(Underwear, men’s bodies, and gay sex, though nothing hard-core, and there will be some material on language. Use your judgment.)
Yesterday’s ad from Daily Jocks, with a racy caption of my own devising:
(#1)
Sporty is solid working-class
South Boston, accent and all,
Quit high school to
Work construction, realized
Petty crime could be more
Profitable if you had a solid
Gang behind you, got approached by a
Needy fag for sex, discovered he liked
That work too and made a sideline as
Rough trade, looking and acting
Dangerous, slapping johns
Around, treating them like
Shit, but reliably never actually
Hurting them, so now he has a solid
Roster of johns paying good money to
Get Sporty.
The ad copy that goes along with #1:
Welcome to 2016! We’ve got an amazing year planned for you with new styles, brands and extra-special offers to help you look your best above and below the belt. [It’s a rare piece of premium underwear ad copy that doesn’t make an allusion to the crotch and its treasures; here, it’s “below the belt”.] Get started with 20% off Sportswear this week from brands including Pump, BCNU, Teamm8, Jack Adams, Marcuse Supawear and more. Workout harder with your new look.
Lots to cover here. Start with the gay slang rough trade: ‘rough or lower-class men sought, and sometimes paid, as casual sexual partners by more privileged or affluent men’ (NOAD2)
Here we see male model Christian Hogue playing at being rough trade:
(#2)
To come: more on Christian Hogue (because he loves displaying his body, including in cock-tease shots); on the adjective sporty; and on Elmore Leonard’s novel Get Shorty and the movie made from it, as well as on Leonard’s writing, which (among other things) celebrated the vernacular speech of the working class and, and especially of lowlifes (like Sporty in the caption).
Christian Hogue.Here’s the man modeling C-In2 Core Basic (photo by Rick Day):
(#3)
The underwear is pulled down low, and he’s got fingers hooked in the waistband to pull them down further.
And then all the way, with cock-tease Hogue naked but covering his crotch:
(#4)
The adjective sporty. The ad in #1 exhorts the (male) viewer to get sporty, using the adjective in one or both of the first two senses from NOAD2, but also in a sense related to the fourth:
[main sense] flashy or showy in dress or behavior.
[a] (of clothing) casual yet attractively stylish: a sporty outfit.
[b] (of a car) compact and with fast acceleration: a sporty red coupe.
[c] [of a person] fond of or good at sports.
Certainly sense a, maybe also the main sense, but also in something related to sense d, namely a sense along the lines of ‘(of clothing) intended as or good as sportswear’.
Get Shorty. But the ad slogan is surely also intended as a play on the title Get Shorty. From Wikipedia:
Get Shorty is a 1995 crime thriller comedy film based on Elmore Leonard’s novel of the same name. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld and starring John Travolta, Gene Hackman, Rene Russo, and Danny DeVito, the plot remained true to the book except for a few minor details. A sequel, titled Be Cool, was released in 2005.
(#5)
Russo, DeVito, and Hackman standing in front of Travolta
The plot is extraordinarily intricate, but here’s a bit (from a 10/20/95 review by Roger Ebert) that explains where the film’s title comes from:
Harry Zimm [(Gene Hackman)] … is found in bed with Karen Flores (Rene Russo), a “scream queen” who is the kind of actress who becomes a cover girl for Fangoria. She used to be married to Martin Weir (Danny DeVito), a major, if short, movie star. They all scheme to get “Shorty” into their picture, and the movie’s single best scene is one where Travolta gives DeVito acting lessons in how to look filled with menace.
My caption carries this ‘get Shorty to play in a movie’ sense over to the sense ‘get Sporty to serve as a sex partner’.
Elmore Leonard and his writing. The characters in Leonard’s books talk incessantly, and they do so in the accents (and grammar) of the working class, especially working-class crooks, petty criminals, grifters, and other lowlifes. (Petty criminals like Sporty in my caption, with his working-class Southie accent.)
Leonard on Wikipedia:
Elmore John Leonard, Jr. (October 11, 1925 – August 20, 2013) was an American
novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. His earliest novels, published in the 1950s, were Westerns, but Leonard went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures.
Among his best-known works are Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Hombre, Mr. Majestyk, and Rum Punch (adapted for the movie Jackie Brown). Leonard’s writings include short stories that became the films 3:10 to Yuma and The Tall T, as well as the FX television series Justified.
Elmore is famous for his representations of vernacular speech and also for his masterful use of free indirect style in representing the internal speech of his characters. Two relevant postings on this blog: “Lowlife dialogue” of 6/6/12, and the first section of “Two stylists” of 8/23/13, which is an obit for Leonard; the other section is an obit for pianist Marian McPartland).
