• About
  • Books By Jammer
  • Contact Info
  • Jammer’s Podcasts

White Tower Musings

~ This blog will be an attempt to explain the significance of various works of great writing, the authors that create them, and some effort to understand correlations between great writing and contemporary events.

White Tower Musings

Tag Archives: Sexual Rhetoric

HOWL for Mad Geniuses Destroyed by Madness, Dope, and Biker C@#k: A White Tower Review (NSFW)

21 Friday Jun 2019

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Bisexuality, History, Literature, Poetry, Sexuality, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Allen Ginsberg, America, American Exceptionalism, American literary Canon, anal penetration, Beat Poetry, Conformity, Daniel Radcliffe, Douglas Sadownick, Harry Potter, Harry Potter getting fucked in the ass, history, Homosexuality, Homosexuality in 1950s, HOWL, Individual Will, Kill Your Darlings, Literature, Male Sexuality, Masculinity Studies, Poem, Poetry, Queer Male Identity, Sex Between Men, Sexual identity, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality

 

Daniel-Radcliffe-naked-in-a-gay-sex-scene-with-Olen-Holm-from-Kill-Your-Darlings-6

Watching Harry Potter get fucked in the ass was when I officially knew that my childhood was over. 

Kill Your Darlings is a beautiful movie about Allen Ginsberg as a young man, finding himself, his sexuality, and his creative voice while attending college and meeting the group that would become the Beat writers who would usher in a new age of American writers and voices before they all collectively began to implode.  Daniel Radcliffe plays Ginsbergallen-ginsberg-de-chavillo-e1507317306590, and near the end of the film the reader gets to watch him go to a Jazz bar, pick up a gorgeous hot blonde stud, take him back to a hotel room, and then get fucked in the ass.  I had grown up alongside Radcliffe because I was eleven years old when the Harry Potter books came out, and I watched the films and read the books at the same time he was growing up.  Harry Potter mattered so much to me because I was able to see another young man dealing with growing up and dealing with the pain in the ass(*snort*) of puberty at the same time as me.  And so watching a man I had grown up with gasp and sigh as another grown man pumped his cock into him was a moment of serious reflection.Daniel-Radcliffe-naked-in-a-gay-sex-scene-with-Olen-Holm-from-Kill-Your-Darlings-8

It was also a chance too to recognize a newly formed homoerotic fixation with the man, but that’s a conversation for Tumblr…Or at least it used to be.

Before Luke Goebel walked into the desert with his dog Jewly and disappeared from my life completely he managed to teach me a lot.  I can’t remember much of it, the man always seemed to either be communicating in a series of unintelligible grunts or else bardic YAWPS that seemed echo down the halls of the academic institution he taught for.  But in the few small moments when he would speak at a readable pitch he often spoke about the works of other writers and their work, one of them being Allen Ginsberg.  On one day, in particular, he stopped class to pull up Ginsberg reading America, and as the man spoke he would pause bringing attention to cultural references and economic philosophies that were supposed to be contained underneath the strange declarations the man was speaking.9780872860179

HOWL, was something else entirely.

To be honest, I can’t even remember all the finer detailed points of the lecture, I just remember Luke barking the word Moloch over and over again.  But somewhere in all of that the poem just hit me and sunk a hook into my brain.  I could feel the power of the words, even if they didn’t all make sense.  And because it’s me, I suspect the fact that Ginsberg was gay there was something beautifully queer in the poem that inspired what T.S. Eliot refers to as the “mermaid songs” or what Alison Bechdel describes as a “siren song.” 

That’s just my way of saying I knew or felt there was something gay in the poem and so I was drawn to it.

HOWL, much like Fahrenheit 451 or To Kill a Mockingbird, seems to embody the idea of Banned Books because shortly after it was published copies of the books were seized as they were sent over by the London publisher, the owner2013-06-25-proofimage9 of City Light books a man by the name of Shigeyoshi “Shig” Murao was arrested for selling the book to undercover policemen, and a major trial took place which has been immortalized largely because of now iconic line “I don’t know how to define what pornography is, but I know it when I see it.”  HOWL was eventually cleared of such charges but to this day few teachers possess the audacity to actually tackle teaching the poem.

Describing the dramatic situation of HOWL, or what the poem is about, is difficult because it’s not a narrative in the traditional sense.  Simply put, the poem is written mostly in a kind of free verse akin to Walt Whitman, and it’s mostly Ginsberg telling his reader about a series of disjointed scenarios that he’s seen over the course of his life.  Each of these scenarios deals with people who have, in some form or capacity, had their will broken by the conformist society which dominated America at the time of the writing.

He begins with what is still one of the most memorable opening lines in literature:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,allen_ginsberg_fbi

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,amanda-seyfried-does-dick-bong

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall (9-10).

I suspect part of life is watching the mad geniuses of youth slowly die off, or at least surrender their wills to the necessary conformity of life.  Part of the initial appeal of HOWL for me was the sense of truth the poem had.  It felt real.  The first time I read the poem was in college and I was surrounded by the idealism that comes with being in that space.  My life at the time was reading books, having ideas about said books, and dreaming of the incredible feeling of destiny my life had.  I was going to be a teacher, and a writer, and so were all of my friends.  There were a great many writers in theAllen_Ginsberg English program at UT Tyler, or editors, or in far too many instances education majors who just needed a major.  This last group didn’t phase me because the people I spent the most time with were writers and damned good ones at that.  A few of them were, in my estimation, some of the greatest writers of this next generation.  Which is why, after college, and even to some extent during that time, I recognized the painful fact that not everyone was so committed to my mad-cap feeling of destiny.  People began to graduate, people stopped writing, people stopped reading, and I was left, seemingly, the only one still buying into the hype.

I watched so many talented people leave college and abandon their craft.  What I didn’t see, however, was that many people still managed to find happiness, but at the time I couldn’t see that.  To me, I had watched the “best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”

Conformity is, by itself, not a vice in any true sense.  It’s only ever something malevolent when it’s used against another human being.  As I’ve grown, and seen so many of my friends flourish in their new professions my original idealism has softened significantly.  It doesn’t matter if a poet sells insurance if he’s happy and living a life of his own choosing, and likewise, it doesn’t matter if a novelist is pursuing a degree in nursing instead of pursuing her Ph.D.  The purpose of HOWL was not simply to call to attention to the woes of artists anamerican-exceptionalismd philosophers, it was designed more to address the conflict of the human spirit.

The 1950s is often heralded as a time of simplicity, prosperity, and greatness in terms of American ideals.  It’s a time that is far often romanticized by the people who lived during that time, or more accurately, the middle class to rich white people of that time.  Beneath the veneer of American prosperity however, there was a real conflict because if you were not privileged and white life could be horrifying and crushing.  It was a period marked by its racial bigotry towards African Americans and Hispanic Americans.  Women lived lives of quiet desperation for something more.  Homosexuality was considered a vice, often equated with pederasty, and could even land someone in a mental institution where they could be tortured or even lobotomized.  On top of all of this, there was also the Anti-Communist scare run largely by Senator Joseph McCarthy which ruined the lives and careers of countless Americans.  This is not to say that the whole of the 1950s was an endless period of suffering, there were plenty of people legitimately concerned about all of these atrocities, but what cannot be denied was that, leading up to the publication of HOWL, the United States was a nation dominated by the need to confirm.  Those who did not, tended to suffer.

The history of the poem was important to me, but as I recently read it again for I believe the seventh or eighth time I really dug into the fact that HOWL is really gay.

preview-xl-tom-of-finland-16-0901081229-id-186401

One of my favorite passages, and also the passage that tends to be the most quoted by prudent observers and censors, just lays Ginsberg’s desire bare and stands as one of the first truly open demonstrations of same-sex desire in American Literature:

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,Tom-of-Finland-artwork-5-865x577

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one53 Leather guys by Tom of Finlandeyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, (13-14)

I really wish I could remember the first time I read this line because it was one of the first times I’d ever heard a writer frankly describe anal sex between men.  “GettingÉdouard-Henri_Avril_anal_sex_detailfucked in the ass” is an expression I’d hear in comedies or dramas, but no writer before had ever described it as something enjoyable, or beautiful, or even as a facet of identity. Yet here was Ginsberg talking about men who found other men sexually attractive and fucking each other in the ass and he wasn’t using it to be shocking, or at least only shocking, it was a simple statement of identity.

And the reader may immediately interrupt and ask so what?  Who cares that Ginsberg talked about guys fucking, we’re living in a period where you can google “guys fuck” and get literally millions of images, videos, and short stories, and novels, and even now major films about just that topic.  There’s nothing revolutionary about talking about men having sexGay-Guys-Pahing-On-The-Fence with each other. 

My response to my contester is, yes there’s nothing revolutionary about that sentence by today’s standards.  In this age when homoeroticism between men is not something shocking, but simply part of culture and society, and when there are literally millions of images and videos of men having sex available for free on the internet, this statement is just that, a statement.  It’s hard to be inspired by something that is now seemingly everywhere.  But  I’d ask my contester to consider what I’ve said already about conformity.

In Douglas Sadownick’s book Sex Between Men he discusses the complexities of eroticism between men, and how men have thought of sex with other men during the latter half of the twentieth century.  Focusing on the 1950s he observes very simply what acknowledgment could mean for men:

Keith Haring Penis ArtGays were so oppressed that they dared not acknowledge the oppression.  To admit to self-hatred was to be overwhelmed by it.  To admit to dick-lust was to be a slave to it. If they had sex, they felt “loose.”  If they didn’t have sex, they felt “uptight.”  (70).

As for Ginsberg himself, sexuality was not always an easy path to tread.  For while he established a cultural and sexual foundation for acknowledgment of desire, he often floundered as Sadownick puts it:

Throughout the 1950s, Ginsberg became a nerdy gay, Athropos, a Primal  Gay Man who was also a Primal Doormat for the straight male god.  With the mixing and matching of drugs, sex, cosmic thinking, and homo eros, he both foreshadowed the ‘60s and conjured them.  Of course, the time —the straight Stanley Kowalski-football types for whom he fell—didn’t allow him easy revelry He was not always fulfilled.  “If you want to know my true nature,” he wrote to Kerouac, “I am at the moment one of those people who goes around showing his cock to juvenile delinquents.”  (71).420089507100d0939e292c100da10545--gay-men-sailors

Where do I fall into HOWL, and why bother writing about it.  Poetry, for me, is powerful not only when artists are able to play with the form and establish new tricks for future writers, it’s powerful when even after a hundred years, or a thousand, or even just 62 years the reader is able to say while they’re reading it, “Yeah, that feels right.”  I remarked to a friend over coffee the other day, in one of my more pathetic-poetic insights that I’m a “cocksucker who can’t suck cock.”  The major reason is marriage which I don’t regret for one minute, my wife has made me the man I am today, but beneath this sentiment was the far more important realization that I often feel contained.

I am not a fairy by any means.  I don’t know the different types of fabrics, I don’t know the different types of furniture, and I never watch Ru-Pauls Drag Race, but I have, in the last few months begun to call myself more and more a “queen.”  I’m finding myself more limp-limp-wristed when I talk, I always leave the house wearing my rainbow button, and Jammer 2I’ve taken the initiative to wear my rainbow glasses to work as often as I can.  These are small demonstrations that are fun and satisfying because they feel like I’m being myself rather than just being what I think I “need to be” to be ignored and left alone.  I’m recognizing, however, that as I age I spend far too much time wondering how “out” that I’m “allowed” to be.  Part of this is just the nature of work; until I get hired by the Museum of Sexuality I have to be professional and wear a shirt and dress pants to work instead of glitter, tassels, and man-panties.  But another part of it is living in East Texas for most of my life I have always felt hostility to anything, let’s call it fabulous. 

My hometown is not an accommodating atmosphere for queer people, or at least my caliber of queer.

And so I find myself feeling always like I am confirming, being something else, being someone else, while my true self is howling away in my heart, desperate to be himself. Gay Parade And so reading HOWL again, I felt myself aware that I might even though I am living in a time where Queer men can be themselves, and live their sexuality without too much fear of social reprisal, I have lived a life defined by conformity denying my erotic truth.  And I hate it.

Reading HOWL isn’t an opportunity though to be quashed by regrets.  I have sat on my queerness often but writing more and more, and discussing it more and more with my friends, I’m ready to fight back.  Or at least, I’m ready to own me and be me.  The conformity which has often defined my existence is something that can’t be undone, but it doesn’t have to define the narrative.  Nor does it have to define the reader’s narrative.

Pride 2018 4Every year, once a year, I let Allen Ginsburg fuck me in the ass with his words.  And every year, once a year, I think about how far I’ve come.  I’m no longer a closet-case terrified about the fact that I jerk off to pictures of men on the internet.  Now I’m sort of person who brings a stuffed llama to Pride Parades and smiles at work when people compliment my rainbow glasses.

And returning briefly to Daniel Radcliffe.  My wife makes fun of me for my crush on the man, but in my defense I think it’s a sign of maturity to finally acknowledge that, during puberty, I might have entertained a small fantasy in which both of us found ourselves in the “Room of Requirement” with a bed, a hot tub, and a pack of Trojans might have been just what we needed at that exact moment. 

Childhood might be a long period of fantasy, but adulthood is at least acknowledging the fantasy was rooted at least somewhat in reality.

Daniel Radcliffe

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from HOWL were provided by the hardback Pocket Poet Series 40th Anniversary Edition.  If the reader would like to read the entirety of the poem I have also provided a link to Poetry Foundation’s website below where the poem can be found and read:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

I’ve included below a link to Allen Ginsberg reading HOWL in case the reader would care to listen to the man himself deliver his own poem.  In my experience poets tend to be shitty readers, they always sound brain-dead or emotionless, but Ginsberg deserves your attention if only for ten minutes.  There is no poem so incredible as HOWL.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkNp56UZax4

 

**Writer’s Note**

I’ve included a few links to articles below that are about Howl and it’s influence.  Please enjoy:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/life_and_art/2010/09/how_howl_changed_the_world.html

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2006/11/21/midmorning2

This week in history: “Howl” has literary merit, not obscene

https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/analysis/allen-ginsberg-s-poem-howl-at-60-the-beat-goes-on-1-8210967

And here, of course, is Ginsberg himself reading his poem.  Enjoy:

 

***Writer’s Note***

Just for the final Record, and I want this to be clear, Daniel Radcliffe is a very fine actor and a constant source of personal inspiration for making your life what it is.  And I just wanted, before I became even more of a self-parody to my reader, to explain carefully that I am not erotically obsessed with the man.  If I was going to get involved with anybody from the Harry Potter films, it would obviously be Matthew Lewis…unless they both had a free weekend, and one of them suggested we spend it at one of their beach houses.  And maybe when we got there someone would suggest skinny dipping, and by that point everybody would be super drunk, and as the moonlight shined off of our bodies and we all felt the sheer sensual grace of the moment one thing might lead to another and three of us might…might…

Daniel Radcliffe Sexy
1432222794-neville

Oh, excuse me, I was somewhere else.

Jammer 3

My god, I’m such a ridiculous queen.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

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

27 Monday May 2019

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Academic Books, Book Review, horror, Masculinity Studies, Queer Theory, Sexuality, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

Freddy Mercury 2

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 Freddy Mercuryquarter 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.Bohemian Rhapsody

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.d06b1c64e176c3f94e6147ef01545e65

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 5102GcZYLXL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_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 preview-xl-tom-of-finland-16-0901081229-id-186401into 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).couple-hug-x750_1

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.CrawfordBarton_005

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:Gay Parade Madrid 2010

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 144ed48ce994d3f0d8f1f95fbf98f9bb--girls-kissing-girls-lesbians-kissingtermination 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 04AIDS2-jumboprevious 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 2870810978_6e7158172c_boutside 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 brokebacktent16after 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.

Freddy Mercury 2

 

 

 

*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 679325dcab4ec252e8476070025538a8dying 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:

harvey-milk

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

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

27 Saturday Apr 2019

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Biography, Feminism, History, Sexuality

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

"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

DEzPFyvEghsl

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.”Ph

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.Cleopatra 3

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 SSch

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.Cleopatra 2

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

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.Cleopatra 9

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.Cleopatra 4

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 Cleopatra 5already—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 Rex Harrison Cleopatramilitary 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.Taylor

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 Cleopatra 6different 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 Library of Alexandriagreatest 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).Cleopatra 8

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.Cleopatra 7

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 b324c-julius_caesar“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.woman-writing-a-book

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.

Cleopatra

 

*Writer’s Note*

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

 

Cleopatra SSch

**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…

Katy Perry

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.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

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

08 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Art, Essay, Queer Theory, Sexuality, Still Life, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

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

img_9698

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

2 October 2018

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

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

01 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Academic Books, Art, Biography, Book Review, Masculinity Studies, Sexuality, Tom of Finland, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

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

preview-xl-tom-of-finland-16-0901081229-id-186401

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.420089507100d0939e292c100da10545--gay-men-sailors

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 dirty pictureseffort 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 Touko-Laaksonen-1959drew 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.  default_tom_compl_works_04_0707021130_id_62735Sexual 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…

Jammer 3

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 the04AIDS2-jumbo 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. 63af78865fa6a36b01c52af1d06da614

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).1 A TOMOF FINLAND KAKE HP 22 CCC

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.

tom-of-finland-4

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.Tom_of_Finland

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 tumblr_ninyvrL0re1s05p4to1_500than 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: RF - ToF 013his 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.e533925986dc3dfdcaef3b94c4b35fff

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).Tom-of-Finland-artwork-5-865x577

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 53 Leather guys by Tom of Finlandrepresentation.  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.tom-of-finlands-obsession-with-a-male-ideal-is-not-unlike-that-of-earlier-artists-in-history.-look-at-david

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.

terry spots

 

 

 

*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.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

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

10 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Bisexuality, Essay, History, Sexuality, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

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

987B1B8A-DFF0-4529-9802-138915BDAB4E

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

-Life on Mars, David Bowie

Coffee

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 thisOn Being Gay 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.

ShipwreckGungHo-Totally Gay

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. I'm Gay

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: Gay Seniorsthere’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:Gay Parade

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.”

800px-New_York_Gay_Pride_2011_(2)“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)Merle Miller

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).

two-bottoms-successful-gay-relationship

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 Jammerhaving 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 Gay-Guys-Pahing-On-The-Fenceknow 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.

Different

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:Gay Librarian 3

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 thingsGay Parade Madrid 2010 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 Jammer 3sentiments.  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.gay-pride

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.

Pavel Patel heels

 

*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.

I_Love_penis_Mug________300x300

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

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

03 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Comics/Graphic Novels, Literature, Politics, Race, Satire/Humor, science fiction, Sexuality

≈ 6 Comments

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

 

gettyimages-530682505-shifting-monashee-alonso

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 Breast_anatomy_normal_schememarathon 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.81+Sf+bNqUL

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.Saga_Ghus

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 Fiona Stapleswho’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:

Saga_1

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 Saga 2discomfort, 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 Brian K. VaughnZero 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 saga-book-lesson-copyspecies 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.  Saga 7What’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 regardlessSaga 12 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 Saga 3about 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.

273B9DAC00000578-3023806-Loving_Trevor_Noah_with_his_mother_Patricia_The_three_year_old_w-a-1_1428088845110Noah’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:Saga 4

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)Saga 5

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,Saga 8 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 Saga_15story 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.

144ed48ce994d3f0d8f1f95fbf98f9bb--girls-kissing-girls-lesbians-kissing

 

*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.

Saga_Petrchir
Saga_Patrichor

Patrichor is BAE.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Dirty Amber by Lips

20 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Academic Books, Art, Bisexuality, Masculinity Studies, Sexuality, Still Life, Tom of Finland

≈ Leave a comment

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

img_1666

Dirty Amber Lips

13 September 2018

 

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

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

04 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Bisexuality, Essay, Literature, Masculinity Studies, Philosophy, Satire/Humor, Sexuality, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

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

Pride 2018 3

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,”Pride 2018and 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 Gay Seniorsso 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 queerPride 2018 2kids 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 Chester Bengington RIPconsult 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 dCalypsoiscovered 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 hisD. Sedaris 11sister’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 Plastic bagpossession 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 alsothe myth of sisyphus book coverappeared 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.”Neck_Fracture_of_the_Fourth_Metacarpal_Bone

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,pride-day-bouden

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 was20770118_1665307576812703_5400588825675041284_nour 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 asgay-pridethey 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. Pride 2018 5

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 heGeorge Takei is god 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.

Alligator_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.

Pride 2018 4

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

#43-Boobs

26 Saturday May 2018

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Art, Comics/Graphic Novels, Essay, Fun Home/Alison Bechdel, History, Prime Numbers, Satire/Humor, Sexuality, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

#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

Nicki-Minaj-Pound-The-Alarm-Explicit-019

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 giphy-2because 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, RjhPSgGhave 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.

1601054_358349127640820_715769883_n

 

[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 DEzPFyvEghslperformances 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.

Katy Perry "California Dreams Tour 2011" - Atlanta

This leaves me in the minority however because the mountain of discourse around Katy giphyPerry’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.”

http---prod.static9.net.au-_-media-Network-The-Fix-Celebs-Katy-Perry-boobs-Katy14-2

 

[#0111.54__second Considerations]alison-bechdel-fun-home-cover1

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:

Fun Home Mrs. Stevens

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 Wearing-bras-after-breast-augmentation-experts-adviceyou’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 Female Breast Anatomywoman’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.

tumblr_mhmff4WZ5O1qb3ns3o2_500

 

[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, 4383075763to 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 Breast_anatomy_normal_schemehave 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).gettyimages-530682505-shifting-monashee-alonso

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.

1004635_609368492457261_1583089276_n

 

[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.

9780307269133

 

[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 nicki-minaj-pound-the-alarm-official-music-video_6454143-184_640x360videos 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.

tumblr_m81b09Hz8f1qcwgrvo1_500

She jiggles them.

Nicki_Minaj-Pound_Alarm

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

tumblr_m81smaMBSb1qiotp3o1_500

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 Nicki-Minaj-Pound-The-Alarm-1being 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.

NM 1

 

 

[0777.091__Seventh Seventh Seventh]

In Desert Hearts Cay seduces Vivian finally by stripping naked and refusing to leave 1986152Q6BHoGmesAbNzbGn4xpaFxyMq18cIJjW9dWA3xM2nJZ1YBpC4LAl0B08KlAs5OoZ3mg1v7zmM6FT4OEYIxHQVivian’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 9781592336142_lbook, 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.

U5drVQVKKDgM7WoQNmXQQF1DRBLhMi8

 

[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.

9780307269133

 

[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 amanda-palmer-facebook-2outward 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 amanda-palmerhas 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.

1

 

[final thoughts]

The cover of Saga Volume 1 and issue #1, shows Alana holding the baby Hazel to her 81+Sf+bNqULchest 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.

gettyimages-530682505-shifting-monashee-alonso

 

 

 

 

*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…katy-perry-peacock

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

article-2165261-13CE1683000005DC-346_310x644

 

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.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...
← Older posts

Blog Stats

  • 74,909 hits

Categories

  • Academic Books (42)
  • Art (190)
  • Atheism (29)
  • Biography (43)
  • Bisexuality (23)
  • Blade Runner (4)
  • Blurb (8)
  • Book Review (74)
  • Christopher Hitchens (27)
  • Comics/Graphic Novels (73)
  • Creative Writing (19)
  • David Foster Wallace (10)
  • David Lynch (6)
  • Edgar Allen Poe (7)
  • Education (8)
  • Essay (67)
  • existentialism (6)
  • fantasy (10)
  • Feminism (38)
  • Film Review (69)
  • FrameRate (1)
  • Fun Home/Alison Bechdel (9)
  • Guest Authors (13)
  • Happy Birthday (5)
  • History (100)
  • horror (22)
  • How People Become Atheists (8)
  • J.R.R. Tolkien (9)
  • Jammer Talks (9)
  • Jammer's Books (5)
  • Libraries (9)
  • Literature (197)
  • Masculinity Studies (61)
  • music (9)
  • mythology (23)
  • Neil Gaiman (11)
  • Novels (77)
  • Philosophy (53)
  • Play (9)
  • Poetry (27)
  • Politics (71)
  • Prime Numbers (9)
  • Queer Theory (36)
  • Race (27)
  • ReBlogged Articles (16)
  • Satire/Humor (51)
  • Science (25)
  • science fiction (37)
  • Sexuality (106)
  • Short Story (10)
  • Speech (17)
  • Still Life (100)
  • Swanky Panky (2)
  • television (14)
  • The Comics Classroom (4)
  • The North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (8)
  • Tom of Finland (3)
  • TOOL (5)
  • Ulysses (7)
  • Uncategorized (5)
  • White Tower Musings (14)
  • Writing (76)

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 516 other followers

Follow White Tower Musings on WordPress.com

RSS Jammer Talks About

  • Henry of Huntington and the Necessity of NOT Devouring Eels: The History of the English People 1000-1154
  • The Battle of Salamis by Barry Strauss
  • What’s Up in the Air with Anomolisa?—Loneliness, Hotel Rooms, And Trying to Find “Someone Else”
  • The Man Who Japed by Philip K Dick
  • Being Strong of Body Brave and Noble…And SUPER Complicated: Bouchard and Chivalry and Incorrect History
  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
  • Righteous Anger, Royals with Cheese, and Decent Folk: Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction
  • The Age of Vikings by Anders Winroth
  • Knights and Dragons and Historical Inaccurate Presentations, Oh MY!: The Knight in History by Frances Gies
  • Making Comics by Scott McCloud
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

The Work Thus Far

Tags: Hope You Find Something You Like

"+ and -" "All Work and No Play Make Jack a Dull Boy" "And Knowing is Half the Battle!" "arrow of time" "A woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman" "Bah Humbug" "Black Mass" "Butt-Piracy" "Chillin" means orgasm "D'Artagnan Motherfucker!" "Dark Continent" "Deplorable Cultus" "Elder Gay" "Fire Walk With Me" "fuck-fest" "Gay Shit" "God is Dead" "Go Get Your Fuckin' Shinebox" "Greed is Good" "Hall Metaphor" "He wishees to think!" "House Metaphor" "How Did They Ever Make a Movie Out of Lolita?" "How fucked up are you?" "I'm here to recruit you" "I'm not Racist but..." "I am no Man!" "If these shadows have offended" "I Got a Rock" "I like the way you die boy" "I like this job I like it" "In Heaven Everything is Fine" "Innocence of Childhood" Myth "Is this a dagger I see before me" "Jammer Moments" "Knowledge is Power" "La Parilla" "Legal" Lolitas "Lost Generation" "Love that dare not speak its name" "Maggot" "Magic Wand" "More Human than Human" "mountain of knowledge" "My name is Harvey Milk and I'm here to recruit you!" "New World" vs "Old World" "Nice Guy" Complex "Nymphet" "Once a day everyday give yourself a present" "Orwellian Nightmare" "PC Police" "Philosopher King" "potent female sexuality" "pride goeth before the fall" "Prufrock Moment" "Reality distortion field" "replicants" "Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication" "Some men just want to watch the world burn" "Strange women lying in ponds" "Sucking the Marrow" "Swimming Beside a Blue Whale" "The Cave" "The Evil Empire" "The Old Professor" "There's this old joke" "the sunken place" "Think Different" "This is America" "Under God" "Vietnam War Movie" "Wanna know how I got these scars" "War on Christmas" "We all go a little mad sometimes" "Well... I shoveled shit in Louisiana." "Well I'm Back" "What knockers!" "Why so Serious" "Will They?/Won't They?" "wiseguys" "World Without Man" "wrackers" "You're one ugly motherfucker" "You Gotta Give 'em Hope" #43 #53 #buylocal #NOLIVESMATTER #TomCanSuckIt $3.01 'Merica 8 words 9/11 12 Years A Slave 38th Parallel 42 Nipple Options 75 Arguments 80s 95 Theses 100 300 Spartans 300 words a day 1000 Page Novel 1066 1408 1453 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West 1492 1901 1960s 1973 1984 2001: A Space Odyssey 2008 Financial Crisis A.N. Wilson AA Aaron Sorkin About Betty's Boob Abram Adams A Brief History of Time A Brief History of Time: From The Big Bang to Black Holes Absalom, Absalom abscence of evidence for god's existence Abscence of god abstinence and why it's shit abuse abuse of authority Abuse of Military authority abyss Academia Academic Book Academic Libraries Academic Writing Acadmic writing A Chilean Dictator's Dark Legacy Achilles A Christmas Carol A Clash of Kings A Clockwork Orange action Action Comics Action Films Action from Principle Activism Adam & Eve Adam Kesher Adam Piore Adam Smith Addiction ADHD Adolf Hitler A Doll's House Adrian Brody Adrian Cronauer adultery Adventure Fiction advertising advertizing A Dying Tiger—moaned for Drink— Aenema Aerosmith A Farewell to Arms Africa African History Afterlife A Game of Thrones Agency Agent Dale Cooper aging agriculture A Happy Death A Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson A History of the Breast A History of the World Part 1 A House Divided AIDS Airspeed Velocity of Swallows Aislinn Emirzion Alana Alan Berube Alan Cumming Alan Dean Foster Alan Ginsberg Alan Moore Alan Turing Albatross Albert Bigelow Paine Albert Camus Alberto Giocometti Alchemy Aldis Hodge Alec Baldwin Alec Baldwin Gets Under Trump's Skin A Letter to a Royal Academy Alex + Ada Alexander Dumas Alexander Nehamas & Paul Woodruff Alexandra Socarides Alfred Habegger Alfred Hitchcock Alfred Lord Tennyson Alfred Pennyworth Alfred Tennyson Alice in Wonderland Alice Walker alien alien-human sexuality Alien: A Film Franchise Based Entirely On Rape Alienation of Affection Alien Covenant aliens Alison Bechdel Allegory Allen Ginsberg Allison Pill Allison Williams All Star Superman All the President's Men Al Madrigal Almonds in Bloom Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace Alton Sterling Alvy Singer Amanda Palmer A Matter of Life Amazon Amelia Airheart America American Civil War American Creative Landscape American Dream American Empire American Exceptionalism American Flag American Gods American Horror Story American Horror Story: Freak Show American Landscape American literary Canon American Literature American Politics American Radical American Revolution American Soldiers American Territory A Midsummer Night's Dream A Mind of It's Own: A Cultural History of the Penis Amira Casar Ammon Shea A Modest Proposal Amon Hen A Moveable Feast A Muppet Christmas Carol Amuro Amy Holt Amy Poehler An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub anal penetration Anal Sex Ananssi Boys An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child Anatomy Anchors Aweigh Ancient Egypt Ancient Greece Ancient History Anderson Cooper 360 Anders Winroth Andre Aciman Andre Maurois Andres Serrano And Tango Makes Three And Yet... Andy Kubert Andy Warhol Andy Weir An Ent is Not a Tree A New Hope Ang Lee An Ideal Husband animal cruelty Animal Farm Animal House Animal Reproduction Animals animation An Indian’s Views of Indian Affairs Anita Bryant Anita Pallenberg ankh Anna Karenina Anna Kendrick Anne Kronenberg Annie Hall Annie Proulx A Noiseless Patient Spider Anomolisa Anthem Anthony Bertrand Anthony Bourdain Anthony Comstock Anthony Everitt Anthony Perkins anthropology Anti-Bullshit Anti-Hero Anti-psychotics Anti-Semitism Anti-theism Anti-War Novel Antoine de Saint-Exupery Anya Taylor-Joy Any Human Heart Apartheid apathy Aplasia Apocalypse Apocalypse Now Apollyon Appalachia apple Apple Inc. Apple Logo apples apples & peanut butter Aquaman A Queer History of the United States Arches Archibald Cox Are You My Mother? Arguably Arguably Essays Argument Ariel Aristophanes Aristotle Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth Arkham Knight Armie Hammer Armitage Family Arnold Swarzenegger A Room of One's Own A Rose for Emily Art Art Commentary Art Culture arthropoda Arthropododa Arthropods Arthur C. Clark Arthurian Romances Artificial Intelligence Artificial Landscape Artillery artist artistic integrity artist models Art Spiegleman Arundhati Roy A Separate Peace As I Lay Dying A spider sewed at night Assassin's Creed Assassin's Creed 2 Assassin's Creed Odyssey Assassin's Creed Revelations Assassination of Julius Caesar Assault on Precinct 13 astronaut astrophysics Astrophysics for People in a Hurry A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again A Tale of Two Cities Atheism atheism identity Atheism is NOT a religion it's important to remember that Atheists: Inside the World of Non-Believers Athens Atmosphere in Science Fiction A Tolkien Bestiary Atom Bombs Atomic Library atronomy Atticus Finch Attraction audience Audubon Society Book of Insects and Arachnids Augusto Pinochet Au Revoir Les Enfants Au Revoir Mes Enfants Austin Dickinson Author's Social role authorial freedom Authorial Integrity Author of the Century Author Vs Voice Vs Persona avant garde Ave Maria Avengers 2 Ayatollah Khomeini Ayn Rand Azar Nafisi B.J. Novak babboon Babel Fish Baby babysitter Back to the Future bacon is amazing and if you disagree you're a goddamn communist Bag End baking Ballyhoo Balrog Banalization of Corporate Aesthetic banalization of homosexuality Band of Brothers BANKSY Banned Books Banned Book Week Bara Barack Obama Barbara Love Barbara Streisand Barista Barn Burning Barnes& Noble Barracoon Barry Levinson Barry Strauss Basic Writings of Existentialism basket Bassem Youssef Batman Batman: The Animated Series Batman: The Court of Owls Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Batman: Year One Batman Arkham Asylum A serious House on Serious Earth Batman Forever Batman Pajama Pants Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice battle Beads Beast Beat Poetry Beauty and the Beast Beaver Dams Beavers Because I Could not Stop for Death Bechdel Test Bedknobs and Broomsticks Bee Bee Documentaries Bee Hives Bee Keepers beer Bees Beetle Bee Wilson bell belles lettres Ben Bradlee Bender Bender's Big Score Benedict Cumberbatch Benedict Cumberbatch naked sunbathing Benjamin Alire Sáenz Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Benjamin Netanyahu Benjamin Walfisch Beowulf Berlin Wall Bernard Heine Best of Enemies Bettie Boop Betty Elms Betty Friedan Betty Gabriel Between the World and Me Be Wherever You Are Bi Any Other Name Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out bias bibliophilia Biblophilia Big Bang Theory Big Bird big black dicks Big Daddy big dicks Big Game Hunting Big Jake Big Mac Big M Burgers Bikini Babes Bilbo Bilbo Baggins bildungsroman Bile Bill Duke Bill Maher Bill Murray Bill O'Reilly Bill Schutt Billy Conolly Bind Crosby Bing Bong Bing Crosby Biographia Literaria biography Biography as Craft biological arguments biology Biopic Birdbox is about Birds in Boxes...I'm sure it is birds Birthdays Bisexuality bite my shoulder Black-face Black and Tans Black Body Black Colleges Blackface Black Friday Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays Black Humor Black Klansman Black Lives in Media Black Lives Matter Black Male Body as commodity Black Men black men in porn Black Sabbath Black Sexuality Black Woman Sexuality Black Women Black women's narratives Blade Runner Blade Runner 2049 Blade Runner Threeway Blaise Pascal Blasphemy Blasphemy for the Sake of Blasphemy Blogging Blogs and Ethos Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies Blood Meridian Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West Bloody Kansas Bloody Sunday blowjob Blue Blues Blue Shell blue shoes Blue Velvet Blue Whale Metaphor Blurb Bob Bob's Burgers Boba-Loompia Bob Cratchit Bob Dylan Bob Hope Bob Hoskins Bob Woodward body body humor body image body issues body objectification Bohemian Rhapsody Boiling Lobsters Bolo Ties Bonnie Hunt Boobs Boogeyman book burning Book Club Book Covers Book Covers and why the Matter Book List Book Review books Books about Sex Toys Books about Writing Books by Jammer booooooooooobs Bootsy Barker Bites Borderlands Born a Crime Born a Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood Born in Dixie Born in Dixie: The History of Smith County Texas Boston bottlecaps bow-ties bow tie boy's club Boyd McDonald brackets Brad Douglas Bradley Pierce Bradley Whitford Breaking Bad Breast Cancer Breast Feeding Breast Milk Breast Milk as Menstrual Blood Breasts Breasts and Fruit Breasts Vs Boobs Brendan Gleeson Brenda Wineapple Bret Easton Ellis Brett Brett Witter Brian and Stewie Brian Jay Jones Brian K. Vaughn Bridge to Terabithia Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Bright Noa British Aristocracy British Empire Brokeback Mountain Broomhilda Bruce Cabot Brás de Oliva Domingos Bubbles Buckley VS. Vidal: The Historic 1968 ABS News Debates Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie Bugonia Bugs Bunny Buildungsroman Bullet Vibrator bullshit-ocracy Bullshit Is Everywhere Bullshit is Everywhere: Full Transcript Bulls On Parade Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion Burt Renyolds Burying Fletcher Bush Administration Buster Keaton Butch Butcher Knife Butch Lesbian butterknife button Buzz Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy BWS Johnson Byzantine Empire C-3PO C.S. Lewis Cait Murphey Calaban Caleb Landry Jones Call Me By Your Name Call of Duty Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Calvin and Hobbes Calvin C. Hernton Calvin Candie Calypso Campaign Finance Laws Camp Climax Can't You Hear Me Knocking Cancer Candide Candle Candy Candy Land Cannibalism Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History Canon Capitalism capitalism and Christianity Captain Genderfuck Caravan of Death Carinval Carl Bernstein Carl Japikse Carl Jung Carl Malden Carlo Ginzburg Carl Sagan Carl Weathers Carnival Carrie Cartoons Cartoons and Romantic studies Casper the Friendly Ghost Cassie Phillips Castle Anthrax Castro Street Catalyst Academy Catalyst University Catch-22 Catching the Big Fish Catching the Big Fish: Meditation Consciousness and Creativity Catharsis Catherine Keener Catherine Scorsese Cat on a Hot Tin Roof cats CBS News CCTV Celie and Shug censorship Cetology Chadwick Boseman chainsaw Challenging Faith Chamelion Champion of Unreason Chandalier Changes chaos chaos theory Char Character Study Charles Darwin Charles Dickens Charles II Charleston Charlie Brown Reference I Hope You Get Charlie Chaplin Charlie Glickman Charlie Kaufman Charlie Rose Charlize Theron Charlotte Haze Chaucer Chauvanism Che: A Revolutionary Life cheating Cheese Che Guevara Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life Che Guevara t-shirts Chemical Bonds Chernobyl Chernobyl Diaries Chernobyl Ferris Wheel Cherry Darling chess Chessboard Chester Benington Chicago Chief Joseph child developement Childe Harold Childhood Childish Gambino Children's Book Children's Entertainment children's fiction Chile China China church protests Chip Zdarsky Chivalry Chivalry is NOT a thing chocolate Choice Cholera Chorus Chris Chris Jones Chris Packard Christian Christianity Christian Rhetoric Christina Chaney Christine Christmas Christmas Songs Christoph Bode Christopher Hitchens Christopher Lloyd Christopher Nolan Christopher Stahl Chuck Palahniuk Churchillian cicada cicada shells Cicero Cinnamon cake Circles circumcision Circus Cirith Gorgor C is for Cookie cisgender men Citizen Kane Citizenship City Civic Duty Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice Civil Disobedience Civil War Claire Quilty clam Clappy the Sad Clown with Clap Clarence Clare Virginia Eby Clarissa Explains It All class Classical Hero Classic Literature Cleopatra Cleopatra's sexuality Cleopatra: A Life Cleopatra VII Clerks II Cleve Jones Clifton Pollard climate Clint Eastwood clitoris Cloche Hat clocks Clopin Clown Clumsy CNN Coagula COBRA coffee coffee mug coffeeshop Coffee With Jammer cognition coins Cold War Colin Firth Colonel Cathcart Colonel Korn colonialism color Color in Art Color in Literature comedy Comicosity Comic relief Comics Comic Shop Comic Shop: The Retail Mavericks WHo Gave Us a New Geek Culture Comic Shops Coming out Coming out Narratives Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two Comix Commandments Commando Commerce commodifying the female body Common Sense Commune Communism Composition studies Conan the Barbarian Confederate Flag Confession confidence Conformity Consider the Lobster Constance Brittain Bouchard Constantine Constantine XI Constantinople Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories contrarian Control Conversation Cookie Monster cookies Coon and Friends Cop Movies Coraline Cordelia Corey Taylor corgi Cormac McCarthy Cornetto Trilogy Corporate Influence corporate product Corporations corpse Corruption Corruption of Small Town America Cosmic Treadmill Cosmos Counterfeit Lesbian country couple Courtly-Love Courtroom Narrative Cow & Chicken Cowboys coxcomb Cracked.com Crazy Harry Crazy Wisdom creation Creative Crisis creative genius Creative Non-Fiction creative space Creative Writing Creators Creators and Creations Creator Vs. Creation Creature of Frankenstein Crime Crime and Punishment Crime Cinema Crime Films Crisco Criss Cross Criterion Cronkite Cross Dressing crossed legs Cruising the Movies Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV Crusades Crying babies crystal Crystal Gems Cthulhu Cuba Cube Cujo Cullen Bunn Cult of Hemingway Cultural Compulsion culture Cunnilingus Cyber-Punk D'Artagnan D.A. Powell D.B.A.A.: Don't Be An Asshole D.T. Max Dafne Keen dagger Daily Show Globe is Going the Wrong Way Dale Cooper Dale Peck Dallas Shooting DAMN Damon Brown Dan Dietle Dan Gearino Dangerous Board Games that can Kill You Daniel Chaudhry Daniel Clowes Daniel Kaluuya Daniel Radcliffe Danny Kaye Dan O'Bannon Dan Rather Dan Vega Dan White Darjeeling Dark Knight Returns Darkness Darren D’Addario Darryl W. Bullock Darth Vader's Little Princess Darth Vader and Son Daryl Hannah data Dave Archambault II Dave Gibbons Dave McKean David David Bowie David Bowie Made Me Gay David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music David Copperfield David Day David Foster Wallace David in the Orrery David L. Ulin David Lipksy David Lipsky David Lynch David Lynch Keeps His Head David M. Friedman David Sedaris David Silverman David Simon David Thewlis David Yates Dav Pilkey Day-O Days of Our Lives Daytripper Dead Babies Dead Baby Tree Deadlands Dead Poet's Society Deadpool Deadpool Killustrated death Deathclaw Death Proof Deborah Tannen decanter deception Deckard Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire deep time degeneration Degredation dehumanization Deirdre Donahue Deliverance Delores Haze Delorez Haxe is Lolita's Real Name Democracy Democrat Demons Denis Villeneuve Dennis was right denominational differences depression Depression is an illness Derek Thompson Derrida Description of the Female Body desert Desert Hearts desire Destiny Detail in comics Dewey Dewey: The Small Town Library Cat Who Touched the World Dewey Readmore Books Dewey the library cat Diamond “Lavish” Renyold Diana Cage Diana Greenway Diane Keaton Diane Selwyn Diary Dice Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics Dick McDonald Dick York Dictatorship Dictionary Die Hard diffusion dildo Dildos Dimebag Darrell Dio Dionysus Director's Style Dirty Pictures Dirty Pictures: Tom of Finland Masculinity and Homosexuality Disasterpeice Discipline and Punish Discourse Disney Dissociative Identity Disorder dithyramb Divinity Django Unchained DK Books Documentary Does the News Matter to Anyone Anymore? Doge Domestcity Domestic Abuse domestic affection Domino Effect Don't eat Eels...That is All Donald Duck Donald Pleasence Donald Regan Donald Trump Donald Trump Alec Baldwin Don DeLillo Don Juan Don Juan de Marco Donna Anderson Donna Deitch Don Quixote Don Shewey Doris Kearns Goodwin Dorling Kindersley Handbook Dory Dostoyevsky Doug Douglas Adams Douglas Brinkley Douglas Sadownick Dr. Eldon Tyrell Dr. King Schultz Dr. Manhattan Dr. Rockso Dr. Salvador Allende Dr. Sam Loomis Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Draft Drag Kings dragonfly Drama Dream Dream Country Dreams Drugs Drunk DSM Duke Johnson Duma Key Duncan Duracell Durin's Bane Dustin Hoffman Dyke dysfunctional relationship dystopia East Texas Ebony Clock Eccentricity economic disparity economic disparity between blacks and whites economics Eddie Marsan Eddie Valiant Edgar Allen Poe Edgar Wright Edith Hamilton Edith Hamilton's Mythology Editorial Edmund Burke Edmund Wilson Ed Skrein Educated Women Education Edward Gibbon Edward Muir Edward Norton Effect of AIDS on Gay Male Sexual Identity and Perception eggs Ego Egypt Egyptian Empire Egyption Revolution Elaine Noble Elbert "Bo" Smith Elder elderberries Eldon Tyrell Eleanor Roosevelt electricity El Gigante Elie Wiesel Elio and Oliver elitism Ellen Montgomery Ellen Page Ellen Page is awesome just in case you didn't know and if you didn't know you really need to know because seriously she's fucking cool as fuck Elliot Kirschner Elliot Richardson Elmo Saves Christmas elocution Elsa Martinelli Elves Elvis Emerson and Antislavery Emerson’s ‘Moral Sentiment’ and Poe’s ‘Poetic Sentiment’ A Reconsideration Emile Hirsch Emily Dickinson Emily Dikinson emotion empathy Empire empiricism encomium Endless Nights Endnotes enema Engineer English-Irish relationship English 1301 English History English Romanticism Ent-Wives Entertainment Entmoot Entomophobia Ents enviornmentalism Eowyn Epic Epic Novels Epilepsy Episcopal Episcopal Church Epistemology of the Closet Epistolary Novel Eraserhead Eraserhead Baby erectile dysfunction Eric Idle Erika Moen Ernest Hemingway Ernie and Bert Ernle Bradford erotic fantasy Erwin Rommel Escape from New York Esquire Essais Essay Essay Collection Essential Dykes to Watch Out For Esther Garrel Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell Eternal Recurrence Ethan Hawke ethics ethos Et Tu Brute? Eugenics E Unibus Pluram E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction Eurocentrism Europe European "Discovery" fallacy European exploration European History Eva Green Eve's Garden Eve Arnold Even Stevens Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises Everybody looks better than I do in heels and I can't stand it Everyday is Exactly the Same Everyday Use Evil Evil as a Force Evil as Force Evil Bear Man Evil Dead Evil is abscence evolution Evolution is not JUST a theory excrement exile existentialism Existentialism and Human Emotions Exit Through the Gift Shop Experimental Essay Expose Eye Imagery in Blade Runner eye liner Eyes eye shadow Eyes Wide Shut Orgies are actually a pain to schedule Ezekiel 25:17 Ezra Pound F. Murray Abraham F. Scott Fitzgerald F. Valentine Hooven III Faber Fabio Moon fable Facebook Activism facebook arguments Faeries Faggot Faggots Fahrenheit 451 failed environment Failed Hero Failed Writer failure Fairy Tale Faith Fallacy Fall of Constantinople Fall Out 4 Fallout 4 Familial exile family Family Guy Family Guy Ipecac Fan Culture Fans fantasy Farcical Aquatic Ceremonies are not the basis for a system of government Fareed Zakaria Farley Granger Farm-Aid Farm Crisis 1980s farting fart jokes Fart Proudly Fast Food Fastfood Nation Father-Son Relationship fathers fatwah Fat Woman Stereotype fear fear of death Fear of Laughter feces Federal Housing Administration Federation Federico Infante Tutt'Art felching fellare Female Masculinity Female Masturbation Female Orgasm Female Poets Female Sexuality Feminimity feminine energy Feminism femnism fencing Ferguson fertility festival Feudalism Feudalism is also NOT a thing Fiction Fidel Castro fidger spinner Fidget Spinner Fievel Goes West Fight Club Film Film Noire Film Presentations of Gay Men film review Finding Dory Finding Nemo Finnegan's Wake Fiona Staples fire Fire Demons Firehose Firehouse Shining fireworks First Lady First Love Fish Fisherman fish sex Five reasons 'Gatsby' is the great American novel flags Flannery O'Conner Flashpoint Flawed hero flowers fly fishing Folk Hero folklore Fondation of Reality Fonts food chain For Argument’s Sake: Why Do We Feel Compelled to Fight About Everything? Forgetting Sarah Marshall Forrest Forrest Gump For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports fossils foundation of reality Founding Father Founding Fathers Founding Fathers Purity Myth Fourteen Stories None of Them are yours Fourth Dimension Fox News Fozzy Bear Fraggle Rock frame narrative FrameRate France Frances Gies Francis Dolarhyde Francis Ford Coppola Francois Rabelias Frank Frankenstein Frankenstein 200th anniversary Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus Franklin J. Schaffner Frank Miller Frank Oz Franz Xaver Kappus François Rabelais Frasier Fraw Freddy Mercury Freddy Mercury is GOD Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings Frederic March Frederico Infante Fred Hembree Fred Kaplan Freedom freedom of information freeing the figure from the marrble free speech Free the Breast free will Freewill Free Working Press French Press French Revolution Freshman Year Composition Course Freud Freya's Unusual Wedding Frida Friday the 13th Friedrich Nietzsche friendship Frodo Frodo Baggins From Hell fruit juice fuck Fuck-ups fucking Full Frontal Full Metal Jacket Fumi Miyabi funeral Fun Home Fusion Futurama G.I. Joe Gabriel Ba Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal Gai Mizuki Gaius Cassius Longinus Gal Gadot gambling Game of Thrones Gandalf Gangs of New York Gangsters garden Garden of Eden Garnet Garth Ennis Gary Collison Gary K. Wolfe Gary King Gauntlets Gay Gay Asian Art Gay Batman Sex Fantasy Gay Comics Gay Erotic Comics Gay Leather Fetish Gay Literature Gay Macho Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone Gay Male Butt Cheek Gay Male Identity Gay Manga Gay Masculinity Gay Men Gay Men Comics Gay Movie Night Gay people in politics Gay Porn Gay Pornographic Comics Gay Sex Gays in Politics Gaza Wall gender Gender Expectations GenderFluid Gender Fluid GenderFuck Gender Identification Gender Identity Gender Inversion GenderQueer Gender Studies Gender Trouble Gene Kelly General George Patton General Omar Bradley generational gap generational trauma Genetically Modified Organisms Gengar Gengorah Tagame genocide Genre Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Geocentric Universe Geoff Johns Geoffrey Rush geometry George C. McGavin George C. Scott George Clooney George Gordon Lord Byron George Lucas George Orwell George Owell: A Collection of Essays George Takei George W. Bush George Washington Gerald M. Garmon Gerald of Wales German Legend Gertrude Stein Get Out Get your credit score and work on gathering reliable assets Ghassan Massoud Ghostbusters Ghost of Christmas Present Ghosts Ghost World Ghus giant cocks Giant Robots Giant Robots Fighting Giant Spider and Me Giant Spider and Me: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale 1 GI Bill gif/jif? Gilgamesh Gimme Shelter Gina Sheridan Giraffe Girl in the Radiator Girls Girls Education Girl Up Gladiator glasses Glen Quagmire Gloria Steinem Goals Goat-Demon Imagery Goats Shit...A LOT god God's Little Acre God...I am really Gay god is not Great gods Godwin's Law Goethe Gollum Gollum/Smeagol Gonzo Good and Evil Goodfellas Good Morning Vietnam GoodReads GoodReads Reviews Good Vibrations Good vs Evil Goofy GOP Gordon Gecko Gore Vidal Go Set A Watchman Gotham Gothic Gourmet government acountability GPS Gracie and Frankie Graduate School Graduate Student graduation graffiti Graham Chapman grammar grandchildren grandma Grandparents Grant Morrison Grant Morrison may be nuts but damn if he doesn't deliver grapes graphic novel Grave Robbers graveyard Gravity Great Courses Great Expectations Great Hookers I Have Known Great Speeches by Native Americans Great White Sharks Grecian Urn Greece Greece History Greek Greek Drama Greek Fire Green Tea grieving Grinch Grocery Shopping Grotesque Groucho Marx Grouchy Old People growing Guest Author Guitar gum Gun-Violence Gundam Gun Powder Guys H.D.F. Kitto H.G. Wells H.P. Lovecraft H.R. Haldeman Halcyon Haleth son of Hama Hal Halbrook Hal Incandenza Hallie Lieberman Halloween Hamburger hammer Hammond Typewriter Hamnet Shakespeare hamsters Hands Up Don't Shoot Hank Williams Sr. Hannah and Her Sisters Hannibal Hannibal Lecter References Hans Zimmer Happiness Happy Birthday Harbinger Vol. 1 Harlem Renaissance Harmony Harmony the Sex Robot Harold and George Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle Harold Bloom Harper Lee Harpers Harrisson Ford Harry Belafonte Harry Morgan Harry Potter Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Harry Potter getting fucked in the ass Harvey Keitel Harvey Milk Harvey Milk gives me hope Hastings Hatari Having erotic dreams/fantasies about sailors and whales is perfectly normal...Todd Hayao Miazaki Hays Code Hazel headband headphones Heart Beating Heart Shaped Box Heath Ledger Heavy Metal Hector He did it with a bucket Heimdall Heinrich Brunner Helena Bonham Carter Hell Helter Skelter henge Henry David Thoreau Henry Drummond Henry Ford Henry Hill Henry I Henry Killinger Henry Kissinger Henry Louis Gates Jr Henry Miller Henry of Huntington he Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants Here's Johnney! Herman Melville Hermoine Didn't Masturbate and Neither Did Jane Eyre Hero Herodotus heroes Heroes of the Homosexual community heteronormativity Heterosexuality High Anxiety Hillary Chute Hillbillies Hippie Historical Accuracy Historical Discourse history History Book History of Comics History of Smith County History of the English People Hitcahi Wand Hitch-22 Hitchcock-Truffault Hitchhiker's Guide Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Hitler Fetish Hobbits Hocus Pocus Holden Caulfield Holidays Hollywood Holt/Cold Home Owner’s Loan Corporation Homo-Social Relationships Homoeroticism Homophobia Homos Homosexual Clone Homosexuality Homosexuality as mental illness Homosexuality History Homosexuality in 1950s Homosexual seduction Honda P2 Robot Honest Trailers Honesty of the Artist about the Creative Process honey Hook hooker Hookers Hooker with a Penis Hope Hope Speech Horace Smith Horns horror Horror Comics Horror Fiction Horror Movies Hostel hot alien babe Hotel Rooms Hot Fuzz Hot Gates Houen Matsuri housewives Howard Hawks Howard K. Smith How Hiram Really Died and What Came After HOWL How People Become Atheists How to Make Love like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale How To Talk to Girls At Parties How Unpleasant to Meet Mr. Eliot HR 40 Hubris Huckleberry Hound Hugh Hefner Hugh Jackman Human/Robot Love Story Human Beings Perception of Reality Human Body Human connection Human Developement Human evolution human exploration Human Ideas are Grander than any Religion humanity Human Memory Human Narcissim Humbert Humbert Humor humors Hunger Games Hunter S. Thompson Hurricane Lolita husbands and wives Hyena Hymn to Intellectual Beauty Hypersexualization of Female Breasts I'm almost positive the song Tribute is the song they couldn't remember but I realize that's a controversial position I'm Going to Go Back There Someday I'm Not a Racist But... I'm Tired I've Been Down That Road Before I, Claudius Icarian Games Icarus Ice Cream that ISN'T Ice Cream Ida Tarbell Idealism identification Identity Identity Crisis Idris Elba If a woman is upset it's not because she's on her period it's because you're being a dick If they ask if you want Pepsi throw over the table throat punch the shit out of them and then proceed to burn that motherf@#$er down If you're reading this pat yourself on the back because you can read and that's awesome ignorance I have Measured Out My Life in Coffee Spoons and K Cups I know too many Michaels I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings I Like It Like That I Like it Like That: True Stories of Gay Male Desire Illuminated Manuscripts illusion Illusion of choice I Love Lucy I Love Lucy Mug I Love Penis...Mug iMac Imaginary Time imagination Immanuel Kant immigrants imperialism Imposter Complex Impressionists In Bed with David amd Jonathan incest Incorporation of images in Pedagogy Independence Day Independent Comics Indie Fiction Individual Initiative Individual Will Industrial Nightmare industry infidelity Infinite Jest Infinite Jest Blogs Infinite Possibility Infinity Informed Democracy Inherit the Wind Injustice innocence vs ignorance In One Person Inquisition insanity Insects Inside Out inspiration integrity intellectual Intellectual Declaration of Independance Intellectual masculinity Intellectual Parent Inter Library Loan internet interracial relationships Interview Inu Yoshi invert Invisible Man Invitation to a Beheading Ion IOWA iPad Ipecac iPhone ipod IRA I Racist Iran-Contra Irish Breakfast Tea Irish history Irish Writers I Ruck, Therefore I Am Isaac Asmiov Isaac Deutscher Isabel Allende Isabella St. James Ishmael Islam isolation Israel Issa Rae It It's an Honor It's illegal in the state of Texas to own more than six "realistic" vibrators It's time to adopt the Metric System in America for crying out loud It's truly truly difficult to find good coffee and by good coffee I mean the type that leaves you feeling as if you've actually tasted something beyond human understanding close to the furnace of all Italy Ivory Tower of Academia ivy I wandered lonely as a cloud I Want a Wife I Was a Playboy Bunny I Will Fight No More Forever I work at a Public Library J.D. Rockefeller J.D. Salinger J.K. Rowling J.R.R. Tolkien J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century J. Robert Oppenheimer J.Y. Smith Jack-O Lantern Jack Halberstam Jack Lemmon Jack Nicholson Jacob Marley Jacques Tardi Jaimee Fox Jake Gyllenhaal James A. Berlin James Franco James Garner James Joyce James Mason James Smallwood James Walker Jamie Lee Curtis Jammer Jammer's Books Jammer Talks Jammer Talks About Janelle Asselin Janet Leigh Jane Tompkins Janissaries Janitor Jared Leto Jason Momoa Jason Reitman Jason Robards Jason Segel Jason Starr Jason Walker Jasper Fforde JAWS Jazz Jealousy between Writers Jean-Baptiste Clamence Jean-Paul Sartre Jean Fouquet Jeffrey Brown jem Jenna Jameson Jennifer Jason Leigh Jennings Jenny Kleeman Jeremy Irons Jerome Lawrence Jerry A. Coyne Jerusalem Jesse Ventura Jessica Rabbit Jessica Roake Jesus Jewish men Jewish mother Jim Crow Laws Jim Gaffigan McDonalds Jim Gordon Jim Henson Jim Henson: A Life Jim Henson: The Biography Jimmy Breslin Jimmy Conway Jimmy Stewart Jim Woodring Jiraiya Joanne Webb Joan Quigley Joe Hill Joel Myerson Joe Pesci Johann Sebastian Bach Johnathan Franzen Johnathan Hyde John Bernard Books John Bunyan John Carpenter John Carroll Lynch John Cleese John Colapinto John F. Kennedy John Gavin John Goodfellow John Harvey Kellogg John Irving John Keating