Gay Macho, Freddy Mercury, and AIDS-The Long, LOOOOOONG Awaited Sequel

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Academic Book, AIDS, Bohemian Rhapsody, Effect of AIDS on Gay Male Sexual Identity and Perception, Freddy Mercury, Freddy Mercury is GOD, Gay Macho, Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone, history, humanity, Martin P. Levine, masculinity, Masculinity Studies, Perception, Personal Development, Public perception, Queen, Queer Theory, Radio GaGa, sex, sexual Education, Sexual identity, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, STIs, We Are the Champions, We Were Here

Freddie Mercury is god, and not just because he was gay.  It just makes god cooler is all.

The longest eight minutes of the day almost always take place once the library has closed.  The way my work-clock functions is there is an electronic clock-in system that requires a password and then you have to wait until the clock reaches to a certain time before you can clock in or out and not potentially lose fifteen minutes of work and thus a quarter of an hour’s worth of pay.  It’s rather convoluted if you ask me, but that’s only because I grew up watching that Loony Tunes special with the sheepdog and the wolf who always greeted each other as they punched their cards in to start and end the workday.  The system being what it is, there is often a moment where, at the end of the day, there are several employees just sitting and waiting in front of their computers talking while the clock slowly ticks to 7:08 when we can all clock out.  It was during this time one night that I was sitting with my friend and coworker TJ and he was scrolling through Rotten Tomatoes like he usually does seeing what films are succeeding and getting the highest ratings.

Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic about Freddie Mercury and Queen, but most Freddie let’s be real here, didn’t get very great reviews and that bummed me out because, as I noted before, Freddie Mercury is god.  Queen was, and still is to me, a band that defines rock’n roll.  While the music was at times odd, peculiar, and sometimes even a little weird, the music was such that I could always appreciate the artistry and sheer personality of the band.  Because of this, the negative reviews almost scared me off from seeing the film because I wasn’t interested in seeing Queen fall from grace, but fortunately, I have an amazing Mom who saw the film before me and insisted I go see it with her.  And, as I usually the case, my mother was right.  Bohemian Rhapsody was not a truly great film, but by the end of the movie I was crying and singing along to Don’t Stop Me Now as the credits rolled.

Freddie Mercury was never a gay icon to me while I was growing up, and even I came out as bisexual, and then eventually pansexual, and then eventually just started using gay and queer interchangeably because ain’t nobody got time for that, Freddie Mercury never rose to prominence in terms of my queer identity.  Honestly, David Bowie has meant more to me erotically speaking, but that’s only because the man looks better in lipstick than I do…the rotten old fairy.

I won’t say that I’ve suddenly become gay for Freddie Mercury, I’m kind of already there, but what struck me most about the film is how his death from Pneumonia related auto-immune disorder, AIDS hit me so profoundly.  It’s a bit of a cliche I know, but watching the recreation of the Live AID performance I was weeping as I realized that had Freddie not died we might still have the man here on this earth making music.  There might be more Queen albums, there might be collaborations between Queen and other contemporary singers, and as for Mercury himself, he might have finally come out himself.  But like many “what if” scenarios, after a time the exercise becomes an exercise in morbidity and futility.

This thought about the life that might have been has been more and more in my mind lately.  In the last few months, I’ve watched the documentary We Were Here, which explores the lives of numerous queer people who lived through the AIDS crisis.  The stories were heartbreaking, but also a chance for personal reflection.  I am a gay man, a queer man, a pansexual man living in a time where AIDS is no longer a death sentence and this largely because of the work of activists, scholars, scientists, and doctors who have worked relentlessly.  This was a beautiful thought.

This was also a chance to complete a review I started literally two years ago, of Martin P. Levine’s Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone.

Martin P. Levine was a sociologist who specialized in the subculture of the gay male community, specifically the “clone” culture that rose prominence in the 70s.  Levine tried to understand why gay men were not only rejecting the previous identity of what gay masculinity was, a.k.a. the Queen or the Fairy, and instead were appropriating the imagery of straight working-class men to create a new mold of manhood.  Levine studied this culture at the same time he was living in it, giving him a unique perspective.  If the reader is interested in the first half of this book they can follow the previous hyperlink, or the link I’ll post at the bottom of the essay.  Levine’s book is definitely worth the reader’s time because it explores how these men were trying to make themselves into something new, something that felt satisfying, and something that would leave them personally, and often sexually, satisfied.  But as Levine completed the first half of his book the AIDS crisis struck this community, and so the second half is largely an exploration of how AIDS disrupted this culture, and how it almost completely unraveled everything these men had worked towards.

Levine notes in one of the early chapters the psychological impact of AIDs:

As a sociologist who writes about New York’s gay ghetto and is very much a part of it, I have observed a wave of terror wash over our community during the past few months.  Driven by an assumption that our lifestyle is responsible for these new diseases, this wave leaves in its make much psychological turmoil.  (138).

He goes on to say:

The AIDs outbreak—some call it the gay cancer to the gay plague, which is no help at all—undoubtedly is our community’s main concern now.  Wherever we gather—at our gyms, in bars, at parties—clone banter is switching from the four D’s (disco, drugs, dick, and dish) to whole is the latest victim of Karposi’s sarcoma.  Hospital visits and funerals are becoming as commonplace as Levi’s 501 jeans.  Friends who never before showed the slightest interest in gay causes are now besieging us for donations to Gay Men’s Health Crisis.  (138).

Though arguably the most potent argument occurs on just the next page:

This panic lacerates our emotions.

After watching friends and lovers die, certain that tricking and drugs killed them, many of us now regard our once-glamourous and exciting lifestyle as toxins.  We are left frightened, nervous, and confused.  We wonder what we have done to our bodies.  Do all those years of frenzied drug orgies at the baths mean it is only a matter of time before we are stricken?  We felt guilt over our past ways.  We are obsessed about our health.  A minor sore-throat, a slight black-and-blue mark conjures up visions of pneumonia or cancer.  We run to our doctors.

For some this hysteria breeds self-hatred.  The threat of disease and death erases more than a decade of gay pride.  Internalized homophobia steps out of the closet as “homosexuality” is blamed for the illnesses.  (139).

Such passages are heartbreaking.  And the testimony of individuals saying they feel that they are being punished simply for being gay only makes it worse.  In this way, Levine’s book is probably not going to be a terribly uplifting read, but simply to dismiss it because it’s not fun to read is not only not a good enough excuse to not read this book (that might have been too many “nots”) it’s also a shitty reason.  I admit that I’m biased here, this is a book about my community, but Gay Macho provides an important insight into how a disease is not just a physical ailment, but often-times can also be a psychological one.

Levine is able to observe this psychological impact upon the community in a later passage as he observes the reason many gay men at the time refused or feared to receive an AIDS test:

The motives cited in the interviews for not taking the test drew heavily upon the psychological definition.  Most of the men reported avoiding being tested because they feared social discrimination, repressive government actions, and the adverse psychological impact of positive results.  Many men feared that hostile groups would gain access to test results and use them for discriminatory purposes.  In addition, they believed that a positive result, even if it was inaccurate, would leave them emotionally traumatized and devastated.  (200).

It’s difficult at times to really understand the paranoia of others if one doesn’t have some sort of similar understanding.  Many queer people today still live under the threat of job termination if they come out publicly, and there are even some, like me, who recognize that they can’t be fired from their job for being gay but can most certainly become a target for the ire of others.  Reading Gay Macho is an opportunity to see what the social and professional reprisals were for simply being gay, and alas having AIDS at the time seen as the ultimate “outing.”  Being gay meant being a carrier for plague and that would, in turn, result in personal emotional distress, possible professional conflicts, familial exile, and then eventual death.

I cannot imagine living under such emotional baggage, and I still struggle with being gay.

Gay Macho to me is an important book, not simply because it provides an important analysis of the gay community at the outbreak of AIDs, it provides a bridge from one generation to the next.  Watching We Were Here recently, and listening to the testimony of the men who lost lovers, partners, and friends to the disease was a chance to see the previous generation of gay people who had endured a goddamn nightmare.  And as a gay man, it was beautiful to me that I could feel empathy for these people, and that I could actually cry for their losses.  Levine’s book outlines plenty of facts about the disease of AIDs, but it also helps contemporary queer, and straight, readers an insight into how AID’s disturbed the community with its presence.

Being gay became a disease almost as soon as the community had eked out some semblance of personal agency, and so it’s all the more heartbreaking that these men suffered so.  But as heartbreaking as it is there is some inspiration in the darkness.

And so returning to Bohemian Rhapsody I remember one scene in particular.  Freddie Mercury is leaving a doctor’s office, clearly having just been diagnosed, and waiting outside the office is a young man, clearly suffering from Karposi’s Sarcoma.  He’s sitting on the bench looking sad, and defeated, and terrified, but as Freddie passes a light enters his eyes and he says after the man, “Day-oh.”  Freddie stops, looks at him, and says it back before leaving the office.  The camera lingers after him, holding on the young man who’s still alone, who’s still suffering, and who is most certainly going to die.  But there for a moment, the two men saw each other.  As for me, I was a fucking puddle trying not to curl up into a ball.

It’s a small scene, but in many ways, this moment was arguably the most powerful of the entire film for the way it took away the stigma of AIDs and showed two men who saw each other and recognized, for a moment, the beauty of their relationship.  Freddy Mercury was a man who never came out of the closet publicly, and his death because of AIDs was ultimately a coming-out.  It’s a testament to the culture that, almost thirty years after the man died there exists a culture that sees in his death, not a punishment for a lavish lifestyle, but a real tragedy for having lost such an important and vital artist.  And that awareness trickles down to the next generation of queer artists, writers, singers, and so on.  It was the work of writers like Martin P. Levine who tried to understand how AIDs hurt the community more than just the surface, physical matters, but the deeper psychological and spiritual ways as well.  And it’s because such work that today AID’s is no longer psychological turmoil, for the most part, there is always exceptions.

Watching Freddy mercury perform We are the Champions at Live AID on screen there was a sadness that the man would never see an age where his sexuality really wouldn’t matter that much to a generation of people, but there was also a subtle joy in singing along to Radio GaGa with my sister and my mom, who, it must be said, always manage to have great taste in films.

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes from Gay Macho were cited from the paperback New York University Press edition.

 

**Writer’s Note**

I didn’t get a chance to work this into my essay but I really wanted to share it.  The film The Normal Heart, based on a play by Larry Kramer, has a beautiful moment where Tommy speaks at a funeral about AIDS and the way it’s impacting the community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn-czSrNlY0

 

***Writer’s Note***

I’ve included below a few links to websites that provide the reader with information about the AIDs virus as well as information about Safe-Sex practices which can help reduce the risk of catching the disease through sex.  I hopes this helps.

https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/default.html

https://www.cdc.gov/actagainstaids/basics/whatishiv.html

https://npin.cdc.gov/pages/hivaids-basics

https://www.avert.org/about-hiv-aids/what-hiv-aids

https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/about-hiv-and-aids/what-are-hiv-and-aids

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hiv-aids/symptoms-causes/syc-20373524

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control

https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/contraception/index.htm

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/get-care/our-services/emergency-contraceptive

 

****Writer’s Note****

One final note, about the images in this essay.  The topic of AIDs is, despite the pretty funny bit in one episode of South Park, NOT funny.

The images of those who have been afflicted with this illness wear on the soul, and looking at image after image of those dying from it can be physically draining.  It makes me sad, and it makes me cry seeing how the disease afflicts it’s host before it ultimately kills them.  It’s because of this I tried in this essay to fill the spaces with pictures of beautiful, happy, gay people living their lives and loving who they are, not to deny the reality of the illness of AIDS, but rather to lift the reader.  Too often AIDs has been used as a weapon against the Queer community, despute the fact that plenty of straight people have contracted the illness as well, and I wanted the reader to be able to see past the morbidity of the illness and be reminded that AIDs is not a punishment of homosexuality, but instead is only the tragedy of the disease itself andf not being informed about the importance of safe sex.

You might disagree with my aesthetic decision here, and that’s fine, but I hope you at least understand why I did it.  Harvy Milk didn’t live long enough to see how the AID’s crisis would affect the LGBTQ+ community, but I’m sure his message would have been my sentiment here:

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Lay Lady Lady, Lay Across this Big Brass Bed…and “Cause” the “Fall” of Rome: Cleopatra, Stacey Schiff, and the Dangers of Literate Women

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"potent female sexuality", Ancient Egypt, biography, Birdbox is about Birds in Boxes...I'm sure it is, Cicero, Cleopatra, Cleopatra VII, Cleopatra's sexuality, Cleopatra: A Life, Dio, Educated Women, Education, Egypt, Female Sexuality, Feminism, Greek, Historical Discourse, history, Julius Caesar, Library of Alexandria, Mark Antony, Octavian Caesar, Pharaoh, Plutarch, Ptolemy, Second Triumvirate, Sexual identity, Sexual politics, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, Stacey Schiff, Women in History

She was conspicuously absent which is especially insulting when you consider I had the time and space to find worksheets and National Geographic articles about Ahmenhotep and his weird Sun cult.  I mean I respect Sun worshippers more than any of the established religions in this world, but even I have to admit that Ahmenhotep was a weird dude, and kinda of a prick when you consider the fact he just threw out gods like Thoth, Bast, Isis, Set, and Ptah in favor of this weird sun-disc with hands.  Ptah was a god of craftsmen and a cool dude who always brought over beer and Doritos whenever we played Smash Bros at Chuck’s place. 

You don’t just throw that dude out with the broken toaster.  You ass.

As I’ve started digging back into history and ingesting as many history-centered YouTube channels I can get my hands on, I’ve been spending more and more time reading actual history.  This has translated into the start of something that I hope becomes an eventual podcast or YouTube channel, but for the time being I’m just enjoying reading actual history and learning more and more about people and events that I thought I had a clear conception about.  This development actually makes a fair amount of sense to my friends and family given the fact that I’ve always appreciated history as a discourse, an institution, a practice, and as a means of nerding-the-fuck-out.  The most obvious example of this of course was the “Egypt-Folder.”

Sometime during sixth-grade ancient Egypt entered my life and totally consumed me.  I think it had a lot to do with the release of a PC game entitled Pharaoh.  It was an isometric city-building game that, as opposed to Sim-City or ROME, was actually quite enjoyable to play.  Whether it was building hunting lodges, chickpea farms, potter studios, or setting up bazaars in just the right place so as not to reduce adjacent property values, I spent hours just building cities in ancient Egypt trying to appease the gods.  In hindsight the game probably wasn’t that great, but I will defend the time I spent on it because it lead me to books and materials about Ancient Egypt.  It didn’t matter what it was actually about, as long as it had something to do with the myths, culture, history, or art of ancient Egypt I wanted it.  So much so that I eventually collected all the worksheets, magazine articles, and occasional sticker-books about the subject I could find and access into a blue three-ring binder that I carried everywhere.

This is all just a way of saying that ancient Egypt was my jam. 

Yet despite my devotion to Egyptian history, Cleopatra remained conspicuously absent.  I don’t have an explanation for this really, the woman just never had much appeal to me for some reason.  And what I did learn from teachers and writers was not particularly flattering either.  Cleopatra was, according to most history I was taught, a slut who brought about the end of the Roman republic and the downfall of men like Mark Antony and Julius Caesar.  Rather than an interesting character, Cleopatra was more of an idea or force who was largely responsible for the end of Egypt as an autonomous country.  And, I suspect, this was the perception many readers were also raised on should they have received any education about ancient Egypt.

Fortunately my aforementioned obsession with Overly Sarcastic Productions changed all of this as Blue made an entire video about Cleopatra which lead to me Stacey Schiff’s biography Cleopatra: A Life.

Cleopatra is a monumental effort and not simply because Schiff places herself between men such as Plutarch, Dio, Livy, and Octavian Caesar.  Schiff’s biography is more than just an effort to clear the charges against Cleopatra of being a seducer and destroyer of “great men,” rather it’s an effort to point out to her reader of the bias of the men who’ve written Cleopatra VII’s history.  Bias is something that is inescapable, and any reader of history has to recognize the fact that the person writing it will always be plagued by some personal, political, and philosophical bias.  Looking then at Cleopatra, Schiff is attempting to demonstrate the fact that the only records that come to us about the life of Cleopatra VII were all written by men, and Roman men at that, and Roman men who had something to gain by portraying her as a seducer and harlot.  The implications for her ability as a ruler were then entirely forgotten, and her capacity as an intellectual are also completely lost to the reader because who cares about her abilities in language, diplomacy, poetry, and philosophy when it’s far more important to know which roman general was banging her on a regular basis?

I’m sorry, do I sound salty?  Because that’s what this book does, it makes you salty, which is not a bad thing.

Schiff addresses the issue with our sources for Cleopatra in the first chapter of her book, aptly titled “That Egyptian Woman”:

History is written not only by posterity, but for posterity as well.  Our most comprehensive sources never met Cleopatra.  Plutarch was born seventy-six years after she died. […]. Appian wrote at a remove of more than a century; Dio of well over two.  Cleopatra’s story differs from most women’s stories in that the men who shaped it—for their own reasons—enlarged rather than erased her role.  Her relationship with Mark Antony was the longest of her life, but her relationship with his rival, Augustus, was the most enduring.  He would defeat Antony and Cleopatra.  To Rome, to enhance the glory, he delivered up the tabloid version of an Egyptian queen, insatiable, treacherous, bloodthirsty, power-crazed.  He magnified Cleopatra to hyperbolic proportions so as to do the same with his victory—and so as to smuggle his real enemy, his former brother-in-law, out of the picture.  The end result is a nineteenth-century British life of Napoleon or a twentieth century history of America, were it to have been written by Chairman Mao.  (6)

Schiff then provides a beautiful summation of our current historical knowledge on the next page:

Affairs of the state have fallen away, leaving us with affairs of the heart.  A commanding woman versed in politics, diplomacy, and governance; fluent in nine languages, silver-tongued and charismatic, Cleopatra nonetheless seems the joint creations of Roman propagandists and Hollywood directors.  She is left to put a vintage label on something we have always known existed: potent female sexuality.  (7).

The topic of “potent female sexuality” is its own essay, though I note with great shame that it’s something I should have already dedicated a seven-part essay series to at this point.  I do have a reputation to maintain after all.  But after reading this quote I hope my reader has the same reaction that I did, which was a combination of shock, intrigue, and then outright anger.  Cleopatra VII is a woman who has had her story written solely by men who had something to gain by discrediting her, and while I don’t want to suggest the woman was the working definition of virtue, it does speak a greater trend in human history where a woman’s sexuality is often used against her to write someone else’s story.

Perhaps the finest example of this was Octavian Caesar, the adopted-adopted-nephew of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra’s first famous lover.  Octavian quickly established himself as the leader of the Republic following Julius’s assassination by members of the Roman senate, and in no short time he established, along with Mark Antony, the Second Triumvirate which sought to hunt down and destroy the assassin’s of his uncle.  This was all partly for show, and Octavian’s wiles in establishing powers will be the stuff of later essays and podcasts (I hope), but for the time being Octavian is important because no figure appears in such contrast to Cleopatra in Schiff’s wonderful biography than Octavian.  Throughout his efforts to acquire power Cleopatra was a constant source of useful distraction largely because of her sheer personality and reputation in the minds of the roman political establishment as well as the common people.  It was not enough that Cleopatra was a woman, nor was she just an Eastern woman, she was a woman that posed a real philosophical threat to Rome.

Schiff elaborates:

Octavian seems to have been the one who decided that Cleopatra plotted to make Rome a province of Egypt, an idea very unlikely to have crossed her quick mind.  He had on his side the familiar type, the scheming, spendthrift wife, for whom no diamond is large enough, no house spacious enough.  As Eutropius put it centuries later, Antony began a war at the urging of the queen of Egypt, who “longed with womanly desire to reign in the city as well.”  Already it was acknowledged “that the greatest wars have taken place on account of women.”  Whole families had been ruined on their account.  And already—the fault as ever of the sultry, sinuous, overtly subversive East—Egyptian women had caused their share of trouble.  They were snowed with insatiable ardor and phenomenal sexual energy,  One husband was not enough for them.  They attracted and ruined men.  Octavian only corralled the evidence.  (257).

Cleopatra appears often in Schiff’s biography from an increasingly Western and Roman perspective and this at times made the book somewhat frustrating.  As I noted before, Schiff is trying to show her reader how our perspective of Cleopatra VII was largely created by Romans and therefore it’s going to be incredibly biased.  It just became frustrating as a reader that so much time was spent with aforementioned romans.  Whether it was passage after passage of Julius Caesar’s ambitions, Mark Antony’s attempted and failed military conquests in the East, or Octavian’s endless schemings and manipulations, a fair amount of the biography is actually about the men who determined Cleopatra’s future. 

Now this could be, in and of itself, a revealing method.  Since our knowledge of Cleopatra VII largely comes from Roman voices, focusing on these roman men as a way of revealing Cleopatra does work.  Julius Caesar appears to the reader less a brilliant military master as a sort of bumbling and often simply lucky man who was saved thanks to the graces of an intelligent and politically savvy Cleopatra.  Mark Antony is revealed, less a military genius, as a sort of bumbling baboon who managed to acquire a significant position because of Cleopatra’s personal political gains as well as her fortune.  And as for Octavian he appears less a grand and epic leader of the roman populace, as a scheming jerk who only attained the power he did because he had the benefit of a perfect scapegoat in the form of a well establish foreign monarch.  These three men were all intertwined with Cleopatra VII, and it’s because of her associations and connections to them that we begin to observe, not a crafty seducer of “great men,” but in fact a great woman brought down by three selfish and ambitious clowns.

I think it’s safe to say that Schiff is trying to show that Cleopatra VII shines for the woman she actually was when you take a step back and really observe the true character and achievements of these men when set in contrast to Cleopatra herself.

And Schiff’s book is not simply an endless encomium and defense, she does perform a great amount of actual historical analysis revealing Cleopatra VII as not just the arm candy of great men, but as an effective ruler.  In one such passage she notes Cleopatra’s approach to the economics of her country:

In economic affairs she took a determined hand, immediately devaluing the currency by a third.  She issued no new gold coins and debased the silver, as her father had done shortly before his death.  For the most part hers was a bronze age.  She instituted large-scale production in that metal, which had been halted for some time.  And she ushered in a great innovation: Cleopatra introduced coins of different denominations to Egypt.  For the first time the markings determined the value of a coin.  Regardless of its weight, it was to be accepted at face value, a great profit to her.  (103).

Creating a central standardized currency created a dramatic upsurge of wealth which helped Cleopatra tremendously during her reign as Pharaoh, and this decision is presented as an informed choice brought about by the fundamental strength of Cleopatra’s personality: her intellect.

Schiff repeatedly reminds her reader that Cleopatra VII was a woman above everything else, educated, and that was in part because of her upbringing.  Schiff observes early in the text how Cleopatra was taught:

And from an early age she enjoyed the best education available in the Hellenistic world, at the hands of the most gifted scholars, in what was incontestably the greatest center of learning in existence: The library of Alexandria and its attached museum were literally in her backyard.  The most prestigious of its scholars were her tutors, its men of science her doctors.  She did not have to venture far for a prescription, a eulogy, a mechanical toy, a map.  (29-30).

And Schiff continues this passage observing just a few such exercises she might have had to practice:

When Cleopatra graduated to syllables it was to a body of abstruse, unpronounceable words, the equally esoteric; the theory appears to have been that the student who could decode these could decode anything.  Maxims and verse came next, based on fables and myths.  A student might be called upon to render a tale of Aesop’s in his own words, in simplest form, a second time with grandiloquence.  More complex impersonations came later.  She might write as Achilles, on the verge of being killed, or be called upon to restate a plot of Euripides.  The lessons were neither easy nor meant to be.  Learning was a serious business, involving endless drills, infinite rules, long hours.  (30).

Though perhaps most important of all, Schiff notes that CLeopatra’s education has one unique aspect that was unlike any of her former predecessors:

While Egyptian speakers learned Greek, it was rare that anyone ventured in the opposite direction.  To the punishing study of Egyptian however, Cleopatra applied herself.  She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled.  (35).

This last quote is worth emphasizing the most because, as is often forgotten it seems, Cleopatra was not actually Egyptian, she was Greek.  After Alexander the Great died, his generals broke his empire up into three pieces, his general Ptolemy taking the region that included Egypt where he established his base of operations and began a dynasty largely defined by endless incest.  The Ptolemaic dynasty was Greek in nature, but Cleopatra performed an incredible personal and political task by breaking from the tradition of her family and learning the language of the people she was ruling over.

I recognize that I hit my reader with three long quotes back-to-back-to-back in a short amount of time, but that’s only because I wanted to convey how much Schiff’s book effected me and my perception of Cleopatra.  By the end of Cleopatra: A Life the woman had become more than the soap-opera queen she had always been taught to me.  Instead the figure that emerged in this book was a charismatic, politically savy, and high educated woman of authority and power and I find that inspiring.  It might just be because I work for, and alongside, and a group of amazing women who are revolutionizing the public library I work for, but strong women are valuable in our society because they bring insight and new ideas for bettering our society.  And so Schiff argues in this book that the lasting image of Cleopatra should not be one solely defined by who she slept with.

Cleopatra: A Life is about revision, but it’s also a book about discovery.  By the end of this book the reader should hopefully have discovered the figure of Cleopatra VII beneath the mountains of scathing and scandalous documents which have attempted to hide her virtues and strengths in favor of painting her with a salacious sexual history that inspires endless steamy paperback novels and really uncomfortable history lectures in high school.  Cleopatra’s achievements were her own, but because she, if I can quote Blue from Overly Sarcastic Productions, “had boobs and did the sex sometimes” became so connected with the affairs of Rome, and the “great men” who were shaping that empire for their own ambitions she was ultimately reduced the figure of the Jezebel who “ruined everything.”

In this way I think Schiff’s book is a defense of Cleopatra, and, in effect, women throughout history who have been screwed by men’s fear of female sexuality.  Cleopatra did employ her sexuality for political purposes, but Schiff observes that even these choices were for the posterity of her kingdom rather than for personal ambition.  So even in the face of the cartoon-slut that Cleopatra can sometimes be there is an element of inspiration.  The reader who finishes Schiff’s biography will find a developed and interesting human being defined principally by her intelligence and charm rather than simply who was regularly visiting her vagina.

There is so much in Schiff’s book worth exploring but I’ve already written enough here, so much so my reader is probably hoping I’ll finish soon so that they can go watch Birdbox (I know what people like…sometimes), so I’ll end with a thought and hope my reader recognizes the importance of this work.

The tradition of men writing histories and rhetorics about the downfall of great men and societies because of one beautiful seductress is a corrupt narrative and one that has been allowed over and over again.  It’s an incredible woman who’s willing to stand between the overwhelming tides of records and stand to defend the qualities of another Great woman who’s qualities were, like so many temples of the ancient world, lost to the harsh and unforgiving sands that wear the resolve of posterity.

It’s also a point to remember that Cleopatra was willing and able to learn nine different languages, and I can’t even get off my ass to spend 10 minutes a day on that damn Duolingo app I downloaded to my iPad.  Such is the measure of a brilliant mind, and an impressive woman.

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from Cleopatra: A Life were quoted from the paperback Back Bay Books edition.

 

**Writer’s Note**

I’ve provided links within the essay but I’ll post them here as well.  Here are the two videos I discussed before, both Blue’s review of Cleopatra:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eGPBX7gY44

As well as the Genealogy of the Ptolemaic Dynasty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3vAKRa0f5I

 

***Writer’s Note***

While watching Blue’s review of Cleopatra, near the end he mentioned an archeologist who is currently digging for the tomb of Cleopatra.  In the description of the video he provides a link and so I thought I would also share it here since, let’s be real, discovering the tomb and body of Cleopatra would be like the coolest thing ever.  Feel free to nerd-out, care of National Geographic.  Enjoy:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2011/07/Cleopatra/

 

****Writer’s Note****

I’m also providing a few links to other reviews about Schiff’s biography.  I’m sure you respect. appreciate, and trust my learned (pronounced “learnd” according to Homer Simpson) opinion, but it’s always good to get as many different opinions as possible.  Hope you enjoy:

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131018363

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/stacy-schiff/cleopatra-a-life/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/01/AR2010110105907.html?noredirect=on

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/22/cleopatra-life-stacy-schiff-review

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/22/cleopatra-life-stacy-schiff-review

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8191028/Cleopatra-A-Life-by-Stacy-Schiff-review.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/books/review/Harrison-t.html

http://www.historybookreviews.com/book_reviews/cleopatra.html

 

*****Writer’s Note*****

In case the reader was curious, I included the “California Girls” Katy Perry image at the start of this essay instead of the one where’s she’s decked out like an Ancient Egyptian because Katy Perry ain’t Egyptian.  She’s a sweet white girl from the Midwest so I thought that if I absolutely had to include her I should do one that’s actually flattering and way less racist.

For example I have that image of her wearing red velvet and I didn’t use that…that…

I’m just gonna hand in my Feminism gun and badge because clearly I have no self control. But at least I don’t have to worry about Plutarch writing mean histories about me being a slut at least.  Could you imagine how awful that would be?

 

******Writer’s Note******

I’ve actually recorded a podcast for Schiff’s book.  You can follow the link below to my SoundCloud channel, or you can go to the Jammer’s Podcasts link at the top of the page.

Trans/Love: Radical sex, Love, & Relationships Beyond the Gender Binary

Tags

Art, Dice, Essay Collection, GenderFluid, GenderQueer, mechanical pencils, Morty Diamond, original photograph, Queer, Queer Theory, Sexual Exploration, Sexual identity, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, still life, tea, Trans Sexuality, Trans/Love, Trans/Love Radical Sex Love and Relationships beyond the Gender Binary, Writing

Trans/Love: Radical sex, Love, & Relationships Beyond the Gender Binary

2 October 2018

Dirty Pictures, Or the Enduring Allure of the Leather Clad Superman Kake: Tom of Finland’s Art (NSFW)

Tags

Academic Book, anal penetration, Art, Art Commentary, biography, Book Review, Dirty Pictures, Dirty Pictures: Tom of Finland Masculinity and Homosexuality, Gay, Gay Men, Gay Porn, Gay Sex, Kake, leather, Male Body, Martin P. Levine, masculinity, Masculinity Studies, Micha Ramakers, Penis, Pornography, Queer, Robust, Robust totally TOTALLY means gay, Sexual Exploration, Sexual Fantasy, sexual idealism, Sexual identity, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, Tom of Finland, Tom of Finland Foundation, Working Class Men, Writing

There’s something about marines.  I really can’t explain it. It’s like how there’s something about men wearing denim.  Or men wearing leather.  Or men wearing lipstick.  Or men wearing cowboy hats.  Or men wearing police uniforms.  Or men wearing work boots.  Or men with long hair.  Or men with tattoos.  Or men shopping for vegetables.  Or men handling wood at hardware stores.  Or men…actually, you know there’s just something about men period.  Maybe that’s what lead me to Tom of Finland in the first place.

Justifying book purchases is getting more and more difficult, and my regular reader probably knows this already if they’ve ever read my homage to Christopher Hitchens.  The space, or, really lack of it, is the primary concern, however there’s also now the issue of mortality.  As I am just a few months away from turning thirty, and becoming yet another in a long line of cliched individuals who realize that they’re youth is quickly becoming a thing of the past, my concern now with purchasing more books is the worry that I won’t actually have time to read them all.  This creates a compulsion towards priority.  DO I really want to read that Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Andrew Jackson when I can’t fucking stand Andrew Jackson, and do I really need to sit down and read Finnegan’s Wake when I realize now that I will never read Ulysses ever again?  There are some positives here, as I have realized more and more that there are books and topics that I legitimately want to read about.  Whether it’s books about Ancient Greece, the Ottoman Empire, anything having to do with Queer identity, and the entire collected works of Vladimir Nabokov these are books that I will read and will make an effort to read. 

And so as I reevaluate my priorities I can honestly write that I felt neither fear nor guilt in purchasing a $50 book about the work of Tom of Finland titled Dirty Pictures: Tom of Finland, Masculinity, and Homosexuality. 

I only feel guilty that, after the book arrived in the mail, I hopped into a couple volumes of the manga One Punch Man before actually reading it, but in my defense One Punch Man is freaking hysterical and I apologize for nothing.

I’ve written before about what Tom of Finland’s work has meant to me, as well as to the homosexual community.  It’s not just that the man was able to help establish an unashamed model of gay porn for queer men to use and gravitate towards, it’s the fact that this pornography and art was able to validate the viewers with men who were attractive and quite visibly happy to be gay.  No matter what Tom’s men were doing (sucking, fucking, sexually harassing postal workers) they always managed to find something to enjoy about being sexual with one another, or, to put it another way, they were having fun being gay. 

This happiness helped establish Tom, real name Touko Valio Laaksonen, as one of the most important gay pornographers and artists, but this happiness, coupled with the fact that the men he drew were typically butch and traditionally masculine, did more for the queer male community who often had been regulated to the “fairy” and “queen” identity.  Tom created a new model of masculinity for queer men, one they were happy to embrace.

Ramakers notes this as he observes the emergence of an unapologetic gay culture:

In the seventies, gay subcultural reality in the United States began to bear an even closer resemblance to Tom of Finland’s images of gay sexuality.  According to sociologist Martin Levine, in that decade there was a noticeable growth in anonymous erotic activity.  Gay meeting places were decorated with Western, leather, or high tech styles and sported “masculine” names such as The Eagle, Badlands, Ambush, Anvil and so on.  In many bars, sparsely lit or darkened rooms were designated for cruising and tricking (spontaneous sex).  Crusing and tricking became the sexual norm.  Sexual techniques were rough and phallocentric and consisted mainly of “deep-throating” (blow job with the entire penis thrust down the throat), hard fucking (jamming entire penis into anus while spanking hard), and heavy tit work (robust sucking, pinching, or biting of nipples).  (106-7).

Before I address this quote I really need to observe that the adjective “robust” always sounds gay to me.  I don’t know what it is.  Just saying the word “robust” it sounds like something a fairy (such as yours truly) would say while describing the repairman who showed up to fix his plumping.  And then maybe, while he was working and trying to keep his long hair out of his face, his shirt would get wet and he’d have to take it off revealing a mess of thick black chest hair that would curl while light would reflect in the small beads of water clinging to…

Oh, I’m sorry, I got distracted.  Anyway, “robust” always just sounds super-gay to me for personal reasons.

Ramakers quote is important though because it reveals where queer men of the seventies were at sexually as well as personally.  It’s easy to forget in an age of Grindr and Scruff and Tindr, but free and casual sex between men was actually quite would have to use codes to find one another, and even then men could find themselves accidentally exposing themselves to straight men who might not always be so happy to discover another man’s hand on their leg.  Compounding this is the fact that, before the seventies, and even some-time after that, being open about one’s queerness could wind one up in a mental institution where there are all manner of nightmare stories.

The ability to suck and fuck, and be sucked and fucked, without fear of social reprisal was not only liberating it was revolutionary.  And in this new erotic atmosphere men began to look for a new character to embody.

Ramakers points his reader to Martin P. Levine, who’s work I’ve reviewed in the past, but then tries to show that the push towards a more traditionally “masculine” culture was an effort by queer men to become something new.  Rather than continue to the idea of the “invert,” or the feminine “fairy,” guys wanted to act and behave more like straight men, only with a lot more sex.  And in this new desire for a masculine ideal, Tom’s work was a great boon.  If the reader has never seen any of Tom’s work the first thing they will observe is, obviously, that it’s pretty gay.  But after this observation what becomes obvious is the fact that his men incredibly masculine.  Ramakers notes this earlier in his book when he observes:

Tom’s men are paper constructions of the ideal body, less a reflection of a particular reality than a representation of a social ideal or mental vision.  Tom’s male bodies are reminiscent enough of reality to be credible, but just far enough beyond that reality to form a nigh unattainable ideal. (72).

Now Ramakers observes that body-building culture impacted this but then later on he observes how Tom accounted for this:

In the later years of his career, Tom attempted to retain idealization, by exaggerating his men’s muscles even further […].  Because of this tendency, however, Tom’s man increasingly became a caricature: “when people criticized him for that, he would tell them, ‘I’m not trying for realism.  I want to express our fantasies.’” (73).

Tom’s work was never, and has never truly been about capturing some kind of realism.  While erotic art and pornography as an institution can at times create and capture the beauty of real and accurate sex, the fundamental purpose of the medium has always been to celebrate and enjoy sexuality, and in this action there is often a great desire for hyperbole.  Looking through some of the many drawings Tom did over the course of his life (the man was amazingly prolific given the fact he began this art at a time where it could have cost him dearly) there is often a great amount of play in his drawings. 

Breasts and shoulders tend to be well defined while hips and legs tend to be slimmer, although the buttocks can often be large and round.  The men, regardless of race or nationality, tend to have similar bone structure in the face, becoming more or less the same copy over and over again.  And, of course, the penises range from simply large to ridiculously gargantuan.

Not that I’m complaining but at some point one has to wonder how these men don’t throw out their back.

At this point the reader may question the immediate relevance of Ramaker’s book.  So what?  Why should I care about the analysis of pornography?  There isn’t any redeeming value in smut, it’s just dudes banging each other so other dudes can jerk off.  How could any of this be considered art?

As always my contester has some excellent points.  It is important to recognize that Tom of Finland’s work was and still is considered pornography by a significant portion of the population, and because the work is homoerotic in nature his appeal is going to be largely limited to a number of queer men, some women, and then a few art critics bold enough to make a serious assessment of the man and his work.  And, to be fair, the typical aesthetic goal of any erotic material is to inspire sexual arousal in the viewer, a sensation which is largely considered base and temporary in most people’s minds.  Looking at this then, Tom’s drawings does not seem to have a great amount of relevance to many people.

But if I can make a solid enough case, this criticism reveals a larger truth about the perception of sexuality in our culture.  Sex is often, at least as far as the United States is concerned, portrayed in the media in a dichotomy.  While there is near constant reference to human sexuality, the lingering Puritanic trend in most Americans ensures that this sexuality is portrayed as obscene, disgusting, or even grotesque thus leading to “abstinence only” environments which have been demonstrated time and time again not to actually work.  The conversation about sexuality is almost non-existent at the same time it is ever-present.

Tom of Finland entered my life entirely by accident, and since he did I’ve been able to explore a facet of my sexuality that feels not only true but liberating.  In Tom’s leather-clad supermen I found my sexuality and discovered that while at time it could be a serious, all-consuming drive, it could also be something funny and enjoyable.  Rather than feeling my desires as something grotesque or morally wrong, my sexuality, my attraction to women and men, was a chance to play and appreciate an idealized world where men could have sex freely without fear.  And while there are probably few straight men that would gravitate to the man’s artwork, the spirit of the work is something that is, at least in my estimation, universal. 

Sex is supposed to be fun, and Tom’s men are often smeared with the word pornography, they seem to find even in this distinction something to revel in.

And on the note of fear, Ramakers observes something incredibly powerful in Tom’s work:

Tom’s work is dedicated to the glorification of the male body, in all its vulnerability: his bodies are constantly being penetrated in every possible way and through every orifice.  (165).

Soon or later every essay about gay sex leads to the anus, and those people who enjoy having their’s penetrated or stimulated.  For the record I tried getting the previous sentence put on a t-shirt but the printers told me that they could move the shirts but there wouldn’t be enough room for the little cartoon anus I illustrated so I decided to scrap it.  If I’m going to make t-shirts about anal penetration you can bet there’s going to be a cute cartoon anus on them.  Integrity matters damn it.

I’ve written before about how the “problem” of penetration in gay sexuality has been discussed by writers and theorists and so I won’t bother my reader with long academic quotes that totally kill the vibe.  The simple matter is often the practice of anal sex between men, and the frequent use of the “top/bottom” dynamic within the community, has lead to this perception that gay sex is simply about which partner acts “like the girl” during sex.  What’s important about Tom’s work is that this dynamic is not only not apparent, it simply doesn’t exist.

Whether it’s construction workers, cops, sailors, soldiers, business men, or the leather-clad Kake himself, Tom’s men love to suck and fuck, and be sucked and fucked.  And so while some readers used to the concept of a pure top/bottom dynamic may at first be bothered by Tom’s presentations, there is actually a real and powerful disruption in the man’s work.  Tom’s men simply enjoy sex, and so rather than constructing identities where sexuality is limited to one action or one sexual organ, his men simply embrace the concept that they are sexual objects and beings and so they are willing to simply play with their sexuality.

Ramakers observes the power of this presentation:

Straight porn is for the most part based on the possession of the penis, which is used as a weapon against those who no not possess I.  In Tom of Finland’s work it is precisely the penis that is possessed by both—or all—parties, thus unhinging that basic tenet  from its supposed immutable position.  This allows the power to fluctuate between partners, none of whom can lay claim to “natural” prerogatives on the basis of possession of the penis. (219).

Or to put it another way, nobody is the “girl” in Tom’s work because there aren’t any girls period.  The matter of women being the weaker creature in pornography is well documented and in fact is its own essay.  For now I simply wanted to focus on Tom’s work because, as I’ve written before in another essay about Tom’s work, the mode of sexuality presented is something I appreciate and respect.

Whether we like it or not, pornography is a staple of the culture, and more and more children will experience pornography as they develop into adults.  In such an environment the importance of sexual education is important, but so is sexual representation.  Whether it be gay or not, Tom of Finland’s work is an incredible presentation of sexual activity because it does not attempt to present sex as a power-play.  Even at it’s most shocking and potentially violent, Tom’s men are not participating in a corrupt or revolting sexual display, they are simply trying to enjoy sex, thus crafting an image of masculinity and humanity that is liberating rather than constricting.

As a queer man, I don’t apologize for enjoying and consuming pornography because it’s an art which has allowed my exploration of self to take place.  And I consider it a point of pride that I blame of Tom of Finland for most of my gay sexual development.  In the pages of his work I found and fell in love with men who were strong (and “robust”) in a physical as well as personal way.  And that in turn was a source of inspiration.  My sexuality is something to celebrate rather than fear.

Dirty Pictures is a serious look at a genre of art that is often denied to the possibility for serious reflection and analysis, and as Tom of Finland’s work and life is recognized more and more by the culture such a book is a vital resource.  Ramaker’s book is an inspiration for those of us who found solace in Tom’s work, and an inspiration to continue the legacy of the man long after he has died.  In this way this review wasn’t just a chance to talk about gay sexuality, it was a chance to thank Ramakers for his book, as well as to thank Tom for his art.

Somewhere on the road there’s a leather-clad superman wearing a winged cock on his hat, and a smile on his face.  And it’s because of Tom’s work that a generation of men made it possible for at least the latter to be not so shocking to us.  Though as I write this I realize it might also just be because Terry Spots is doing another photo shoot in which case I’ll probably have to stop writing so I can disappear into Instagram for a few wonderful hours.

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from Dirty Pictures: Tom of fInland, Masculinity, and Homosexuality were quoted from the first edition hardback St. Martin’s Press edition.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/tom-of-finland-who-is-the-gay-icon-a7319911.html

**Writer’s Note**

I included this in a previous essay about Tom of Finland, but I’ll put it here again.  This website totally and completely supports the work of tOm of Finland and those who try to maintain the legacy of the man’s art.  In fact, one such organization is the Tom of Finland Foundation, a sort of museum, archives, community center which maintains the legacy of Tom of Finland, houses most of his work, and actually supports the work of other erotic artists working today.  I mention this organization not just because I love Tom of FInland, but also because I’m a member of the Foundation and considered it one of the proudest moments of my life when I received my membership card in the mail.

If you love Tom of FInland, or at least would be more interested in learning more about the man’s work, I’ve included a link below to the FOundation’s website where you can contact them directly as well as see some of the various artists who have contributed to their organization.

https://www.tomoffinlandfoundation.org/foundation/N_Home.html

I would also recomend, if you get the chance, visiting the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago.  While their work is not dedicated solely to Tom of Finland, it was partly because of his art that the leather-scene took off in the United States and became not just an aesthetic but an entire lifestyle.  Their museum and website is dedicated to collecting and preserving leather-culture and the various arts and artists and peoples who have helped establish the community.  you can see their site by following the link below:

https://leatherarchives.org

***Writer’s Note***

If the reader is at all interested I found a few articles and pages about the lasting significance of Tom of Finland and have included them below.  Some of them have to deal with the new biopic film about Tom of Finland himself (which I do intend to watch and review at some point)  Enjoy:

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/tom-of-finland-who-is-the-gay-icon-a7319911.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_of_Finland

http://www.worldoftomoffinland.com/xToF_home.php

https://www.npr.org/2017/10/12/555652264/the-man-behind-all-those-behinds-tom-of-finland

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/aug/10/tom-of-finland-review-biopic-gay-artist

And finally, if you would be interested in reading (really seeing and owning) Tom’s work for yourself, I’ve provided a link to TAschen’s website where you can purchase some of the beautiful collections of Tom’s work.  I would ABSOLUTELY recommend it:

https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/search/tom-of-finland

 

****Writer’s NOTE****

Okay, seriously this time. THIS is the last thing I’ll say.  Tom’s work was largely responsible for creating a “working-class” model of homosexuality thus shattering the illusion that queer men could only be upper-class-fairy-limp-wriested-fops.  Not that there was anything wrong with being an effeminate queen (lord knows I am), but Tom essentialy gave queer men more room to find themselves, and this perception that anybody could be gay has allowed for some beautiful moments in art.

Case and point my all time favorite scene from The Simpsons.  Homer thinks Bart is gay and so he takes him around to see several examples of burly-straight-men all of which turn out to be gay until it culminates in this moment of pure comedic genius.

On Being Gay, Different, or Simply Dangerous: Miller’s Line in the Sand

Tags

Bisexuality, COBRA, coffee, Eccentricity, Essay, Everybody looks better than I do in heels and I can't stand it, Faggot, Familial exile, G.I. Joe, Gay, God...I am really Gay, history, Homophobia, Homosexual seduction, Homosexuality, I Love Penis...Mug, Lipstick, Merle Miller, On Being Different, On Being Diufferent: What it Means to Be a Homosexual, Sexual identity, Sexual politics, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, SuperGay is just like Gay but twice as Fabulous, The "Fairy", What it Means to Be a Homosexual, Writing

It’s a god-awful small affair, to the girl with the Mousy hair

-Life on Mars, David Bowie

The only thing I wouldn’t trust myself around is someone else’s coffee, not because I have a fear that I would attempt to “seduce” the cup into becoming a homosexual, but just because I have a very real coffee addiction and I would almost certainly drain the entire glass in one sitting.  I do not believe that I have a problem, as coffee addiction demonstrates only that I am a cool and interesting person, and the tragedy of existence is because I’m a queer man some people wouldn’t even bother to learn this fact about me before telling me to go to hell.

On one side note I’m not sure how one would “seduce” a cup of coffee into becoming gay.  What would that look like?  Would the coffee turn into a rainbow?  How would it demonstrate its affection for members of its own sex?  And would it look better in jeans than me.  These are serious questions and I need answers damn it.

But another concern rises, which is that because I am gay, there are some that would be afraid to leave me around their children.  This is not an unfounded accusation as this entire essay will focus on Merle Miller’s canonical essay On Being Different: What it Means to be a Homosexual, but I should set up the intro first.  You see working in my job I’m usually stationed either in the Local History Room where I serve a largely adult (typically senior citizen clientele) community, but when I work at the information desk at least a quarter, if not half, of the patrons needing help are children.  They want to know about the 3D printer, they want to know if we have Dog Man or Percy Jackson, they want to compliment my rainbow glasses (more on this later), or else they want headphones for the kid’s computers.  These little interactions are often one of my favorite parts of my job and despite my awkwardness around kids I try to be helpful and informative.  They don’t know that I’m pansexual, that I find men, women, and everyone in-between as sexually attractive; it’s just not even on their radar.  And in this interaction is just doesn’t come up because there’s no reason for it.  There is however, some concern on my part, that if any parents knew about my sexuality they may be concerned that I was attempting to infect their children with the “gay agenda.”

The “gay agenda” of course, was a subplot of COBRA in the G.I. Joe cartoons to sway children to become members of the terrorist organization.  I can prove this by the fact that Cobra Commander spoke in a really sharp lisp and wore boots that accentuated his butt.  Only gay  men, you see, have lisps and wear nice boots.

My regular contester might interject here and say that my concern is unfounded.  We’re living in an information age where acceptance of homosexuality is better than it’s ever been.  Queer people can get married, sign up for the same legal benefits as straight couples, they can even adopt children.  In this kind of age there should be no fear for any queer person to be afraid of being out and open.

To this I can only sigh and respond that, yes, no queer person should be afraid, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t.

Yes there have been incredible advancements over the last few decades for queer people, and because of these advancements I know and trust that will not be terminated from my job, exiled socially by my friends and loved ones, and will not be imprisoned in mental facilities or actual jails for being gay, but at the same time I find myself often in a territory that, while it is not openly hostile, still bears the mentality that there are some things that should not be said outloud.  Being a queer man in East Texas is often akin to being Boo Radley: there’s nothing specifically wrong with you, but most people would just prefer that you stay out of sight.  The fear is, as I began, that you will somehow “seduce” the next generation into being gay and that returns to me Merle Miller’s powerful essay.

One of the most pernicious charges against homosexuals is that the “lifestyle” is something that is seduced into children’s mind.  The image is that of a homosexual hypnotist luring children into the sexuality the way the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang lured the children out with twinkle tarts and lollipops.  This isn’t a conversation that has died away much in the time since Merle’s essay, but it should be noted how the charge was leveled towards gay people, even by the people who were supposed to be friends.  In quite possibly the most heart-rending passage in the essay Merle describes two instances of this perception:

The fear of it simply will not go away, though.  A man who was once a friend, maybe my best friend, the survivor of five marriages, the father of nine, not so long ago told me that his eldest son was coming to my house on Saturday: “Now please try not to make a pass at him.”

He laughed.  I guess he meant it as a joke; I didn’t ask.

And a man I’ve known, been acquainted with, et’s say, for twenty-five years, called from the city on a Friday afternoon before getting on the train to come up to my place for the weekend.  He said, “I’ve always leveled with you, Merle, and I’m going to now.  I’ve changed me mind about bringing ———[his sixteen year old son].  I’m sure you understand.”

“I said that no, I didn’t understand.  Perhaps he could explain it to me.

“He said, “———is only an impressionable kid, and while I’ve known you and know you wouldn’t, but suppose you had some friends in, and…”

I suggested that he not come for the weekend.  I have never molested a child my whole life through, never seduced anybody, assuming that word has meaning, and, so far as I know, neither have any of my homosexual friends.  Certainly not in my living room or bedroom.  Moreover, I have known quite a few homosexuals, and I have listened to a great many accounts of how they got that way or think they got that way.  I have never heard anybody say that he(or she) got to be homosexual because of seduction.  (19-20)

This passage is heartbreaking, and I know I should be shocked and appalled after reading it but, people don’t really change all that much.  I often hear friends mystified about the current political and social landscape being shocking for the fact that repugnant statements that were spoken in the sixties and seventies seem to be repeating.  And while I am disgusted by such statements, sentiments, and expressions, I can only shake my head and remember what I said before: people don’t really change.  Miller’s passage here is one that I heard spoken in some varieties and fashions growing up, either by adults or fellow classmates, and reading as much history as I do I’m aware of the fact that being a queer man or woman often meant that one had to suffer.

The argument that homosexuality is an infecting vice that aims at children is as old as humanity itself, and while the treatment of queer people in society is one of constant fluctuation (sometimes we’re in fashion other times we’re in the closet planning out next fashion statement) Miller offers a sentiment that feels terribly accurate:

A fag is a homosexual gentleman who has just left the room.  (19).

I’ve been called a faggot before, never to my face fortunately, and as I have embraced my sexuality more and more I’ve felt a greater and greater target attached to my back.  Then again I wear rainbow glasses to work so I suppose that doesn’t help.  Living in East Texas, and in fact, living in a town that has been listed as one of the worst places in Texas to be Queer, there is always this concern that my sexuality will be perceived as a threat.  Working in a public library, I encounter a fair number of children approaching the desk looking for a copy of Dog Man, Drama, Dork Diaries, or whatever Rick Riordan has published this week.  This means talking with kids, interacting with them, and sometimes walking with them to the shelves to find the books.   It’s impossible for people to know that I’m gay without announcing it, but at the same time all it would really take is one person to assume and make a complaint. 

And speaking honestly and plainly, I live in a constant fear that my sexuality could cost me my job.  And this fear causes me to sit on my sexuality a lot, altering aspects of my behavior I normally wouldn’t alter.  The tone of my voice, the way I walk, or even just having a conversation with a coworker when a patron is nearby.  This in turn just fuels an life-long established internalized homophobia and I feel like, well,  a pathetic old closet-case queen.

This honesty isn’t just for the sake of creating pity, it’s keeping in line with something Miller writers about early in his essay:

I have always thought that one of the obligations of a writer is to expose as much of himself as possible, to be as open and honest as he can manage—among other reasons so that his readers can see in what he writes a reflection of themselves, weaknesses and strengths, courage, and cowardice, good and evil.  Isn’t that one of the reasons writing is perhaps the most painful of the arts?  (36).

These essays aren’t always easy to write, mostly because I check my stats daily and I know very few people read anything other than my early work about Finding Nemo or culture’s obsessions with black penises.  But I live by the notion that I’m a writer and that real writing is about honesty.  I try to always be honest with my reader in these essays and after finishing On Being Different I honestly felt like I was often reading many of my own thoughts. 

I feel different, a lot of the time.  And just as often I find myself trying to conform and “sell” myself off as just another guy, or just another public servant, or just another East Texan instead of the ridiculous East Texas Queen that I am.  My life feels more and more like a battle between cowardice and ambition, conformity and security, virtue and lies.  And while I struggle with this conflict, I feel often that I’m missing the chances to simply be.  Even just saying, or writing really, that I’m a ridiculous queen and a silly fag feels like bold efforts rather than just enjoyable self-declarations.

Being different, isn’t enjoyable.  Or at least it’s not enjoyable the way it was when I was a kid.

Miller offers one more passage that, while it seems a dramatic turn feel accurate for everything this essay has been about.  And if nothing else it’s an excuse to return to the library.  Miller elaborates on his youth and the introduction of sexuality:

Growing up in Marshaltown, I was allowed to take as many books as I wanted from the local library, and I always wanted as many as I could carry, eight of ten at a time.  I read about sensitive boys, odd boys, boys who were lonely and misunderstood, boys who really didn’t care at all that much for baseball, boys who were teased by their classmates, books about all of these, but for years nobody in any of the books I read was ever tortured by the strange fantasies that tore at me every time, […]

And in none of the books I read did anybody feel any compulsion, and compulsion it surely was, to spend so many hours, almost as many as I spent at the library, in or near the Minneapolis & St. Louis railroad station, where odd, frightening things were written on the walls of the men’s room.  And where in those days, there were always boys in their teens and early twenties who were on their way to and from somewhere in fright cars.  Boys who were hungry and jobless and who for a very small amount of money, and sometimes none at all, were available for sex; almost always they were.  They needed the money, and they needed someone to recognize them, to actually see them.  (15).

I’ve spent a lifetime wanting to be different, wanting to be unique, and wanting to be my own person, yet constantly struggling against larger systems, organizations, or collected sentiments.  Whether it was the oppressive environment of attending the most expensive private school in my hometown, whether it was being bullied for being effeminate, whether it was laughed at for being strange, and whether it’s just the perception that I’m seen as some kind of freak by certain members of the community being different feels very much like being invisible.  Or, perhaps more clearly, it feels often like people would prefer I was invisible.

These are perceptions, but these are honest perceptions about my sense of self and so Miller’s On Being Different felt painfully relevant almost 47 years after it was originally published.

Miller’s essay is very much of its time, and several critics have observed that the work is not as significant to our contemporary period.  In an age where gay people can get married, adopt children, purchase property together, enjoy the same kind of insurance benefits as straight couples, and even get a third of the air of air time on Modern Family it would seem that the morose reality of the past would be “over and done with.”  The problem with this perception however is that it’s not a universal reality, and even though this is probably one of the best times be a queer person, there are still a great many of us who are struggling both internally as well as externally.

Being different, and being labelled unwillingly as different is a drag because it promises you a lifetime of being an outsider.  And even if one embraces this term, this kind of isolation can inspire paranoia, depression, and sometimes self-loathing.  And for my own part I don’t have an answer to this.  As I said before I live with a fear that at any time someone could take offense to my existence and raise a stink, and my life could be over.

I don’t want to seduce anybody into becoming gay, I would only ever want them to be themselves and be ready to be themselves whenever they were ready.  It took me 26 years to find myself and I’m still figuring things out. 

My fears aren’t going to dissipate or disappear anytime soon, but rather than simply dwell on these negatives I try try try to stay positive, to stay ridiculous, to try on new lipsticks, and to try and figure out how a cup of coffee could be gay.  Like seriously would little arms and legs pop out of the mug?  And if they did what kind of shoes would they wear? 

I can only hope that it wouldn’t look good in pumps because damn it, everybody looks better in pumps than I do, and it’s not fair.

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from On Being Different were quoted from the paperback Penguin Classics Edition.

 

**Writer’s Note**

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/merle-miller-and-the-piece-that-launched-a-thousand-it-gets-better-videos

https://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/10/21/on-being-different-what-it-means-to-be-homosexual-by-merle-miller/

https://themillions.com/2012/11/the-march-of-progress-is-never-neat-merle-miller-and-on-being-different.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2gbcVaZ448

 

***Writer’s Note***

So I have come to the conclusion that it’s impossible to “seduce” a cup of coffee into becoming gay…HOWEVER, I have found what is, to my mind, the gayest and most accurate coffee mug for myself that I have ever found.  My wife agrees, as when I showed it to her she simply went “Ha, gay.”  Which is usually her way of saying I love you dear.  Whatever the case I have a mug to buy.

My Saga of Saga: A Science Fiction Masterpiece about Breast-Feeding in Public and Being Born a Crime

Tags

Alana, Apartheid, apathy, body humor, Born a Crime, Breast Feeding, Breasts, Brian K. Vaughn, Comics, Fiona Staples, Ghus, graphic novel, Hazel, Humor, interracial relationships, Landfall, Let women breast feed in public damn it!, Literature, Love, Love Story, Marko, Marko and Alana, Othering, Parents, People like to fuck, Petrichor, Politics, race, Race relations, racism, Rape, Saga, science fiction, Sex Criminals, Sexual Exploration, Sexual Fantasy, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, The Stalk, The Will, Trevor Noah, War, Wreath

 

The only other woman I had ever seen breastfeeding was my mother.  I remember stumbling in on her feeding my little sister a month or two after she was born and then promptly shutting the door and going back to the living room to watch Swat Cats.  This time it wasn’t my mother needlessly hiding herself away in her bedroom (though she might have just needed to be somewhere quiet and my near-constant Swat Cats marathon probably wasn’t what she needed) but was in fact a member of the graphic novel book club I’m a part of.  The woman was unforgettable with her purple hair and Nightmare on Elm Street t-shirt, but what struck me was, while I was delivering my usual lecture, this time on the graphic novel Saga, she actually lifted up her baby, opened her shirt, and held her child up to her breast.  I had never seen anyone breast-feed in public before, and seeing it sitting right next to me, I wasn’t entirely sure why anyone would ever have a problem with- it.  The kid was hungry and it wasn’t affecting me personally, so I carried on explaining why I thought Saga, which was also decorated with a breast-feeding mother, just wasn’t an interesting book.

My attitudes towards breast-feeding in public remain the same, let mothers feed their children damn it, but I’ve softened towards Saga.

There was a woman who used to work at the library who I considered a close friend, and that’s why it hit me pretty hard when she announced that she was leaving the library for one in Dallas.  I understood that her reasons were a combination of desire for better pay as well as to be closer to her boyfriend, but I have trouble finding people who seem to like me so I was pretty bummed.  The only real sort of solace I had in the whole thing was that, because she was leaving, that meant that I would be the only person in the library who really knew the graphic novel section, and so, once my supervisors approved, I became the one responsible for shelving the graphic novels.  This task is one that, to say I’ve warmed up to it is putting it mildly, I fucking love it.  Pushing my green cart to the second floor I take a good 15 minutes a day just to rearrange the shelves, prop up new books for patrons passing through the area, arranging the tipped over or worn books up to their proper place, and while I am shelving I almost always find a fantastic book I want to read.  One of them was Saga and, while I admit a moment ago I didn’t find the book terribly wonderful the first time I read it, looking at Marko and Alana on the cover there was the same impulse there always is, a little kid who read Calvin & Hobbes over and over and over again saying, “Check it out, you got a library card!”

I grabbed the first two volumes on my way back down to help a woman send a fax.

There’s too much of Saga to try and tackle all of it in just one essay, and I’m not even looking at just the first volume.  While I’m writing this I’m currently on Volume six, and I’m positive by the time I finish this essay I’ll probably be at the last volume, (it’s up to eight right now) and become one of the I’m sure millions currently devouring this book every time it hits the shelves.  I’ve also finished all of Sex Criminals so if I start appearing peaked it’s because I’ll be sucking comic-book writer’s dicks for new issues.  My other real challenge is the fact that Saga is beloved, or, put it another way, Saga is the comic book that people who hate comics read.  Being friends with the owner of Ground Zero Comics (though I suppose I’m being charitable he may not consider me a friend at all and now I look foolish) he’s often talking about his patrons who come in trying to their wives, girlfriends, etc. into comics, and while the first option is almost always Sandman Vol 2 The Doll’s House, Saga is the series he almost always cites as the second option.

It’s not hard to see why, given the fact that the series is written as one long emotional melodrama, and I don’t mean that pejoratively.  Rather than superhero comics which are often defined by physical gods fighting the forces of evil in tight outfits and experiencing their own sort of melodramas (nobody ever really dies and there’s always a brother who’s supposed to be dead but who turns out to actually be alive or a clone or some shit), Saga is drama about family centered in race, specifically race mixing.  Alana and Marko are people from different cultures, different races which are war with one another.  Marko is from Wreath, the only moon of the planet Landfall the homeward of Alana.  Marko’s people practice magic, whereas Alana’s people tend to gravitate more towards science and technology.  Because war, meaning total destruction of each other’s planets, could potentially destabilize the orbits of their worlds the cultures have moved their war to other planets thus involving a wide variety of peoples in this conflict and creating universal destabilization.  Marko becomes a prisoner of Landfall’s coalition where he meets and falls in love with Alana.  And because people in love have a tendency to fuck, Alana becomes pregnant which is where the series actually begins. 

The first page is memorable for a variety of reasons:

Allright, in all fairness, there’s really just one reason why this page is so striking: too many people forget that when babies are born they aren’t born with any original bacteria in their intestines to help with digestion.  Because of this humans evolved so that it was common for a pregnant woman to void her bowels during labor so that the bacteria in her feces would introduce bacteria into the baby’s body.  Now breast-milk is also a common way for mothers to transfer this bacteria, thus offering me another opportunity to remind my reader that breast-feeding is more important than your discomfort, but it should be noted that pregnant women also tend to poop because, well, shit’s happening.

But that first line, carefully outlining Alana’s reddened face is an important one because Brian K. Vaughn frames the narrative of Saga as first person narration in the veing of  Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Saga is the story of a woman named Hazel who is the product of an interracial union narrating her life story to her audience.  She introduces herself, not as a person, not as an individual ego, but more of an idea.

This is how an idea becomes real.  But ideas are fragile things.  Most don’t live long outside at the ether from which they were pulled, kicking and screaming.  That’s why people create with someone else.  Two people can sometimes improve the odds of an ideas survival…but there are no guarantees.  Anyway, this is the day I was born.  (1-4).

Vaughn’s writing style is something I’ve had plenty of opportunities to explore and study and that’s largely because of my friend TJ.  As I’ve noted in several of my previous essays, he’s the founder of the local Graphic Novel Book Club that meets bi-weekly at Ground Zero Comics, and because of this prestige position he gets to decide which books are read in the group.  We’ve read quite a number of books over the years ranging from Understanding Comics to Transmetropolitian to Sandman to Fun Home, but many members have observed that, in the last year alone, we’ve read close to six or seven of the man’s books and this has lead some to label us the “Brian K. Vaughn appreciation society.”  There is some disagreement upon this suggestion largely because we’ve also read plenty of Jeff Lemire.  The coming war between the Vaughnites and Lemirians is coming and I’m not sure how many lives will ultimately be lost.

But this is just a way of saying that reading Saga is much like reading many of the other Vaughn books and the man has a real tendency to build up his spaces.  Saga is not just an intimate love story between Alana and Marko, it’s an opportunity to observe countless species and peoples, all of whom are impacted by the war between the two races.  The reader is sometimes bombarded by this enormous amount of oddity, and while the first time I was overwhelmed by this treatment, as time in the story progressed I became more and more used to the oddity of the humanity.  And this I believe is its own sort of method. 

Race is very much biological, your DNA will always determine your physical characteristics as well as plenty of facets of personality, but race is also rooted in cultural and individual psychology.  Observing someone’s physical characteristics and observing difference is not racism, it’s only when one allows those observation of differences to form bias that the corrosive quality of racism manifests.

A racist is ultimately formed by a subculture that educates them that differences in physical characteristics such as skin color, or more abstract qualities such as language or nationality, are an indication of lesser worth.  What’s incredible then about the graphic novel Saga is that, much like the Star Wars and Star Trek films before it, the reader is constantly exposed to individuals of different races and species intermingling without too much concern that such interactions are taking place.  The reader is able to see the physical differences, and encouraged to just accept these characters as people.  Whether it’s the Prince Robot IV and his television head, the floating ghost specter with half a body named Isabel, the half spider half human freelancer known simply as “The Stalk,” or my favorite character Petrichor a MTF transgender woman from Wreath.  Saga encourages the reader to see that race is biological, but that racism is ultimately just the social construct because regardless of physiology, anatomy, or whether you’re a pothead actress made out of moss, people are people, and their qualities are what ultimately define them.

That would have been my end to Saga were it not for the fact that recently I’ve begun a new routine.  With the rightful fall of Charlie Rose, my morning breakfast routine has been shaken up dramatically because I used to watch interviews and eat.  I’ve now taken to watching Seth Meyers, The Daily Show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and of course The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.  This later one provides me with some news of the day and some means of maintaining my sanity as I watch the current administration do its…let’s say thing.  I like Colbert, he makes me laugh, and he gives me something to think about when I’m shoveling my eggs, donuts, and tea down my throat as I get ready for work.  Most recently however he interviewed Trevor Noah, complimenting him about his time on the Daily Show, revealing to the world that Noah had a brief appearance in the film Black Panther, and then asking him about the issue of race.  It was during this last conversation that Noah reminded me about his eloquence, but then also about the larger narrative of racism in South Africa.

And during this interview Noah pointed out that, ultimately, his existence voided the larger racist narrative.  If one race in power argues that race-mixing cannot produce offspring it voids and ultimately destroys the racist narrative to begin with.  This shouldn’t have been such a powerful observation, but hearing him express it as such made me pause and really dwell on that statement.  It also made me go back to his biography and look through a few of the passages.

Noah’s memoir Born a Crime doesn’t just mirror Saga, it could almost be its own spin-off.  Noah imbues his life story with plenty of wit and humor, but constantly throughout the book he is able to demonstrate a real intelligence about the farce that was the governmental race policy of his home nation.

He writes in one chapter:

In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn’t merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent.  Race-mixing proves that races can mix—and in a lot of cases want to mix.  Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.  (21).

Looking then at Saga this is most certainly the case because Vaughn and Fiona Staples, the illustrator who deserves an entire essay to herself, show the family as constantly on the run from the two central organizations of their homewards who see their union as not just a threat to the larger war effort, but to the very war itself.  The war between Wreath and Landfall is a racial war, it’s a war founded on the idea that the two races not only should not intermingle and interbreed, but that they cannot.  Alana and Marko, and by extension Hazel is a rejection of that system.  Its proof that the war is, ultimately, bullshit.

Noah’s biography goes on to note the length to which apartheid was ridiculous and cruel:

Laws were passed prohibiting sex between Europeans and natives, laws that were later amended to prohibit sex between whites and all nonwhites.

The government went to insane lengths to try and enforce these laws.  The penalty for breaking them was five years in prison.  There were whole police squads whose only job was to go around peeking through windows—clearly an assignment for only the finest law enforcement officers.  And if an interracial couple got caught, God help them.  The police would kick down the door, drag the people out, beat them, and arrest them.  At least that’s what they did to the black person.  With the white person it was more like, “Look I’ll just say you were drunk, but don’t do it again, eh? Cheers.”  That’s how it was with a white man a black woman.  If a black man was caught having sex with a white woman, he’d be lucky if he wasn’t charged with rape.”  (22).

There’s a brief moment in Saga when Prince Robot IV is being briefed by a Landfall intelligence officer about the couple and the subject of Alana’s consent is mentioned.  Alana’s pregnancy is observed and Robot IV says rather plainly,

“Love child?  Surely he forced himself on her.” (24)

And this is, ultimately, everything.  The narrative of the war and the races has become so ingrained in the zeitgeist, so embedded into the universal culture of Saga that two people of Landfall and Wreath falling in love and conceiving a child is not only inconceivable, it’s repulsive.  There’s also the fact that throughout the text Marko’s people speak a language that often appears to be some sort of slavic tongue mixed in with Spanish which makes the theme of racism all the more potent.

Hazel as a character is an idea and a material reality for her very existence is a crime.  Saga as a work of art then is not something that is just relevant it’s historical pertinent.  Often the charge against graphic novels is that they are too fantastic, too hyperbolic, or else that they are too much like a melodrama or a soap opera.  My argument against this charge is that while Saga is all of these things, it still manages to consistently say something about humanity which that we are more than the petty and paltry divisions which are used to allow suffering.

Rape camps, racism, sexual slavery, transphobia, and murder for hire are all concepts which are explored in the Saga Series, and while many would prefer that it didn’t exist, all of these concepts are realities that are still plaguing society.  Saga doesn’t just create a new world, fill it with quirky languages and science fiction creatures for the sake of delving into high fantasy; the book is an effort to touch and explore that which is most human.  Love is ultimately a biological imperative based in chemistry to get us to reproduce, but looking past this and seeing how we allow it to create meaning in our lives the story of Hazel is a story which, as Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime demonstrates, is an ongoing narrative.

People like to fuck, and people like to fall in love.  Regardless of a person’s sex, gender identity, race, or nationality everyone has the capacity to love another human being.  And this idea is powerful because love allows more than just two people to come together and find one another.  People comes with families, friends, associations, organizations, creeds, and personal ideologies all of which expose each person of the relationship to new ideas and people which expand their world.

Talking about Saga, and watching that woman breastfeed beside me, was a chance to observe other people, to explore a new way of thinking, and listen to other people’s opinions about what the book meant to them.  In a period and time when it feels more and more like human beings are looking for excuses and reasons to “other” each other (pardon that pathetic string of words) it speaks to the power of a book to ask its reader if those differences are really so profound that we can’t find some excuse to recognize another person’s humanity, and maybe see them as somebody we’d like to know, or fuck, or even love.

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from Saga Volume 1 were taken from the paperback Image copy edition.  All quotes cited from Born a Crime were cited from the first edition hardback Spiegel & Grau copy.

 

**Writer’s Note**

I really wanted to cite Trevor Noah directly in this essay but it just didn’t work out that way.  So instead here’s the original interview from The Late Show.  Please enjoy, and please remember to take the time to appreciate that they got Trevor Noah to be an A.I. hologram in the movie Black Panther.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC6V4gLAat4

 

***Writer’s Note***

I didn’t get a chance to do it here, and maybe hopefully at some point I’ll have time to write a long treatise, but having now read the entrety of the Saga series run published thus far, my absolute favorite character, after Ghus, is Petrichor.  I don’t know whether or not it’s because she’s beautiful or else because she’s hysterical, but I adore her more than anything in the world, and I admit with no shame whatsoever that I have the individual issue with her on the cover in my bookshelf.

Patrichor is BAE.

Dirty Amber by Lips

Tags

Academic Book, Art, Dirty Pictures, Dirty Pictures: Tom of Finland Masculinity and Homosexuality, Gay, Gay Men, Gay Sex, glasses, Homosexuality, Joshua Jammer Smith, lips, Masculinity Studies, Micha Ramakers, Penis, Pornography, Sexual Exploration, Sexual identity, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, still life, Swiss Army Knife, tea, Tom of Finland

Dirty Amber Lips

13 September 2018

 

Feeding Turtles Tumors While We Were Waiting to be Okay – Calypso and Suicide

Tags

"Butt-Piracy", "Elder Gay", A House Divided, A Modest Proposal, Anthony Bourdain, Calypso, Chester Benington, David Sedaris, Deadlands, Elder, Essay, Essay Collection, Get your credit score and work on gathering reliable assets, Happiness, Homosexuality, Humor, Joshua Jammer Smith, Kate Spade, Literature, Longview Pride 2018, Masculinity Studies, Philosophy, Pride, Satire, Self-Effacement, Sexual identity, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, suicide, Surviving, The Myth of Sisyphus, The One(s) Who Got Away, Writing

I mean the dude was just killing it.  He didn’t have spectacular abs, I thank whatever fortune I possess in this life for that, but his body was clearly one that he worked on.  He had short blond hair and a great ass and he just twerked it wearing by now just a pair of khaki shorts, knee high socks and some kind of sport-tennis shoes.  I was wearing my Mad Hatter socks, my fingerless lace gloves, glitter nail polish, my little red “pimp-hat,”and of course my ultikilt.  Some artist came on, someone who’s five years younger than me probably could have identified, and I watched this young guy twerk and just kill it on the dance floor while the rest of the young people around him cheered him on.  I was sitting with some friends on the edge of the venue just watching him wondering if I had any real desire for him, or if I was just impressed by his dance moves.  He was just so free and gay in the ways that I wasn’t and I realized, at that moment, that I was something the kids are referring to as an “elder-gay.”

An “elder gay” as far as I can tell, is a someone from previous generations  who identifies as some variety of Queer.  The way my friend Alia uses the term one would suspect that an Elder Gay is something out of Dungeons and Dragons, some mystical being who possess knowledge of the organisms and energies that exist in the spaces between dimensions. Likewise the sage would almost certainly possess the knowledge of what is the best way to score a bank loan for that B&B you’re dreaming of starting up in Dallas. 

An “Elder Gay” is someone who has survived and managed to stay “cute” and queer and not let the straight superstructure complex of heterosexuality break you down and force you back into the closet.  The term implies a level of strength, wisdom, and integrity and so I’m a little fretful to use that term on myself because, looking at the path my sexuality has taken, I’m not really sure I can use that term for myself.

Then again I looked up the word “Elder” on Urban Dictionary and aside from the smutty implications it has for Mormons there was a definition that read: “Gay men who prefere[sic] to take cock from behind.”  This definition was followed by the various refining elements that read: #fudge packer, #rump roaster, #fag, #gay, #butt pirate.  I’ve never honestly considered “butt piracy” because I’ve no idea whether that job comes with any sort of real benefits, and at this stage of my life and career working without health insurance just isn’t an option.  I do like the idea of taking cock from behind though so perhaps I will allow myself the title of “Elder Gay.” It sounds like something I could put on my resume.

Watching that kid dance, and sitting next to my friend Alia Q and her boyfriend however, I felt a wonderful sense of place.  Even if I didn’t want to dance, and I found myself fine and dandy just sitting on the bench blowing bubbles and watching the younger queerkids have fun, the moment had a real sense of purpose and joy.  It was my first official Pride Event.  There had been one or two such events in my hometown of Tyler, but they were small affairs that didn’t have the same level of teeth to them.  Attending this event, even if it was during the last two hours of the official day, was a chance to be out, to really be out, and be happy.  And if nothing else, realize that I really was an “elder gay.”

Suicide has been haunting me more and more lately.  Not that I’m seriously considering taking my own life, I’ve promised three of my friends that I wouldn’t, and while I know that sounds like a soft promise these three women are the sort of people who would hold a severe grudge against me and I’m almost positive all of them would immediately consult necromancy just to bring me back and kick my ass.  Though I’m sure in fact my punishment would be something far more benign like being forced to watch insurance seminar power-point presentations and therefore all the more cruel. 

But as my regular reader might remember, just a few months ago I lost my friend Savannah Blair to suicide.  Not long before this Chester Bennington had decided to take his own life by hanging himself.  Having recently begun reading all of William Shakespeare’s plays I began a book entitled The Medical Mind of Shakespeare and discovered there was an entire chapter dedicated to Suicide.  And just in the last week of writing this essay Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade have both killed themselves.  This series of losses all seemed to be one long endless reminder of the disease of depression, and so on the morning before the actual Longview Pride festival I decided to sit down and finish reading David Sedaris’s latest book Calypso.  Sedaris is one of my favorite authors and is consistently funny and so I thought it might be a great way to have a laugh and prepare myself for the days festivities.  I opened the book, started reading, and discovered several passages of the book dealt with the recent suicide of his sister Tiffany.

I heaved a heavy sigh, muttered the sentiment “fucking really?” and read the book in one long burst.  I can’t say that by the end I’d come to a better place, but I had become sadder because I realized that I would probably never have the gumption to feed one of my eventual tumors to a snapping turtle.

Calypso is a book that, like the rest of Sedaris’s oeuvre, is about observing the absurdity of everyday existence, while also managing to find some human statement in our faults.  Sedaris doesn’t just acknowledge that he has selfish or cruel thoughts about other people, he simply writes them down turning them into the narrative of everyday life.  And this honesty over time just becomes part of the sarcasm, satire, and the general method.  His prose is always self-effacing while also managing to be self-promoting, and by the end of just one of his essays the reader has almost always come to some kind of conclusion that Sedaris is doing his best to stay one step ahead of the joke he’s turning himself into.

But Calypso felt different from his other books because it possessed a sharper bite that I suspect comes with growing older, and also perhaps from losing a sibling to suicide.

In one of the essays, A House Divided, Sedaris describes walking down a beach near a house his family was renting out, and talking about their sister when others sister Lisa mentions the mode of death.  She’s interrupted briefly by a woman walking a dog and then casually mention that Tiffany took her own life with a plastic bag.  Asphixiation is supposed to be one of the miserable ways to go, I know this because my wife tells me things like that all the time.  She reads essays and Reddit posts by doctors and scientists and supposedly strangling is unbearably painful.  Sedaris doesn’t mention this but he notes something about the tool used to take hissister’s life:

It’s hard to find a bag without writing on it—the name of a store, most often.  Lowe’s it might read.  SAFEWAY.  TRUE VALUE.  Does a person go through a number of them before making a selection, or, as I suspect, will any bag do, regardless of the Ironic statement it might make?  This is what was going through my mind when Lisa stopped walking and turned to me asking, “Will you do me a favor?”

“Anything,” I said, so grateful to have her alive and beside me.

She held out her foot, “Will you tie my shoe?”

“Well…sure,” I said, “But can you tell me why?”

She sighed, “My pants are tight and I don’t feel like bending over.”  (62-3).

This gave me something to think about because my pants are often tight at work and I own almost no laceless shoes, yet I always stoop down to tie them if they become unlaced.  This terrifies me as there is a set of stairs at the library that I’m sure is going to kill me.  But after this I think about what kind of plastic bag I would use if I decided to asphyxiate myself and this becomes a problem.  Almost all of the plastic bags in my possession are ones my wife has brought home after one of her endless shopping trips and these tend to usually be from Hobby Lobby.  Its may sound vain on my part but there would be nothing so gosche as to kill myself and then be found with a Hobby Lobby bag wrapped around my head.  The people who find me may suspect I support the corporation’s philosophy of denying birth control coverage in employee health insurance, or else that my sex-life was so awful and/or nonexistent that I had to take up a hobby to fill the time.  I think if I had to use any sort of bag I would want it to be from someplace like Half Price Books or Barnes & Noble, that way the medical examiner would think I was cultured, or at least a reader, or at least someone who spent their time around books which is something I suspect at least most people would like to appear to be.

I know it’s morbid, but suicide is still to me one last means of controlling my fate in this universe.  Since I have no use for religion, and because my wife refuses to take up ballroom dancing with me, the only real means I have of staving off the inevitable realization that my life has no meaning is to dwell on death, and this in part tends to push me to thoughts, or considerations of suicide.  Before Louis C.K. was rightfully skewered by the #MeToo movement I did watch him pretty regularly and he had a sentiment that was best expressed, “You don’t have to do anything, because you can always kill yourself.”  This sentiment was one that made me laugh, but I realized that it was one that had alsoappeared before in Albert Camus’s book The Myth of Sisyphus. 

He begins his book by noting:

There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide.  Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.  All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards.  These are games; one must first answer.  And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that the philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act.  These are facts thee heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.  (3).

Suicide is, ultimately, about survival.  The people that one sees moving about, shopping for groceries, urinating on public busses, picking their nose when they think no one is looking, and giving their boyfriends hand jobs in the far back corners of a public library, are ultimately people who survived past the impulse to kill themselves.  It’s absurd, and ridiculous, but each person has found some conclusion that amounted to, “No, I need to keep living today.”

My reason tends to be coffee, books, movies, Deadlands, and orgasms.  Each of these brings me a tremendous amount of pleasure, and if I’m being honest I’d like to have more experiences with them before I finally shuffle off this mortal coil.

Calypso is a book that, while reading it, I kept thinking about because, ultimately, it seems to be defined by a recurring theme of being a survivor.  Sedaris writes about the frailties of his body, the problematic dynamic he has with his father,  suffering a gastro-intestinal virus during a book tour, having a tumor removed, losing his sister to suicide, and finally just surviving to the age he has lived to.

Looking at a later passage in The One(s) Who Got Away Sedaris asks his partner Hugh how many men he slept with before they settled down together.  As Hugh counts men up well past the number fifty Sedaris observes his jealousy, the difference in their physical attractiveness, but then also the fact that both of them are still there.  He writes,

By what miracle had neither of us attracted AIDS?  How had we gotten away?  I don’t just mean later, when people knew to be safe, but back in the days when it didn’t have a name and no one understood how it spread.  One of the men Hugh had lived with—a professor he had his first year of college—had died of it in the late eighties, and surely there were others, on both my side and his.  Yet for some reason we’d escaped, had prospered, even.  Now here we were, the shadows lengthened, our spaghetti growing old, as he hit the half-hundred mark, then blithely sailed beyond it.

Whore.  (159).

It is nothing compared to living with a man for several decades and scoring up an impressively sluttish roster of former lovers, but as I sat at the Pride Event next to my friend Q who was clapping and regularly saying, “Yes queers you DO IT!” I was struck by the fact that we were both survivors, Q more so than I.  She had been far closer to Savannah that I was.  I couldn’t tell you her favorite film while she was alive, nor her favorite book, nor could I even tell you her fucking birthday, and yet over the last few months I’ve had the audacity to label her as a friend.  What I suppose connected us wasour mutual associations and our working together, and I suppose Gay Movie Night.  But what I find, what I return to over and over again is that both Sav and I were, until her end, mutually suicidal.  The only difference is Sav stopped finding a reason to go on, whereas Q and I had.

Reading this short passage again I realized David Sedaris very much qualifies for my previous definition of “Elder Gay,” because along with the previous work another of his essays in Calypso titled A Modest Proposal he tackles the development of Gay Marriage in the United States.  Sedaris is honest about the fact that he’d never considered marriage.  He writes:

The Supreme Court ruling tells every gay fifteen-year-old living out in the middle of nowhere that he or she is as good as any other dope who wants to get married.  To me it was a slightly mixed-message, like saying we’re all equally entitled to wear Dockers to the Olive Garden.  Then I spoke to my accountant, who’s as straight asthey come, and he couldn’t have been more excited.  “Fox tax purposes, you and Hugh really need to act on this,” he told me.

“But I don’t want to,” I said.  “I don’t believe in marriage.”

He launched into a little speech, and here’s the thing about about legally defined couples: they save boatloads of money, especially when it comes to inherited property.  My accountant told me how much we had to gain, and I was like, “Is there a waiting period?  What documents do I need?”  (125).

Words like equity, inheritance, benefits, insurance, and escrow are words that are steadily becoming more and more relevant to my day to day existence.  They suggest, I suppose, a worldliness or at least that you have a head on your shoulders and that you know where you’re “going” in life.  I need to know that I’m going to have at least few bucks in my bank account before I can apply for a loan, I need to have a credit score, and I need to have something for collateral.  These realizations are not epiphanies, they’re just day to day realities that come with surviving. 

Watching that young man while I adjusted my silk gloves and straightening the hem of my kilt, I saw someone who wasn’t wondering about whether or not his dad “accepted” his lifestyle, I didn’t see a young man who was wondering how he was going to “survive” a miserable biological assault on the homosexual community, and I didn’t see a young man struggling to make sense about whether his gender identity and sexuality meant there was something morally wrong with his very existence.  I just saw a young man possessed by music and having a fucking blast.  And while I blew my bubbles and watched his butt wiggle about I was happy for him.  I wanted him to be happy, happy in the ways I hadn’t been but wanted to be when I was younger.  Happy in the ways I wish my friend Sav could have been during her life.  His body and mind hadn’t yet been afflicted with the realities of things like the development of tumors, low bank funds, or the suicide of a friend.

And so maybe as I think about it, perhaps I need to adjust the working definition of what an “elder gay” actually is.  Getting older, surviving to become older, is in someways a mix of resentment and fondness for youth.  It’s the desire for the ones that come after you to have fun without fear of personal or societal retribution, while at the same time hating them for having so much liberty.  Being a queer man who stayed in the closet until he was 26 I envy this next generation of young queer people who hopefully, if I make my life something that matters, won’t be afraid to come out and live their sexuality as they so chose.  I envy that their survival won’t be as afflicted with the struggle to justify or explain their desire to a warring camp of people who would rather they just didn’t exist in the first place.  I hope for a generation of young queer people who treat marriage the same way straight people do, just something you do when you stop dancing at parties and instead sit off to the sides blowing bubbles wondering if you’re supposed to go to work on Monday and whether or not you should have really spent $50 on rainbow buttons and flags instead of a savings bond.

Surviving can be a drag, but at least there’s the chance to have a few more orgasms, and maybe feed one of your tumors to a snapping turtle.

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from Calypso were taken from the First Edition Hardback edition published by Little, Brown & Company.  All quotes cited from The Myth of Sisyphus were provided care of the paperback Vintage International edition.

 

**Writer’s Note**

I’ve provided a link to the definition of “Elder” provided to me care of Urban Dictionary.  I had no idea that Mormons were such a kind bunch, I guess you learn something new everyday.  Yet another reason to prolong my life if only to understand further the intricacies of mormon sexuality.  Anyway, enjoy:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Elder

 

***Writer’s Note***

I really wanted to start this essay out with the following statement: “I attended my first “real” Pride Parade with a Llama, a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in my backpack, and wearing a kilt.”  It was a lovely sentence that was completely true, but technically, like I said before, I had been to an actual parade in my home town already.  Still, I at least got some great photographs.

#43-Boobs

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#43, A History of the Breast, Amanda Palmer, Boobs, Breast Milk, Breast Milk as Menstrual Blood, Breasts, Breasts and Fruit, Breasts Vs Boobs, Brian K. Vaughn, Cunnilingus, Desert Hearts, Diana Cage, Essay, Fiona Staples, Free the Breast, Fun Home, graphic novel, Holt/Cold, Humor, Hypersexualization of Female Breasts, Jean Fouquet, Katy Perry, Katy Perry Elmo, Katy Perry's Boobs, Knockers, Marilyn Yalom, May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, Nicki Minaj, Nicki Minaj's Boobs, Pound the Alarm, Prime Numbers, Saga, sex, Sexual politics, Sexual Rhetoric, The Art of Asking, The Lesbian Sex Bible, The Travels of Marco Polo, Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels, Women Can Breastfeed WHEREVER THE FUCK THEY WANT, Writing, Yes I wrote an entire essay about boobs I know I write a lot about sex between men but I like women too you know

Thought experiment, file #43: consideration of the prominences located on the upper ventral region of the torso of homo sapiens sapiens, specifically of the female sex.  Thought Experiment shall concern itself with the following: What’s the deal with breasts and boobs yo?

 

[000.0001__initial concerns]

Boobs are not the same thing as breasts.  Breasts are parts of women’s bodies responsible for feeding babies, and babies are pure, and innocent, and sexless.  When was the last time you saw a sexy baby?  Case and point.  Boobs are different from breasts then because when I think of boobs I think of pornography.  I think of beer commercials.  I think of skinny women with their boobs packed into bras which are designed to press the flesh and blood of their bodies up close to the base of their chin so that we can see that flesh flex and ripple and flex while the women smile and entice.

Boobs to me is sex, but is this an empty observation?

Plenty of writers, commentators, academics, and cultural theorists who need tenure and so they write about something sexy to sell a book and help the review board forget about that incident last spring with the tennis star that left him divorced and looking for cash, have all written about the sexualization, and in many cases over-sexualization, of human breasts.  It’s important to note that these theorists have almost entirely centered their attention on the female breast because that tends to be where this sexualization takes place.

Meditating on or observing the rhetoric of noticing sexy-boobs is really just an empty gesture.  Unless one can add something to the argument a writer is really just masturbating on the page.  I have tried at least twenty times to write about breasts on the internet.  Doing my best to scrape together boob-puns and picture after picture of clever and terrible innuendos that rely on breasts for the joke to work.  In the end all I’ve done is observe a lot of boobs, and I’m not sure whether I’ve really learned anything from the experience.

 

[004.7884t____first observation]

Buzzfeed has dedicated an entire “article,” if you can call the collection of photo series they do articles at all, over what Katy Perry has used to cover her breasts during performances and music videos.  This includes, but is not limited to the following: whipped cream dispensers, candy, muffins, cupcakes, shells, pockets, a banana, film reels and even Elmo’s face.  This last was purposefully salacious because she had recently appeared on Sesame Street performing her song Holt/Cold with Elmo and many mothers of children who viewed the program complained that her outfit was “unnecessarily sexual,” specifically, her boobs were bouncing around through the whole thing.

For my own part, if I have to pick a favorite it would be none of these because while the woman is certainly curvaceous, it’s her thighs that often leave me a puddle on the floor.  I have no reasonable explanation for this.  There’s just something about Katy Perry’s thighs.

This leaves me in the minority however because the mountain of discourse around Katy Perry’s body has to do with the big bouncing mountains of writing and blogging material on her chest: her boobs.

It seems those mounds of flesh are an endless fertile crescent for creeps on the internet who write up manifestos using creepy and fucking fuck expressions like “mounds of flesh.”  It’s just that every time Katy Perry appears somewhere in culture somebody somewhere has to comment about her breasts.  This is nothing new, because for close to two decades society decided to talk about Madonna’s vagina and who or what was visiting it regularly.  Katy Perry is not Madonna, but like Madonna Katy Perry has used her body in her visual art as a means of establishing some sort of aesthetic.  Her imagery tends to be sexual in nature, but unlike Madonna who tended to fuck on screen for attention, Katy Perry has often used her breasts to be both sexual, and funny.  Her boobs aren’t pornographic, they’re something to look at but also to laugh at, and so while the rhetoric tends to be “look at Katy Perry’s boobs” the aesthetic is usually to the effect of, “Well, duh, she’s pointing right to them.”

 

[#0111.54__second Considerations]

My favorite book of all time is Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and I’ve written somewhere around four or five essays about the book.  In fact having finished it again recently I’ve considered returning to it and writing yet another in a long line of kiss-
assery.  The power of the graphic novel to me is the combination of honesty, attention to detail, and the near constant literary references that make me feel special because I have a fucking Masters degree.  The book is always an inspiration though, and I’m better for having it in my life because it helped me realize that I’m just as attracted to men as I am to women.

There’s plenty of frames in the book that make me pause and consider Bechdel’s aesthetic, but one frame always stops me.  Allison is in college reading, devouring really, numerous books about feminism and lesbian identity and in one scene she is reading a novel while eating and Bechdel provides the quote:

This frame has the impact on me that it does because when I was young, and just starting to write reguarly, I would often compare a woman’s breasts and boobs to fruits like melons, peaches, or…yeah that’s pretty much it.  I mean, what monster or hack would compare a woman’s breast to a dragon fruit?  I suspect part of being a young writer, a young male writer, I should specify, is comparing body parts to food.  I suspect this is a habit because when you’re young you’re still in high school and every high school teacher has to bombard their students with relentless symbolism because that’s all you’re going to do in college level English classes, apparently.  Discuss how boobs feel like peaches, or jelly, or pillows, or sponges.  Why can’t men write about a woman’s breast without using something else to describe them?  Why do boobs have to be anything apart from boobs?

Being honest here, I think it’s because men don’t have boobs, we just have cocks and balls, and cocks are just these hard poles we rub until goo shoots out and balls are too tender to squeeze.  When a man feels a breast however it is very much like the rest of a woman’s body: soft and alien.  There isn’t any real frame of reference because there’s nothing a man can feel on himself that compares to a woman’s breast, and because fruits tend to be soft and “fleshy”  and sweet it stands to reason that they’re the first thing a man is likely to think about when he’s trying to give his reader an erection.

This leaves a male writer’s female reader in a bit of an awkward position because it’s highly unlikely she’s ever compared her knockers to ripe figs or honeydew melons.  She’ll probably just refer to them as breasts, and leave the word “knockers” to male writers like Mel Brooks.

 

[04041.0009__third anomaly]

I have many books in my library that deal with men, specifically, how and why men fuck, with each other.  I have very few books about lesbian sexuality, and this often leaves me, to quote the great French philosopher Michel Foucault, pretty fuckin bummed in myself.  Still there are a few books about women in my library, more than a few, and between my considerations of Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj (she’s next you see) I found a few books that deal with women and their anatomy.

A History of the Breast by Marilyn Yalom has been sitting in my “to-read” pile for close to
a year, though in fact calling this now functioning shelf full of books a “pile” is an exercise in self-delusion.  I have a problem and I intend to handle it, that’s what retirement is for.  The book is unique however, not just because the cover is adorned with Jean Fouquet’s Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels which shows Mary as a European aristocratic woman bearing a single orb-resembling breast to her child, but also because it is part of a niche collection of books that center their attention on a single body part.  Someone was able to fill an entire book with concepts and ideas that people have formulated about breasts, and while I haven’t read the book in it’s entirety I’ll open it from time to time and read a passage, and this one struck me at this reading:

Husbands often favored the use of a wet nurse, since it was believed that couples should refrain from sexual intercourse while the mother was nursing.  It was widely thought that a mother’s milk was a form of vaginal blood, transformed from blood to milk as it passed from the womb to the breasts.  The agitation of intercourse would have the consequences of corrupting the milk supply, curdling the milk, and might even kill off any fetuses that managed to be conceived.  As for the aesthetics of breast feeding, many husbands did not like the appearance of their wives with a child at the breast.  Nursing, a praise-worthy occupation for ancient goddesses and the Virgin Mary, was not considered attractive when practiced by highborn ladies.  Many upper-class women, subservient to the eroticized ideal of a youthful bosom, were thus obliged to entrust their babies to wet nurses.  (70).

I’m honestly not sure which part is more surprising here, the fact that husbands didn’t think breast-feeding was sexy or that breast milk is apparently menstrual blood.  I should probably go with the blood though since men being stupid will hardly be much of a revelation.

I’ve never fully understood the male reaction to the Menstrual cycle given the fact that, as men, we’re supposed to be doing nothing but thinking about vaginas all the time.  It would seem men like vaginas, but only when they don’t have to actually think about how they work.  At work in this dynamic however is the difficulty of the Breast Vs Boob paradigm.  Men like boobs when they’re these big squishy bags of fun that don’t have babies or reproduction attached to them, but the moment men consider a woman’s actual biology a boob becomes a breast again.

Breasts are reminders that sexuality is not a sterile or artificial construct, but a messy exchange of fluids that results in procreation and new life.  When a Boob starts to leak milk it must be connected to a vagina, and there’s nothing like leaky Boobs then to turn men off.

 

[5555.00301__fourth argument]

I want to read Marco Polo’s Travels.  I bought the book at the PeaPicker, a local bookstore in my hometown of Tyler, and I’ve always wanted to sit down and actually read it.  There’s this idea that I would be really touching history by listening to the records of one of those who came before.  This has nothing to do with Boobs, but I feel like it might have something to do with boobs.  Or not.  It’s still a nice thought.

 

[5555.00302__fifth observation]

Nicki Minaj is another one of those women in recent times who has gained a certain prominence in society for being a skilled musician, but also because she has very, very large boobs.  And, to note, a rather large heinie.  I say boobs and not breasts because there is usually not much earthiness to Nicki Minaj, or at least not in the songs and videos I’ve watched.

I wrote an entire essay about Nicki Minaj and her boobs, ultimately arriving at the conclusion that the sexuality model she was offering in the video for her song Pound the Alarm was largely artificial given the fact the entire aesthetic was building on carnival.  As a mode of celebration carnival goes back to the Middle Ages where people would celebrate the life and death of the year by celebrating sexuality but also death and with this came many jokes about poop and farting.

Pound the Alarm has no reference to feces, or bodily odors for that matter,  but it does have lots of Boobs.  Nicki herself is always the center of the video and her breasts, her boobs, are always part of the display.

She bounces them.

She jiggles them.

She pushes them together with her arms and wiggles her butt.

And throughout the short film when the music hits a spike she will thrust her shoulders back making her boobs pop out at the reader.  There’s nothing inherently wrong about this, and I don’t want to be the male writer who says Minaj isn’t allowed to advertise her body and sexuality.  But looking at Minaj there is always a sexualization of her body being displayed or encouraged.  Her breasts are not earthy or biological, they are part of some sterile sexual performance which is at the heart of her entire public persona.  Sex is not about procreation it’s about fun, and her boobs are just part of the fun.  Great big
jiggly bouncing fun at that.

Observing the observation of Nicki Minaj’s boobs is much like the observation of the observation of Katy Perry’s Boobs then.  Whatever merriment and mirth is derived from watching whatever Nicki or Katy decorate their boobs with, at the end of the day they remain boobs rather than breasts, and the understanding is there will never be any babies suckling on them any-time soon.

 

 

[0777.091__Seventh Seventh Seventh]

In Desert Hearts Cay seduces Vivian finally by stripping naked and refusing to leave Vivian’s bed despite her protests.  Put aside the fact the scene would flop appallingly if Cay were a man, Cay’s refusal eventually succeeds and the pair of them finally making love and thus providing a sexual denouement to the tension which has been building during the entire film.  The first time I watched this scene however was not when I was twelve and supremely and erotically fixated upon “lesbian” sexuality (and I quote that because “lesbian” porn exists and it definitely wasn’t made for lesbians, or at least not the ones I know, they clip their fingernails).  It was Gay Movie Night and I was hanging out with a group of friends all of whom were queer women.

The sex didn’t show any cunnilingus, it was just Cay and Vivian kissing and eventually suckling on each other’s nipples.  It was shortly after this act that Vivian experienced an orgasm.  None of my friends were entirely sure how this occurred, in fact there was a dubiousness that lasted until we finally shrugged and someone simply suggested, “Well, they were just chillin.”  Chillin, of course, became synonymous with orgasm.

I became convinced rather quickly that lesbians possessed some secret power to bring their partners to orgasm simply by touching each other’s nipples and so I went to my library and looked in my copy of The Lesbian Sex Bible.  Breasts only appear twice in this book, and only one has an entire quote, it reads as follows:

TOUCHING BREASTS AND CHESTS

Everyone loves breasts.  We either want ours touched or we want to touch someone else’s—and often we want both.  Touching her breasts and nipples releases a feel-good hormone called oxytocin that gets her excited and ready for sex.  If your lover is more masculine, she might find that having her breasts cupped feels too girly.  Instead, concentrate on playing with her nipples.  Pull and pinch the nipples, roll them between your fingers, grip her tits girly, or stroke her chest as if it were flat.  (84).

This passage was rather interesting largely because it contained the words “breasts” three times, and the word “tits” once.  Tit is a word I’ve avoided because it honestly sounds too masculine, or else too sharp.  I like the word Boob though because it has a linguistic curvature that’s fun to say.  “Tits” isn’t fun, but neither really is “breasts.”

Whatever the case the passage left me disappointed because it revealed nothing of Lesbians’ secret power to give each other orgasms simply by stimulating each other’s nipples.  Such is life.

 

[8.08__a return before final assessment]

I could read Marco Polo’s Travels, but I also want to read War & Peace before I die, and I haven’t even touched my hardback Plutarch’s Lives.  There’s so many books I want to read but I don’t have time for.  This thought has some connection to Boobs, I just don’t know what it is yet.

 

[011111111.111111110__another return before final assessment]

Amanda Palmer painted her almost naked body so that one half of her was the outward physical form, but the other half showed her muscles, tendons, nerves, and the child gestating in her uterus.  She was pregnant at the time and so the belly that protruded outward from her physical form was not just for show, she was actually pregnant.  This was not the first time Amanda Palmer “revealed” her breasts to the public.  The internet abounds with pictures of her either in concert, in videos, or at public events periodically bare chested and simply not giving a fuck.  As she is want to do.  Even beside me while I write is a copy of her book The Art of Asking, which has her naked and covering her breasts with her arms while holding a flower.

There’s so much to be impressed about by Amanda Palmer, but I return to her New York performance because the image of an almost naked, pregnant woman standing perfectly still outside a library is something just indescribable.  Her bare breasts are part of a performance, but rather than simply be about showing Boob, her breasts remain breasts because of the baby in her tummy that is clearly up for display.

It was a moment of pure honesty and a reminder of the biological function and purpose of breasts that was both challenging and fascinating.

The last few years have seen a rising of the “free the breast campaign” as women the world over have begun to push back against the sexualization, or over-sexualization of breasts, demanding the same rights as men to bare their chests without fear of social or legal reprisal.  This cannot be attributed solely to Amanda Palmer, but the willingness to show her body as a means of both demonstrating the power of the body, as well as its own naturalness surely was a knock to the supremacy of Boobs.

 

[final thoughts]

The cover of Saga Volume 1 and issue #1, shows Alana holding the baby Hazel to her chest where the babe is suckling gently.  The cover, and the book itself, garnered widespread condemnation by certain comic book fans who objected that a “family book” had such advanced material. The only problem with this criticism is that Saga was never a “family” book as it contains numerous scenes of violence and sexuality, however the initial charge of corruption due to breastfeeding remains the best example of the final separation between Breasts and Boobs.

Human beings are an ego driven species, and we tend to think about fucking a lot.  And in the Information Age where millions of images of breasts can appear with just a few clicks of a button, the sexualization of breasts appears to be an seemingly unending, unmovable onslaught.  Likewise the conversations about the hyper-sexualization of breasts can become a pedantic affair  because conversations about sexuality can become heated rather quickly.  In an environment where people don’t even like discussing condoms how can one create an atmosphere where nuance about women’s breasts can take place?

My own thoughts here are random, spotty, and really only amount to a collection of quick observations.  In fact upon consideration it seems fair to argue that this “essay” was in fact just an excuse to download a lot of pictures of topless women.  This is not a nuanced discussion at all, and Boobs remain Boobs and Breasts remain Breasts.

It seems the only sane response is to appreciate breasts as sexual protuberances until it’s time for the baby to be nursed.  Because, and this is important, at the end of the day the kid’s gotta eat more than I need to appreciate a great pair of boobs.  And besides, unless Playboy goes bankrupt anytime soon, there’s always gonna be a space for looking at Boobs.

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All Quotes cited from A History of the Breast by Marilyn Yalom were taken from the Hardback Knopf edition.  All Quotes from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Allison Bechdel were from the Hardback Houghlin Mifflin Edition.  All Quotes taken from The Lesbian Sex Bible by Diana Cage were taken from the Hardback Quiver Press edition.

 

**Writer’s Note**

Below is a link to the aforementioned article listing the varies garments employed to dress Katy Perry’s now famous breasts.  I hope the reader enjoys and also takes the time to learn a little bit of history about breasts after “reading” this “article”:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/whitneyjefferson/things-katy-perry-has-worn-on-her-breasts?utm_term=.bmKDBV1YY#.si8Z6zBRR

 

***Writer’s Note***

Please find below a link to the wikipedia page for breast.  Why?  Because read the reference section.  Seriously Wikipedia is changing, and even though your high school English teacher told you to never, never, NEVER use Wikipedia the only reason she told you that was because your lazy ass would have just copy/pasted the whole fucking thing and then you wouldn’t have learned anything.  But now that you’re an adult, you can scroll down to the “references” section and see what research ACTUALLY went into producing the material that helped you bullshit your way through twelfth grade Health Class.  Anyway, enjoy the page, and the boobs, and, more importantly, the FACTS about the boobs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast

 

****Writer’s Note****

Below I’ve provided a link to the World Health Organization(WHO), specifically a page dealing with breast-feeding that provides general information, links to resources, and general health information.

http://www.who.int/topics/breastfeeding/en/

I’ve also provided something similar for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/

And finally here also is a link to Planned Parenthood:

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/breastfeeding

 

*****Writer’s Note*****

On one final note I would like to offer my apologies to Katy Perry for my weird, creepy comments about her thighs.  I’m not saying they’re not lovely to look at or that…that…

Ahem, sorry, as I was saying it was wrong of me to…to…

 

You know what I’ve lost whatever dignity I had here.  I resign myself to being a pervert.  Remember me well friends.  And please don’t look at my browser history.  It is a tale of sadness.

Will They, or Won’t They? The Fabulous Gay Love Story That is the Early Chapters of Moby Dick

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"Jammer Moments", "Will They?/Won't They?", Gay Men, Gay Sex, Having erotic dreams/fantasies about sailors and whales is perfectly normal...Todd, Homoeroticism, Homosexuality, Humor, Ishmael, Jason Momoa, Literature, Male Sexuality, masculinity, Masculinity Studies, Moby Dick, Moby Dick is TOTALLY GAY, Novel, Quee-Queg, Queer, Queer Sexuality, Queer Theory, Sailors, Satire, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, The Hardcore Gay Erotica that is Moby Dick, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, Well Hung Bad Boys Looking for D, Whalers, Writing

I mean if I woke up to find myself in the arms a large, able-bodied, tattooed god I could only hope that my make-a-wish came true and that I was resting next to Jason Momoa.  A man can dream after all.

It’s been a strange sort of year, one that has come with numerous changes and developments, but the most recent one was finishing yet another in a long line of 1000 page books, however my most recent challenge was unique because it was not a novel but in fact it was a history book.  Since I was a child my father has owned a dense tome wrapped in a black dust jacket marked with a swastika.  I knew a fair amount about Nazis because my father would often tell me stories of men like Patton and Ike Eisenhower who defeated these evil monsters that were almost on par with orcs from The Lord of the Rings.  I could never understand then why my dad had a book with their logo on the front.  This was largely because I didn’t take the time to read the cover.  The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer is an incredible book, and while I would hope one day to write about it’s significance to World War II history discourse, I began to observe, somewhere in the three hundred pages of Russian-German diplomacy, that I really, really, desperately wanted to read Moby Dick.  Again.

I mentioned this the other day to two of my co-workers and they gave “the look.”

It’s an odd sort of look.  I can’t say that it’s pity exactly, nor would I go so far as to suggest that it’s jealousy.  In fact it’s something in the middle I suspect.  A loathing of the self before one comes to the realization that I’m a narcissist and a weirdo who thinks he’s special and interesting and so they pity my strange variety of nerdom.  It’s a look I’m familiar with, and one friend even has a name for these moments that he charmingly refers to as “Jammer Moments.”  I’ve yet to contact Oxford English Dictionary because the term has yet to develop a significant etymology and I also don’t have the merchandizing rights yet.  “That’s so Jammer” will look great on t-shirts, and I intend to make a killing.

Despite my oddity, and my friends and co-worker’s mystification at my desire to read what is widely regarded as one of the most unreadable novels in all of human history, I’ve enjoyed picking up Moby Dick again.  The novel is beautifully written, philosophically profound, textually complex, and also a wonderful opportunity to dig into my queer sexuality and find what is surely one of the most delightfully gay romances in American literature.

Now I can anticipate my reader’s objections before I even get into the fun parts.  Fun parts for the record are of course queer jargon for ding dongs and buttholes, both of which terms are straight jargon for penises and anuses, both of which are themselves medical jargon for those things that shoot out babies and turds.  Why should I care about whether or not the characters in Moby Dick are gay?  I’m never going to read the book in the first place, so why should I bother worrying over the sexuality of two fictional people?  More to the point, if Moby Dick is a beautiful and philosophically profound novel, why worry about something as petty as sexuality?

My reader makes some wonderful arguments and I understand where they’re coming from, but to be frank I just feel like having some fun and writing a trashy queer romance and maybe, possibly perhaps, find something culturally relevant to observe at the end.  So get off my back people, life is hard and sometimes we all need to find a way to relax.

Now our story begins in the city of Nantucket where the gloomy Ishmael finds himself in a bar, the Spouter Inn to be exact.  I’ll touch on that imagery in a moment.  Our young stud of a protagonist is a country-boy named Ishmael who is caught by a wanderlust that is at times gloomy, which just gives him this precious “dark side” allowing the reader to picture the man as a kind of Goth dream-boat only without eye-liner and leave tattoos.  That’s for later.  Ishmael is caught by a near-constant desire to travel specifically to go whaling on the ocean for it provides his spirit an unknown, or indescribable satisfaction.  The fact that he surrounded by men is unspoken, but I hope my reader will agree, it’s clearly all about the dick, whale.

I meant whale.

Ishmael steps into the ejaculation, Spouter, I meant Spouter Inn, and he walks past a group of butch sailors to inquire about a room.  At this point the reader is given the first bits of foreplay to the beautiful party:

“But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to sharing a harpooner’s blanket, have ye?  I s’pose you are a goin’ a whalin’, so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.”

I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooner might be, and that if he (the landlord) had no other place for me, and the harpooner was not decidedly objectionable, why rather wander further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with half of any decent man’s blanket.  (19).

I suppose I have to sigh and groan that our protagonist should announce himself upfront to be a bit of a slut.  It’s not enough that he let’s the barman tap his “head” in front of him without calling him on it, then you have the fact that admits to preferring multiple lovers and that monogamous relations leave him tired and bored, and before he’s even finished the sentence he has admitted that he’s not overly picky about the sort of man who shares his bed.  But perhaps what’s worst, or best of all, I’m not sure which at this point, Ishmael states outright that he’s willing to shack up with any guy if it means being warm and dry.  I mean I’m as much of a slut as the next guy, but show at least a little deference in selection of sexual partners Ishmael.  There are some Creeps out there, and you always find out far far too late in the game.  That orthodox priest was not happy when I said I had an early meeting.

Now my reader is sure to object against my interpretation by suggesting that none of that was actually implied.  Ishmael was just a young man looking for a place to stay during a nasty storm.  Well my reader has some very intriguing ideas concerning Ishmael’s sex-life, however I’m afraid I must continue to the juicy parts.

The reader is given a lengthy passage in which Ishmael deliberates about whether he should share a bed with the strange man that the bar-tender speaks of.  I wish I could say that this was enjoyable to read, but Melville really lacks a certain penasch in terms of getting one hot and bothered for random bed-sharing.  Chapter four progresses rather slowly until the reader is able to get a juicy couple of pages of Ishmael discovering his bed-mate will be a cannibal, and there is some rather yummy passages in which Ishmael studies Queequeg’s body, but it really isn’t until the start of chapter 5 that the reader gets any sort of hint that the action is starting up again:

Upon waking up the next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner.  You had almost thought I had been his wife.  (36).

Before the reader interrupts my good time let me observe rather quickly that from this point on Ishmael will regularly use marital adjectives when describing his relationship with Queequeg.  It’s not enough that the pair of them wake up in a loving, warm embrace.  After all, it was a cold, rainy night and they were strangers seeking solace and warm in one another’s…company.  But just a few pages on from this Ishmael drops another hint at his developing infatuation:

But at length all the night’s events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament.  For though I tried to move his arm—unlock his bridegroom clasp—yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain.  (38).

Once again Ishmael employs the adjectives of marriage, and this association of course leads to a somewhat annoying realization that Ishmael is one of those queer men who buys into the idea that one of them is “the girl.”  This is a rather unfortunate realization, because up to this point I was enjoying Ishmael’s sluttiness and unbroken frolicking with another man.  Perhaps what’s so frustrating is this perpetuated rhetoric in today’s society, most obviously in straight communities.  Homosexuality is seen often as a kind of malleable heterosexuality in which two men or two women form a monogamous bond that mimics a straight couple’s.  One of the pair is the man, and therefore the active penetrator or licker.  I should really consult a lesbian and determine what the inside terminology is.  While the other partner is the passive receiver, meaning of course that that person is “the girl.”  Ishmael seems to be employing this imagery as he observes Queequeg not responding to his attempts to wake him up, and while it’s hardly a severe reiteration of a tired mode of thinking, it’s just disappointing that Ishmael can’t foster his own working model of queerness.

I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch.  Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage’s side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby.  A pretty-pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk!  (38).

The only thing missing I suppose is some leather chest-guards, chaps, some cigars, and one of those swings you have to pay somebody to set up.  Who says Literature is boring?

Now my reader interrupts my fantasies because they are compelled by some misguided sense of revisionist intellectualism to remind me that there was no actual sex.  Queequeg simply fell asleep and Melville is trying to establish a purely heterosexual friendship between the two characters.  The use of the word “savage” as well is not meant to be dirty, but is in fact some unfortunate racism on Melville’s part to appeal to his original audience.  These are all fine points, but they’re ignoring the obvious assplay that was exchanged, and Ishmael being a weird slut who totally wanted it.

This is compounded by a later passage in which Ishmael is just watching Queequeg, and thinking about their association together.  And after a few moment’s reflection, which, let’s be honest here, men only ever employ that term to mean “thinking about all the sorts of kinky sex I’d love to have with another man,” Ishmael makes a further move:

I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile.  At first he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows.  I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.  (73).

If a man told me he’d like to sleep with me more than once I would probably be flattered as well…alas, I have yet to even receive an offer.

I suppose I must sigh here, and gently wave towards my face as Ishmael only gets more steamy in the sheets with his Cannibal lover (Man eats Man would be either a beautiful title for a homoerotic play by Tennessee Williams or else a wonderful title for a gay porno, I’m not sure which, why not both?).  After the previous exchange was offered Ishmael offers another sight just a few pages on where he let’s the obvious foreplay be observed:

But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.

How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends.  Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning.  Thus, then, in our hearts honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.  (75).

Again, before I can even get into the juicy parts about what is obviously sexual, my revisionist reader must needs interrupt to inform me that I’m performing a gross disservice to literary analysis.  What is being described is not an openly homosexual relationship.  Melville is merely using words like “honeymoon” to show a deepening friendship that is developing between Ishmael and Queequeg.  They would also like to remind me that strong homosocial bonds were common between men of this time because it was just not socially acceptable to share emotions between people of different genders.  Men and women kept their personal selves to themselves, and preferred to share such intimately with members of their own sex.  They would also like to tell me that I’m obviously trying to write contemporary homosexuality onto these characters which is unfair because the homosexuality of today’s society is an entirely different animal than homoeroticism that existed in the past.

Well, if I can offer a defense, I never used the word homosexual.  We have no idea if Queequeg is homosexual, or pansexual, or bisexual, or just queer.  Now Ishmael is most definitely gay though, because this entire book is just one long testament to his fascination and erotic fixation on “THE D.”

Now if my reader is done interrupting I need to get to the last two passages which obvious end with our queer heroes finally getting, if I can borrow an expression the kids are using these days, “Biz-zay.”  Immediately following the previous quote the next chapter begins with Ishmael and Queequeg, resting together and just basking in the afterglow:

We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.  (76).

While this is nowhere near as pornographic as I would like it to be (Ishmael remains to the very end a nasty little tease) it’s so obvious that these two men have spent the night voraciously making love.  Queequeg’s invitations might also suggest that he was the one doing the penetrating, but even my skills of queer deduction only go so far.  I mean, the dude is the one leading the advances in this scene, literally “filling” the space of the bed and actively “pushing” into Ishmael’s personal space demonstrating his affection, but then again plenty of men like to be the one leading the advances before lifting their rump in the air like a cat in heat.  You never really know somebody until you get them in bed.

What’s obvious, apart from the fact that they both spent the night hiding the “sau-seege” is that these two men have developed a deep and caring intimacy.  Ishmael and Queequeg can freely touch and talk and fuck to their hearts content, and thus suggests that the opening passages of Moby Dick are offering a classic narrative of the “Will they?/Won’t They?”  Readers and viewers enjoy watching this dynamic because people are sexual creatures who tend to get some kind of voyeuristic thrill of watching another romance develop.  And because love is an evolutionary development designed to encourage procreation that results in long terms relationships to ensure two parents can raise a child together, sex is always going to be the end result of a love affair.

People want to see people fall in love to see if maybe they don’t see a little bit of themselves in these characters.  We want to observe another person’s love affair to see if it resembles the loves that we’ve pursued in our own lives.  And, I secretly suspect, this desire to watch another person’s love affair is a chance to explore a sexual dynamic that we did not.

I myself never got a chance to form a love affair with another man, and to be honest I’m not sure if I ever would.  I tend to gravitate more towards women when it comes to my emotional self.  I like their company, but I can’t deny that my queerness does push me towards a sexual dynamic with men.  I guess then I should give my reader one last chance to argue with my interpretation of these early passages of Moby Dick.

It’s ridiculous.  This whole essay has been one long, almost mastubatory re-writing of an American classic for the purpose of justifying or exploiting the writer’s personal sexual curiosities and hang-ups.  Ishmael and Queequeg do form a strong, homo-social bond together, and while there is some physicality in it, there’s no way that these two men could have possibly been considered lovers.  Its irresponsible and indulgent.

And I suppose my reader does have a point.  Queer as a word has changed from what it was.  That’s the nature of language.  It’s a fluid and constantly altering technology that allows human beings to turn thoughts into physical, tangible reality.  Queequeg and Ishmael express a companionship that is intensely homoerotic that manifests in physical and emotional closeness, and Melville writes it out as a kind of marriage between these two men, using the language of domestic partnership to allow the reader to see how much Queequeg becomes the most important person in Ishmael’s life.  The language of Melville shows that men in the past formed strong homosocial bonds between other men and found some kind of emotional solace in it.  So strong were these bonds that often times men found, in other men, more emotional and physical comfort in the arms and bodies and company of other men than they might have had with women.  And some men, in these relationships, might have found something akin to a romantic partner who gave them a stability and foundation of love that they could then build a life on that might, as time went on, save them from any and all kind of emotional problems.

I suppose my reader is right about Moby Dick in the end.  Men might have loved and fucked one another in the past, but the only thing that’s really changed is the language.

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes from Moby Dick were taken from the 2000 paperback Modern Library Classics edition.

 

 

**Writer’s Note**

As per usual, I really like helping my reader dig into the great works I write about, and so while I was writing this essay I found a few essays about Moby Dick in case the reader would like to dig a little deeper into the text.  Enjoy:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-moby-dick-means-to-me

https://www.shmoop.com/moby-dick/sexuality-sexual-identity-theme.html

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_cult/evolit/s04/web3/d1scarpa.html

http://www.trivisonno.com/moby-dick

https://thoughtcatalog.com/harris-sockel/2014/06/10-quotes-that-prove-moby-dick-is-actually-gay-porn/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/30/herman-melville-mark-twain-parini

https://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2010/05/14/126828648/-moby-dick-musings-on-whale-heads

https://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2011/10/18/141429619/why-read-moby-dick-a-passionate-defense-of-the-american-bible

The two-headed whale: Bisexuality and Melville’s “Moby-Dick.”

 

 

***Writer’s Note***

On an entirely separate note…seriously, Jason Momoa isn’t the sexiest man of the year?  Seriously?  Do I really need to…okay.  Apparently I do.

You’re welcome.