“restored to its element”

Jean Cocteau is probably most famous for Beauty and the Beast (1946). Worth seeing, if you haven’t. An autobiographical account of his gay life is included in a collection of pre-Stonewall gay writings. I was charmed by Cocteau’s description of the penis, which I here reproduce for your delectation: 

“[T]hat fabulous little undersea plant, forlorn, inert, shipwrecked on the frothy fleece, which then stirs, unwrinkles, develops, rouses itself and hurls its sap afar when once it is restored to its element of love.”

source:

“The White Paper” by Jean Cocteau

Calamus: male homosexuality in twentieth century literature, an international anthology

edited by David Galloway and Christian Sabisch

1982. Quill/William Morrow & Co., New York NY

I swear I won't call no copper, if I'm beat up by my papa. Tain’t nobody's business

In his recent memoir Siya Khumalo includes feminist critiques of men and homophobia. 

I once heard some of my friends discuss violence against women. Without exception, they, male and female, agreed it was unacceptable for a man to hit a woman who is not his own girlfriend. Consider, also, a conversation I overheard at a bus stop. ‘I don’t date a man who doesn’t beat me,’ one woman was saying. Her friends thought this was excessive; it was enough for him to warn and threaten to beat her, wasn’t it?

But the first woman’s argument was, how would she know that he really cared to have her (and have her to himself) unless his jealousy and possessiveness boiled over now and then? … By offering her body to patriarchy’s son, this lady at the bus stop was serving her role in the tribe perfectly.”

The woman who needed to be beaten, Khumalo says, was helping to reinforce the culture of wife-beating. She had become an advocate for her own victimization, seeing violence against women as a necessary proof that men were … I don’t know … too stupid to resolve disputes without fists? so incontinent with their feelings that they easily lost control? only strong enough to pick a fight with a weaker opponent? 

Hatred of gay people is of a piece with wifebeating, Khumalo says. 

Homophobia isn’t a stand-alone prejudice. It’s normalised so all other violence and bigotry may be tolerated when it comes.

Tolerable prejudices are the gateway drug to harder stuff, the solvent in which the next scapegoating prejudice can dissolve.

No one who hates his brother, whom he has seen, can claim to love God, whom he has not seen.

source:

You Have to Be Gay to Know God

Siya Khumalo

2018. Kwela Books, Cape Town, South Africa

men dying in their 40s

I remember as a kid hearing about men dying in their 40s. I never thought of that as old. My mother had me at 43, after all. Nine days later she celebrated her 44th birthday, thrilled, no doubt, to be changing the diapers of her early birthday present. 

This week I was reading two books that happen to describe the deaths of two men in their 40s. 

In his memoir Insomniac City Bill Hayes writes about his partner of sixteen years, Steve, dying beside him in bed, and not peacefully: 

His death had been as swift as it was inexplicable: He had been only forty-three and remarkably fit, with no history of heart problems. At first, I thought he was having a nightmare, but he was thrashing so violently and unable to speak. I called 911, began CPR, EMTs came. I remember how they kept asking me if we’d been doing drugs; the question seemed absurd; Steve was so clean-living, so wholesome really, he never even drank a beer. They got him to an ER just a few blocks away. But by then he was gone.

In The Grand Piano, a collection of autobiographical essays by poets associated with the Language Movement, Carla Harryman writes about the theater director Philip Horvitz: 

[At] forty-five years old … his heart stopped beating while he was on a plane between New York and San Francisco, where he was headed to attend his brother Bill’s wedding in Sonoma County. Because of heart trouble, the San Francisco engagement [of Harryman’s Memory Play] following the wedding would have been his first solo performance in many years. 

My father had a heart attack at 49*. I am well past 40, and 50 is rather behind me as well. We’re getting to those years where the risks to life arise at least as often in the body as through misadventure. All my life I’ve tried to eat well. I walk regularly; I do yoga. Yet last year during an angiogram I was diagnosed with a blocked artery — 80 to 90% blocked. I don’t know how close a heart attack was lurking. In lieu of major heart bypass surgery the doctor inserted a stent. The stent re-widens the artery and keeps it propped open. I have since learned I have friends who have multiple stents. The stent has reset my capacities by a few years — as far as my subjective experience is concerned. No more angina symptoms. Those were, in case you're interested, a gripping tension in my upper back, which would subside when I stopped walking uphill (I never had any problem walking downhill!), and bad nighttime leg cramps, which made my legs ache deep inside and jerk and twitch. Although I still get mild body aches, there’s really no comparison.  

Odd to think one has made it past the years one could get credit for dying early. 

sources:

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and me

by Bill Hayes

2017. Bloomsbury, New York

The Grand Piano, part 3

an experiment in collective autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980

by Steve Benson, Tom Mandel, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Kit Robinson, Ted Pearson

2007. Mode A / This Press, Bloomfield Township, MI

______

* My sister, who has a clearer memory for these things, corrects my original guess, which was 50. 

word of the day: ebullition

word of the day: ebullition

Hawthorne’s first person narrator in The Blithedale Romance is Miles Coverdale, a poet. He never shares a line of poetry with us. In this passage Coverdale reveals a hint of insight into the situation of women, a proto-feminism as it were. His (soon-to-be-former) friend, the pontificating Hollingsworth, has just declared that the role of women is to be subservient to men. 

“I looked at Zenobia, however, fully expecting her to resent — as I felt, by the indignant ebullition of my own blood, that she ought — this outrageous affirmation of what struck me as the intensity of masculine egotism. It centred everything in itself, and deprived woman of her very soul, her inexpressible and unfathomable all, to make it a mere incident in the great sum of man.”

defintion (Merriam-Webster): the act, process, or state of boiling or bubbling up

Zenobia is an assertive and intelligent woman. Wouldn’t she readily challenge Hollingsworth’s pronouncements? Coverdale is disgusted when, instead, Zenobia acquiesces. He grumbles to himself about this surrender. “‘Is it in their [women’s] nature? Or is it, at last, the result of ages of compelled degradation?’”

source: 

The Blithedale Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

1852. 1960, Dell Publishing, New York

swishy

It’s the early 90s in Los Angeles. Jeremy Atherton Lin is just coming out, trying to figure out himself and what “gay” is, what kind of community he might be finding himself in. The following description is of a powerful type, one I recognize, more or less. Lin seems attracted and repelled.

The guys at the table seemed so confident — jaded already. They sat with impudent elbows and ankles. I’d heard it said that gays were perpetually adolescent, but I was convinced this particular sampling had never been boys in the first place. They assessed instead of greeted. They laughed like they’d already been butt-fucked. They looked down long noses with the pride of a man with an ass made only for fucking, as if there never was shit. They used phrases like fresh meat as they recrossed their legs. They spoke as if words were handed to them to disgrace. They were swishy — not mincing, but like a sword slicing air. They were satisfied with cliche. They dismissed whole populations with one sting. Bottoms and tops were fixed positions. To have a clear racial preference was a highly amusing character trait. If someone liked black men, for instance, He goes to Catch One was all that needed to be said.

Lin’s memoir/history of gay bars has some poetry in it. 

source:

Gay Bar: why we went out

by Jeremy Atherton Lin

2021. Little, Brown and Co., New York

masturbation contests

As a teen Peruvian (future) novelist Mario Vargas Llosa went to a military-style boarding school. Academically it was considered a cut above. It sounds like young Mario did okay there, but it instilled no love in him for the military’s “mechanical hierarchies, [its] authorized violence [or] the at times … cruel and monstrous uses” to which these were put. But what sticks out to me (so to speak) are the literally homosexual acts these (almost certainly mainly heterosexual) boys promulgated. 

On the very first day, after getting into their school uniforms and hearing welcoming (?) speeches from the adults, the new boys are turned over to the older boys for the usual hazing rituals. 

A group of cadets took me and a[nother] boy … to a fourth-year dormitory. They made us go through a ‘right angle’ contest. We had to kick each other in the backside as we doubled over alternately; the one who kicked more slowly than the other was in turn kicked, hard, by the hazers. Afterward, they made us open our trousers fly and take out our penis and masturbate: the one who came first would be let go and the other would stay behind to make our torturers’ beds. But, however hard we tried, fear kept us from getting an erection, and finally, bored by our incompetence, they took us out to the soccer field. They asked me what sport I went in for: ‘Swimming, sir.’ ‘Swim on your back from one end of the athletic field to the other, then, perro.’

As Mario figured out the place, he recognized that, “in order not to have one’s will broken [by the relentless bullying], it was necessary to do daring things, so as to earn the good feeling and respect of the others. I began doing them from the start: from the masturbation contests — the one who ejaculated first or who shot his sperm the farthest — to the famous escapades at night, after lights out.” The biggest “escapade,” Vargas Llosa says, was the escape, “going over the wall,” as being caught leaving the compound without authorization meant you’d be expelled “without appeal.” Mario was a regular escapee, it seems. 

Of course you had to boast about your sexual prowess with women — even if (especially if?) you were a virgin, which most of the boys were, I’m sure. The highest prestige went to (as it comes to us in English) the “mad jock with a big cock,” a title Mario proudly claimed.

In his memoir Mario Vargas Llosa at times expresses sympathy for gay men, and disappointment in others’ homophobia, though he presents himself as very het — besides the “masturbation contests,”  that is, although isn't that somehow hetter than het? It’s not like there’s any love or affection in it.

source:

A Fish in the Water

by Mario Vargas Llosa

translated by Helen Lane

1994. Farrar Straus Giroux, New York

A dozen Dorothys

It’s 1970. Lesbians are just beginning to distinguish themselves as lesbians within the women’s rights movement. Judy Grahn writes about standing up to authority: 

[A] group of us attended a lecture by a well-known, thoroughly published psychiatrist, an ‘expert’ in female homosexuality. From the audience, we questioned him, what was his authority based in? What real reasons did he have for pathologizing our lives? For emphasis, we stood up, scattered throughout the audience. There were at least a dozen of us, perhaps more. We didn’t yell or threaten, just stood. At our standing up, declaring our sanity to him, he gathered his papers and fled the room. We felt like Dorothy discovering the Wizard as a tiny man behind a curtain of false authority.

The emperor has no curtain. 

source:

A Simple Revolution: the making of an activist poet

by Judy Grahn
2012. Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco CA

#feminism

Adrienne Rich is trying to pursue ambitions other than motherhood. She realizes that continuing to have children will foreclose everything else. 

Before my third child was born I decided to have no more children, to be sterilized. … My husband, although he supported my decision, asked whether I was sure it would not leave me feeling less ‘feminine.’ In order to have the operation at all, I had to present a letter, counter-signed by my husband, assuring the committee of physicians who approved such operations that I had already produced three children, and stating my reason for having no more. … [M]y own judgment would not have been acceptable. When I awoke from the operation, twenty-four hours after my child’s birth, a young nurse looked at my chart and remarked coldly: ‘Had yourself spayed, did you?’

WTF.

source:

Of Woman Born: motherhood as experience and institution

by Adrienne Rich

1976. W. W. Norton & Co., New York

Reading a Man

Judy Melinek is a medical examiner for New York City. She autopsies dead bodies. 

On this day off she’s just seen a movie with her husband, T. J. They are enthusing about the movie while waiting in line at a taqueria. Judy casually looks at the back of the man in front of them in line. I love the way what she observes begins to come together for her into a portrait not just of the man’s lifestyle but in particular something that happened to him. Any of us could have picked up on the man’s sex, age, clothes, but it’s the thing at the back of the man’s head that Judy recognizes from her job. 

He was a huge man — six two easily — in his midtwenties, with a shaved head and nickel-sized black lacquer plugs piercing both earlobes. His forearms were covered with the sort of tattoos I had seen on drug users as a way of camouflaging needle tracks. Some of them I recognized as prison badges. The thing that really startled me, though, was the back of the man’s neck. He had a perfectly circular scar at the base of his skull just to the left of midline, and a vertical, linear, well-healed surgical cicatrice extending down his cervical spine. …

This man had done something awhile ago that had induced somebody to shoot him carefully in the back of the head. Based on the rough diameter of the scar, the shooter probably used a .22 or other small-caliber weapon at close range. The blow had knocked the tattooed man down and probably out, but the bullet lodged in the thick bulb of bone at the butt of the skull and didn’t penetrate. A skilled surgeon had extracted the slug, stemmed the bleeding and saved [the man’s] life. I could even see the textbook pinprick scars of the suture staples on either side of the old incision going down his neck.

As they are eating, Judy and her husband notice the man is sitting nearby. Is he casing them? T. J. begins talking loudly about Judy’s police colleagues, naming them, wondering who is on duty in this precinct. The man with the scar abruptly gets up, leaving his drink unfinished on his table.

Based on her expertise Judy Melinek could read a lot more here than the average person. She is humble enough to say that she could have been misreading the situation, that the man may not have been looking to rob them. 

I love the way people with a particular expertise can see through things that to the untrained eye would be opaque. This doesn’t mean they always get it right. But their education gives them access to information that they just might be able to use. 

source: Working Stiff: two years, 262 bodies, and the making of medical examiner

by Judy Melinek, M.D., and T. J. Mitchell

“flaunting, brazen!” … you say that as though it’s a bad thing

About the time I came across an anti-feminist poem by a Japanese poet, I came across an anti-feminist poem by a South African poet. The poem is so baldly wrong that one might suspect it means to parody anti-feminism, but considering the era in which the South African poet is writing (turn of the 20th century) and the emphatic last lines, I’m guessing he’s serious. It’s an ugly poem, and I debated with myself whether to present it here, but I think it’s interesting as a piece of propaganda and for its use of vivid language. But it’s also ugly in a funny way, a way totally unintentional and campy that makes you roll your eyes and shake your head and, yes, laugh.

The New Woman

On the Threshold flaunting, brazen,

See the Coming Woman stands:

Bold her mien, absurd her garments,

Harsh her speech and strong her hands.

Loud She prates at public meeting,

Solid plants her massive foot;

Shrieks her message: ‘Man, the tyrant,

Of all evil is the root!’

Howls for equal rights for woman —

Right to don divided skirt;

Right to swear, to smoke, to gamble —

Right to drink, too woo, to flirt.

Dread Emancipated Female —

Wants to make man share the ‘Curse’;

Wants to see him rock the cradle,

Wants to wreck the Universe!

Wants man’s vote, his pants, his latchkey,

Wants this passed and that repealed —

Wants all sick’ning social festers

To her morbid gaze revealed!

She-crusader, with a ‘mission,’

Let her motto be unfurled:

‘Woman’s will must sway the senates —

Unsexed neuters boss the world.’

— Thomas Craig

Oh Craig, Craig, Craig. I am so on the side of Woman here. I’m for bold women, for women with strong hands and big feet, who can swear at injustice and flirt with the cuties, who can bring social festers to light, who can pass this and repeal that, who demand equality and have a real say in how the world is ordered. 

Like the anonymous Japanese anti-feminist Thomas Craig thinks a woman’s attractiveness has something to do with whether she has human rights. I doubt he would make the same argument about his own gender. But double standards are just fine with Craig. No problem with smoking, swearing, gambling and social festering for Craig! So long as it’s exclusively men who do it. And I guess seeing a man rocking a cradle would give the easily quailed poet a conniption. 

I’m always weirdly amused by the fetish such people have for gender roles. A woman in pants is bad all right, but “unsexed neuters,” whew, those are what will really wreck the universe. I mean, if you can’t tell a man from a woman, well, how will the world persist? Presumably, people who can’t tell men from women won’t be able to figure out how to have children, and the next generation will have sharper faculties. 

source: A Century of South African Poetry

edited by Michael Chapman

1981. AD. Donker / Jonathan Ball Publishers

the only reason you need rights is cuz you’re ugly

“We women . . . . !”

A skinny creature

Stands there.

— Chinchabo

“It is no accident that most suffragettes and women workers are unattractive people. Beautiful women have their privileges which they properly value more than their rights,” adds editor and translator R. H. Blyth in a note appended to the senryu. 

This isn’t an argument. It’s merely a taunt. Ha ha! You’re ugly! If you were pretty you’d be happy. 

If you want to classify the fallacy, call it ad hominem; as Wikipedia has it, “genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument.” Fits this one to a T. 

Blyth follows up by elevating “rights” over “privileges,” which basically translates to I Got Mine So Shut Up, in Blyth’s version of What Women Want.

Hmph.  

source: Senryu: Japanese satirical verses

translated and explained by R. H. Blyth

1949. Hokuseido Press

Roxane Gay On Assholes

In a chapter of friendly advice in her book, Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay has a few things to say about assholes, the whole body variety:

Sometimes your friends will date people you cannot stand. You can either be honest about your feelings or you can lie. There are good reasons for both. Sometimes you will be the person dating someone your friends cannot stand. If your man or woman is a scrub, just own it so you and your friends can talk about more interesting things. My go-to explanation is ‘I am dating an asshole because I’m lazy.’ You are welcome to borrow it.

Don’t flirt, have sex, or engage in emotional affairs with your friends’ significant others. This shouldn’t need to be said, but it needs to be said. That significant other is an asshole, and you don’t want to be involved with an asshole who’s used goods. If you want to be with an asshole, get a fresh asshole of your very own. They are abundant.

source: Bad Feminist: essays by Roxane Gray

2014. HarperCollins, NY

having new things to think about

Here’s one of those thoughts that I hadn’t had. Sure, I’d heard of phantom limb pain, wherein an amputated arm seems to the amputee still to be there, at least insofar as it hurts. It follows that, if a man has had his penis amputated, then he would not be immune from the pains of other amputees. 

[There are] cases of men whose penile cancer forced them to have their genitals removed. In one study, 60 percent of these men experienced feelings of pain where their genitals used to be, similar to those who have lost a limb. In elective male-to-female sex reassignment surgery, however, where the genitals are removed and refashioned into a vagina and clitoris, there have been no reported cases of ‘phantom penis’ syndrome.

The brain houses a version of the body onto which it maps signals received from the body. If expected signals are missing, the brain can read the absence as a problem and problems are often described as pain. A recent, successful treatment for phantom hand pain involves tricking the brain with mirrors. Show the amputee the existing hand mirrored, making it seem as though the missing hand was as normal as the existing hand and the brain accepts the mirror hand as real, at least long enough to figure out that there isn’t a problem, and the missing signals are dismissed as a non-issue. The pain goes away.

My admittedly incomplete consideration of sex reassignment surgery had not included thoughts of phantom pain from the missing penis. Perhaps the MTF’s brain somehow never mapped the penis as penis anyway? Perhaps the new clitoris and vagina send signals to the brain that are similar enough to the old penis signals that the brain can accept the new arrangement without confusion? Perhaps no MTF wants to admit to phantom penis pain?   

Well, there you are. I have now thought about phantom penis pain in the context of sex reassignment surgery. Which I hadn’t before. 

source: Becoming Nicole: the transformation of an American family by Amy Ellis Nutt

2015. Random House, NY

“I don’t want to watch boys masturbating.”

Excerpt from a Berkeley Poetry Review interview with Steve Lance and Lyn Hejinian:

BPR:
How does that unpredictability and surprise relate to what you were describing earlier about how we are over-inundated with newness and we can’t place as much value in encountering new things anymore?

Steve Lance:
Well novelty is weird now. Novelty itself is commonplace. I don’t just mean in a sense of aesthetics, but do you guys know about Chatroulette? You go to a website and click “connect me” and you have your video going on, and it connects you with a random stranger. And about a third of the time it’s a guy masturbating. There are a lot of penises in this. But almost every single time it’s just people who say “hey” and that’s it. And they’re just looking to be amused by this crazy new thing. It’s totally wild, totally insane but totally boring. It’s just boring. It’s either boring or a guy masturbating.

BPR:
That’s funny because I was about to say that novelty is so pornographic now. It’s just the speed of amusement, and complete commitment of your desire to that quick amusement.

Steve Lance:
Well, we should go on Chatroulette right now.

Lyn Hejinian
I don’t want to watch boys masturbating.

I’d never heard of Chat Roulette. (Probably more accurately I should say, if I ever had heard of Chat Roulette everything about it has slipped from memory.)

So I looked for more information and found a couple Hot New Thing articles about Chat Roulette. It was the Hot New Thing in 2010! Sam Anderson’s article at New York Magazine describes his experience:

I entered the fray on a bright Wednesday afternoon, with an open mind and an eager soul, ready to sound my barbaric yawp through the webcams of the world. I left absolutely crushed. It turns out that ChatRoulette, in practice, is brutal. The first eighteen people who saw me disconnected immediately. They appeared, one by one, in a box at the top of my screen—a young Asian man, a high-school-age girl, a guy lying on his side in bed—and, every time, I’d feel a little flare of excitement. Every time, they’d leave without saying a word. Sometimes I could even watch them reach down, in horrifying real-time, and click “next.” It was devastating. My first even semi-successful interaction was with a guy with a blanket draped over his lap who asked if I wanted to “jack of” with him. I declined; he disconnected. Over the course of an hour, I was rejected by what felt like a cast of thousands: a teenage girl talking on her cell phone, a close-up of an eyeball. It started to feel like a social-anxiety nightmare. One guy just stared into the camera and flipped me off. Another stood in front of his computer making wave motions with his hands, refusing to respond to anything I typed. One person had the courtesy to give me, before disconnecting, a little advice: “too old.” (I’m 32.)

Anderson pushes on, bringing in a male friend, asking his wife to participate, and he has some fun after all:

The default interaction on ChatRoulette is roughly three seconds long: assessment, micro-interaction, "next." This might seem like yet another outrage of the Internet era—the Twitter-fication of face-to-face interaction. But I was surprised (as I was with Twitter) by how much pleasant communication—joy, interest, empathy—can occur in these tiny chunks. The quest to connect becomes lightning-quick. A few seconds is plenty of time to wave, or give a thumbs-up, or type “EMO HAIR,” or elaborately mime the process of smoking marijuana, or jovially flip somebody off. (Middle fingers are extremely popular on ChatRoulette, and somehow seem affectionate.)

Eventually, I realized that clicking “next” was not so much a rejection as it was pure curiosity, like riding a train past an apartment building at night, looking briefly into as many lit windows as possible.

The New Yorker’s Julia Ioffe wrote about Chat Roulette at about the same time:

The point is to introduce you to people you’d never otherwise meet and will never see again—the dancing Korean girls, the leopard-printed Catman, the naked man in Gdansk. More than a million people, most of them from the United States, clog Chatroulette’s servers daily. To “next” someone has become a common transitive verb. Catman is an Internet celebrity, as is Merton the improvising pianist. Brooklyn bars throw Chatroulette parties, an indie band has used the site to début an album, and the Texas attorney general has warned parents to keep their children far, far away.

Sam Anderson mentions the dancing Korean girls, too.

My Google searches for Chat Roulette aren’t returning much that’s current. Perhaps I should end with a quote from salon.com’s “What went viral 5 years ago today: Chatroulette, social media’s short-lived penis empire”:

[B]efore the webcam service was declared officially dead at the tender age of eight months, the website did provide us a fascinating window into human nature in the digital age. And by that, of course, I mean penises.

According to an RJ Metrics survey from March 2010, 89 percent of Chatroulette users were male. Many, many of those men were baring it all on screen, apparently, prompting the site’s Russian teen founder to, at one point, threaten to turn the naked offenders into the cops. The absurd nudity problem quickly became part and parcel of the Chatroulette experience.

Chatroulette.com is still online. You have to register to use it. Maybe you didn’t five years ago. The articles don’t mention that. Back in 2010 there was no age limit. Now there is. And now, officially at least, no dicks:


1. Broadcasting or offering nudity is not allowed.

2. If you are under 18, you can not use the service.

source of interview quote: Berkeley Poetry Review Issue 41
2010. UC Berkeley, California

a cold wind off the ocean

from the diary (Tuesday, 1/24/89):

”What are you thinking?” said Glenn to Garin.

“I was just thinking I’d like to take time off from work and go up to the snow.”

“Do you ski?”

“No. Everyone I know who’s gone skiing has broken something. I used to love to sled.”

“What else are you thinking?”

“It’s blank. I’m not thinking anything.”

“The wind blows right through, hm?”

“What are you thinking about?”

I said: “You.”

Garin and I went to the beach today — Salmon Creek. Mom says they are going to be closing [the] old favorite parking lot but they haven’t yet. The weather was gorgeous. No fog. We got there early — elevenish and the beach was actually warm for a couple hours. A brisk wind from the ocean became quite chill on the way back to the car but the sun was still comfortable. …

Garin claims he was badly hurt during the affair with David W. … These people who say they are so hurt by a previous relationship that they … [w]on’t … jump into anything — … seem to jump [pretty fast] when they find Mr. Beautiful.

As I remember it, the wind off the ocean was so sharp and cold that it drilled into my ear and brought on a headache, which eventually turned into a migraine, probably one of my more memorable if only for the poetry of it. Garin and I did not go out on another date.

What J. Edgar Hoover liked to see

This one’s not going in the “evidence disproving Hoover was gay” column.

[FBI agents] complied with a dress code enforced as much through fear of Hoover’s personal disapproval as through any written rule. They wore dark, conservative suits, white shirts, ties, and spit-polished shoes, their hair cut short and their faces closely shaved. They were subject to annual physicals and strict weight limits, though some of them complained that Hoover seemed well over the limit. “We were all taking pills to try to repress our appetite, to trim down,” [agent Burney] Threadgill recalled.

Hopped up on pills to look good to a man.

Victims of the male gaze.

source: Subversives: the FBI’s war on student radicals and Reagan’s rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld

Napolean's racism fix

What was to be done so that these peoples, so different, might live in good intelligence? … Napolean [thought that] men [sh]ould each marry two women of different color. Then the children of this double marriage would be raised together and, in spite of the difference in color, they would become accustomed to living together and would consider themselves equal.

Actually that's what happened in practice wherever slavery was an institution, masters begetting children from more than one woman and of more than one color. However, because the mothers were not considered equal the children were not considered equal. The kids may have played together, but they were raised on two tracks. Kind of like boys and girls, you know? O Napolean, keep thinking!

The quote is from Jean Descola's Les Messagers de l'Independence as it appears in an endnote of German Arciniegas's America in Europe: a history of the New World in reverse.

"to traffic freely with angelic forces"

I'd read about the cross-dressing berdache tradition of shamanism, and decided I could do a glossy, chaos magic, nineties version of that as a way of shaking out my identity and becoming my own complete opposite. A few fetish-wear catalogues later, and I'd assembled a shiny disguise … The clothes and makeup allowed me to transform into a female alter ego I now created to stand in for me during the darker magical operations I was undertaking. … [T]he 'girl' was smarter and more courageous and could more easily negotiate with and fend off predatory 'demonic' entities. … Dressed in black vinyl with six-inch heels, showgirl makeup, and a blond wig, I began to traffic freely with angelic forces …

That's Grant Morrison in his memoir / essay on superheroes, Supergods: what masked vigilantes, miraculous mutants, and a sun god from Smallville can teach us about being human.

fathered by a man other than

“In an analysis of about twenty-four thousand children across nine mostly Anglo-Saxon countries, about 3 percent were found to have been fathered by a man other than the presumed father. That means that about one out of thirty men was unknowingly raising someone else’s child …”

quoted from A Billion Wicked Thoughts: what the world’s largest experiment reveals about human desire by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

Six generations back every one of us has 32 great grandfathers. If you draw your family tree past the sixth generation, chances are you’re beginning to or already are running down the pasts of men not related to you.

Does this statistic include the artificial inseminations? I guess sperm banks don’t go far back. But there’s always been adoption. And it’s not always been something people have talked about.

straight but not thick – or long

“The average length of the gay penis is 6.32 inches. The average length of the straight penis is 5.99 inches. … When it comes to the prime organ of masculinity, [gay men] have been endowed with nearly an extra half inch.”

Authors Ogas and Gaddam even speculate that the fayest of the gays have the meatiest of the cocks. A study waiting to be undertaken?

From the notes in the back of the book: “Gay men are thicker too: straights have a penis circumference of 4.80 inches, while gay men have 4.95 inches.”

source: A Billion Wicked Thoughts: what the world’s largest experiment reveals about human desire by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam