(About a gay porn flick, with naked hunky models displaying their bodies, but no actual genitals on display or descriptions of man-on-man sex, just some vulgar slang and reference to ejaculation. Still, not to everyone’s taste.)
In my e-mail on 11/22, a Falcon | Naked Sword mailing for its 2023 Christmas gay porn movie, whose title is a cheap raunchy pun:
The guys with the Xmas goodies (I’ve fuzzed out their pornstar dicks for WordPress modesty): Beau Butler (who’s been featured a number of times on this blog; here displaying his pornstar butt), Damian Night (new here), and Reign (from my 2/20/22 posting “Men’s Briefs: the locked gaze”)
My interest at the moment is not really in the flick or in the actors, but in the pun in the title. (“How like a linguist”, you are saying, “to disregard the hot stuff and focus on the wording”. As it happens, I’m entirely capable of getting off on the hot stuff while making mental notes on the wording.) But I will post Falcon’s publicity for the flick for you, because it actually describes the background plot, without the sex-act by sex-act retelling of the individual scenes:
“Cum All Ye Faithful’ to the movie event of the season! For years, friends from around the world have traveled to famous drag queen Sherry Vine’s rustic home on California’s Pacific Crest Trail for Christmas. But, when legislation against live drag performances threatens Sherry’s livelihood, she’ll need all the help she can get to fight the conservative lawmakers and save her lodge-style holiday house. Good pal Damian Night rallies the chosen family to produce a photo op fundraiser that will hopefully stop greedy land developer Reign from buying Sherry’s place right out from under her, and, at the same time, save drag as an art form. Old and new flames ignite among the hunks as they race against the clock to give Sherry financial security while also delivering the very best kind of hard candy Christmas.
The title pun. The basis for the title pun is the Christmas carol “Adeste Fideles”, aka “O Come, All Ye Faithful”, an exhortation to all faithful Christians to metaphorically come to Bethlehem and adore the Christ child.
Come All Ye Faithful would be a dirty pun on the carol’s title, with the motion verb come replaced by the sexual verb come (and Christian faith replaced by some sort of sexual faithfulness, or perhaps a faith in the power of orgasm); from NOAD:
verb come: … 6 informal have an orgasm. [call this variant VO — V for verb, O for spelling with o]
Come All Ye Faithful would be a perfect pun — with the pun identical to its basis — both phonologically and orthographically. But apparently that would have been too subtle for the Falcon pornsters, so they used the spelling variant cum instead; Cum All Ye Faithful is unmistakably a pun. From NOAD:
verb cum-2: vulgar slang have an orgasm [variant VU]
(NOAD‘s cum-1 is the learnèd preposition cum ‘with’ and is entirely irrelevant here.)
Note the difference in the usage labels for the two spellings of the sexual verb /kʌm/: the spelling cum is considerably dirtier (vulgar slang) than the spelling come (informal — just slang); it’s actually raunchy. So of course Falcon goes for the raunchy spelling (like a jester slapping you with a pig bladder).
As it happens, there’s also a noun come, a nouning of the verb, and it’s also just slang:
noun come: informal semen ejaculated by a man at an orgasm. [variant NO]
And, yes, also a noun cum-2, which is either a variant spelling of the noun come, or a nouning of the verb cum-2 (or the verb is a verbing of this noun); in any case, like the verb, it’s raunchy:
noun cum-2: vulgar slang semen ejaculated by a man at an orgasm. [variant NU]
So: both spellings are available for both the verb and the noun. Why are the O variants merely slang, while the U variants are vulgar slang? This is a subtle point, and one you can’t explain just from the facts available in NOAD.
For a satisfactory explanation, you need to know that in current AmE usage, the dominant variants by far are VO and NU: come is the default verb, while cum is the default noun. So the spelling cum, usually associated with the noun, is vividly, stickily seminal — Raunch City — while the spelling come, usually associated with the verb, is just a sexual use of an everyday (motion) verb. As a result, VU — the verb cum (as in the Falcon porn title) — pretty much has a lot of jizz in it, so of course it’s raunchy, and that’s just what Falcon wanted.