(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):
(#1)
(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) :
(#2)
and in an eXposed poster:
(#3)
(#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):
(#4)
(You might consider for a moment the arts of stagecraft that were deployed to make this image available to us.)
Jed and Kick as a couple. Yet another poster for the video, with the two principals in it:
(#5)
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):
(#6)
Ok, that screams “I want you! Take me!”, in a pleasantly faggy voice. (Don’t fuss at me; I really like pleasantly faggy.)
Contrast #6 with this more aggressively seductive pose (this time, with his big pornstar cock on the table):
(#7)
Similarly in his pose for the porn flick Iron Works, starring MI and taking place in the Iron Works Printing company:
(#8)
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.
