(Hot guys in very skimpy underwear, suggestive verse, but generally playful and not actually X-rated. Use your judgment.)

Today’s  Daily Jocks sale ad, for Marco Marco Valentine’s Day homowear, with a caption in two parts, one raunchy doggerel, one Puckish:

(#1)

Lincoln Darwin Valentine
Is a cutup friend of mine
Loves the boys with all his heart
Loves them hard in every part

And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover’s fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!

That’s LDV’s Cupid Face.

The holidays. Today, February 13th, is a brief valley between Lincoln Darwin Day (February 12th: both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on this day in 1809) and Valentine’s Day (February 14th, also celebrated as Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky Day).

The ad copy from DJ (with its Ad Agency Capitalization):

Happy Valentines! Put a little love in your Undies with the Marco Marco Valentines Day Exclusive. The Love Brief [aka Luv U brief] has a red heart print and is sure to be your new favorite. This new style has a peek-a-boo cutout in the back and on the sides making it just the right amount of sexy.

Treat yourself or your partner with this Limited Edition Brief.

The Marco Marco line is unabashedly queer. Note the assumption that the audience for the ad is male, in fact guys with male partners.

The briefs in detail. From the front, displaying the pouch:

(#2)

And from the side, showing the peek-a-boo cutouts that make it a half moon brief:

(#3)

The poetry. Catalectic trochaic tetrameter (a cut 4×4), 4 lines of 4 SW feet, except that the last foot is short.

The  first verse, mine, has a play on cutup / cut-up (NOAD: “a person who is fond of making jokes or playing pranks”) and cutout (NOAD: “a hole cut in something for decoration or to allow the insertion of something else”).

The second verse, Shakespeare’s, is spoken by the fairy Puck (puckish in NOAD: “playful, especially in a mischievous way”) in Midsummer Night’s Dream (in a passage that also supplies the title of this playful posting, with its inevitable fairy double entendre).

The Marco Marco files. On this blog:

on 3/3/17, “Marco Marco teases”, with information about the company

on 5/19/17, “Marco, Marco, Marco”

on 9/15/17, “The many and the one”: Tetra briefs from Marco Marco

on 3/20/18, “Perfectionist in pink sequin”

on 8/21/18, “Jo Flamingo”: in #3, a half moon brief, with the caption “Party time at Cleft House!”

(The Daily Jocks e-mail of 2/11/19 with a homowear offer from the Varsity company came with the header “NSFW: Boys in mesh”, so this posting will clearly not be for everyone. Seductively exposed buttocks, offered sexually, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

With a brief caption of mine:

(#1) Mesh Man: Always Open for Business®

Ever at the ready, a
Marvel of receptivity
Mesh Man, always there for you,

Mind reader and lightning
Provider of sexual
Emergency service

The ad copy. Introducing the all-new Varsity Mesh Collection!

Both sexy and preppy, Varsity prides itself on a great range of basics and statement pieces designed for every guy’s wardrobe. The stylish brand is influenced by American University sportswear and Frat parties, combining a mix of sporty elements and details that won’t leave you unnoticed. Totally versatile, Varsity will always have you covered for parties, the gym and everyday wear.

Jockstrap, Jock-Thong, Mesh Shorts, Mesh Singlet. All available now in Black & White.

I’m struggling to imagine Mesh Man at a frat party. Well, maybe Sigma Epsilon Chi:

(#2)

The facial expression. Mesh Man looks heroically into the far distance, scanning the sky for signals from men calling to him. He will come to you instantly if you need him.

Mesh Man’s kin. In the Marvel universe: Spider-Man, Iron Man, Ant-Man, and Iceman. In the D.C. universe: Batman, Superman, Aquaman, Catman, and especially his cousin in shmattes, Ragman.

From the Comic Vine site:

(#3)

Ragman: Wearing a suit of rags made from the souls of evildoers, Rory Regan patrols the streets of Gotham City dispensing vigilante justice. He is one of the few Jewish superheroes in the DC universe

(noun schmatte (also shmatte): US informal a rag; a ragged or shabby garment. (NOAD))

This is not generally known, but Mesh Man is also Jewish. Originally, he was Meshuga Man, projecting craziness within a sphere 20 feet around his body, but then after an especially satisfying sexual liaison with Iron Man, he discovered his true calling as a Receptive.

(adj. meshuga (also meshugga or meshugah): North American informal (of a person) crazy; idiotic (NOAD))

(This posting will go lots of places, some of which — a Greek military re-enactors’ group in Melbourne — you’ll find astonishing, but there’s no denying that, as the title suggests, it’s penis-dense. Without actually depicting them — those images are in my posting this morning on AZBlogX, “Gay Heart Throbs” — but still. However, without penises strewn along the road every few feet, there’s no getting to the fun stuff (like allusions to Miss Anne Elk and to Sonnets from the Portuguese). So use your judgment.)

Phallophilia I: self-regard. A recent Daily Jocks ad (for Kasper Military shorts from the Helsinki Athletica company) showing a hunky model gazing fixedly down at his bulging crotch, with a title and a caption supplied by me:

(#1) On contemplating his penis

Could I just say here for one moment that
I have a new theory about the penis?
Yes, well you may well ask, what is my theory.
And well you may. Yes my word you may well
Ask what it is, this theory of mine.

Well, this theory that I have — which is mine —
This theory which belongs to me is as follows.
Ahem. Ahem. This is how it goes.
Ahem. The next thing that I am about to say
Is my theory. Ahem. Ready?

My theory is along the following lines.
All penises are round at one end,
Tubular in the middle, and then
Anchored in hair at the far end.

That is the theory that I have
And which is mine, and
What it is too.

— excerpts from an interview with noted penis scholar Gay H. Throbs, DPhS. (Doctor of Phallological Science)

On the nose, GHT!

Notes on #1.

First note. The DJ / Helsinki Athletica image came with this (extremely restrained) ad copy:

The Kasper sportswear range is designed for maximum performance whilst bringing sleek European aesthetic to your workout. Featuring figure-hugging trackpants & performance running shorts.

In the world of premium men’s underwear ads, you come to expect hysterical hyperbole, along with Lots of Caps, exclamation points!!, and heavy-handed allusions to genitals and sex. This copy touches the two essential bases — performance, embracing comfort and support, and aesthetics, looking real good in your skivvies — but no more. Maybe it’s Finnish reserve.

Second note. The gesture in #1, which I’ve posted about (on 11/8/10) on AZBlogX as “The Gaze Downward”:

Several times I’ve posted photos of guys — underwear or porn models — staring fixedly down at their own hard cocks, apparently with no regard for the viewer. The Gaze Downward, seen here in a 10percent ad (with the cock in the model’s pants, but hard enough for everyone to see) and in a Pits ‘n’ Tits display in the locker room…

(#2) The 10percent ad, with moose-knuckles

… the Gaze Downward isn’t all that common, probably because it doesn’t engage the viewer directly [instead, voyeurstically]. On the other hand, it does guide the viewer’s attention to the model’s dick [out in the open, or in his bulge / pouch / package]. You start by looking at his face, then you travel down his model-perfect body, appreciating it, until you end up on his cock.

From this blog, in a 3/16/11 posting “Underwear puns”:

(#3) Undergear Greek-design (wink, wink) briefs (ok, so called because of the Greek key design on the waistband); in the same posting, an example of the even more indirect Gaze Sideward, in which the model’s eyes engage neither with the viewer nor with his crotch

Two more examples from my files:

(#4)

(#5)

Not a lot of variation. The model in #3 is bearing his weight on his right leg, with his left hip slightly uptilted, while the others are standing with equal weight on both feet. His head is also not as far tilted down as the others’. All five express little or no emotion on their faces; I have yet to see an underwear model or porn actor smile during a Gaze Downward, or come even close; it’s serious stuff, contemplating your penis.

Third note. The source of the caption. A cheap steal from Monty Python’s sketch “Interview with Anne Elk” (Miss A. Elk, who had a similar theory about the brontosaurus), with some editing down, plus alterations to make it fit a phallophilic context.

Fourth note. the degree DPhS, Doctor of Phallological Science. Based on DDS, Doctor of Dental Surgery, with a bow to PhD, Doctor of Philosophy.

Fifth note. The name of the phallologist, Gay H. Throbs. This borrowed from e-mail that came in while I was studying the image in #1, e-mail from my friend Ken Rudolph, who had come into possession of a vintage gay (porn) comic book Gay Heart Throbs No. 2 (1979), more on which below, because its cover is a festival of phallophilic signifiers. (And Gay can be a male personal name. As for the family name Throbs, well, if Hurt, why not Throbs?)

Sixth note. This would be as good a time as any to announce that this blog now has a Page inventorying  postings about gay comics and cartoons (on AZBlog and AZBlogX). Everything from the wry humor in urban upper middle class gay male life as depicted by William Haefeli in the New Yorker to the intensely raunchy excesses of the Hun’s prison diaries.

Phallophilia II: penis-dense images. A summary of today’s Gay Heart Throbs posting on AZBlogX, with 5 images, plus discussion of settings and themes in gay porn:

(#1) the cover of No. 2 (1979), a festival of phallophilic signifiers

(#2) the contents page for No. 2, featuring a really big fat dick on a guy with an anatomical-model body and a stylized Gay Clone head pasted on top

(#3) from No. 2, a historical frontier fantasy of enthusiastic manly gaysex: the rancher, the soldier, and the Injun — with, in the last panel, gallons of spurting cum and a variety of cum faces

(#4) the cover for No. 1 (1976): gay boys in fairyland, with pan flute, nymph, butterflies, and Bambi — plus a fashionable Ascot-knot scarf and a crotch loosely wrapped in fabric

(#5) the cover for No. 3 (1981), in which a flamingly camp country boy is approached with amorous intent by a biker: not a Knight in White Satin, but a  Biker in Green Leather; his boots are fabulous, and so is country-boy Dwayne’s off-the-shoulder scarf (not to mention the tiny denim scrap around his waist)

From here on out, it’s all about GHT No. 2:

(#6) Issue created by M. Kuchar / Michael J. Kuchar (and other contributors with suggestive pseudonyms)

The central elements in this composition: the man-on-man kiss and the purple pouch thong (matched by the smaller sex-red pouch on the warrior’s lover)

The accessory phallic elements, littering the landscape: spears, arrows, daggers; shields with roosters / cocks on them; stylized Spartan helmets that look like dickheads

Notes on #6.

First note. On the name Kuchar. From GDoS:

noun cooch (also cootch, cutchie [and coochie, cootchie]: (abbr./euph. for cunt; [etymology unclear, possibly involving Welsh]) 1 (US) a ‘hootchy-kootchy’ dance, i.e. belly-dancing; thus cooch dancer, coocher, a belly dancer … [1st cite 1910] … 3 (US) the vagina; thus, by metonymy, a woman. [1st cite 1966] … 4 (US gay) an effeminate homosexual male. [only cite 1972, from Rodgers’s Queens’ Vernacular] … [also, I should add, from personal experience, the male anus viewed as a sexual organ. See Urban Dictionary entry for anal cooch ‘a gay man’s vagina’ (Man 1: Hun, something is wrong with my anal cooch – from contributor “that_just_happened” 6/22/07)]

Second note. The excellent, poetically satisfying, phrase purple pouch thong, which passed by without comment above.

An actual garment:

(#7) The Daniel Alexander Protrude pouch thong in purple

And a hymn to its kind:

The Song of the Thong

Purple pouch thong
How I love thee
To thy depth and breadth
And height

I love thee to
Every day’s
Most urgent need,
Freely, with the
Passion of a lifetime

Third note. Acute readers will recognize this affirmation of love as a total travesty of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese 43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”.

Fourth note. On Spartan helmets, that dickhead gear that’s all over #6. Up close:

(#8) Mask World edition of the Frank Miller Spartan helmet from his 300 comics

Frank Miller’s blockbuster movie “300” held as steadily in the upper rank of the movie charts as the 300 Spartans did at Thermopylae. But if you were picking out the historical inaccuracies while watching this visually compelling, epic battle with the Persians, you didn’t understand the movie’s concept. “300” is not a historical documentation – it’s a masterful adaptation of a comic book.

… Our “300” Spartan Helmet, which is based on Frank Miller’s comic of the same name, is a replica of the one used by the Spartan hoplites when they battled the Persian army in the film – despite being hopelessly outnumbered. This solid head protector is made of steel with a bronze alloy coating and fastens with a chin strap. The genuine leather lining make this Spartan Helmet comfortable to wear, and it comes with a helmet stand so you can proudly display your helmet when you’re not wearing it.

In chronological order:

The 1962 CinemaScope epic:

(#9) Helmets with crests, without the facial shielding in #7

The 300 Spartans is a 1962 CinemaScope epic film depicting the Battle of Thermopylae. Made with the cooperation of the Greek government, it was shot in the village of Perachora in the Peloponnese. … It stars Richard Egan as the Spartan king Leonidas, Sir Ralph Richardson as Themistocles of Athens and David Farrar as Persian king Xerxes, with Diane Baker as Ellas and Barry Coe as Phylon providing the requisite romantic element in the film. Greek warriors, led by 300 Spartans, fight against a Persian army of almost limitless size. Despite the odds, the Spartans will not flee or surrender, even if it means their deaths

The 1998 comic books:

300 is a historically inspired 1998 comic book limited series [of 5 issues] written and illustrated by Frank Miller with painted colors by Lynn Varley.

The comic is a fictional retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae and the events leading up to it from the perspective of Leonidas of Sparta. 300 was particularly inspired by the 1962 film The 300 Spartans, a film Miller watched as a young boy. The [1998] work was adapted in 2006 to a film of the same name [300]

The 2006 movie:

300 is a 2006 American period action film based on the 1998 comic series of the same name by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley. Both are fictionalized retellings of the Battle of Thermopylae within the Persian Wars. The film was directed by Zack Snyder, while Miller served as executive producer and consultant. It was filmed mostly with a super-imposition chroma key technique, to help replicate the imagery of the original comic book.

As for the many varieties of helmet, I’m uncertain as to both their history in ancient Sparta and to their traditions in (fictionalized) popular culture, but #8 is what filtered into the Gay Heart Throb comic of 1979.

Fifth note. On cock shields (battle shields with fighting cocks — the poultry — on them, not protective shields for penises). Notable in #6, where they look a bit silly. But they were real things, which can be reconstucted from historical records, as in this remarkable photo:

(#10) The cock shield device of Idomeneus (other shield devices from the same source: bull’s head, lambda, drinking chalice of Dionysus, serpent, hawk, dolphins, crouching lion, hibiscus flower, stars, the flesh-eating Sphinx, the Gorgon, horse, centaur, club of Herakles)

The source is The Ancient Hoplitikon of Melbourne AU:

All proud members of the Australasian Living History Federation (ALHF)

… [comprising people who] specialise in Ancient Classical and Hellenistic Greek re-enactment. The group’s focus is to study, replicate and perform with military and civilian equipment from the period of 600-100 BC.

… A major aim is to make aware to the general public that Greek culture not only lead the ancient world in philosophy, democracy, art and citizenship but also the genius of military prowess, arms technology and application on the ancient battlefield. This ability and determination to repel invaders over the centuries earned great respect and enabled Greek culture to flourish and spread through the Mediterranean world, inspiring the emerging Roman Republic.

The Greek Hoplite Warrior seems to have international appeal and encapsulates the beginnings of early European cultural determination and sense of galvanizing order out of chaos. School children or adults who may or may not have been exposed to literature of the Illiad [their spelling], Odysseus or Alexander the Great can easily identify with this imagery and instantly recognize the symbolism of Greek struggle for independence and freedom

As for the shields, about the Ancient Hoplitikon’s Shield Registry (edited):

Shield iconography had personal, family and tribal klan significance. The shield devices in our register are faithfully reconstructed based on research, rather than artistic license.

You don’t have to be Greek to participate in the association, but it does make sense that the group should be located in Melbourne VIC. From Wikipedia:

Greeks are the seventh-largest ethnic group in Australia. Moreover, Melbourne is home to one of the largest Greek diaspora communities in the world as well as being the city with the largest Greek-speaking population outside Greece.

According to the 2001 Australian census, Melbourne has the largest Greek Australian population in Australia … and the largest Greek population of any city in the [world] outside of Greece.

I told you we’d end up in Melbourne, brandishing shields (and swords and daggers).

(Hunky male models in very little; lots of lexicography to come in later postings, but here lots of plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so not advised for kids or the sexually modest.)

The 3/37 Daily Jocks ad in e-mail — with the header Bottomless Shorts  — now with a caption of mine:

(#1)

He navigated the
Corridors of the Blue
Boy Bar, savoring its
Pygian gloom, signaled
Red in the smoky
Dusk of desire, whispered
Shoot me, please,
Shoot the Moon

Who is he? He is Moon Moon Moon II, whose American father, né Moon Mullins, married first Keith Moon, then another wayward Englishman, Alfie Moon. (Ban-Ki-moon proposed, but Moon rejected him; Moon I was something of a kimchee queen, but he had an overwhelming weakness for bad boys like Keith and Alfie, so a secretary-general of the United Nations was way too good for him. ) Moon II, in contrast to his father (who was flamboyantly bisexual), lives a racy but apparently straight life, while being fully engaged in the subterranean world of secret gay sex, where, like his father before him, he is an eager bottom boy.

More on the characters in this family drama below, with a thrilling digression from Moon I’s early days in which Popeye screws him. (Those were the days, my friends!) And a note on Moon II’s little brother Cosmo (a naughty boy who has a nightly tryst with the moon he loves).

But first a little background.

Barcode Berlin. See my 8/14/18 posting “Butch fagginess” on the “frank homowear” from the Barcode Berlin firm. Then in the DJ mailing on the 27th:

The new mesh leather-look Moon Shorts by Barcode Berlin will be sure to have you turning heads.

Featuring premium black mesh side panels with a contrasting colored front and back.  The pouch and rear are extremely sexy, with see-through mesh and a window right below the waistband, these shorts are perfect for those daring enough to wear them!

Moon Shorts [come] in asphalt, red, yellow

(#2) Stunning in yellow

In a follow-up posting I’ll get to the complex word play in Moon Shorts, evoking moon shots and shoot the moon, with sexual allusions in moon and shoot/shot. And then in a second follow-up posting I’ll look at DJ’s use of bottomless for things like #2 on the left.

The Blue Boy Bar in Berlin.

(#3) The Blue Boy Bar, a gay bar in Berlin (Kleiststraße 7), in business for 40 years, open 24 hours

The Moons. On to the family, starting with Moon I. From Wikipedia:

(#4) Moon I in 1947; the boy is Moon’s street urchin kid brother Kayo

Moon Mullins is an American comic strip which had a run as both a daily and Sunday feature from June 19, 1923 to June 2, 1991. Syndicated by the Chicago Tribune/New York News Syndicate, the strip depicts the lives of diverse lowbrow characters who reside at the Schmaltz (later Plushbottom) boarding house. The central character, Moon (short for Moonshine), is a would-be prizefighter — perpetually strapped for cash but with a roguish appetite for vice and high living. Moon took a room in the boarding house at 1323 Wump Street in 1924 and never left, staying on for 67 years. The strip was created by cartoonist Frank Willard.

Then Moon’s first great love, the mercurial Keith Moon:

(#5) Keith in action

Keith John Moon (23 August 1946 – 7 September 1978) was an English drummer for the rock band the Who. He was noted for his unique style and his eccentric, often self-destructive behaviour. His drumming continues to be praised by critics and musicians. (Wikipedia link)

After Keith died in a haze of drugs, Moon Moon fell into years of intense aimless sex, with both women and men, before he found his second great love, Alfie Moon, a laddish petty criminal from London’s East End with a charming side. Just Moon’s type:

(#6) Alfie Moon as realized by Shane Richie

Alfie Moon is a fictional character from the BBC soap opera EastEnders, played by Shane Richie. [2002–2005, 2010–2016, 2018–2019] (Wikipedia link)

Moon Moon and Alfie Moon were married in a fabulous ceremony on Fire Island; Moon Moon took Alfie’s name, becoming Moon Moon Moon (“You can never have too many moons in your life”, he quipped); and Alfie took on the role of adoptive father for Moon’s two sons from his days of coupling with women. The first boy, Moon, they renamed after his father: Moon Moon Moon II, called Moooooon Two for short, and nicknamed Moonie. The second boy was already named Cosmo, after Moon I’s long-time fuck buddy Cosmo Topper (see the Wikipedia page on Thorne Smith).

Both boys are a bit odd. Moon II was never comfortable with his fathers’ flagrant public queerness and retreated into a shell of stiff heteronormative respectability, while secretly engaging obsessively in public sex, on an almost daily basis, with men in many cities. He’s particularly fond of Berlin, with its vibrant gay resources right in the middle of the city, so that he can move easily from ordinary straight life to back-room bars and sex clubs, where he can satisfy his intense desire for cock. Like his father before him, he adores getting fucked; sein Arsch is famous.

Cosmo is still a boy, and a strange, dreamy one, mooning about the house. His story has now been told in print, in Cosmo’s Moon by Devin Scillian (Sleeping Bear Press, 2003). The publisher’s description from Google Books, including an account of Cosmo’s nightly tryst with the moon he loves:

(#7)

Cosmo loves the moon, and the moon loves Cosmo. They both come to realize though that lots of things depend on the moon – the ocean tides, morning glories, and the dogs, who can’t stop howling. A magical book about the power of friendship and the nature of responsibility, Cosmo’s moon will charm everyone who’s ever been bewitched by the beauty of the moon. “Cosmo loved the moon. He had moon pajamas and a moon nightlight and stars and moons all over his bedroom. Every night, Cosmo’s [fathers] gave him a hug and a kiss and tucked him into his bed. But just as soon as they closed his bedroom door, he threw aside the covers, ran to the open window, and watched as the golden moon came into the night sky just above the sycamore tree. And as a gentle night breeze blew across the curtains, Cosmo would talk and the moon would listen.”

Who knows where this will lead.

Moon Mullins’s youthful straying down the primrose path. The tale begins with a social practice in our culture, an extension of the practice of double dating. From NOAD:

noun double date: a social outing in which two couples participate.

Classically, the couples are mixed-sex, and either the two women, or the two men, or both, are close friends. The people in these pairs offer each other psychological support in their dealing with the other sex on this occasion, which is a dating event, in which romantic or sexual pairing  is potentially on the agenda (and that may be the source of some anxiety).

Such occasions are planned; they are a species of appointment. But people can also affiliate in short-term pairs on a pick-up basis, especially for casual sex, and it’s not uncommon for someone engaged in a search for a sexual partner to do so in company with a friend of the same sex (who again is a source of psychological support, encouragement, and the like). So: buddies will look together for women to score with; and if they’re successful in finding two women, may go on to consummate their connections together, say in a hotel room. The presence of the other couple takes some of the pressure off each man — he’s not flying solo — while also providing some modeling, shared arousal, and a certain degree of friendly competition. Such a relationship between men is homosocial and involves sex, but it is not necessarily homoerotic (though it can be, especially for a man  who appears to be straight but experiences significant sexual desire for men).

In any event, this is a practice, or social routine, that straight guys (at least in some social groups in the US) have sometimes engaged in, for some time now; I have heard about instances from straight friends, and the practice is sometimes represented in fiction and the movies. If it has a name, I don’t know it.

All this is a build-up to representations of the practice in Tijuana bibles, cheap and usually crude pornographic cartoon strips circulated underground in the early-to-mid 20th century. See my 6/25/12 posting “Tijuana bibles”, with a link to two such “bibles” (a Mickey and Donald bible and a Donald bible) on AZBlogX here (the 6/28/12 posting “Disney Tijuana Bibles”).

As a very popular comic-strip character, Moon Mullins was worked into a considerable number of Tijuana bibles. One of them — “Stepping Out” (c1935) — pairs Moon and Popeye engaged in the practice of two buddies hooking up with two women for sex; the cover of the bible:

(#8)

My AZBlogX posting this morning, “Popeye screws Moon”, shows p. 7 of this sexual adventure, in which the man-on-woman sex is interrupted by an interlude in which Popeye the Sailor Man screws Moon Mullins — while Moon eats pussy and a second woman licks Popeye’s balls (obviously not a WordPressable image).

Otherwise, we have no visual record of Moon I’s predilection for taking it up the ass, so ths is a precious artefact.

With that, I leave the Moon family. In postings to come: moon shots and shooting the moon; and bottomless shorts.

(Today’s Daily Jocks dude — call him Jock — showing off his lean muscled body in nothing but a Helsinki Athletica Sport jock, while earnestly appreciating his gorgeous penis (not shown here). Lots of penis-talk, eventually some notes on sculpture — but of naked athletes. Kids and the sexually modest might want to avoid the scene.)

Beautiful penis, wake unto me,
Arousal and dewdrops I am waiting from thee

(#1)

Do you have a dick that you really love,
One that you feel so groovy with?
You don’t even mind if it’s a bit worn,
That only makes it nicer still.
I love my dick, I love my dick,
My dick is so comfortably lovely.

To come: the Helsinki Athletica ad copy. The Stephen Foster song parodied in the header for #1. The Donovan song parodied in the caption for #1. The slogan I love my dick (with a note on alienable and inalienable possession, and one on personal datives). Beautiful penises. And the pose in #1, combining one convention from classical sculpture (the athlete in repose) and one from male photography (self-regard: contemplating your penis with a gaze downward).

The HA Sport jocks. The ad copy:

Lovers of comfortable, supportive and sporty underwear will truly appreciate the Helsinki Athletica Sport range. The low rise design is great for everyday wear with the soft mesh fabric ensuring all day comfort and you can be sure of excellent support in the dual layered pouch. Available in 3 bold colorways.

The on-line DJ catalog lists three colors — red, “khaki” (which is actually black), and white, but HA also offers blue (as in #1) and grey.

“Beautiful Dreamer”. The sentimental Stephen Foster song, beginning:

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee

The full song performed by Roy Orbison here.

“I Love My Shirt”. From Wikipedia about Donovan’s album Barabajagal:

(#2) Donovan and the Smothers Brothers performing in 1968

Barabajagal is the seventh studio album and eighth album overall from British singer-songwriter Donovan. It was released in the United States on 11 August 1969

Side one: 1 “Barabajagal”, 2 “Superlungs My Supergirl”, 3 “Where Is She”, 4 “Happiness Runs”, 5 “I Love My Shirt”

Side two: 6 “The Love Song”, 7 “To Susan on the West Coast Waiting”, 8.”Atlantis”, 9 “Trudi”, 10 “Pamela Jo”

The shirt verse in the original:

Do you have a shirt that you really love,
One that you feel so groovy in ?
You don’t even mind if it starts to fade,
That only makes it nicer still.
I love my shirt, I love my shirt,
My shirt is so comfortably lovely.

Phallophiliana: I love my dick as a slogan on various objects.

I love cock and I love dick as slogans expressing appreciation of or desire for penises in general (with cock/dick as M(ass) Ns) are available on t-shirts, mugs, buttons, etc. from many suppliers. From my 7/30/17 posting “The queer quilt”:

[panel 4.2  of the quilt:] I ︎  (conveying ‘I love cock’) t-shirt from CafePress. Other suppliers provide I ︎ Cock, I ︎ Dick, and I ︎ Penis shirts, even I ︎ Big Black Dick. Plus straightforward I Suck Cock and Cocksucker shirts (and rebus  ‘cocksucker’ shirts, with a lollipop, aka a sucker).

And a rainbow-queer I love dick t-shirt:

(#3)

On to I love my dick shirts (etc.), which are also very common, as here:

(#4)

The slogan would ordinarily be understood as conveying an appreciation for one’s own penis, especially as the source of sexual pleasure; this takes my penis to be an expression of inalienable possession; see my 7/27/18 posting “Are you my bottom?”, with a section on alienable vs. alienable possession. But alienable readings are also possible; I could, for example, talk about my lover’s penis as my dick if I am viewing it a beloved possession (referring to it more intimately than with the neutral your/his dick or the distancing that dick).

A side note: my dick can also serve as direct object in a personal dative construction: I love me my dick — which can be understood in several ways, but most easily as a variant of I love dick highlighting the speaker’s involvement in the situation. In my 12/17/18 posting “Penguins and packages”, there’s a section on personal datives.

Beautiful penises. #1 is not only about Jock’s love for his penis, but also about the beauty of his penis. There’s a Page on this blog about beautiful cock, with links to illustrations and further discussion. This is all about the penis consdered as an aesthetic object; there’s a separate Page on size postings.

The athlete in repose. Now to the models for the way Jock is posed in #1. First, there’s a long tradition of sculptures of athletes in repose. Three examples:

(#5) Resting Athlete, a Roman marble in Palazzo Altemps, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome

(#6) Auguste Rodin, The Athlete, 1901-4

(#7) Charles Despiau, Athlete Resting (athlète au repos), c.1929

Self-regard. In #1, Jock is also gazing with pleasure at his dick. A man contemplating his penis with a gaze downward is a fairly common presentation of the male body in (homoerotic) male photography, where our inclination to look first at faces in photographs is exploited by the photographer: we look at the face and then follow its gaze to the central feature in the image, the subject’s genitals. (Or, more subtly, in cropped photos, to his implied genitals.)

A similar strategy is often used in high-end underwear photography, except that the dick and balls are covered (usually, just barely) by cloth — an article of clothing that is in fact the point of the photo. See my 2/20/19 posting “News for penises: notes on phallophilia”, with a section on self-regard, contemplating one’s penis. One shot from that posting:

(#8) Look downward, angel

Get off on his body and, oh yes, buy our really cool underwear!

(Men’s bodies, clicks, mansex, dactyls, homowear, eggcorns, street talk, and more. Not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

The Daily Jocks mailing of the 15th, with a studiedly homo-smouldering ad for crop tops from the fetish-wear company Barcode Berlin. Plus a foul derangement of (heavily enjambed) dactyls as a caption.

(#1)

Kiko the crop-top kid,
Impudent pussy boy,
Butch faggy target for
Amorous arrows — a

mazing for festivals,
Parties with gangbangers,
Mid-drifting kikis with
Quatrains of dactyls

The ad copy (slightly edited):

It’s time to make a statement in one of the latest crop tees from Barcode Berlin.

The mid-drift crop sits at the perfect length and suits multiple body types. The sporty raglan sleeve paired with the lightweight polyester fabric will keep you looking good and feeling great throughout the whole day/night.

Amazing for festivals or parties!

Kiko has fully embraced the Barcode life of butch faggotry, as a crop-top kid. From the alternatives (which I’ll enumerate below), he’s chosen the party-boy Kiki target as his own emblem and identity: he is the target, the possessor of the bullseye ◎ that the arrow of desire seeks to penetrate.

Kiko’s world: crop tops. From postings on this blog:

— on 8/2/18 in “Male crop tops!”, an overview of crop tops, with a note on the expressions crop/cropped top/tee

— on 8/14/18 in “Butch fagginess” (in Barcode Berlin’s clothes)

(#2) A shirt that conveys both ‘I’m a real man’ and ‘I’m a total slut’

Printed on the crop tops:

Shady Bitch, Kiki, #CANDY, This Boy Is A Bottom, [two unicorns with a rainbow, no words], Get Naked, Cheap & Easy, Bitch, Bear, Fetish, Bitch I’m Fabulous, Love Boys

Linguistic note: mid-drift, mid-rift. From the ad copy above: “The mid-drift crop sits at the perfect length”. The word midriff is an old word with a now-obsolete second part:

noun midriff: the region of the front of the body between the chest and the waist. ORIGIN Old English midhrif, from mid-1 + hrif ‘belly’. (NOAD)

So mid-drift is an eggcorn, an attempt to make some sense out of a word that appears to have the prefix mid– in it. From the Eggcorn Forum (on the Eggcorn Database site), entry 665 Commentary by Lara Hopkins , 9/27/05:

“Mid-drift top” for “midriff top”. I spotted this on a mailing list just now. Maybe the speaker is imagining the hem to be progressively drifting upwards on the torso. “Midriff” in isolation is more or less obsolete nowadays.

Google confirms nearly 6000 examples, including a number of dress code handbooks:

“Thongs, “baggy” pants, mid-drift tops, “spaghetti strap tops”, etc. are not considered safe for school”…

“please forgo any mid-drift tops, tennis shoes, torn jeans, etc.”…

“#3 NO halter, tank or mid-drift tops.”…

“Matching bra or mid-drift tops are available, but are VERY small. ”…

And from Urban Dictionary:

mid-drift: A midriff/belly that is unintentionally visible due to the owner of the midriff’s shirt riding (drifting) up during use. That chick’s rocking some SERIOUS mid-drift. — by Wildbluesun 5/20/14

(Note that both report an attempt to rationalize drift as the second element in the word.)

If not drift, then maybe rift. From the Eggcorn Database on midriff » midrift, entered by me on 8/13/07:

Classification: English – final d/t-deletion

Analyzed or reported by: Hilary Robinson (link), Paul Brians (link), Peter Forster, calamityjane01 (link)

Suggested to me by Rachel Cristy, 13 August 2007. Earlier reports above.

Brians: “Midriff” derives from “mid-” and a very old word for the belly. Fashions which bare the belly expose the midriff. People think of the gap being created by scanty tops and bottoms as a rift, and mistakenly call it a “midrift” instead. In earlier centuries, before belly-baring was in, the midriff was also the piece of cloth which covered the area.

AMZ: It’s possible that this interpretation is encouraged by viewing the “midriff” pronunciation as the product of final t-deletion.

Kiko’s world: the (squatting-kneeling) posture. Kiko’s posture, kneeling with his legs spread, heels raised, and body vertical, but one leg raised as in squatting or crouching, is designed to thrust his crotch forward as much as possible and to display his muscular thighs (as the bare midriff displays his muscular abdominals).

Kiko’s world: facial expressions and pussies. Kiko’s facial expression in #1 combines an element of impertinence or impudence with one of seductiveness or sexiness. But it’s fairly restrained. Here’s George Michael going all out on these dimensions:

(#3)

The word impudent, all on its own, moves us towards sex. From NOAD:

adj. impudent: not showing due respect for another person; impertinent: he could have strangled this impudent upstart.  ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense ‘immodest, indelicate’): from Latin impudent-, from in- ‘not’+ pudent- ‘ashamed, modest’ (from pudere ‘be ashamed’).

noun pudendum (plural pudenda: (often pudenda) a person’s external genitals, especially a woman’s. ORIGIN mid 17th century: from Latin pudenda (membra) ‘(parts) to be ashamed of’, neuter plural of the gerundive of pudere ‘be ashamed’.

In fact, Kiko is not only impudent, he’s a pussy:

noun pussy: 1 informal (also pussycat) a cat. 2 vulgar slang [a] a woman’s genitals [that is, her pudenda]. [b] women in general, considered sexually. [c] North American informal a weak, cowardly, or effeminate man. (NOAD)

pussyboy / pussy-boy / pussy boy ‘passive male homosexual, catamite, bottom boy’ (from several sources)

Kiko’s world: let’s have a kiki. Kiko’s shirt in #1 is embazoned KIKI. From my 3/19/17 posting “Sexting with emoji”, about Grindr gaymoji, including this one:

(#4)

With this explanation:

From Wikipedia:

A “kiki” (alternately kiking or a ki) is a term which grew out of Queer Black /Latino social culture – loosely defined as an expression of laughter or onomatopoeia for laughing, which extended to mean a gathering of friends for the purpose of gossiping and chit-chat, and later made more widely known in the song “Let’s Have a Kiki” by the Scissor Sisters. [2012] [Scissor Sisters videos can be viewed here and here]

(#5)

The Kiki world is extravagantly gay, also full of drag displays and general genderfuck.

Kiko’s world: targets and bullseyes. Kiko’s shirt in #1 has KIKI superimposed on a target. A target with its bullseye center. From NOAD:

noun bullseye: 1 [a] the center of the target in sports such as archery, shooting, and darts. [b] a shot that hits the center of a target in archery, shooting, and darts. [c] used to refer to something that achieves exactly the intended effect: the silence told him he’d scored a bullseye.

An archery target with an arrow penetrating the center of its bullseye:

(#6)

A bullseye is open to many symbolic interpretations — in particular, as an eye, so metaphorically a sign of focus or concentration, as in a mandala, and as an eyelike bodily cavity: the mouth, the vagina, or (as surely intended in #1) the anus (Kiko is a pussy boy).

A linguistic bonus: a version of the bullseye in now Unicode symbol U+0298, used to represent a bilabial click (the sound of a lip smack or kissing gesture)  — in a simple variant here:

(#7)

and in Times New Roman here:

(#8)

(Mesh Man in his underwear, leading us in many directions, but with plenty of sexual content — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

From the 12th: Mesh Man returns to the Daily Jocks underverse, flogging their fabulous Varsity Mesh Shorts, flaunting his famous receptive organ — he’s all man and a foot deep — kneeling with feeling in #1 and flashing a finger gun to his fans in #2:

(#1) Party shorts! (see the ad below) — I go down on one knee to go down on my guy

(#2) Always open for business® — and I got a gun cocked for you, too

I used to stand and watch him every day
He was always smooth and cool
I used to love to hear the people say
He’s a regular posing fool
But I’ve noticed in all the reports
When he took his bow
To the crowd and the town
The crowd went crazy
And the house came down
When Daddy wore his
Varsity
Mesh
Shorts

(Hat tip to Billy Green, who had no idea what I was going to do with this.)

Alas, we have no photos of Mesh Man when he was still the laddish Butt Boy, always poised to take care of his bad boy buddies. But here he is back on 2/13, in the posting “Mesh Man: Always Open for Business®”:

(#3) In an especially satisfying sexual liaison, Iron Man’s semen transformed the superhero into Mesh Man, now known as one of the Underverse’s stellar receptives

Earier this month, MM briefly explored hs penetrative side in a ad for Helsinki Athletica, which I recorded in my 4/9 posting “Athletica Sport Dick, how I admire thee”:

(#4)

Even in his Varsity moments, MM occasionally offers front as well as rear:

(#5) The Varsity Field Mesh jockstrap in white

The ad text:

VARSITY MESH RESTOCK! Our top seller of 2019 has been restocked, both sexy and preppy, Varsity prides itself on a great range of basics and statement pieces designed for every guy’s wardrobe. Jockstrap, Jock-Thong, Mesh Shorts, Mesh Singlet. All available now in Black & White.

… Mesh Shorts: Introducing the all new Varsity Mesh Collection!  These party shorts are made from a high quality Nylon mesh that is form-fitting to accentuate your curves. They are perfect to wear over the Varsity Field Underwear, or if you’re daring enough, nothing at all!

Where this will go now: to a personal note on MM’s body; to the source of the snatch of song above (“Very Soft Shoes” from the Broadway show Once Upon a Mattress), with notes on the formulaic expression dancing fool ‘fool for dancing’ and on Daddy/Boy relationships; to the squatting-kneeling postion or posture in #1 (with a wide range of uses, at least six, most (but not all) having to do with submission); and to the metaphorical chain “my finger is my gun is my cock”, as in the finger gun gesture in #2 (which leads to a Mexican standoff scene from US tv’s The Office and to Robert Mapplethorpe’s penis photography).

Got it? Hang on to your program, ’cause it’s time for the show.

A personal intro. I find the photos of MM, especially #2 and #4, moving and hypnotic; I keep coming back to gaze at them with great aching pleasure — because MM has the thin lean muscular body with long torso — the swimmer’s body — of my man Jacques, the male body I’ve been most familiar with in my life (even more than my own), in every detail, from the 26 years we were linked, so my ideal of a desirable male body. Essence of Jacques, with a version of J’s smile in #2, and even an updated edition of J’s 1970s hair in this classroom photo:

(#6)

I love this photo because it conveys his physical presence in the context of the man passionately engaged in his calling. This earlier beach photo strips things down to his body, but still conveys a persona in his half-smile:

(#7)

MM is not only an incarnation of this body type, but he also projects an amiable playful persona, so of course I’m crazy about his image.

The body type is well represented in the underverse, in men’s premium underwear ads –many in my earlier postings, though the genre tends towards bodybuilder types. And of course, in actual swimmers, like this one:

(#8)

And in the occasional pornstar, like this one cropped from the Lucas Studio ad for the Fourth of July in 2017:

(#9)

The Varsity Mesh Shorts song. This is an only slighty altered version of “Very Soft Shoes”, sung by the Jester in Once Upon a Mattress in loving memory of his father, who was a dancer. From Wikipedia:

(#10) Theatrical poster for the 1959 Broadway original, with Carol Burnett as Princess Winnifred, Jack Gilford as King Sextimus the Silent — and jazz and ballet dancer Matt Mattox as the Jester

Once Upon a Mattress is a musical comedy with music by Mary Rodgers, lyrics by Marshall Barer, and book by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller, and Marshall Barer. It opened off-Broadway in May 1959, and then moved to Broadway. The play was written as an adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Princess and the Pea.

… Initial reviews of the play were mixed, but critics and actors alike were surprised by the show’s enduring popularity. Once Upon a Mattress is a popular choice for high school drama programs and community theatre groups.

(#11) “Very Soft Shoes”, from the original 1959 Broadway cast recording

The song comes in two parts, the first establishing the context:

I am far from sentimental or romantic
And I like to think I’m strictly up to date
But at times the dancing gets a bit too frantic
In these hectic days of 1428
So indulge me as I pause to raise my chalice
To a quaint and charming dance they used to do
In the days when my dear father played the palace
Back in 1392
My dad was debonair and quite as light as air
In his
Very
Soft
Shoes
How he could dip and glide
And skip and slip and slide
In his
Very
Soft
Shoes

Then the main story (the part I’ve riffed on):

I used to stand and watch him every day
He was always smooth and cool
I used to love to hear the people say
He’s a regular dancing fool
He barely touched the ground
And never made a sound
But I’ve noticed in all his reviews
That when he took his bow to the crowd and the crown
The crowd went crazy and the house came down
When Daddy wore his
Very
Soft
Shoes

The boldface material is stuff I’ve altered: I removed one couplet completely; made other changes to take the song out of a court context where a man dances for an audience and move it to a context where he poses for an audience, eliciting pleasure in the desirability of his body; and further sexualized things by replacing the soft shoes by mesh shorts, thereby shifting Daddy towards a gay Daddy/Boy interpretation, rather than a literal father/son interpretation.

Daddy/Boy relationships come up on this blog regularly, especially around Fathers Day. See, for example, my 6/21/15 posting “My hard-on belongs to Daddy”, and note this explanation from the GameLink gay porn emporium:

Gay daddies are older men with big hard cocks. Older men with the authority to be the boss and the equipment to make you like it. (link)

MM is an instance of an apparently paradoxical variant, the Amiable Bottom Daddy, but the species is fairly well attested, in real life as well as in gay porn (in an earlier life, I played this role on occasion). Daddiness is a matter of who’s in charge, not (necessarily) who does the fucking — a psychological arrangement, not an anatomical one.

Then, in the midst of “Very Soft Shoes”, there’s what I took to be a formulaic expression dancing fool ‘fool for dancing, someone who is devoted to dancing’ (playing on two senses of fool), which I altered to posing fool.

As I say, I took dancing fool to be some kind of fixed expression; posing fool was interpretable to me, but it sounded to me like a novel, creative extension of a fixed pattern. And, indeed, when I took the expression to the American Dialect Society mailing list, Ben Zimmer searched up some notable examples of dancing / dancin’ fool:

“The Dancin’ Fool”, 1920 silent comedy film (link); “The Dancing Fool”, 1932 animated cartoon with Betty Boop (link); “Dancin’ Fool”, 1974 song by The Guess Who (link); “Dancin’ Fool”, 1979 song by Frank Zappa (link)

What I had not thought about was the role of the head noun fool in all of this. On ADS-L, Garson O’Toole summarized some results from the slang dictionaries: HDAS with:

fool n. a person who is excessively dedicated to a given activity. — usu. constr. with prec. ppl. [1875 in DAE: A Fool for Luck.] 1913-1915 Van Loan Taking the Count 176: He’s the fightin’est little fool ‘at ever pulled on a glove. . . . 1953 I Love Lucy (CBS-TV): I’m a dancing fool!

And GDoS with:

fool n. 3. anyone excessively enthusiastic about a given activity or topic; thus dancing fool, singing fool; often found as a fool for … 1887 [US]  in Overland Monthly (CA) July 66: That air that fiddlin’ fool, Pete Dobine.

Some of this is boiled down in NOAD‘s entry:

noun fool: [a] a person who acts unwisely or imprudently; a silly person: what a fool I was to do this. [b] historical a jester or clown, especially one retained in a noble household. [c] informal a person [AZ: excessively] devoted to a particular activity: he is a running fool. [d] archaic a person who is duped.

Sense b is highly salient in the Mattress context, since the character who sings “Very Soft Shoes” is a jester, that is, a fool-b. Meanwhile, the subject of the song is a fool-c, as I noted above.

In modern usage, fool-c seems to occur in two patterns:

PRP (compound) pattern: V-prp fool — dancing fool, singing fool, running fool above (a compound, but with afterstress  (a dancing FOOL) rather than the forestress of ordinary N + N compounds, like a DANCING lesson, DANCING shoes)

FOR (prepositional) pattern: a fool for N — which the Merriam-Webster Online dictionary takes to be an idiom:

— a fool for idiom — used to say that a person likes or loves something or someone. He’s a fool for candy. I’m a fool for you. [The N can of course be a gerundive nominal: a fool for dancing.]

Both patterns deserve further study. The compound pattern does seem to very strongly prefer gerundive nominals as first elements; things like He’s a candy FOOL ‘he’s excessively fond of candy’ would appear to be very rare. That’s an empirical question, but one hard to investigate, since text searches can’t pick out the expressions with both the right prosody and the right interpretations.

The prepositional pattern is a bit easier to investigate, though you have to winnow out other senses, as in He’s a fool for several reasons and He’s a fool for profit (meaning that he works as a fool to earn money). As a start, I looked at all the relevant fool for examples on this blog (before this posting). As it happens, the topic of excessive enthusiasm for something is likely to come up on this blog specifically in connection with affection and sex, as here:

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I am a fool for kisses (link)

originally a genuine country boy, clever and sweet, but largely unschooled, also a fool for mansex (link)

Often as he offered his dick for sucking, Locke was a fool for cock, an ubercocksucker who loved to take loads in his mouth (link)

Though there is one musical example (referring to shapenote songs):

I’m a fool for trumpets, and angels. (link)

And, in my files of material for future postings, at least one sexual example with a gerundive nominal:

[gay pornstar and landscape architect] Marcus Iron is a fool for sucking cock, especially at glory holes

But to return to my original concern: it’s now clear to me that the PRP pattern occurs with a considerable range of Vs, but still dancing fool seems to be a very frequent collocation, something more like a cliché than an actual idiom.

Squatting-kneeling in #1. On to postures / positions and their social meanings. The overarching observation is about kneeling of all sorts; from Wikipedia:

Socially, kneeling, similar to bowing, is associated with reverence, respect, submission and obeisance, particularly if one kneels before a person who is standing or sitting: the kneeling position renders a person defenseless and unable to flee. For this reason, in some religions, in particular by Christians and Muslims, kneeling is used as a position for prayer, as a position of submission to God

(Such a posture might of course be chosen for utilitarian reasons, having to do with its suitability for particular actions.)

What we see in #1 is one variant of a posture combining kneeling (with one leg) and squatting or crouching (with the other). A posture noted on this blog in my 4/21/19 posting “Let’s have a kiki … in me”:

(#12) Kiko in a squat/kneel — squeel, I’ll call it — position in a Barcode Berlin ad, differing from MM’s position on several dimensions [added 4/30: on some of these dimensions, see Note 1 in the comments]

Squeeling is the position for, at least:

(a) genuflection, as part of Christian religious practice

(b) kneeling in honor of a fallen comrade on the battlefield

(c) getting knighted

(d) “taking a/the knee” in protest of injustice

(e)  shooting a rifle, as one of the standard positions

(f) fellating a standing man, as an alternative to a two-knee kneel

[added 4/30: one further squeeling activity: (g) proposing marriage; see Note 2 in the comments]

Squeeling: genuflection. From Wikipedia:

Genuflection or genuflexion … [from early times] has been a gesture of deep respect for a superior. Today, the gesture is common in the Christian religious practices of the Anglican Church, Lutheran Church, Roman Catholic Church, and Western Rite Orthodox Church. The Latin word genuflectio, from which the English word is derived, originally meant kneeling rather than the rapid dropping to one knee and immediately rising that became customary in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. It is often referred to as “going down on one knee” [the caption for #1 exploits the ambiguity of going down] or “bowing the knee”.

Nice cartoon by Bill Abbott, showing an employee genuflecting before his employer in an office, with the boss saying,“Rise. Genuflecting was only required during internship.” (Using the cartoon requires a fee, so I’m describing it to you.)

Squeeling: honoring the fallen dead. On the website of the All Classics, Ltd. company, which supplies (among other things) custom bronze statues:

(#12) “Life-Size Kneeling Soldier Memorial Statue” (4 ft. tall) — on sale for $13,000

Squeeling: getting knighted. From an unidentified print-maker, this scene to stir the imperialist British heart:

(#13) Queen Elizabeth I knighting Sir Francis Drake on board the Golden Hind at Deptford in London on 4 April 1581; from Illustrations of English and Scottish History (1882) (Getty Images)

Squeeling: taking a knee in protest. Not so much a gesture of submission, but an unmistakable rejection of the gesture of standing for the playing of the national anthem before sports events.

(#14) Eric Greed and Colin Kaepernick of the NFL’s 49ers taking a knee in 2016 to call attention to systematic racism and injustice in the historical treatment of people of color in the US [added 4/30: see note 3 in the comments]

Squeeling: the kneeling position in rifelry. Entirely utilitarian, this one: the kneeling position steadies the arm holding the stock of the rifle. From the Peterson’s Hunting site:

(#15) One of the three basic positions: prone, kneeling, standing

Squeeling: giving a standing blow job. An alternative to two-knee kneeling when fellating a standing man. The standing blow job is usually understood as submissive for the cocksucker — it’s configured as a kind of worship — but it also has its utilitarian side, since the act requires no furniture and can easily be performed almost anywhere.

Usually, the cocksucker does a two-knee kneel, but the position is somewhat unsteady (a cocksucker will often steady themselves by holding onto their man’s hipbones) and can be tiring on the cocksucker’s thigh muscles. A squeel can alleviate both problems, as in this scene of automotive fellatio in the great outdoors (dick suppressed to satisfy the modesty of WordPress and social media):

(#16)

(#17)

So much for MM squeeling in #1.

I’m a desperate man … send fingers, guns, and penises! (with apologies to the late Warren Zevon). In #2, still displaying his muscular buttocks, MM is standing, and flashing the (raised) finger gun gesture, in which an index finger symbolizes the cock-and-gun gun complex, sometimes the gun, sometimes the cock; and sometimes the gun symbolizes the cock, but sometimes the cock symbolizes the gun. (I owe the idea of the complex to Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1982 photograph Cock and Gun — which I cannot of course show you here, though you can view it cordoned off in a carnal ghetto with the similarly themed Jack walls, #833 (also from 1982) in “The Mapplethorpe gun file” on AZBlogX.)

On the finger gun, from Wikipedia:

The finger gun is a hand gesture in which the subject uses their hand to mimic a handgun, raising their thumb above their fist to act as a hammer, and one finger extended perpendicular to it acting as a barrel. The middle finger can also act as the trigger finger or part of the barrel itself.

It is also sometimes used by placing the “gun” to the side of one’s own head in, in one’s mouth, or under the chin, as if committing suicide, to indicate a strong desire to be put out of one’s misery, either from boredom or exasperation, or to express one’s dislike for a situation. In addition, it can also be used as a way to say “hey” or “what’s up” to friends or acquaintances. It can be used as an insulting gesture, as to suggest your brain should be blown out of the back of your head.

(#18) Rowan Atkinson’s tv character Mr. Bean performing the upraised variant of the finger gun (as in #2), preparatory to lowering the weapon and firing it

Children, teenagers, and teacher’s assistants have occasionally been punished or removed from school for making the gesture. In some cases, this was because authority figures interpreted it as a signal for threatening real violence, while in others they interpreted it as unacceptably supportive of gun violence in general.

MM’s finger-gun performance in #2 can be seen as an offer to use his gun-cock on you, or as an appreciation of gun-cocks, modeling how you might use this one on him. Either way, he’s amiable.

Finger guns can easily be put to playful purposes. They can, for example, be used to create make-believe Mexican standoffs, as in this finger-gun “Standoff” scene from tv’s The Office (US):

(#19) S6 E10 (11/12/09), “Murder”

On the Mexican standoff, from Wikipedia:

A Mexican standoff is a confrontation in which no strategy exists that allows any party to achieve victory. As a result, all participants need to maintain the strategic tension, which remains unresolved until some outside event makes it possible to resolve it.

The term Mexican standoff was originally used in the context of using firearms and today still commonly implies a situation in which the parties face some form of threat from the other parties [OED3 (Dec. 2001) has its first cite from 1876]. The Mexican standoff is a recurring trope in cinema, in which several armed characters hold each other at gunpoint.

… A Mexican standoff where each party is pointing a gun at another is now considered a movie cliché, stemming from its frequent use as a plot device in cinema. A famous example of the trope is in Sergio Leone’s 1966 Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, where the titular characters played by Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach face each other at gunpoint.

Mapplethorpe on the cock-gun complex. Mapplethorpe’s preoccupation with penises, especially erect ones, resulted in a huge assortment of photographs, some now quite famous. The two cock-gun photographs in my AZBlogX posting of yesterday (#2 and #3 there) are from the same 1982 shoot: #2 is a close-up, with the subject naked; #3 is a mid shot, with the same subject clothed, his erect penis protruding from his open fly. My comment there:

Symbolism, sure. But is the gun a symbol of a penis, or is the penis a symbol of a gun? (The dangerous dick. It can kill.)

The gun in both is a very small revolver (considerably smaller than the cock in the photos) of odd appearance (but then I’m an idiot about handguns):

(#20) The gun in Mapplethorpe’s cock-gun photos; I suspect it of being a toy gun

Also on AZBlogX is a Mapplethorpe cock-gun photo I can display here:

(#21) Patrice, N.Y.C. (1977): The penis as gun, but sheathed in its holster.

(Reference to penises, plus some penis art and garments for penises, so not to everyone’s taste.)

From Kyle Wohlmut on Facebook today, items from the gift shop at Castello di Fénis, in the Italian Alps:

(#1) Models of the castle, the castle in snowglobes, but featuring a bag with Fenis (easily read as Penis) in a red heart, conveying ‘I love Fenis’

First: on the castle, the town, and its location (so close to Switzerland — on this blog, many roads lead to Switzerland; or Homoland; or both). Then the red meat: on readings of Fenis; on penis bags (bags with penises on them); on penis bags (bags with penis on them); and on the intimate men’s garment the penis bag (aka penis pouch or cock sock).

Fénis Castle. From Wikipedia:

(#2)

Fénis Castle (Italian: Castello di Fénis, French: Château de Fénis) is an Italian medieval castle located in the town of Fénis [about 13 km (8 mi.) from the city of Aosta]. It is one of the most famous castles in Aosta Valley, and for its architecture and its many towers and battlemented walls has become one of the major tourist attractions of the region.

Aosta is 38.9 km (24.2 mi.) from the Great St Bernard Pass by road. On the map:

(#3) Where the northwest corner of Italy abuts both France (to the west) and Switzerland (to the north) — all breath-takingly up in the Alps

From my 12/5/18 posting “News for massive dogs: St. Bernard of Menthon”

[from Wikipedia: the Great St Bernard Pass] connects Martigny in the canton of Valais in Switzerland with Aosta in the region Aosta Valley in Italy. It is the lowest pass lying on the ridge between the two highest mountains of the Alps, Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa [aka Dufourspitze]. The pass itself is located in Switzerland in the canton of Valais, very close to Italy.

(Yes, where the dogs come from.)

The Fenis bag. Things would no doubt have been easier if the bag had said Fénis, and if the F of Fenis hadn’t looked so much like a P. As it stands, some readers were tempted to see Fenis as the plural of Feni, whatever a Feni is; the bag then says you  them.

Two other readers went for Fenis as a pun. One offered Fenis navidad (Feliz Navidad). Another went for Fenis reborn (Venus Reborn, that is the painting The Birth of Venus by Botticelli).

But whether you saw that F as a P or not, you almost surely entertained Fenis as  Penis. Of course you did. That makes the bag in #1 a penis bag, for some interpretation of the compound penis bag. Here are three…

— a bag with a penis on it. As it trns out, there are tons of bags of all sorts (tote bags, handbags, gym bags, what have you) with representations of penises on them, ranging from the anatomically accurate to the stunningly artful. For instance, this playful duffel bag with rainbow penises on it, from the søciety6 site:

(#4) The “You can’t say Happiness without Penis” bag by Nikki Nikki

— a bag with penis on it. Two canvas tote bags from CafePress: just plain penis:

(#5)

and I PENIS:

(#6)

— a bag for a penis: a penis pouch or cock sock, like this LinvMe penis pouch available from Amazon (in black, blue, and red):

(#7)

(The  makers of #7 think that one size fits almost all. I’m dubious.)

It came to me via Google Alert last week, another creative Zwicky: Denis Zwicky, videographer in Miami. At first, I guessed from his French first name and his fluent but non-native English that he was related to the Zwickys of Wallisellen, outside Zürich, of the Zwicky thread and yarn company and now the Zwicky Areal Facility, an exploration of urban development on the grounds of the thread factory:

(#1) Wallisellen: the old factory and a corner of the new development

Though they’re in German-speaking Switzerland, the younger generations of the family mostly have French names (I’ve written about Joelle); see my 6/27/18 posting “Three Züricher Peter Zwickys”, with a section about “Silk Peter” of the thread company and his four daughters.

But no, far otherwise. As I wrote in yesterday’s posting “Das Wappen”, Denis turned out to be one of the Slavic Zwickys (more in today’s posting “Tsviki from Belarus”). However, I’ll put this personal and family history aside for today, to report on Denis the videographer.

Specifically, from his ZwickyFilm website for “wedding and cinematography video in Miami”, this “Who we are?” statement:

(#2) A display of six of DZ’s videos: five wedding videos and a 2019 Miami Beach Pride video ad for the men’s fashion company 2(X)IST

Zwicky Filmmaking is a Video Company located in Miami, Florida. We always try to make our works cause feelings and be special. We take the process of shooting very seriously, and we always try to do something unique in every work. Zwicky Filmmaking we specialize in Commercial, Wedding, Promo-Video as well as Real Estate and non-commercial projects.

From DZ’s page on the WEVA (Wedding & Event Videographers Association International) site for professional wedding photographers (in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Iceland, and Australia) — of course there’s a professional organization — this intense banner:

(#3) Featuring a still from the very erotic “Black Magic Woman” (cinematic video)

Then two photos of DZ himself:

(#4) On a shoot for a video about New York City, with camera and notably magenta t-shirt

(#5) DZ’s presentation of himself for prospective clients

It’s worth reflecting on these, since they’re an artist’s self-portraits. In both, DZ’s gaze is to the side, not confronting the viewer, but absorbed in his work. In the ad shot, he’s casual in a flannel shirt, masculine and easy-going, smiling pleasantly; his wedding clients are young couples, so he wants to appear both cooperative and competent, and inspire trust in both women and men (not too fussy, not too aggressive, not too stiff). (This is my reading; I’m sure Denis didn’t think it through like this when he was choosing his clothes and striking his pose — he just went with what felt right, no doubt after trying a lot of things out, that’s what artists do, but the result is there for people like me to analyze.

A bit more detail on the Miami Beach Pride video, which I think is wonderfully shot and wonderfully cut; I wanted more (but it’s an ad). The video:

(#6)”Promo video for American luxury fashion label 2(X)IST on Miami Beach Pride 2019 . Videographer: Denis Zwicky. Music: Mikey Geiger – Fern Avenue.”

From Wikipedia:

2(X)IST (pronounced “to exist”) is an American luxury fashion label that makes men’s underwear, swimwear, activewear, loungewear, socks, and watches. 2XIST also launched a women’s line featuring activewear, sleepwear and intimates. The company was founded in 1991 by Gregory Sovell and is headquartered in New York City.

The core business is high-end homowear (underwear and swimwear), often advertised extravagantly, as in this ad from a 6/8/16 posting of mine:

(#7)

(Mango Meshman shows off his body, to the accompaniment of mansexually suggestive lyrics. Not for everyone.)

(#1)

The beauty of his buttocks
And the juicy sweetness
Of his secret parts

We know him in a previous incarnation as the fabulously receptive superhero Mesh Man:

(#2) From my 2/13/19 posting “Mesh Man: Always Open for Business®”

(And again in my 4/27/19 posting “A standout in his shorts”, with Mesh Man “flaunting his famous receptive organ — he’s all man and a foot deep”, in photos #1  – #3 (and admiring his penis in #4).)

But now he’s doing business as Mango Meshman, the maestro of the Mango Ballet, with costumes provided by a new fetish underwear line, DJX, from the Daily Jocks firm (ad in my mail today). The ad copy:

Get party ready with the DJX Trough Collection. Exclusive to DailyJocks this party look will make you stand out from the crowd with matching Harness, Jockstrap, Shorts & Socks.

From NOAD:

noun trough: a long, narrow open container for animals to eat or drink out of: a water trough.

The trough in the ad will suggest pigs feeding, and gay sexual excess.

As for the Mango Ballet, it’s a dance form of Meshman’s own devising, based on four ballet positions, each with an associated color and character; each character has perfectly color coordinated clothes (harness, jockstrap, shorts, and socks) — fetishwear with style:

(#3) First position: the Red Fool, an especially ridiculous-looking posture and costume

(#4) Second position: the Blue Victor

(#5) Third position: the Khaki Contemplative

(#6) Fourth Position: the Black Cruiser

In the technical literature on Mango Ballet, the first two positions are known as covered positions: the buttocks are covered by shorts, and the dancer’s prominent package is highlighted instead. And the last two as open positions: the dancer’s buttocks are on display in his jockstrap.

The fourth position is sometimes known jocularly as The Closer, or as the Coup de Grâce.

(Men’s bodies and mansex, not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

In the Daily Jocks mailing yesterday, this heavily sexualized ad for WaterShorts swimwear (in black, aqua, lime, and coral), the first swimwear from the premium homowear company PUMP! (an old acquaintance on this blog) — with a caption of mine in run-on free verse:

(#1) The Magnficent WaterSports

cruising hard in a pack
the four ride acrest waves of desire
intimidating contemptuous seductive
assuming the burden of
creating enlivening animating
celebrity characters

muscle-hunk Yuri Bruno
menacing in black
leader of the four
crafts an actor “Yul Brynner” aka
Cajun gunslinger Chris Adams
in a famous Western movie, with
guns instead of water pistols so
ominous

haughty faggy Stevie Molleen
wanton in aqua
creates a hyper-macho
“Steve McQueen” all
fast race cars and motorcycles
doing drifter Vin Tanner in the movie
“McQueen’s” fiercely competitive love for
“Paul Newman” was notorious darling
we love them both for it

crotch-grabbing Horn Blucher
incontinent in lime the boy just
cannot keep his hands off his dick
admittedly it is beautiful a monument of
masculinity but still, he animates a
“Horst Bucholz” in the movie a young and
hot-blooded shootist called Chico all
ethnicities melt together in the
watery lands of celluloid desire

impassive Jocko Burnish
indifferent in coral, fresh
aquatic feminine coral, doesn’t
give a shit creates the super-flinty-cool
“James Coburn” whose gun rarely
stays in its holster but movie-morphs into a
knife that Britt wields in the movie one
mortal metal cock is much like any other

Yuri might be the leader, but Stevie (with his white-blond hair, stud earrings, and  hyper-ripped body, plus that haughty stare) is the focus of the group portrait. Here he is displaying his (completely smooth-shaven) body for us, alongside a crudely symbolic lion’s-mouth fountain:

(#2)

Background note: The Magnificent Seven. From Wikipedia:

The Magnificent Seven is a 1960 American Western film directed by John Sturges and starring Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter, James Coburn and Horst Buchholz. The film is an Old West–style remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Japanese film Seven Samurai. Brynner, McQueen, Bronson, Vaughn, Dexter, Coburn and Buchholz portray the title characters, a group of seven gunfighters hired to protect a small village in Mexico from a group of marauding bandits (whose leader is played by Wallach)

Background note: Steve McQueen. Something of a maximal contrast in persona to Stevie Molleen, so that having Stevie be the creator of the “Steve McQueen” character is especially delicious. From Wikipedia about the celebrity that Stevie constructed:

Terrence Stephen McQueen (March 24, 1930 – November 7, 1980) was an American actor. McQueen was nicknamed “The King of Cool”, and his antihero persona developed at the height of the counterculture of the 1960s made him a top box-office draw during the 1960s and 1970s. McQueen received an Academy Award nomination for his role in The Sand Pebbles. His other popular films include The Cincinnati Kid, Love With the Proper Stranger, The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt, The Getaway, and Papillon, as well as the all-star ensemble films The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, and The Towering Inferno.

The early-life script that Stevie wrote for this character is gripping: a turbulent, violent childhood history, years in reform school, a series of rough jobs, the Marines, and a breakthrough in the role of bounty hunter Josh Randall on tv’s Wanted Dead or Alive (1958-61), a paragon of great masculine strength and great decency as well. A p.r. shot for the show:

(#3)

Stevie deveoped his “Steve McQueen” character off-screen, in a series of high-macho exploits (race cars and motorcycles, palling around with other high-masculinity celebrities). Shirtess on a motorcycle:

(#4)

(Note: McQueen had a lean body type, and kept in shape, but he looked naturally fit and not gym-ripped.)

More PUMP! news. Catching up on PUMP! WaterShorts led me to another remarkable line of homowear from the company: the Creamsicle line, in burnt orange and several styles:

(#4) Left to right: brief, jock, access trunk (backless), boxer

Archly queer ad copy for these items, for example:

Fatally masculine, the Creamsicle Brief is the kind of treat you simply can’t help but crave.

A creamy style with a tangy twist, the Creamsicle Access Trunk is everyone’s favorite flavor. …  retro styling that adds a bold and playful touch for when you’re (un)dressed to impress.

The Access Trunk up close, seen from the rear, as it was meant to be:

(#5)

Earlier on this blog: my posting of 10/17/18, “PUMP!ing it up”, on the Creamsicle access trunk, and on the Creamsicle — popsicle-ice frozen exterior, vanilla ice cream interior — originally in orange flavored ice (hence the color of PUMP!’s underwear line), though now in a variety of flavors:

(#6) Old original (orange) Creamsicles

Popsicles are, of course, classic phallic symbols (especially powerful symbolically because you put them in your mouth and suck on them and eat them), and when you add cream (slang for ‘semen’) to the name, you have Gay Delight. (If you like orange ice, as I do, even better.)

And, yes, there’s a National Creamsicle Day: August 14th.

(Much about men’s bodies and mansex, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest; also about military displays for Independence Day, but that comes after the raunchy stuff — Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.)

So we have the 4th of July as a celebration of commercial mansex (every holday is a sales opportunity): selling premium men’s underwear by hawking men’s bodies; and offering gay porn sales, usually with a holiday-themed image (naked bodies wrapped in the flag are a conventional presentation, but there are many other possibilities). From this year’s rich crop of ads, I’ve chosen one of each type: a holiday ad for DJX homowear in the Trough line; and an ad for the political-satire gayporn film Cauke for President from TitanMen.

The raw material. The DJX Trough line: jockstrap and socks, in the colors of the holiday, framing desirable, fuckable, male buttocks:

(#1) Jockstrap waistband in blue, straps in white, plus socks in red; American flag as backdrop

The jocks and socks are the products on sale; the model’s attractive body, especially his ass, is the hook.

(#2) The hunky, homophobic, and clandestinely uberqueer Senator Mike Cauke (played by Matthew Bosch), with his patriotic tie pointing to his pubes and the big fat cock just out of our view

#1 The patriotic man moons of July. From my 5/24/19 posting “The ballet of Mango Meshman”, with some Daily Jocks ad copy from the time:

Get party ready with the DJX Trough Collection. Exclusive to DailyJocks this party look will make you stand out from the crowd with matching Harness, Jockstrap, Shorts & Socks.

Yes, color-coordinated fetishwear. From that posting:

The trough in the ad will suggest pigs feeding, and gay sexual excess.

The Trough line comes in a variety of colors, including red, blue, and white (plus black, khaki, and some neon colors as well).

Well, the American flag is reproduced accurately in the background of #1, but the assemblage of homowear on the model (blue waistband, white straps, red socks) is not in fact American red, white, and blue, but French blue, white, and red (color stripes being read left to right or top to bottom), as in the Tricolor:

(#3) The colors of the 14th of July (Bastille Day, la Fête nationale in France), not the 4th of July (Independence Day in the USA)

From Wikipedia on that holiday:

Bastille Day is the common name given in English-speaking countries to the national day of France, which is celebrated on 14 July each year. In French, it is formally called la Fête nationale(… “The National Celebration”) and commonly and legally le 14 juillet (… “the 14th of July”).

The French National Day is the anniversary of Storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, a turning point of the French Revolution, as well as the Fête de la Fédération which celebrated the unity of the French people on 14 July 1790. Celebrations are held throughout France. The oldest and largest regular military parade in Europe is held on the morning of 14 July, on the Champs-Élysées in Paris in front of the President of the Republic, along with other French officials and foreign guests.

This will become politically relevant later, after we leave Gayland. To anticipate the big point: the French national day is the anniversary of a physical revolt against the government (actual fighting broke out in the storming of the Bastille), while the American national day is the anniversary of a document of separation from the government, a political revolt (actual fighting had broken out over a year earlier, in Massachusetts, not Pennsylvania).

But before we get to that, a lot more mansex, now utterly explicit (not just implicit in the flaunting of male buttocks).

#2 Fucked for freedom. The premise of the porn flick Cauke for President (released in November 2016) is, as they say, ripped from the headlines, in the story of former Congressman Aaron Schock. In the Titan summary:

When it comes to sealing a man’s vote, nothing can persuade him more than a nice hard cock in the mouth and ass. All guys yearn for the pleasure of hard meat, and this meat is gonna get your vote guaranteed!!

Directed by Jasun Mark, Cauke for President tells the story of a hunky and homophobic U.S. Senator who bears a striking physical resemblance to former U.S. Congressman Aaron Schock. While he’s running for President, his clandestine sexual hook-up spirals into a tale of political intrigue and sex. It stars Matthew Bosch in his gay porn debut as the Senator. He is joined by Dallas Steele as his Chief of Staff/lover, and David Benjamin as the ruthless Campaign Manager willing to do anything to get the Senator elected.

The Senator uses Manhunt.net to find a hot hook-up in the form of hunky Nick Prescott, who secretly records their sex romp to expose the Senator. The Senator’s loyal staff does everything they can to protect the him from the release of the sex tape. But in the end the video goes viral on Pornhub.com, ending the campaign and destroying the Senator’s career. Or does it? Will the former Senator finally come out and become an advocate for the gay community that he once voted against? Will he have a Governor McGreevey moment and declare that he is a proud gay American? See Cauke for President!”

Tons of mansex, including  the scene in which Nick Prescott (as the Manhunt trick) fucks Matthew Bosch. Illustrations in an AZBlogX posting today, “Matthew Bosch for President”, with the following images:

#1 The Cauke for President cover (#2 above)

#2 Triptych of Prescott and Bosch in that flick: Prescott scissor-fucking a smiling Bosch; Prescott full-frontal display, Bosch full-frontal display

#3 Bosch being fucked (reverse cowboy) by Dirk Caber in Titan’s Package (Bosch is versatile, but he’s an especially enthusiastic bottom, a pleasure to watch)

#4 Bosch doggie-fucking Liam Knox in Titan’s Boom (just to show you that he can top, too)

Bosch’s porn persona is amiable (and he’s charming in interviews) — sometimes ecstatic while being fucked, as in the cropped image below from Package, but often smiling in pleasure, as in the cropped image below from Cauke for President:

(#4) Bosch ecstatic while riding Caber’s cock

(#5) Bosch smiling while taking Prescott up his ass

Then the real-life story of Aaron Schock, from Wikipedia:

Aaron Jon Schock (born May 28, 1981) is a former American politician who was Republican U.S. Representative for Illinois’s 18th congressional district from 2009 until 2015. The district is based in Peoria and includes part of Springfield. He was the first member of the U.S. Congress born in the 1980s; when he took his seat in 2009 he was the youngest member of Congress.

… Schock resigned from Congress in March 2015 amid a scandal involving his use of public and campaign funds.

… In 2009, Schock appeared on The Colbert Report, during which the host, Stephen Colbert – making fun of [press] reports  – “grilled” Schock about his “six-pack abs”. Schock went on to appear on the cover of the June 2011 issue of Men’s Health, which one commentator decried as evidence of “a narcissism that never rests”.

… Since 2004, media outlets have questioned Schock’s sexual orientation in relation to his voting record. In interviews with Details and OutQ, Schock said that he was not gay.

In January 2014, journalist Itay Hod [wrote] a post on his personal Facebook page accusing a Republican congressman from Illinois of voting against gay rights, while showering with his male roommate and visiting gay bars. The New York Times stated that the post “might be described as the world’s most obvious blind item”, and media outlets considered the post to be an outing of Schock.

In April 2019, Schock attended the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival with several gay men, and appeared on a video allegedly showing Schock kissing and fondling one of the men. In June 2019, a video was released showing Schock tipping a male go-go dancer at a gay bar in Zona Rosa, Mexico City. Schock’s actions drew condemnation from gay rights activists due to his past political stances and votes on gay issues.

Side notes: Schock and Bosch. For comparison: p.r. photographs for the two men, then torso-hunk shots for them both.

(#6a) Schock in a campaign p.r shot

(#6b) Bosch p.r. shot for TitanMen

(#7a) Pecs and abs: see my 1/7/14 posting “Congressional abs”, about Aaron Schock in Men’s Health

(#7b) Pecs and abs: see my 4/14/19 posting “The taXXXman will come for you”, with this cover for theTaxxx DVD (2017), featuring Matthew Bosch (on the left)

Side note: the name Mike Cauke. At first I didn’t get it, then I saw Cauke as an imperfect pun on cock, then I realized the name was no doubt chosen by someone with the cot-caught (LOT-THOUGHT, or low-back) merger (widespread in American English), in which the distinction between cock and caulk is neutralized, in favor of the vowel in cock — so that Mike Cauke is pronounced like my cock. (There is a Page on this blog on the merger.)

4th of July displays in the real Washington DC. This year, instead of just the usual national fireworks display in DC, the United States was treated, for the first time ever, to a display of military might on the mall in Washington, with tanks, armed men marching on parade, military flyovers, and an address by the would-be tyrant Helmet Grabpussy. A performance modeled on the Bastille Day military parade in Paris described above.

As I explained above, a military parade makes sense for Bastille Day, which commemorates acts of physical revolt against the government. But the American Independence Day commemorates a political revolt — one of ideas, not force.

The onset of the physical revolt was celebrated in verse in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn”:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

From Wikipedia:

The phrase [the shot heard round the world] comes from the opening stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” (1837) and refers to the first shot of the American Revolution at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, where the first British soldiers fell in the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.

This event is celebrated as a holiday in Massachusetts: Patriots Day, the 3rd Monday in April.

In July of the following year came the political act, embodied in a remarkable document that is at once a recital of grievances against the tyrant George III (then king of Great Britain); a severing of political ties with Great Britain; an initiation of a union of the 13 American colonies; and a grounding of these actions in principles of universal human rights (not mere parochial grievance or desire for power). The Wikipedia account, where the very best part comes at the end:

The United States Declaration of Independence is the statement adopted by the Second Continental Congress meeting at the Pennsylvania State House (now known as Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 4, 1776. The Declaration announced that the Thirteen Colonies at war with the Kingdom of Great Britain would regard themselves as thirteen independent sovereign states, no longer under British rule. With the Declaration, these new states took a collective first step toward forming the United States of America. The declaration was signed by representatives from New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

The Lee Resolution for independence was passed on July 2 with no opposing votes. … The Declaration was a formal explanation of why Congress had voted to declare independence from Great Britain, more than a year after the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War.

… The Declaration justified the independence of the United States by listing 27 colonial grievances against King George III and by asserting certain natural and legal rights, including a right of revolution. Its original purpose was to announce independence, and references to the text of the Declaration were few in the following years. Abraham Lincoln made it the centerpiece of his policies and his rhetoric, as in the Gettysburg Address of 1863. Since then, it has become a well-known statement on human rights, particularly its second sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This has been called “one of the best-known sentences in the English language”, containing “the most potent and consequential words in American history”. The passage came to represent a moral standard to which the United States should strive. This view was notably promoted by Lincoln, who considered the Declaration to be the foundation of his political philosophy and argued that it is a statement of principles through which the United States Constitution should be interpreted.

A passionate statement of one of the guiding principles of Enlightement thought: individual liberty. From Wikipedia:

The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on reason as the primary source of knowledge and advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government and separation of church and state. In France, the central doctrines of the Enlightenment philosophers were individual liberty and religious tolerance, in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. The Enlightenment was marked by an emphasis on the scientific method and reductionism, along with increased questioning of religious orthodoxy

The emphasis on individual liberty led the Founders in general to be acutely aware of the dangers of homegrown despotism (which might simply replace the tyranny of the colonial power). It’s hard to imagine them countenancing anything like this year’s spectacle on the mall.

Appendix: the Committee of Five. It always pleases me to read the roster of the rivalrous and disputatious crew who framed the Declaration, under Jefferson’s guidance. Especially to note that, by design, there was not a single military man among them. From Wikipedia:

the committee: John Adams, representative of Massachusetts, who became the second U.S. President; Thomas Jefferson, representative of Virginia, who became the third U.S. President; Benjamin Franklin, representative of Pennsylvania, known as one of the most famous of the Founding Fathers and the first U.S. Minister to France; Roger Sherman, representative of Connecticut, the only person to sign all four of the U.S. state papers (the Continental Association, the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution); Robert Livingston, representative of New York, who later negotiated the Louisiana Purchase as the Minister to France

But they were all practiced at negotiation: as lawyers, politicians, diplomats.

(An politico-sexual riff, with steamy underwear photos, on BoJo, the MP for Bone Juice and South Blowjob and the Man Who Would Be PM; you should be able to tell from this description that this posting is not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Passed on to me on Facebook by Dean Calbreath on 7/20, a link to a Business Insider article, “Boris Johnson called gay men ‘tank-topped bumboys’ and black people ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles'”, by Adam Bienkov on 7/12/19.

Boris Boy

(#1) Ya hev yer Borstal Boys, thin ya hev yer Boris Boys, all poofters, slants, an wogs —

the Boys of Boris Beauville

The thriving metropolis of Belleville has Les Triplettes, who sing, but the Beauville slums, where BoJo’s roots are planted, has Les Prostitués, who screw, and they all belong to Boris the Panderer. For Boris, you see, is dirty to the bone.

(#2) The Flamingo Hustlers of Beauville: poofters, slants, and wogs, all pretty in pink

(BoJo says faggots, Chinks, and niggers, of course, but on this blog we’re more refined.)

Here ends the riff. Now come the footnotes.

Note 1: the Business Insider article. I’d quote from it, but since I block ads, the site is unavailable to me. Great headline, though.

Note 2: the underwear photos. The Supawear model in #1 comes from a recent Daily Jocks ad for a sale on jockstraps. His extraordinary muscularity isn’t remarkable in a premium underwear model; his solid blackness is, however. He seems to be new at Supawear; let’s see if they use him some more.

Of course, he’s presented for sexual objectification in this ad, and some might be uneasy about a black man, especially a dark black man, being used in this way. But that’s the function of all premium underwear models; their bodies (and the personas they project) are being used to sell stuff. In that context, it’s surely a socially good thing (for both the models and their viewers) that the models represent a range of races and ethnicities.

As in #2, which comes from my 8/21/18 posting “Jo Flamingo”, where I observed that in addition to the East Asian model on the left and the black model in the center, with their gazes averted from the viewer’s, there’s the impertinent white guy on the right, staring directly at the viewer:

The languidly seductive guy on the right has a supertight butch haircut and facial hair — but all in pink, like his lips. These guys are definitely not your grandfather’s underwear models.

Note 3: the riff, from BoJo into LSD. The caption in #1 starts out using BoJo’s words, more or less, and then morphs bit by bit into a travesty of the lyrics from “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (though I’m not entirely sure whether a parody of psychedelia can be fairly described as a travesty). From Wikipedia:

(#3) LSD (remastered 2009)

“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was written primarily by John Lennon and credited to the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership. Lennon’s son Julian allegedly inspired the song with a nursery school drawing that he called “Lucy – in the sky with diamonds”. Shortly before the album’s release, speculation arose that the first letter of each of the title nouns intentionally spelled “LSD”, the acronym commonly used for the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide. As a result, the song was the subject of a BBC radio ban. Lennon repeatedly denied that he had intended it as a drug song, although he got the inspiration from an LSD trip. He attributed the song’s fantastical imagery to his reading of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books.

The Beatles recorded “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” in March 1967. Adding to the song’s ethereal qualities, the musical arrangement includes a Lowrey organ part heavily treated with studio effects, and drone provided by an Indian tambura. The song has been recognised as a key work in the psychedelic genre.

Note 4: Belleville and Beauville. In the body of this posting, these are fantasy places, strongly gendered. In the real world, there are many places with these names, in France and elsewhere. In particular, there’s a small village of Beauville roughly halfway between Bordeaux and Toulouse.

Note 5: BoJo’s slurs. From Boris, the stereotype or trope of gay men in  tank tops, plus the homophobic slur bumboy (not discussed here before); and the racist stereotype or trope of watermelon eating, plus the racist slur piccaninny / pickaninny (also not discussed here before).

Start with gay men in tank tops, like these two guys:

(#4) Rainbow kissing, in tank tops (the way bumboys do it)

Or like this guy, solo, but nevertheless sending heavy homo messages:

(#5) From Aliexpress.com, a (i) shirt-lifter with a (ii) crop-top (iii) tank top (iv) in faggy colors: four homo signals in one compact package (if they hadn’t airbrushed that nipple, they could have given him (v) an erect pencil-lead tit)

Then from GDoS:

noun bum boy [also bum-boy, bumboy] [< BrE slang bum ‘the posterior, buttocks, anus, rectum’ + boy] ‘male homosexual’ [attested from at least the mid-20th century, probably in use for a century before that]

Like sodomite, bumboy in principle can refer to either partner in anal intercourse between men — the sodomizer (insertive), who desires to penetrate a man’s bum, or the sodomized (receptive), who desires to have his bum penetrated — but in the absence of context, there’s a strong tendency to take it to refer specifically to the bottom in such encounters: metonymically, the boy is his bum. (Contributing pieces of (misconceived) folk sexology: the notion that in anal intercourse, only the bottom is truly queer — well, any man might get a kick out of fucking another man, the theory goes, but only a faggot likes to get fucked — and the belief that all queer guys like to get fucked.)

(Since the BrE slang bum is regularly used to refer to the posteriors of infants or young children, it can have connotations of cuteness, so that bumboy will strike some people in some contexts as, well, a kind of sweet way to refer to a catamite, and Boris’s foaming about tank-topped bumboys will just sound silly rather than harsh and cutting.)

On to racial nastiness. Again, pickaninnies with watermelon smiles, though offensive in fact and offensive in intent, flirts with cuteness, in a way totally unlike, say, niggers with fat jungle lips (which might have been what Boris was really, in the darkness of his heart, aiming at).

First, the watermelons, which have come up on this blog before, in fact with reference to a Supawear promotion (like #1 above). From my 4/4/16 posting “The watermelon files”, about

this startling ad from the Daily Jocks firm

(#6)

… Startling, because it shows a black man in a field of watermelon slices — an image that will evoke a racist stereotype, no matter what the intentions of the creators were.

(Much more on the watermeon trope and its history in that posting.)

With the watermelons come the kids. From NOAD:

noun pickaninny (also picaninny or chiefly British piccaninny): offensive a small black child. ORIGIN mid 17th century: from West Indian creole, from Spanish pequeño or Portuguese pequeno ‘little’, pequenino ‘tiny’.

Part of the litany of anti-black talk, sent up in the song “Colored Spade” (from the musical Hair), which begins:

I’m a
Colored spade
A nigra
A black nigger
A jungle bunny
Jigaboo coon
Pickaninny mau mau

Pickaninny mau mau, BoJo, pickaninny mau mau.

(Underwear boys, so not to everyone’s tastes. But not especially raunchy.)

Young men in the, if you know what I mean, pink of life, advertising a Lucas Studios porn sale, with my caption:

Mindful of the
Neighborhood rash of
Bikini brief thefts,
Pongo was fearfully
Protective of
Bongo’s beloved
Magenta Silks

For a change, this is not about men’s bodies, pleasing though these are; nor about pink/purple men’s bikini briefs, though there’s a fabulous array of them on display on the net; but about facial expressions.

I’m far from an expert on gesture, facial expression, stance, and gait, but I know a bit of the literature, and try to observe carefully. I’ve specialized in two cases from the world of gay men, using examples from real life and from gay porn: facial expressions during mansex (there’s a Page on ths blog about postings on the topic) and cruise faces (facial expressions as part of the rituals of cruising for mansex).

My first reading of Bongo’s and Pongo’s expressions above was: suspicion; wariness; distrust; maybe even fear. Not any cruise faces I’d seen before. But both their mouths are somewhat open, in some contexts a sign of arousal.

Bongo looks especially intense, but Pongo might possibly be entertaining a trace of amusement.

And they seem to be conferring. Maybe contemplating a prospective trick. (For you? For me? Let’s do him together?)

Without more context, facial expressions are hard to read. They are seriously indeterminate: they can convey many things, indeed more than one thing at a time, they are highly variable, they are only partly under conscious control, and so on. Like intonations in conversation, vocal qualities, and other paralinguistic features. All impossible to read accurately out of context, and not fully determinate even in context.

I’d be interested in hearing other people’s readings of the expressions on Bongo and Pongo’s faces.

And yes, Bongo presents as t, Pongo as b, on a number of dimensions — but that’s old stuff on this blog, and anyway it’s not my topic here.

Dog Days. Also in passing, the Dog Days of Summer. From my 7/18/15 posting “Late summer porn sales”, in its section on the Dog Days of Summer, we find the Dog Star Sirius, associated wth summer heat and a host of evils: the sea boils, the wine turns sour, dogs grow mad, other creatures become languid, and people suffer from burning fevers and hysterics. And sometimes the queer lads get all paranoid.

(About men’s bodies and fetishwear, so not to everyone’s taste.)

Today’s bulletin from the Daily Jocks company, introducing a new brand (Sparta’s) on their site, with the image below — to which I’ve added a caption in free verse:

(#1) Il Leopardo di Sparta

Background: the company. From the DJ site (not edited by me):

Italian brand Sparta’s Harness specialise in premium harnesses made from high quality materials.

Sparta’s owner, Tony started his career as a tailor in Milan, at first under the guidance of Gianni Versace and afterwards working in the haute couture department for his sister Donatella.

Check out these latex harness with easy access velcro strap available in 9 colour ways.

The company makes a wide variety of harness types. A display of four in the latex style:

(#2) In white, fuchsia. black, and leopard; also available in camo, blue, green, orange, and red — $85 each

Sparta’s also does serious harnesses, like this Maximus style in genuine leather (for $180):

(#3)

Another chapter in butch fagginess. An item of classic leather gear, the harness (offered by a company named after the warlike and stoic Spartan state), pressed into service in the latex items as playful, fashion-conscious, kicky (recalling the delicious excesses of the Versace firm). Simultaneously conveying a high-macho identity and a flagrantly gay one: the message of what I’ve called, in a 8/14/18 posting, butch fagginess:

These garments [from the frank-homowear firm Berlin Barcode] scream “I’m queer! And butch! And that’s wonderful! You too?” They’re advertisements for one specifically gay style of masculinity. There are others: celebratorily fem(me)/sissy styles… ; gender-fluid styles; “regular guy” homosexuality (attempting to adopt all the trappings of heteronormative masculinity except for the sex of one’s partner); MSM “just sex” configuration of male-male pairing (embracing mansex  as celebratory male bonding while rejecting gay as identity, community, or source of affectional partnership); and hypermasculine homosexuality (Berlin Barcode caters to this audience in many of its products).

A note on the title. Il Leopardo di Sparta, reminiscent of but distinct from Il Gattopardo di Lampedusa (see Wikipedia link).

(Meanwhile, if you’re so inclined, you can find any number of remarkable leopardwear items for men: thongs, bodysuits, trousers, tuxedos, and more.)

… an arresting line from the Sacred Harp (1991 Denson revision), #404, Youth Will Soon Be Gone, suggesting perhaps:

OUR CARNAL WEAPONS

 

(#1)

adj. carnal: relating to physical, especially sexual, needs and activities: carnal desire. (NOAD)

But in SH404 it comes from St. Paul, in 2 Corinthians 10:3-4 (KJV):

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh … For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal

And it all depends on what the compilers of the King James Version meant by carnal, which is evidently not what comes first to modern minds.

(Image in #1 from today’s Daily Jocks ad, for “$10 Mystery Underwear”. Ah, sweet mystery of underwear!)

The line from SH404 is especially striking because it has the only occurrence of the word carnal and the only occurrence of the word weapon(s) in the Sacred Harp — this in a song that can fairly be described as deadly serious:

(#2) Ominous warnings to frivolous, Godless youth

As sung at the Sixth Ireland Sacred Harp Convention (2016):

(#3)

When the Palo Alto Sacred Harp group was led in this song last Sunday, I was immediately struck by the word choices; well, I’m a linguist and also something of a scholar of sexuality.

Carn-y vocabulary. Earlier on this blog:

— on 2/18/18 in “Putting the carnal in Carnival”

— on 3/5/19 in “carnitas”, with a brief survey of carn– related expressions, including Sp. carne ‘meat’

To which I now add, from NOAD:

noun carny (also carnie or carney): (a) [usually as modifier] North American informal a carnival or amusement show: a carny atmosphere. (b) a person who works in a carnival or amusement show. [clipping of carnival + suffix -y]

The 2 Corinthians 10 text. Apparently this is St. Paul’s defence of his ministry. First, I give you the whole thing in the KJV version. (I am sadly reminded of why I came to recoil from Bible readings many years ago; this passage is an interpretive minefield.)

10 Now I Paul myself beseech you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ, who in presence am base among you, but being absent am bold toward you:

² But I beseech you, that I may not be bold when I am present with that confidence, wherewith I think to be bold against some, which think of us as if we walked according to the flesh.

³ For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh:

⁴ (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;)

⁵ Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

⁶ And having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled.

Then in a modern translation, in the NIV (New International Version):

10 By the humility and gentleness of Christ, I appeal to you — I, Paul, who am “timid” when face to face with you, but “bold” toward you when away!

² I beg you that when I come I may not have to be as bold as I expect to be toward some people who think that we live by the standards of this world.

³ For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does.

⁴ The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.

⁵ We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

⁶ And we will be ready to punish every act of disobedience, once your obedience is complete.

Though this is scarcely transparent — to my mind, verse 5 is still a head-scratcher — it at least somewhat clarifies the intended opposition in verses 3 and 4, between the worldly (the physical, the carnal) and the spiritual (the divine).

So: no actual flesh, no meat, and certainly no man-meat.

E-mail from the Stanford linguistics department on the 10th, under the header:

Save the Date: BOY Party 9/27

Whoa! I thought, conjuring up images of a department party featuring attractive young men — as entertainers (maybe some lesser-known boy bands), as guests of honor (very young up-and-coming NLP entrepreneurs, perhaps), as party staff (a phalanx of Ganymedes, in costume), purely as eye candy (twinks on parade), whatever — things are really loosening up in Margaret Jacks Hall!

But wouldn’t it be at least questionable (if not worse) to restrict these things to males, and at least tacky (if not worse) to introduce elements of sex and sexuality into the event?

Hmm, it could be a costume party, in which everyone comes dressed as a boy: Boy George, Blue Boy, Danny Boy, A Boy Named Sue, etc. Like an early Halloween party.

Oh, it might be a birthday party for a son of one of the students, staff, or faculty. Or a department baby shower for a boy on his way.

(For a moment, I entertained thoughts of the boy parties of the gay world — in Rio, New Orleans, or Sydney, for Carnival; on the party circuit (say, the White Party in Palm Springs); in gay Bangkok, around a pool; on Fire Island, near the beach. No, not even remotely possible on Serra St. at Stanford.)

I was clearly faced with the massively huge interpretive indeterminacy in N + N compounds like boy party.

And then I read the first line of the text:

Please mark your calendars for our Beginning of Year Party!

Oh dear, BOY was an acronym, not just an extremely enthusiastic occurrence of boy. So, still more interpretations: Balance of Year, the Bank of Yokohama, (the IM acronym) Because of You, Blue Orange Yellow, and more.

(Of course, the staff no doubt committed BOY party in full awareness of its humorous potential.)

So, another linguistic topic: alphabetic abbreviations — acronyms like BOY, initialisms like BYO (for ‘bring your own’, short for BYOB ‘bring your own bottle / booze / beer / beverage’). (Here I use the terms I prefer; discussion in early postings on abbreviations in this blog.)

And of course a ton of stuff about gender, sex, and sexuality, and social practices in these areas.

Semantics of compounds. I floated quite a range of possible interpretations above for boy party with head noun party referring to a particular kind of social event. (Just to note here that there’s another set with head noun party referring to a political group; someone could easily found a Boy Party devoted to pressing the causes of boys and young men.) And with modifier noun boy referring to a male child (roughly, through the teenage years, though we have to acknowledge that the boundaries of the BOY category aren’t crisp); below, I’ll look at an extended sense of boy; and then of course there’s the acronym noun BOY as modifier (which I’ll put aside).

Even restricting things for the moment to boy referring to a male child and party referring to a social event, boy party can be used to refer to any party that is in some way related to boys — a huge range of possible relationships. Some of which are actually attested. In particular, ‘birthday party for a boy’ and ‘baby shower for a boy to be born’. Note the intricate sociocultural matrix in which these compounds boy party are embedded: birthday parties and baby showers, indeed each of these specifically for boys rather than girls.

‘birthday party for a boy’. The party ideas involve culturally “boy things” (to various degrees), like trucks, spaceships, superheroes, sports, the circus, and Legos. One example, from the Country Living site: “20 best birthday party ideas for a boy, #10 Slime-themed birthday party”:

Is the little dude in your life [AZ, speaking unprofessionally: oh, barf; but note that the site is clearly addressed to women] obsessed with slime? (Aren’t all kids? [AZ: well, no; girls are stereotypically grossed out, which is what stereotypically makes green slime attractive to boys]) Celebrate his big day with a party that’ll have him (and guests!) oozing smiles. For food, serve up a buffet of all things green (think smoothies, veggies trays, and pesto pasta cups) and cut into a drippy-looking cake for dessert. Oh, and don’t forget the edible slime! Yes, it exists.

The big event, of course, is making the slime, so prepare a kit for each guest with everything they’ll need and stash it in a tote:

(#1)

Such sites are mostly selling stuff, and they tend to recommend birthday celebrations of Martha Stewart-level fanaticism; treat them as fantasy.

‘baby shower for a boy’. On the Shutterfly site: “99 Cute Baby Shower Themes For Boys, #6 It’s a Jungle Out There” (a theme I chose because (like the green slime above) it’s not in the omnipresent color baby blue:

(#2)

Animals are always appropriate when it comes to baby shower themes. Rich golds and deep greens are the color scheme for this jungle animal theme. Decorate with framed prints of your favorite animals and then reuse them to decorate the baby boy’s room.

Ok, no baby blue, but it’s still heavily gendered — featuring jungle animals (admittedly, some on the cute side) rather than cute domestic animals, like kitties and puppies, which would be more suitable for girls.

‘party of/for gay boys’. I now shift to an extended sense of boy, one current in the social world of gay men, referring to a category GAY-BOY that covers males well into their 30s and even beyond: a category opposed to what I’ll call GAY-PAPI, the opposed category being sometimes referred to by English daddy, but standing outside the gay “daddy-boy” relationship; GAY-PAPI is a category of age and maturity.

Some of this conceptual complexity was exposed in my 4/4/13 posting “Calendars: Boy Next Door, Philip Fusco”, when I noted that the gay calendar boys weren’t really boys next door, in modern American usage, but in gay male usage are at least boys — not necessarily twinks, but young men (up into their 30s at least).

On to parties of/for boys in this sense. (The illustrations to come are of very minimally dressed shirtless hunks — that’s the native turf of gay boy parties — and might not be to everyone’s taste; some readers might want to bow out at this point.)

As a transition, consider the party boys who populate boy parties.

From the Gay Theatre Festival site on 5/17/18, a review of the film Party Boy:

(#3)

the tale of a little gay boy who grows up in Dublin and Australia, and whose life and interests lead him into a career as a phone sex operator, a gym rat and trainer, and finally as a go-go boy and performer in live and filmed sex shows

Then to the premiere boy parties of North America, the gay circuit parties, giant events for meeting, greeting, dancing, sweating, and having sex. From my 6/22/10 posting “Rivers of Babylon”, a section on gay circuit partes (for instance, the White Party in Palm Springs) and this much-amended shot of a circuit party in the early meet-and-greet stages:

(#4)

Then for Carnival (in Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, Sydney, and elsewhere) and other holidays of the flesh, boy parties with costumes:

(#5) From the GayRio4u site advertising Rio Carnival 2019

Then a specialty in some Asian countries and in North American as well, the boy pool party:

(#6) From the Dear Straight People site, a boy pool party for the Songkran holiday in Bangkok, Thailand (April 2019)

And a Fire Island boy party:

(#7) Flyer for the 2018 Daniel Nardicio party at the Ice Palace, Cherry Grove on Fire Island NY: diversity on several dimensions, tilted towards boy boys (compare #4 and #5)

In today’s mail, a wonderful conjunction of two images: a vintage ad for Spangles (a classic British sweet, or candy), subject (in modern eyes) to an entire constellation of giggly racy interpretations; and a Daily Jocks ad (quite fairly labeled NSFW) for an item of fetishwear, a Locker Gear jockstrap with an open pouch for easy access. As it happens — surprise! — Spangles bring with them allusions to the adventures of the American screen cowboy Hopalong Cassidy and his young sidekick Lucky Jenkins.

You can see where this is going when all three elements are set in motion.

I’ll start with the Spangles ad, with its unintentional silly sexiness, and then (after a page break) go on to a male couple experiencing raw mutual enjoyment of the Locker Gear jock; the image and my accompanying caption are not suitable for kids or the sexually modest. (It’s the most sexually explicit, and dramatically hot, underwear ad I’ve come across so far.)

But first (hat tip to Tim Evanson): “Handily packed, delicious to eat, SPANGLES are the fruitiest sweet!”:

(#1)

The sweet way to go gay! From Wikipedia:

Spangles was a brand of boiled sweets manufactured by Mars Ltd in the United Kingdom from 1950 to the early 1980s. They were sold in a paper packet with individual sweets originally unwrapped but later cellophane wrapped. They were distinguished by their shape which was a rounded square with a circular depression on each face.

When Spangles were introduced in 1950, sweets were still on ration, and the price of sweets had to be accompanied by tokens or points from one’s ration book, but Spangles required only one point instead of the two required for other sweets and chocolate. This bonus, accompanied by effective marketing, made Spangles even more popular. American actor William Boyd was chosen to front the advertising campaign as a character he made famous in numerous films, Hopalong Cassidy, along with the slogan “Hoppy’s favourite sweet”. Another slogan was “The sweet way to go gay!”

Different times, different meanings and imports. And then Hoppy (and Lucky). From Wikipedia:

(#2) Lucky Jenkins (played by Russell Hayden) and Hoppy in Law of the Pampas (1939)

Hopalong Cassidy or Hop-along Cassidy is a fictional cowboy hero created in 1904 by the author Clarence E. Mulford, who wrote a series of short stories and novels based on the character.

… As portrayed on the screen, white-haired Bill “Hopalong” Cassidy [played by William Boyd] was usually clad strikingly in black (including his hat, an exception to the Western film stereotype that only villains wore black hats). He was reserved and well spoken, with a sense of fair play. He was often called upon to intercede when dishonest characters took advantage of honest citizens. “Hoppy” and his white horse, Topper, usually traveled through the West with two companions — one young and trouble-prone with a weakness for damsels in distress; the other older, comically awkward and outspoken.

The juvenile lead was successively played by James Ellison, Russell Hayden, George Reeves, Rand Brooks, and Jimmy Rogers.

And then briefly on Russell Hayden, from Wikipedia:

Russell “Lucky” Hayden (June 12, 1912 [as  Hayden Michael “Pate” Lucid] in Chico, California – June 9, 1981 in Palm Springs, California) was an American film and television actor. He is best known for his portrayal as Lucky Jenkins in Paramount’s popular Hopalong Cassidy film series.

In the Daily Jocks backroom. Today’s NSFW ad and my caption (tying together Spangles, Hopalong, and Locker Gear jocks):

(#3) In the cowboys’ locker room

Hoppy, overwhelmed by
ungovernable lust for
Lucky’s delicious spangles —
plunges a hand into his buddy’s
fruity steamy jockstrap to
fondle that handy package —
Lucky gives himself over to
Being devoured

The ad copy from DJ:

The DailyJocks Backroom hand picks the best fetish-wear brands from around the world & brings them directly to your inbox.

Check out our hottest new addition, Spanish fetish brand Locker Gear. Featuring a rugged, classic look on all of their products.

From jockstraps with an open pouch to chest harnesses or unlock your addiction with the zipper pouch jockstrap.

(These front-opening jockstraps, zippered or not, come with black bodies and detailing in white (as above), red, or blue.)

Cowboys with candy.

From the attitude (UK) site on 9/11/18, “Underwear brand Marco Marco features all trans models at New York Fashion Week: The groundbreaking runway show featured some of our favourite transgender stars”:

(#1) Marco and the boys

A complex presentation. Male fashion models are typically presented as ideals of conventional masculinity, with the facial features, musculature, and gait and gestures of young but mature, very fit, straight men of good class and conventional lives. Transgender men, however, often aim for more machismo markers than is customary in fashion models: facial hair and bodybuilder musculature, in particular. Neither of these is modal or classy, but they do visibly perform the masculine gender role, so that they’re of considerable symbolic value.

Transgender men are then doing two things, in different contexts: sometimes they want to present themselves simply as men — to just be, unremarkably, guys. Sometimes there are practical reasons for men to reveal their trans status, but occasionally they want to display it as an accomplishment, as here; they did, after all, put a lot of effort into achieving this concordance between their sense of identity and their appearance.

(Hat tip to Kim Darnell.)

Note 1: shirtlessness. Any part of the body can signal masculinity, but front views are richer sources of information than rear views, and three regions of the front of the body are especially powerful sources: the head, via the hair and the facial features; the torso or trunk, from neck to waist, via the shoulders and the musculature of the bare body (notably the pectoral and abdominal muscles), plus the exposed nipples; and of course the crotch, though the genitals are ordinarily covered by clothing.

Faces are usually easily available for inspection, so for a deliberate display of physical masculinity, the focus will be on the torso, especially unclothed: shirtlessness is the most intense form of masculinity display — which explains why shirtless photos and other images figure so prominently in contexts where high masculinity is the focus, as in material appreciated by gay men (and often reproduced on this blog). Like Marco Marco ads, which are fashioned specifically for a gay male audience.

Note 2: styles of masculinity. Consider the men in #1 merely as an assortment of shirtless young men, not otherwise identified in any way (in particular, they could be cis or trans, straight or gay). They are clearly diverse on some sociocultural dimensions, and they are also of several body types, but in addition they vary in the way they present themselves as gendered persons, via (at least) their hairstyles, facial hair, accessories, body art, muscular development, facial expressions, and stances; some project much more machismo than others, and one (on the far left) might be pegged by some as effeminate.

The point is that there’s quite a variety of styles of masculinity, independent of gender identity and sexuality. I’m especially interested in the styles usually characterized as effeminate (and often consequently viewed with contempt), because I view such men as especially significant in the world of gender and sexuality. I hope to pursue that topic in a future posting on Hilton Als and the femme style — a topic I opened up a little bit in a section on Als in my 9/11 posting “Giovanni in Ferragamo”, where I noted his self-identification as an “Auntie Man”. Specifically, as a (cis) man and gay and femme (and not as non-binary).

There are, not surprisingly, trans man with femme styles, which I believe should be characterized that way and not as trans men who have failed to fully accomplish their masculine identities, just as I would not characterize femme gay men as failed men.

Marco Marco. From the attitude story (photo in #1):

Underwear brand Marco Marco pushed the fashion envelope in more ways than one during it’s New York Fashion Week showcase with an all transgender line-up of models.

… Designer Marco Morante told Mic: “I wanted to create a space to celebrate trans bodies. This was an opportunity for their presence to be undeniable and reinforce that trans is beautiful.”

Morante’s LA-based brand has long catered to the LGBT community, but the all transgender show marks an important landmark for an industry in which many brands only pay lip service to diversity.

On the company, from my 2/13/19 posting “Captain of our fairy band”:

The Marco Marco line is unabashedly queer. Note the assumption that the audience for [this particular ad] is male, in fact guys with male partners.

The posting has an inventory of five previous Marco Marco postings on this blog. Not only is the intended audience gay men, but the models are often framed in poses meant to be read as gay as well, as here:

(#2) The look, the gesture with the left arm, the pin-up pose  — with the briefs as icing on the cake

(About men’s bodies in very plain terms, and about the fantasy world of steamy male underwear models, and a bit about the social and sexual practices of gay male life, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Refections on yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, officially for a Varsity mesh shoulder harness for men, but also featuring a mesh trunk — and a sexual gesture involving that trunk, which together with the model’s facial expression frames the scene as a fantasy of cruising for sex (between men).

The gesture skirts the line between covering the genitals and revealing them and also, independently, the line between protecting the genitals and fondling them, so it involves us in the question of what is permissible for display in various social contexts (in particular, in WordPress blogs like this one); the central photo might well be over the line in WP, so it appears here with the details of the gesture fuzzed over (though it’s reproduced unaltered in an AZBlogX posting “Skirting the lines” accompanying this one, along with another problematic photo and three unquestionably WP-unsuitable images).

The central photo, with a fuzzy hand:

(#1) A hand plunged down into his underwear, fondling his cock — either jacking off for his own pleasure or offering his dick to the viewer (details, including the dickhead between his thumb and forefinger, visible on AZBlogX)

He’s an underwear model, so he’s shirtless and extravagantly fit. But there’s also the gesture, and his intense facial expression, neither of which is standard issue for models. Taken together, they cry out: cruising for sex.  (There’s a lot to be said about cruising for mansex and the conventions of its many forms, but there’s a brief overview in my 7/19/18 posting “Get your cruise face on”.)

Concealing and revealing: opacity vs. visibility. We’re dealing with meshwear here, so there are issues. With underwear made from opaque fabric, almost anything goes, no matter how remarkably moose-knuckly. Such images, of dicks and balls wrapped — whether negligently, ostentatiously, aggressively, or reverentially — in cloth, are permissible in a wide range of on-line contexts meant for the general public. There they are perceived as on the raunchy side, by some observers as indecent, even offensive, but (like naked buttocks) not strictly speaking obscene.  Here’s a DJ ad for PUMP! underwear, which regularly goes to the moose-knuckle limit:

(#2) See me, feel me, touch me … Gazing at you, I get the heat

Visible flesh, on the other hand, is over the revelation line. I was surprised that the DJ ad wasn’t labeled as NSFW; maybe the DJ staff thought the dickhead was too small and obscure to merit a warning. But my eyes picked it out almost immediately: they went, as always, first to the model’s face; then to his chest (the intended focus of the ad, on the harness and the pecs it frames), and then right to the gold, the man’s cock in his hand.

Over the line. Only a few days before this ad, DJ produced a remarkably hot ad that the company rightly labeled NSFW: no genital reveal, but way over the fondling line:

(#3) From my 9/24 posting “In the cowboys’ locker room”, photo #3: a DJ Locker Gear ad, labeled NSFW, with one (naked) model plunging his hand into another model’s open-front jockstrap and fondling his (not visible) genitals

There are underwear ads with flagrant self-fondling, but not many of them; here are two:

(#4) From my 2/27/15 posting “Color and advertising your preference”: #2 the Andrew Christian C-Ring Brief Jock (with the model also concealing his cock with his hand)

(#5) From my 2/13/17 posting “VDay hands in pants”

Mostly, the models’ hands are otherwise occupied — one or both of them are up in the air as part of a pitsntits presentation, or down doing a pants-lowering tease. And then of course a lot of the models are just doing straightforward fashion poses.

Underwear ads occasionally tease the viewer by having a model conceal his genitals by covering them with a hand. But since the poses are static, they can always be interpreted as fondling in progress. So these presentations come close to the line. Two examples:

(#6) From my 5/1/10 posting “DEFINE “SCRIMMAGE T-SHIRT””:  a 10percent crop top, with the model covering/fondling crotch

(#7) From my 12/3/15 posting “José Parra”:  #4 the N2N C Strap

But there are also plenty of underwear ads that are way over the reveal line (these are segregated on sites behind warnings). The subtler of these employ mesh underwear, as in #3 the Pulse Mesh Sock (sheer mesh) and #4 the Mesh Jock (coarse mesh) in my AZBlogX posting. Others are designed to flaunt cocks (and often balls as well) as much as possible, as in #5 the Male Power Master Trunk on AZBlogX. Some postings about such flagrantly revealing garments:

on 6/14/11 in “Today’s remarkable underwear”

on 3/15/13 in “Remarkable underwear update”

on 4/5/13 in “Maximum exposure: Good Devil”

on 4/5/13 in “Maximum exposure: Male Power”