(Some vulgar sexual slang from the world of gay sex, but nothing beyond that.)
More drawers of my files moved from Staunton Ct. to Ramona St. (and into the oaken desk there). Almost all academic files, but the drawers contained a few surprises, like two gay porn magazines from early 2001, in particular the Torso from February of that year, with the friction fiction “Fire-Station Stud: Italian Muscleman Starts a Fire” by a prolific writer of such stories, “Bearmuffin”. The teaser insert in the story:
Two points here: the verbing of the noun spunk ‘semen’ and the poetic form of the insert’s text, which is perfect iambic pentameter (with the bonus of the internal half-rhymes spunked … trunk and between … tree).
The verbing. On spunk, there’s a May 27th posting on this blog about three lexical items spunk, clearly distinct semantically but, rather remarkably, sharing an etymological source. But all of this is beside the point here, the point being that one of these items, the (mildly) vulgar slang spunk ‘semen’, has been verbed in the text above, and verbed with a direct object NP, my load.
First fact: the verbing of spunk ‘semen’ has been going on since the 19th century, largely in Umliterature. Green’s Dictionary of Slang has as its first sense for spunk as a verb:
(also spunk off, spunk up) to ejaculate
with a first cite in 1888-94 from My Secret Life and (among others) a 2000 cite from M. Manning in Get Your Cock Out: “spunking all over the wall”.
The plain verb verb spunk, without a particle off or up, has very nearly the same syntax as the sexual slang verb shoot ‘ejaculate’ (note: the aggression verb shoot is irrelevant here); label the sexual verb shoot-SX. Both are almost always intransitive (like ejaculate and sexual come) — I shot-SX / spunked on his belly but *I shot-SX / spunked him on his belly. The notable exception to this generalization is that cognate objects — object NPs with a head N denoting ejaculate — are possible with spunk just as with shoot-SX:
I spunked / shot-SX a (big) load (of cum / spunk / jizz / spooge / etc.) on his belly.
I spunked / shot-SX a lot of cum / spunk / jizz / spooge / etc. on his belly.
I spunked / shot-SX my load / cum / spunk / jizz / spooge / etc. on his belly.
(on his belly, in his fist, in his mouth, in his ass, or, if you, prefer, between his treetrunk thighs).
The poetic form. The insert text is perfect iambic pentameter, five iambic — light + heavy — feet:
I spunked / my load / between / his tree / trunk thighs
So that if you’re so inclined, you could use this as the first, introductory, line of a longer text, or as the last, summary, line of one. Play with it.
As it happens, the insert text is a short version of the text in the story:
Right then, I spunked my load between his hairy tree-trunk thighs.
Still resolutely iambic, but now heptameter. You could go on like this indefinitely — English is deeply fond of alternating stress, in iambic or trochaic rhythms — but in fact the text surrounding the load-spunking line isn’t at all stress-alternating. This is just a wonderful, probably accidental, drop into poetic diction.
Big
Jimmy ruled the
Gym with a thumb of
Steel – one
Snap of his
Strap made the
Strongest man
Kneel
Big Jimmy’s in a Timoteo 84 Jockstrap in black. Here’s his younger brother Little Jake (also delicious, but much less threatening), in a Timoteo Shadow Jockstrap in black/red:
#1 came from the Daily Jocks people yesterday, with this (unusually staid) ad copy:
Timoteo underwear, swimwear and sportswear has grown into an internationally recognised menswear brand. a go-to-brand around the globe for stylish men. Known for their exceptional fit, quality and cutting-edge designs.
Two earlier postings on this blog about Timoteo, a name I like to think of as meaning ‘fear of God’ (Latin verb timere ‘to fear’ and noun timor ‘fear’, plus Greek theos ‘god’; yes, I know, the name Timothy / Timoteo / Timothée / etc. actually has Greek timao ‘to honor’ as its first element):
a posting on 7/11/13 “Steve Grand, DNA, Timoteo”: “The Timoteo line [of menswear by Timoteo Ocampo] is deeply devoted to men’s bodies, especially their crotches.”
a posting on 4/10/16 “Magnitude Boys”, with two shots of the Timoteo Magnitude jock in red, white, and blue
Big Jimmy’s gym is called Rip Rep Rap City. The rip is simple; note the ripped bodies above. (Rip Rep Rap City is definitely Hunkytown.) But rap and rep come from the black dudes in Giacco’s crib: from the rap music that plays non-stop at the gym, especially the local favorite, “(I be) Reppin My City” performed by Brisco, Triple C, & Rick Ross, from Ross’s Trilla (2008). (You can listen to it here.) The slogan on a t-shirt:
Represent can here convey quite a range of meaning: ‘stand for’, ‘front for’, ‘stand up for’, ‘be a credit to’.
Advanced note for the sound-inclined: rip rep rap has a series of three lax (and open) front vowels /ɪ ɛ æ/ descending in height — and with descending frequency of the second formant, giving the perceptual impression of a descent in pitch and a synesthetic impression of an increase in size (so, getting lower and bigger, in steps). The series continues with /a/ and /ɔ/; in my American variety, I have the whole series in big/dig beg bag bog dog (but other dialects have quite different phonetics).
A remarkable long piece in the New York Times Magazine Culture issue on October 30th, by film critic and general cultural critic Wesley Morris, “The Last Taboo: Why American pop culture just can’t deal with black male sexuality”, on the elision (or, alternatively, mythologization) of black male sexuality. In a supremely ironic development, the text of Morris’s piece has itself been elided from the public record (no doubt by massive incompetence rather than malevolence): links on the NYT site (and, as far as I can tell, on all sites that refer to “The Last Taboo”) take you not to this article but to another, racially and sexually irrelevant, Morris piece, “Uncommon Ground: Our New Urban Oases”, on elevated railways turned into pedestrian parks, which is identified as being from the NYT Magazine’s Culture issue (puzzlingly dated October 27th), but it’s not in that issue.
I’ll start by showing you scans of the title pages of “The Last Taboo”, just to show you that I’m not making this up, and then go on to quoting at some length from Morris’s text, which I have spent a very long time typing in by hand.
(These came from a Google search, not from my scanning. Of course, when I clicked on “Visit Page”, I got taken to the “Uncommon Ground” piece.)
Now from Morris, with quotations interspersed with content notes::
These are banner times for penises onscreen.
[catalogue of examples]
We’ve gotten more gender-neutral, more feminist, more used to seeing dudes in gym locker rooms, better at Instagram and Snapchat and Tumblr – and so, too, have we gotten more O.K. with penises.
Some penises, anyway.
A vast majority of these penises are funny, casual, unserious. Their unceremonious appearance – as naturalism, comedy, symbolism, provocation – is new, and maybe progressive. But that progress is exclusive, because these penises almost always belong to white men. … A black penis, even the idea of one, is still too bound up in how America sees – or refuses to see – itself.
… This is what’s been playing out in our culture all along: a curiosity about black sexuality, tempered by both guilt over its demonization and a conscious wish to see it degraded. It’s as old as America, and as old as our history.
[some history, from “The Birth of a Nation” through the rape of black slaves to lynching]
The nation’s subconscious was forged in a violent mess of fear, fantasy and the forbidden that still affects the most trivial things. A century after Griffith, you’re free to go to a theater and watch Chris Hemsworth throw his legs open and parade his fictional endowment, while sparing a thought for what it would mean if the black star who goes by the Rock were to do the same.
[on the Blaxploitation era and Quentin Tarantino’s take on the genre, followed by personal recollection]
… Here’s our original sin metastasized into a perverted sticking point: The white dick means nothing, while, whether out of revulsion or lust, the black dick means too much.
One night, when I was 24 and living in San Francisco, I met a handsome white guy visiting from Germany. We stood near a window in a crowded bar and talked about an art show he’d just soon. Eventually I brought him to my apartment, where, after removing some of his clothes, he eagerly started to undo my pants. But then he stood there for a moment and gave my crotch a long, perplexed look, like Geraldo Rivera did when, after months of buildup, he opened up what turned out to be Al Capone’s empty vault. He replaced his clothes and, before exiting, explained himself: That’s not what I expected.”
I knew what he meant. He was expecting a “Guinness Book of World Records” penis. He wasn’t the only one – just the last to do it with such efficiently rendered disappointment. That hurt, but I remember being amused that, for him, all our attraction came down to was what someone had told him my dick should look like. I remember standing there, half-dressed in my living room, and actually saying out loud, “Why does he know that?”
But everybody knows. Anytime a par of pants is prematurely rezipped or the line goes dead in a sex app’s chat window, I always know: He was expecting a banana, a cucumber, an eggplant, something that belongs to either a farm animal or NASA. He was expecting the mythical Big Black Dick (which, online, people just call “B.B.D.”), That presumption is something you tend to prepare for with interracial sex – that your dick could either render the rest of you disposable or put your humanity on a pedestal, out of reach. That it could make you a Mapplethorpe.
[extended discussion of the complexities of Mapplethorpe, including Glenn Ligon’s critique of him]
There is no paradigmatic white penis. To each man his own. But there is a paradigmatic black one, and how do you stunt-cast for that?
[section on presentation of black male sexuality in the 1980s and 1990s, including Larry Blackmon in the video for Cameo’s 1986 hit “Candy”, with his red codpiece — you can watch the video here — and later images]
There’s a magnificent new movie called “Moonlight” that know hows hard [it is to get from grinding to loving].
[touching story of Morris, at 9 or 10, admiring an older boy’s penis and getting labeled “faggot” for it]
The only penises I’d ever seen at that point were as black as David’s. But I noticed his. He was 12 or 13 and more developed. Admiring it got me cast out of our little Eden – but only because that’s how boys are. We didn’t know about sexual myths or racial threats, about the taboos that we would discover are our particular birthright. I didn’t anyway. Not yet. I just saw a penis. And it was beautiful.
A wonderful amalgam of perceptive cultural criticism (in plain language) and (touching) personal experience. The piece comes across as judicious dismay overlaid on bedrock anger, not a tone easily achieved.
Bonus track, playingfor Morris Carroll:
Hunter’s Longing
Veers into Verse
He was hunting a snipe,
But the
Snipe was a penis, you
See – still he
Pines for it –
Gimme
Spine.
Lukas and the Back Alley Boys
Return this week for a
Short engagement,
Featuring old favorites
— “Butt Up, Baby”, and
Fresh stuff
— “Pullin’ My Pants Down For You”,
Soon to be released on their
Ballsy new album Silly Love Songs
(Lukas sport shorts from Helsinki Athletica.)
Apologies to Paul McCartney, whose 1976 song “Silly Love Songs” actually was about silly love songs. And of course to the Backstreet Boys for the play on back alley (from Green’s Dictionary of Slang: alley ‘vagina’, 1st cite in 1842, then, inevitably, alley ‘anus’, 1st cite in 1934, a usage often played on in a gay context, as in the San Francisco leather street fair Up Your Alley).
Bonus material, with fortuitous finds, discoveries from checking the Daily Jocks site. Which led me to this:
Cellblock13’s new X Wing Jockstrap is one of the sexiest jock we’ve had. This specific jock/pouch can only be worn with a harness. For a complete gear look, wear it with the “X Wing” Neoprene Harness [sold separately].
Two parts: the jock, which won’t work on its own, because it has only the butt band, with no waistband to hold it up; and the harness, a cross harness (or X harness). Front view of the jock-harness combo, in red:
(Not really the point here, but this strikes me as a satisfyingly homoerotic shot.)
The jock harness doesn’t come cheap: $34 for the jock, $62 for the harness. A big outlay to show off your bulge, your big pecs, and your hot butt.
At this point, realizing that Jock is a reasonably common personal name (a Scottish name, diminutive of John, like English Jack) and that Harness is an attested surname, there might well be guys named Jock Harness.
And so there might, but my search for them was overwhelmed by pieces of apparel called jock harnesses, all of them combining something like a jock with some kind of harness. None, as far as I can tell, as fine as Cellblock13’s model.
Also thrown up in my searching: links to things labeled as vegan jock harnesses. You might well want to mouthe a jockstrap, but eat one?
Well, it turns out that vegan here is short for vegan leather (truncation is everywhere): leather not involving animal products, that is, artificial leather. From Wikipedia:
Alternative leather (bicast leather) is a fabric or finish intended to substitute for leather in fields such as upholstery, clothing, footwear and fabrics, and other uses where a leather-like finish is required but the actual material is cost-prohibitive, unsuitable, or unusable for ethical reasons.
… Artificial leather is marketed under many names, including “leatherette”, “faux leather”, “vegan leather”, “PU [polyurethane] leather” and “pleather”.
And of course, the branded Naugahyde (“Tell me, Eric, just how many innocent naugas had to be sacrificed to make you those sexy chaps, jockstrap, and big bulldog harness?”).
(An assortment of linguistic points along the way, but a lot of stuff about the gay porn flick BuckleRoos (2004), with explicit discussion of men’s bodies and male-male sex, plus images at the borderline — seven definitely over the line are on AZBlog X, in a posting entitled “Watching the BuckleBoys” — so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
My Saturday morning playtime viewing was this favorite video — 2 discs, plus a 2005 documentary about its creation, eXposed: The Making of a Legend — which moved me to write a metered (but not rhyming) caption for one scene in the flick: part 2, scene 2, involving a rancher and two Mormon missionaries:
Late-breaking news in the Beefland Raunch Bulletin:
Cowboy Screws Mormon On Park Picnic Tabletop
Any guy with the buckle is magically hot;
He can take what he wants, not a man can resist.
Both the boys on the mission know nothing of sex,
But ol’ Jed leads the way to ecstatic abandon.
Now he’s fucking a boy on the top of a bench;
We are watching a Mormon get screwed by a rancher.
The intro material is a double dactyl: two lines of dactylic tetrameter (printed as four lines). Each verse in the text is a double anapest: two lines of anapestic tetrameter. (A dactyl and an anapest are both trisyllabic feet, with front accent for the dactyl (SWW) and back accent for the anapest (WWS).)
[The inspiration for the lines of text, especially the last two, was the wonderful climactic line of the comic monologue by Michael Flanders (of Flanders and Swann fame) “Tried by the Centre Court”, about a Wimbledon match between Miss L. Hammerfest and Miss Joan Hunter-Dunn: They are bashing a ball with the gut of a cat. A gem of anapestic tetrameter, not to mention Germanic monosyllabism.
My last two lines do well on the Germanic monosyllabism front, though ranch is Romance and so, alas, is screw, though they both sound Germanic, and Mormon is an invention we get via Joseph Smith.]
But what of the scene described above?
Background about the video, from the Colt Studio site, in its jaunty winking prose: the film has
a Man in Black, … [gay porn superstar] Zak Spears in a non-sexual role – though this man is more sexual fully clothed than most men are buck-naked. He plays a mystical figure – ghost, spirit, fairy godfather? – who dispenses magical belt buckles. While most belt buckles keep pants on, these keep pulling them off. [You wear the buckle, and any man is yours.] He stays to watch what happens and even helps things along.
Right now he’s looking after the owners of the “Beefland Ranch,” Kick (Dean Phoenix) and Jed (Marcus Iron). These two guys live by one rule: no sex a second time around; it’s “hello,” then “goodbye.” They had sex with each other once but vowed never to do it again. Luvin’ can trap a man, so now they’re just best buddies.
That’s the driving force of the movie: it’s a long, sweet love story (as so many ambitious gay porn flicks are). Kick and Jed share a bed; the jack off to gay porn videos together; they cruise for sex together (see #5 on AZBlogX); but they don’t kiss, or hold each other, or share their dicks.
The principals in posters. Dean Phoenix (a great favorite of mine; see especially my 3/18/11 AZBlogX posting about him):
(The image has been cropped to conceal the yummy bits, but they’re easily available on-line, and #1 on AZBlogX has DP displaying his dick (and smiling broadly; he smiles a lot).)
Marcus Iron in a BuckleRoos poster (where he displays the sex-buckle) :
(#3 here has been cropped to conceal MI’s balls and cock hanging down between his legs, but again the full image is easily available on-line, and #2 on AZBlogX has a fine photo of MI displaying his body.)
More about DP and MI later, but now on to the Mormon boys. From the Colt Studio site about the scene (part 2, scene 2):
Jed (Marcus Iron) angrily [angrily because the doorbell has interrupted him and Kick (Dean Phoenix) during an intense jack-off session] answers the door to find two young Mormon missionaries Gabriel (Timmy Thomas) and Jacob (Sammy Case) have come to save his soul. Jed soon realizes that he should be doing some saving himself after Jimmy Joe makes a bet that he’ll get more wearing the COLT belt buckle. Jed proceeds to saving the two young sexual virgins from a boring straight life! Jed takes them out to a picnic bench in the back-40 and shows them [coaches them, everybody smiling happily] what hard cocks, tight assholes, and soft, wet mouths are REALLY for. This sure beats bible school.
Explicit photos in #6 on AZBlogX, with this text of mine:
Everyone smiles a lot. They’re all ridiculously happy — Jed pleased with his salacious wickedness, the boys giggling with their new-found sexual pleasures (ooh, dicks to play with, dicks to suck, dicks to take up my — omg, yes, yes! — ass, mouths and assholes for my taking, and kissing, kissing, kissing!). It’s all silly, and funny, and full of boyish first-time delight.
The photo that directly inspired my captioning, made minimally WordPressable by fuzzing over the little bit of Jed’s cock that was in the original (Sammy’s mouth, which was a moment before on Timmy’s cock — Sammy is enjoying his very first spit-roast — now conceals it, so there are, at least technically, no dicks in the photo):
Here, Kick is displaying the magic buckle. But, more interestingly, Kick is framed as the subordinate partner, the b to Jed’s dominant t (see my Page on b/t roles, especially my 12/18/10 posting on b/t in the gay porn flick The Bombardier, where I suggest that in the default case the assignment of b and t roles can be predicted from differences in (stereotypical) masculinity, including power differentials, and that the roles typically play themselves out as differences in how the sex unfolds in time:
The roles are what I’ll call b (an extension of “bottom”) for the gayer man and t (an extension of “top”) for the more masculine man. The script goes: b takes t’s dick first; sometimes this is the end of it (t doesn’t take b’s dick at all), but things can then go on to t taking b’s dick. t gets serviced first.
In addition, when couples are presented visually, b/t roles typically will be coded in the same way as sexual bottom/top roles. On such presentations, here’s what I said with reference to the uberbottom Kevin Wiles in a 2/9/16 posting:
Top and bottom roles [in fucking] are often conveyed in [gay porn] publicity not only by hands-on ownership but also by the positioning of the men’s bodies, with the top standing above the bottom (and behind the bottom, putting the bottom on display for the viewer [as a trophy of the top’s conquest]) — reproducing the placement of other-sex couples in, for instance, wedding photos: husband over (and behind) wife.
The visual presentation of the couple in #5 says quite clearly that Jed is t to Kick’s b: Jed is behind and above Kick, and claims hands-on ownership of him.
This difference is reproduced in the time course of their fucking, when they finally get around to it (in the last, sweet, tender scene of the video): Jed fucks Kick first (#3 in AZBlogX), and then Kick fucks him (#4 there). That is, Jed takes his pleasure first (on the conventional assumption that fucking is for the sake of the top — an idea that most bottoms would dispute) and then allows Kick to get off. (Outside the frame of the porn story, DP was famous for never having been fucked on-screen — writers were careful to add the hedge “on-screen” — so DP’s taking MI up the ass was a Big Thing in Pornlandia.)
I went back over the story looking for other indications that Jed was b to Kick’s t, but came up largely empty-handed. The characters seem to be of the same age (the actors are almost exactly the same age, both having been born in 1974), of identical status in their ranching world (they are equal partners in the business), and are indistinguishable as to their presentation of themselves as working-class country & western types (right down to their equally fine reproductions of Hollywood-conventional c&w talk). They do seem to differ a bit in their sexual tastes: until Jed fucked him, Kick seemed to be a total fuck-top, while Jed seemed to be a bit more versatile. (Note that in #3 Jed is offering his ass, a conventional bottom pose.)
Then they differ a bit in the qualities that contribute to the “gay voice”, with Jed (like MI himself) showing just enough GV to ping my gaydar sometimes, while Kick (like DP himself) never gets a hit. Finally, Jed (like MI in other roles) tends to present himself as seductive, while Kick (like DP in other roles) tends to present himself as amiably taking charge (trust him, you’ll like it); their gazes in the dick-display photos in AZBlogX are quite different on just this score, and sometimes MI comes across as extravagantly seductive, as in this publicity shot (pitsntits and bedroom eyes):
On balance, Kick wins on masculinity points, but nevertheless Jed is t to Kick’s b. This would make these guys like a lot of real male couples, where b/t roles are something the men come to in any way that suits them. That is, Jed and Kick are acting like real people, and not like figures working out the conventions of gay porn scripts. To my mind, that makes the video even more satisfying.
The conventions of porn. Still, many of the conventions of porn must be honored. The video must be episodic, with individual episodes (usually parts of a larger “scene”) short enough to keep the viewer engaged and to get him off in a reasonable amount of time (porn can rise to the level of great craft or even art, but it still has purposes that must be served, and prime among these is helping the viewer to shoot his load). Even if there’s a long story arc, as for BuckleRoos, the players have to be diverse enough (in body type and persona) to satisfy viewers with different tastes. The main characters can’t be on-screen and in the action all the time, or the viewers are likely to tire of them; so there are frequent digressions to other partners for the principals (in Pornlandia, everybody’s a slut) and to other actors entirely (Ricky Martinez and Arpad Miklos have a scene in BuckleRoos, and there are secondary characters who get their turns too). There’s some impetus to go beyond the plain vanilla gay sex sequence — kiss and caress, play with dicks, suck cock, fuck, come — by offering fetishes, orgies, gangbangs, remarkable athleticism, unusual positions, playful or humiliating dirty talk, sex in surprising (especially very public) settings, unusual sexual practices (Martinez is an accomplished auto-fellator), ethnic diversity, first-time sex, sex with straight men, silliness, whatever.
Being gay. The actors DP and MI and the third principal, Owen Hawk, are all themselves flat-out, openly gay, and so are their characters in BuckleRoos, who are in fact all intensely preoccupied with getting as much mouth and dick and butt as they can. Hawk plays Kick’s teenaged nephew Jimmy Joe, whose parents have thrown him out for his brazen sexual exploits with high school football players and who then takes refuge with Kick and Jed; outrageously randy-gay Jimmy Joe struts about everywhere in a bright cloud of playful, smiling sexual energy, engaging carnally with any man he can. (He also has a relentlessly sunny outlook, and seems not to have a bitchy bone in his body.) Jimmy Joe pretty much transcends categories like butch and femme, and in this he’s like a lot of real men I’ve known. A wonderful, monumentally faggy, masculine character. (With a really big pornstar cock, of course. On display in #7 on AzBlogX.)
Jed is butch, with a significant footnote for seductiveness. Kick is plain butch, but he’s just as queer as the other two.
The magic of the buckle is not that it allows you to have sex with straight men. It’s that if you’re wearing it, it makes any man queer — queer like you, and, even better, queer for you.
What are we to make of the experience of the Mormon boys? Maybe the effect of the buckle is to alter a man forever, so that the Mormon boys (and the state trooper and…) became forever, irrevocably, happily, queer. Or maybe its magic is one-time only, after which a man reverts to being a free agent, as it were, but with the memory of the genuine pleasures of gay sex, so that he might then choose to live on the rainbow road, as the Mormon boys seem to have done. (Yes, this does sound an awful lot like recruitment. I doubt that the makers of BuckleRoos thought through issues of free will and choice or the role, in our actions, of other people’s actions (as exemplars) and their encouragements to us, and of our own experiences — what if you tried it and you really liked it?).
The counterpart couple. I’ve already introduced Jimmy Joe, who first appeared in part 1. Now in part 2, from the Colt site:
Jimmy Joe … decides to try out for the team at his new school. In the locker room he meets Linc (Jason Kennedy, with a dark serious face and incredibly hairy legs) and goes for the quarterback sack – the sack in his jock, that is. Hawk sucks him down to the pubes like a pro, then Kennedy buries his face in Hawk’s butt before fucking him from several angles. In a turnover that will get lots of replay, Hawk then fucks Linc from the side [an easy, comfortable, often tender position for fucking — like spooning with a fuck bonus]. Both shoot loads worthy of their youth and follow up with some deep-throat kissing and declarations of new-found love… Jimmy Joe brings his new boyfriend home
Hawk and Kennedy in #7 on AZBlogX: Linc in the wild; face-fucking in the locker room; Jimmy Joe in the wild (with only a slight smile; mostly, he grins).
Jimmy Joe and Linc, full of professions of love, are also incredibly handsy boyfriends — all around, a distressing example to Kick and Jed, who’ve been hands-off best-buddies-only for ten years, and are now witnessing a touching demonstration of what they could have had — and ache to have — but have denied themselves, out of fear of losing themselves in one another. Kick moves out to the barn to escape the example of Jimmy Joe and Linc. Jed follows him, and they do the tender flip-fuck I described above. Love triumphs.
Marcus Iron. Dean Phoenix — thoughtful, amiable top, especially for hot twinks — is an old porn friend, and I’ve cited an earlier posting about him above. But Marcus Iron is essentially new to my blogs. He has a brief Wikipedia entry:
Marcus Iron (also Michael Loftis) [born October 18, 1974 in Montana] is an actor in gay pornography. He is a professional landscape architect and has appeared on the house renovation programme Curb Appeal (HGTV).
He began his gay porn career in 1997 at the age of 23; he’s versatile (well, a versatile top); like DP, he’s nicely muscled but not bulky or beefy; and has what counts as a hairy chest in gay porn. He and DP are a nice pairing, similar enough to imaginably be brothers, but significantly different in most of their facial features and in what they do with their eyes and mouths.
They inhabit the characters of Jed and Kick so well that, early on in the video I started to want to see more of them outside of their specifically sexual lives; in particular, for some reason I wanted to see them dance together, not slow dancing (that would have been way too intimate for them) but rocking out, abandoning themselves to the music the way they lose themsekves in sex. I wanted to see them shopping for things to make their meals and then doing the cooking together. I wanted to see them caring together for their cattle and their horses, the way men on a working ranch do. I wanted to see their garden. I wanted to see how they negotiated furnishing and decorating the house they lived in. I wanted to hear their small talk, their jokes, and their playful competitive banter. I wanted to see their horseplay. I wanted to see them argue. The video made them real enough that I wanted to know more of them. Just bits here and there would have done; I was, after all, there for the hot sex just as much as any other jack-off queer.
A few more notes on MI. The 2003 flick Iron Works, for one thing (#8 above). The title in part is a play on MI’s professional name, but then both the title and the name are plays on iron ‘penis’ — like wood, a noun referring to a naturally stiff substance often encountered in elongated objects (wood sticks or planks, iron bars). Green’s Dictionary of Slang has the word from 1533 and 1719 in double entendres, with its first straightforward cite in 1700. It also has two cites from dirty comic strips from the 1930s, reprinted in Tijuana Bibles (1997).
A bit later than this MI found a new career (in his late 30s) as an ubercocksucker for Paul Morris’s Treasure Island Media, in Suck Dick Save the World 2 (2011) — Morris is entirely earnest about that title — and Drunk on Cum 6 (2013), and in Morris’s accounts of the intense pleasure he and, especially, MI derive from their indulgence in glory hole sex. More on that in another posting.
By himself in the
Darkened rainbow
Sex room,
Cromo reflected on the
Secret of his
Crotch, found it was a
Flash piece of
Top-notch meat.
The caption reflects the ad copy from DJ:
PUMP! has propelled itself into the top-draw of men around the world due to their use of bright colours, mesh fabrics, sporty appeal and attention-seeking imagery. With Pump’s athletic designs, hit up the town in style with a flash piece of underwear from a top-notch brand.
DJ is from Australia, PUMP! is from Montrẻal. The slang adjective flash, from NOAD2:
informal, chiefly Brit. 1. (of a thing) ostentatiously expensive, elaborate, or up to date: a flash new car; (of a person) superficially attractive because stylish and full of brash charm: he was carrying this money around and trying to be flash. 2 archaic of or relating to thieves, prostitutes, [homosexuals] or the underworld, especially their language.
Cromo’s crotch is apparently ostentatious, stylish, attractive, and queer, all at once.
Yes, a toy tank, German WW II vintage, I think — a seriously phallic replica, a butch plaything (one among many) on nz’s board “pat”; nz’s other board is Endroits à visiter (‘Places to visit’). All of which conjures up, for me anyway, the image of a flamboyant, or even downright swishy, francophone Kiwi queer. But maybe nz’s a woman with a dykey bent to military personnel and heavy armaments. (I learn nothing on the net about who nz is, so I’m free to speculate wildly.)
This led me to an undoubtedly real Nelly Zwicky, a writer from — extravagant astonished gestures here! — the town of Mollis, canton Glarus, Switzerland. Where the Zwickys come from.
And it all made me wonder whether it was too late in life to take up a career as Swish Zwicky, the Divine Miss Z.
Swish is a US English slang term for effeminate behaviour and interests (camp), emphasized and sanctioned in gay male communities prior to the Stonewall riots.This behaviour is also described as being nelly in British English [and American as well], and both terms are often considered to be derogatory. Being swish stereotypically includes sashaying and the use of falsetto voices, feminine pronouns, and superlatives.
The article depends heavily on Martin Levine and Michael Kimmel’s Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone, which describes swish as the norm before Stonewall, then the ascent of butch as the new norm — a gross oversimplification of a complex state of affairs (I came out pre-Stonewall and became politically actuve post-Stonewall, so I have some first-hand knowledge of those times).
Two previous postings here. Item one, “Swish Exhibitionism” on 9/27/09, with a quotation from a t-shirt company:
Swish Embassy [note play on Swiss] is a Gay-owned and operated casual apparel company started in 2008. The inspiration for starting Swish Embassy was the observation that there should more options for fun, suggestive, relevant and appropriately fitted wear for gay men than the oversaturated chains that cater to Tweens rather than Queens.
Defiant celebration of swish queens. Work it, Mary! Meanwhile, we can expect swish cheese (all those holes, for the anally appreciative), swish watches (keeping Gay People’s Time), swish chocolate (flamboyant black men), Swish Army knives, swish cuckoo clocks, Swish Air, swish banks, and on and on.
the idea of homosexuality as sexual inversion continues as a powerful folk belief, with bull dykes and nelly queens as its poster people.
… A dose of reality: for the most part, bull dykes and nelly queens don’t at all see themselves as transgender, as “really” belonging to the opposite sex; instead, they see themselves as a particular kind of person of their own sex, and most are comfortable (or even defiant) in these identities.
Searching on “swish” and “Zwicky” together brought me to The Gilded Edge, with Kay Stanis embroidery classes, in particular the class Élégant Éventail:
The swish of a satin gown and the glow of times past are remembered in this gold and blue fan, or as the French would say élégant éventail. The foundation for creation is #24 Congress Cloth and the silk fibers used are flat silks, Zwicky twisted silk, and silk sewing thread. These combine with smooth, rough, and check purls; Faconnee; Jacerons and braids. The stitches included are vertical, horizontal, voided, and diagonal satin used flat and over padding. The students will also learn how to transfer parts of their own patterns and make a new thread composite from metal thread components. The focus of the class will be on padding and filling areas with purls. The student should be proficient in Blackwork and laying flat silk.
(Though I could have stopped with Zwicky twisted silk, from the Zwicky thread company, I left in all that technical description just for fun — and to get to laying flat silk, which sounds like an elegant sex act.)
But on to the Nelly Zwicky for whom there’s some record. From a Historical Dictionary of Switzerland entry of 1/12/14, translated and compressed:
b. 27.7.1872 at Obstalden (formerly Glarus North), d. 26.3.1946 in Mollis (now North Glarus), prot., Of Mollis. Single. Educated primarily by her parents and encouraged by them, Z. in 1897 published her first novel, Die Wacht an derRheingrenze [Watch on the Rhine Boundary, i.e., the French border], under the pseudonym Nelly Bergmann [‘mountain man’]. Others followed.
Including Pfarrer Melchior Zwicky’s Schicksal (Pastor Melchior Zwicky’s Fate) of 1939 (19 pages of family history, it seems). Apparently, she was also a mountaineer (hence, I suppose, the pseudonym).
Hmmm, a single woman vigorously pursuing a literary career on her own and devoted to mountain-climbing. We can only hope.
[Onomastic note. Yes, my Swiss grandfather’s name was Melchior. But my family, like many Swiss families, was parsimonious in its roster of personal names. For men, tons of Walter, Fritz, Kaspar, Arnold, and, yes, Melchior, over and over again, through a dozen generations and more. Genealogy can be tricky in the circumstances.]
(About semen and sex acts and facial expressions and slang and syntax — but, yes, semen is central to the posting, and there’s a lot of talk about sex acts in very plain terms. Only one photo, but it might make some people uneasy. So probably not for children or the sexually modest.)
Over on AZBlogX, a sale ad suggesting that the Lucas porn studio could supply you with a high-protein dessert for Thanksgiving: a splash of semen on your face. Lick and savor.
#1 there shows a man with a cumface, the result of a (cum) facial, the cum / jizz / spunk / cream / spooge supplied via the quite substantial cock also shown in the photo. On AZBlogX there are six more guys who’ve been facialed, who’ve gotten a facial (from a shooter), been given a facial (by a shooter), whose faces have been jizzed / spunked / creamed / spooged (by a shooter).
Crude slang terms have been underlined above. Some, like the seminal nounscum, jizz, spunk, cream, and spooge (these lists are not necessarily exhaustive) are quite widely known and used; similarly, the ejaculatory verbsshoot,come and the denominal jizz, spunk, cream, and spooge. But none of these are specific to the (cum) facial scenario; most of the rest are, and they are attested but rare, largely restricted to discussions of facials as a sexual practice (more on the sexual practice below). The term shooter for the person serving as Agent (the donor of the cum) in the sexual practice is mine; my counterpart term for the person serving as Patient (the recipient of the cum) is target, the term I also use for the affected person in gang sex (gangbangs, gangsucks, and piss bukkake).
My interest in the AZBlogX piece is focused on the facial expressions of guys getting cum shot on their faces — intensely focused (as in #1 on AZBlogX), smiling with pleasure, ecstatic (as in #2 on AZBlogX, a bukkake scene, with several shooters on a single target), adoring, sated (as in #5 on AXBlogX, showing dick-sharing, two targets each getting their measure of pleasure from a single shooter), or calmly satisfied, as in this photo (#4 on AZBlogX):
The targets’ faces usually express some kind of pleasure (unless they’ve got cum in their eyes), but there’s quite a range, already illustrated in earlier postings on AZBlogX, especially “Scruff cum” of 4/7/13 and “Cumshots and cumfaces” of 4/6/15.
You’ll note that facials are messy affairs, requiring significant clean-up. The messless alternative is internal ejaculation — a genuine technical term — in this case, in the mouth, whether open or (the usual case) closed. But there are good medical reasons for wanting to avoid internal ejaculation (whether oral or anal), at least if the shooter isn’t protected by prophylaxis (mechanical or pharmaceutical). So: external ejaculation instead: on some part of the target’s body, on some part of the shooter’s body, or in the shooter’s fist.
In most cases, external ejaculation has the additional virtue that the target can witness the cumshot, even participate in it. This provides a big emotional payoff for many gay men: we adore spurting, spraying, erupting displays of the essential fluid of masculinity. Taking it into your body, absorbing it as part of your own body, has one kind of emotional value; watching it shoot has another.
Then, shooting on the target’s body is symbolic of the shooter’s dominance over the target, subtler than fucking him or getting a blow job from him, but still significant: he’s claiming the target’s body as his territory.
Finally: of all the destinations for the cum in external ejaculation, several have special emotional power: the target’s buttocks and his crotch, as the foci of the target’s own sexual appeal, and his face, as the locus of his personality, indeed his humanity, as well as another focus of the target’s sexual appeal; we are facially oriented creatures.
That brings us to the cumface in the photo above, an image I’m guessing is beyond most of my readers’ experience (which is why it might make some of you uneasy). Getting facialed is, I think, a minority taste among gay men; it’s disliked and resented by women*; and of course it’s an appalling prospect to straight men (since it’s seen as both faggy and demeaning).
[* I interrupt this presentation with a note: two quotations illustrating the verb facial ‘give a cum facial, come on s.o.’s face’ and women’s antipathy to the practice:
TIFU [today I fucked up] by having sex with my boyfriend and he jizzed in my eyes so i hit the doorframe after we had sex and he facialed me [insert some separating punctuation here: a period, or at least a semicolon or a dash] did I mention I had sex? oh yeah and i had sex (link)
I just got facialed. I just got fucking facialed. Can you believe it? I’m his girlfriend, his better half, his significant other, his soon to be within a matter of 365 days his wife. And he facialed me. He fucking facialed me.! Ladies chivalry is motherfucking dead I tell you! Dead! It has to be dead when youre fiancé in the heat of reaching the climate of his sexual excitement decides to deposit the evidence of that heightend sexual excitement on your face. Wtf? No motherfucking respect none. He didn’t even ask me if he could facial me. (link)
A Bad Boyfriend plaint and a Bad Boyfriend rant.]
The true home of cum facials is gay porn, where it’s all over the place. Porn in general has to provide visible dicks (a goal totally defeated by internal ejaculation), and, especially, visible cumshots, as proof of potency on the part of the shooter (the audience for porn, gay or straight, is largely male). In gay porn, the idea is that if you can’t come in a guy’s mouth (or asshole), you can at least come on his face, and get him as close as possible to full participation in the event, with a frisson of submission and some naughty mess thrown in. And all that should make him happy.
As it does in porn (see the AZBlogX photos). And sometimes, in real life as well. I can vouch for that.
(Facials combine particularly well with scenes of glory hole sex — another minority taste among gay men, and a kind of encounter largely unknown among women and straight men. In any case, the two practices are among the conventional components of gay porn — of sex in fantasy Gayland — that are far from vanilla, far from everyday practices in male-male sex generally: rimming, watersports / piss play, gigantic anal sex toys, bdsm, daddy-boy relationships, sex in public, gang sex, orgies, athleticism, instant tricking (gay zipless fucks), and so on.)
Lexical and syntactic notes. First, on facial (originally an Adj derived from face) as N (by nouning the Adj) and V (by verbing the N), in a sexual (rather than cosmetic) sense: OED3 (Sept. 2009) and HDAS don’t have this facial as either N or V; GDoS has the N (from 1988 and 2001) but not the V; Urban Dictionary, however, has facial as V as well as N (and one entry has the N referring not only to the act but also to the cumload on the face).
On to the seminal Ns and ejaculatory Vs.
A partial inventory of seminal Ns:
mass Ns: the scientific Ns semen (a metaphor in Latin) and result or product N ejaculate (with unaccented final syllable); semen‘s literal English translation seed (now mostly poetic or jocular; also see note below); the everyday deverbal cum (usually so spelled); the slang Ns jizz, spunk, cream, spooge; goo, (man) milk, (man) mayo, all still, as far as I can tell, playfully metaphorical
count Ns: the metonymic or abbreviated load ‘load of cum, cumload’; the metaphorical shot; a set of not-yet-lexicalized product or result (metaphorical) Ns spurt, shower, squirt, jet, etc.
Note, from OED2: seed, sense 4. = semen n. Now rare. [1st cite in OE; notable cite 1914 Jack London letter of 24 Feb.: “I have never wantonly scattered my seed.”]
A partial inventory of ejaculatory Vs:
the scientific V ejaculate; the lexicalized metaphorical V shoot; a set of not-yet-lexicalized metaphorical Vs spurt, shower, squirt, jet, etc.; everyday slang come (in an old metaphor turning on the image of arriving at a destination; on the history, see note below); slang denominals cum (see note below), jizz, spunk, cream, spooge; the Vs seed and breed, used as transitive (internal-)ejaculatory verbs in describing bareback anal sex (He seeded/bred me / my ass)
Note, from OED2come, sense 17. To experience sexual orgasm. Also with off. slang. [1st cite 1650; notable cite 1969 Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint: “Did you warn her you were going to shoot, or did you just come off and let her worry?” — note bonus of ejaculatory shoot]
Note: there’s a competition, not merely orthographic, between everyday slang V come (PST came, PSP come) and denominal V cum (PST/PSP cummed); they are syntactically as well as morphologically distinct: He cummed/came on my face BUT He cummed/*came my face.
A few syntactic notes, using the Vs jizz, spunk, and cream as exemplars; other ejaculatory Vs may be more restricted::
all can be used intransitively, without a direct object (even an implicit one): He suddenly jizzed, He jizzed in his pants
but also with reflexive direct object: He jizzed himself either ‘He jizzed on himself, on his body’ OR roughly ‘He jizzed in his pants’
and with cognate direct objects: He jizzed .. his load / a huge load / a shot .. (of cum)
but also with location objects, both oblique and direct: He jizzed/creamed (in) his jeans / (in) my ass/butt ‘anus, asshole’, He jizzed/creamed (on) my face / (on) my ass/butt ‘buttocks’; note the locational ambiguity of He jizzed/creamed my ass
and some with human objects: He jizzed/spunked me; with location specified He jizzed/spunked me in the/my mouth/ass, on the/my face/ass/chest
Some background on this blog.
from 4/26/11, “Argument structure in porn” (which some readers have seen as triumph of pedantry), on (1) Oh yeah, shoot my ass! as (2) ‘shoot [your cum] on my ass, ejaculate on my buttocks’ [ONTO reading] or (3) ‘shoot [your cum] in(to) my ass, ejaculate in(to) my anus’ [INTO reading]
from 10/31/16, “Annals of verbing and poetic meter” (in which I get things not quite right):
First fact: the verbing of spunk ‘semen’ has been going on since the 19th century, largely in Umliterature. Green’s Dictionary of Slang has as its first sense for spunk as a verb:
(also spunk off, spunk up) to ejaculate
with a first cite in 1888-94 from My Secret Life and (among others) a 2000 cite from M. Manning in Get Your Cock Out: “spunking all over the wall”.
The plain verb verb spunk, without a particle off or up, has very nearly the same syntax as the sexual slang verb shoot ‘ejaculate’ (note: the aggression verb shoot is irrelevant here); label the sexual verb shoot-SX. Both are almost always intransitive (like ejaculate and sexual come) — I shot-SX / spunked on his belly but *I shot-SX / spunked him on his belly. [This claim I now see to be inaccurate, in the face of examples from vernacular speech and writing; the best we might be able to say is that trasitive uses are less frequent than intransitive ones.] The notable exception to this generalization is that cognate objects — object NPs with a head N denoting ejaculate — are possible with spunk just as with shoot-SX:
I spunked / shot-SX a (big) load (of cum / spunk / jizz / spooge / etc.) on his belly…
Play-poetic bonus. All this seminal-ejaculatory exploration reminded me of the vocabulary play in Reamin’ Semen’s sad ballad “Lonely Man Shots” (2016):
Jizz in my skivvies
Jizz in my briefs
Milk in my silks
Cream in my jeans, seed in my Levi’s
Sticky goo in my Fruit of the Looms
Spooge in my Speedos
Spunk in my trunks
Cum in my AussieBums
A load in my lonesome Lees
A shot in my hot jock
Man mayo alone in my Marco Marcos
Me and my solitary semen
RS acknowledges his debts to Paul Rhymin’ Simon and to “Lonesome Day Blues”, “Lonesome Whistle Blues”, Hank Williams’s “Long Gone Lonesome Blues”, and Slim Dusty’s “Lonely Lonesome Blues”.
(Some may find the topic distasteful; take the title as a gauge of the content to follow.)
Another essay on the seminal-ejaculatory vocabulary of vernacular English, following on the discussion in my “Face work” posting of the 27th: on the seminal N sperm (not in the earlier posting) and its verbing; more on the seminal N and ejaculatory V jizz; and a note on the SquirtJet word spew.
The title. Ok, the fun first. Two pieces of off-color word play, chained together.
“Sperm, sperm, wonderful sperm” is buffoonery on Monty Python’s “Spam, spam, wonderful spam” (already a deeply silly sketch and song, featuring British drag-housewives, hearty singing Norsemen, and of course canned processed meat product):
And “all that jizz”, a play on the musical film title All That Jazz, itself a play on the ambiguity between jazz as the name of a musical genre and the jazz ‘nonsense; stuff’ in the slang idiom (and) all that jazz, with a whiff of sex in uses of jazz to refer to fucking and to cum (and in director Bob Fosse’s high-energy homosexuality).
All That Jazz is a 1979 American musical film directed by Bob Fosse. The screenplay by Robert Alan Aurthur and Fosse is a semi-autobiographical fantasy based on aspects of Fosse’s life and career as dancer, choreographer and director. The film was inspired by Bob Fosse’s manic effort to edit his film Lenny while simultaneously staging the 1975 Broadway musical Chicago. It borrows its title from the Kander and Ebb tune “All That Jazz” in that production.
On relevant senses of jazz from GDoS:
jazz 3 in fig. uses. (a) (orig. US) misleading, untrue, empty or preposterous talk, nonsense [1st cite 1917]; (b) (US) anything, stuff … 4 (US) semen [1st cite in 1932, from Alan Walker Read’s collection of mensroom graffiti]
all that jazz [sense 3a above] (orig. US) that sort of thing [AZ: similar to stuff, junk, shit], usu. following a list of proper nouns …and all that jazz. [1st cite 1958 E. Frankel. Band of Brothers: “I’m a sucker for tradtion, Captain. You know, ‘Marines never say die,’ and all that jazz.”]
Seminal-ejaculatory sperm. On the N sperm in OED2:
Etymology: < Old French esperme (French sperme), sparme, or Latin sperma (hence also Italian sperma, Spanish esperma, Portuguese esperma), < Greek σπέρμα, < the stem of σπείρειν to sow.
[main sense:] The generative substance or seed of male animals (esp. of vertebrates). [1st cite from Chaucer; generally scientific or at least formal]
But it’s been extended to (generally playful and slightly off-color) slang uses, exploited for its assonance in the compound sperm-burper (‘someone who performs fellatio’; ‘male homosexual; as a general term of abuse), and verbed in the rhyming phrase sperm the worm ‘to masturbate’ (all as reported by GDoS, all from 1993 or later).
The N has been more widely verbed in vernacular uses, notably in several examples of He spermed my ass ‘he ejaculated internally in my anus, that is, he came in my asshole’, from the gay male area of the Nifty website.
[Extended digression on the Nifty (nifty ‘particularly good, skillful, or effective’ (NOAD2)) lgbt site: “Nifty Erotic Stories Archive. Established 1992. Over 235,000 stories by over 10,000 authors.” Further fascinating information from Wikipedia:
Nifty.org was used as a source for one million words of gay male erotic narratives, and a comparison million words of lesbian erotic narratives, by Paul Baker of Lancaster University, in a study of “the identity constructions and language use of those who are viewed as ideal sexual partners; important themes or narrative patterns within the texts which reveal the discourses of sexuality that the authors have accessed; [and] the language that gay consumers/creators of erotic texts find to be sexually arousing”.
[reference footnote:] “Querying Keywords Questions of Difference, Frequency, and Sense in Keywords Analysis”, Journal of English Linguistics, Vol. 32, No. 4, December 2004, pp. 346-359. This study included by [Paul] Baker, under the title “As big as a beercan. A comparative keyword analysis of lesbian and gay male erotic narratives”, in Public Discourses of Gay Men, London, New York, Routledge, 2005, … reissued unchanged in 2013
The Nifty gay male categories:
adult friends, adult youth [i.e., adult + youth], athletics, authoritarian, beginnings [of sexual attraction], camping [and outdoors], celebrity, college, encounters [quick tricks], first time, high school, historical, incest, interracial, masturbation, military, no sex, non-English, relationships, rural, science fiction or fantasy, urination [and raunch], young friends [sex between kid friends]
The stuff appears pretty much as submitted, so it ranges hugely in the niftiness (both quality and effectiveness) of the writing, but it is a splendid source of vernacular language, including both British and American usage (and sometimes even from different regions in the UK and the US), and the usage of both younger and older men.]
Notes on jizz. Jizz (both N and V) has gradually become my favorite item of slang in the seminal-ejaculatory zone; it’s got spunk.
OED2 under jizm gives the spelling variants chism, chissum, gism, jissum, jizzum, jisum, jissom, jizz (go for the monosyllable in sex talk, I say), and admits that its origin is unknown. Otherwise:
slang (orig. U.S.) 1. Energy, strength. [1st cite 1842] 2. Semen, sperm. Often regarded as a taboo-word [1st cite 1899; notable quote 1968 John Updike Couples: “Georgene would wash herself before and after. Said his jizz ran down her leg, too much of it.”]
(The shift from ‘energy, strength’ to ‘semen, sperm’ is straightforward, with cum seen as the essence and symbol of male energy and strength.)
[Added 11/30. The verb jizz got a boost from the comedy sketch “Jizz in My Pants” by the group The Lonely Planet, which garnered lots of attention when their “Dick in a Box” sketch appeared on Saturday Night Live; see my 12/30/15 posting on this blog. “Jizz in My Pants” has a narrative-present V. The guy describes some apparently innocuous encounter that sets him off: so and so happens “and then I jizz in my pants”. So now we have Andy Samberg, star of this sketch, in a visual meme:
Sometimes the verb is converted to a narrative past: “and then I jizzed in my pants”.]
The SquirtJet item spew. SquirtJet is my (recently devised) name for a class of English words not yet conventionalized in use both as ejaculatory Vs (referring metasphorically to the act of ejaculation) and as seminal Ns (referring to the product or result of that act); the examples I gave in my “Face work” posting are spurt, shower, squirt, jet. It’s not always clear which is basic and which derived synchronically (squirt feels more V-like to me, jet more N-like, but those are just subjective impressions), so I prefer just to label them as SquirtJet words.
SquirtJet Vs tend to resist straightforwardly transitive uses, in examples parallel to He shot/jizzed/spunked my ass ‘he ejaculated on(to) my ass/buttocks’ or ‘he ejaculated in(to) my ass/asshole’ — things like He spurted/squirted/jetted my ass. But maybe such examples will eventually, um, come.
In any case, spew (encountered as N in my Nifty explorations) is yet another SquirtJet word. No doubt there are still more I haven’t noticed.
The Steam Room Stories video of December 1st, “Camping It Up”, which came to me this morning, is all about performing effeminacy; you can watch it here. (Actors: Ray Tezanos, Evan Bonifant, Raif Derrazi.)
Two of the steam room guys are gaily camping it up — girl, bitch as affectionate address terms, campy repartee, sexual inuendo, gay voice, effeminate hand gestures and facial expressions — when a third regular (played by Derrazi) betrays his heterosexuality (Derrazi, the model/actor/bodybuilder, is in fact gay), which means to the others that they’re not in the gay space they had thought they were, so they switch to butch mode and turn on him angrily. Derrazi confesses he just wanted to be one of them, because straight men are so boring.
[Digression: there’s established gay slang for dropping hints, intentionally or inadvertently, of one’s homosexuality (attested since at least the 1960s): to drop one’s beads,pearls, or (hair)pins. But there are no counterparts for dropping hints of one’s heterosexuality; I suggest to drop one’s tool belt or hard hat. In most contexts there’s not much use for such expressions, since heterosexuality is assumed to be the state of nature, but in specifically gay spaces such idioms could sometimes, um, come in handy. And then GDoS has keep your hairpins up “maintain a ‘normal’ mask”.]
The two gay characters confront Derrazi’s character by saying that of course they don’t act this way all the time — “try acting like that in a Walmart … in Kentucky” — and Derrazi responds:
I was hoping to be schooled from you. … Look, everyone loves gay men – your clever repartee, your wit, your mastery of pop culture. I was hoping that by hanging around you guys I would pick up some of your fun, frolicking fabulousness and it would transfer onto me and make me someone worth being around.
(Love “fun, frolicking fabulousness”.)
Of course, lots of gay men are not particularly effeminate; some are, as an everyday thing; and some can perform effeminacy on occasion, by camping it up.
From HDAS:
camp v. Homosex. to display exggeratedly effeminate mannerisms. [first cite:] 1925 McAlmon Silk Stockings 10: His camping manner, copied from stage fairies in America, sat strangely upon him. [HDAS has n. and adj. uses in the early 20th c.]
camp it up Orig. Homosex. to camp, above; (also) to make an ostentatious or affected display; ham it up. [notable cite: 1966-71 Karlen Sex. & Homosex. 356: The homosexual camping it up at a gay party is saying, “You see, ladies, … I can play your game more extravagantly than you.”
England has had its share of men who publicly camp it up. The queen of this camp is surely Julian Clary, with his gay voice and gestures; outrageous costumes and makeup; sexual innuendo; self-awareness of his role; and in fact sweet disposition (his occasional bitchiness is mostly playful and affectionate). Clary is, well, lots of fun. A few highlights from Wikipedia:
Julian Peter McDonald Clary (born 25 May 1959) is an English comedian and novelist. Openly gay, Clary began appearing on television in the mid-1980s and became known for his deliberately stereotypical camp style. Since then he has also acted in films, television and stage productions
… He entered the alternative comedy scene in the early 1980s, first under the alias “Gillian Pieface”, and later as “The Joan Collins Fanclub”. He wore heavy glam make-up and dressed in outrageous clothes, often involving leather/PVC and hinting at bondage. His pet dog “Fanny the Wonder Dog”, a whippet, also featured in performances
… After a number of appearances on Friday Night Live in the mid-late 1980s, Clary co-hosted the short-lived ITV game show Trick or Treat in 1989 with Mike Smith, before achieving greater success later that year with his own high-camp Channel 4 gameshow, Sticky Moments with Julian Clary. More a vehicle for his brand of humour than a genuine gameshow, Sticky Moments was a light-hearted “non-quiz” satire, with him often awarding points because he liked the contestants, rather than because they possessed a particular skill or aptitude. He later starred in the 1992 audience participation sitcom Terry and Julian with Lee Simpson, again for Channel 4. His next series was the BBC’s studio-based All Rise for Julian Clary in 1996, in which he played a judge in a mock courtroom setting.
… He is married to Ian Mackley – the pair have been a couple since 2005, and were married on 19 November 2016. They live in Aldington, Kent, at Goldenhurst Farm, a 17th-century manor house once owned by Noël Coward. [Coward was another notable, though much more restrained, English camper.]
Despite the extravagance of his performances, Clary manages to get his audiences on his side, to take them into the joke. Isn’t this just so preposterous! Let’s enjoy it!
From a Facebook discussion between a black woman T, a white guy C, and me, over the interpretation of a baffling — because drastically poor in detail — news story involving two young black men, a set of store employees, and a policeman: the guys asked for sliced cheese; an employee said the store didn’t carry it; the employee then herded the staff into a back room, locked it, and called the police; the cop who turned up told the guys they had to leave the store or they’d be arrested. T and I suspected that race might have been involved in the incident, and I was especially dubious about the sliced cheese part of the story; C maintained that race was not at issue, and in any case we didn’t have enough information to suspect that it did. At this point, T to C:
please don’t use your woke status to affirm your reading of the story and to presume that Arnold is alone in his side eye.
That is, my figurative side eye (or side-eye): I didn’t actually look sideways to express distrust or disbelief, but I certainly did express those attitudes (verbally rather than visually).
Slang check. The adjective woke ‘be socially aware’ (about the situation of black people), especially in the collocation stay woke, has spread relatively recently in AAVE. It’s natural for T to use it of C.
The compound side eye ‘a sidelong glance conveying disapproval, contempt, criticism, animosity, scorn; shock, surprise; distrust, disbelief’ (combining glosses from a number of different sources), on the other hand, turns out not to be particularly associated with black America, though, as it happens, I first heard it used by black speakers. Two illustrations of the gesture, from Justice Sonia Sotormayor and comedian Bernie Mac:
Now, on the expression and also the word, from Merriam-Webster’s “Words We’re Watching” site, the piece “The History of ‘Side-eye’: We have our eyes on this one. Chances are you’ve been on both ends of the side-eye. It’s that sidelong look, that glance or gaze that doesn’t want to involve the front of the face, but instead says way more by shifting to the corners of the looker’s eyes”:
People have of course been using side-eye forever, but the term side-eye (also styled side eye) is only newly popular. Since the end of the first decade of the 21st century it’s been increasingly used in major publications.
At its core, the term is about a physical act that communicates any number of things: suspicion, scorn, annoyance, jealousy, veiled curiosity. When we use the word, the context explains what the look being referred to expresses:
It’s this friendship, presented with utter sincerity, that serves as the movie’s emotional rudder. Though there’s humor in the unexpected pairing, the actors play it with the innocence of children who do not yet count the judging side-eye as part of their vocabularies. — Eliza Berman, Time, 18 Mar. 2016
The guy who stole your heart as the class clown can seem like just a clown out of his original context, like when people are giving him side-eye for cracking lame jokes in the hostess line. — Lauren Panariello, Cosmopolitan, July 2014
NZ comedian Steve Wrigley later commented that Kiwis have a unique habit of laughing enthusiastically, while at the same time sounding like they aren’t sure if they should be, and shooting a sneaky side-eye at their neighbours to make sure they are laughing too. — The Dominion Post (Wellington, New Zealand), 27 Apr. 2010
It’s often (and increasingly) used with the:
For the most part, the singular focus on results washes away concerns about getting the side-eye from a colleague judging you for not being in your cubicle, said Jack O’Laughlin, executive director of employment experiences at Edmunds. — Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz, The Chicago Tribune, 18 Mar. 2016
Suddenly, Eddie … is attracting the attention of barons of the boardroom …, bullies on the street … and some mysterious third guy who keeps giving him the side eye and chasing him around Manhattan. — Cary Darling, The Detroit Free Press, 18 Mar. 2011
Newly ubiquitous though the word may be, it’s not a new term at all. James Joyce used it in Ulysses, published in 1922:
A side eye at my Hamlet hat. If I were suddenly naked here as I sit? I am not. Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun’s flaming sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands.
But he was by no means the first. Our earliest evidence of side-eye in use is from 1797:
Here we come to what calls for the strongest eye-sight, the most steadfast gazing. Our being in Adam has been looked on with a side eye. The subject has provoked dislike; I may almost say, contempt. It is now painful to speak of it. — Remembrancer For Lord’s Day Evenings, 19 Mar. 1797
We’ve also seen some evidence of verb use, with the earliest example dating to 1916, but most evidence dating to the current decade:
In his mind’s-eye he saw himself associating with actor-folk, who invariably side-eye him and whispered among themselves: “That’s Alonzo Gubbins —frightfully wealthy — just about the real backing of the Frohman ventures –though, of course, Frohman is putting up the name and reputation!” — The Arizona Republican, 26 Aug. 1916
I naturally and perpetually side-eye every woman who can rock a pointed-toe shoe with ease. How divine your black, nude or brightly colored shoe looks on your tiny foot. — Lauren Porter, Essence, 23 Mar. 2016
With Zika Virus Headed North, American Scientists Side-Eye Asian Tiger Mosquitoes — headline, Inverse (inverse.com), 9 Mar. 2016
One other thing about side-eye: in these modern times, there’s some debate about what exactly side-eye is — in particular, about whether or not a turn of the head disqualifies a sidelong glance from being side-eye. Some say you have to keep your head steady and straight ahead and do it all with your eyes.
From a lexicographer’s perspective, the jury is very much still out on that. If people refer to both versions as side-eye, then both versions qualify. We’ll see if that changes. In the meanwhile, throw side-eye however you like. We won’t take it personally.
Even stronger: stink-eye. These explorations took me to another eye-rejection compound, stink-eye, that I had also heard first from black speakers. This, too, seems not to have any strong connection to black speech.
From GDoS:
stink-eye (US) an aggressive, hostile look. 1989 shot the dude a direct stink-eye … 2007 Not a hug, not a handshake, just the fuckin’ stink-eye all night
give someone the stink-eye (v.) to stare at someone in a hostile manner. 1999 Vic gave Jay some of that piping-hot stink-eye …
stink-eye v. to stare at in a hostile manner … 2005 The clerk just stink-eyed the greenback
There seems to be a general feeling that stink-eye is more extreme, more malevolent, than side-eye, but the evidence is uncertain. For one thing, the very same photos (of Michelle Obama, for instance) appear as examples of both; only the heading or caption differs. On the other hand, some stink-eye photos do seem more extreme that your typical side-eye photo — but not because of what the subject’s eyes are doing (which is side-eye), but because of what their mouth is doing in addition (a lip curl or sneer, for example). An especially nice example, from the character Sam Weir in the U.S. tv show Freaks and Geeks, as played by John Francis Daley (later Lance Sweets on Bones):
(“Freaks and Geeks is an American teen comedy-drama television series, created by Paul Feig, with Judd Apatow as executive producer, that aired on NBC during the 1999–2000 television season.” (Wikipedia link))
One more: the eye-roll. The side-eye or stink-eye is directed at someone; it’s an aggressive act. Other eye-rejection gestures are aversive, and the most dramatic of these is the eye-roll, illustrated here dramatically by Saturday Night Live‘s Tina Fey:
The OED has citations for roll the/one’s eyes back to the 15th century (Milton, Paradise Lost; Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece), but referring to a gesture conveying lust. The aversive gesture is iconic and might well be universal or nearly so. But the great fashion for it among teenage girls seems to be relatively recent; in this context, it can sometimes be passive-aggressive, but very often it seems to be a display of independence.
More terminology for eye gestures conveying aggression and/or rejection. Just three more idioms that occurred to me: to look daggers at (someone), to give (someone) a dirty look, to give (someone) the hairy eyeball. I haven’t researched their histories.
Senator Batson D. Belfry, beltway blowhard, was originally a take-off of former Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neil. He has evolved over the years and, these days, typifies what outside-the-beltway Americans consider to be the quintessential politician: You can’t trust him as far as you can throw him, and he’s so big, you can’t throw him very far. (link to the strip site)
Shoe is an American comic strip about a motley crew of newspapermen, all of whom are birds. It was written and drawn by its creator, cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, from September 13, 1977 until his death in 2000. It has since been continued by Chris Cassatt, Gary Brookins and Susie MacNelly.
While not politically oriented in the style of strips such as Doonesbury, Shoe often pokes fun at various social and political issues of the day (especially when Senator Batson D. Belfry makes an appearance).
Backtracking a bit: the association in English between bats and insanity (presumably from the erratic flying of bats), as in the slang adjactive batty ‘crazy’ and the idiom (have) bats in the belfry seems to be originally American and relatively recent (beginning of the 20th century), despite some ingenious story-telling that would make it earlier.
On to batshit, N, Adj, and Adv, from GDoS:
batshit n. also batcrap. 1. lies, nonsense, rubbish; also as excl. [play on bullshit] [first cite 1943]
batshit adj. … insane, crazy, also as adv.; thus go batshit v., to become insane, to act crazily; drive batshit v., to drive mad. [first cite:] 1966 R. Stone Hall of Mirrors (1987) 202: You’re batshit.
An entertaining development this morning on ADS-L, from Stephen Goranson:
Speaking of Batson D. Belfry…, in 1990 an American Egyptologist using the name Batson D. Sealing submitted an article to the British periodical Discussions in Egyptology. The article claimed to reproduce from an old New Orleans periodical a text in an unknown language. It was a fake periodical issue, but imitated an issue of a real one. The text was in Demotic, which the new article misleadingly translated. It was actually a (modern) translation into Demotic of parts of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. It was set in type for publication and was written up in The Financial Times as a great discovery before being recognized as a hoax the next week
Xmas tradition that my kids love. Mac Daddy Santa is back! –TW
A lot of people seem to be distressed by the display of his nipples (too sexualized); some by his apparently adopting the persona of a pimp, and a black pimp at that (Woods is famously multiracial); some by his displaying his body at all at his age (Woods is about to be 41).
On mack in GDoS, which notes it as a short form of much older slang mackeral:
(also mac, maq, maque) [early 15C-mid-17C SE mackeral a pimp, pander or procuress ult. Fr. maquereau a pimp … 1 (US Und.) a pimp [1st cite from 1908] …
Then, from this, mack daddy (also mac daddy):
1 (US black) a successful pimp or criminal [from 1959 on] [the Great MacDaddy, protagonist of an African-American rhyme of the 1950s] 3 (US black) an important, influential black man, a power in the community, a very successful or skilful man [from 1993 on] 4 (US black) a handsome, virile man [1st in 1997-2001 Online Slang Dict.] 5 (US campus) anything or anybody that is considered the best (Eble 1995)
The sense development depends on the black pimp as a figure of power and significance. But even as the expression has been extended to non-sexual contexts (while preserving its strong positive evaluation) and then out of black communities into wider usage, a whiff of prostitution and the exploitation and abuse of women still clings to it, all the more since the older usage is still going strong, as in the Urban Dictionary’s top-ranked definition for mac daddy:
The pimp-meister, the king of the streetwalkers, possessor of the blingest of bling-bling. The mac daddy is the man who means everything (and the only man who really means anything) to his ladies of the night. [by hux 5/22/03]
So I would be very cautious about adopting the mac daddy persona (complete with black sunglasses, ostentatious watch, and black ballcap) for fun. Yes, the kids probably don’t get the pimp connection, seeing their father in costume merely as portraying a strong black man, worthy of respect (and they don’t know the history and social context of mac daddy). But readers of TW’s tweet are not so innocent and might well be disturbed by the image.
Now for something completely different, and (I think) genuinely lighthearted: a small San Francisco restaurant (1453 18th St., on Potrero Hill) named Mac Daddy, because its specialties are “playful mac ‘n’ cheese combos, salads & American sides”. Part of a trend in restaurants turning comfort food into exquisite upscale specialities. I mean, like truffle mac ‘n’ cheese.
Widely reported, in the middle of stories about the extension of the 2nd Avenue subway in NYC, a piece about Vik Muniz’s mural in the 96th St. station, with over three dozen mosaics of typical New Yorkers waiting for a train, including this gay male couple holding hands:
There’s a nice story about these men, “Meet the Gay Couple Holding Hands in That Groundbreaking NYC Subway Mural”, an interview with the men by Alexander Kacala on the (informatively named) Unicorn Booty site on the 3rd.
New York is the gayest place in the world. We all know this, right? I don’t have stats on me right now, but you sign on to a dating app and instantly are bombarded with the profiles of a hundred men less than a few feet away. In short, New York is gay AF [flag on gay AF, below].
So why did it take so long for us to get some gay AF public art?
… Not only did New York get a brand-new subway line and three shiny new subway stations, it also got its first permanent, non-political LGBTQ piece of public art.
… The 96th Street Station is especially bougie [flag on bougie, below]. One of the things making it extra fabulous is a captivating mural by Vik Muniz. “Over three dozen mosaic portraits depicting everyday New Yorkers waiting for a train adorn the walls of the new line,” Buzzfeed writes.
One of those portraits is of married couple Thor Stockman and Patrick Kellogg.
The couple is particularly proud of their participation in the project because they don’t feel represented in popular culture. “Our friends were happy that this is gay representation on the walls of New York City, but our friends were even happier that this is gay representation that is not incredibly beautiful and skinny,” Kellogg tells The New York Post.
…. TS: I should have expected all the hate spewed out on the internet — ”Disgusting perverts!” — but I am still surprised by how upset some people get over something so minor as two men holding hands. Some are saying it will get defaced. But the big surprise was a lot of the criticism from gays and lesbians that we’re too white, too male, not queer enough, too old, too out-of-shape — you name it — to properly represent NYC’s vast and varied LGBTQ communities. And to that I kind of have to agree, but I also encourage everyone that if you don’t feel that the art out there represents you, to make art that does. Write the stories and songs, make the paintings and comics and films that show the world just how fierce and fabulous we are.
PK: I was shocked at the internet trolls. Upon seeing the mosaic, some commenters replied “yuck” (and worse, much much worse). It’s weird that two men holding hands would cause a strong reaction in 2017. We’re not even kissing. One webpage spun out a whole conspiracy theory about how this mosaic was trying to get more people to become gay, that Muniz was part of a “Hollywood cabal” of pro-gay artists churning out propaganda.
A piece of background, about Muniz, an artist I posted about on 9/29/11, in “Vik Muniz (and me)”, about his mosaics. He’s an originally Brazilian artist, working in NYC for some time; much of his work is explicitly “political”, on various fronts. His stuff is sensitive to queer issues, to a degree that some just assume he’s queer.
On complaints from LGBTQ people that Stockman and Kellogg are insufficiently representative of the diversity of the community: there’s no way, of course, that one couple could represent this diversity; only if about a third of the travelers in the mosaic were identifiable as LBGTQ would it come close to representing the diversity of the community, but then it would fail to represent the diversity of New York City.
On the shocking hateful responses to the image of two men holding hands: I’ve never understood the depth of these reactions, which both terrify and enrage me. Terrify me, because they seem always to be on the verge of setting off gay-bashing. Enrage me, because they have te effect of constraining my freedom of action in ways that straight people would never accept.
Linguistics note 1: gay AF. Short for gay as fuck ‘really really gay’. In an idiom pattern
Adj as Expletive (for Expletives hell, shit, fuck, at least)
gay as fuck is one of the two sources of the tv series title Queer as Folk, the other being the British informal aphorism there’s nowt so queer as folk ‘people are funny’ (i.e., people behave oddly).
Linguistics note 2: bougie. A complicated story here, part of which goes back to French bougie ‘(wax) candle’; but the relevant part of which goes back to French bourgeois (from bourg ‘town’) ‘of or characteristic of the middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes’ (NOAD2). An abbreviated version bougie (with several alternative spellings) of bourgeois (in the sense ‘taking on the attitudes and lifestyle of the middle classes’ (GDoS)) came into slang use some time ago (first attestation in GDoS, 1976), often with negative connotations (of pretentiousness and the like). This use of bougie is especially widespread among U.S. black speakers, but it has wider usage as well.
Then, in an interesting development not recognized (yet) in GDoS, the word has been ameliorated to uses conveying ‘stylish, fashionable, fabulous’ (possibly ‘faabulous’) — as in “The 96th Street Station is especially bougie” in Unicorn Booty’s gay-hip intro above.
(Mostly about language, but male bodies and bodyparts play significant roles.)
Yesterday, a posting about a fantasy agency supplying male hustlers, featuring two meat + N compounds: meat market ‘sexual marketplace’ and meatmen ‘men considered as sexual objects’ (as bodies as wholes, but especially as assemblages of sexual parts — cock, balls, and ass). The interplay of two senses of meat here (the body, especially the male body, as a whole vs. the central masculine bodypart, the penis) led me to two joking uses of meat, in a Pat Byrnes New Yorker cartoon from 2001 (in which the ‘animal flesh as food’ sense of meat is central) and a piece of advice on the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss from Joseph Francis some years ago (in which the ‘body as sexual object’ sense is central).
Pat Byrnes is an American cartoonist best known for his work for The New Yorker. He created the comic strip Monkeyhouse, which ran for three years.]
Then on figurative developments from the primary sense, from GDoS:
1 a body, usu. a woman’s, as an object of sexual pleasure [1st cite 1515-16; in the gay world, the body in question is usually a man’s, as in the Francis quote]
2 (also lump of meat, piece of meat) the penis [1st cite c. 1564]
3 the vagina [1st cite 1611]
The sense development in 2 is presumably metaphorical — penis as like a piece of meat — while the development in 3 is pretty much a classic whole-for-(central)-part metonymy.
meat ‘body’. From a 5/1/16 posting with a caption for a shot of a man in his underwear:
He scrutinized himself pitilessly in the
Mirror, as a piece of meat to feed the
Hot guys
The development is from meat as food, providing one kind of pleasure, to meat as providing other sorts of pleasures — visual, tactile, sexual.
That brings us to the compounds meat market and meat rack, referring to places where bodies are made available to others. From GDoS:
meat market as a place, usu. for sexual encounters:
(a) a rendezvous for prostitutes of either sex [first cite 1896]
(b) (US) any situation or place where people are regarded as commodities, such as a recruiting agency ior a modelling agency [first cite 1941]
(c) anywhere that people gather for the primary purpose of finding sexual partners [first cite 1957, in a college context]
(d) in fig. use, the world of commercial sexuality [first cite 1967]
meat rack (orig. gay) a place, such as a bar or a particular street, where homosexuals display their charms to potential customers [this should be revised to “potential sexual partners”, since the encounters are not necessarily commercial]. After the ‘singles bar’ explosion of the 1970s, the term was extended to heterosexuality. [1st cite 1963, from John Rechy’s City of Night, referring to a cruisy L.A. park; 2nd 1978 from Larry Kramer’s Faggots, referring to the hook-up area of Fire Island Pines on the Long Island NY coast]
meat ‘penis’. Very common uses here in the (rhyming) slang idiom beat one’s meat ‘masturbate, jack off’ and the slang idiom eat s.o.’s meat ‘fellate s.o., suck s.o.’s cock’. The latter has been the source of numerous double entendres on the ‘food’ sense of meat, as on the
EAT MY MEAT
cookout apron from Crazy Dog Tshirts in Rochester NY (on Amazon for $26.99)
The Meatmen are an American punk band headed by Tesco Vee, originally existing from 1981 to 1997. They were known for their outrageous stage antics and offensive lyrics. They reformed in 2008 and continue to tour and record. (Wikipedia link)
Tesco Vee (born Robert Vermeulen; 1955) is a Michigan-based punk rock musician and co-founder of Touch and Go Records zine. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he is a former elementary school teacher and the founding member, and front man, of punk bands The Meatmen, Tesco Vee’s Hate Police, Blight, and Dutch Hercules. (Wikipedia link)
And in the song “It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion”, whose title has itself become a catchphrase and an idiom. Glosses from Wiktionary:
When it comes to sexual satisfaction, penis size doesn’t matter, but technique does.
(more generally) The tools you use to accomplish a goal are not as important as what you do with them.
Originally a 1951 song by Lois Mann and Henry Glover, recorded by The Swallows; you can listen to it here. It’s probably now known best through the cover Maria Muldaur recorded in 1999, which you can listen to here.
Finally, there is of course phallic meat in the world of gay porn, as in this reference to prime meat in the liner notes for Choice Cuts (1983 HIS Video starring J.W. King):
All-beef weenies on the rampage! From hard hats to surfers, students to street hustlers, Choice Cuts shows you Southern California from a distinctly male U.S.D.A. prime meat in action perspective.
(It starts with dough and cross-dressing and eventually touches on several sexy topics. So: definitely racy, but probably not enough to frighten the horses in the street.)
Today’s Rhymes With Orange portrays the kinky side of the Pillsbury Doughboy, Poppin’ Fresh (the advertising icon and mascot of the Pillsbury Company):
The Doughboy cross-dressing in an adorable pink skirt — a fluted cupcake liner, from the set on the kitchen counter.
Now: some remarks on cupcakes; a note on sexual undercurrents in the Poppin’ Fresh ads; and extensive discussion of sentient, speaking figures (often anthropomorphic, as here) in advertising, cartoons, or fictions of other kinds, figures that are in fact foodstuffs.
A cupcake (also British English: fairy cake; Hiberno English: bun; Australian English: fairy cake or patty cake) is a small cake designed to serve one person, which may be baked in a small thin paper or aluminum cup. As with larger cakes, icing and other cake decorations, such as candy, may be applied.
… Cupcakes are usually baked in muffin tins. These pans are most often made from metal, with or without a non-stick surface, and generally have six or twelve depressions or “cups”.
… Individual patty cases, or cupcake liners, may be used in baking. These are typically round sheets of thin paper pressed into a round, fluted cup shape.
Frosted chocolate cupcakes with sprinkles, in their fluted cases
The British and Australian term fairy cake introduces a potential ambiguity with sexual content. My 11/24/14 posting on “fairy X” distinguishes at least four senses of fairy in fairy X expressions:
fairy ‘associated with fairies, the magical beings’ (as in a fairy ring of mushrooms) fairy ‘effeminate or homosexual man’ (derogatory, like pansy, fruit, fag, etc.) fairy ‘small or delicate’ (as in fairy shrimp and fairy cake) fairy ‘perverse’ (as in fairy chess)
In addition, cupcake itself has sexual uses. From GDoS:
1 (US) an attractive young woman; also an affectionate term of address [1st cite 1939, from Damon Runyan]
3 (US gay) a young homosexual man [esp. a passive one; 1st cite 1972 in Rodgers’s Queens’ Vernacular, indicating earlier use; in my experience, as an address term used affectionately by queers to queers and derogatorily by straights to queers or despised straight guys (if I call you cupcake, it means I think you’re cute; if a straight cop calls you cupcake, he’s calling you a fag or demeaning you by comparing you to a woman)]
4 (US gay) in pl., buttocks, esp. when tight, firm and small [metaphorical; 1st cite 1971]
So we get a possible penumbra of queerness and/or effeminacy (probably not intended by Hilary Price, the cartoonist) surrounding the straightforward kinkiness of the cartoon in #1.
Sexual undercurrents in Poppin’ Fresh ads. As I noted in a 8/26/15 posting on “Nothing says A like B”, the Poppin’ Fresh character (a talking anthropomorphic — and male — creature of dough) comes along with the (rhyming) slogan
Nothin’ says lovin’ like something from the oven
which explicitly introduces love — that is, deep affection — into the ads, but also suggests loving in the sense of making love to, having sex with. And then there’s the oven image, evoking the hot core of the body, especially the female body. Whatever the adwriters’ conscious intentions were, they certainly managed to introduce sexual undercurrents.
(The Doughboy ads also featured a human finger poking Poppin’ Fresh affectionately in the belly, making him laugh: some tickle play. You can watch one here (from the 1960s) — complete with the slogan.)
Eating my kind. Eat me! Poppin’ Fresh is both a hunk of dough and a sentient, talking humanoid. Hawking dough in the BBCCM — bread / biscuit / cake / cookie / muffin — domain (which has no ordinary-language label), completely prepared but not baked, sold in refrigerated containers so that you can then bake the dough at home, thereby getting just-baked foodstuffs with a minimum of work and fuss.
Poppin’ Fresh doesn’t eat any of these finished products himself — that would smack of cannibalism — nor does he offer himself to be eaten — that would be like offering himself for physical abuse. But both of these lines have been crossed by other fictional sentient creatures, some of whom eat the foodstuffs of which they are made (Eating my kind), some of whom offer themselves to be eaten as food (Eat me!).
[Digression on two verbs eat. So far, it’s all been about the food verb eat (roughly ‘consume as food by mouth’). But we’re working up to creatures that cry out Eat me!, using the food verb but suggesting the slang sexual verb eat (of metaphorical origin: it all has to do with using your mouth). From GDoS:
to perform hetero- or homosexual fellatio or more usu. cunnilingus [first cite 1888-94 in My Secret Life] [or analingus, first cite 2000]
In gay contexts, sexual eat is a rough synonym of sexual suck, but is (for some speakers) somewhat more restricted in its syntax. Suck and eat both take the full range of direct objects referring to a penis:
I sucked / ate his (hot) cock / (big) dick / (thick) meat; the biggest one I ever sucked / ate; Suck / eat that monster! I love to suck / eat cock / dick …
Suck is also freely usable with direct objects referring to a man (understood as actually referring, metonymically, to that man’s penis):
I sucked him enthusiastically; the hottest guy I ever sucked; Suck my buddy! …
But many speakers are reluctant to use eat this way, and examples like the following seem to be rare:
I ate him enthusiastically; the hottest guy I ever ate; Eat my buddy! …
A striking exception here is is the imperative Eat me!, which is usable, and common, either as a true imperative (‘Suck my cock!’) or as a dismissive insult (very roughly, ‘Fuck off!’).]
On to Eating my kind examples, notably Mrs. Potato Head, taken unawares by her husband while she’s secretly snacking on Lay’s Potato Chips. Still shot:
“But you’re a potato!” he cries out in dismay. Well, they are potatoes. And they’re also plastic children’s toys (on which, see #2 in this posting of mine). And humanoid characters in an advertising drama, with speaking (and eating) roles. In the end, they agree that Lay’s Potato Chips are too good to resist. You can watch the whole ad here.
And then, Eat me! Starting from this entry on the TV Tropes site, “Let’s Meet the Meat”:
Does the sign include an illustration or mascot? Drawings of plates of food or ribs are okay, though not great. Pig mascots are good; smiling anthropomorphic pigs are even better. Is the pig surrounded by flames? If so, it should look happy about the situation. Best of all is an anthropomorphic pig eating ribs. Such a sign says, “Our food is so good that pigs will commit cannibalism to enjoy it.”
— Stephen Granade, Choosing A Barbeque Restaurant
There is a curious phenomenon in commercials in which edible animals or the post-prepared food and drink is given intelligence and the power of speech. And it wants humans to eat it. Or at least, others of its kind.
The title comes from the Dish of the Day sequence in Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe [1980, book 2 in the Hitchhikers’ Guide series].
[Zaphod, Trillian, Arthur, and Ford] escape from Zarniwoop by asking to be transported to the nearest restaurant. Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, is the nearest restaurant in space but not time. They are transported there “five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years” into the future. Marvin [the Paranoid Android] is left stranded here for this incredibly vast amount of time parking diners’ spaceships while waiting for the humans to return. After the meal …
Among the items on the menu were the very obliging Ameglion Major Cow and the somewhat less obliging vegetables in a green salad. Many cuts of the Ameglion Major Cow were available, such as shoulder braised in white wine sauce, grain fed rump, casserole, liver and steaks.
‘Would you like to see the menu?’ he said, ‘or would you like meet the Dish of the Day?’
‘Huh?’ said Ford.
‘Huh?’ said Arthur.
‘Huh?’ said Trillian.
‘That’s cool,’ said Zaphod, ‘we’ll meet the meat.’
… A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox’s table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.
‘Good evening’, it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, ‘I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in the parts of my body?’
It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters in to a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them.
Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox.
‘Something off the shoulder perhaps?’ suggested the animal, ‘Braised in a white wine sauce?’
‘Er, your shoulder?’ said Arthur in a horrified whisper.
‘But naturally my shoulder, sir,’ mooed the animal contentedly, ‘nobody else’s is mine to offer.’
Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling the animal’s shoulder appreciatively.
‘Or the rump is very good,’ murmured the animal. ‘I’ve been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there’s a lot of good meat there.’
It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again.
‘Or a casserole of me perhaps?’ it added.
‘You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?’ whispered Trillian to Ford.
‘Me?’ said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, ‘I don’t mean anything.’
‘What’s the problem Earthman?’ said Zaphod, now transfering his attention to the animal’s enormous rump.
‘I just don’t want to eat an animal that’s standing there inviting me to,’ said Arthur, ‘It’s heartless.’
‘Better than eating an animal that doesn’t want to be eaten,’ said Zaphod.
‘That’s not the point,’ Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. ‘Alright,’ he said, ‘maybe it is the point. I don’t care, I’m not going to think about it now. I’ll just … er … I think I’ll just have a green salad,’ he muttered.
‘May I urge you to consider my liver?’ asked the animal, ‘it must be very rich and tender by now, I’ve been force-feeding myself for months.’
‘A green salad,’ said Arthur emphatically.
‘A green salad?’ said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.
‘Are you going to tell me,’ said Arthur, ‘that I shouldn’t have green salad?’
‘Well,’ said the animal, ‘I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whoile tangled problem and breed
an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.’
Bonus. A French ad for saucissons that goes one step further and has the pig actually carving the sausages out of its body to supply the customers:
Yesterday’s weird slur bulletin from Iowa (hat tip to LJ Yanney on Facebook): in the Des Moines Register, “Adel lawmaker accused of using gay slur” by Molly Longman:
A central Iowa lawmaker has been accused of using a gay slur while making fun of a former political opponent at a public forum over the weekend.
State Rep. Ralph Watts, an Adel Republican, said in an interview Monday that the critics are wrong about the slur: They misunderstood a homonym.
“It was not a slur,” Watts said.
A video taken at the Saturday forum at the Adel library shows Watts referring to business owner Bryce Smith — the Democrat whom Watts defeated in November to win his seventh term in the House — as either “Red Ryder” or “red rider.”
The terms sound the same and are one letter apart. But the meanings are drastically different.
One Iowa, the Des Moines-based advocacy group, said in a news release Monday evening that “red rider” is a slur used to describe a gay man.
A “Red Ryder” is the brand of BB gun Ralphie asked for in the film “A Christmas Story” before his mother told him, “You’ll shoot your eye out.”
… Watts said later Monday that he didn’t know the term “red rider ” was a slur.
Hardly anyone else does either. If you sling a slur in a wasteland, does it sting?
Three gay sites — Towleroad, Queerty, and LGBTQ Nation — professed bafflement, and numerous readers (including me) said they’d never heard it before. I went to GDoS, which has nothing at all under red rider, but does have a clue that points in a useful direction: no red rider, but there are two relevant senses for rider, one straight, one gay:
womanizer, male copulator [from 1594]
(US gay) a male homosexual who takes the active role in anal intercourse [one cite, from Rodgers’s 1972 Queens’ Vernacular, not an entirely reliable source, since a number of the cites seem to be colorful one-shot inventions]
These are both straightforward agent nouns referring to a man who (metaphorically) rides his partner in intercourse.
Then to Urban Dictionary, where are two entries for red rider, one straight (referring to a menstruating woman in woman-on-top intercourse), one gay (referring to a top man in intercourse). The first is straightforward: woman as rider, red with her menstrual blood. The second looks like a playful expansion of the (already infrequent) slang term rider, taking advantage of the trade name Red Ryder.
Nothing I’ve said so far takes either rider or its expansion red rider, with gay reference, out of the merely slang domain and into the slang slur domain, but it could be the case that some speakers take any expression referring to a gay man to be slingable as a slur — a move that would get us from (red) rider ‘top man’ (more pointedly, ‘butt-fucker’) to ‘faggot’.
But I can find no examples whatsoever on the net where red rider is clearly being used as a sexual slur (in, say, You fucking red rider!, parallel to You fucking faggot!).
Clearly we’re dealing with an extremely infrequent usage. But apparently it’s familiar to at least one person at One Iowa (“Iowa’s leading lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) organization working toward full equality for LGBT individuals”), an organization that went on to assert, baldly, in a press release that
“Red rider” is a derogatory term for a gay man.
That’s a claim about the practice of English speakers, and I’d like to see some evidence.
smad about having to dwipe. In #1, Ruthie invents portmanteaus to suit her condition: sad + mad, dust + wipe.
The Zippy is more complex. First, the Sharknado films (with the portmanteau sharknado = shark + tornado) are old stuff on this blog, though I don’t recall having seen the shark-headed surfer image (a hybrid being to accompany the portmanteau) before. But the title duditude = dude + attitude was new to me — though the word has a fair presence on the net.
The focus of the strip, however, isn’t on portmanteaus, but on shifts in slang fashions (in white middle-class American speakers, I’d guess): on the claimed spread of awesome (at the expense of great) and the claimed decline of cool. Google Ngram shows no such changes in books (though great has been declining overall for some time), but of course the claim is about informal speech and writing. I haven’t checked the relevant COCA material, but my subjective impression — and it is only that — is that the first claim is broadly accurate while the second is dubious. (On the other hand, the second claim might be broadly accurate for young speakers.)
… or, playing over the top, and in fact doing this knowingly while winking at the audience, so that you might want to say: camping it up. I refer to the Netflix version of A Series of Unfortunate Events, in which Neil Patrick Harris (NPH) plays the villain for laughs, while Patrick Warburton plays the author-narrator, Lemony Snicket, ditto, and a bunch of others — notably Joan Cusack, K. Todd Freeman, and Alfre Woodard — join them.
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, or simply A Series of Unfortunate Events, is an American black comedy dramedy television series from Netflix, and developed by Mark Hudis and Barry Sonnenfeld, based on the children’s novel series of the same name by Lemony Snicket. It stars Neil Patrick Harris, Patrick Warburton, Malina Weissman, Louis Hynes, K. Todd Freeman and Presley Smith, and premiered on January 13, 2017.
Lemony Snicket is the pen name of American novelist Daniel Handler (born February 28, 1970). Snicket is the author of several children’s books, also serving as the narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events (his best-known work) and a character within it and All the Wrong Questions. Because of this, the name “Lemony Snicket” may refer to either the fictional character or the real person.
Now, the genre of the series and the books on which it’s based: they are firmly in the genre I’ll call fantasy comedy, manifested in performances of many types: Punch and Judy shows, animated cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle (squirrel and moose beset by comically incompetent villains Boris and Natasha), Joan Aiken’s alternative-history comedy-adventure novels for children (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, etc.), James Thurber’s book The Thirteen Clocks, the movie The Princess Bride. The protagonists tend to be absurdly innocent, the villains thoroughly wicked, the settings fantastical rather than realistic, the plot lines full of bizarre twists and turns (like Zippy the Pinhead comic strips, but with villains). Many of these performances wink at the audience, and characters often address the audience.
Series has a fantastical setting; look back at #2. The characters are cardboard figures played for laughs: the Baudelaire children are preposterously earnest, good, and plucky; the other characters are absurdly good (Cusack’s judge character), sweet but deranged (Woodard’s character, the children’s Aunt Jusephine, who’s a nut about grammatical correctness, by which she mostly means spelling and word choice), bizarrely clueless (for example, failing to recognize the NPH character, Count Olaf, in his ridiculously transparent disguises), thoroughly evil, or deeply corrupt. And Warburton’s character does nothing but address the audience, owlishly warning us about the dire events about to unfold and telling us that we should avert our eyes, look away, thus pulling us into the guilty pleasures of the show. (I’d like to point out that there’s a lot you can do with adverbs.)
Digression on comedy genres. Fantasy comedy contrasts with two other comedy genres (though, as always, the lines between genres are not crisp): what I’ll call light comedy and black comedy. These are relevant because NPH is also celebrated for his work in a sitcom (a subtype of light comedy), How I Met Your Mother, and so is Warburton (in Rules of Engagement), while Cusack is celebrated for her work in a black comedy (Shameless). (Warburton and Cusack are both specialists in comic acting, of several types — they do almost nothing else — while Freeman and Woodard are acting generalists.)
Light comedy includes sitcoms (on tv) and romantic comedy (in the movies) as well as comic novels and short stories that are realistic in both setting and character; black comedy, the comedy counterpart to dramas like Breaking Bad, manages to be both funny and horrifying at once, again in realistic settings and with characters that have identifiably human characteristics the audience can sympathize with, but also with disastrous flaws.
The black comedy Shameless has a realistic setting, a white working-class neighborhood of South Chicago, complete with the El. Its preposterous characters are nevertheless played straight, and with no winking at the audience. All the characters are seriously flawed, but all have some redeeming qualities that allow you to sometimes identify with them: even the frighteningly narcissistic, irresponsible, alcoholic and drug-addled central character Frank (William H. Macy in an extraordinary performance) has a sweet love affair – with a woman close to dying from cancer, who then commits suicide. Fantasy comedy, either meant for children or affecting a child-like view of the world, steers clear of sexual connections, while Shameless is dramatically high in carnality: the characters fuck like bonobos, almost reflexively, out of ungovernable desire and, apparently, as a way to relieve tension; there’s also plenty of same-sex butt-fucking and muff-diving; and even the baby Liam compusively masturbates.
In Series, Warburton’s character and the theme song keep telling us to look away, look away, knowing that that will make us watch. But watching Shameless, you often do want to avert your eyes, because, out of sympathy with the characters, you wish you could pull them away from the disastrous things they are about to do.
The five featured actors. NPH, Warburton, Cusack, Freeman, and Woodard.
NPH (appearing as Count Olaf in #1) is an old acquaintance on this blog, seen most recently in the posting “Annals of adorable” (with his husband, David Burtka) on the 10th. Earlier, onstage in his underwear (and nothing else), in the 2/23/15 posting “From the Oscar watch”.
How I Met Your Mother … is an American sitcom that originally aired on CBS from September 19, 2005 to March 31, 2014. The series follows the main character, Ted Mosby, and his group of friends in Manhattan. As a framing device, Ted, in the year 2030, recounts to his son and daughter the events that led him to meeting their mother.
… Neil Patrick Harris as Barney Stinson is a serial playboy, using his relative wealth and an array of outrageous strategies to seduce women for sex with no intention of engaging in a relationship. His catchphrases include ‘Suit Up’ and ‘Legend-wait-for-it-Dary’. He is Ted’s “bro,” often jealous of Marshall for having known Ted since college. Due to his father leaving him as a young child, Barney has abandonment issues and clings to his friends. He marries Robin in the series finale but they divorce after 3 years. In 2020, after a failed one night stand, he has a daughter named Ellie.
Patrick John Warburton (born November 14, 1964) is an American actor and voice actor. In television, he is known for playing David Puddy on Seinfeld, the title role on The Tick [a superhero parody], Jeb Denton on Less Than Perfect, Jeff Bingham on Rules of Engagement and Lemony Snicket on A Series of Unfortunate Events.
And on the plot of the sitcom Rules of Engagement:
Two couples and their single friend deal with the complications of dating, commitment and marriage. It looks at different relationships in various stages, starring Patrick Warburton and Megyn Price as a long-married couple, Oliver Hudson and Bianca Kajlich as newly engaged sweethearts, and David Spade and Adhir Kalyan (the latter added in season 3) as their still-single friends. They often gather to enjoy a meal and discuss their issues at “The Island Diner”. (Wikipedia link)
The Warburton and Price characters are constantly negotiating having sex, which brings us many shots of a shirtless Warburton, as here:
Warburton is a solid, beefy bear of a man, with a “natural”, rather than gym-boy, physique (note the hint of love handles). In Series, he always appears fully clothed, almost always in a dark business suit (as in #2). And in that show (and in some others) his tone is always wry, and even if you can’t see it, one eyebrow is raised.
Digression on camping it up. In a 12/3/16 posting “Camping it up”, I wrote about a Steam Room Stories episode, the expression camping it up (in the episode, camping it up is used as an in-group marker, for use by gay men with gay men, as a kind of bonding ritual), and the British actor Julian Clary (who camps it up a lot, rather sweetly, in public).
Series plays it for laughs, plays it over the top, to the point of camping it up, thus casting a gay lavender light over everything and disposing you to think that the male characters might be gay.
If something is played for laughs, it means it is being used with the intention to be comedic. It is often a parody of the instances where said device or trope is used seriously.
On the idiom over the top from NOAD2:
informal to an excessive or exaggerated degree, in particular so as to go beyond reasonable or acceptable limits: his reactions had been a bit over the top.
And then some relevant entries from GDoS:
noun camp: (also campery, campiness, camping) flamboyance, overt exhibitionism; usu. but not invariably applied to homosexuals [first cite 1932, from Scarlet Pansy]
verb camp to act ostentatiously and outrageously in a homosexual manner, although by no means restricted – verbally or physcally – to the gay world [first cite 1910]
verb camp about (also camp around, camp it up): of a man, to act in a deliberate and exaggeratedly effeminate manner; used of effeminate male homosexuals and those who, maliciously or otherwise, are attempting to mimic them [first cite 1962]
All of this vocabulary can be used to refer to merely extravagant, exhibitionistic, or outrageous behavior, but a connotation of effeminacy, or merely gayness, persists. That connotation colors our view of all the male characters in the campy Series, even Warburton’s character, thanks to his slyness.
More to come on this theme in a little while. Meanwhile, back to the featured actors.
Joan Cusack (… born October 11, 1962), is an American actress. She received Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress for her roles in the romantic comedy-drama Working Girl (1988) and the romantic comedy In & Out (1997)
… Cusack was a cast member on the sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live from 1985 to 1986. She starred on the Showtime hit drama/comedy Shameless as Sheila Gallagher (née Jackson), a role for which she has received five consecutive Emmy Award nominations, winning for the first time in 2015. She is the sister of actors Ann and John Cusack.
Cusack’s characters are almost always highly strung (as in Series). In Shameless, her character Sheila is beyond highly strung, into out-of-control, even deranged, territory: she’s cripplingly agoraphobic, compulsively orderly, hypersexual, and sexually kinky.
On Freeman, from Wikipedia:
Kenneth Todd Freeman (born July 9, 1965) is an American actor in theatre, television, and film.
… Freeman has been an ensemble member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, Illinois since 1993 [and has appeared on stage in Wicked and Airline Highway].
… He has also had supporting roles in various films such as Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), The Cider House Rules (1999), and The Dark Knight (2008). On television, he is perhaps best known for his recurring role on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as “Mr. Trick”.
The character’s Buffyverse Wiki identifies him as a young vampire and the leading minion of Kakistos and, later, Sunnydale’s Mayor Richard Wilkins, adding that:
Unlike his ancient master [Kakistos], Mr. Trick was a modernist technophile at heart. He considered time-honored customs like hunting outdated, enjoying the amenities of modern occidental life, such as fast food employees, [and] pizza delivery boys
In Series, Freeman plays Arthur Poe, the Baudelaire parents’ family banker, in charge of placing the children in the care of a suitable guardian; he’s generally venal, but sometimes merely deluded.
On the amazing (and astonishingly hard-working) Woodard, from Wikipedia:
Alfre Woodard (born November 8, 1952) is an American film, stage, and television actress, producer, and political activist. Woodard has been named one of the most versatile and accomplished actors of her generation.
Woodard began her acting career in theater. After her breakthrough role in the Off-Broadway play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1977), she made her film debut in Remember My Name (1978). In 1983, she won major critical praise … for her role in Cross Creek. In the same year, Woodard won her first Primetime Emmy Award for her performance in the NBC drama series Hill Street Blues. Later in the 1980s, Woodard had leading Emmy Award-nominated performances in a number of made for television movies, and another Emmy-winning role as a woman dying of leukemia in the pilot episode of L.A. Law. She also starred as Dr. Roxanne Turner in the NBC medical drama St. Elsewhere
And that just gets her up to 1990; there’s a lot more. A nice p.r. photo of her:
In Series, her Aunt Josephine is deranged (but sweet) and generally over the top.
Back to campiness. As I said above, the decidedly campy tone of Series tends to cast a lavender light on all the male characters. And then, by extension, on the actors who play those characters. On every evidence, Warburton is uncomplicatedly straight, while NPH is openly, even celebratorily, gay — but his natural presentation of self is as normatively masculine, not at all campy. (He can of course do campy; he’s a versatile, accomplished actor. And in Series, he does one episode in drag.)
That leaves Freeman, who’s an intriguing cipher. Freeman has taken several gay parts (not especially common for black actors), he’s never been married, and none of the sources about him say a word about his private life — indicators which, taken together, would suggest that he’s a closeted gay man. Staying in the closet wouldn’t be at all surprising for a black male actor: being out would risk career suicide for a black man, so the the number of out black male actors is ridiculously small.
Another, simpler case: the hard-working black actor Ron Glass, who had two standout roles in his long life in acting, until he died at age 71 late last year. From Wikipedia:
Ronald Earle “Ron” Glass (July 10, 1945 – November 25, 2016) was an American actor. He was known for his roles as literary Det. Ron Harris in the television sitcom Barney Miller (1975–1982), and as the spiritual Shepherd Derrial Book in the 2002 science fiction series Firefly and its sequel film Serenity.
His character Harris was impeccably dressed, intellectual, precise, even prissy — one “type” of gay man — and he pinged my gaydar 40 years ago in Barney Miller (and then again much more recently in Firefly). Glass as Harris:
The actor was, by all accounts, charming and funny, and his homosexuality was an open secret in Hollywood for many decades (though he never came out). He frequented gay places in West Hollywood and apparently had an affair with actor Tony Geary from General Hospital, during which they often appeared together in public as a couple. He’s also said to have been rather effeminate and sometimes sweetly campy. Most of the people he worked with must have known he was gay, but still he seems to have thought that his career would have been threatened by his coming out. And maybe he was right.
(Plain sex talk of several kinds, not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Yesterday’s morning name, and it was clear to me when I woke up that this was the vulgar sexual noun snatch ‘woman’s genitals’. and not the grabbing snatch or the stealing / kidnapping snatch or the weightlifting snatch — but then it turns out they’re all related.
Overview from NOAD2:
verb snatch: quickly seize (something) in a rude or eager way: she snatched a cookie from the plate | figurative: a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. – informal steal (something) or kidnap (someone), typically by seizing or grabbing suddenly: a mission to snatch Winston Churchill.
noun snatch: 1 an act of snatching or quickly seizing something: a quick snatch of breath. – a short spell of doing something: brief snatches of sleep. – a fragment of song or talk: picking up snatches of conversation. – informal a kidnapping or theft.
2 (weightlifting) the rapid raising of a weight from the floor to above the head in one movement.
Snatch (stylised as snatch) is a 2000 British crime comedy film written and directed by Guy Ritchie, featuring an ensemble cast. Set in the London criminal underworld, the film contains two intertwined plots: one dealing with the search for a stolen diamond, the other with a small-time boxing promoter (Jason Statham) who finds himself under the thumb of a ruthless gangster (Alan Ford) who is ready and willing to have his subordinates carry out severe and sadistic acts of violence.
The film features an assortment of characters, including Irish Traveller Mickey O’Neil (Brad Pitt), referred to as a “pikey”, arms-dealer Boris “the Blade” Yurinov (Rade Šerbedžija), professional thief and gambling addict Franky “Four-Fingers” (Benicio del Toro), American gangster-jeweller Abraham Denovitz known as “Cousin Avi” (Dennis Farina), and bounty hunter Bullet-Tooth Tony (Vinnie Jones). It is also distinguished by a kinetic direction and editing style, an intricate double plot featuring numerous ironic twists of chance and causality, and a fast pace. (Wikipedia link)
The snatch is the first of two lifts contested in the sport of weightlifting (also known as Olympic weightlifting) followed by the clean and jerk. The objective of the snatch is to lift the barbell from the ground to overhead in one continuous motion. … In the squat snatch, the lifter lifts the bar as high as possible and pulls themselves under it in a squat position, receiving the bar overhead with the arms straight, decreasing the necessary height of the bar, therefore increasing the amount of weight that the lifter may successfully lift. (Wikipedia link)
And on to the sex stuff, from GDoS:
[[< Standard English] snatch, to grab] in sexual contexts: (a) sexual intercourse, esp. quick or illicit or with a prostitute [first cite 1538] (b) the vagina [negative image] [first cite 1785] (c) (US prison) a male homosexal [1950 dictionary cite] (d) a collective term for women in general, as viewed as the route to sexual intercourse [first cite 1950 in that same dictionary, but then other cites] (e) a woman [first cite 1952 James Jones From Here to Eternity] (f) (US gay) the anus [dictionary cites from 1950 and 1972]
The first step is from ‘sexual intercourse’ (viewed negatively) to ‘vagina’ (viewed negatively), and then the senses radiate in familiar ways: from the vagina to a woman viewed as a sexual object (a metonymy) to a woman in general; from the vagina to the (male) anus viewed as a sexual organ (a metaphor); and then from the anus so viewed to a man viewed as a sexual object (a metonymy); and to a male homosexual in general..
Slang snatch ‘vagina’ has come up in passing twice on this blog:
on 1/20/16, in “butt/booty, dial/call”: Green’s Dictionary of Slang gives two senses (front and rear) of this booty:
the vagina, hence by metonymy, a woman, esp. as a sex-object and generic, for sex (whether with a man or a woman): first cite c1908 [on the metonymy for ‘woman’, compare similar uses of cunt, snatch, piece of ass, etc.; on the generic use for ‘sex, sexual relations’, compare the usage in I need some ass / dick/ etc.]
the buttocks, the rectum: first cite 1926
on 3/22/17 , in “The news for beavers”, with two mentions of sexual snatch as an alternative to box, pussy, cunt (and beaver)
It was probably inevitable that the sexual sense should get crossed with other senses, as in this double-entendre texty slogan:
It has also occurred to me to take advantage of the original ‘grab’ sense of the verb snatch to float an alternative to the names Helmet Grabpussy and Squire Grabpussy (and Lord Dampnut): Deacon Snatch-Snatch.
Image may be NSFW.
