, pyjama shorts and pants, long johns, and t-shirts. Yet another instance of the libfix –wear. Note that homowear is something entirely other, and that there’s no homowear in RD’s homewear (though other firms offer homewear (in RD’s sense) that’s also, dramatically, homowear).

But to return to Discipline, the men’s fragrance. Remember that this is RD’s first venture in the fragrance world; it looks like they’re not fully plugged into it yet.

From their site, some basic perfumery talk:

Discipline Sport Pour Homme, a fresh and woody scent that accentuates your personal style. A disciplined scent based on a blend of crisp citrus to awaken, balanced out by Nordic pine with undertones of intoxicating woods.

… SCENT PROFILE: Bergamot, Lemon Zest, Watermint, Cardamom TOP, Sandalwood, Vetiver, Cedarwood HEART, Violet Leaves, Nordic Pine, Lentiscus Absolute BASE

And in the middle of that, this offer:

Try before you buy: Order a Discovery Size [0.1 oz / 3 ml for $9.95] and get a coupon for $10 off the full size bottle.

Here’s the thing: if you just want to find out how big a full size bottle is and how much it costs — or if you’re so enchanted by the description above that you want to forge ahead and buy a full size bottle — you’re flat out of luck, because, I swear, there is no place, at the moment, on the RD site where you can do either of those things. Nor does there seem to be any specialty shop (like Sephora) or department store (like Nordstrom) that, at the moment, has Discipline Sport Pour Homme to sell you.

Apparently the Discovery Size is all there is. You have to order it (from RD) even to find out how big the full size might be and what it might cost.True, $9.95 is really cheap for any kind of serious perfume / cologne, but then 0.1 oz is a really tiny bottle.

Meanwhile, having spent so much time — with a bit of pleasure, a lot of chuckles, and a certain amount of dismay — exploring the RD site, my Facebook page is being inundated with more ads for men’s fragrances. (As it happens, my current adventures in fragrance products are limited to Mysore Sandal Soap from India and a JĀSÖN Purifying Tea Tree [Melaleuca] Deodorant Stick, both used sparingly. Otherwise, it’s AZ Musk, a “distillation of locker room”*, of my own creation.) [* “– but in a good way”, my, um, buddy hastily added]

(Warning: there will eventually be a naked male pornstar, but without his naughty bits visible, plus some mention of feminism and same-sex attraction.)

Two faces that recently caught my eye. I saw them first in a rich context, including the rest of the pose they were in; a background behind the pose; information about the place where the larger photo appeared; and some knowledge about that place and the function of the photo there. Here they are, as bleached of context as I could manage: just the faces:

(#1) Call this person A

(#2) Call this person B

What personas are these two people projecting? What are they like, and what are they doing in the photos?

People will disagree about what they see here — photos don’t tell you what they’re doing; even if they did, they might be self-deluded; and in any case facial expressions are notoriously slippery to interpret — but there are some clear differences at the outset.

First, the facial shapes — A’s more rectangular, B’s more V shaped. In general, B’s face is more delicate, more “feminine”, than A’s. In line with that, A’s face has a bit of facial scruff, while B’s is smooth. So B appears both younger and more twinkish.

Other facial features: B’s lips are a bit fuller than A’s

Then, the facial expressions. B is considerably more engaged with the viewer than A is. B is looking directly into the viewer’s eyes, while A seems to be focused on something beyond the viewer. As people sometimes say, B is looking at us, A is looking through us. People in personal photos, with friends and family as their audience, look at the camera; people in administrative photos (for id’s, licenses, passports, p.r. shots, etc.) look through it. So A’s photo is more impersonal.

On the other hand, A is half-smiling, with modest action at the corners of the mouth, modest crinkles at the corner of the eyes. (A’s more impersonal photo then might be selling A, or presenting A as selling something else; while B is expressing some emotion, not necessarily offering anything). On the other hand, B is unsmiling, expressing dubiousness or truculence: eyebrows slightly raised and knitted, eyes in a V, mouth slightly pursed.

Beyond this, it’s all rich interpretation and story-telling. I might guess that A was a political candidate or an actor, and that the photo was for p.r. Or that B was a queer teenager, dubious about the world; an eyeroll might be coming soon. But those are all great leaps from what we can see.

Note. Something I didn’t notice in the original photos, even when I extracted and blew up the faces, was the fingernails on B’s hand: long and with a dark red polish. That was surprising, given my original assumption that B was a queer guy — perhaps an effeminate guy, but a guy — since everyday effeminacy doesn’t usually come with fingernail polish (yes, yes, I know; the world is complex and varied and offers many surprises; but I think that my generalization, hedged with “everyday” and “usually”, is pretty good).

In any case, the full photo of B came in an assortment of images from Etsy of queer-slogan t-shirts, all of which showed men modeling the tees (or showed just the tees, without any bodies in them), so I assumed that #4 below did too. Eventually, I realized that I was just flat wrong.

The full photos. Corresponding to #1 and #2:

(#3) Not in fact the full photo (from a Hunt for Men gay porn subscription ad in e-mail on 9/11); for the sake of WordPress modesty, I’ve cropped Lee’s fully erect, 8.5″, thick pornstar penis (with a slight angling upwards at the top end)

(#4) From a 9/10 e-mail ad for queer t-shirts available on Etsy, this in-your-face item

The Steven Lee presentation. In #3. I post a lot about facial expressions in gay porn — in those expressions during sex between men, and in the faces they present in ads for gay porn, which are sometimes smiling-buddy faces, sometimes seductive faces, very often heavy cruise faces (conveying dominance). SL’s face in #3 is unusual, like a p.r. photo (advertising his availability in Falcon sex videos and as guide to offerings from studios under the Falcon umbrella).

It might be relevant that SL’s previous job was as a tv weather- and newscaster, for which this presentation would be entirely appropriate.

[In a 1/20/19 interview on the Str8UpGayPorn site, “Exclusive: Gay Porn Newcomer [he was then 27] Steven Lee Talks Forecasting The Weather, Fucking On Camera, And More”, SL noted that this work trained him to work on camera; maintained that he loved the tv work; but added that it was very hard work, with long hours and low pay, so that gay porn was a breeze in contrast. And of course he came equipped that big pornstar dick (and a pleasant face). Other stats from Next Door Studios: that dick is cut;  he’s 6’2″ tall; he’s a top; and his body type is described as “gymnast”.]

A taste of SL at work: a literally steamy still from one of his flicks:

(#5) Cropped for modesty again, but with some teasing pubic hair left for the photo’s intended audience

i’m not interested. Once I started analyzing the presentation in #4, from Etsy, I searched for the source of the item on the site: BrennendeHerzen (‘Burning Hearts’), which is to say, Leokadia Grolmus in Vienna, Austria, providing items on: “Feminism, Queerness, Social Justice”. She turns out to have collected a gigantic assortment of stuff for sale, so it took some time trying out various collections of keywords to find another item with #4’s model in it. Then, this delightful find, “for Lesbians and Sapphics”:

:

(#6) So: presenting as a really cute lesbian, complete with the secret codewords girl in red — the recent girl-on-girl counterpart to the antique queer friend of Dorothy

I’ll get back to girl in red in just a moment, but first a note on the slogan in #4, which appears in t-shirt designs from (at least) other Etsy suppliers, Zazzle, Redbubble, and (my favorite) Shirtcent:

(#7)

do you listen to girl in red? From Wikipedia:

Girl in Red (stylized in lower case) is the indie pop music project of [gay] Norwegian singer-songwriter and record producer Marie Ulven Ringheim (born 16 February 1999) [known as Marie Ulven]. She rose to prominence with her homemade bedroom pop songs about romance and mental health featured on the early EPs … Her debut studio album If I Could Make It Go Quiet was released through AWAL on 30 April 2021.

Girl in Red has been cited as a queer icon

… her debut single “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend” [was released] on SoundCloud in November 2016

Two developments of Ulven’s work:

— Haley Margo’s album 2020 Do You Listen to Girl in Red, with the line “Does she listen to “girl in red”?”, conveying ‘Is she attracted to other girls?’.

— a 2021 graphic novel based on her life:

(#8)

How the mind does wander.

(References to penises but no depictions of them , even (alas) on plastic action figures. On the other hand, there’s a neon pink dildo, so readers might want to exercise their judgment.)

My neon pink DJX Trough jockstrap (in size L) has arrived from the antipodes (the company is in Australia, but the jock was shipped from New Zealand) and been installed in its place as an item of decor in my living room. Meanwhile, my new Lollicock neon pink dildo has come to rest on the desk in my bedroom; it has become a Desk Dildo. And I am finally releasing a portrait of three gay action figures and their three companion mammoths, engaged in a ritual celebration under the blazing bedroom sun (on what I still think of as Jacques’s dresser, even though it’s the one I use in daily life — the dresser on which J once erected a small shrine to Mark Wahlberg in his (Marky Mark’s, not J’s) Calvins).

Anyway, it’s all dick-heavy (on the scene and even in reminiscence), though there are no discernible actual dicks.

The Bookcase Jockstrap. Viewed here in situ:

(#1) Out on the prowl, here hanging out with other objects of decor, books on the analysis of comics, collections of gay comics, collections of cartoons, and some graphic novels — a companionable neighborhood

On the jock, see my 8/26/21 posting “Pretty in neon pink”, where it can be viewed on a living male body:

(#2) The neon pink DJX Trough jockstrap, modeled

The Desk Dildo. Seen in the relative gloom of my bedroom, but in the piercingly bright light of the desk lamp:

(#3) Flanked by its watchbirds, the Lollicock; then Arnold and Jacques as a loving couple; and a framed AMZ collage in which no dicks are visible, though practically everything else is, but in miniature

Details in my 9/8/21 posting “My Lollicock has come home!”

The ritual of the action figures. The Action Three in the company of their mammoths, under the blazing bedroom sun:

(#4) It’s a fine line, but my understanding is that #3 can appear on WordPress because it’s a (realistically phalliform) dildo, not a human penis or a model of one; but the action figures cannot, because they’re models of human beings, with (extraordinarily) visible naughty bits; so I’ve fuzzed out Rebel’s and Carlos’s dicks (which must be humiliating for them, since their outsized cocks are the glory of their being)

On the ritual, see my XBlog posting of 8/9/16 “The Action 3 at worship”, where I wrote:

A display at the Ramona Schwanzhaus, depicting the Action 3 — Leather Carlos, Tom of Finland’s Rebel, and Army Tyson — engaging in a ritual revering their Sex Stones (in the t-room there, using the Chinese ceremonial bowl). Each displays his (proportionally) elephantine dick while communing with his personal Sex Stone, which confers potency, endurance, and allure (white for Rebel, different patterns of brown for Carlos and Tyson). On this occasion, Carlos has been blessed with the gifts of power and dominance, Rebel the gifts of erectile enthusiasm, Tyson the gift of happy submission.

In #4, they are joined by their companion animals, their adorable and cuddly woolly mammoths. Not only are the mammoths excellent friends, they are also, should it come to that, meat.

(Male bodyparts, sex between men, visually right up against the line, so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)

From yesterday’s “Materials for a blog”, reporting on my asking, puckishly, in Facebook:

What happens in the romantic popular song “Teal for Two”? If it’s set in a tealroom, whazzat?

Answers to these and other questions are forthcoming, but first the spur for my silly queries: a Daily Jocks ad for PUMP! men’s underwear, a display of PUMP!’s Activate homowear collection, in teal (with deep purple and white), with four teal studs in four different moose-knuckly garments, displaying four different cruise faces: We’re looking at you, buddy, cause we know what you need!

Ad copy:

Your favourite brand is back with a new collection for 2021. The PUMP! Activate collection comprises … a Trunk, Brief, Jock & Sidecut Brief, all made with premium materials to achieve unmatched levels of comfort and style.

(#1) Cockateal crotches: Cockateal, cockatool! / A-wand’ring I will go

Men’s underwear, a bird, a color, a sportive allusion to cocks of the phallic, rather than avian, sort. As in my 8/15/21 posting “Jock robin”, about Cock Robin and a jockstrap in robin’s egg blue.

The four garments, up close and in detail, but unfortunately headless (and hence faceless) and with more muted phallicity (I also note that PUMP! seems to have a non-standard notion of the color teal — real teal still to show up here — and that DJ’s color reproduction appears to have been dipped in bleach):

(#2) “Mr. Spock, activate jockstrap!” And so the enormous greenish-blue duck-shaped phallus shot through space towards the Klingon Fissure…

Oh yes, the cockatiel. From Wikipedia:

(#3) From the Pet Refine site on 12/28/19 “All About Cockatiels: Types of Cockatiel”

noun cockatiel: a slender long-crested Australian parrot related to the cockatoos, with a mainly gray body, white shoulders, and a yellow and orange face. Nymphicus hollandicus, family Cacatuidae (or Psittacidae). (NOAD)

And now teal. The bird and the color.

noun teal: [a]  a small freshwater duck, typically with a greenish band on the wing that is most prominent in flight. Genus Anas, family Anatidae: several species … [b] (also teal blue) a dark greenish-blue color.  (NOAD)

(#4) Male Green-Winged Teal (Anas carolinensis), a common and widespread duck that breeds in the northern areas of North America

(#5) [from the Color Club site] with its nail polish Teal for Two (h/t to Jens Fiederer on Facebook); this is the real thing in the color department (you might love the colors in #1 and #2, and that’s fine; just don’t call them teal)

And the queer tearoom. A familiar locale on this blog; see the Page on this blog on sex in public. To refresh your memory, what NOAD says:

[NOAD] noun tearoom: North American informal a public restroom used as a meeting place for homosexual encounters. [also T-room, which GDoS labels as the original form, with T for toilet]

Soon to become relevant…

because of the tealroom. From the figmental NQAD (the New Queer American Dictionary):

noun tealroom: 1 a queer tearoom with teal-colored walls, said to facilitate focused sexual arousal. 2 a queer tearoom infested with teal (a common problem in mensrooms in the wetlands of eastern Canada, where the birds are found in large numbers)

(I’ve found some pretty decent photos of mensrooms with teal-colored walls, but like most photos these days, they cost money — $33 a shot, to be specific — for use on-line, so you’ll just have to imagine the tealroom milieu.)

No photos, but a seriously raunchy folk song —  here, the chorus and one verse:

on a toilet, in a tealroom
seeking out an urgent trick

stalls of steel
tiles of teal
dick is here
mouths are near

Hang on, we’re almost there. We also need a popular song from almost a hundred years ago, but still going strong. From Wikipedia:

“Tea for Two” is a song composed by Vincent Youmans with lyrics by Irving Caesar and written in 1924. It was introduced by Louise Groody and John Barker in the Broadway musical No, No, Nanette.

… In the French-British WWII-set comedy film La Grande Vadrouille (1966) the humming of the “Tea for Two” melody is the secret code for the British bomber crew members to recognise each other in the Turkish baths at the Grand Mosque of Paris.

(Secret codes and venues for public sex between men will figure in a further digression below.)

The penny drops for Aric Olnes. Who quoted from T-4-2 on FB:

  Darling this place is a lover’s oasis where life’s weary chase is unknown.

To which I responded “Jackpot!” And Aric replied with delight, “Yup, it totally works with the gay cruisy tearoom sexual innuendos.”

For a perfect picture, just add some teal-tiled walls.

The original text, with a bit of one verse (what Aric found, above) and the beginning of the chorus, with tea respelled as T for further sexual reference, plus three marked notes:

Darling, this place is a lover’s oasis
Where life’s weary chase is unknown *1

Picture you upon my knee, *2
T for two and two for T *3

Note 1. The obscure fragment of free verse “Cruiser’s Rest”, related in theme to the raunchy folk ballad above, perhaps the work of some unknown queer poet transforming the folk song:

seek no more for a raging penis,
seek no more for a hungry mouth,
come here and it’s all laid out for you
with the man that you need, that needs you

Note 2. Upon his knee, meaning in his lap, so resting on his thighs: the allusion is to the Cowboy position for intercourse. Here we see a performance of Reverse Cowboy in a toilet stall (all is not fellatio in tearooms):

(#6) From the gay-fetish-xxx.com website, with the men’s genitals fuzzed out for WordPress modesty, leaving us withe union of the bodies and (yes!) the impending kiss (note handsome blue, but not teal, painted wall)

Note 3. From the Lost Lexicon of Cruising:

noun T: of men’s underwear, the visual T made by the waistband and the pouch; or of the male body, underneath that T, the T of the crotch: the horizontal axis of the hips plus the vertical of the genitals; or, by metonymy, the male genitals as a package, as in the off-color song line, T for two and two for T.

Secret signs. Knowing that humming the melody has been used — well, used in fiction — as a secret code for men to recognize their fellows in the baths suggests that we might entertain notes 1 through 3 as pointers to secret queer coding in the lyrics of T-4-2. Was Vincent Youmans trying to tell us something?

No surprise if the song had come from Cole Porter or the lyrics from Lorenz Hart, whose attractions to other men are well known, but Youmans? Well, gossipy gay sites just assert that he was gay — on no evidence that I can see, but then very little is known about the man’s private life. He was born into a socially prominent family, served in the Navy, and enthusiastically went into the theatre, where he collaborated with virtually every top lyricist in the business, writing sophisticated popular melodies for them. According to Wikipedia, he died young (aged 47), of tuberculosis. And though he mostly composed for the stage,

In 1933, Youmans wrote the songs for Flying Down to Rio, the first film to feature Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as a featured dancing pair.

A wonderful confection with lots of campy moments, some of them intentional.

I would like for Youmans to have been gay, to have pulled off a secret life with boyfriends, and to have selected lyrics with coded tearoom-sex or gay baths allusions in them, just for fun. But that is itself a gay fiction.

(Men’s underwear and its symbolic values, frank talk about male sexuality, but otherwise not over lines; use your judgment.)

Powerfully eruptive, yet respectful of his anatomy: the vaunted twin virtues of Krakatoa underwear for men, especially the company’s Vesuvius collection (which is, presumably, doubly volcanic in symbolic power), all with aggressively full front pouches, designed (as the ad copy has it) to respect a man’s anatomy while preparing him for life’s activities. The goods:

(#1) Krakatoa’s Vesuvius Collection: trunks, boxer briefs, and briefs in intense blue and intense red (power colors) and in black and (for the trunks) saturated gray (strongly masculine “just plain guy” colors), with those volcanic pouches all around

These two volcanos and this underwear will take us many places. But first, two shots of Krakatoa underwear (from lines other than Vesuvius) being modeled by actual men (accompanied by the ad copy “Put a volcano in your pants”).

(#3) Long boxer in intense green

(#4) Trunk in saturated gray

Not just well-filled pouches, but volcanic — eruptive — well-filled pouches, in wording that allows for the possibility that those spacious pouches would facilitate ejaculation: if you want to, go for it, man, ejaculate in your underwear, come in your pants, nothing wrong with that (and in fact, in the proper place, there isn’t). Promissory note: I’ll get to underpants eruptions in a while.

The associative neighborhood of Krakatoa underwear. On Facebook recently, I noted that I’d come across men’s underwear from a company called Krakatoa and was considering posting on it. And garnered responses that merely played on volcanic eruption (Jeff Goldberg: Sounds like a blast) or exploited the possible sexual innuendo (Chris Ambidge: Big bangs imminent!). In a sequence, Aric Olnes started with the innuendo (Your tease is erupting with possibilities), to which Ann Burlingham punned (lava it alone), leaving it to Timothy Riddle to tie the whole thing together with This whole conversation is going east of Java… — a summary that incorporates a play on the movie title Krakatoa, East of Java (more on this below) and a play on the idiom go south ((NOAD) informal, mainly North American fall in value, deteriorate, or fail).

The associations of Krakatoa are those of volcanos in general — eruption, explosion, spewing; great power; noise; fire; flows (of magma); death and destruction — clouds (of ash and debris); unpredictability — with, for Krakatoa specifically, a spectacular eruption, incredible power, a gigantic noise (literally, heard round the world), and enormous clouds (darkening the skies all over the globe and affecting the world’s weather for years). Only a couple of these associations — spectacular eruption and great power — can be easily exploited to sell underwear, and Krakatoa the underwear company works these to the fullest.

Krakatoa’s audience and how it proposes to reach it. Most of the underwear that comes by on this blog is transparently homowear, with a primary audience of gay men. I have, however, posted some on what you might call machowear, specifically communicating toughness, and also sold primarily to gay men. And in passing on the neutral family-guy underwear of mass-market Y-front white briefs and plain boxer shorts. Even, in my 9/5 posting “Masculinity messaging from Sweden”, on men’s high-end premium underwear that is explicitly and conspicuously framed like the mass-market stuff:

The [Ron Dorff] company’s main product line for men is sportswear that is absolutely, solidly masculine, but in remarkably unobtrusive, understated ways; the company offers masterpieces of conspicuous unconspicuousness. Apparently designed to offer no flash of peacock self-display — nothing macho — and no erotic appeal whatsoever.

Krakatoa sells what you might call guywear, for straight men with some swagger, men who want to feel powerful, also men who hate to buy underwear, can’t be bothered with fussy stuff like that. For such men, the company proposes to harness the symbolic values of the volcano — the eruption and the power and even the noise. From the “What’s Krakatoa?” page of the company’s website:

In 1883, volcano Krakatoa in Indonesia erupted with absolute power, pulverizing 6 cubic miles of island into the atmosphere and changing the weather patterns around the globe for almost a decade. It’s considered the most powerful blast ever heard by mankind and the biggest eruption ever recorded.

While its shockwave circled Earth 3 times and the 200 Megaton explosion created 100-foot-high waves with devastating consequences, the dust from Krakatoa’s eruption had a beautiful side-effect: It created incredible sunsets for years around the planet.

We built Krakatoa because we believe power and beauty can be translated into sensible personal garments that are powerful in their execution and beautiful in their craftsmanship.

We also think eruptions and loud noises are a typical guy thing and a perfect name for the most important garment in a man’s wardrobe.

… The Krakatoa Anti-Gravity Briefs – Vesuvius Collection combines the most modern technical fabric with a full front pouch for a comfort-focused connection between materials and fit.

Designed with your life’s activities in mind, it delivers softness and support from the first wear, so you can power through your day fearlessly with a piece of art in your pants.

… personal garments that are powerful in their execution … you can power through your day fearlessly …[and, yes] eruptions and loud noises are a typical guy thing …

So you, typical guy, can be free to erupt and make loud noises in, and through, your Krakatoa underwear. With a song in your heart and a piece of art in your pants. Let’s hear a cheer for Krakatoa!

A bit more on the volcano. From Wikipedia:

(#5) Indonesia as a whole; within it, the Sunda Strait and the island of Krakatau

Krakatoa [also transcribed Krakatau] is a caldera in the Sunda Strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra in the Indonesian province of Lampung. The caldera is part of a volcanic island group (Krakatoa Archipelago) comprising four islands: two of which, Lang and Verlaten, are remnants of a previous volcanic edifice destroyed in eruptions long before the famous 1883 eruption; another, Rakata, is the remnant of a much larger island destroyed in the 1883 eruption.

In 1927, a fourth island, Anak Krakatau, or “Child of Krakatoa”, emerged from the caldera formed in 1883. There has been new eruptive activity since the late 20th century, with a large collapse causing a deadly tsunami in December 2018.

… The most notable eruptions of Krakatoa culminated in a series of massive explosions over 26–27 August 1883, which were among the most violent volcanic events in recorded history.

(#6) Cover of Simon Winchester’s 2005 book

… The 1883 eruption ejected approximately 25 km3 (6 cubic miles) of rock. The cataclysmic explosion was heard 3,600 km (2,200 mi) away in Alice Springs, Australia, and on the island of Rodrigues near Mauritius, 4,780 km (2,970 mi) to the west.

According to the official records of the Dutch East Indies colony, 165 villages and towns were destroyed near Krakatoa, and 132 were seriously damaged. At least 36,417 people died, and many more thousands were injured, mostly from the tsunamis that followed the explosion. The eruption destroyed two-thirds of the island of Krakatoa

And the 1968 movie, from Wikipedia:

Krakatoa, East of Java is a 1968 American disaster film starring Maximilian Schell and Brian Keith. During the 1970s, the film was re-released under the title Volcano.

The story is loosely based on events surrounding the 1883 eruption of the volcano on the island of Krakatoa, with the characters engaged in the recovery of a cargo of pearls from a shipwreck perilously close to the volcano.

… Famously, the movie’s title is inaccurate: Krakatoa actually is west of Java, but the movie’s producers thought that “East” was a more atmospheric word, as Krakatoa is located in the Far East. [note: words chosen for their associations, rather than for accuracy]

Using the name Krakatoa. And now, for a while, we leave the world of Krakatoa the volcano and Krakatoa the underwear, to look at a broad sampling of other applications of the name (no doubt there are many more).

Hot sauce. From a HotSauce.com site review of CaJohns Fiery Foods Co.’s Krakatoa! Pure Red Savina Mash Hot Sauce:

(#7)

… be warned – it can cause an eruption of fire and flavor to rival the obliteration of Krakatoa, an Indonesian island, in 1883. From Ohio. Red Savina [a variety of hot pepper], Habanero chiles, and vinegar.

An Indonesian restaurant. Named after one of the country’s most famous features: the Krakatoa Indonesian Restaurant in Hollywood FL (in Broward County, between Miami and Fort Lauderdale):

(#8)

A bike servicing shop. Maybe an allusion to the power of racing bikes and mountain bikes.

(#9)

[ad for:] Krakatoa Bikes [in Fairfax CA (in Marin County, home of the Marin Museum of Bicycling)] was founded in 2008 by Olympian Athlete Miguel Figueroa. Whether you’re an occasional rider or a serious pro, our store brings you the collections, the knowledge, and the passion you need for your next adventure. We service all kinds of bikes from Road Bikes to Ebikes. Suspension Services on Fox, Marzocchi, Rock Shox and more. Mountain Bike specialists since 2008. Call us today to schedule your next service.

A live music bar in Aberdeen (Scotland). Maybe because the music is hot and the bar itself is steamy. A Tripadvisor review says it’s the original live music bar in Aberdeen.

A game. Probably because of the danger of death as you flee. According to the Steam site on the game:

Krakatoa is a single player Action-Adventure/Survival Horror game. Attempt to escape Siren Head by surviving its onslaught of attacks. Integrated with 3D audio you’ll need to listen closely, act quickly and be aware of your surroundings to stay alive.

Notes on coming in your pants. Postponed from the beginning of this posting. From GDoS:

verb-1 come: (abbr. [Standard English] come to a climax) to achieve orgasm; of a man, to ejaculate [1st cite 1599 Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing] [then variants in which this verb is reanalyzed as a denominal, derived from come ‘semen’: cum, jizz, cream]

come in one’s pants to behave in an exggerated, over-excited manner; the image is of extreme premature ejaculation [this is the figurative phrase; lovely cite: They had a choco-sprinkle-cream made you come in your pants.]

And then there’s the literal phrase, with head verb come ‘ejaculate’. The literal phrase is consistent with spontaneous ejaculation (in sleep, by hair-trigger response to a sexual stimulus, or by premature ejaculation during sex play); and with masturbatory ejaculation (masturbation either of oneself or by someone else). It’s also consistent with ejaculation in one’s (under)pants alone — as in a common variant of masturbation — or with ejaculation in one’s  trousers or jeans, usually (but not necessarily) through underpants.

On the health question: from the Young Men’s Health site, “Is it safe to ejaculate in my underwear?” on 5/17/19:

Thank you for your question. Many guys wonder about this, so you are not alone. The good news is there are no health risks to ejaculating in your underwear. The downside is your underwear will feel wet for a while, and then it will likely feel a bit stiff (like a starched shirt) when it dries. The stain and stiffness comes out when you wash them. Many guys find it easier and more comfortable to use a towel when they masturbate but ejaculating in your underwear is fine too.​

So: masturbate away, happily — but in private, of course. Masturbating publicly, even surreptitiously in your pants, is creepy, and against the law as well.

Note: strippers who see themselves as performers rather than sex workers warn their customers sternly against coming in their pants: facilitating ejaculation isn’t something they have on offer, and if they’re giving you a lap dance, it’s messy for them as well as you — but they’re wearing a costume that they need to protect, and they’re going on to other customers after you. In any case, you’ll probably get barred from the strip joint for life.

Finally, the lame Come-In-Pants Joke, which can be found in a number of variants. Two of them:

The annual Premature Ejaculation Society dinner will be held on Friday night. No dress code – just come in your pants!

When you don’t know what to wear to the premature ejaculation symposium, so you just come in your pants.

Notes on fleeing from a volcano. Here we shift from Krakatoa in the year 1883 — fleeing is hopeless — to Vesuvius in the year 79, where quick thinking could get you out of Pompeii or Herculaneum. From a Wired Classic (a republication of an earlier story, from September 2020), “How to Escape From an Erupting Volcano: If you had been in Pompeii in 79 AD, you might have tried to hunker down or escape by sea. This would be a mistake. But there is a way to safety.” by Cody Cassidy (a piece in which we get to see uses of the verb vitrify and the noun vitrification — not things that happen very often):

Let’s say you were visiting the Roman town of Pompeii on the morning of August 24, 79 AD. And let’s say you arrived sometime between the hours of 9 and 10 am. That should give you enough time to explore the port town and maybe even grab a loaf of bread at the local bakery … But it would also put you in Pompeii in time to experience a 5.9 magnitude earthquake, the first of many, and watch the black cloud rise from Mount Vesuvius as the mountain began to erupt 1.5 million tons of molten rock per second and release 100,000 times the thermal energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. All while you were standing a mere 6 miles away.

Your situation would seem challenging – but, surprisingly, not hopeless! When I emailed Pier Paolo Petrone, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Naples Federico II, asking if any Pompeiians survived the eruption, he wrote back to say that many did. “But likely only those who took immediate action.”

Unfortunately, instead of immediately evacuating, some Pompeiians took shelter from the falling ash. This may seem prudent, but it is a mistake. Buy that bread. And get it to go.

… Depending on its composition, lava ranges from 10,000 to 100 million times as viscous as water. This means even the runniest molten rock has the viscosity of room temperature honey. Unless you’re on a very steep slope, you can generally outrun it. Stationary objects like houses can be flattened by these fiery rivers, but “usually people can move out of the way,” says Stephen Self, a volcanologist at UC Berkeley.

Instead, it’s the magma beneath the mountain, and its precise composition, that should deeply concern you.

… When I asked Petrone where the survivors of Pompeii went, he wrote that there’s evidence of successful escapes to both the north and south. However, he suggests you run north toward Naples – and toward the eruption. He says the road between Pompeii and Naples was well maintained, and the written records of those who survived suggest that most of the successful escapees went north – while most of the bodies of the attempted escapees (who admittedly left far too late) have been found to the south.

But if you do run north, you’ll need to move quickly, because you’ll pass through the small Roman resort town of Herculaneum on your way to Naples – and Herculaneum is hit by the first pyroclastic flow.

Herculaneum sits barely 4 miles east of the volcanic vent, but for the first few hours of the eruption the prevailing winds largely spare it from most of the ash and pumice. Unfortunately, when Vesuvius first taps into the deeper magma and develops its first pyroclastic flow, the heated gas and ash will move directly into Herculaneum and kill everyone almost instantly.

Archeologists have found scorch marks in [Herculaneum] that suggest the cloud may have been as hot as 930 degrees Fahrenheit, and because its victims were encased in negative spaces of ash, archeologists can see their final, frozen poses. These poses show almost no signs of the boxer-like defensive stance typically taken in extreme heat, which suggests to Petrone that the victims in Herculaneum may have been killed so quickly that they did not even consciously register discomfort. Petrone even found a glassy piece of brain-matter in the skull of one Herculaneum victim, suggesting the cloud heated this person’s brain so quickly it vitrified. Nevertheless, you can avoid vitrification if you follow these instructions carefully.

(In the world of turning into glass or a glass-like substance, there’s both an intransitive verb vitrify, inchoative in meaning, as in When the wave of superheated air reached Cicero, his brain vitrified instantly; and a transitive verb vitrify, causative in meaning, as in When the wave of superheated air reached Cicero, it vitrified his brain.)

This posting originally came in two parts, united in fact by a sheer accident of timing, that two celebratory — fireworks! bang! — things happened  during a July weekend in the US: the first is a personal celebration, of an honor from the Linguistic Society of America that marks me as officially a kind of famous faggot (I happily embrace faggot); the second is the 4th of July holiday, an occasion as American as baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie, but capable of being hijacked for raunchy purposes. But in the interests of getting something posted while I still live, I’m putting the second part off, to appear as a separate posting (which will require a warning of  irredeemable raunchiness; this part dips into sexual topics with some frequency, no surprise, but needs, I think, no more severe a warning than that).

Notes: I do love fireworks, because there are occasions when only excess will really do the trick; but like a stereotypical queer, I am at best lukewarm on sports (though I have an enthusiasm for the San Francisco Giants when they’re in the World Series — go figure); I enjoy eating the occasional hot dog (for its taste and texture as well as its phallicity), but it has to be kosher (I had my ritual Independence Day Hebrew National wurst on the 3rd); and I also enjoy eating apple pie, but my preference is for Julia Child’s Tarte aux Pommes (another faggy enthusiasm).

The other thing about holidays, the Fourth of July notably among them, is that they are occasions for elaborate advertising campaigns hawking homoware: men’s premium underwear (including oh my, jockstraps), steamily presented, and gay porn videos (not to mention sex toys for gay men), all of these items that I view both as sources of deep personal satisfaction (which I am happy to talk about in detail, in the plainest of street language) and as objects of academic analysis, on several levels.

And then I have contrived to make a more than accidental connection between celebrating my recognition as an LGBTQ+ linguist and celebrating the Fourth of July, by selecting a holiday porn ad that turns on the ambiguity of N and V bang, as referring to noise-making or as referring to sexual intercourse: consider this exemplary text, the Falcon Big Bang 2021 sale ad (for gay porn) that came in my e-mail on July 2nd:

(#1) On the lexical front, heavily working the sexual (big) bang, rocket, and blow ‘explode’ / explosive territory. Also of interest in its presentation of male bodies as objects of desire; in the subtle cock tease by the man on the right; and in its choice of particular facial expressions as cruise faces (designed to engage male partners for brief sexual liaisons) (the overstuffed American-flag briefs on the man on the left are just a holiday bonus)

For a gay porn ad, this one is visually extremely decorous; it’s clearly meant to be displayable in public, so there are no visible genitals or anuses. But beyond that, though the models’ briefs are well-filled, there are no visible outlines of partially or fully erect penises; the models are in fact clothed, though minimally, rather than being naked with their genitals concealed from view; and no kind of sexual act is depicted (even one with genitals concealed, indeed even kissing). The models in #1 could be from a conventional newspaper ad for underwear — for Macy’s, say — with just a bit of an edge to it. Yes, the models are muscle-hunks rather than ordinary guys with nice bodies, but conventional underwear ads have moved with the times, thanks to Calvin Klein.

For the record, though I’m not usually into muscle-hunks as objects of sexual fantasy, I’m much taken with the model on the right, probably because of his facial expression. (I’m a face guy.)

Oh, this style of writing — highly digressive, with material piled upon material in Whitmanesque profusion, full of self-reflection, mixing a wildly playful tone with dead seriousness, with embeddings within embeddings (as in the sentence you are reading right now) — is sometimes taken to be characteristic of gay male writers (characteristically faggy, if you will).

On the award.

The foreshadowing. On this blog on 4/26/21, “LSA to announce award for LGBTQ+ linguistics”, with the note: “details of the Arnold Zwicky Award to be announced”.

Then, the actual announcement, in mid-July:

LSA Launches New Award in Honor of Arnold Zwicky

The LSA is pleased to announce the establishment of its newest award, intended to recognize the contributions of LGBTQ+ scholars in Linguistics. Named for Arnold Zwicky, the first out LGBTQ+ President of the LSA [in 1992], the award recipient will be recognized at the Awards Ceremony at the LSA Annual Meeting in January of 2022.

(#2)

Read on for more details about the award nominations and selection process:

Frequency: Annually, as nominations warrant.

Next Nomination Deadline: A preliminary nomination consisting of the nominee’s name, curriculum vitae (CV) and/or website URL, must be submitted here no later than August 1, 2021. A final nomination, consisting of a nomination form, an updated CV link for the nominee, and a brief citation that can be read at the presentation of the award, must be submitted at the same link by September 1, 2021. Self-nominations and nominations by others are equally welcome. If nominating someone other than yourself, please seek confirmation from the nominee of your intentions prior to submitting your preliminary nomination.

Eligibility: The Zwicky Award recognizes LGBTQ+ linguists who have made significant contributions to the discipline, the society, or the wider LGBTQ+ community through scholarship, outreach, service, and/or teaching. Eligible applicants will be current members of the LSA and identify within the LGBTQ+ community. Eligibility is open to nominees at any career stage.

The prize is intended to recognize distinguished accomplishments by LGBTQ+ scholars, whether working directly on LGBTQ+ issues in language or not. Nominations will be considered based on excellence in one or more of the following areas, focusing on the most recent 3-5 year period:

— Scholarship, including presentations, reports, and publication

— Outreach outside academia, including podcasts, interviews, and journalistic publications

— Service to the LGBTQ+ community, including activist and advocacy work, organizing, and mentorship

— Teaching, including excellence in course design, creation of teaching materials, and sharing teaching expertise with others

— Other information relevant to their work as an LGBTQ+ scholar in Linguistics

The Presidential Address, “Mapping the Ordinary into the Rare: Basic/Derived Reasoning in Theory Construction” (given on 1/9/93 at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles). From my 2/7/20 posting “The BSDR Files” about the paper, first on the occasion:

Something that is actually relevant for my paper is that I was the first openly LGBTQ president of the society. That fact is not in itself remarkable, since I’d been fully out as a gay man in the academic world for over 20 years at that point, though on this occasion my queerness was on display: I appeared in a couple with my man Jacques Transue and we also hosted a huge OUT in Linguistics reception in the Presidential Suite at the Biltmore (an event open to all members of the society, so long as they were willing to be seen as gay-friendly). (It did seem to me that 1992 was awfully late for visible queerness, but, well, someone has to be first, and that just happened to be me.)

… I was given an affectionate introduction by the secretary-treasurer of the society, Fritz Newmeyer, who happened to have taken some courses with me at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, many years before. And I warmed up the audience with an old academic joke, as amended in a telling to me by Jim McCawley. From the RationalWiki site, with “An old joke … Challenge: Demonstrate that all odd numbers greater than 1 are prime.” [responses by various professions followed]

… What Jim added was:

— generative linguist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 appears to be composite, but underlyingly it’s prime, …

I’m inclined to believe that more people remember the joke than recall the paper, which was a serious exploration into the conceptual world of generative linguistics, in particular about how alternations between variants are to be described. The customary generative approach employs a basic / derived (BSDR) logic, with a basic variant from which alternatives are derived by mapping rules. I opposed this logic to one of defaults and overrides, which I argued was superior. The detailed handout is available in my 2/7/20 posting.

Characteristically (for me), the paper moves from straightforward linguistics (well, metatheoretical linguistics in this case; I’ve never given up practicing philosophy without a license) to a bonus section at the end on sex and sexuality (my blog postings on sex and sexuality tend to travel this road in reverse, with some surprise linguistics at the end). The bonus material:

(#3)

Thomas Laqueur on BSDR conceptualization of sex, taking male sex as the basic; John Boswell on BSDR conceptualization of sexuality (in his Type C theories), taking heterosexuality to be the basic state. I am, unsurprisingly, dubious about these normative moves.

Back to the Arnold Zwicky Award. And the eligibility requirements.

Eligibility. “LGBTQ+ linguists who have made significant contributions to the discipline, the society, or the wider LGBTQ+ community through scholarship, outreach, service, and/or teaching.” This requires some interpretation, and I’m going to give you some interpretations of mine; I’m not speaking for COZIL or the LSA here. (I had no hand in framing the announcement of the award and will have no hand in selecting winners. And, on reflection, I’ve decided that it would be inappropriate for me to nominate people for the award; more on this below.)

First, LGBTQ+ linguist exhibits an ambiguity parallel to that of French linguist (‘linguist who is French’ vs. ‘linguist who studies the French language’): ‘linguist who is a an LGBTQ+ person’ vs. ‘linguist who studies the language / language use of LGBTQ+ people’: is the queerness in the linguist or in the linguist’s field of study?

Note 1. There are further potential ambiguities here, which I’m disregarding.

Note 2. The French linguist example might suggest that the ambiguity is simply a matter of the modifier being (copular / predicative ) Adj (‘linguist who is French’) vs. (patient / objective) N (‘linguist of French, linguist who studies French’), but parallels in Adj + N canine therapist and N + N dog therapist, both of which have both readings (‘therapist who is a dog’ vs. ‘therapist for dogs, therapist who treats dogs’) shows that this idea is at best too simplistic. (See some discussion in my postings “The canine therapist” from 6/3/18 and “therapist dog, dog therapist” from 9/22/18.)

Note 3: though the two readings are clearly separable in principle (it’s easy to find examples of linguists of all four types: ± queer person, ± queer field), it’s also natural for a scholar who’s in a group to study that group, at least occasionally. Especially if the group is derogated or threatened (who else is going to do it?).

In any case, a fair number of potential candidates will be LGBTQ+  in both senses, and that’s a good thing. But the eligibility requirements make it clear that the queer-person property is to be privileged over the queer-field property: “Eligible applicants will … identify within the LGBTQ+ community … The prize is intended to recognize distinguished accomplishments by LGBTQ+ scholars, whether working directly on LGBTQ+ issues in language or not”.

Indeed, when I was LSA President, I was very visible queer person: something of an activist in both Ohio State and its area and Stanford and its area, nurturer of LGBTQ+ students in both places (consequently the recipient of death threats in both places, demands that I be fired from both universities, and the object of years of police surveillance in Columbus — this sort of thing comes with the territory), the founder of OUT in Linguistics, and so on — but I was not yet generally known as a scholar of queer linguistics. My one conventional publication in queer linguistics — “Two lavender issues for linguists” (Hall & Livia, Queerly Phrased, 1997) — was still in the future, as was my one adventure in conventional writing for a general public on a queer topic, “The other F word” (Out magazine, 2003), about fag(got).

My queer-linguistics interest did appear in conventional academic publication in a series of examples in Arnold Zwicky & Ann Zwicky,  “Telegraphic registers in written English”  (Sankoff & Cedergren, 1981), examples we characterized as (in sequence, getting progressively more abbreviated) “lavatory graffiti proposing sexual liaisons” “graffiti advertising sexual favors” “advertisements for sexual favors” and “sexual advertisements” (“collected by Arnold Zwicky from Ohio State University men’s rooms serving as locales for sexual activity between men”) — the jottings of what are vernacularly known as t-room queens (not queen ‘ostentatiously effeminate gay man’, but the snowclonelet queen referring to an enthusiast of some activity — in this case, sex between men in mensrooms — with no imputation of effeminacy). The t-room theme appeared in my non-academic writing in the newsgroup soc.motss in a fictobiographical / gay porn story from 1991, “Roseate Tom” (describing events that took place in 1967, with a Coda scene set in 1974) that I eventually re-posted, lightly edited, on my XBlog (on 2/5/11). By then my blog postings frequently examined the world of t-rooms as a sociocultural phenomenon and the vocabulary used in talking about that world. Along with similarly analytical postings on other modes of subterranean or surreptitious sexual activity between men (for instance, gay baths, sex clubs, and cruising for sex), partly based on my personal experience.

Note 4. The eligibility requirements say that the candidate must “identify with the LGBTQ+ community” — meaning not merely that the candidate view themselves as belonging to this community, but that they do so publicly. They need to be out. Out enough to go to major academic conference and accept an award for being admirably LGBTQ+.

There’s a great tangle of complexities here. Acceptance of one of these identities comes slowly, often painfully, for many people (and not at all for some, who adopt the sexual practices but not the sexual identity or the association with the community or one of its subcultures), and the character of this acceptance can change over time. All of this is out of the public eye. People then come out, if at all, selectively, to different audiences and in different ways.

[Personal, but relevant, interlude. In my case, born in 1940, I unsurprisingly went through great pain and turmoil in accepting my homosexuality. Over some years came out to many close to me — in effect, coming out “privately” — but then came out spectacularly publicly when in 1971 I embarked on a sexual relationship with a graduate student (a multi-faceted relationship: my first male lover was an intellectual companion as well as a sexual one, and, most significantly, he had become politicized after Stonewall; he educated me in taking pride and in taking action). Of course such relationships are unwise, but they will happen, and they aren’t wicked; I realized immediately that to protect him ours would have to be maximally aboveboard (he should not be seen as getting special advantages through a secret relationship to me) and we would have to be maximally dissociated academically (I would have no hand in his formal education or power over his career in graduate school).

My solution became the model for handling other professor / grad student pairings in the department — there were more to come, all heterosexual — and then a contributor to the policy in the College of Humanities. That is a very good thing, and I’m proud of what I did. I am also deeply indebted to the principles of academic freedom and tenure — and the scrupulous observance of these by the relevant administrators at Ohio State — that protected my job during all of this.

In any case, I very suddenly became a Highly Visible Queer and embarked on a career in that role (among others). I can work that role for political, academic, or artistic purposes, but I can’t evade it: since 1971, I may have been many things in my public life, but a great many people will also know me as that obtrusive faggot in linguistics.

Now, the real point here, finally nearing on the horizon. In my fictobiographical writings about these times (where everyone except Arnold Zwicky has a pseudonym), this first lover is called Danny; I will call him D here. As lives will, D’s and mine have crossed and recrossed many times, and they have taken many surprising turns and gone to many unexpected places. Long and short, D ended up living and working (in linguistics, after some digressions) in another country (a country with much less tolerant social attitudes towards homosexuality than current American ones), with a long-term male partner (I’ll call him K), effectively his husband. To preserve K’s relationship with his family and D’s academic position, the men have had to largely conceal their relationship. (On D’s occasional visits to the US, he is of course completely out, free to talk about K and their lives together.) This is a bargain, the bargain of the closet: to get some things of value, you give up others. (We must all make bargains: do not be too hasty to condemn people just for making a bargain.) Being out is, I believe, generally good for the soul and for society as well, but it’s not for everyone on all occasions. End of personal interlude.]

But, of course, not being out should eliminate you as a candidate for the Arnold Zwicky Award; D, for example, should be out of the running, whatever the value of his work in linguistics (he would maintain that this work is too modest to deserve an award, but that’s not the point). For the good reason (to be expanded on in a later note) that naming such an award after someone is not merely raising a big huzzah for their achievements but is also holding the award’s eponym up as a model for others to aspire to, and for that the awardee has to be publicly known as LBGTQ+.

Note 5. Being out is being out to an audience. So (as I just noted) you can be out to one audience and not to another. A lot depends on way information flows between social groups. When I came out dramatically in 1971 as a Highly Visible Queer, I didn’t realize that even plenty of academics failed to get the message (I don’t read as queer unless I wear identifying signs and symbols or talk explicitly about my gay life, so heteronormative assumptions kick in; and information in the academy tends to flow along disciplinary, and of course geographic, lines). So for 50 years I’ve been endlessly coming out explicitly to new audiences (including LGBTQ+ groups, who don’t necessarily accept me easily as One of Them).

All of this is messy, but routine. The complication is that many linguists engage in fieldwork (studying language use in its sociocultural context) in many settings — in far-flung locations, in enclaves both urban and rural, in institutions and subcultures of all kinds (high schools, drag clubs, sports teams, fishing communities, t-rooms, whatever), on reservations, and so on. The people serving as the objects of study are sometimes viewed as subjects (recruited for study in laboratory settings or unknowingly serving as subjects for a participant-observer investigator), sometimes as consultants (or “informants”) selected for interviewing by an investigator. These studies are often conducted by teams, with a number of investigators working together or with staff hired for the purpose. And the studies require further staff for administration, technical support, arrangements for travel and living away from home, data analysis, and so on.

The whole business is highly social in character, but bringing together various groups of people who would not otherwise interact with one another and who are often socioculturally highly diverse, each group with its own world view, including attitudes and expectations about how people should behave. A diversity that easily puts LGBTQ+ investigators into tension with the people they work with. Sometimes quite serious tension; openly LGBTQ+ investigators in strongly homo-intolerant cultural settings could be in real danger, especially if their behavior is visibly discordant with local norms; and more generally they could face intolerant and uncooperative staff. (The problem isn’t confined to social science research; LGBT+ investigators doing, say, zoological or paleontological fieldwork can face the same issues with their staffs.)

So everybody adapts to some degree to their uncongenial situation, often by altering their behavior (which is typically hard to carry off, so it puts the investigator into a state of constant anxiety), but certainly by concealing their identities from most of the people they work with in the field — while being entirely out in their professional lives, of course. (Even I have used my ability to pass as straight to covertly collect anecdotes about men’s attitudes towards women and queers in relaxed settings of male sociability, like locker rooms.) It’s a tricky terrain to negotiate, one that could make things problematic for some number of natural candidates for the Arnold Zwicky Award; such public notice of their LGBTQ+ status could make it very hard for them to return to their fieldwork.

I have been asked in the past by colleagues in other fields to moderate what I say about them on this blog, because the blog has, over time, accumulated thousands of readers from all sorts of backgrounds, so it’s a form of wide publicity (such as receiving the Arnold Zwicky Award would be) and then also potentially a threat to their professional lives, especially in field settings. This has made me very cautious about what I say here about linguists; not everyone involved in OUT in Linguistics, for example, would want to be out to the world in general (even though the group explicitly welcomed (straight) friends).

In any case, nominees may have to consider whether they would welcome the publicity of the award.

Note 6. Above:

naming such an award after someone is not merely raising a big huzzah for their achievements but is also holding the award’s eponym up as a model for others to aspire to

As I, with all of my manifold faults, have served, since 1971. Being a public role model is an edgy business. In fact, some people have felt free to explain to me how unsuitable I am as a role model. I have broken a ton of laws, but some of that comes with the territory (for quite some time, all of the sex I had with other men was illegal in the local jurisdiction, and that continued to be true in some places until fairly recently — like, Oklahoma, as J and I drove together between Ohio State and Stanford for some years); and some of it still is.

But I didn’t flaunt these activities and invite physical attacks and arrest, as some of my role models did (notably, John Lewis and others in working for civil rights); instead, I confined my protesting to forms that should have been legal, managing in the process to protect my job (for my own sake and for those  who needed my support — my wife and daughter, and, later, Jacques). Some of my critics view this as simple cowardice. Certainly, not at all heroic.

I was outspoken, and politically active: in the Columbus branches of Gay Liberation Front, and after it the Gay Activists Alliance, and later in Stonewall Union in Columbus and with several organizations in the Bay Area. But that’s the simple minimum for a Proud Gay Warrior. And it came tainted by my obviously affectionate marriage to a woman — which then morphed into a very public married triple with Jacques. It wasn’t until after Ann died, in 1985, that I became half of an ordinary gay couple and so more acceptable to many in the gay community. J never put himself forward, but he was solid in his commitment to gay political causes and supported me, even encouraged me, in my public displays, which both entertained and impressed him.

We found some acceptance in corners of the gay community, mostly through the internet newsgroup soc.motss — and realized from the outset that we were now, rather scarily, serving as exemplars to the world outside that community. He was entirely prepared to serve as the support person for his linguist husband-equivalent (among other things, he continued to sit in on courses I taught and offered me useful critiques on both the content and on pedagogy — J was himself an extraordinary linguistics teacher), but he fretted about whether he could be good enough to represent Gay Men to the straight world. As was I. As am I

Note 7. Back to the award. After nearly a hundred years — the society was founded in 1924 — the Linguistic Society of America has accumulated a considerable number of awards, professorships, and fellowships named after people (one of them is named after C. L. Baker, my first PhD advisee, which just goes to show how old I am), one of which I received myself: the Sapir Professorship, named for Edward Sapir, which I held at the 1999 Linguistic Institute at the Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. But until the Arnold Zwicky Award, none had been named for a living linguist.  Though sometimes the honor was created soon after the eponym’s death: the Victoria Fromkin Award, created in 2001 (after Vicki’s death in 2000); the Kennth Hale Award, created in 2002 (after Ken’s death in 2001).

In my case, the impetus for the honor came from enthusiastic young people, who managed to get it approved and announced while I was still alive (which was very sweet). Now, since no other eponym had any say in naming the recipient of their honor, I have scrupulously stayed away from the  selection deliberations, currently in progress.

The story starts with an instance of semantically reversed impervious (to) — a converse use of a predicate adjective. From Anat Shenker-Osorio, the founder of ASO Communications, interviewed on 10/11 on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. From the transcript:

… What we find in experiment after experiment is that when people have already cemented a world view, they in essence have a frame around what is occurring, then facts are simply impervious to it. They bounce off of it, right?

… And so it`s precisely as you said. If they have an existing story line about, quote, unquote, what Democrats do and how they behave, then facts are pretty much impervious to it.

The relevant sense of impervious in the quotes from Shenker-Osorio is sense b in NOAD:

adj. impervious: [a]  not allowing fluid to pass through: an impervious layer of basaltic clay. [b] [predicative] (impervious to) unable to be affected by: he worked, apparently impervious to the heat.

But what Shenker-Osorio intends to convey here is not that facts cannot be affected by beliefs — world view, frame, or story line — but that beliefs cannot be affected by facts. She’s using impervious to convey the converse of its customary meaning. This works pretty smoothly because we’re inclined to believe that facts stand on their own, regardless of what people believe, so that unconsciously we reject the expected meaning and reason that its converse must have been what Shenker-Osorio intended to convey. This unconscious reasoning works whether the original was just an inadvertent error — people often reverse participant roles (famously in “You’re my biggest fan!” said to a celebrity) — or represents an entrenched non-standard usage, as seems to be the case for Shenker-Osorio.

It’s then reasonable to ask why people do converse switches like this one (which I’ve come to call, in my playful fashion, converse all-stars); presumably the answer lies in pragmatics and discourse organization, but I don’t at the moment have a general account of the phenomena, and I encourage others to take up the question.

Relational nouns: two converse all-stars. From previous postings of mine, two converse uses of a relational noun:

— from my 10/10/11 posting “Semantic reversals 1: ancestor/descendant”: ancestor used for its converse, for example:

An unlikely, close-knit bond develops between ancestors of slaves and the ancestors of their slave masters.

— from my 10/6/12 posting “Semantic reversals 2: benefactor/beneficiary”: benefactor where its converse beneficiary would be expected: a semantic reversal for benefactor, which has picked up the meaning ‘one who gets benefits’ in addition to the meaning ‘one who gives benefits’. Fr example:

[Homeless man John Cornelius Foley] was an early benefactor of gentrification.

From my files, another relational noun and a verb.

— converse use of the predicate noun (a) match (for) in be no match for, reported by Charlie Doyle in ADS-L, 4/28/11:

An Atlanta newscaster on TV just reported, regarded a mobile home that a tornado had flung into a line of trees, killing the two occupants, “The winds were no match for the mobile home.”

— converse use of the verb sustain (in sense ‘inflict’), as reported by Jon Lighter in ADS-L, 11/9/11:

An English archaeologist on a National Geographic show inspects a seventh-century skull and finds: “a sharp injury that was sustained by a sword or an ax.

And now for something completely different. I turn now from converses in semantics to

Converses on the basketball court. From Wikipedia:

Chuck Taylor All-Stars or Converse All Stars (also referred to as “Converse”, “Chuck Taylors”, “Chucks”, “Cons”, “All Stars”, and “Chucky T’s”) is a model of casual shoe manufactured by Converse (a subsidiary of Nike, Inc. since 2003) that was initially developed as a basketball shoe in the early 20th century.

(#1) Classic high-top Converse All-Star shoe: the bearer of much cultural meaning

… Although Chuck Taylor All-Stars had vanished from the professional basketball scene by 1979, they continued to flourish in popular culture and fashion as casual footwear. As fashion icons, Chuck Taylors have played a role in several subcultures, which the company has promoted as part of the brand’s ongoing cultural popularity. In addition, Chuck Taylor All-Stars have continued to prove their iconic status through their use and portrayal in film, art, and music culture, as well as some sports sub-cultures such as powerlifting and skateboarding.

Chuck Taylors are culturally associated with authenticity. They were popularized by James Dean for rebels and outcasts. They were also associated with Andy Warhol, Kurt Cobain, the Ramones, and Karl Lagerfeld. [And have been worn by many (primarily male) actors in (primarily American) movies and tv.]

They are well-designed for basketball (and some other athletic activities). But they’ve also become the bearers of a collection of cultural meanings: athleticism, masculinity, Americanness, authenticity (vs. pretense). Though Converses would probably have supported and eased my flat feet, I would never have worn them, because I felt that would be false cultural advertising: I was not a jock or sports fan (but rather a kind of anti-sports figure) and not a guy guy (but instead projected a kind of nice-guy homomasculinity). On similar grounds, I never wore a leather (or any other kind of) harness, even though when I was really fit, one would have really shown off my chest; it would have seemed like making a false claim to being a leatherman.

The name. From Wikipedia:

Forty seven-year-old Marquis Mills Converse, a manager at a footwear manufacturing firm, opened the Converse Rubber Shoe Company in February 1908 in Malden, Massachusetts. The company was a rubber shoe manufacturer, providing winterized rubber-soled footwear for men, women, and children. By 1910, Converse was producing shoes daily, but it was not until 1915 that the company began manufacturing athletic shoes

So: Converse shoes from the Converse company, named after its founder, with the family name Converse.

And that name Converse is a variant of the Anglo-Norman name Conyers, with a name based on placenames in northern France.

(Meanwhile, the English common noun cónvèrse as a term of semantics is ultimately from Latin conversus ‘turned about’, past participle of convertere (from which, English convert). And, yes, the English verb convérse — also, the noun conversation — goes back to a form of convertere too, but by a different route.)

Converse as a family name immediately reminded me of the American actor Frank Converse (born 5/22/38) — shown below in a head shot advertising the tv show Coronet Blue:

(#2) The hunky Frank Converse at the height of his career

And I recalled thinking that, given his name — and his frame (6ʹ2ʺ with broad shoulders) — he should really have played the lead role (high school basketball coach Ken Reeves) in the American tv show The White Shadow: then we’d have had Converse in Converses. The part was, however, taken by the actor Ken Howard, who not only looked the part — he could easily be Frank Converse’s brother — but had in fact been a basketball coach (some discussion in my 3/26/16 posting “Ken Howard”):

(#3) Ken Howard p.r. shot for The White Shadow

(men’s bodies, references to sex between men, so inadvisable for kids and the sexually modest)

From ads in my e-mail recently, these two male faces, with (lots of) context removed:

(#1)

(#2)

The question is how we read these faces, what we see in them, and that turns out to be an enormous question, in part because our responses are a compound of  many different kinds of judgments, all of which are complex and variable in themselves.

The faces are not without context. They are, to start with, faces in poses (these faces are in static photos; if we had them in motion, there would be even more information to cope with).

Suppose we got them in a neutral pose, facing the camera. What we’d be looking at then would be a compound of a basic face overlaid by a facial expression, and we’re accustomed to assigning an interpretation to both of these things. And these interpretations are essentially never unique.

Basic faces. Removing features of a face that are straightforward matters of choice — hair styling and facial hair styling, for example (both notable in the two photos above) — we get something like a basic face as provided by nature (subject to the understanding that some of these are fairly easily alterable — hair color, brow thickness — and some adjustable through more radical means, like surgery).

Somewhat surprisingly, people readily interpret photos of neutral-expression faces (such as are used in IDs, mug shots, and the like) as evoking essential characteristics of the person depicted. They will judge photos of men’s faces as more masculine or more feminine, more or less dependable / trustworthy, more or less violent, and so on. I know men who’ve been told (repeatedly) that their neutral faces in repose mark them as gay, or even that their eyes alone do so.

Such judgments turn on interpretations of a suite of characteristics of parts of the face and head: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, chin, jaw, cheekbones, forehead, adam’s apple, neck, at least.

Facial expressions. And on top of that, several of these parts of the face and head — the eyes and the mouth, especially — can vary and so can convey a variety of emotions. Dilated pupils of the eyes can convey fear, surprise, attraction, and openness / interest (obviously, different emotions in different circumstances), and eyes open wide can convey all of these as well. While narrowed eyes can convey disgust, focus / attention, dominance, suspicion / distrust, or anger (again, different emotions in different contexts).

All this is relevant to #1 and #2. The guy in #1 has dilated pupils and widened eyes, plus a sidelong glance that can be understood as flirtatious (other sideways glances are negative in affect: slant-eye). The combined effect suggesting attraction and interest — in a gay male context, that could read as an open and friendly cruise face.

Meanwhile, the guy in #2, with his narrowed eyes, slightly furrowed brow, and (perhaps questioning) head tilt, can be seen as conveying focused yearning — in a gay male context, that could read as a different sort of cruise face, conveying attentive desire.

None of this interpretation is guaranteed, and some people viewing the faces might have seen other things, even when I tell you that both photos are indeed in a gay male context.

#1 guy is the gay porn actor Beau Butler, as seen on the cover of a recent Raging Stallion DVD Just/Sex (from an ad that appeared in my e-mail on 10/8):

(#3) Jake Nicola (insertive) and Beau Butler (receptive), doing very different facework

From my 8/29/21 posting “Sweetly earnest and pleasantly gay”, on Butler:

Sweetly earnest and pleasantly gay, also, a superhunky muscle bottom (descriptors the man himself laughingly accepts as compliments); a “voracious bottom” (or eager receptive, to put it in more distanced technical terms), as an interviewer put it a while back; and something of a queen (a descriptor he occasionally uses of himself as well as the other “queens in recovery” in his alcoholism support group). This is gay pornstar Beau Butler, who appeared earlier on this blog in my 5/3/21 posting “With knitted brows”, because brow-knitting is one of his Serious Faces, frequently displayed during sex with other men, in particular while he’s being pronged by a Raging Stallion co-worker on a mensroom sink in the porn flick Show Hard.

(#4) Another Butler DVD cover

Touches of fagginess, in the form of bits of symbolic girliness: the big sign is his bodily position, with his back somewhat arched and his butt pushed out (in what’s known as the pinup push — see my 9/28/19 “Gender notes: the pinup push”); girly ax-wielding (I’m not quite sure what makes this unconvincing as butch ax-wielding, but it’s actually what I noticed about the pose first); and, most subtly, his facial expression, not the usual porn-ad cruise of death, but instead conveying alert receptiveness

#2 guy is a model (whose name I don’t know) in a Daily Jocks sale ad of 10/15 for an item from the homowear company PUMP!:

(#5) [ad copy:] The PUMP! All-Access Trunk fits like a typical boxer brief, except the backless rear brings the playfulness, freedom, and added [receptive] sexiness of the Jockstrap. This truly is a new style underwear that is guaranteed to heat things up, for whatever the occasion.

Not to mention the Romantic hair. Truly wonderful hair.

(A homoerotic pose, with companion poetry set in the world of gay desire. Nothing explicit, but, yeah …)

A Daily Jocks ad for its new Signature line of underwear captures a handsome young man in his white high-rise Signature briefs focused intently on the solidly packed pouch of those briefs and apostrophizing the magnificent penis within:

Out of his bath and into the world of men’s desire

my sword and lure

O Penis! my Penis! rise up and hear men’s need;
Rise up — for you the rainbow flag is flung — for you the boys do plead,
For you, pansies and lavender’d wreaths — for you, the sailors whistling,
For you they call, the cruising hunks, their eager faces flushing

Well, yes, it’s the beginning of the second stanza of Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”, transformed into something utterly other. I’m pretty pleased with the lines as a piece of occasional poetry, but it counts as a burlesque, since it so thoroughly abandons the content of Whitman’s original, which is a keening outpouring of grief on the death of Abraham Lincoln.

Just before the passage transformed above comes:

But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

And then the original of what I wrote:

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up — for you the flag is flung — for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths — for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning

But the Captain will not arise, because he’s fallen cold and dead.

My lines aren’t bad as a paean to a tumescent penis, I think. I chose the Whitman because it was a passionate apostrophe, and I like the straightforward rhythms in it (unusual for him) and its declamatory style. But in the context of Lincoln the Captain lying dead in his blood on the deck of the ship of state, it’s a trivialization.

(Some day I might tackle “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, but that’s probably way beyond me.)