When I was a young man, and out to myself and mostly comfortable with it, I was invited to go on a motorcycle ride with a friend’s girlfriend, to see her father’s place. It would be, so she said, of interest to an artist such as myself. And so it was. She was rightly proud of him, but also a tad reluctant to let people meet him. He was of the sort of random creative genius whose artwork could not be contained. He’d made himself a house inside an old airplane hanger the interior of which seemed like an art museum. A haphazard yet fascinating art museum.
‘C’ invited me on a drive to see him on her BMW motorcycle. It was only the second motorcycle I’d ever taken a ride on, the first one being her boyfriend’s Harley. Her boyfriend and I were pals going back to when we were both teenagers and by that time he’d let me have lots of rides on his hog. I loved it. Plus, the design of the seats on a hog were such that the passenger on the back rode a tad higher than the driver, allowing you a better view.
‘C’s BMW had a seat that left the passenger staring into the back of the driver’s helmet unless you were taller, which I wasn’t. I got on and she started out and I put my hands on her hips because that was the only place I had to keep a grip on. She didn’t seem to mind.
As I said, by then I was out to myself, had been for years, and fairly comfortable with the idea of being sexually attracted to men. I knew at some deep down level that it wasn’t a matter of being afraid of women like the couch psychiatrists said. I wasn’t afraid of them, I was never sexually abused, nobody turned me homosexual. I simply had no interest. Women were not on my radar the way guys were. Some guys. Cute sexy guys (see my recent art posts). I wasn’t repelled, I just had no interest.
And just then all I wanted was to make sure I wouldn’t fall off the back of ‘C’s BMW. So I reached around and held onto her hips. It was the first time I’d really put my hands on and held onto a woman in my own age group. I had plenty of hugs from mom, and maybe though I don’t recall some of my other older female family and the other church women. This was a young women who, had I been a heterosexual male, I should have found myself attracted to, at least to some degree. She was lithe, physically fit, beautiful according to my left brain. My friend was head over heels in love with her.
My hands instantly discovered how soft and…well…squishy her body was. And my instantaneous reflex deep down inside was along the lines of Oh, that’s…odd…
This was a fairly outdoorsy, athletic young woman. And yet her body was…soft. Well defined, shapely even, according to my left brain anyway. You wouldn’t look at her and see anything overweight about her. But her body was…soft. Which I understood to be how it was with women. Logically I supposed this was something that excited heterosexual males about a woman’s body. But that was the first time I’d actually felt it. And it seemed strange. By then I’d had my hands on the hips of her boyfriend, ‘B’ many times while riding with him. For a short time I even had a crush on him. But if he wasn’t a perfect Kinsey 0 he was close to it.
I remembered something much later after our ride…how ‘B’ had given me a ride on his hog one hot summer day. We had on our helmets, jeans and light summer shirts. His was opened in the front. Suddenly he told me to hang on, because he was going to punch it…something he knew I loved. That Harley might not have been race track material, but it had massive amounts of torque. When you got those flywheels going and banged it up a gear it was stunning. So I reached around and this one time my hands connected with the bare flesh over his stomach, felt the muscle under his skin, and instantly this electric sexual thrill shot right through me.
I never told him.
But there it is. In a nutshell, the difference between a male body and a female’s. It’s not just genitalia. It’s the physical totality of it. One is exciting. The other is…meh. That isn’t something you learn like a bad habit. It is how you’re wired.
When I was a teenager this was something the heterosexual majority didn’t seem to want to know. But we knew. To a more limited degree I knew the moment I came out to myself, while crushing on a male classmate. It was how I was wired. Nothing else made sense to me. And if you’re ever wondering why the secular and religious right have been on a scorched earth culture war against science and education, here’s a data point about that…
In an important book, he challenged the widely held Freudian notion that same-sex attraction was curable, finding it instead rooted in biology.
We have been telling them this since Stonewall…those of us not so badly damaged we desperately sought out a cure for something that needed no cure. But science has been telling them this same something about us for decades now, that they’ve never wanted to hear: That human sexuality, let alone reality, doesn’t not care what their religious and moral dogmas say. It is what it is. And what it is, is older than the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates, let alone us. We bear within us every waking moment of our day the living history of hundreds of millions of years of life on earth. And those ancient tides will pull and tug on his whether or not they make sense to the lives we live now. We can be our best, only when we honestly try to understand how those threads move within us. Only then can we learn how to honorably live with them.
His 1988 book, “Male Homosexuality: A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspective,” showed that sexual orientation was largely biological and presented a case that helped undermine the belief held by most Freudian analysts at the time that homosexuality was a pathology that could somehow be cured.
When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird. We are not that different from our heterosexual neighbors. We can make our contribution to civilization. But we have to be allowed wholeness. Damaged humans, do damaged things. To themselves. To each other.
There is nothing wrong with us. There was never anything wrong with us. Science has been telling them that for decades now, and that is one reason why science, reason and education became the number one enemies in their scorched earth culture wars. We were just the convenient scapegoats of men who hate existence, and beauty, and the awe and wonder of love and desire, and everything fine and noble a human can be, that they cannot.
In the complaint (there’s a PDF link to it in the article) are two actual businesses, both recreational: Antietam Battlefield KOA and Adventure Park LLC. They have at least a plausible claim to economic damage. The others are preachers, one church member, a couple delegates, and one of those shadowy astroturfing groups that’s probably behind it all. The right wing billionaires behind it could probably afford to pay the preachers for missing their tithing plate money but would rather attack the idea that government has anything to do with securing the safety and welfare of the common man and woman. Government is for securing their prerogative to use the rest of us as they see fit.
The preachers have zero concern for their flocks and don’t seem to care at all if a percentage of them, particularly the older sicker ones die horribly. That really says it all for their ersatz Christianity. Perhaps they need their collection plate money. But more likely it really is just simple tribal hatred of science and knowledge and those of us able to cope with this pandemic by using our brains. That is after all, the unforgivable sin.
I never really started paying attention to this reflex in the kook pews until I was older and more invested in the gay civil rights struggle. The science that said we were as normal as anyone else was the enemy. They built entire massive artifices of junk science to wave back at us. It took me a while to realize that providing a counter argument, even if it was completely nuts, wasn’t the point. Propaganda doesn’t merely serve to make people question what the facts really are, it exists to make people stop believing in facts altogether. The point was to erase the notion that any of us in the pews let alone the outside world could decide for ourselves what is and is not factual and true. It wasn’t just about Teh Gay, it was everything that challenged their authority over the hearts and minds of the people. This is appalling in any religious denomination, but especially so when it’s coming from a Baptist pulpit. But I suppose, not a Southern Baptist pulpit. If I saw this when I was a teenage boy I’d have turned atheist a lot quicker than I did.
How To Draw Pictures Of Sexy Guys Wearing Glasses In X Easy Steps…(continued)
I think I’m pretty well done with the blue ink roughs on the figure. I had his body shape wrong due to putting the book in place before I’d finished with the rest of him and it confused me a tad. The solution was to put the book on its own layer I could switch off and on as I worked on drawing him.
Procreate has a nice perspective grid you can switch on and set vanishing points for. It’s going to help a lot as I draw the bookshelves he’s leaning against.
Wow…the JPEG artifacts here are really annoying. But I’m just posting these to share my process with whoever stumbles onto this blog. When I post a finished piece I’ll use a better compression algorithm.
Probably get the inks on the figure done, or close to it, tomorrow. I haven’t decided on a title for it yet.
No offence to the singer here, Ty Herndon, who came out last year and changed the pronouns of this song, which was a hit in its previous incarnation. It’s wonderful in so many ways. That he found the courage to come out and live an honest life. That he updated this song with the pronouns that reflect how his heart saw the song when it first came to him. That gay kids and adults can hear music that speaks directly to us. So long have I mentally flipped a pronoun or two while listening to pop music, to at least imagine it speaking to me.
But for reasons I won’t go into now…or maybe ever…this particular song is both wonderful and devastating. Now I need a drink…
How To Draw Pictures Of Sexy Guys Wearing Glasses In X Easy Steps
Well…okay that How To Draw…thing is a bit of a running gag around here and this is a more serious attempt to to do some quality sexy sketching, and keep my mind occupied on something other than how quarantine is making it sadly obvious that I need a road trip Now and I Can’t Go Anywhere!
This one’s going to take a while like the last one did, because the plan here is he’s leaning up against a huge set of library shelves. Dozens and dozens of books. It’s the sort of drudge work I dislike because it gets so boring and I get impatient and then I get sloppy. So I’m trying also to consider this an exercise in artistic self discipline.
I’m being a tad more Safe For Work here on these than I’ve occasionally been here on the website because I’m also sharing these to my Facebook page, and so they’ll probably show up in co-workers screens. They all know I’m gay, and my employer is fantastic about supporting their LGBT employees, nobody really cares. I’m just trying to stick to a line I’ve drawn about my sexy sketching for the time being so I can freely share. But deep down it’s also, maybe mostly, about my getting more comfortable being an out gay man.
You’d think by now that wouldn’t be an issue, but I came out to myself in the early 1970s, and it’s been a struggle all my life to simply give myself permission to be me. I gain a little more ground every year but it’s never the whole of it. Gay kids of my generation had to hide their desires. The adults we grew into have had to work and freeing themselves from that ball and chain ever since. My cartoon series A Coming Out Story is about the beginning of that struggle. I’m 66 now and it never has ended. I’m actually feeling proud of myself sharing these on Facebook with Everyone and shining a small light on this part of me unafraid (mostly).
Also, it Is fun to walk up to the line and not go over it. I would much rather be teased than have my buttons pushed.
It’s too late for me to have the young adult life I should have had, that we all should have had. But I can at least nod to it from time to time, look back and relive the wonder of discovering the beauty of men. Well…of a certain sexy to me type…
Finished. On to the next one tomorrow. But must mow the lawn first…
You can go back through the sequence of these and almost see my desperate hunt and peck, erase, draw, erase, draw, erase, draw technique. I will frequently draw something one evening that I am thoroughly satisfied with, that upon viewing the next morning looks completely wrong. Once I drew a figure seated at a park bench with his legs crossed and I gave him backwards left/right feet by mistake and didn’t see it for a couple days. Luckily I was in the stage of things where I was adding colors to it in the computer and I was able to fix it. But the inks in traditional media still have that mistake in them.
This is why cartoonists don’t always sell or give their originals away.
This is helping me stay sane during quarantine. When the abyss stares back into you, shout beauty back.
Probably Not Quite As Safe For Work As The Others…
This one’s probably not as safe for work as the others. But I’m dealing with quarantine and a variety of other things I won’t bring up now and I reckon I’m just more willing to share this side of me and my artwork than usual. Hopefully everyone who can’t handle that Bruce is gay and likes guys is already out of my life (Hi Glenn!), or has already defriended me on Facebook (Hi Burt!), and this is about as brazen as I get artistically anyway.
He’s looking out into a bright sunny dawn, from inside a darkened old stone building. This is going to take some more work than the others, so probably won’t be finished with it for several days. I actually have to spend most of my awake time teleworking until the weekend.
Total deaths in seven states that have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic are nearly 50 percent higher than normal for the five weeks from March 8 through April 11, according to new death statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is 9,000 more deaths than were reported as of April 11 in official counts of deaths from the coronavirus.
The new data is partial and most likely undercounts the recent death toll significantly. But it still illustrates how the coronavirus is causing a surge in deaths in the places it has struck, probably killing more people than the reported statistics capture.
Since our testing capabilities are basically maybe a half-step about non-existent then…yeah…this is almost certainly the case. Go read the whole thing. The included graphs alone tell an alarming story.
Some of this increase may be due to people just not going in, or not able to get in, to their health care providers for things that arise and then they get fatally worse. But that should be balanced out by a much lower rate of traffic fatalities, and the sort of accidents that happen outside the home. The fact is we don’t even know how many of us have or had the virus. We’re flailing around in the dark here. But this is ominous.
I think I’m really warming now to the advantages of digital media. And I’m actually getting comfortable with the tactile feel of drawing on a glass iPad screen. I didn’t think that would be possible.
Probably start another one tomorrow. That’s a Jackson Pollock bandana he’s sporting. In color while the rest of him is grayscale because I do that mixing up color and grayscale when it works for me. Have I mentioned how much I hate that damn hanky code?
If you were to ask me why I’m doing these just now, and if I was still religious, I’d refer you to the morning headlines and the daily death toll, then point to this one and say that beautiful guys are my proof that, despite everything, God is good. Well I’m not a believer anymore and haven’t been for decades now, but I can still say they’re my proof that life is good and worth living despite everything in it that makes you hurt. Like the daily death toll from COVID-19. Like Trump and his death cult republican base. I very much need these proofs.
In my worst jags of cynicism and pessimism I never expected to see the human depravities I’m seeing now. Not even during the AIDS plague when they were all but openly rejoicing in our suffering and dying. They’ve gotten worse since then. So I draw beauty. When the abyss stares back into you, answer it with beauty.
Further Sexy Sketching In Lieu Of Climbing The Walls…
Doing another one….
No go-go boots this time. I’ve moved on.
These are coming out of me pretty easily now. I seem to be doing more work than usual at the kitchen table lately. Possibly because the iPad is easy to use here whilst snacking out. More probably because the basement isn’t really a good place for an art room as its only light is from the ceiling fluorescents. But I have no other place in the house to put it. There is no sunlight. And the bar is way too nearby. That’s really not a good atmosphere to be creative in. Unless maybe you’re a detective novel writer.
The kitchen seems to be my hangout when I’m not teleworking. But I’m beginning to appreciate why Van Gogh once said it was either paint or go mad. But then he went mad anyway, so there’s that.
I’m going to make his bandana a tie-dye just to confuse everyone…
When Your Own Artwork Makes You Nervous Despite How Tame It Is
Opening banner for something I’ve been working on for well over a year now…
I should try to finish this, since I’ve been working on it for nearly two years now. Thing is I keep seeing panels I hate and I have to do them over again and I get discouraged.
Bear with me here please…
There’s an element of risk in giving the world a glimpse of your libido, which I suppose is why most writers of erotic fiction use pseudonyms. It’s especially true if your libido tacks in a different direction from most. I suffer here from a double penalty of both being gay, and being an American gay male who isn’t all that into guys that look like they model for superhero comics. It makes me nervous even talking about it. Yet I spent my formative adolescence on a diet of underground comix, men and women who were heroically…some might say a little Too heroically…willing to honestly write and draw about human sexuality and their own specifically. Howard Cruse is one of my heros in that regard, but there were so many others that gifted their talents and insights to Gay Comics. Even so I’ve struggled with how transparent to be in A Coming Out Story.
My initial concept of the character that represents my libido was he would simply be…in the underground comix tradition…a naked me. I tried drawing that over and over and was never comfortable with it. I just couldn’t do it. And then I thought…wait…that’s truth. And the first four episodes came immediately to mind, and I knew I had something I could go with. This is why the libido character is always wearing a fig leaf. As he says in that first episode “I’m your libido, not Robert Crumb’s libido.” Truth.
So I’m not the most brazen of cartoonists (my mild mannered fig leafed libido is a running gag in the story), which means I get nervous whenever I venture into this territory. Whenever I attempt something like You Can Leave Your Hat On (it’s a riff on a song by Randy Newman…the banner here is a riff on R. Crumb’s Keep On Trucking comic (which he now hates) which was itself a riff on a blues song Truckin My Blues Away by Blind Boy Fuller) I have to get the artwork as right as I can. That way if it provokes jeers I can shrug them off because I’m satisfied I got it right.
Some years ago I showed a cuteness I’d drawn to a gay guy I no longer hang out with, who cracked that he looked like he was one estrogen shot away from a job at Hooters…
Which only goes to show that even gay guys can be sexist jackasses. People like that are why males blessed with that beautiful angelic face often have a bad attitude about it.
Thing is, even allowing for the misogyny of it, there is still the coarseness by which people draw their lines around what is male and what is female. You’d think gay folk of all people would know better, yet I have been asked repeatedly (by that those same guys I no longer hang out with) if I’m really gay because the guys my libido alerts on just aren’t ripped enough, look too feminine, just aren’t manly enough.
Much of this is gay guys reclaiming their masculinity from a culture that blasts a torrent of abuse at gay males over gender conformity. So I get that pushing back thing. But I’m a solid Kinsey 6 regardless of what you think of my tastes in men. In A Coming Out Story episode 20, I have this argument with my libido who assures me that “You like Y chromosomes, just not the big overly muscled ones.” The punchline is when he asks me about photographing the next swim team meet. Even in some gay circles that kind of thing makes me weird. Hey guys…we’re gay…we’re all weird by the majority’s reckoning. Get effin over it!
So…anyway…I was struggling with this one because while I knew exactly what I want it to be I could not get comfortable with making it as sexy as I needed it to be to get my point across. For a while I was going to really go for it on this one and make it completely not safe for work…and I just couldn’t. But I think I know now how to walk right up to that line and still get my point across.
And yes..that’s Mr. Short-Shorts and Go-Go Boots. I first drew him around the same time as I heard You Can Leave Your Hat On played at a club in Laurel where I went to see classmate Rev. Billy Wirtz play. I assumed it was about a straight guy talking his girlfriend into dancing naked for him, but there was a lyric that jumped out at me…
Suspicious minds are talking Trying to tear us apart They say that my love is wrong They don’t know what love is I know what love is…
That spoke to me, obviously, as a gay man. And then this entire cartoon…mostly…came to mind. When it happens like that I know it’s something I have to get out of me. But this one’s been a struggle.
Cats And Their Little Ways Of Expressing Displeasure
I get just a little late putting food out for the calico and when I do go to put it out I step in my bare feet on dead bird remnants that are all over my doormat. I need to start looking down first. Yes madam, I was late. I need to put BEWARE OF THE CAT signs around my feeders.
I still see a few tweaks I need to make…but this is pretty much finished. I’m really coming to love Procreate’s charcoal sticks. I’ve tried a bunch of digital drawing apps and none of them get the charcoal sticks right. Procreate gets them almost perfect. Now if it only had a torn kneaded rubber eraser.
[Update…] Okay I’m done here. Tweaks made, I’m satisfied with it. Now to move on to the next…
Whenever I do one of these I keep thinking about a cartoon R. Crumb did in “XYZ Comics” back in the day, that had a panel in it of him drawing (it looked like he was using an old Rapidograph) one of his sexy ladies (he had a very distinctive type of full figured gal he liked) with a caption to the effect that he drew to get the objects of his desire. But I suppose we all do that. Look at this…
This is the sculptor Luo Li Rong and one of her works. This isn’t just an artistic reverie on the female form. Check out some of her other work. That’s a muse. Those pieces of hers ache with desire struck awe.
I will never be near that good. But I have my muses. They keep me feeling alive.
Pride organizers and the city government came to the decision together, according to a Heritage of Pride press release. Mayor Bill de Blasio has canceled all in-person gatherings in New York City through June due to the pandemic, which has hit his city particularly hard.
It is the first time since the Stonewall Riots that the parade has been cancelled. But this time there was no other way. I’m sure there will be online celebrations. This was always a parade about defiance against the darkness, survival, and love. And we will go on, defying hate, surviving, and loving and taking care of each other, as we did before, while they that say plagues are gods wrath come on us are packing their stadium churches and sharing their viral loads with each other more recklessly than what they accused us of during the AIDS crisis, and drinking bleach.
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