(Freely exploring men’s bodies as sexual objects and man-on-man sex, so totally inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest.)
From Daily Jocks on 3/21, what I found to be a startlingly weird ad for a line of DJX fetishwear (DJ ad copy, untouched, below):
(#1) The DJX Liquid Couple, insertive and receptive: the Chocolate Monument and Alterna-Dude, with A-D, on one knee, engaged in the lovingly intimate practice of pouch-touching, publicly demonstrating his engagement with CM’s cock and balls within that silvery pouch
The ad copy, about the homowear the men are dressed in:
Stand out from the crowd in this unique liquid metal effect look, made from a premium foil-print fabric. Match the Harness, Jockstrap & Shorts together and create the sci-fi disco of your dreams. Available in Silver & Gold [and also in Black Shorts]
In the Temple of Priapus. Well, there they are, looking as hot as they can manage in their ridiculously shiny foil undershirts and underpants — well, harnesses and jockstraps — and the obligatory big butch boots, in a sci-fi disco (which is quite dark in the e-mail photo; I’ve used some Preview technology to lighten the background so that we can see what the sex buddies actually look like).
It’s a disco in a murky orgy room, where nameless men grope each other in the semi-dark and engage each other’s sweaty bodies in moments of urgent, needy sex, panting and grunting and moaning, engaging fingers and lips and cocks and fuckholes. (Imagine the sex-club scene at the beginning of Joe Gage’s 1979 gay porn classic L.A. Tool and Die.; see commentary below.)
It’s an orgy room, but it’s also a disco, with a hard-driving beat, a fuck beat.
And a spotlight. Which is trained on CM and A-D, who are putting on a show for us. A-D is on one knee, fondling his sex buddy’s junk, but also displaying CM’s hot crotch for us to savor the way he does.
In a real orgy room, CM would be looking down at A-D with lust in his heart and his eyes, while A-D would either be fixated on CM’s pouch, revering the object of his desire; or returning CM’s gaze with equal heat. (And CM would have his hand on A-D’s head, conveying both affection and control.) Instead, they’re putting on a performance, but not for us: their expressionless gazes are trained on a spot off to the left of us, where (we guess) an audience of dick-loving disco men is appreciatively taking in their act.
Now, this is peculiarity piled on absurdity, in the midst of some silly play-acting, and my first, enormously complex, response — after noting that I find CM really hot, in part because he has my man Jacques’s bodytype (lean, muscular, long torso, long legs) — was to break up in giggles.
After dozens of views over three days now, I still look at #1, judge that I wouldn’t kick A-D out of bed, though he’s not my type (when my sex engine gets going, fine matters of taste go out the window); see that CM is truly hot (and revs up my dick in seconds); but then take in the full scene, especially those liquid silvery pouches, and find it profoundly ridiculous, instant boner death.
Note on the Gage film. From my 1/28/17 posting “Joe Gage”:
L.A. Tool & Die (the high point of the trilogy) could have been named Days of Sodomy and Roses: the first scene is a steamily mansex-packed scene in a sex club: fucking, sucking, jacking off, sprays of cum; you can almost smell the sweat, testosterone, and jizz. And then, as described in the Wikipedia entry, it becomes a love story
Buddy-sex and buddy-love. Of course L.A. Tool & Die becomes a love story. Most long-form gay porn films are love stories. It’s probably not unsurprising, then, that the single frame in #1 reads so easily as a scene of not only buddy-sex about to happen, but buddy-love, the affection of close male friendship. Yes, the men are decked out in decorative homowear and they seem to be performing in a sex club disco, but that pouch-touch looks friendly, intimate rather than urgent.
A-D is about to give his buddy CM a satisfying blowjob; he’s taking the receptive role and he’s down on a knee — well, you need to get down to go down on a guy — but he looks independent rather than submissive, and you can read the scene as A-D just doing a favor for his buddy (or, alternatively, as satisfying a deep need to have a hard cock in his mouth; there’s more than one reading).
We have now slipped into the world of close male friendships. And its intersections with the MMS (male-male sexuality) world. Back to buddies, buddy-love, and buddy-sex in a moment. But first, three digressions, one photographic, one musical (remember that #1 is set in a fantasy disco, so there’s gotta be music), and one linguistic.
The color of their connection. #1 is what I got by lightening the background in the original ad. When I imported that photo to an album in my Mac’s Photos, automatic enhancement turned the sandy-gray (greenish around the edges) background of #1 into a magically lavender shade:
(#2) The DJX Liquid Couple go to LavenderLand
The anthem of the Disco at LavenderLand:
Put another nickel in
In the nickelodeon
All I want is having you
And music, music, musicI’d do anything for you
Anything you’d want me to
(On the song, which is very sticky and Ohrwurmisch, from Wikipedia: “Music! Music! Music! (Put Another Nickel In)” is a popular song written by Stephen Weiss and Bernie Baum and published in 1950. … The biggest-selling version of the song was recorded by Teresa Brewer with the Dixieland All Stars on 20 December 1949, and released on December 26 by London Records [you can watch Brewer performing the song here])
The rude-mouthed boys of LavenderLand are given to various more raunchy versions of the song, starting with the sly “Put another pickle in / In the pickleodeon” and going on to things like “Slide your monster hard dick in / Along my slick perineum”.
“My Buddy”. But since the focus of the ad is His Buddy’s Pouch, the fantasy disco is obviously playing that old standard, the ragingly sentimental ballad “My Buddy”. From Wikipedia:
“My Buddy” is a popular song with music written by Walter Donaldson, and lyrics by Gus Kahn. The song was published in 1922 and early popular versions were by Henry Burr (1922), Ernest Hare (1923) and Ben Bernie (also 1923).
I’m not fond of the lyrics, but here’s an elegant version by Mel Tormé in 1951. A random list of some of the other musicians who’ve recorded it:
Gene Autry, Chet Baker, Count Basie, Teresa Brewer, Rosemary Clooney, Harry Connick Sr., Bing Crosby, Bobby Darin, Doris Day, Connie Francis, Stan Getz, Jackie Gleason, Eydie Gormé, Doctor John, Al Jolson, Lionel Hampton, Coleman Hawkins, Earl Hines, Mario Lanza, Lena Horne, Sammy Kaye, Guy Lombarbo, Genn Miller, the Mills Brothers, Anne Murray, Dinah Shore, Nancy Sinatra, Kate Smith, Barbra Streisand, Jerry Jeff Waker
The tune stands on its own nicely, and lends itself to jazz improvisation; jazz trumpeter (and vocalist) Chet Baker recorded several fine performances.
In the original words, it’s a song of loss and longing:
Nights are long since you went away
I think about you all through the day
My buddy, my buddy
Nobody quite so trueMiss your voice, the touch of your hand
Just long to know that you understand
My buddy, my buddy
Your buddy misses you
The second of these verses can be altered minimally to serve as a song of affection that could be addressed by either of the men in #1 to the other as his buddy:
Love your voice, the touch of your hand
Just smile to show that you understand
My buddy, my buddy
Your buddy treasures you
buddy referring to the penis. In my experience, it’s not uncommon for an American man to refer to his penis as my (little) buddy (invented example: my (little) buddy woke up happy this morning); this is a creative (off the cuff) metaphorical personification of a penis, especially an erect one, as a little man — and, given the pleasure it can afford the bearer, as a friendly little man.
Sometimes the metaphor supplies Buddy as a nickname for the penis, with the syntax of a proper name (even if I don’t take a shower, I always wash Buddy in the morning).
In some varieties of English and related language-forms — in particular, according to GDoS, in West Indian English and in Jamaican Creole — the common noun buddy has become a conventionalized metaphor for ‘penis’ (again an invented example: he stuck his buddy in my face and told me to suck it).
All of these usages derive from the AmE informal noun buddy ‘close friend’ (attested from the mid-19th century on; and roughly corresponding to BrE mate).
Back to buddy-love and buddy-sex. A theme I return to often in this blog is the importance of same-sex friendships (for both women and men) in social life; homosocial bonds play a central role in childhood, eventually combining in a complex way with both heterosexual and homosexual pairing in adolescent and adult life.
For men, the ideal buddy relationship involves mutual trust, admiration, and support, which can provide some relief from the intense competitiveness and jockeying for dominance that tend to characterize the behavior of men in groups. Your buddy has your back, as they say, he’ll try to act in your best interests, and he’s a safe harbor: you can tell him things without his using them against you. It’s a kind of love relationship (Greek philia, the love of friends), one not grounded in sexual attraction (Greek eros).
Buddies of this sort often express the closeness of their relationship through conventionalized forms of physical contact — in the culture I grew up in, buddy hugs, buddy pats on the shoulders or (in certain circumstances) buttocks, arms around each other’s necks, and so on, but not holding hands or touching crotches.
This kind of buddy relationship can, of course, be recruited for the purposes of male-male sexuality (in what I’ve called the MMS world), with eros overlaid on philia. Giving us buddy-love (with a sexual tinge) and actual buddy-sex. (I’m doing my best here not to treat these matters reductively: the buddy friendship relationship is not “really” sexual attraction; buddy-love in the MMS world is not “merely” sexual; and in fact even buddy-sex, guys actually performing sexual acts with one another, is not necessarily “merely” sexual.)
The MMS world is monstrously complex, more than I can expose here. To start with, the MMS world is defined by three separate dimensions:
— men’s sexual tastes, their desires (what turns you on? what do you want?)
–men’s sexual practices (what acts do you perform, in what circumstances?)
— men’s identifications with sexual communities (what kind of a person do you take yourself to be sexually? gay, straight, bisexual, neither?)
And then men in this world present themselves in a (large) variety of ways; these presentations of self include:
— personas, presentations of self on their own (as butch or fem, for example)
— roles, presentations of self in relation to others (as submissive or dominant, for example)
In the real world, men can engage in various sexual acts — giving or getting handjobs, giving or getting blowjobs, fucking or getting fucked, in particular — while configuring these acts in different ways and identifying their sexuality in different ways. Very briefly, men can suck cock for a variety of reasons — just doing a favor for a buddy is a common one — and can connect their cocksucking to sexuality labels in a variety of ways (some guys who sometimes suck cock think of themselves as just plain straight, especially if guys don’t turn them on). Life is enormously complex.
Yes, that’s not A-D and CM back in #1; those fantasy characters are queer as a steamer trunk packed with three-dollar bills (of the actors who are playing them, we know nothing). But real life is messy, and men seem to have a lot of trouble talking about what they desire, what they do sexually, and who they are sexually. Which brings me to Quora questions about (friendship) buddies and sex. (This being Quora, a lot of it’s no doubt invented, but the questions strike me as possible queries from real men, as much like things I’ve heard actual guys say.)
Quora queries. I’ve discarded questions that appear to come from young teens, though these sound like things I heard from other boys (who were exploring sex) when I was a young teen myself. So here are some questions asked by older teens, young adults, and men in middle age. Some are funny, some are kind of sad, several are both.
Queries about displaying dicks (conveying, I assume, guys’ anxieties about penis size, but possibly wondering whether an interest in guys’ dicks is, omg, faggy):
Has your buddy ever showed you how big his penis was?
Have you even shown your dick to a buddy?
My all-time favorite query:
Why does my buddy ejaculate when he gives me a handjob? [The buddy here might be gay, but it any case that happens because he’s sharing your pleasure, and that’s great for the both of you.]
A query probably related to this one:
Have you ever masturbated with your buddy? [Note that I’ve excluded young teen sources; jacking off together is widespread among young teens.]
A query asked again and again, in various formulations:
I want to suck my straight friend’s dick and let him cum in my mouth and swallow it, but I am straight. Would this ruin our friendship? How can I ask him? [This one cries out for more information from the questioner.]
And then, laugh out loud:
If I give my buddy a blow job, am I cheating on my wife?
Laugh out loud because it presupposes that sex with other guys is somehow not really sex, but it needs an answer more serious that a flat YES. I happen to have had a fair amount of experience getting blowjobs from married men, so I appreciate that there’s more complexity here that you might think at first.