Cockateal crotches

(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.