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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”:
***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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
language of cinema to imply perversion without ever outright showing it.
the center of the everything. The viewer first sees Lolita from the back, sunbathing and wearing nothing but a large feathery hat, dark sunglasses, and a pink bikini (the film is black and white but some color photographs exist revealing the outfits actual color). The shot shifts from behind Lolita to Humbert’s shocked and obviously aroused expression before going back to Lolita and from there Kubrick works his ability as a director. Charlotte Haze describes the garden while the viewer is left to “gaze” upon Lolita. Lolita herself looks up from her book, stares at the viewer, slowly removes her sunglasses, and offers up a look that hints at curiosity and mild erotic interest, meanwhile she never steps out of her pose. The scene lingers and the viewer becomes aware that they are not looking at a young girl who is beginning to, if I can 
borrow the botanical term, “blossom” into womanhood. In fact they are looking at Humbert’s desire, for the lingering shot and her entire suggested sexuality is entirely Humbert’s imagining. And so the so the viewer is invited to participate in Humbert’s erotic fascination with Lolita, looking at her body and wondering to themselves if this gaze that is centered on her isn’t just implied, but something that is actually erotic.
It’s just crush. As I age however, I notice more and more that whatever initial erotic feelings I had at this image feels creepier and creepier. It’s now at a point where I can remember being young and attracted to girls that age, but I refuse to acknowledge any kind of erotic fascination with the image. That’s all a fancy-pants way of saying that when I watched Lolita again I felt absolutely repulsed at the erotic suggestion.
The reader actually gets a moment when Humbert is surrounded by young women, many of them wearing swim-suits, and the viewer is left watching the image of all these young girls displaying their bodies. The shot works because the viewer is invited to consider the sexual nature of all these girls, but at the same time is reminded that, because of Humbert’s presence that this erotic display really isn’t one. It’s just girls being girls. Likewise later on in the film Delores Haze participates in a play by the corrupt playwright Clare Quilty. The “play,” when the viewer actually sees it, is in fact a kind of fertility display and this lets the reader observe the sexual undercurrent running throughout.
after watching it again. And of course, that reaction troubled me immensely because it neglects the reality that Humbert Humbert is a pedophile who seduced Lolita’s mother so that he could get closer to Lolita so that he could ultimately rape her.
recent events have left me feeling depressed and beaten, and far more important, it’s left my hope a little damaged. For reasons that are Kafkaesque and absurd I cannot actually write about the details of the event in question, but I can at least write honestly that the events have left me worried about being honest publicly about my sexuality, or with trying to offer up public information about queer people and our history. The short version is, I feel like I’ve been pushed back into the closet by an idiot and several people who are too cowardly to stand up to said idiot. What’s worse is that people close to me, people who I have nothing but respect for, who have tried to fight have either 
been silenced or, even worse, had to apologize to the aforementioned idiot. I’ve had to watch my queer friends actually shed tears and tell me they feel like they’re being shamed and hidden away. And I’ve had to bury my anger and cautiously consider my actions for fear of personal and professional safety. And the worst part of the whole ordeal, is that I’ve lost a bit of hope that there’s anything I can actually do.
So much for that. Why are we here? Why are gay people here? And what’s happening? What’s happening to me is the antithesis of what you read about in the papers and what you hear about on the radio. You hear about and read about this movement to the right. That we must band together and fight back this movement to the right. And I’m here to go ahead and say that what you hear and read is what they want you to think because it’s not happening. The major media in this country has talked about the movement to the right so the legislators think that there is indeed a movement to the right and that the Congress and the legislators and the city councils will start to move to the right the way the major media want them. So they keep on talking about this move to the right.
and con. In every radio station, in every TV station and every household. For the first time in the history of the world, everybody was talking about it, good or bad. Unless you have dialogue, unless you open the walls of dialogue, you can never reach to change people’s opinion. In those two weeks, more good and bad, but more about the word homosexual and gay was written than probably in the history of mankind. Once you have dialogue starting, you know you can break down prejudice. In 1977 we saw a dialogue start. In 1977, we saw a gay person elected in San Francisco. In 1977 we saw the state of Mississippi decriminalize marijuana. In 1977, we saw the convention of conventions in Houston. And I want to know where the movement to the right is happening.
Then again Democrats never have been very good at winning and holding something so I probably shouldn’t speculate about future demographics. This passage at first doesn’t have much to do with “hope” and the importance of queer people to have hope for the future. In fact at first it seems to suggest nothing except that it would be a great time for queer people. It would appear as such, but in fact this recognition that republicans are not the ones in power reveals a real problem. Queer people were not enjoying a time of provenance despite the Democratic party’s majority, and that was largely because Democrats at the time were not very good friends to the queer community.
many democrats still saw queer people as a threat to political capital rather than a bonus. Being tolerant or even supportive of homosexuals could be a political death sentence (unless you were Bernie Sanders), and so as queer people in the 1970s were beginning to assume more and more of a cultural identity they were looking to some kind of leadership. The problem was, all of the leaders were straight.
And thus I return to the recent events that I can’t talk about and that reality is what most disturbs me. I never hide from my reader. I offer up my honest ambitions, thoughts, feelings, and reflections about works of literature while always speaking honestly about my own life. It’s my way of making amends for making my reader sit through the long boring analysis.
It’s only been 19 years since Matthew Shepard was killed in Wisconsin. Suicide is still the second leading cause of death for people between the ages of 10 and 24 and this number is 4 times greater for LGB youth. The reason the T is absent at the end of this statement is because the numbers for Trans people committing or considering suicide tends to be higher with at least 40% of the population saying that they have attempted suicide.
front, will not walk away from a responsibility and be afraid of being tossed out of office. After Dade County, I walked among the angry and the frustrated night after night and I looked at their faces. And in San Francisco, three days before Gay Pride Day, a person was killed just because he was gay. And that night, I walked among the sad and the frustrated at City Hall in San Francisco and later that night as they lit candles on Castro Street and stood in silence, reaching out for some symbolic thing that would give them hope. These were strong people, whose faces I knew from the shop, the streets, meetings and people who I never saw before but I knew. They were strong, but even they needed hope.
who’s also bisexual who was also disgusted by the events which have recently taken place. It’s a nice addition to my rainbow colored bow-ties, and it also keeps my hope alive.
essays, and so what was once “Recent” at the time of writing was actually months ago. My “process” aside, if you can call it that, I did take the time to watch the film Blade Runner this year with a group of friends. I’m a hermit by nature who tends to enjoy his isolation because it gives me time to read what I want and watch the movies that I want without having to worry about what’s new with the people I spend my time with. But, I still recognize that part of self-preservation is having some kind of social contact with people who aren’t my cats and dogs and immediate family members. That and the demon who lives on my bookshelves voted for Trump and won’t let me forget about it.
watching the original film, I took my wife to see the sequel film Blade Runner 2049. I can honestly say that I’ve never been so terrified to see a movie. Blade Runner is an important film to me, and I’ve seen lately how Ridley Scott has attempted to expand some of his previous films with sequels and prequels, successfully with Prometheus, and tragically with Alien Covenant. I was waiting for Ridley Scott and the director Denis Villeneuve to turn the Blade Runner universe into something akin to a Marvel movie where characters are nothing but action figures and product endorsement.
are fighting in a ballroom in the ruins of Las Vegas, the hologram projections of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and show-girls flicker in and out of existence providing only snippets of sound. It’s not that there isn’t any speaking, talking, or music during Blade Runner 2049, it’s just that after a while the reader becomes aware that the world and the design of the world, coupled with electronic music that honors the original film tend to be far more important than any of the dialogue.
just another sound in this universe. And so looking back to the original Blade Runner my question feels terribly important: Are the two films actually just silent movies?
Dvd and Blue-Ray, or else played on TCM (We miss you Robert Osborne) are always accompanied by some kind of musical score. My little sister’s copy of Nosferatu includes two different scores, one of which is a horrifying as fucking-fuck organ. And recently when I checked out a Blue-ray of Metropolis I discovered it was a remastered cut in which the producers had sampled hit songs from Eighties pop bands to play over the film. This is all just a way of saying that Blade Runner 2049 and Blade Runner, despite the sound in their films, could be construed as Silent Films.
Vangelis, who produced the music for the original Blade Runner, manages to create a world that, while it isn’t dying, is more electronic than it is real. Along with his score, which manages to balance sound and silence brilliantly, are the various sounds which make up the world. When Deckard is studying the details of a photograph the clicking of the computer and the various switches broken by his drunken “enhance” let the reader disappear into the film. Watching the original Blade Runner, at least to a contemporary audience, is like listening to the sounds and world of a video game.
Having watched a few Silent movies, and I do mean few, I’m usually struck by the concern for visual detail. Part of this might have been fortunate accident on the part of these filmmakers, however it is important to remember that many of the great masters of the early genre of film created wonders the likes of which have only been dreamed of by many current film makers. A film like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, yet another brilliant horror film from the early days of film which still manages to be actually terrifying, pays attention to the “place” of the story, allowing that “place” to become it’s own language.
or else the constant concern with the idea of procreation sex is constantly part of the landscape of Blade Runner 2049 culminating with K’s initial walk through the ruins of Vegas.
one room being nothing but a small island in a room filled with water which shines reverberating light across the walls. Even if language is spoken in these rooms, it’s obvious over the course of time that the words are immaterial.
private room decorated with gold and columns, or else if it was the Doll Room of Sebastian’s home colors created their own language. The designs of these rooms, and the details packed into them often allowed for the dialogue to be rather secondary if not irrelevant. Even if you heard batty asking Sebastian to help him into Tyrell’s office, the reader was probably more concerned with Prius’s make-up or else the way Sebastian’s home was a menagerie of toys, robots, and rotting walls. When Deckard is walking through the streets of Los Angeles the color of the light-up umbrellas, or the asian script made up of neon lights manage to tell the viewer more about the world than any of the later exposition. If nothing else about the “place” manages to capture the reader, then 
surely the ever-present rain should be enough to create the feeling of the world and what it is about.
would understand the message of the shot. Likewise if they see a director holding the camera still while two people eat in silence the scene will have it’s own meaning and context. This idea of film creating its own language is something which has existed since the early silent film era, and directors and artists have tried to build that language into something meaningful since the establishment of the medium.
of the language of cinema. The images and lights and colors are far more important because they communicate more about humanity than most of the dialogue.
always the cover of a book and said either, “Aleya has begun [TITLE X]” or else “Aleya has finished [TITLE X].” This intrigued me and when I asked her about it she mentioned that you could link your Goodreads account to your Facebook page. I set up my account, and after only a month I discovered that you could see a years’ worth of books that you read as one large picture. The image of all the different titles was illuminating because each book was a different experience, a different memory, and showed me exactly what I was doing, reading, and thinking about at the time. Because of this I’ve been looking back over the books I’ve read and been thinking, “that really needs to be in the log.” As such my copy of Lolita (distinct with its picture of a little girl’s pink lips) made its way into my path again, and I saw an opportunity to add another book to the log.
if not the greatest, proseists of the twenty-first century. Every sentence is a careful construction and the man has a linguistic skill that many writers could only aspire to. Part of it is a careful attention to puns that litter throughout the work, but more than anything is Nabokov’s ability to seduce with linguistics.
We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Empirically, no killers are we. Poets never kill. (87-8).
They read quickly and give me space between Lolita and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I checked the book out though because my friend Aleya had recently added it to her GoodReads account and had given it a pretty high rating. That’s it. Just these two connections allowed for a moment of serendipity which lead me to checking the book out.
“makeup face artist” was using a fine brush to paint eyebrows, freckles and smoky eyeshadow on a rack of faces. Shore explained that most of their customers send photographs of what they would like Abyss to recreate. With a subject’s written permission, they will make a replica of any real person. “We’ve had customers who bring their significant other in and get an exact copy doll made of them,” he said. Shore estimates that less than 5% of doll customers are women, even for their small range of male dolls. McMullen sculpted one of the three male face options to look exactly like himself. None of the male dolls are selling very well. In fact, Abyss is in the process of revamping its entire male line.
and use those facts in conversation, “so it feels like she really cares”, as McMullen described it, even though she doesn’t care at all. Her memory, and the way she learns over time, is what McMullen hopes will make the relationship believable.
machine that conforms to your tastes and preferences it removes the human element of a relationship because other people disagree or hold different attitudes about what is right, wrong, pretty, ugly, grotesque, or beautiful. It’s the differences of opinions and the regular challenges by other people that a healthy personal self is able to develop. I grind my teeth every time somebody posts an alternative opinion on my Facebook page, or when someone close to me defends President Trump, but I recognize that that difference of opinion is what helps me keep myself grounded in reality.
And I suppose if my argument isn’t clear enough, the problem with turning sex robots into intelligent partners that are obedient and compliant with your every wish and preference, it stands to reason that the individual who lives and acts with one is going to be left completely disconnected to real humanity.
He sees in Ada a companion that has an absence of choice and so desperate to see if there’s a way to change her he finds an online group dedicated to helping robots attain a freedom and sentience. During one exchange between two members of the group Alex offers a line that reveals everything about his humanity:
that satisfies the ancient biological urge to fornicate. But where some are looking to AI to find a corrupt kind of solipsism, Alex + Ada offers up the idea that technology is going to change even this dynamic because at some point people, hopefully, will look into the eyes of their sex dolls and probably ask the question: Could there be more?
Nuclear Arsenal Diplomacy on the international stage. The problem with the library, like almost every library I’m sure, is funding. Because only the city of Tyler’s taxes go to fund us, people who live within the county but not the city have to pay a membership fee. My reader may be wondering what this has to do with my mother or Trevor Noah’s wonderful autobiography Born a Crime. I’m sorry, I like to talk, but I’m getting to it.
The Daily Show and people were looking to disrupt the institution at this supposed moment of weakness. Stewart left, Noah began, I stopped watching for a while. It wasn’t that he wasn’t funny, it just that he was new and I’m one of those obnoxious people who has to settle into things slowly. Still I enjoy The Daily Show and Noah himself has begun to really demonstrate that he’s made The Daily Show into his own and so I’ve become a regular watcher again, and in fact, in the last few months I’ve come to adore Trevor Noah as a comedian, and even more as a writer and Born a Crime is largely responsible.
criminality. The only time I could be with my father was indoors. If we left the house, he’d half to walk across the street from us. My mom and I used to go to Joubert Park all the time. It’s the Central Park of Johannesburg—beautiful gardens a zoo, a giant chess-board with human-sized pieces that people would play. My mother tells me that once, when I was a toddler, my dad tried to go with us, and I ran after him, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” People started. He panicked and ran away. I thought it was a game and kept chasing him. (27).
Revolutionary Life by Jo Lee Anderson comes next, Jim Henson: A Life by Brian Jay Jones (Also look up his George Lucas), Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens, I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai, and recently I’ve begun Life by Keith Richards. This list may seem to contradict my statement before about the scarcity of truly great biographies but in fact it only reinforces it. These books are products of a careful craft (pardon the alliteration) that tries to leave the reader with a real sense of the person under discussion, and rather than try to chronicle every detail of a person’s existence, it instead tries to offer the heart and personality in all its beauty and flaws.
After that she never raised her hand to her children again. Unfortunately, by the time she stopped Abel had started. (262).
of Batman Vs Superman. But mothers are important for a young man’s development because she becomes the first relationship. Mothers, the good ones anyway, teach their sons emotional strength and then eventually how to interact with the world. They teach them the proper ways to speak and act towards women. They teach them about the importance of family. They teach their sons love, and what that word really means against the supposed images and representations of it that crowd the media. This last lesson is important, the most important, because as Noah’s biography demonstrates that love is what helps develop people into the individuals they are and instills in them their ideals and moral constructions.
members of Alpha Chi, an academic fraternity that spans the entire United States. Students from chapters all across the country came to give lectures and presentations from virtually every field. Lecture topics could range from Pre-Med students discussing the nature of telomeres in DNA to discussing the Indian Boy in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For my own special I brought in a lecture about Mark Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger which was rather eventful given the fact that one of my slides dealt with blackface and one of the moderators in the room was black. It was a fun couple of days when I wandered through the streets of Chicago (feeling the mean bite of “The Hawk”) with a few friends and a man name Jim Koukl.
don’t see how the boy could reach high enough. The people said he done it with a milk bucket. The constable fetched the biggest bucket in the town and made the boy stand on it, but he still lacked a foot. So the Justice of the Peace says the whole case looks fishy to him, and they turned the boy loose for lack of evidence 
(pronounced Mizz-ur-ee or Mizz-ur-uh depending on what part of the state you’re from). This region is probably familiar to the reader who has ever watched the film Deliverance and believed that that is a good representation of entire South of the United States. For the record Deliverance took place in Georgia, however it has unfortunately come to embody the imagery of the “hillbilly” who is in fact not a gap-toothed lunatic who enjoys raping people in the woods. Well, okay, there’s probably one of those out there, but I promise you that ass-clown is in the minority. Also ass-clown was probably the wrong word to use there and now I’m going to have nightmares.
general humor of a people who lived and made a life in the woods of Ozarks. The reader may wonder what value such stories have to the general culture given the fact that most of them are nothing but stories about people fucking, talking about fucking, or horny priests, prostitutes, or men measuring their dicks. I suppose this concern is a fair criticism and the first story from the collection doesn’t necessarily help that much:
highlighting. Before my teacher assigned us A Midsummer Night’s Dream to read in class she covered the myth of Piramus and Thisbe, and I was already familiar with the book because I had read Romeo & Juliet the year before and we had gone over the myth. To those who don’t know there are two warring families with a son and a daughter named Pyramus and Thisbe respectively. The pair fall in love but can only communicate by sending messages through a crack in the wall that separates both families. Eventually overcome with lust Piramus arranges to meet Thisbe and tun away with her. She says yes, but of course because this is myth everything goes wrong. Thisbe spots a lion and runs away dropping her sash, Pyramus comes upon it later and spots lion tracks. Believing his lover is dead he drives his sword into his side, and when Thisbe discovers him slain by his own hand she removes the sword and kills herself with it.
stories of young lovers winding up embarrassed or mocked by the community they live in but the final component is everything. Pissing in the Snow feels communal while the reader actually reads it, and in fact the only real way to read it is out loud. These are recorded stories by average everyday people who had these stories memorized, who lived with these stories that had most likely been passed down by generations. Their earthiness and near-constant crudeness reveals a people who lived and interacted with sexuality without any kind of real shame, and while some would suggest that this is wrong, Pissing in the Snow shows a people who wouldn’t really care about this response.
lived off the land and would know the proper way of breeding livestock, would eventually come to see sex as something funny and absurd, but ultimately uniting because in the end these stories helped shape a community’s, as well as a region’s, attitudes about sexuality.