So via my blog reader (Feedly) I’m looking at this post from a blog I only follow occasionally, but this particular post interested me when I saw it in the feed. Its author, a rock musician, is writing about posing nude for a rock magazine he’s often written for. Supposedly it was a turnabout is fair play issue, since the magazine often features lovely ladies wearing not very much if anything.
I was curious because throughout my life whenever the opportunity to get naked, at a clothing optional resort for example, I just could not, though I remember once skinny dipping with some friends. In retrospect I think I managed it by mostly staying in the water. That discomfort I have is the punchline in that first episode of A Coming Out Story. I actually had a conversation about this with a friend recently back from Burning Man where the celebrants wander around in various stages of undress if they want.
So I’m reading this blog post because after all these years I am still intensely curious to know how it is that people who can do this manage it. And I came to the following verbiage…
Having been on stage nude several times it was both a no-brainer to ask and a no-brainer that I would consent to doing so for their publication…But swanning around the room nude, very much in my element I had had a thought. Since nothing is quite as disappointing as the nude male…
Huh? Really? Really?? Okay…tell me you’re a heterosexual male without telling me you’re a heterosexual male.
I kinda skimmed the rest of that blog post, but I think I get a better sense of my own reticence now.
Some years ago when I began A Coming Out Story my intention was to do the artwork in the style of the old underground comix. It would be all ink line art with cross hatching instead of my usual charcoal shading. In addition to the object of my adolescent crush, Mom, and various friends whose names and faces I would change around a bit, I had a notion that my journey to sexual self discovery would also include three fantasy characters representing different aspects of my consciousness.
Left Brain and Right Brain would represent the art/spiritual versus the science/techno geek in me. Then, because this was a coming out story, there would be a character representing my libido. I visualized him as an unfailingly polite yet absolutely relentless nag who would be making me very anxious and irritated all through the story. Unlike the other two, who would only inhabit subconscious central, Libido would be able to interact with me in the real world, because he was a sudden pest whenever I least needed it.
And in the spirit of the underground comix I initially decided that he would embody as a naked version of me. Left Brain would embody as a stereotypical nerd with white business shirt, narrow tie and a pocket protector. Right Brain would be hippy child me with a flower in his long hair, a tie-dye t-shirt, bell bottoms and bare feet. But I figured Libido, because he represented my sexual self, had to be naked, just like nearly all my favorite underground cartoonists would sometimes represent themselves. To Hell with the comics code authority!
But as I began working out the first few episodes of the story, I kept feeling very uncomfortable about drawing myself naked. Let me see if I can illustrate that with a side story.
Back in sixth grade one day I arrived in class to see someone had written stuff on the big blackboard in the front of the classroom. It was some kids from the class ahead of us, who had gone on to Junior High (what they now call Middle School). They wrote a bunch of stuff on the blackboard to tell us what to expect because Junior High was a very different experience, according to them. Instead of just one classroom all day long, you went from this class room to that and each one taught a different subject. Also, there was no recess. But there was gym class.
My eyes came across the following verbiage: “Tell them not to worry about group showers, it’s no big deal.”
I could feel my jaw dropping. What?! WhAT??! WHAT!!!???
You might think a gay kid would be just delighted to shower naked with all the other boys, but I was in denial all the way to my senior year, and I never got past the embarrassment of showering with the others. I would just tune everything out. I love a good shower, especially after a lot of physical work. But I would just imagine I was the only one there and that got me through it.
And it’s a bit of a running joke in the story (and my life) about how mom and I would just avoid the subject of her boy’s emerging sexuality whenever it got dangerously close. To paraphrase Monty Python, are you embarrassed easily…I am…but don’t worry, it’s all part of growing up and being Baptist.
So there I am fretting about drawing my libido character as a naked me, but I felt I had to in order to respect the truth of my story, except it was too damn embarrassing to draw myself naked…but TRUTH…but…but…I just can’t do it…
..and then I realize…hey wait…that’s Truth. And I swear as soon as I thought that, the first four episodes of the story just immediately came to mind fully formed. And the punch line in that first episode is perfect; “I’m your libido, not Robert Crumb’s libido.” Yes…that.
And all this is a long drawn out way of saying that I’ve still been fussing with how to draw that cartoon riff on Randy Newman’s “You Can Leave Your Hat On” that I started about four years ago and couldn’t finish, because I couldn’t get comfortable with drawing the dancer in it naked but for the hat which they were told they could leave on. Last time I brought this cartoon up I said I was going to do it the way the song was written because TRUTH, instead of the way I started it which was to just let the dancer keep their tiny little briefs on. But no…TRUTH.
But I have my own truths to deal with, and this reticence about nudity and how to draw nudes is one of them. Maybe I’m a prude after all. Maybe this is what you get when you raise a gay boy in a Baptist household. But I dislike sexuality being turned into cheap push button entertainment and I would much rather be teased than doused with porn. Pornography is obvious. I like sensuality and romance, which is why porn never really did much for me. And there is a sweet sexy and romantic subtext that I see in that Randy Newman song. That is what I want to develop in the cartoon.
And I’m getting back to work on it because I think I see a way now, to respect the song’s truth and my own. An artist has to be faithful to their own truths or don’t even bother because it’s way too much work to be faking it.
A Facebook friend’s status post and subsequent comment thread tosses me back to a memory of my pre coming out to myself days that is both funny and cringe inducing at the same time. Funny how often memories of our teen years are like that…
A friend is posing for an underwear fashion shoot and he’s asking for advice on getting a nice pair of black briefs because black is the specified color of the shoot and all he has are a pair of AussieBums that he doesn’t like. He points to a link to the AussieBum page and I take a look. They’re nice, thinks I. I have a thing for briefs and find it regrettable that they’re not the fashion in the younger set anymore. When I was a kid, boxers were what the old men wore. Now I’m getting old myself and boxers are what the young guys wear and they think briefs are old guy underwear. But briefs are still out there, gay guys at least still like wearing them, and the AussieBums I’m looking at are very nice…except like a lot of underwear companies these days, the waistband is like a damn billboard with the company name occupying almost as much real estate as the material below it.
I can appreciate a company wanting to get its name out there…but I really hate it when the branding on clothes demands more attention then the body wearing them. I am not your walking billboard. Plus, when I see an attractive guy, and especially if he’s not wearing very much, I don’t appreciate advertising getting in the way. My Facebook friend merely replies that it’s all about the branding, and that normally it’s only a glimpse of the wasteband that’s visible. A company has to get your attention when and where it can. Okay. Fine. I get that. But I’m still annoyed by it.
And then suddenly I’m remembering myself as a teenager, and those first confusing, thrilling times when getting that glimpse of an elastic waistband peeking out above a guy’s belt line would make me all hot and bothered for some reason I really didn’t want to explore just then. I touched on it in Episode 10 of A Coming Out Story…
There’s a toss-off line in John Fox’s The Boys On The Rock, where the young protagonist Billy takes note of the different kinds of underwear he and his new boyfriend are wearing as they are undressing each other. It’s the kind of detail, that the kid even knows how some brands of underwear are different from other brands, that tells the reader this kid has been looking at guys in a sexual way for a while now. I suspect some of my straight peers back then could tell just by glancing at a girl’s tight shirt who made her bra, and whether it had hooks or snaps. They’d have probably been surprised to learn that men’s underwear differed from brand to brand in anything more then just price. Had I told them I could tell what make of underwear they were wearing just by looking at the waistband they’d have known more about me then I was ready to tell anyone. Including myself.
In the 1960s, long before they’d come out with such things as designer underwear for men, you had maybe four major brands of underwear. There were Fruit of the Looms, Hanes, BVDs and Jockeys. Back then your choices were white cotton, high in the waist and cut such that the leg openings didn’t rise up the thigh much. Not terribly sexy by today’s standards. All the same to a gay kid whose hormones had tentatively started percolating the underwear pages of the various catalogs suddenly became pretty riveting reading. I started ogling them when I was nine or ten I think.
I can hear the snickers now. A catalog? Given the level of open sexuality these days, gay and straight, it’s probably hard for people who didn’t live that period to get how sexually repressed it was, and how shocking the free love morality of the Beat and Woodstock generations were to their elders. My peers and I grew up in their shadow and in the 1960s even my heterosexual peers had to resort to the catalogs to get their fix, though they could also at least find the occasionally discarded Playboy in the trash bins. I remember a friend finding one of those and gleefully passing it around as we gathered in one of our secret hiding places. There was an article about a nudest camp and I remember being completely riveted by the few naked guys I saw in the pictures. My companions were all making admiring comments about the women and parrot like, I mimicked them. But I never took my eyes off the naked guys. That was discovering sex when you were a kid back in those days. You and a bunch of the other guys, in your treehouse or fort or secret hiding place, passing around a Playboy someone had found in the trash. There was no Internet you could browse alone in your room when your parents weren’t looking.
I was careful to ogle the catalogs when I knew I was alone in the house, knowing full well at some level what I was doing and yet at the same time not admitting it to myself. And true to form the budding little geek in me began around then to critically analyze the object of my fascination. It wasn’t long before I could spot the difference between a Hanes and a BVD at a glance. The catalog retailers, Sears, Montgomery Ward, J.C.Penny, used to buy from one of the big companies and rebrand them with their own names. I could tell just by looking at them. These are made by Fruit of the Loom…these are really BVDs…
Most spellbinding of all were the Jockeys. The first time I saw another kid in the gym locker room wearing one of those Y fronts my jaw almost hit the floor. I’d never seen anything so…alluring. Particularly on that one kid who had a body that looked like it had stepped out of one of my anatomy for artists books. It was junior high and I was fourteen or fifteen. Being careful not to gawk in the locker room wasn’t usually a problem though. It was so embarrassing to have to undress, let alone shower naked with a bunch of other guys, that I became adept at tuning everything out and just getting on with it (I joke sometimes that it’s a trick I learned in Vacation Bible School). Plus, even at that age when you are busy becoming all hormones and nerve ends my libido was very low key and persnickety. But there were close calls. When the other guys my age began rhapsodizing about advertising for bras and woman’s lingerie I knew I had to keep my mouth shut. But I wasn’t ready to admit to myself why.
In high school, in the early 70s low riser bell bottom jeans started coming into fashion and I began seeing other guys my age wearing them in school. Not every guy who wore them really had the body for it, but those who did drove me nuts every time they walked by. The best of these really showed off a guy’s…attributes…nicely. And if the shirt wasn’t tucked in you might see a glimpse of elastic peeking up above the belt line. By the time I was 17 I had become I became expert at telling the brands apart just by the waistband because the stitching each company used was different. Fruit Of The Looms had a small blue stripe with a yellow stripe below it. BVDs had a black dotted line, sometimes with a red dotted line below it. Nowadays on a lot of brands the elastic waistband is a damn billboard. Back then it was something you decoded stealthily, like a secret message.
How I could become such an expert on men’s underwear and at the same time remain clueless about my sexual orientation is something I’ve been trying to delve into in my cartoon, A Coming Out Story. It was a combination of the horrible things I was taught about homosexuals back in my ninth grade sex-ed class, and the relentless stereotypes of that time. On the one hand I knew I could not possibly be a homosexual because I was none of the horrible things that I’d been taught homosexuals were. On the other, I knew perfectly well what would happen to me if it became common knowledge that I was one. Already through most of my grade school life I’d been tormented and bullied severely because I was small, scrawny, and I hated sports. Faggot was a routine insult kids like me got whether we were actually thought to be queer or not. I didn’t need the extra added threat of the other kids knowing for certain that I was, in fact, a queer.
So I kept it all inside. But sex is an instinct older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates, let alone humans, let alone teenage boys. You can try to bottle it up inside of you, but it will find its way out no matter how much you’d rather it just went away. Even such a tame little apologetic libido as my own. It just kept…insisting that I look at all the beautiful guys. Especially the ones with a tempting bit of skin showing between the belt line and the shirt. Insisting that I look as they walked by. Oh…look over there…that one…well now, his hips move very nicely as he walks don’t they? Long legs… Nice jeans… Oh look…he’s wearing Jockeys…
I count it as a blessing that I was able to avoid the years of self loathing other gay guys of my generation endured. I fell in love and in that wonderful glorious rush of teenage first love was able to finally come out to myself and not see myself as perverted, mentally ill or an abomination in the sight of God. But I understand completely how it is that some people, strident cultural conservatives getting caught with rent boys, politicians getting caught soliciting vice cops in parks or public restrooms, can do the things they do, things that fairly write I Am A Homosexual on their foreheads in neon lights, and still resolutely not consider themselves to be gay. All I have to do is remember back to when I was a kid alone in the house with one of the big mail order catalogs, gawking at the men’s underwear pages, one part of me completely entranced, the other just keeping its mouth shut.
[Edited a tad…] I had to add the words “advertising for” to the end of one of the paragraphs there to make it clear my childhood friends weren’t transvestites. I’m not saying any of them aren’t…just that back then they were ogling advertising for bras and women’s lingerie like a lot of boys that age did back then, not fantasizing about wearing it. A couple wise guys here apparently thought I meant otherwise…
If my mother’s rule was right I was already thinking pretty well. But she also said, “Cold feet – warm heart” and that’s a different matter. -John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley.
Male libido is assumed to be a constant, quivering thrum. For some men, maybe it is. But for me, as much as I enjoy the old in-n-out, the rubba-dub-dubba, the squeak-n-bubble, I have never craved it the way our culture has led me to believe I should, not even during my fabled Horny Years from ’91 to ’95. Except for those moments when I was in the first throes of a new love, sex has never subsumed me. Yet every cultural message I receive has led me to believe it should. Consequently, my lack of nymphomaniacal tendencies has always left me feeling embarrassed and emasculated.
That’s me. When I was a teenager, and still had not admitted to myself that I’m gay, I was mostly turned off by what I regarded as the oversexed conversations of my friends. On the one hand I was too polite to say anything negative about their preoccupation with girls. On the other, I understood perfectly well that if I didn’t at least make some effort at joining in I would be regarded as a weirdo. I decided to just go with the weirdo thing and make friends with other weirdos. Problem was, they were, or at least seemed to be, just as horny as everyone else with a Y chromosome.
Then I came out to myself as gay. Fine. Okay. This explains why I wasn’t all about tits and ass. Well…at least female ass. But it wasn’t long before I came to realize I still wasn’t all that horny compared to my fellow gay males either. Yes, yes…I liked the look of comely guys. And there were times when the very thought of having sex with some of them would drive me completely nuts. But those were mostly guys I was crushing on. Random pretty bods would turn me on after a fashion, yes, but quite soon after coming out it became clear to me that my sexual thermostat was set several degrees below that of my gay male peers.
And even in the gay community, or perhaps especially in the gay community, if you aren’t 100 percent horny, 100 percent of the time, people think there is something wrong with you. Something, of course, that getting laid will cure.
I remember way back in the BBS days, the Gay bulletin board I frequented, and did volunteer work for, GLIB (for Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau) had a guest columnist on sexual health. Questions posted to the doctor’s forum were anonymous. One day a fellow glibber, male, wrote that he was concerned that his libido was too weak. He needed he said, lots and lots of gentle foreplay just to get a head of steam up for it. The doctor assured him basically what this heterosexual columnist is saying here: human males aren’t all as sexually charged as the stereotype says we are. There’s nothing wrong with you, find a boyfriend who understands your sexual needs, relax and enjoy the extended foreplay. Reading this exchange, I was tremendously relieved. It was, I am not kidding, one of those Wow…I’m not the only one after all moments gay boys are supposed to have when growing up, but for an entirely different reason.
To me, sex isn’t even about sex. Fundamentally, it’s about acceptance, having somebody desire you enough to allow you to envelop them and wanting that person to envelop you in return.
This. What Steinbeck’s mom said, presumably about women, is true of a lot of men too. It’s true of me. You could never get me into the sack at a moment’s notice. But I could be coaxed. Perhaps this was always for the best anyway. A guy who thinks coaxing is superfluous would obviously not be dating material either.
Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin quotes a little Michael Heath…
During my lifetime I have witnessed the descent from Playboy into the abyss of online porn…
Okay…That’s about all I need to read. If you think the human, let alone the American fascination with pornography started with Playboy Michael, and the mass consumption therein, then you have been very grievously misinformed. Google Tijuana Bible Mike. No…that’s not a translation for Spanish speaking Christians.
My own fascination with pornography ended pretty soon after it began, when I eventually figured out (don’t laugh) that there is very little romance in it. The few porn magazines I bought back in the day all had images of guys being affectionate as well as sexual. That was my turn on. No matter how hot I thought the guys were, if it was just sex I got bored if not a tad turned off. There had to be affection on display too. The more affection the better. But affection of that sort between males was a pretty radical thing to portray in any form back then, back room magazine rack or mainstream movie house. In some ways, and in some venues, it still is.
I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating because it really says it all. Back in the day an old high school friend of mine told me about taking a college course on human sexuality. The course, he said, included a number of films which you might expect to find in an Adult Entertainment store rather then in a university classroom. And so naturally most of the college students who signed up for that course did so, according to my friend who probably did also, just to see those films. What they didn’t bargain for was also having to watch a bunch of sex they didn’t much like. This was after all, a course on human sexuality, not a course on pornography. In addition to the hot young babes there was also footage of folks old enough to be their own parents having sex. Then there were the sections on geriatric sex. You can imagine how well that went over with a bunch of college students. But it was the section on gay male sex that bothered some the audience most of all. And it wasn’t the sex specifically that offended them. In fact, the sex really didn’t bother that group much at all. According to my friend, when the gay male sex scenes came on screen the ignorant jock types in the class burst out laughing and mocked the couple.
But then images of that couple being affectionate with each other came on screen and the jock’s attitude changed. Those scenes of that male couple being affectionate, kissing, holding hands, being in love, completely offended the jocks my friend said, far more, far, Far more, then watching them have sex did.
What pornography is, to my mind at least, is it just pushes your sexual buttons and nothing else. That’s all it’s for. That’s all it does. Empty button pushing. But that’s all some folks want it to be. Oh well for them I guess. What I discovered about myself, and had I not the freedom to at least look the stuff over I might not have figured this out about myself, is that I am about romance, affection, playful fun, when it comes to sex. I like to be teased. I like the friendly smile and the longing look. And the kiss. Especially the kiss. I am not much about just having my buttons pushed for the sake of pushing them. There has to be more. There has to be love. There has to be the kiss. So what my little private collection of erotic art began to consist mostly of as I grew older, is that. Sex yes, but not always that specifically and always in the context of romance. Body and soul together. I love that. It turns me on.
Your mileage may vary. That’s fine. I’m pretty sure in any case that your definition of pornography Michael is almost certainly a lot broader then mine. Anything having to do with same-sex couples even if it’s just a kiss probably counts as pornography in your book. No…Especially if it’s just a kiss. Because homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. But here’s the thing Michael…most of us just look the other way when we’re grossed out or disinterested. When I found out there wasn’t much in pornography that interested me, at least of the hard core sort, I stopped looking. But you can’t for some reason.
Don’t you think that puts you in the same ugly peep show stall that the people you’re railing against are stuck in? Well…except they seem to be enjoying themselves and you’re not. And what is offending you most of all Michael, isn’t the sex gay couples are having. It’s the affection. It’s their joy. It’s the kiss…isn’t it Michael. You’re calling it “sodomy based marriage” now…it’s your new slogan that you seem to honestly think is a winner but it’s merely your way of turning kisses into pornography. Because that’s how they seem to you.
You begin your email to supporters with a little rant about pornography, but it’s all about same-sex marriage with you, not pornography, not sexual decadence. And that’s because it’s the kiss that offends you, not the sodomy. Marriage is about love and devotion, about body and soul together as one, and same sex couples are fighting for access to marriage, because they love, because they are devoted, because they are one in body and soul. And you see it don’t you. Yes…yes you do. And it bothers you massively doesn’t it. And you can’t look away. Why is that Michael?
Some might suggest that it’s because you’re a closet case yourself. I honestly doubt that you are in that particular sort of closet. There’s another, darker, colder one your sort lives their lives in. There is a marvelous scene in Mary Renault’s The Fire From Heaven, where Alexander’s father Philip, punishing his son and his son’s lover for a transgression, knowing that the punishment of his lover will hurt Alexander more then his own punishment, thinks, “…between contempt and a deep secret envy…The man does not live that I could feel that for, or the woman either.”There you are Michael. There’s why you can’t look away. There’s why you need their kisses to be empty. There’s why you hate them.
[Update…] After I cross posted this over to Truth Wins Out I checked out some of the other posts there and found This One from Evan Hurst concerning Peter LaBarbra’s post also referencing the rant of Coach Dave Daubenmire that I riffed on a few posts back. Remarkably, it contained this image from an episode of Glee, tastefully censored to prevent cases of the vapors in the kook pews. I’ve captured the full context from Pete’s site….just look at this would you…
…blocked for decency’s sake… Oh make my case for me why don’t you? Christ almighty…Pete…listen…there is something seriously wrong with you. If the image of two guys in love kissing is enough to motivate you to start up the image editor of your choice, load that image into it, and take the time to carefully black out (white out?) those two dear little pairs of lips locked like they were mashing genitals instead of kissing, you have problems. Seriously…get help.
“Permit me to clarify the definition. Sodomy is one MAN inserting his genitals into the mouth or anus of ANOTHER MAN. Say it again. Say it out loud so your ears hear it. Picture it in your mind. Picture Barney Frank and Elton John in action. Barney Frank putting his genitals into Elton John’s. That is what they want to tell us is normal€¦no wait€¦tell our children is normal. Into that ‘union’ they are asking permission to place children. Would you let them put YOUR grandchild into a sodomy-based family? Why would you let them do it to someone else’s child? Have normal people lost their minds?” -Crackpot “Coach” Dave Daubenmire.
Normal people don’t obsess about the sex their neighbors are having Dave, particularly when it’s sex that turns them off. You on the other hand, clearly can’t seem to get it out of your head.
You have issues Dave. Let me try to address one of them. If you think opposite sex couples wouldn’t do anything that grosses you or “normal” people out then you really don’t know much about what other people are up to. Perhaps that’s for the best. All in all, I wish sometimes I didn’t know myself.
See Dave…when I was a young gay man, back in the early 1970s, there weren’t many places I could go to get my weekly copies of The Washington Blade or The Advocate. You may of course assume these are gay porn since they’re gay publications and we homosexuals don’t have lives, we just have sex. But they’re newspapers, classifieds and ads for various sexually graphic other publications notwithstanding. And being a young gay man living in a world which at that time was loath to admit that such as I even existed, I needed a source of news and information for my community.
Back then there were no gay publications to be found at the local bookstores and newsstands, let alone the public libraries. There was no Internet. If you were a gay American back in the early 1970s and you wanted news and information concerning your community you didn’t have a lot of choice. Luckily for me growing up in the Washington D.C. suburbs, there was Lambda Rising. But to get there I had to borrow mom’s car and drive downtown. The Metro subway system wouldn’t reach out to my suburban neighborhood for nearly a decade.
So I was always on the lookout for a place closer to home where I could find my gay newspapers. One day, running errands for mom, I drove past a small strip shopping center near Wheaton Plaza, and I glimpsed a sign: ADULT BOOKS.
Well we all know what “adult” means don’t we? So working up the nerve (and I must have driven around that block several times…) I parked the car nearby and strolled in. I think I had just turned 21 but I might have been only 20 and in any case in Maryland then I only needed to be over 18.
The bookstore was small, a tad rundown, but neatly organized. There were a few customers inside. The front area of the store was your usual newstand layout with various magazines and newspapers on the shelves. As you moved toward the back you saw more and more straight skin magazines of the Playboy/Penthouse sort. Your usual softcore men’s magazine stuff. I don’t think Playgirl had yet started publishing. There was a door in the back with a sign over it that said You Must Be 18 or Over To Enter and a nice older lady sitting at a counter beside it. It took me a few minutes of wandering close, pretending to look at the other magazines before I worked up the nerve to enter that door. I’m certain the old lady at the counter had seen first time customers doing that dance many, many times before and she wasn’t fooled. She knew where I was headed.
Oh look…another room…I think I’ll have a look inside… Inside the door was another room about the same size as the front one. The light in there was a bit harsher and the shelves seemed starker somehow. Nearly all the titles were wrapped in plastic, presumably to make people pay to enjoy their contents. But the covers…oh gosh…
As I said, I was 20, maybe 21 and I thought I knew everything there was to know about how to have sex. Well…no. As it turned out, there were Lots of other ways. Lots and Lots and Lots of other ways. Being a gay guy I felt somewhat enlightened and tolerant by the fact that the thought of heterosexuals getting it on really didn’t bother or gross me out. But clearly what I had been imagining was only the Reader’s Digest version. Here before my eyes was the unabridged, and little Baptist boy me was horrified. No…I won’t go into details. The details aren’t important.
Eventually I worked my way clear to the back where, in a corner, was the Much smaller gay section. Once more I beheld a universe of sexual possibilities I really had absolutely no interest in, and many of which to be perfectly honest grossed me out considerably. But I must also honestly admit there were some magazines back there that definitely tweaked my interest. Unsurprisingly these were the ones that matched the imaginings of sex I’d had since my hormones started percolating. Some of the guys in them were beautiful. During later visits I would actually buy a few of these. But that wasn’t my goal just then. Mostly I just wanted to see if I could get my newspapers and be out of there. And sure enough, right at the very bottom of one of those shelves, were copies of the Blade and The Advocate, and nearby, a couple gay softcore titles I’d never seen before. Playboy could sit in the front, but gay softcore had to sit with the straight hard core porn because…well…it was gay after all.
I much preferred going to Lambda Rising, but for about the next decade, when I couldn’t get downtown, I made the trek to ADULT BOOKS and got my newspapers.
So…dig it Dave…for almost a decade I had to walk a gauntlet of heterosexual pornography just to get my damn newspapers.
I am so sorry for you. I mean…a coach for goodness sakes…and here you are like a freshly minted teenage boy so fascinated, so completely preoccupied with sex, and yet blissfully naive about it all. How did that happen to a guy your age? The thought of one man having oral sex with another grosses you out does it? I could tell you things that heterosexuals do that would curdle your milk Dave. You poor sorry soul. I have a suggestion. Never…Never…order up one of those adults only channels next time you’re on the road without your wife. You might have a heart attack.
From Sullivan, who posts on the heterosexual version of Grindr…
Marshall Sella went undercover to understand the allure of the gay-cruising app. After interviewing the men who met up with him, he applied his knowledge to Blendr, the straight version:
In large part, human interaction is irrational or it is nothing. This is especially true with dumb sex. Dumb sex makes a fool of logic. If you’re the man who has a “type” in romance, you probably also have a “system” at cards. Blendr is built on these insights into our silliness and our strangeness, and instead of finding you the person you think you’re looking for, the software opens your eyes to the people around you.
The person you think you’re looking for… No jackass. I have a type in romance…which is to say I know what my libido is sexually attracted to and what it is not, and what sort of person I am emotionally attracted to and what sort of person I am not. Combine sexual attractiveness with emotional attractiveness and you have your romantic type. That is, if you are even the type who is into romance. A lot of people aren’t. If you aren’t…look…don’t even think for one second you grok those of us who are. You don’t. You can’t. Clearly, it isn’t you.
Dumb sex makes a fool of logic… Well no…actually the fool is you. Knowing what works and what doesn’t work for you romantically isn’t the same as thinking you have a system for playing cards. You might have a system for finding and dating your romantic type that works as well (or not) as your system at cards but that is a separate thing from who you are, and who you are not attracted do. And you almost get it when you say that sex can make a fool of logic. It’s making a fool of yours right now.
Yes…libido has its own separate and relentless logic and you just have to accept that it will want what it wants. It isn’t something you can switch on and off, it isn’t a blackboard you can wipe clean and scribble onto it whatever you’d rather have there. It is what it is. Your gay neighbors understand (or they damn well ought to) how that is…
This switch does not exist
We learn to deal with it. You can too. But that’s just the desire part. Then there is this thing we tend to refer to metaphorically as the “Heart”. It has its own logic too. My libido may or may not tick like yours. Likewise for my heart.
You may think the heart part doesn’t matter, or isn’t important, or it always gets shoved into the car and taken for a ride to the nearest motel by the libido part…but that’s just how it looks to you. A lot of people probably share your point of view. A lot of people don’t. We’re not naive. You are, if you think your point of view is the only realistic one.
It’s like the lady said: Some people are settling down, some people are settling and some people refuse to settle for anything less than butterflies. But also like the man said: When you die you’re going to regret the things you don’t do. You think you’re queer? I’m going to tell you something: we’re all queer. You think you’re a thief? So what? You get befuddled by a middle-class morality? Get shut of it. Shut it out. You cheat on your wife? You did it, live with it. You fuck little girls, so be it. There’s an absolute morality? Maybe. And then what? If you think there is, go ahead, be that thing. Bad people go to hell? I don’t think so. If you think that, act that way. A hell exists on earth? Yes. I won’t live in it.
If Grindr is your thing then go for it. If random casual sex is your thing, fine. Be that. If you wake up next morning in bed with a total stranger and you’re feeling ashamed like you always do when you do that then stop doing that. If a new conquest every night makes you feel like you’re on top of the world then bask in the glory. But don’t fucking tell me that something like Grindr “opens your eyes to the people around you.” Hahahaha….that’s bullshit. It’s the kind of bullshit people tell themselves because they’re afraid of being called pigs and sluts.
Look…admit it…Grindr just a goddamned sex park and if you’re there then clearly it’s because you want to be an item on somebody’s menu. Fine. No, really. It’s Okay. If that’s you, then go ahead and be that. If you think all that dating and romance stuff is for children and arrested adolescents who still cry when Rick tells Ilsa they’ll always have Paris then so be it. Life is short. As long as everyone knows what they’re in it for and they treat the people they take into their arms honestly and decently then for god’s sake go ahead and just whore around if that’s what you want. Sex is wonderful!
Life is good. Don’t end up on your death bed with a lot of regrets about everything (everyone) you didn’t do when you had a chance to. There’s nothing to be ashamed of here. Admit it: you don’t actually want to get to know any of those people, just fuck them. Grindr is telling you everything you want to know about them, and nothing you couldn’t care less about. Are they sexy…yes or no…are they close at hand…is there someplace nearby I can get them alone and horizontal…
I am not being cynical here. This poor angry world, I am convinced, would be a much nicer, more peaceful and productive place, if everyone was a bit more sexually fulfilled. What we all need to understand in the pursuit of that great big beautiful tomorrow however, is that one person’s paradise is another person’s trailer park. I get that. You need to get it too.
Now kindly get the fuck off our backs. You don’t get romantics. You never will. Now go away.
So I went to Key West a few weeks ago, for a little vacation with some friends. I love Key West. I absolutely love the climate (at least the winter climate…I hear the summer swelter is a bit much…). Even more, I love its laid back live and let live attitude. It’s a place where people go, creative people, intelligent people, non-conformists, go to live lives away from the mainland mainstream. The t-shirts on sale everywhere there celebrate sex, drinking, cigars, smuggling, toking, Harleys, growing old and not giving a damn, being poor and not giving a damn, drinking, drinking, and sex. Levittown it ain’t. It’s San Francisco and New Orleans but more laid back. It’s Taos but instead of mountains it’s surrounded by a beautiful turquoise tropical sea and never gets below freezing.
The old town part of the island shelters dozens of historical landmarks and structures with history going back to the first Americans, embracing pirates, salvagers, smugglers, shipwrecked settlers, writers, artists, actors and presidents. Hemingway, Truman, Hunter S. Thompson, Tennessee Williams, Robert Frost and Thomas Edison called it home at one point or another. The locals call themselves Conchs and call their island home a nice little drinking place with a tourist problem.
In 1982 the U.S. Border Patrol put up a roadblock between Miami and Key West, and vehicles were searched for narcotics and illegals. The roadblock put a huge dent in tourism. The city council complained to the Feds and got nowhere. So Key West declared itself The Conch Republic, seceded from the Union, declared war on the United States (by way of the mayor breaking a loaf of stale Cuban bread over the head of someone dressed in a military uniform…), then immediately surrendered and asked for a billion dollars in foreign aid and war relief.
Well they didn’t get their billion, but the roadblock came down.
I love Key West. Ever since my first visit, I’ve thought often about moving there someday. I love its laid back, away from the mainland mainstream attitude. And it is a party town, at least around Duval Street. You practically can’t spit in any direction without hitting a bar, at least one of which, The Garden of Eden, is clothing optional. There are strip clubs, gay and straight and the dancers will walk over to customers to negotiate commerce, barely legal and possibly otherwise as well. A blind eye is turned to a lot of things as long as no one causes any trouble. For all its open sexuality and drinking, there is actually very little rowdiness.
You have to love a place where all this can be going on and yet it stays laid back about it all. I could love to live in a place like that. The ironic thing is, this trip to Key West really emphasized it for me that I am not that.
I have this love/hate relationship with my Baptist upbringing. Sometimes I feel like it made me grow up entirely too inhibited. Sometimes I am deeply grateful for it. There are values, moral values, I still hold to, and find ever more vital as I grow older, and see more and more of what a world without them looks like. Honesty. Prudence in ones financial matters. Earning your keep, and the trust of others. A regard for social justice, tempered by a little humility every now and then, when the urge to thump your pulpit strikes. But for every positive, I can find a negative.
I was never allowed to think of myself as beautiful or desirable. That was vanity and it was a deadly sin. Once when I was in my middle teens, mom, grandma, and a few other family members were at the beach. I had decided to wear the new swim suit I’d bought, which I knew might raise some eyebrows but I thought I’d dare it. It wasn’t terribly sexy by today’s standards, but it was colorful and showed my body off at a time when I definitely had one to show. I strolled out onto the beach with it feeling beautiful for one of the rare times in my life, and just loud enough for me to hear some of the folks made a few off color cracks about it…precisely aimed to embarrass the hell out of me. I must have blushed fifty shades of red and went back to the hotel. I never wore it again.
I’ve had trouble my entire life with being sexually inhibited, and it isn’t just the beating my psyche took being a gay adolescent. But there is inhibited, and there is reserved and it’s taken me the better part of adulthood to discover that my sexual reticence isn’t all the result of having the bible beaten over my head all throughout my childhood. It’s been like carving out a hunk of marble to find the shape within that is really me, and not the stone cast around me from an early age. I think I’m about down to it now, and swear I’d have thought the inner uninhibited me was a tad more footloose and fancy free then this. But…no.
My friends stayed in “Big Ruby’s”…a gay “clothing optional” bed and breakfast. I stayed at the Coco Palm, just around the corner. Let me tell you about that. Two of the guys I went down with are a couple. The other is a party kind of guy, and not to put too fine a point on it, he went down there for the sex. So this guy makes some arrangements for rooms at Big Ruby’s and the night before, he sends me an email asking if I wanted to share a room with him. I had a pretty good idea what he was going to be getting into down there and I didn’t want to be sharing a room with him if he was going to be bringing guys back to it. So I made a polite excuse…told him I’m an “only child” who always had his own room and I like my privacy…blah, blah, blah… The next day I learn he’d made arrangements for himself and my two friends at Big Ruby’s, but not me. So I guess “yes” was the right answer. But…NO.
In retrospect I’m glad I didn’t stay there. My two friends got themselves a nice apartment room with a kitchen that we all used as a headquarters. We used the kitchen for making lunch and sometimes dinner too, and we all relaxed around the pool during Big Ruby’s happy hour. Since I wasn’t a guest there I couldn’t drink their booze, but the landlord was fine with my bringing my own liquor and sharing with the others. And as I walked in and out of Big Ruby’s, I got an eyeful of the stuff going on there and sometimes it was embarrassing. They had a hot tub… Walking past it was a real challenge. Part of me would be deeply embarrassed while that damn logical/analytical part of my brain was absolutely fascinated, full of questions. Don’t they have lovers…???
I watched several naked guys rise from the hot tub at full attention and I was not only unaroused, but actually turned off by the whole thing, and I swear the thought crossed my mind right at that moment that maybe I’m not gay after all. Later I tried to think of a situation where I would be aroused. Immediately one came to mind, but it involved not a group of guys but one…one special one…just him and me in the tub all by ourselves. The plus side of having the high intensity imagination I do is I can make myself all hot and bothered pretty easily.
Yeah, I’m gay all right. Just not the kind of gay guy who goes for casual hooking up in the hot tub with a bunch of strangers regardless of how gorgeous they are. While reading John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley I came across this saying: Cold Feet, Warm Heart. At the age I read it I kinda thought I knew what it meant, but it took years of growing up and passing through adolescence to really understand it. Yeah. That’s me. Cold feet, warm heart.
So I wandered for a time amongst the party crowd at Key West, enjoying myself very much, but coming to an understanding, finally, that I am not that. I am a quiet little romantic, who feels suffocated wherever people have to stifle themselves in order to survive. I’m a shy little homebody looking for his soulmate, who despises people who impose particular gender and sexual roles on others. I’m a gay man who understands intimately well how conformity kills the soul. I’ve watched it happen. I will not willingly live in that world. Even if I could pass for normal in that environment…I couldn’t. But I am not that.
Roman Polanski And The Child Abuse Apologists…All Of Them…
Like many people I suppose, I’m following the story of Roman Polanski reluctantly…drawn into it against my better judgment. It’s an ugly affair but there is far more ugliness in the public chatter surrounding it. In 1977, the year he was arrested and tried, I had just tentatively begun to come out to my circle of friends and I had my own issues with human sexuality. I wasn’t all that interested in the sexual trials and tribulations of a 44 year old Hollywood glitterati, other then how it re-enforced my perceptions of the heterosexual double standard. Had his thirteen year old victim been a boy I had little doubt his film making career would have been over instantly and his name would be poison in the film industry. But Hollywood seemed perfectly willing to forgive him his use of a thirteen year old girl as sexual junk food. Probably because it was something practiced among the Hollywood rich and powerful all the time. His crime it seemed, if any, was that he had allowed it to make headlines.
So now it’s back in the headlines again, and I’m watching the stories fly across my Google News page with the same sense of irritable astonishment. Hello…look at all the people who were outraged at the way the Catholic church aided and abetted child molesting priests, coming to Polanski’s defense. I have to wonder in retrospect how much of that outrage was because they took sexual advantage of kids at the same time they’re preaching about sexual purity, or because they were homosexuals and the victims were boys. How much ink would have been spilled on the scandal had the victims been girls instead? But this passage from Polanski’s victim, now an adult who just wants to not have to deal with it anymore, struck me…
She spoke with People magazine in 1997. After her mother went to police, "all hell broke loose," Geimer said. The European media compared her to Lolita, the young seductress in fiction.
"The fallout was worse than what had happened that night," she told People. "It was on the evening news every night. Reporters and photographers came to my school and put my picture in a European tabloid with the caption Little Lolita. They were all saying, ‘Poor Roman Polanski, entrapped by a 13-year-old temptress.’ I had a good friend who came from a good Catholic family, and her father wouldn’t let her come to my house anymore."
Against that backdrop, the plea deal was struck.
Afterward, Geimer shut down emotionally and rebelled, she told People on the 20th anniversary of the crime.
"I was this sweet 13-year-old girl, and then all of a sudden I turned into this pissed-off 14-year-old,’ Geimer said. I was mad at my attorney; I was mad at my mom. I never blamed her for what happened, but I was mad that she had called the police and that we had to go through this ordeal. Now I realize she went through hell trying to handle things as best she could."
Geimer dropped out of school, got pregnant at 18 and married at 19. She divorced and moved with her family to Hawaii. She later married a carpenter, with whom she had two more children.
Cindy and Dan O’Connor were very worried about Zach. Though bright, he was doing poorly at school. At home, he would pick fights, slam doors, explode for no reason. They wondered how their two children could be so different; Matt, a year and a half younger, was easygoing and happy. Zach was miserable.
The Times story is as heartwarming as the tale of Roman Polanski is grotesque. Zach’s parents loved their gay kid, and tried their level best to make sure he knew it, even as the kid struggled with terrible fears and doubts about himself. But both stories contain this little nugget of fact: both kids turned from sweet little dears into sullen, angry, and self destructive shells of their former selves almost in an instant. And it wasn’t simply a case of raging adolescent hormones that did it. They had both been sexually abused. Geimer directly and physically. O’Connor, though his parents tried their absolute best to protect him from it, by the culture of anti-gay hate he was growing up in.
The misery Zach caused was minor compared with the misery he felt. He says he knew he was different by kindergarten, but he had no name for it, so he would stay to himself. He tried sports, but, he says, “It didn’t work out well.” He couldn’t remember the rules. In fifth grade, when boys at recess were talking about girls they had crushes on, Zach did not have someone to name.
By sixth grade, he knew what “gay” meant, but didn’t associate it with himself. That year, he says: “I had a crush on one particular eighth-grade boy, a very straight jock. I knew whatever I was feeling I shouldn’t talk about it.” He considered himself a broken version of a human being. “I did think about suicide,” he says.
Though I never hated myself for being gay, I know something of the misery that kid was going through. I wrote about it Here…
That was so me. And looking back on it after mom retired, I never really appreciated how bad I was. Then when mom passed away, I inherited her diaries. And I saw it all then. It was very painful reading…
Bruce came home in a very bad mood. Stomped into the bedroom… So I called up J*** & went over to her place for the rest of the evening. He had my stomach just tied up in knots…Oh how I wish he would turn back to the Lord & become like the little boy I once knew, kind, thoughtful, & love for all…
But I wasn’t her little boy anymore, let alone bloody likely to walk back into a church where I would be demonized as an abomination in the sight of God. I was a young man with a young man’s needs and doubts and heartbreaks, all the more confusing and difficult to deal with not so much because I was gay, as that I couldn’t talk to the one person in my life who by all rights should have known me better then anyone, and who might have been able to give me some guidance, but mostly just love, when I needed it most. And love she Did give me…but it had, or so I felt, strings attached. Strings I was terrified to break.
She absolutely positively didn’t want me to come out to her. Every time I even went near the subject of my sexual orientation she would get cold and angry herself and throw up a wall. So I just accepted the fact that we could never talk about it, and I always had to keep that part of me inside when I was in the house. So when my first love left me, and then my second try went very bad on me, and then my third, and I was a miserable desolate wreak inside, I had to keep it inside. I grew increasingly sullen and angry.
Even my friends back then, who were mostly straight, saw it. It was a time before the Internet, and easy access to information about the greater gay community beyond my doorstep. I only knew of a few seedy bars downtown, where I really didn’t want to be. To get my weekly copy of the Washington D.C. gay paper, The Blade, or the Advocate, I had to venture down to this really squalid adult bookstore in nearby Wheaton. Gay kids nowadays will, thankfully, never know how alone and isolated it felt to be gay back then. Most of my friends were straight kids I knew from my high school days, and I really couldn’t talk much to them either, as counter-cultural tolerant as they were (though some of them not so much really). But none of them could have given me what mom might have been able to, had we both lived in a different world.
If only I’d had a chance to open up to her about what was going on in my life, if only I’d had her to talk to then, I might have been a lot less angry, a lot less miserable. My temper was always flaring. I would storm into my room and sulk for hours. I knew I was having "anger management" issues back then, but in retrospect I never thought I was as bad as I was, until I read her diaries.
It isn’t just Roman Polanski’s apologists who are hypocrites here. The deeper, uglier hypocrisy hangs around all the sexual moralists now venting at Polanski’s apologists, who themselves see nothing wrong with sexually brutalizing children. From clergy thumping their pulpits that god considers homosexuality an abomination, to right wing pundits and politicians raging against the homosexual menace, to the hostile hate filled mobs that pack school board meetings to rage against anti-bullying rules that protect gay kids, to the child abusers in every ex-gay ministry that teach gay kids to fear their bodies and hate themselves, the only difference in kind between them all and Roman Polanski is that Polanski, as near as I can determine, never said he boozed up and raped that girl because he loved her and wanted to bring her closer to God.
The age at which the most people are convicted of "sexual assault" is fourteen. Fourteen. And no doubt some of those were actual sexual assaults. But the vast majority of them were not. The vast majority of them were kids convicted of statutory rape. And they are then, in most states, considered sex offenders for the rest of their lives. A taste of why this essay is so important, first on how easy it is to become one of those statistics:
It takes so little for this happen to a child. A girl in school has oral sex with a boy in school. She becomes a sex offender for the rest of her life. Streaking a school event, as a practical joke, becomes a sex crime in the new America. Two kids "moon" a passerby and are incarcerated in jail as sex offenders, where they may well learn a lesson or two about rape. A teenager, who takes a sexy of photo of him, or herself, is paraded around the community as a "child pornographer" for the rest of his or her life…
If you think this was an unintended result of the past couple decades of right wing hysteria over child sexual abuse, you are not paying attention. This is exactly what they wanted to accomplish. Not the persecution of child molesters, but of children. Because they must hate their bodies. Because they must hate themselves, all of them, gay and straight alike. They must hate themselves. And most of all, they must fear joy.
This isn’t rocket science. Our children are our future. The way we treat them is the judgment we pronounce every day upon the human race. When you see someone treating them like crap you have to wonder if that’s not because they think the human race is crap and doesn’t deserve to survive. And many do. If you think child molesting louts like Polanski are the bottom of the human gutter you haven’t looked down into it very far and I can’t say I blame you. Nietzsche was right about gazing for too long into an abyss…
To Polanski’s defenders I can only say this: No means No. That simply should not even be an arguable thing. I understand the reflex to push back against American sexual hypocrisy. But: No means No. Furthermore, if you are a grown adult and the person whose pants you’re trying to get into is a kid, Yes means No too. They may come onto you. They may think they get it. But they don’t. Not the way you do. Your job is to set an example, to show them what it is to be the grownup they ache to become. How often do you bellyache about corporate greed and political avarice? How often do you rail against the coarseness of American culture, the casual off-handed brutality of a might-makes-right morality? Did you ever blast the cigarette companies for pushing their health damaging addictive wares onto kids? You take sexual advantage of a kid, and for sure that kid will grow up with an understanding that taking advantage of someone weaker and more vulnerable then them for your own greedy pleasures isn’t so wrong after all. Is that what you want?
You need to be the kind of person you want that kid to grow up to be. You need to live the kind of life you want the world of tomorrow to become. Yes, sex is wonderful. Sex is one of this life’s perfect joys. But only where No means No and grownups don’t take advantage of naive youngsters, itching to grow up quickly. If you want kids to grow up strong and proud and beautiful and unafraid of their sexual selves, then adults who take advantage of them must be held accountable. For the sake of all those strong, proud, beautiful kids and the tomorrow they represent.
As for the voices from the kook pews now crying hypocrite at Polanski’s defenders: If sex, as your kind is so fond of saying, is for making babies, then hating human sexuality is also a way of hating the future, hating the human race. You warp a kid emotionally to the point they are incapable of having a healthy sexual relationship with anyone, and you are damaging not only that kid, but everyone that kid takes into their arms, and whatever children they might bear. I am perfectly aware that this is fine with you.
You teach them abstinence not to keep them healthy and strong but because you know perfectly well that teenage girls will get pregnant, that kids who don’t know how to protect themselves from STDs will get horribly sick and you believe that motherhood, sickness and death are just punishments for enjoying sex for its own sake, just punishments for living life for its own sake. Didn’t the bible say that Eve’s punishment for disobeying god was to bear the pain of childbirth? Children should be afraid of joy as you are. They should loath their human bodies as you do. They should hate their flesh and blood life and this good earth and all of human existence as much as you will until the day you die. Your problem with Roman Polanski is that he took pleasure in sex, not that he raped a young girl. Women are supposed to submit to the authority of men aren’t they? Were Polanski a moral man he would have broken that kid’s heart without taking any physical pleasure from it.
The next time a case of child sexual abuse hits the headlines, please kindly shut the fuck up, because you are no better then that criminal is. Wait…let me amend that. You are worse.
Oh…you think…? And there I read that the study was done via the German youth magazine Bravo, which "combines no-holds-barred sex advice with explicit photos".
Wow. I’m sitting here trying to picture what my teen years would have been like if American youth magazines had treated sex that matter of factly. Damn.
This may strike some of you, or most of you as odd…but most of my sexy guy sketches start with my seeing something aimed more at young heterosexual males…some pin-up photo of a sexy woman…and I’ll find myself thinking Hey…that’s a nice pose…but I’d rather see a guy in that photo…
The young pirate I did some months ago was actually one of those little pirate statuettes you find for sale at some seaside resorts…a sexy female pirate being served a jug of ale by a little monkey. I bought the statuette and when I got it home did several quick sketches, recasting her as a young man, and adding some background detail and giving him a slightly more direct and challenging look. I guess you could say I butched him up a tad…but only a tad. I was reaching for a sense where he’s beautiful and sexy but not in a passive way, such as I often see in most male heterosexual skin magazines. I’m trying to thread a middle ground between the hyper-masculine art I see in a lot of gay magazines and the hyper-feminine stuff I see in straight boy magazines.
It seems the gay sensual archetype here in the U.S. is the hunk. I’m really not into that. But I’m not really into uber twink either. There is very little I find myself responding to in any of the gay magazines or the online photo galleries. I’m not into porn. Porn is obvious. I want to be teased. I like the sensual and beautiful over graphic sexuality. And no…this isn’t just a middle aged guy loosing his interest. I’ve always been like this. In a world that must seem to the pulpit thumpers like it’s swimming in sex, there is very little in it I actually like. I don’t see that as my being particularly finicky. I’m an artist. I don’t like saying that about myself because it sounds so damn pretentious, but there it is. I spend a lot of time with my feelings…alone at my drafting table, or out and about with one of my cameras. I know perfectly well what turns me on and it’s not that I have a sexually narrow bandwidth, it’s that the culture I live in does not like to admit that men can be beautiful and sexy that particular way. Most of my skin magazines are Asian and that’s not because I have a thing necessarily for Asians, but because Asian cultures seem more willing to admit that males can be beautiful and sexy in a way that isn’t hunk.
There are males like that everywhere. But here in the U.S. they have to dress like slobs or butch up or they catch grief from other U.S. males. Once upon a time, back in the 70s and early 80s, sexy lean and beautiful guys could wear their jeans tight and low and their hair long and their cut-offs high and nobody gave it a second thought. That was a great time to be a young gay man I’m here to tell you. But then as the gay rights movement grew and became more vocal, heterosexual males experienced a kind of gay panic and then those gawd awful baggy pants and swimsuits began to appear and all the sexy beautiful males went into hiding, lest someone think they were gay. Meanwhile, gay males, after being told for generations that they were pathetic mincing swishy faggots, began to reclaim maleness for themselves. That’s a good thing, but alas it’s become too much of a good thing. At least for me.
So when I want to spend some sexy time at the drawing board, I find myself inspired more by straight boy pin-up girls then by anything I see in the gay press or online on the gay websites. It’s weird I guess, but except for the passivity I usually see in it, I find myself drawn more to that then to explicitly gay stuff. I just mentally switch the gender of the subject a lot. I find myself looking at something that is very nice, but would be greatly improved by adding a few ‘Y’ chromosomes. But not too many.
The sketch in the previous post started out as a photo of a gay guy in low riser jeans with thong straps rising up slightly in a very sexy way from the pant waist. I thought that was a good idea, but I didn’t like his pose and he was a tad too muscular for my taste. I like muscle…I like the hardness of the male body…but there are limits. Then I saw another photo of a woman in a very tiny bikini and a hat. She was looking at the camera in a pouty pin-up girl kind of way. I took her pose and the idea of the low risers and thong straps and tried to combine the two. I made the pose a tad more assertive and changed the facial expression from pouty pin-up girl to more introspective and sensual male.
I do most of my pencil work these days on layout paper because it’s easier to erase and re-draw and I am a hunt and peck kind of draftsman, not a professional by any means. I am completely self taught and it probably shows. When it’s sexy time at the drafting table my goal is making myself all hot and bothered. It isn’t like I have anyone in my life to do that to me. So I do it to myself. I find that it’s often the simplest strokes of the pencil that can have the most dramatic results. The concentration level is intense…almost trance like…while I’m working with the pencil. That logical analytical side of my brain is working on the mechanics of drawing, and at the same time it is dispassionately watching the libido. I draw to make my libido go…Damn! Goddamn!
Beats sitting alone in a bar pondering the fact that Facebook is feeding me ads for Mature Gay Dating now. I would love to find a nice, good looking, good-hearted gay guy about my own age to date. As long as he wasn’t mature.
Via KOS…A wee post from Effective Measure, a public health forum, titled, What Else Did You Expect From Horny Teenagers? Remember it, the next time you hear some crackpot argue that religion is a precondition of moral behavior…
Evolution has hard wired a drive to reproduce in young, healthy humans. That’s how the species survives. Maybe you don’t want them to have sex and maybe they even promise they won’t, but biology is more powerful than parents or governments.
Or even…religious dogmas. Like those that insist evolution is nonsense because it contradicts the biblical story of creation…
A study published in the journal Pediatrics followed 289 teenagers who said in 1996 they took a virginity pledge and compared them with 645 non-pledgers, taking into account religious beliefs and attitudes to sex and birth control. This was done because previous studies didn’t factor in the possibility that teens who pledge may be quite different characteristics that affect sexual behavior than those who don’t. So this was an attempt to compare "like with like," the main difference being that one group had promised not to have sex while the other didn’t. "Virginity pledges" are a prominent feature of the Bush administration’s abstinence only sex education programs that didn’t teach contraceptive practices.
Five years after taking the pledge:
82% of pledgers denied ever having taken the pledge
Pledgers and matched non-pledgers did not differ in rates of premarital sex, sexually transmitted disease, and oral and anal sex behaviors
Pledgers had 0.1 fewer sexual partners in the past year but did not differ from non-pledgers in the number of lifetime sexual partners and the age of first sex (Jennifer Warner, WebMD News)
There was one significant difference between the pledge and non-pledge group, however. They were less likely to use condoms or any form of birth control when they did have sex.
You can’t blame them. No one told them how.
Here’s the thing you need to notice about this: Eighty-two percent of them denied ever having taken the pledge. Not that they broke the pledge and had sex anyway, but that they denied they’d made it. Eighty. Two. Percent.
This is where fundamentalism finds its dead end. You can accept that the bible is literally true or you can accept the natural world as it really is but you can’t accept them both. Fundamentalism won’t have it. The simple, stark, finger of God writing it on the wall truth is this: fundamentalism corrupts its followers. It has to. When confronted by a fact, the honest thing to do, the moral thing, is knowledge it. But fundamentalism demands that you deny any fact that contradicts its own truths. What it instills in a person isn’t either a love or fear of god, but a casual acceptance of deception, first as a religious duty, then as a necessary part of every day life. See it in Alan Bonsell testifying under oath that he did not know where the money had been raised to donate sixty copies of Of Pandas and People to his school’s library. See it in the Proposition 8 advertisements that claimed same sex marriage would result in the forcing of churches to marry homosexuals. See it in the eighty-two percent of teenagers in that study who denied they’d ever taken a virginity pledge. Their religion didn’t change their sexual behavior. It didn’t make them more moral. It made them less likely to use condoms, more likely to catch and spread VD, more likely to get each other pregnant, and more willing to lie. What their religion did for them in short, was take away their brakes.
I keep getting hits on This Post, via search strings like "sexy guys" "sexy guys underwear" and so forth. And from the most interesting places too…like Ogden, Utah and Dubai, Dubayy and Islamabad, Pakistan, where they’re only a little more sexually repressed then in Utah. No, I am not kidding about the hits from the middle east. I get an amazing amount of search engine hits on gay topics from that little sex hostile part of the world, and lately that post in particular. Oh…and the American bible belt of course. And…Utah.
Let’s face it…this poor world is hungry for images of sexy guys wearing little to next to nothing at all. And I’m here to help. Time for another drawing lesson. Bring your drawing pads and sharpened pencils here tomorrow. It’s easy. It’s fun. You could be excommunicated from the Mormon church!
The Side Of The Comic Book Rack I Always Stayed Away From…
…had a lot of these in it…
When I was a kid, I just couldn’t imagine how even girls liked these. Although I never actually saw any browsing that side of the comic book racks anyway. Maybe they were too embarrassed to be seen looking at these. Or maybe they just waited for the boys to leave first, before approaching them. I can imagine the snickers coming from the boys side of the rack were a girl to wander over and pick one up…
But there must have been a market for these, because the comic book publishers kept grinding them out. Some of the most famous names in comic book…er…excuse me…Graphic Novel history did these. Here’s one by Jack Kirby…
At the age I was buying a lot of comics, I could barely stand to look at these. They just completely creeped me out. That whole icky love stuff just totally mystified me. Who cares? I used to fidget in my seat at the movies whenever the love interest parts of the story were going on. I’d be sitting there thinking to myself, Ah Jeeze…come on, come on, let’s get on with it…
Had I bothered to sneak a look inside one of these, I might have found something like this inside…
…which would have just confirmed my suspicions for me. All that love stuff was for the birds. Who cares? Leave me out…please.
I just couldn’t fathom it. As I said…those things really creeped me out. Why would anyone…even a girl…bother with crap like that. Especially when you could buy a really neat comic like…oh…this one…
Or…this one…
Man…I couldn’t get enough of that when I was a kid. For some strange reason. Even though the stories were usually pretty lousy.
They say girls mature a tad sooner then boys in the romance department, and maybe that’s true to a degree. Also, I was a bit of a late bloomer. But there was a section missing from the comic book racks back then too, and had it been there, maybe I could have grown up understanding all that gooey, icky love stuff a little bit better. Maybe by the time my hormones really started to percolate, I wouldn’t have been so fumbly, clumsy and deathly shy.
I grew up in a world where homosexuals were twisted monsters who lurked behind schools waiting to pounce on kids my age. The messages we all got back then to beware of strange men fell on the ears of gay kids too…and looking back on it, I can clearly recall flinching away whenever my thoughts began to stray toward how…attractive…some of the characters in my comic books were. I didn’t want to be a monster. I didn’t want to be sick. So I just kind-of let my eyes wander over whatever it was something deep down inside of me had jerked them towards…
…and then wander away again without thinking about it too closely.
What I really needed in my young teenage life was something that spoke to me. Well…what I really needed was to grow up in a time when adults were willing to talk to teenagers honestly and rationally about sex and sexuality. The girls weren’t getting any of that either back then really.
Even so…as horrible as it was back then, to even contemplate being homosexual, had I seen something like this on the comic book racks, I would have snatched one up instantly…
I don’t know if I could have worked up the courage to actually take it to the cashier or not…but I’d have gotten it out of the store one way or the other…
Well…of course there would have been no “explicit content” allowed. But just the idea that boys could fall in love with other boys, and that it was okay, and that you weren’t a monster if you felt sexually attracted to one, would have made so much of a difference in my life later on… So very, very much of a difference…
Romance. Maybe it wasn’t so icky after all…
…maybe I could find one of my own someday…
Every time I buy one of these now…and I have several bookshelves full of them…I have to laugh at how contemptuous I felt toward those girl’s romance comics way back when. Yes…they were horribly sexist. But at least love always won in the end in those things. It was something you could hope for, for yourself too. Here’s a portion of the back cover of Constellations In My Palm…
What would you do if you lost the best thing that happened to you because of your own pride and selfishness? What would you do if you lost the best thing that happened to you because you were taught to be afraid of it? What would you do if you lost the best thing that happened to you because you were never taught how to reach for it like the other kids were? What would you do if you had another chance and lost it again? And again? And again? What would you do if you spent your whole life trying to get beyond that fear and confusion they put into you when you were a kid, and you couldn’t?
My generation, and the one just before us, the pre Stonewall generation, began this movement to break down those barriers of self loathing, fear and confusion, and reclaim our human right to love and be loved. And this is our great victory: that gay teens no longer have to live in a world where all they ever hear about themselves is that they are sick, broken, twisted, monsters. They can grow up now, believing that they are fully human too. They can grow up now, believing in the promise of love too.
It was, and still regretfully is, a hard and bitter fight. But every day now, more and more of us are finding our way to the promise land. Even, thankfully, some of us older gay folk too. Some of us will only stand on the hillside just beyond, never to find our way in after all, stricken by how much more beautiful it really was, how much more beautiful then we could have ever imagined, back when we first started fighting to win it back. But we can take heart in this, and carry on: so no kid will ever have to grow up in a world that tells them they will never find love, never be loved, because they are gay.
When I moved to the South, I thought I lost an important tool: my gaydar. I routinely met men I believed were gay, only to discover they either only dated women or were married to them.
I mourned the loss of my sixth sense, but then a co-worker clued me in: Blanca, if you think they are gay, it’s likely because they Are.
Obviously this isn’t always true, but I’ve since learned that some of the couplings I questioned were indeed what I suspected.
As we all know, Atlanta has an expansive, vibrant and seemingly supportive gay community, but some men (and women) instead choose a traditional partnership with someone of the opposite sex. In some cases, their spouse knows, while in others it can either be a lifelong secret or a Jerry Springer episode…
In the case of people who go into these gay-straight marriages knowing what they’re doing, as opposed to being in denial about their sexual orientation, I’m willing to bet that it’s mostly a generational thing, with more older gay folk doing this then younger, and that it’s also mostly a bible-belt thing.
As I said in a previous post, I’ve had this track record in my dating life of falling for guys who later claimed to be completely, perfectly, absolutely heterosexual. Yet my shyness when it comes to dating nearly immobilizes me, and I am not one of those who likes to hit on straight guys by any means. And yes, there are gay guys like that. Think of it as the gay male version of a straight guy who thinks lesbians are hot. I am not anything like that guy. I need someone who is on the same page as me. Very much so. And between that and my shyness I have never, Never approached any guy who wasn’t pinging my gaydar pretty solidly…or so I thought at the time.
Yet I seemed to keep making the same mistake over and over again. So over the years I came to think that the problem is I have lousy gaydar. I began making jokes about how bad my it is. But now I look back over the course of my adult life and I realize that I have spent most of the waking hours in a week in the workplace with tons of heterosexuals. And when I look at how those heterosexuals relate to each other, verses the ersatz straight guys in my life, I have to wonder. Anyone who thinks that gay people, gay men in particular, are way more preoccupied with sex then heterosexuals are, is living in Fantasyland. The subtext between them is always there, just as it is between gay guys or lesbians…
Harry Burns: You realize of course that we could never be friends. Sally Albright: Why not? Harry Burns: What I’m saying is – and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form – is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way. Sally Albright: That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved. Harry Burns: No you don’t. Sally Albright: Yes I do. Harry Burns: No you don’t. Sally Albright: Yes I do. Harry Burns: You only think you do. Sally Albright: You say I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge? Harry Burns: No, what I’m saying is they all WANT to have sex with you. Sally Albright: They do not. Harry Burns: Do too. Sally Albright: They do not. Harry Burns: Do too. Sally Albright: How do you know? Harry Burns: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her. Sally Albright: So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive? Harry Burns: No. You pretty much want to nail ’em too. Sally Albright: What if THEY don’t want to have sex with YOU? Harry Burns: Doesn’t matter because the sex thing is already out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story. Sally Albright: Well, I guess we’re not going to be friends then. Harry Burns: I guess not. Sally Albright: That’s too bad. You were the only person I knew in New York.
–When Harry Met Sally
And it’s exactly that subtext, which I see all the time when I’m in a mixed company of straight men and women, that I just never pick up on in certain other contexts. Just as there is a difference between acting gay and being gay…
…there is a difference between acting and being straight.
Was I really mistaken about the sexual orientation of those guys I tried to date once upon a time? Or was it the nobility I thought I saw within them that I was mistaken about?
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