(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.