Assembling materials for my posting on Jack Adams underwear for men took me further into the world of homowear, premium men’s underwear brands (pricey, emphasizing athleticism and stylishness, plus comfort and sexiness, and also homoerotically tinged) and the world of the male underwear models who are used by these brands — both crowded and competitive fields these days. And there I came across this David Wagner photo of model José Parra displaying his muscular body and offering his crotch (and one armpit) in a wrestling singlet (aka wrestler) from N2N:

(#1)

I’ll be posting a few more photos of Joey Parra (as he is also known), mostly doing enthusiastic cock-tease performances, and also information about some of the homowear brands he’s worked for, starting with N2N.

Wrestling singlets. Strictly speaking, #1 is not a cock-tease performance, since this wrestling singlet is cut super low by design, so that anyone wearing it will be displaying pubic hair. The garment is not a piece of athletic gear at all; it’s a piece of homowear. Note the stylish fabric and the pouch enhancement.

Here’s a genuine athletic singlet, from a wrestling supplies firm:

(#2)

It has a U neck, like many athletic shirts, but it’s not scooped low.

An intermediate case, from the style-conscious firm Pistol Pete:

(#3)

This has a scoop neck, designed to show off the wearer’s manly chest, and it’s stylish, but it has no pouch enhancement, and it could in principle be worn on a wrestling mat (especially if your team’s colors are gold and black).

Homowear singlets are scooped way low, below the navel, to display the whole torso; they are pouch-enhancing; they’re likely to be made of sexy materials (faux leather, shiny fabrics, camo fabric, fabrics in intense colors); and sometimes they have open rears, offering the wearer’s butt as well as his crotch (the singlet in #1 does not). They are for fun and display, not athletic competition.

Of course, the attraction of a wrestling singlet, even one not homo-enhanced, is the combination of the high masculinity of  sports and the high homoeroticism of two sweaty, minimally clad men in prolonged close physical contact with one another.

The N2N brand. From the Underwear Expert site:

Designed to offer a flattering fit, N2N Bodywear offers a wide selection of men’s underwear, swimwear, active wear and loungewear specifically for gay male consumers or adventurous metro-sexuals. Founded in Los Angeles in 1997 by fashion designer, Andrew MacKay, N2N (short for “Next to Nothing”) offers an apparel line that embraces the male physique and provides customers with a number of options. N2N Bodywear’s mission is to provide the most comfortable, quality apparel to make any man feel masculine, sexy and confident.

The N2N Underwear line offers a variety of styles such as revealing G-strings or jockstraps as well as trunks or long johns that hug the body. The brand utilizes natural and synthetic fibers such as cotton, polyester and spandex to achieve a lightweight, smooth feel. The brand provides a variety of selections with different colors and prints. For a flattering contour enhancing silhouette, N2N offers its own nHANCE pouch, which lifts and supports your package. N2N Mens Underwear also provides a sensual touch with several ranges featuring see-through fabrics.

N2N underwear is in the premium range (mostly $20-$30 apiece), but they also offer some specialty items, especially in the Erotic category, where you can find

(1) The C-Strap (for cock strap), essentially a nylon/spandex cock ring, which N2N bills as a “bulge booster” and “ball lifter”. In various kicky colors, at $14 apiece.

(#4)

(2) The N2N Suede Harness, which goes for $40:

(#5)

(3) And another homowear wrestling singlet, The Liquid Skin Wrestler, which sells for $44:

(#6)

On José “Joey” Parra. He’s now in his late 20s. Lives in Montebello CA (in L.A. County, east of downtown L.A.). His entry on the Model Mayhem site says he doesn’t do nude shots… but he’s clearly an adventurous fellow. From a 12/13/13 feature in Next Magazine, “Colby Melvin, Brent Corrigan and [José Parra] model the smallest men’s underwear you’ve ever seen [NSFW]”:

Looking for a stocking stuffer that won’t take up too much space? PetitQ has taken revealing underwear to a whole new level with their latest line of incredibly skimpy products. (Seriously, you could use some of these to floss.) [with a link to an entertaining video; a screen shot from the video]

(#7)

Joey’s big break was modeling for Andrew Christian. Here he is, younger and tamer than above (but still intense), modeling an AC jockstrap:

(#8)

On the Andrew Christian brand. From the Underwear Expert:

Based in Los Angeles, California, Andrew Christian underwear was founded in 1997. Led by the brand’s namesake creative director, Andrew Christian, the brand is best known for its devoted fan base, viral video campaigns, innovative pouches and designs and, of course, the ever popular Andrew Christian models.

The brand is perhaps most well known for its anatomically correct Almost Naked range of men’s underwear. The range features a hang-free pouch designed to enhance the profile of the package and maximize comfort.

AC on this blog:

“Male vanity” of 3/30/11: the AC Shock Jock Flirt Brief (with “a soft hidden cup, sculpted into a penis shape”)

“For Stonewall Day” of 6/28/12: including “a puppy pile of Andrew Christian football boyz”

“Color and advertising your preference” of 2/27/15: ad copy for AC; photos of the CoolFlex Retro Brief Jock and the C-Ring Brief Jock (brief jock = jock brief, brief in front, jock in the rear)

David Wagner and Rufskin. In Joey’s next big career move, he hooked up with L.A. male photographer David Wagner for work with Rufskin garments (underwear and jeans), both for ads and for cock-tease play. In all of these shots, the man is sexily intense. I find these shots really hot and at the same time really funny.

Two underwear cock-teases, with Joey using both hands to pull his skivvies down to show some pubes and suggest that he might be willing to go all the way for you:

(#9)

(#10)

And then a nice sequence, with the ad first (with both armpits displayed), followed by a one-handed cock-tease pants-lowering (the other hand in use for an armpit display):

(#11)

(#12)

In the jeans cock-teases, Joey has undone his fly and pushed his jeans down to expose his pubes and (usually) also his cockroot, leaving both his hands free to do whatever he wants with them:

(#13)

(#14)

In the underwear cock-teases, Joey is naked except for the underwear, so all the muscles on the front of his body are on display. In these two jeans cock-teases he’s exposing some of this musculature, by opening his shirt in #13, by shirt-lifting in #14.

The Underwear Expert (in January 2013) on the Wagner / Parra / Rufskin shoot:

David Wagner recently photographed this series of Jose Parra Rufskin photos. Parra pulls Rufskin off like a champ – the 25 year old model really isn’t shy in front of the camera and is more than willing to give us a peek at what’s going on underneath in these Rufskin photos. We see Parra in briefs, boxer briefs, button-fly jeans and even a bow tie. The tan and muscular model reminds us just how seductive and sensual the California based apparel brand can be.

(As far as I can tell, WagnerLA has appeared on this blog only once before, in yesterday’s posting on Jack Adams underwear — with cock-tease shots of model John Strand.)

The Rufskin brand. A San Diego firm founded by Hubert Pouches and Douglas Coats. From its website:

Rufskin began with a desire to fill a void in men’s fashion, starting with the ethos of our brand: a well-cut, sexy men’s jean. The business grew from its original artisan denim line, created from a garage in San Diego, to a global menswear company encompassing swimwear, underwear and athletic wear. It is built on the foundation of being at once vintage, sexy, masculine, athletic, futuristic and above all, well crafted.

“About Rufskin: Ruf but Smooth” by Darren Styles, who interviewed the founders:

Coats: “Hubert and I met in Paris back in the ’90s, where he ran a modeling agency and I was one of the models. He’d previously worked for a couple of fashion labels there, Bernard Perris and Courreges, and after a decade together we decided to become business partners, too”

… The kick-start for Rufskin was the founders’ realisation that there was a gap in the men’s denim market, where men were going into women’s stores to find jeans with a fitted, sexier cut – as styles elsewhere had morphed into something altogether more workmanlike. “So we started with low-rise jeans with unique styling and made that our signature,” recalls Pouches.

… some of the Rufskin output has a reputation for being somewhat risqué

Rufskin came up in this blog in a 7/1/10 posting with the poem “Golden State Rufskin Tit”, based in part on a Rufskin ad — one that features, among other things, yet another homowear wrestling singlet.

It started with a postcard from my friend Max:

(#1)

The card said this was a photo of model Nathan Black, from Body Image Productions. That led me to the company’s website (not especially easy to negotiate) and eventually to the information that #1 was from a photo spread in Men magazine (formerly Advocate Men) by male photographer Ron Lloyd — a magazine that was one of a number of publications that supplied high-quality erotic photography (featuring lots of full-frontal nudity) appealing primarily to to gay men (who used it as jack-off fuel) but also to straight women. The models have attractive (and carefully developed) bodies — they are muscle hunks — which they, in effect, sell: they are professional muscle hunks.

Body Image Productions has an even narrower focus: its wares are aimed specifically and unapologetically at gay men, and they are intended as well “for the physique connoisseur”.

The company sells books and calendars of erotic male photography, and now DVDs in which Lloyd’s hunky models do a specialized form of gay porn: solo performances, with a man jacking off for an audience. (Some guys who do solo-only are in fact straight, but they love to display their bodies and usually revel in the attention they get from gay men.)

Still photography calls for some acting ability, some talent for projecting a persona; Nathan Black was really good at this. (If you decide to look at his Men spread, you should know ahead of time that Black has some scarring on his (otherwise very attractive) penis that shows as a white strip — an imperfection that Black, admirably, just ignores in his performance for the camera.) But videos call for more serious acting abilities, and not all professional muscle hunks have them. In a while I’ll post more about one who’s really wonderful doing solo work, the regrettably named Braun Drek (I’ll post about the name, too).

Now, Ron Lloyd. From his book publisher in an amazon.com writeup:

Ron Lloyd, the man behind Body Image Productions, started his career as a professional photographer in the early 80’s. As a young man he developed a passion for the beauty of pronounced forms through looking a bodybuilding magazines.

Now he supplies these images for other aficionados.

From the Body Image Production site on Lloyd’s most recent Legend Men photo book (reproduced here exactly as on the site):

Photographer Ron Lloyd has one of the best jobs of this planet without doubt: He’s looking for muscular, incredibly good looking hunks and makes them strip off their clothes in front of his camera … all their clothes. With a naughty grin on their face these dream-made-flesh guys present their bodies, which are immaculate from top to bottom. Horny hunks such as Zeb Atlas and Von Legend are popular among gay men worldwide — and in Lloyds third photo book LEGEND MEN they offer us a look that really deserves to be called “legendary”.

(#2)

Model Von Legend aka Matt Davis on the cover

(If a Lloyd model has any clothes on at all, he’s about to strip them off.)

And Lloyd’s recent book Built!, with Zeb Atlas on the cover:

(#3)

(No, Zeb Atlas doesn’t have a small head; it’s entirely normal in size, but he has an absolutely gigantic upper body. He has a big dick, but in photos it often looks small, by comparison to his musculature. However, if you actually dealt with it, as guys do in the hard-core porn Atlas performs in, you’d realize that it was really big.)

Now from the company’s calendar days — it no longer seems to produce them — two examples: Naked Straight Men, with Max Wheeler on the cover; and Naked Hairy Jocks, with Braun Drek on the cover:

(#4)

(#5)

Now we’re in video and DVD days. Here’s the cover of the Legend Men DVD, with Braun Drek again:

(#6)

Pornhub has a big pile of Drek solo videos. I’m not generally a fan of solo performances, but these are really good. He has a handsome face, a great smile, and a long dick, and he loves to display himself. He puts on a fine show.

Digression on the name. I haven’t yet found an audio in which Braun Drek pronounces his stage name, or even one in which someone else does, but I’m pretty sure his first name is not /brawn/ (like brown), as it would be if taken directly from the German family name, but instead /brɔn/ (like brawn), as in Carol Mosely Braun and the bodybuilder P.J. Braun. That would be an auspicious first name for a professional muscle hunk

But Drek is harder to cope with. It would, alas, seem to be dreck /drɛk/. From NOAD2:

rubbish; trash: this so-called art is pure dreck. ORIGIN early 20th cent.: from Yiddish drek ‘filth, dregs,’ from a Germanic base shared by Old English threax; probably related to Greek skōr ‘dung’

Dreck is often glossed as crap (both as ‘rubbish, junk; nonsense’ and as ‘excrement’) or even shit (again, two sense ranges).

Maybe someone thought of Drek as powerful name, like Shrek (the ogre), suggestive of German Schreck ‘terror, shock, fear’, or Dred, suggestive of dread (note pornstar Dred Scott); or as suggestive of Derek / Derik (derrick, a construction machine with masculine associations) and Drake ‘male duck’. But it sure does sound like dreck. And if you know a bit of Yiddish, Braun Drek reads as ‘brown shit’.

The muscle hunk continuum. Ron Lloyd’s models are far out on the continuum of muscle hunks, a continuum that ranges from well-muscled very fit men (like most underwear models and many actors given to shirtlessness) to the Truly Huge, like the “massively muscled bodybuilder type” Billy Herrington (the pornstar) and, even more, competitive bodybuilders like Flex Wheeler, with high muscular definition and very low bodyfat. Both Herrington and Wheeler were treated in a December 7th posting of mine.

At the high end, we have men who are extremely ripped: not only massively muscled, but also with bodyfat low enough to produce very prominent veining. Note the comment in the earlier posting about the veining, and also the comment about men at the high end of the continuum as victims of “testosterone poisoning”. Both comments were from gay men; some gay men celebrate, even fetishize, men at the high end of the continuum, but many are turned off by them.

The economy of professional body-workers. Professional body-workers are those who exploit their bodies to earn a living. The category covers the professional muscle hunks I’ve been talking about, men who use their bodies to earn model fees for work for photographers, but it includes much more: male models in general, especially underwear models; male strip-tease performers, like the Chippendales dancers and Channing Tatum and other actors in the Magic Mike movies, all of whom do “male erotic dance shows”, and men performing solo at parties; other men paid to dance for audiences (doing pole-dancing for tips, for example); men who do solo porn; and men who are straightforwardly sexworkers of one sort or another — doing hard-core porn, doing live sex shows, and men working as rentboys, escorts providing sex, and sexual masseurs. It’s very common for men who serve in one of these occupations to take on work in another, or of course other work outside of body-work. (Gay porn actors may also work as models, dancers, or escorts, and many have more ordinary jobs.) And of course men whose main source of income is something other that body-work (notably professional athletes and actors) may do some body-work as a sideline.

Very few men who get modeling fees can come close to living on them; they need other work. Male photographers (like Ron Lloyd and others I’ve talked about) can get closer to living on the fees they get from selling their photographs of men, but almost all of them do other sorts of photography (say, fashion photography, portraiture, journalistic photography, or “art photography”) and some do other kinds of artwork as well. But, still, they have to piece together a living, and many have resorted to operating as their own distributors, in the belief that the real money comes from selling the products (books, DVDs, and videos-on-demand (VODs), in particular) to the public.

This is what Ron Lloyd has done with the videos he makes. In addition to Body Image Productions, there is a separate legendmen.com site, with spreads on all of the models he’s used, which serve as a come-on to a subscription service for VODs.

Two male-hunk calenders, one with an image for the Christmas season. Mr. December from the Meet the Bern calender, supporting Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders:

(#1)

And the cover image from the Calendrier des Pompiers calender, with homoerotic male photography celebrating French firemen:

  (#2)

(Hat tip to several Facebook friends for #1, to Kim Darnell for #2.)

Bern. The Sanders calendar (note: not an official product of the Sanders campaign) has attractive men in little or no clothing, most having bits of language play (including double entendres) supporting Bernie. From BuzzFeed:

Twelve months of dudes wearing not much more than a Sanders sticker — sometimes even less than that — plus a centerfold.

#1 above has a minimally clothed underwear model putting a Bernie doll at the top of his Christmas tree. Here’s Mr. May (the models are of a wide range of physical types) with a jokey caption and a Bern pun:

  (#3)

Les Pompiers. From the Bright Side website, which says:

These firemen from France have released the most stunning 2016 calendar you’ve ever seen

#2 I recognized as the work of male photographer Fred Goudon, who I’ve posted about twice on AZBlogX: “Concealing and revealing: Fred Goudon” of 11/16/10; and “Concealing and revealing: more Fred Goudon” of 11/23/10. In the latter posting I wrote:

Cinq is thoroughly erotic in tone, focused on beautiful, sensuously presented, young men (as are Goudon’s four other books).

(A sixth book, Summer Souvenirs, has now been published.)

Wikipedia on Goudon:

Fred Goudon is a French professional photographer. Originally from Cannes ([in the] south of France), he is now based in Paris.

He started shooting when his father gave him a camera as a gift on his 16th birthday. His work includes shooting of the 2006 issue of Dieux du Stade, (English: Gods of the Stadium) calendar and DVD, featuring nude and semi-nude photographs of members of Stade Français, a Paris-based domestic French rugby team as well as at times players from other rugby union clubs and athletes from other sports. He was invited again to shoot both the 2014 calendar issue and the 2015 issue of the series. He publishes some of his work in books through Bruno Gmunder publishers.

Two covers of the Dieux calendars, for 2014 and 2015:

  (#4)

  (#5)

And one more shot from the fireman calendar, a voluptous nude shot (but with the man’s penis concealed):

  (#6)

Intensely masculine men. And then Goudon does underwear photography as well, for a number of companies. A fabulous video spread of this work can be viewed on YouTube here, set to the song “Let Me Be Your Underwear” by Club 69.

From Chris Ambidge a little while back, this arresting piece of sculpture in the form of a human body — a collaboration between model and photographer to yield an image that looks like something made of a silvery metal. In a pose that reminded Chris of photos I’ve posted of male ballet dancers executing movements that make them appear to be flying in mid-air; but this man is posing supported:

An extraordinary, almost hyper-real body in a remarkable pose.

Chris found this on the net, on a site that identified neither the model nor the photographer, though both deserve credit (and praise). So I went to the Google images site in the hope of finding at least one of these pieces of information.

And found that the image had been passed around from one image-aggregation site to another, with never an attribution.

Some people who posted the image thought the model was a bodybuilder, and some thought he was a practitioner of yoga (and a tribute to the vegetarian way of living), and a few lovers of beards were engaged by his scruffy face, but no one seems to have wondered who he was or what the photographer was after in the image.

The menswear guy, especially coats and footwear (shoes, boots, even Varvatos Converse sneakers — high end sneakers, at $100 to $140 each), though now he’s branched out in other directions: men’s fragrances and recordings, in particular. You can view a short commercial for the John Varvatos Fall 2015 Menswear Collection here. It’s a pas de deux between two beautiful fashion models (beautiful in two different ways), Nick Rea and Jonas Kesseler, left and right in this still at the end of the ad:

(#1)

The ad focuses on their coats and, in frequent shots, their boots. And it has a haunting sound track, “Old Bones”, performed by Tyler Bryant and the Shakedown (on, yes, John Varvatos Records).

Here’s Rea looking seductively beautiful in a spread of homotography by Giovanni Squatriti in Essential Homme magazine (September/October 2011):

(#2)

From that same spread, a trio of macho-hunky models, shirtless in their underwear:

(#3)

On to Jonas Kesseler, seen here looking steamy in a John Varvatos fragrance ad:

(#4)

And back to Varvatos himself. From his website:

Ask John Varvatos to pinpoint the moment when his obsession with fashion and music began, and he’ll show you a photo of The Stooges taken in 1970. “It was all hippies before these guys,” says the Detroit native. “They showed up wearing motorcycle jackets, ripped jeans, aviators … nobody looked like them at the time.”

Oh my. And there’s a Michigan connection, Detroit and Ann Arbor; from Wikipedia:

The Stooges, also known as Iggy and the Stooges, are an American proto-punk band from Ann Arbor, Michigan, first active from 1967 to 1974, and later reformed in 2003. Although they sold few records in their original incarnation, and often performed for indifferent or hostile audiences, the Stooges are widely regarded as instrumental in the rise of punk rock, as well as influential to alternative rock, heavy metal and rock music at large.

Here’s a classic Stooges shot, with the guys looking disdainful and provocative (in several senses):

(#4)

You can listen to the Stooges punking out “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (1969) on YouTube here.

Two recent items passed on to me by Mike McKinley: one a photograph of young male dancers at the barre, the other a video compilation of dancer Joseph Gatti in an assortment of his roles. The photograph, found on a Facebook page (where it wasn’t identified in any way: where? when? who are they? who was the photographer?):

(#1)

The Gatti compilation can be viewed here; it has some remarkable stuff.

#1 has three dancers, all young, lean, and muscular, all wearing nothing but their dance belts. The first two are at rest at the barre. The third, with his remarkable buttocks, is, also remarkably, standing en pointe at the barre. It’s a wonderful photograph, of dancers, of male bodies, of faces, of people at work; I might have asked the photographer to shade down the background behind the first two dancers, to make their heads stand out more clearly, but, on the other hand, leaving the shot this way underscores its unposed character.

I appealed to Google Images to find the source, and the program found a huge number of examples of this image: dozens and dozens on various Pinterest pages, large numbers on tumblr pages, but not a single one with any information at all. (One of the Pinterest people thought it was an old-time photo, I don’t know why.)

Now Gatti is young (30), very much a dancer of our times, and easy to find information about. Well, he tweets., so I know something about his career, his gigs, the fortunes of his favorite sports teams, his enthusiasms for some surprising dancers (like Michael Jackson), his friendships, and the excellence of his girlfriend. He sounds like a nice man, and he’s cute:

(#2)

Another compilation, put together from his performances in various competitions and remixed, can be viewed here.

From an Orlando (FL) Sentinel story from a year ago, “After 13 years, Joseph Gatti returns to Orlando Ballet”:

After nearly 13 years, Joseph Gatti is coming home.

From 2001-2003 the dancer was an apprentice with Orlando Ballet, under then-director Fernando Bujones. Just 17 when he departed — he’s now 30.

“It’s the right decision,” Gatti said about returning to live in Central Florida. He’ll perform with Orlando Ballet as principal guest artist during the 2015-16 season and work as an instructor at the school.

“I’ve been through a few companies now, big and medium,” said Gatti, who was a principal dancer with Cincinnati Ballet from 2007-2008, then a principal dancer with Corella Ballet in Spain and most recently a first soloist with Boston Ballet.

“I just don’t feel the need to sacrifice love and happiness for the name of a bigger company,” said Gatti, citing the stress found in big-name troupes. “I’ll be really happy here and loving my career, dancing until the last day I can dance.”

For the past few years, Gatti and his dance partner [not his girlfriend], Adiarys Almeida Santana, have performed freelance gigs with companies worldwide.

(#3)

Gatti in flight in mid-air. And here’s Gatti and Bradley Schlagheck flying together in Polyphonia (choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon to music by György Ligeti), photo by Gene Schiavone, at The Boston Opera House in February 2012:

(#4)

Bonus. In looking for the source of #1, I found lots of other neat stuff, including the amazing young dancer Jorge Barani, trained in Cuba, who can be seen in action here.

(This posting alludes to some male-male sexual practices — given the content of the books, that could scarcely be avoided — but in measured language rather than street talk, in accord with the tones of the books, one deeply sexy but sweet, the other not especially sexy but funny. Use your judgment.)

Arrived together a few days ago, two books of (sort of) male photography, where male photography is photography with a homoerotic slant. Sort of in one case because the book goes way beyond a homoerotic slant to explicit gay porn, sort of in the other case because the book alludes to images of men soliciting sex with other men and has a gay sensibility (manifested in its wry take on things: it’s intended to be funny, and it’s hilarious) but is focused elsewhere, on interior decoration as practiced by (non-professional) men.

The first is a product of the CockyBoys porn studio: Sixty Nine: Joyful Gay Sex (Bruno Gmünder, 2015) by photographers RJ Sebastian & Jake Jaxson. The second is the work of photographer and cultural critic (among other things) Justin Jorgensen: Obscene Interiors: Hardcore Amateur Décor (Baby Tattoo Books, 2004). What unites them is their association with artist and gay pornstar Colby Keller; my 2/2 posting on Keller has a section on Jorgensen and a section on CockyBoys.

Sixty Nine. A big book (13.4 x 10.2 x 0.8 in.) on thick stock, primarily featuring lush photos (in relatively soft focus) celebrating men having joyous, affectionate sex with one another. Anal intercourse — and there’s a huge amount of it in this book — has never looked so good.

(#1)

(That’s a grinning Levi Karter playfully licking a foot.)

Accompanying the photos are seven pieces of romantic short fiction about sexual encounters between men. In order:

We Will Always Have Paris, We Watched Ourselves in the Mirror, Naked in the Woods, The Blue Chair, We Wanted to Love and be Loved, Sex on a Sunday, A Fire Island Love Story

The sex is hot, but suffused by love.

Two photos of Karter (on the left in both) with a taller, rougher-looking  (but still loving) Ricky Roman on Fire Island:

(#2)

(#3)

That’s the good stuff. Then the annoying things: the pages aren’t numbered; hence, there can be no table of contents or index; nowhere that I can see are the author(s) of the short fiction identified; the actors in the photos aren’t identifed either (I can pick out Karter and Roman by their tattoos, and I recognize a few other actors because they are favorites of mine, but that wouldn’t work for most people). At least, the Acknowledgments page at the back of the book lists them all:

Pierre Fitch, Ricky Roman, Levi Karter, Tayte Hanson, Justin Matthews, Rafael Alencar, Max Carter, Levi Michaels, Chris Harder. Jaxon Radoc, Jake Bass, Darius Ferdynand, Gabriel Clark, David Corey, Dillon Rossi, Jasper Robinson, Duncan Black, Seth Santoto

Many of them are young (and impudent) and some of them are twinks, but far from all the guys who perform for the studio are boys or boyish.

Obscene Interiors. (Photos in my Colby Keller posting.)  Jorgensen’s inspired idea was to take photos of men that they distribute to solicit sex with other men (I say this carefully, because many of these men don’t identify as gay or bisexual) and focus not on the way these men pose their bodies but on the way they have decorated the spaces they live in. To this end, he replaced the images of bodies with solid gray outlines.

(Note: in many cases, it’s still possible to figure out how they’re displaying themselves. Some of then are clearly showing off their erect penises, others are offering their buttocks (in quite a range of ways), and some probably have neither of these foci of man-man sex exposed, but are open to negotiation.)

In his introduction, Jorgensen frames his central question:

How do we create a space that communicates our ideals of masculinity while simultaneously storing our possessions and displaying our interests? How do we make that same space appeal to our mates? In other words, how do we decorate? The answer: not very well.

Now, surely a fair number of guys soliciting men for sex identify as gay or bisexual, but there’s no evidence in this book that they have any more taste in decorating than other men. We still get clashing colors, regrettably chosen and placed art, odd accumulations of objects, truly ugly or overly fussy furniture, things bizarrely (or dangerously) placed on the top of other things, and so on.

The fact is that men get virtually no preparation in these matters. They decorate spaces that they have reserved for themselves (a number illustrated in Jorgensen’s book), creating dens and mancaves, with wood panelling, the symbols and materials of hunting, fishing, sports, automobile racing, and/or golf, maybe some gym equipment, and plenty of cool electronics and computer games — plus a workshop where they can make things with their tools. These are high-masculinity spaces, places where masculinity is displayed, but also spaces defined by their exclusion of women and their rejection of femininity.  Otherwise, women do most of the decorating.

And so you get to extreme examples, like the one on p. 32, which Jorgensen describes as

proving masculinity by not even attempting anything that could be considered decorating.

I wonder if it ever happens that two guys hook up on-line, one guy goes to the other guy’s place, takes it in says, “I really want to do you in the worst way, but I can’t possibly have sex in a room that looks like this.” Maybe not; urgent desire could probably override almost any degree of good taste.

Two things that came to my attention over this holiday (Valentine’s and Presidents Day) weekend, both involving same-sex couples: a piece on two men who are a couple (an engaged couple, in fact), Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black, in the February issue (the “love” issue) of OUT magazine; and a review (in the NYT Book Review on the 14th) of a children’s picture book about two hermaphroditic worms in love.

In both cases, the question is how these couples will present themselves and how they will be portrayed in images (photographs or illustrations) — in particular, how they will treat the conventions of coupledom for other-sex pairs, in which the sexes are often sharply distinguished. There are three possibilities: (a) to embrace these conventions; (b) to abandon them, by appearing as equals; and (c) to fragment them, by assigning each partner a mixture of them. Daley & Black present themselves / are presented sometimes via (b), sometimes (c), and the worms go for (c). I’ll get to (a) — which is well represented in male-male couples in gay porn, and sometimes in real life — after some discussion of Daley & Black.

Daley & Black, photographically equal on the cover of OUT:

(#1)

Here they are coded as equals in dress (both playfully in pajamas) and in the positioning of their bodies (neither is above the other or behind the other, but instead they are side-by-side and face-to-face). Black’s hand on Daley’s shoulder might be seen as indicating what I’ve called,  in a recent posting on gay pornstar Kevin Wiles, hands-on ownership (by a more dominant partner of a more subordinate one), but could just follow from the fact that Black is a bit taller than Daley.

In real life, partners are never entirely equal. Daley and Black have equally substantial careers, but Black is significantly older (by 20 years), so that Black has more authority (seen as masculine) while Daley has more sexual desirability (often seen as feminine). From the OUT article, “Dustin Lance Black and Tom Daley fell in love at first smiley” by Aaron Hicklin (photography by Harry Borden):

One was an Olympic diver who loved Nerf guns; the other was an Oscar-winning screenwriter who made great burgers. A chance encounter at a dinner in Los Angeles — and a smiley face — set the scene for a procession of foiled wedding proposals.

Wikipedia on Daley and on Black, very briefly:

Thomas Robert “Tom” Daley (born 21 May 1994) is an English diver and television personality. Daley specialises in the 10 metre platform event and was the 2009 FINA World Champion in the individual event at the age of 15. He started diving at the age of seven and is a member of Plymouth Diving Club.

Dustin Lance Black (born June 10, 1974) is an American screenwriter, director, film and television producer and LGBT rights activist.

Now, one of the photos inside the magazine, another couple shot:

(#2)

A remarkable shot (thanks to Juan Gomez for calling my attention to it).. On the one hand, Black is positioned above Daley (man above woman, as Erving Goffman noted in his remarkable 1979 book Gender Advertisements); Black is wearing a business suit (a sign of a masculine status in society), while Daley is mostly or entirely naked (he’s appearing here in his occupational status as a diver, so he’s probably in a Speedo, but the effect here is to foreground the sexual desirability of his body, as women are presented in advertisements and sometimes in couple photos as well); and Daley is made to look smaller than Black (as women are generally smaller than their male partners). On the other hand, Black is positioned in front of Daley (as women typically are in couple photos; they are displaying themselves for the viewer, while their male partners are displaying social status or authority), and Daley is clasping Black with both hands, indicating serious hands-on ownership. So each of the men is projecting some m characteristics together with some f ones.

Couple photos are made for several purposes — for simple display (in living rooms and the like) and to accompany the rites of coupledom in our society, all with a sexual tinge to them: prom photos (in the U.S.), engagement photos, and wedding photos. Traditional engagement and wedding photos have the woman seated in front of a standing man, with one or both of his hands on her shoulders (he has hands-on ownership and is displaying her as a trophy); and they are differently attired. In a traditional engagement photo, the man is in a business suit, indicating formality and often occupational status, while the woman is in a “good dress”, indicating femininity (and sometimes sexual desirability as well). In a traditional wedding photo, the man is in a tuxedo, indicating formality, while the woman is in a wedding gown, indicating her role in the wedding ceremony (tuxedos are worn for a number of formal occasions, while wedding gowns are worn almost entirely in wedding ceremonies).

This description holds pretty well for the state of things when Goffman wrote his 1979 book (which looks at more things than advertisements), but the world has changed. Engagement photos, in particular, are almost always informal in dress, though they fairly often preserve the positioning and hands-on characteristics of the tradition, as in this example:

(#3)

Wedding photos, on the other hand, generally preserve some version of the traditional attire, with the woman in a wedding gown and the man in some sort of formal or “good business” attire (not necessarily a tuxedo), as here:

(#4)

What’s changed here (at least in the New York Times) is that the wedding couple is usually shown  in some sort of egalitarian positioning, side-by-side or face-to-face.

On to same-sex couples. What I said on this blog in an 8/4/10 posting on “Marriage equality”:

As my grand-daughter put it recently, Jacques and I weren’t allowed to get married — so we racked up a series of domestic partnerships, the last of which (contracted while his mind was still up to it) granted by the city of Palo Alto. On February 14, 1996. Valentine’s Day, and a beautiful day it was (not always a sure thing in these parts in the middle of February). There was a ceremony inside City Hall, then a party, put on by the city, on the plaza outside.

Elizabeth, bearing small wedding-equivalent gifts, came to see her fathers get domestically partnered. A surprising number of the couples were there with their children, so it was very much a family occasion, and most of them had been certified as domestic partners — an almost entirely symbolic status, but a powerful symbol for us nonetheless — several times before, though not in such style.

Later, our friend Robert Emery Smith (aka ModBob), who’s a professional photographer (among other things) came by to take pictures of Jacques and me. His wedding-equivalent present to us. There was some discussion about where J and I would pose (answer: on our front patio, among the cymbidium orchids that were my annual birthday presents to him) and how we would be arranged.

The classic wedding photo has the couple standing or (very often) the bride sitting and the groom standing — in either case, ensuring that the man will be shown standing above the woman. Also, quite often with the groom behind the bride, looking proprietary while she is shown off to the world, sometimes with his hand on her shoulder (to emphasize the gender inequality even further). In any case, the couple are facing the camera, and the world, presenting themselves to an audience.

All three of us just hated the whole business and the gender-relationships baggage that comes with it (we’d read our Goffman, after all).

In the end we took a couple of chairs out there, and sat facing each other [well, sitting side by side, but with our heads turned to face one another]. We’re symbolically equals, and we’re in this for each other, not an audience (though J’s kids, and the rest of his family, were just as pleased by the occasion as my daughter was). (We also decided not to go for formal wear.)

(#5)

In shots from gay porn, couples are represented not in terms of f/m roles, but in terms of the corresponding roles I’ve called b/t. From a 12/19/10 posting on AZBlogX:

An obvious point about the b and t roles: they’re a re-inscription in Gayland [the fantasy word of gay porn] of gender stereotypes (feminine vs. masculine) in the straight world.  All sorts of things then tend to align with each other, among them: differences in physical characteristics like size, muscularity, and strength; differences in dress, hair style, posture and gesture, and speech; asymmetries in social roles, in particular those involving power, authority, assertiveness, and (in)dependence; and of course differences in sexual encounters as to who does what to/for whom, when, and how much.

The b in an encounter is subordinate to a dominant t, who’s in a sense in charge of the encounter; more details in that AZBlogX posting and a 12/19/10 posting on this blog. Although things are more complicated than this, there’s a tendency for b/t to play out as bottom/top in anal intercourse . As I wrote in a posting on Kevin Wiles:

Top and bottom roles [in anal intercourse] are often conveyed in publicity [for gay porn] not only by hands-on ownership but also by the positioning of the men’s bodies, with the top standing above the bottom (and behind the bottom, putting the bottom on display for the viewer) — reproducing the placement of other-sex couples in, for instance, wedding photos: husband over (and behind) wife. A typical portrayal, involving [bottom Kevin Wiles] in the flick Foreplay (Midnight Men, 1986): top over bottom, bottom on display as the trophy of the top’s conquest:

(#6)

Somewhat more subtly, here’s a photo from a 12/13/15 posting on “Boyfriends”, showing pornstar boyfriends Sean Duran (t, left) and Nick Cross (b, right), their difference coded in a variety of ways (note bearded Duran and smooth-faced Cross, for example) and playing out in the positioning of their bodies and hands-on ownership (and sexually Duran is mostly top to Cross as bottom):

(#7)

Worm Loves Worm. Now to Dan Vaccarino’s review in the NYT, in the print version “Will You Be Mine: Four picture books follow the many courses of love, from first meetings to the pain of separation”, where we can see a fragmented presentation of gender roles, as in #2:

Adults lug around a five-piece Samsonite luggage set of love and intimacy issues, but most small children have none, or at the most, a carry-on. They are unencumbered by personal history, commitment issues or self-doubt.

They just love.

Four new valentines disguised as picture books examine age-appropriate love affairs of every stripe: from high-rise-dwelling kids to urban polar bears, from worms to an ink drop and a snowflake.

… Gender roles are imposed on us all. As adults, we mostly accept, rail against, or at least acknowledge them, but as far as the youngest of lovers are concerned, the point is moot. J. J. Austrian and Mike Curato’s “Worm Loves Worm,” [for children 3 to 8] in which two worms of the hermaphroditic variety fall in love, brilliantly explores the idea of love between two beings, regardless of gender (or species) and despite societal pressures.

Curato’s spare but sure silhouetted images and Austrian’s straightforward text are a perfect match to deliver the simple story of two characters who just want to declare their love and commit to each other. With patience and good cheer they accept the various matrimonial trappings offered to them by their well-meaning insect friends, like a wedding party, a cake and rings — even though they have no fingers. The all-embracing spirit of the story is best represented by the worm couple’s lack of regard for traditional wedding garb: Each wears bits and pieces of a tuxedo and a wedding dress during the ceremony.

(#8)

Note that they are both wearing their gold wedding bands.

Note: this posting is about pickles (in the American sense: pickled cucumbers) and uses of the word pickle, especially in proper names; my main theme is that pickles and the word pickle tend to be intrinsically funny, inherently risible. I’ll be citing a whole bunch of uses, but I do not intend this posting to be a complete inventory of uses of the word, so if I don’t mention some example that you know or especially like, please add it in a comment, but don’t do this by accusing me of having failed or neglected to mention your example; that would just be gratuitously insulting.

It started with an entertaining piece by Winnie Hu in the NYT on the 15th: (on-line) “At United Pickle, Preserving the Standards of a Deli Staple”, (in print) “Family-Run Supplier Preserves Standards For a Briny Deli Staple”, beginning:

Not every cucumber has what it takes to be a pickle. As dozens of them tumbled from a steel hopper onto a conveyor belt in a Bronx factory, two workers enforced a strict pickle standard.

Bruised. Broken. Too curvy. Too short. Sorry, no exceptions.

The rejects — about one in 10 — were tossed into plastic bins, destined to become relish.

“You can’t just pickle any produce,” said Stephen Leibowitz, the self-described “chief pickle maven” of this operation, as he reached past the workers to personally pluck out an offending cucumber. “I can put in the best ingredients, and they still won’t turn out right.”

Mr. Leibowitz is the man to see if the pickles at your local deli, diner or burger joint have lost their crunch. Whether kosher dills, sours, half-sours or bread-and-butters, chances are they got their start on the production line at United Pickle, the largest family-owned supplier of pickles and pickled condiments in New York City.

Or as Mr. Leibowitz, 73, ever the pickle pitchman, put it, “If you’re in a pickle, call United Pickle.”

Kosher dill spears in preparation:

(#1)

Later in the piece:

United Pickle is one of the last of what were once scores of pickle companies in New York City that helped elevate a common deli staple into a culinary treat. United Pickle, which traces its roots to the 1890s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is owned by Mr. Leibowitz and Marvin Weishaus, 61, the president of the company. Mr. Leibowitz and Mr. Weishaus, third- and fourth-generation pickle men, merged the traditions and the secret recipes of their families in 1979.

Today, United Pickle makes nearly 50 million pounds of pickles and pickled condiments a year for restaurants, stores and companies as far away as Dubai, Japan and South Korea. About three-quarters of that is produced at its Bronx headquarters, a 25,000-square-foot brick building in the Tremont neighborhood. The company, which has 50 full-time employees, also owns a seasonal processing plant in New Jersey and uses packing plants in California and Ohio.

I love the idea of third- and fourth-generation pickle men.

Brief background on pickles and pickling. Many foodstuffs can be pickled, that is, preserved in brine or vinegar, or both: there’s pickled herring, pickled meat, pickled eggs, pickled cauliflower, pickled peppers, pickled beets, and more, and of course pickled cucumbers (hereafter, just pickles). Pickles are especially common in northern and eastern Europe (roughly, the Germanic and Slavic lands). So we have a homey, everyday foodstuff, with (in the U.S. at least) strong Jewish associations (which opens them for Jewish humor), it’s highly phallic to boot, and it has an -ickle name (like fickle, prickle, trickle, stickle), allied to words in –iggle (giggle, wiggle, etc.) and words in -icker (snicker, knicker, etc.), which means that the word sounds rather silly, even if you don’t think about the referent. All of which makes pickles and their name likely objects of fun.

Earlier postings. I’ll take these up in chronological order.

9/4/06 on Language Log, “Barney Miller and the linguist” (link):

I remembered a guy on “Barney Miller” enraged by pickle ad copy along the lines of “crunch-crunch-crunchalicious”. This might or might not have happened, though the wonderfully fey “ko-ko-kosherific” (note portmanteau of kosher and terrific) pretty clearly did. And the language loony was identified as, oh dear, a LINGUIST.

(A reader found a description of the show: “A linguist vandalizes a billboard to protest improper grammar in advertising”.)

2/4/13: “Annals of phallicity: or are you just happy to see me?” (link): the figure, “Is that an X in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me” (reporting on an erection), with X = gun, pistol, banana, but with other phallic-symbol words attested, including pickle

8/24/13: “Men and their pickles” (link): “never get Freudian with a man holding a pickle” (from a Law & Order episode); on the risibility of pickles (as phallic symbols); on a wonderful Firesign Theatre episode playing around with pickles; stroke one’s pickle ‘masturbate’ [similarly, suck s.o.’s pickle]

8/24/13: “pickles” (link): on the food; on cucumbers and cucumber pickles as phallic symbols; pickle kisser ‘gay man’ (i.e., ‘cocksucker’); tickle my pickle and The Tickled Pickle Massage Parlor (in Amsterdam)

4/1/14: “April 1” (link):

On April 1, 1970 NBC reportedly paid tribute to the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest by broadcasting a segment about a farm where pickles grew on trees. One of the only descriptions of this segment is found in The Pleasures of Deception by Norman Moss:

On April 1st, 1970, on the National Broadcasting Company’s Huntley-Brinkley programme, John Chancellor did an item on that year’s pickle crop, with film of a dill pickle tree. He said he was reporting from the Dimbleby Pickle Farm.

(tangentially related: 12/3/14: “just happy to see me” (link): a Mother Goose and Grimm with the “just happy” figure, in the caption: “No, I’m not just happy to see you, I’m a unicorn.”)

New stuff: pickles and the common noun pickle. In no particular order.

Item 1: On the bon appétit magazine site on 8/30/12, food writer Sam Dean on “Origin of the Phrase “In a Pickle””:

These days, the phrase “in a pickle” has an old-timey ring about it–the last time you heard it, it was probably referring to a baseball player trapped between two bases, and even that’s more commonly called a “rundown” by today’s commentators. But you know what it means: to be stuck in a difficult situation.

Dean runs through the OED on pickle ‘difficult situation’: (a) John Heywood 1562 poem, interpretation unclear; (b) Shakespeare, The Tempest, but “the usage seems to be closer to another common meaning of “pickled”: to be drunk, soused, sloshed, blotto, or whichever preferred term you use for alcoholic inebriation”; (c)  first solid use of in a pickle in current sense from Pepys’ diary on September 26, 1660. Dean goes on:

Apparently it’s a Yank thing to use “pickle” to mean “a pickled cucumber,” and the Brits use “pickle” to refer to what any American hot dog vendor would call “relish”: a sloppy sauce made of chopped-up, pickled vegetables [as in Branston pickle]. With that context in place, “in a pickle” as Pepys used it suddenly makes sense as a pretty direct metaphor. Like the veggies in the relish, if you’re in a pickle, you’re in a state of jumbled disarray.

Item 2: a 10/4/05 Achewood cartoon with “pickles on parade”:

(#2)

The idiom pickles on parade is a coining, possibly by Chris Onstad, or possibly something he picked up from someone else. It looks like a loose combination of in a pickle and rain on s.o.’s parade.

(On rain on s.o.’s parade, from the Oxford Dictionaries site: ‘prevent someone from enjoying an occasion or event; spoil someone’s plans’)

In Urban Dictionary:

pickles on parade
A bad situation to be in. An unfortunate ocurrence.
Ah, I see. Well this IS pickles on parade. For both of us, mind you.
by Mark Blue 9/13/07

(The (unattributed) quotation is from #2.)

Item 3. Literal pickles, literally on parade, in this playful  2/3/13 photographic composition by Peter Dunne “Pickles on Parade”

(#3)

We are pickles, and we’re here to say, pickles have to be eaten in a certain way. (My contribution, not Dunne’s.)

Item 4. “Hammer and Pickle: Jewish Humor in the Soviet Union”, the title of one or more 2015 talks by Sasha Senderoff, Asst. Prof. of Russian Studies and Jewish Studies at Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, reporting on his research on Soviet Jewish humor. A play on hammer and sickle. From NOAD2 on the original:

the symbols of the industrial worker and the peasant used as the emblem of the former Soviet Union and of international communism

Visual play on the emblem:

(#4)

And a more or less literal interpretation, from the S. Weasel site:

(#5)

Item 5. Senderoff’s stuff led me to the  Jewish Humor Central site (jewishhumorcentral.com), which is jam-packed with great stuff, including an interactive video of animated kosher dills. Still from the interactive video:

(#6)

You can watch the video (with an exuberant deli song) here. You’ll need to click on the pickles one by one to get to the song.

New stuff: pickle used in proper names. Again, in no particular order.

Item 1. The tv show Mr. Pickles. From Wikipedia:

Mr. Pickles is an animated television series created by Will Carsola & Dave Stewart for Adult Swim [a deeply X-rated network available for late-night watching only]. The series revolves around the Goodman family, namely their 6-year-old son named Tommy and the family’s border collie, the demonic Mr. Pickles. The series has been picked up for 10 quarter-hour episodes for its first season, which premiered on the network on September 21, 2014 [and was renewed for a second season]

In the small, old-fashioned world of Old Town that is slowly being taken over by the modern world, the Goodman family and their innocent 6-year-old [disabled] son Tommy obtain a border collie named Mr. Pickles. The two spend their days romping around Old Town on classic adventures — while unbeknownst to Tommy and the family (except for Tommy’s grandfather), Mr. Pickles’ secret evil streak drives him to slip away to kill, mutilate and hump his victims.

… The titular character of the series. He is the Goodman family’s pet border collie who loves to eat pickles (hence his name) which Tommy regularly feeds him. He also enjoys mutilating, killing, and humping as well as engaging in sexual debauchery. He possesses demonic powers, which allows him to control local animals to do his bidding. Despite his evil ways, he actually is quite protective of the impressionable young Tommy: protecting him from danger and will often kill those who might mean to do the boy harm (such as murdering a group of pedophiles or turning an unlicensed breast surgeon who gave Tommy breast implants into a multiple-breasted freak).

(Hat tip to Juan Gomez.The show’s logo:

(#7)

And the main cast:

(#8)

Note the 666 on the logo. The cast in #8, left to right: Tommy, Mr. Pickles (who’s forever sexually assaulting Tommy’s mother), the mother (voiced by Brooke Shields), Tommy’s grandfather (the only person to understand Mr. Pickles’ satanic nature), and Tommy’s father.

You can watch the pilot episode here. I warn you that it is not only X-rated and tasteless, but it goes well beyond simple tastelessness, into downright nastiness that I find very hard to take.

Item 2. The Mr. Pickles Sandwich Shops, which I’d been unaware of until yesterday (even though a number of them are located not far from where I live). Nothing extraordinary about the sandwiches, though many of them have interesting names. (I hope that the company is unaware of the tv series. A nasty resonance for the company.)

The individual franchises have websites with tons of photos of overstuffed sandwiches on them, none (so far as I can tell) identified. But here’s a photo of the Daly City location:

(#9)

From the menu on the company’s website, a descri[tion the its eponymous sandwich, The Mr. Pickle:

The Mr. Pickle (695 cal) sandwich is hot: Chicken Breast, Bacon, Avocado, Melted Monterey Jack

What some would call a California chicken sandwich (thanks to the avocado and the Monterey jack). Some other offerings:

Summer Love, Hang Loose, Tom Turkey, Manhattan (hot pastrami and melted Swiss – ok, pastrami, but certainly not kosher), Hot ‘T’, Chicken Ranch (with ranch dressing, but the echo of the Chicken Ranch brothel in Nevada might not be welcome — but maybe the idea was to sound “naughty”), Fast Eddy, Kickin’ Chicken (for the rhyme), Big Easy (chicken salad, Swiss, avocado – how is this New Orleanian?, not much like a po’boy, in any case) , Got Beef (play on the Got Milk? ad campaign, maybe combined with the Where’s the Beef? ad campaign?), Big Jake (allusion to the John Wayne Western movie)

The location map on the company’s website tells me that there are a huge number of franchises in the Bay Area, mostly in the East Bay, plus two on the Central Coast, and one in SoCal.

Item 3. Going back in time, to the Dick Van Dyke Show on tv. From the Wikipedia page on actor Morey Amsterdam’s character:

Maurice “Buddy” Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam) – an energetic and at times sarcastic “human joke machine”, one of the comedy writers. Amsterdam was recommended for the role by Rose Marie as soon as she had signed on to the series. Buddy is constantly making fun of Mel Cooley, the show’s producer, for being bald and dull. His character is loosely based on Mel Brooks, who also wrote for Your Show of Shows. He makes frequent jokes about his marriage to his wife Fiona Conway “Pickles” Sorrell. In several episodes, it is mentioned that Buddy is Jewish. He was identified by his birth name, Moishe Selig, when he had his belated bar mitzvah in “Buddy Sorrell – Man and Boy.” Buddy plays the cello and owns a large German Shepherd named Larry.

So I remember Buddy’s wife Pickles from way back. Don’t know why she was called Pickles — possibly just because it’s a silly name.

Item 4. A Bay Area institution, the Pickle Family Circus. The beginning of the Wikipedia page:

The Pickle Family Circus was a small circus founded in 1974 in San Francisco, California, USA. The circus formed an important part of the renewal of the American circus. They also influenced the creation of Cirque du Soleil in Montreal. Neither circus features animals or use the three-ring layout like the traditional circus.

After working with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Pickle Family Jugglers (founded by Peggy Snider, Larry Pisoni, and Cecil MacKinnon) decided to create the Pickle Family Circus. Their first show was in May 1975, in the gymnasium of John O’Connell School in San Francisco. After they received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1976, they went on their first tour, going to five cities in Northern California. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Circus performed on weekends in the San Francisco Bay area during Spring and Fall, and toured for 3 months in the summer, mostly in towns along Highway 101 in Northern California and Oregon. In these years, the Pickles operated with a business model that every show was a benefit, usually for a local community organization. The local sponsor sold advance tickets (getting a portion of the revenue), did publicity and site preparation, and ran a midway. The Circus returned to the same towns year after year, and these events became an important source of funding for the sponsors.

A poster from days long gone:

(#10)

The name was almost surely chosen for its silliness value.

(About photography/video and the male body, rather than about language.)

It started with a wonderful atmospheric photograph of a gorgeous nude man, sent to me by Mike McKinley, but without a source. The image is #1 in a posting I just did on AZBlogX; although it’s clearly a work of art (by a professional photographer using a professional model), it has a penis in it, so I can’t reproduce it here or on Facebook or Google+.

I gave the image the name “Romantic Haze” (since the model was posed in a blue-purple haze) while I searched for the source. This time Google Images eventually brought me to young Dutch filmmaker and photographer Paul Sixta and his model Marios.

From Sixta’s website, a brief bio:

Paul Sixta (Netherlands, 1979) graduated in 2003 from the Audio-Visual department at St. Joost Breda. Sixta works as a filmmaker and photographer. His films and video-installations were shown on festivals and museums worldwide and won several prizes. Sixta often collaborates with other artists and his work ranges from visual anthropology to performance videos. Sixta’s work deals with sensitive subjects, emphasizes the story telling, and delicately explores relationships.

There’s a generous sampling of his work on his website. There’s a wide range of stuff, including work on couples of all sorts, among them male couples. The studies of men are certainly homoerotic, but they are also character studies. My AZBlogX has three examples, of very different tones; in each, the model’s penis plays a role in the story you might tell about the man in the photo.

Sixta has done other nude studies of Marios, without showing his penis, so I can sample a few of these for you here. First, a shot of Marios’s face:

(#1)

Then a model who is probably Marios but might be another of Sixta’s bearded models (his body seems to be slenderer),  pretty much in full, with his head tilted back, perhaps ecstatically:

(#2)

And then a remarkable pair of mirror-man studies:

(#3)

(#4)

Again, this might be Marios or it might be another of Sixta’s bearded models (he uses a number of them); the model seems to be substantially more muscular and hairier than the Marios in (#1) or in the AZBlogX photo — still, those eyes and that hair!. (Of course, some of these characteristics can be altered by shaving or grooming, and some by manipulating images digitally; note the moustache+beard differences between #3 and #4.)

(Sex in the Greek/Roman mythological world, but it’s man-man sex, sometimes described here in pretty plain terms, so it might not be for everyone.)

On AZBlogX, some images from the Ganymede series on Priapus of Milet’s blog, showing (a version of) the youth Ganymede’s encounter with the God Zeus, told as an elaborate story in photographic images. Very accomplished stuff, also wonderfully erotic.

The Ganymede story (in brief). From Wikipedia:

In Greek mythology, Ganymede … is a divine hero whose homeland was Troy. He was the son of Tros of Dardania, from whose name “Troy” was supposedly derived, and of Callirrhoe. …. In one version of the myth, he is abducted by Zeus, in the form of an eagle, to serve as cup-bearer in Olympus. Homer describes Ganymede as the most beautiful of mortals:

[Ganymedes] was the loveliest born of the race of mortals, and therefore
the gods caught him away to themselves, to be Zeus’ wine-pourer,
for the sake of his beauty, so he might be among the immortals.
— Homer, Iliad, Book XX, lines 233-235.

The myth was a model for the Greek social custom of paiderastía, the socially acceptable erotic relationship between a man and a youth. The Latin form of the name was Catamitus (and also “Ganymedes”), from which the English word “catamite” is derived.

Vocabulary notes: pederasty, pederast, catamite. In the Greek/Roman context, the meaning of pederasty seems pretty clear: the practice involved an adult man in a social and sexual relationship with a pubescent youth, in which (in the ideal case) the youth was protected by the man and tutored by him in the ways of the world and also served him sexually, in particular as the receptive partner in anal intercourse. In the modern world, such a relationship would treated as sexual molestation, by definition exploitative and non-consensual. As a result, pederasty is now a loaded term, with very strongly negative connotations. (In addition, there’s also the fact that pederastic relationships can be sexually more mutual than in the Greek/Roman custom; can center on other sexual practices (frottage, masturbation, fellatio) in addition to or instead of anal intercourse; and can involve many expressions of affection in addition to sexual connection.)

Pederast shares these negative associations, with the added complication that it’s not entirely clear which partner in a pederastic relationship it refers to, though when the roles in such a relationship are sharply defined, it seems to be used most often for the dominant partner (in the Zeus role); there’s no standard term for the submissive partner, though I’m fond of catamite (with its direct association with the Ganymede role); see my 7/2/15 posting “Briefly: a catamitic misreading”, for some discussion of the word.

The Ganymede artist. The Priapus of Milet site doesn’t give us any information about the artist, beyond the fact that he has an e-mail address in the Netherlands and the conclusion we can draw from his body of work, which says that he’s clearly what I’ll call “homoerotically inclined”.

His pseudonym combines a reference to the Greek and Roman phallic fertility god, Priapus in Latin (the Cock God, so to speak), with an allusion to Anatolian Greek antiquity. Wikipedia on Milet:

Miletus (… Ancient Greek: Μί̄λητος Mīlētos; … Latin: Miletus; Turkish: Milet) was an ancient Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia, near the mouth of the Maeander River in ancient Caria. Its ruins are located near the modern village of Balat in Aydın Province, Turkey. Before the Persian invasion in the middle of the 6th century BC, Miletus was considered the greatest and wealthiest of Greek cities.

Priapus’s Ganymede story. Priapus has Ganymede, naked, athletically scaling a sheer cliff to reach the pinnacle, where the eagles fly, and offering himself to be vanquished. And winged Zeus, a black-haired muscle-hunk, takes up the slim, red-haired young man’s offer. Off into the air.

Where Ganymede comes on heavily to Zeus, who seems gratified by rather astonished. Here’s a mid-air kiss, Ganymede in charge:

(#1)

More kissing and hugging, traded blow jobs, and Ganymede fucking Zeus, all up in the air, sky high, sky high. None of this is in the Greco-Roman script for pederastic relationships; instead it’s mutually pleasuring, symmetric sex, culminating in Zeus drilling Ganymede, to the young man’s evident delight. On AZBlogX, #1 and #2,

the mid-air fuck (note Ganymede’s outstretched arms)  and (back on land) another kind of mid-air fuck, the so-called Flying Cowboy (in which Ganymede rides Zeus’s dick while being suspended by him in mid-air)

Whew!

Priapus of Milet goes one step further, building yet another fantasy into the encounter: the fantasy that by taking a man’s semen into your body, you absorb his power, indeed his masculinity, and become a stronger, better man: getting fucked transforms you. In the case of the Ganymede series, transforms quite literally. Ganymede awakes after his coupling with Zeus, fingers a feather from the god’s wings — and is himself transformed into a winged man, a flying angel [photo #3 on AZBlogX]

Ganymede in art. As a steamy bit of mythology, Ganymede / Zeus has been a durable theme in art for two millennia or so. In Roman times, the pairing was a common subject for dirty pictures (well, drawings), and in later years, along with other mythological and Biblical subjects, the abduction was painted or drawn by any number of artists. Virtually always, as far as I can tell, framed as the forcible rape of Ganymede by a Zeus overwhelmed by the youth’s astonishing beauty.

But then Zeus is famously a serial rapist, given to forcing himself on anyone who catches his eye. In Ganymede’s case (on one popular account), Zeus went on the elevate the young man to godhood, so that he could provide his excellent services (as cup-bearer and wine-pourer, of course) to all the pantheon for all time.

More recently, Ganymede / Zeus has become a popular subject for homoerotically inclined artists, who have taken any number of approaches to it. Pierre et Gilles, of course, in their Ganymède (2001) — Ganymede (on the ground) mesmerized by the eagle just before it descends on him from the sky — which you can view as #7 in an AZBlogX posting of 1/20/13.

Then Zeus and Ganymede, enamel on vinyl by Rick Herold (born 1941), with a porn-delicious Ganymede (in mid-air) in the embrace of a highly stylized eagle:

(#2)

And finally a deliberately provocative Zeus and Ganymede by Australian photographic artist Aaron David Holloway (born 1981), from his “Lovers of Antiquity” series, found on a Saatchi Art site:

(#3)

Daddy Zeus and Boy Ganymede (looking like a jailbait twink while offering his, um, cup to Daddy, no wings).

(There’s a lot more.)

(Only a bit about language, and given the topic, not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The subject of the 2009 book:

Escort: 40 Profiles with Photographs of Men Who Sell Sex (text by David Leddick and Heriberto Sanchez, photographs by David Vance)

(#1)

(cover model: Stefan Pinto)

Leddick has a significant career writing about male nudes and male photography, and Vance is a well-known male photographer (though almost always modest in his work, concealing genitals in one way or another, as in the cover photo).

Background X-rated material from AZBlogX, in a posting yesterday on “Guys for hire”, about the Escort book: models Tony Serrano (#1) and Sloan Christian (#2) in full-frontal shots, model Chris (broadly smiling in #3 and #4) in a clothed/unclothed pairing (a common visual scheme in male photography). (Note: all the models are referred to by the pseudonyms they use in their sex work.)

From the book: a variant of the clothed/unclothed pairing, model A. Gabriel (or just A.G.), Israeli-born, now doing sex work in South Florida, broadly smiling, first in (some of his) business clothes (he has a parallel career as an accountant), but featuring a jock strap and athletic socks, and on a bed, paired with him doing a cock tease pose in army camo (he actually served in the Israeli army, and says he hustled while on duty):

(#2)

(#3)

Backgound about existing Pages on this blog: one on postings about concealing and revealing, covering both photographers’ preferences for one presentation of male bodies over the other and also clothed/unclothed pairings; and one on postings about  male prostitution.

Background about Leddick, from his own website (note the source):

[Born 1930 in Detroit MI, now living in Miami Beach,] David Leddick is known world-wide for his novels and homoerotic art books. The author of the Lambda Award-winning books: “Naked Men” and “The Male Nude”, David Leddick has published no less than 27 works [including gay novels]. His latest book is “I’m Not for Everyone. Neither Are You”, from Black Irish Press, Spring 2014.

Leddick has also written musicals with Andrew Sargent as composer: “The Secrets of the Chorus”, “Quentin and I’, “Presenting Gilda Lilly” and “RentBoy… The Musical”, are some of the shows in which he starred.

Previously he has been an officer in the U.S. Navy, danced at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, directed TV commercials and was the Worldwide Creative Director for Revlon at Grey Advertising and International Creative Director for L’Oreal at McCann-Erickson, Paris.

Leddick’s current presentation of self seems to be as an outrageous old queen, a role he performs beautifully. A recent book: Gorgeous Gallery: The Best in Gay Erotic Art (2012):

(#4)

(a young man in awe of David’s dick)

Background on Heriberto Sanchez, a young man originally from San Juan PR, working here on his first photo-journalism project. He begins his introductory essay, “Reflecting on Escorts”, with a really fine bit of anaphora into an anaphoric island:

I’ve never escorted nor hired one.

where the nominal anaphor one conveys ‘an escort’, linking to a noun escort that doesn’t actually occur in the preceding context but instead is evoked by the verb escort ‘work as an escort’ that does occur there. See the “Anaphoric islands” Page on this blog.

Sanchez emphasizes that the book is not intended to glamorize prostitution, but to humanize it — to reveal something about the (very diverse) lives of guys in the business.

Background on David Vance, treated at some length in a 3/25/13 posting on this blog (with a number of examples of his work), which is both male art (with the male body as its focus) and character study (with the nature of the subjects revealed especially by their facial expressions, but also by their carriage, posture, dress, and their surroundings).

And as male art, the work is both an aesthetic enterprise (an appreciation of the male body) and an unashamedly homoerotic one (an invitation to arousal).

As I noted above, in most of Vance’s work, he shears away from showing the model’s genitals, supplying instead head shots, torso shors, butt shots, and the full range of cock-tease poses. But even in the full-frontals that Vance shot for the Escort book, it’s the faces that catch your eye first: the face, then the dick, then everything else. A broadly smiling face, as in #2 and #3 above (A.G.), and #3 and #4 on AZBlogX (Chris); an intense, welcoming gaze-lock as in #1 above (Stefan Pinto) and #1 on AZBlogX (Tony Serrano); or a playfully cocky face as in #2 on AZBlogX (Sloan Christian).

And then there’s Arpad Miklos, a high-end pornstar hunk (and total top) and much sought-after escort who used his right hand to call attention tio his beautiful uncut dick, while offering a gentle soulmate face. Here with the dick cropped so you can focus on his face:

(#5)

The escorts’ life stories are all over the place. Some of the men are jaunty, resilient,  entrepreneurial, happy in their sex work. Others are conflicted, trapped, hiding their dirty secret from family and friends, even desperate. It’s hard not to think that most of the difficulties of being in the life stem from social stigma (some of it internalized) and legal penalties rather than from individual failings or the intrinsic evils of prostitution.

Despite his great success in porn (mostly gay, but also straight) and escorting, Arpad Miklos fell into depression and committed suicide in February 2013, at the age of 45 (alas, old for a pornstar). Because of this, I was hesitant to include Miklos in this posting, despite the attractions of Vance’s photo — but I need to observe that the man had a career as a chemical engineer before he got into porn and escorting, so he wasn’t necessarily confronting a dead end in his life; some individual stories take a sad turn.

(Unicorns are of course phallic symbols. But there’s more here.)

The first Facebook query came from Melinda Shore, who hoped I’d be able to identify the heavily muscled model in this campy purply-pink composition on Imgur:

(#1)

I had no idea, and tracking down any composition on a meme site is almost invariably hopeless, so the best I can do is pass this on to you.

Then came Season Von Hexe, offering up another mystery mani-corn-aganza, this time on a rainbow them:

(#2)

Also taken from life, but this time unposed, at some sort of public event. In this case a Google Images search served me well.

The mani-corn in #2 turns out to have been a big hit at the 2016 Coachella Festival (the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio CA), and this photo has made thr rounds on a great many sites. At least one of them identified the photographer as Frazer Harrison — but Harrison almost never identifies the people he photographs.

In any case, the guy in #2 is quite something to look at, and he sports rainbow (as well as a golden horn) with great aplomb.

Yesterday, I posted, in “Two extravagant mani-corns”, two homoerotic photos of hunky men dressed as unicorns: #1 elaborately posed, #2 an unposed shot taken on the fly at this year’s Coachella Festival. I quickly discovered the photographer for #2, but failed to identify either the photographer or the model in #1. But that’s been remedied, in Facebook by David Preston, in a comment on my posting here by reader R: the photo comes from the studio Exterface (an obvious play on interface), and the model works under the professional name David Morgan. But both my informants noted that the shot in #1, extravagant though it was, was only the tamest in a wild portfolio of photos, three more of which I’ll post here.

It’s not easy to get information about Exterface Studio, but from the material on its site, it would seem to be devoted to intensely homoerotic photography (though, apparently, short of displaying genitals openly). High quality, totally in-your-face work.

A BuzzFeed piece (of 2/19/13 by Saeed Jones) on what I’ll call the Homo Pony spread comes under the headings:

The Sexiest Gay S&M Unicorn Photo Shoot You’ve Ever Seen

There are bronies, and then there are bronies. This unicorn is so NSFW.

(From a 9/20/11 posting: brony is “bro + pony (as in My Little Pony): a grown man who’s a fan of the television show and the toys”.)

Yesterday’s #1, with the meme text there cropped out:

(#1)

This is wonderfully outrageous, but on to harder stuff: Homo Pony with a crystal ball gag, in a photo that also highlights his pink harness and collar, plus the pink armband (on his right arm, signifying that he’s a bottom):

(#2)

Then a blatant crotch display (in pink crotchless pants and a pink jockstrap), holding a riding crop in his teeth:

(#3)

Finally, a cock-tease shot, with a smiling Homo Pony wearing a My Little Pony t-shirt (showing a pony named Ruben):

(#4)

(Mostly about male art, not much about language. Sexy, but far from incendiary.)

It started with a mailing, weeks ago, from this aggregation site that keeps sending me ads (mostly lame) for gay porn (from an assortment of addresses), with this image, which it touted as a hot item I should pay for:

(#1)

This is a cool, and funny (and meant to be funny), piece of male photography showing  a relationship between two hot (and very playful) boyfriends (Mikele on the left here, Leo on the right). Way sexy, but meant as art, not — primarily, anyway — as jack-off material.  It’s part of a big portfolio staged mostly by Leo, material that I hope he will get published in book form. Maybe the aggregation site just gratuitously lifted this shot from the net, maybe they paid Leo for it (though I seriously doubt that), but what it is not is just amateur porn, which is what the (apparently Chinese) aggregation site was trying to sell it as.

Here: more of Leo, and some of the lovers together, a selection from Leo’s portfolio, available via his bahamvt Tumblr site, where @leotakespix says:

Just some nerd living in Rome. THIS IS MY ONLY ACCOUNT Exclusive cuddle buddy of @mikeletakespix. Open to partnerships with brands.

The man needs an agent. Seriously.

Both men are pleasingly muscular — they work out a lot — but Leo is more massive, Mikele leaner. (They also seem to have a huge collection of underwear, jockstraps, and swimsuits.)

Leo is fond of flowers. Here he is in two floral front shots:

(#2)

(#3)

Leo often presents himself from the rear, humped up, sometimes with flowers:

(#4)

There are a fair number of playful shots, life this one of Leo in a pink harness (his comment: “Got no time to be masc i love pink too much.”

(#5)

Cheeky lad.

Now the twoof them together. Making love:

(#6)

(Leo’s comment: “Oh how i love sundays with @mikeletakespix.”)

Mock-wrestling:

(#7)

And presiding over the Barbies that a friend had made in their likenesses:

(#8)

(on actors, writers, and artists, with not much on language)

… and Billy Mumy and Ferenc Molnár and Edith Barakovich. It starts with some tv I watched yesterday: “Long Distance Call”, episode 58 of the American tv series The Twilight Zone (originally aired on 3/31/61), notably featuring Lili Darvas and Billy Mumy:

(#1)

The set-up, from Wikipedia:

A boy named Billy communicates with his father’s mother using a toy telephone that she gave him on his birthday before she died. His parents become concerned when Billy spends all his time having “pretend” phone conversations with his deceased grandmother. He says that she tells him she is lonely and misses him.

The boy (7 when the show was aired), from Wikipedia:

Charles William “Bill” Mumy, Jr. (… born February 1, 1954), is an American actor, musician, pitchman, instrumentalist, voice actor, and a figure in the science-fiction community. He came to prominence in the 1960s as a child actor, when he was credited as Billy Mumy. His most notable role was in the [1965-68] CBS sci-fi television series Lost in Space, where he played Will Robinson, the youngest of three children in the Robinson family.

The actor playing the grandmother was, by the time of the show, very well known in both Europe and the US. She has Wikipedia pages in both German and Hungarian, but not English; from her IMDb mini-bio by “I.S. Mowis”, somewhat edited:

Lili Darvas (pronounced ‘Darvash’) (born 4/10/02 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary), died 7/23/74 in NYC) was a major star first in Budapest, then on the German stage with Max Reinhardt’s theatre company during the 1920’s, touring Europe with plays by Goethe, Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Shaw. She received her education at the Budapest Lyceum and made her acting debut at the age of 20 as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. In 1926, she married the playwright Ferenc Molnár, who wrote several plays for her, including Olympia and Delilah. The following year, she made her Broadway debut as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Darvas, who was of Jewish background, fled Europe after the Austrian Anschluss in 1938, using her Hungarian passport to escape to Switzerland. Later, on the advice of actor Walter Slezak, she hired a tutor to perfect her English language skills. Though she became known for her fine acting range, she never lost her European accent, which limited her to playing women of continental background. In 1944, she became an American citizen and, over the next three decades, had many successes on the New York stage, including a starring role in Waltz of the Toreadors (1958) and as Sigmund Freud’s domineering mother Amalie in The Far Country (1961). She was nominated for a Tony Award in one of her last roles as Best Supporting or Featured Actress in Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs [1970].

On screen, she appeared in the big budget MGM musical Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956). Following her husband’s death in 1952, Lili acted increasingly in radio and early television drama. She is fondly remembered as Billy Mumy’s grandmother in The Twilight Zone … episode “Long Distance Call”.

Here she is as a young woman, in a gauzy voluptuous photograph by Edith Barakovich (more on her below):

(#2)

On to her husband. From Wikipedia:

Ferenc Molnár (birthname Ferenc Neumann; 12 January 1878 – 1 April 1952) was a Hungarian-born dramatist and novelist who adopted American citizenship. Molnár was born in Budapest. He emigrated to the United States to escape persecution of Hungarian Jews during World War II.

As a novelist, Molnár may best be remembered for The Paul Street Boys, the [enormously popular] story of two rival gangs of youths in Budapest. … His most popular plays are Liliom (1909, tr. 1921), later adapted into a musical (Carousel); The Guardsman (1910, tr. 1924), which served as the basis of the film of the same name, which starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (1931); and The Swan (1920, tr. 1922). His 1918 film, The Devil, was adapted three years later for American audiences, starring George Arliss in his first nationally released film. The 1956 film version of The Swan (which had been filmed twice before) was Grace Kelly’s penultimate film …

Two of Molnár’s plays have been adapted for other media: The Good Fairy was adapted by Preston Sturges and filmed in 1935 with Margaret Sullavan, and subsequently turned into the 1947 Deanna Durbin vehicle, I’ll Be Yours. (It also served as the basis for the 1951 Broadway musical Make a Wish, with book by Sturges.) The film version of the operetta The Chocolate Soldier used the plot of Molnár’s The Guardsman rather than the plot of its original stage version, which was based on George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man

Now to the photographer of #1. From an auction-house catalogue:

Edith Barakovich was one of the most famous Viennese photographers of the interwar period; photographs by Edith Barakovich fetch up to €1,200 at international auctions

In the 1920/30s, Vienna was a famous venue for an assorted group of female photographers, that gradually stirred up the long-established scene of professional studio photographers, dominated by men. Edith Barakovich … specialized in portraying the upper middle class. She took pictures of actors and actresses, just as of fashion and dance protagonists. The present portrait reveals a young actress wearing an elaborate costume of pearls and bears the title ‘Funny Kozary’:

(#3)

Especially fine with women as subjects.

(About art and sexuality. Not much language in it.)

Terry Castle, my Stanford colleague (in English literature), has been using Pinterest to compose a kind of history of modern art in pictures, specializing in drawings, paintings, and photographs of lgbt interest. Most recently, two photographs by George Platt Lynes, a photographer of (among other things) male nudes, from the 1930s-50s:

A photograph of a trio of men from Lynes’s artistic (often labeled “magical realist”) and homosexual (the term they used at the time) circle, George Tooker, Paul Cadmus, and Jared French:

(#1)

And then a photograph of a “dancer in costume with animal skull headpiece” (as it is described by the Metropolitan Museum of Art):

(#2)

On to some male nudes, starting with one that doesn’t have any officially naughty bits in it, so I can show it here:

(#3)

Note: black men figure prominently in Lynes’s work, and in French’s. Here’s a Lynes featuring a black singer:

(#4)

Then, on AZBlogX, three definitely X-rated male nudes: #1 an elegant formal composition, #2 a study in light and shadow, #3 a portrait of his friend French, with the painter’s intense gaze and his weighty penis anchoring the composition.

The Wikipedia article on Lynes emphasizes the importance to him of his circle of friends but also the great anxiety of his life in the closet, the fear that exposure might ruin his career at any time or subject him to imprisonment. He found a niche in fashion photography — and then his approach to his subjects was superseded by the work of fresh photographers, like Richard Avedon, Edgar de Evia, and Irving Penn. An alternately joyous and sad story, which I quote at length here:

George Platt Lynes (April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955) was an American fashion and commercial photographer.

Born in East Orange, New Jersey to Adelaide (Sparkman) and Joseph Russell Lynes, he spent his childhood in New Jersey but attended the Berkshire School in Massachusetts. He was sent to Paris in 1925 with the idea of better preparing him for college. His life was forever changed by the circle of friends that he would meet there. Gertrude Stein, Glenway Wescott, Monroe Wheeler and those that he met through them opened an entirely new world to the young artist.

He returned to the United States with the idea of a literary career and he even opened a bookstore in Englewood, New Jersey in 1927. He first became interested in photography not with the idea of a career, but to take photographs of his friends and display them in his bookstore.

Returning to France the next year in the company of Wescott and Wheeler, he traveled around Europe for the next several years, always with his camera at hand. He developed close friendships within a larger circle of artists including Jean Cocteau and Julien Levy, the art dealer and critic. Levy would exhibit his photographs in his gallery in New York City in 1932 and Lynes would open his studio there that same year. He was soon receiving commissions from Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, and Vogue including a cover with perhaps the first supermodel, Lisa Fonssagrives.

In 1935 he was asked to document the principal dancers and productions of Lincoln Kirstein’s and George Balanchine’s newly founded American Ballet company (now the New York City Ballet).

While he continued to shoot fashion photographs, getting accounts with such major clients as Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue during the 1930s and 1940s he was losing interest and had started a series of photographs which interpreted characters and stories from Greek mythology.

By 1946, he grew disillusioned with New York and left for Hollywood, where he became chief photographer for the Vogue studios. He photographed Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, Gloria Swanson and Orson Welles, from the film industry, as well as others in the arts among them Aldous Huxley, Igor Stravinsky, and Thomas Mann.

… During his lifetime, Lynes amassed a substantial body of work involving nude and homoerotic photography. In the 1930s, he began taking nudes of friends, performers and models, including a young Yul Brynner, although these remained private, unknown and unpublished for years. Over the following two decades, Lynes continued his work in this area passionately, albeit privately. “The depth and commitment he had in photographing the male nude, from the start of his career to the end, was astonishing. There was absolutely no commercial impulse involved — he couldn’t exhibit it, he couldn’t publish it.” – Allen Ellenzweig, art and photography critic who wrote the introduction to George Platt Lynes: The Male Nudes, published in 2011 by Rizzoli. In the late 1940s, Lynes became acquainted with Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his Institute in Bloomington, Indiana. Kinsey took an interest in Lynes work, as he was researching homosexuality in America at the time.

By May 1955, Lynes had been diagnosed terminally ill with lung cancer. He closed his studio and destroyed much of his print and negative archives, particularly his male nudes. However, it is now known that he had transferred many of these works to the Kinsey Institute. “He clearly was concerned that this work, which he considered his greatest achievement as a photographer, should not be dispersed or destroyed…We have to remember the time period we’re talking about—America during the post-war Red Scare…” The body of work residing at the Kinsey Institute remained largely unknown until it was made public and published in 2011. The Kinsey collection represents one of the largest single collections of Lynes’s work.

Lynes’s work began to surface in 1993 (in a book by James Crump), 1994 (in a book by Jack Woody), and 2000 (in a book by David Leddick), but didn’t get a full treatment until the 2011 book — 56 years after his death, and all of this was possible only through the good fortune of Lynes’s association with the Kinsey Institute.

The magic realist circle. Earlier on this blog,  a 3/31/11 posting “George Tooker” and a 3/22/13 posting “Surrealists” with a section on Cadmus and one on French. Now more on French. From Wikipedia:

Jared French (1905–1988) was an American painter who specialized in the medium of egg tempera. He was one of the artists attributed to the style of art known as magic realism. Other artists of this movement included George Tooker and Paul Cadmus [who was for a time French’s lover].

Born in Ossining, New York, French received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College in 1925. Soon after this he met and befriended Cadmus in New York City. French persuaded Cadmus to give up commercial art for what he deemed, “serious painting”. In 1937 French married Margaret Hoening, also an artist. For the next eight years Cadmus and the Frenches summered on Fire Island and formed a photographic collective called PaJaMa (“Paul, Jared, and Margaret”). During this period French painted murals for the WPA.

French’s early paintings are eerie, colorful tableauxs of still, silent figures derived from Archaic Greek statues. His later work shows “a kind of classical biomorphism,” strange, colorful, suggestive organic forms

(Of the four artists, French, Tooker, and Cadmus all lived well past the Age of Homosexual and into the Age of Gay; only Lynes died young.)

Two works of French’s from 1939, both unsettlingly strange (and both wth racial content). First, “Washing the White Blood from Daniel Boone”, set in something resembling the Holy Land, with Boone as a Christ figure:

(#5)

Boone/Christ is in an extreme low-rise swim suit, with drawstring, while his attendants (dark-skinned, bald, and with space-alien eyes) are in thongs or briefs, framed so as to emphasize their packages and buttocks — to my mind, much more homoerotic than if all the men were nude and just happened to have their penises hanging out.

Then, with a Confederate soldier theme, “Stuart’s Raiders at the Swollen Ford”, a mural for the Richmond (VA) Parcel Post Office:

(#6)

Buttocks and packages very much on display. Rough soldiers posing on the shore, men in the water who could at first be taken for bathers at the seashore, until you notice the horses. Apparetly French’s original sketch for the mural had the Rebs as hunky male nudes; hard to imagine how he thought he could get away with that, but in any case the idea was nixed by the federal official in charge of murals for public buildings, who insisted French had to put clothes on them.

The mural is, in principle, just a depiction of an actual Civil War event, but it has an odd, edgy feel to it, and it’s wildly homoerotic, a fact that has made commenters wonder about the word swollen in its title.

Another unearthing — of photo sets (or photosets) from two male photography studios in the 1990s: Colt Studio (American, the work of Jim French / Rip Colt) and Marco Studio (Brazilian). Details on the studios in an AZBlogX posting “Colt and Marco”, along with samples of the photography: four shots of three models from Colt, three shots from Marco, plus a more recent Marco shot of pornstar Rafael Alencar.

All of this is X-rated, all of it is created for the sexual pleasure of a gay male audience, and all of it is carefully, artfully composed photography (in the case of the Colt photos, of high quality). That is, these are artworks and also works serving a non-artistic function — like drawings or paintings meant to excite laughter or to advance social or political criticism, like scientific illustrations, like photograpy (including fashion photography) meant to advertise or market products, like visual art or music mean to praise a deity and excite devotion in followers.

In the case of male art (including male photography), there is a range of work according to intention: artworks with purely aesthetic aims, whose makers choose to take the male body as their subject; artworks depicting male subjects with a homoerotic eye; artworks frankly intended to arouse sexual desire. From an aesthetic point of view, all can be done well, or routinely, or shabbily and awkwardly. Just like, say, hymns.

Following up on yesterday’s posting “No cigar”, on a Tom Chitty cartoon with phallic foodstuffs striving to become cigars, two items: You’re no Cigar (Lloyd Bentsen: You’re no Jack Kennedy) and Sometimes a cigar is a lot more than a cigar (apocryphal Sigmund Freud: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar).

You’re no Cigar. Photo, with my caption:

(#1)

Sir, I smoked with Señor Cigar. I knew Señor Cigar. Cigar was a friend of mine. Sir, you’re no Cigar.

Two things combined absurdly: Lloyd Bentsen on Jack Kennedy; and Stephen F. Dennstedt’s 2014 photo of Señor Cigar, shown here in a gallery:

(#2)

#1 is in fact a photo of Dennstedt, savoring one of his favorite Cubans.

Of #2, Dennstedt says on his Indochine Photography website:

I photographed Señor Cigar in Trinidad, Cuba, during my visit in April & May of 2014. He was a character, and deserves our help.

[Digression: Dennstedt on his career:

I’m an itinerant American expat traveling the world and taking my pictures. Before I got a life I was a commercial banker for thirty years, and a (very) young Marine Corps Sergeant in Vietnam. I’ve been snapping shutters for over sixty years, and finally turned professional in 2009 founding my company Indochine Photography. I left the USA in early 2012 to pursue my lifelong dream of photographing the world, and interacting with its diverse cultures. Shortly after arriving in Yucatan, Mexico, I spent a year as the staff photographer for The Yucatan Times newspaper, and also provided my photographic services to the Kaxil Kiuic Biocultural Reserve and Puuc Jaguar Conservation. Since I’ve been on the road I’ve adopted the philosophy of: Live Simple, Live Cheap, Live Free.

A high-masculinity guy who’s also an artist.]

On to the 1988 vice-presidential debates, between Senators Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen:

Quayle: I have far more experience than many others that sought the office of vice president of this country. I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency…

Bentsen: Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.

“You’no Jack Kennedy” quickly became a tag line conveying reproof to someone who thinks too highly of themselves. And that, finally, gets us to “Sir, you’re no Cigar”, with its alternative reading for no cigar.

Sometimes a cigar is a lot more than a cigar. The background is a quotation — in several versions, which eventually crystallized into the canonical Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar — widely attributed to Sigmund Freud, and intended to convey that cigars aren’t always phallic symbols. No one denies that cigars are sometimes phallic symbols, and the relationship is the source of jokes, like this adaptation of a classic Freud photo, with the man’s cigar swapped out for another phallic symbol, a hotdog:

(#3)

(It’s all in pink for the sake of a Pink Floyd / Pink Freud joke. See my 9/11/10 posting “Pink Freud”.)

To admit that a cigar isn’t always a phallic symbol is not, however, to maintain that cigars don’t have any symbolic values whatsoever. In fact, they are powerful symbols of masculinity (and masculine sociability and bonding) throughout European culture. There are cigar lounges, with a clientele largely (in some cases, exclusively) male; private cigar smoking groups (almost all, so far as I can see, men-only); and, of course, the social custom of all-male cigar smoking (and “masculine” conversation) after dinner.

But what, you ask, did Freud actually say? The Quote Investigator got on the case a while back; Garson O’Toole’s final report of 8/12/11 concluded, after a thorough scouring of the record, “Freud probably did not make this statement” (Garson frames his assessments very cautiously; on the basis of his evidence, I would have been much more dismissive).

Beyond its symbolic values of masculinity and masculine sociability, tobacco smoking — of any sort — also has powerful psychological value for some people. For some, it’s a sexual fetish, providing pleasure and arousal, known in clinical literature as smoking fetishism or capnolagnia.

[Digression on the term capnolagnia. First element Gk. capno– ‘smoke, vapor’ (also, in an extended use in technical contexts, ‘carbon dioxide’). Second element: Gk. –lagnia ‘morbid sexual arousal’ (as Michael Quinion’s affixes site glosses it), used primarily in technical terms in psychiatry — in (for example) urolagnia (urine, urination), algolagnia (pain), and coprolagnia (feces).]

Okay, you’ve got something that has the symbolic values of masculinity and male sociability and also possible sexual fetish values. What do you expect? Really heavy gay-male sexual-fetish value. And we get it: cigars are a significant element in the gay-male leather world. Just two images from a huge number:

(#4)

(#5)

#4 is from the Smokinghunks.com site, a gay-sex site about hunks smoking (cigars or cigarettes) — but also about hunks who are smokin’ ‘first-rate; OR sexually excited’ and about hunks who are smoking (sucking) cock. #5 has a cigar-smoking boy in full leathers; many of the guys in these images are older rough-daddy types or bears.

On the ambiguity of smoking in Smoking Hunks. First, as in tobacco smoking, from NOAD2:

inhale and exhale the smoke of tobacco or a drug

Second, a family of senses for the positive-evaluation and intensity adjective smoking, from Green’s Dictionary of Slang:

[orig, jazz use smoking, technically skilled] 1 first-rate, excellent [first cite 1964, in a jazz context] 2 (US campus) difficult, intense [first cite 1977] 3 (US black) very urgent, very excited, esp. in a sexual context [first cite 1970] 4 (US black) attractive, well-dressed, elegant [first cite 1989]

The guys in #4 and #5 are presented as smoking / smokin’ (but of different body types) in sense 1, and the guy in #4 is also smokin’ in sense 3.

Third, the third verb smoke in Green’s:

(play on n. pipe; note Fr. synon. faire une pipe) to perform fellatio (on) [1st cite 1966 in a collection of adult sex words and phrases] … G. Hasford, Short Timers 10: You queer for Private Cowboy’s gear? You smoke his pole? … [1993 quote] You want to smoke me?

Note that this verb smoke has essentially the syntax of suck ‘perform fellatio (on)’. In particular, its direct object denotes either a penis (Suck/Smoke my cock!) or a fellatee (Suck/Smoke me!).

In #4, the tobacco-smoking smokin’ dude is getting smoked. Smoke it, kid!

(Personal note: I am indescribably not into cigars, gay or otherwise. And I was so even pre-asthma (when I smoked cigarettes). In fact, the idea of performing masculinity over cigars has always chilled my soul.)

(About men’s bodies and man-man sex, in very plain talk, with only a little bit of linguistic interest — so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

What is this man so earnestly fixed on?:

A penis, which he’s about to fellate avidly. (The full picture, and some details, in #6 in the AZBlogX posting linked to below.)

On AZBlogX, an extended pictorial essay “Poised to prong, psyched to suck”, on the representation of fellators in publicity for gay porn. Here’s the text (without the thoroughly X-rated images), edited down somewhat to concentrate on the visual conventions in a corner of the gay porn world, but preserving the style of the original, which uses lots of street vernacular.

This is an essay on the representation of man-man sex in the publicity shots for gay porn — not in the porn itself, but in the stills used for publicity. These aren’t screen shots, but carefully posed photos designed to advertise the flicks themselves: buy this (or rent this or view it on demand, but pay for it), it’s **hot**!!! (As I’ve noted before, not infrequently these photos show things that never actually made it on screen.)

Visual gay porn is focussed, first of all, on dick; secondarily on asses: these two as sources of sexual pleasure. The overriding principle is Everything To the Max: really big — magnificently long and thick — cocks, in particular, accorded Maximum Visibility. The porn actors jack those cocks (their own or each other’s) off, suck them and get theirs sucked, fuck with them or get fucked by them, and all the while the cocks are the stars of the action, the top draw for the men using the videos for their own pleasure, so of course the films show as much of the stars as they can, for as long as they can. This drive for Maximum Visibility is much greater in still shots, of course.

In videos, a cock shown in all its splendor can be — will be, must be — engulfed, in part or in whole, in a mouth or asshole, but more of it will soon be back on view. On the other hand, in still shots, you have only the frozen moment; a photo of cock plunged to the hilt in ass or mouth shows no cock at all, and is therefore not even technically X-rated. In any case, many men find such shots unsatisfying (I find them quite moving, since they depict the deepest possible union between two bodies), so we get publicity shots in which cocks are shown in their entirety (poised to thrust into mouth or asshole) or almost so (with only the tip inserted). The latter approach, which I’ll call tipping, is a compromise between Maximum Visibility and another principle of visual porn, Carnal Connection, calling for actual physical engagement of two bodies. The other, less carnal, approach I’ll call gearing-up.

My impression is that tipping is by far the dominant approach in publicity shots. #1 on AZBlog shows a recent all-tipping mail ad from the C1R company for some Cocky Boys videos — which I was going to post anyway because of the remarkable athleticism (so wonderful to look at, so unlikely in real life) in the ad for Hung Flip Fuckers.

The real topic of the AZBlogX posting, however, is gearing-up, because it was featured so prominently in an issue of Adam Gay XXX Showcase (Vol. 8 No. 7, January 2001) I recently unearthed (from only 15 years ago, but in some ways an artifact from another world).

In tipping shots, the enthusiasm of the receptive (cock-taking) partner isn’t at issue; after all, the guy has the dick in his mouth or (partly) up his ass. But for gearing-up shots, things are not always so clear. For fuck shots, you’ve got the fucker poised to prong the hole, and the hole has usually arranged himself to convey his enthusiasm for the deed (humping up for doggie sex, for instance). In any case, all he really has to do is offer his asshole, make it available.

But for suck shots, you’ve mostly got the insertive partner doing the offering, and the prospective fellator showing, somehow, that he’s psyched to suck. I find these gearing-up for cocksucking shots almost always somewhat ridiculous, unintentionally funny. So many choices for the cockhound: how to position himself vis-a-vis the engorged treasure, what facial expression to display, what to do with his mouth (and tongue). The fellatee, meanwhile, can just stand (or sit or lie) there, offering his stiff rod, and his face can take on any expression appropriate for a guy engaged in having sex, of any kind (including solo jacking-off) — but the fellator is having a social encounter with a much-desired phallic partner. Hablale, to paraphrase Almodóvar.

The AZBlogX posting then surveys 10 Adam Gay images of such encounters, from three jack-off flicks released in 2000. Several are beautifully composed, several strike me as notably (unintentionally) funny, and one has an especially impressive implement, as I put it there. Some, of course, are artless or awkward. But they’ve all got dick.