word of the day: twinky

context: "[T]he Twilight phenomenon activates ... intense [negative] passions among the Comic-Con crowd ... it's telling that many of the same folks who pitch a fit over a couple of twinky, sparkly boy vampires ... hav[e] no problem with ... naked girl vampires and sexually depraved demons ..."

twinky (see twink)

twink: An attractive, boyish-looking, young ... man. The stereotypical twink is 18-22, slender with little or no body hair, often blonde ... A twink is the gay answer to the blonde bimbo cheerleader.

The definition is via the Urban Dictionary. There is no definition for twink at dictionary.com or at merriam-webster.com (unless it's hiding in their "unabridged" version).

I first heard “twink” not long after I came out, age twenty, and was at my twinkiest, I suppose. This was mid-80s. Not long after I heard it for the first time I think an older gay man (30s? 40s?) called me a twink and I felt insulted. Or maybe he called a friend of mine a twink. I don’t really remember. But “twink” didn’t sound like a compliment to me. I wasn’t really sure what it meant, but it sounded belittling, dismissive. Was it derived from “twinkle”? That sounds like a version of a gay slur. (Or a camp term of endearment?)

When at some point I wondered aloud about the word’s etymology, I was told it came from the Hostess Twinkie, which is long and firm and full of cream. That, at least, was funny.

So here it is twenty-five years later and for the first time I come across “twink” in a non-gay context. The author of this book on the San Diego Comic-Con is married to a woman, but clearly his life experience has been informed by gay culture. Although he’s my age he takes for granted that his readers will know what “twinky” means. It’s not a typo. He didn’t intend to write “twinkly.” You wouldn’t say, “twinkly, sparkly.” That would just be redundant. And the shirtless, hairless torsos of the youthful stars of the Twilight series display the qualities of twinks so the word is apropos. Nor would it be a surprise that the sexual objectification of the idealized youthful male body might make the nerdy straight boys of Comic-Con uncomfortable.

source: Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture: what the world's wildest trade show can tell us about the future of entertainment by Rob Salkowitz

Tyron Garner, civil rights hero

In 1998 Tyron Garner and John Lawrence were arrested and charged with the crime of engaging in homosexual conduct. This conduct, the police reported, occurred in the bedroom of John Lawrence’s apartment. Mr Garner and Mr Lawrence did not believe they had done anything wrong. When contacted by gay activists the two men were willing to fight in the courts in order to prevent what had happened to them from happening to anyone else. Their case was resolved at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003. The decision in Lawrence v. Texas invalidated all sodomy laws for being unconstitutional intrusions into citizens’ private lives.

Just three years later Tyron Garner was dead “of complications from meningitis.”

Challenging sodomy laws had been tricky. People were not being arrested for breaking these laws, unless they were people easily pushed around, working class or worse. When such charges were leveled the defendants typically just wanted the hassle to go away and would pay a small fine and move on. When gay activists heard about the arrest of Mr Garner and Mr Lawrence they reached out to them as quickly as they could. The two had to agree to pursue what would likely turn out to be a long drawn out court case, one which would expose their personal lives to public scrutiny. If they had begged off, we would not have seen the end of sodomy laws in 2003. Lawrence v. Texas opened the way for much greater and faster progress for the gay community.

John Lawrence worried about how the case would affect his job. He was mostly closeted at work. Tyron Garner was less worried about that; he seldom had fulltime employment. At the time of the arrest Mr Garner was the sole caretaker for infirm parents. Neither lived an easy life, though Mr Garner’s was more troubled, with intoxication and domestic disturbance arrests on his record (both before and after the sodomy case). The attorneys expended much effort keeping their clients out of the media eye. The case was not about them in the end, it was about the private love lives of every American.

I am grateful that both Mr Garner and Mr Lawrence stood up for themselves, and, ultimately, for all the rest of us.

Sadly, when Mr Garner died, he was virtually anonymous.

[Tyron] Garner’s death [September 11, 2006] was received mostly with silence in the media, including the gay media. His family did not have enough money to bury him or cremate him. Calling Garner’s contributions to the gay community ‘immense,’ Kevin Cathcart, executive director of Lambda Legal, appealed to that community for funds to defray disposal and funeral costs. Two weeks after his death, $200 had been raised. For weeks, the civil-rights hero’s body lay in cold storage in the Harris County morgue. Finally, in mid-October, with only $25 more having been donated, Garner’s brother released his body to the county for cremation (at no cost). The family wanted to place his remains in a modest metal urn, instead of a plastic bag, and run a proper obituary in the newspaper. But they needed $200 more for that and didn’t have the money. There was no memorial service for him in the gay community. There was no funeral, period.

Lambda Legal has created a scholarship in Mr Garner’s name: The Tyron Garner Memorial Fellowship for African-American LGBT Civil Rights . “This fellowship will be a paid legal internship awarded to a law student or recent law graduate to work in any of Lambda Legal’s five offices …”

source: Flagrant Conduct: the story of Lawrence v. Texas by Dale Carpenter

If the police read your diary, it’s considered publication

Back in 1998 in Houston police officers entered an apartment in response to a report of a black man waving a gun around. In the bedroom of the apartment the police were shocked and horrified to find two men engaged in anal sex (or, as one of the two witnessing officers later equivocated, oral sex, maybe?); certain such pleasures had to be illegal (and peeved, no doubt, at finding no guns) the police arrested the men.

There are lots of cruel absurdities in the campaign against the gay. These days most of the noxious rhetoric comes out of the mouths of Republicans, that party having become the default representative of racists, homophobes, and misogynists. Example:

Harris County [Texas] GOP chairman Gary Polland … told the press that the state sodomy law was not unconstitutional and should not be repealed. … “We think it would definitely send the wrong message and signal a continuing deterioration of morals in our society,” he stated, asserting that privacy was not an issue in the case because the sexual conduct of the men became public when police entered the bedroom.

Yes, I bolded that last clever gambit because, c’mon, it’s just so fun!

Lots of people have “evolved” on gay matters since 1998. Current Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel was spouting off in the U.S. Senate about the evils of homosexuals back in 1998, but now he’s assuring the BLT with G community that he’s fully in support of something-having-to-do-with-gays-but-don’t-ask-too-closely. President Obama’s spokesfolks claim that Hagel will be carrying out the president’s policies, which are totally pro-gay, don’t y’know, and 1998 was ever so long ago. Maybe Mr Polland, too, has evolved into a new humanity, who knows? Is he up for a post in the administration?

The Supreme Court evolved back in 2003, overruling their 1986 anti-gay ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick, with Lawrence v. Texas thus throwing out all state sodomy laws. Lawrence was one of the men arrested in what GOP chairman Gary Polland then considered public space.

source of quote: Flagrant Conduct: the story of Lawrence v. Texas by Dale Carpenter

Constipation = Masturbation?

I’d read before that in the late 1800s there was a lot of hysteria about sexuality, masturbation in particular being considered a dangerous scourge (because everybody secretly knew they were doing it?), and that Kellogg’s Corn Flakes was originally invented in order to (somehow) prevent masturbation. Why Kellogg thought cereals might be helpful in the anti-masturbation fight I don’t recall. I mean, who can remember all the dubious notions that underpin modern life? So when I came across this explanation, that constipation could be a sexual thrill, I had to blink:

Constipation was judged to excite the nerves of the pelvis and encourage insalubrious behavior; both Sylvester Graham’s eponymous cracker and John Kellogg’s breakfast cereals were part of the effort to ensure regular, healthy bowel movements that would not cause undue stimulation to sensitive bits of the anatomy.

Puts a different light on those nice ladies pushing Ex-Lax on TV.

source: Straight: the surprisingly short history of heterosexuality by Hanne Blank

The Human Genome Project

In his new DNA USA: a genetic portrait of America (2012), Bryan Sykes remembers the hype around the Human Genome Project:

All you needed to know was the DNA sequence and everything would flow from that. This was pure hubris … ten years and billions of dollars later, the Human Genome Project has achieved very little as far as alleviating or even untangling the suffering caused by disease. The claims of ten years ago that we were about to witness the greatest medical advance since antibiotics have proved, thus far, to be thoroughly hollow.

Hm. Yes. I’m remembering the hooplah. Ten years ago, was it? Really.

Techno-hype. What else was going to completely upend the status quo? Personal computing? The paperless office? The internet? Twitter?

Revolutions.

Is that all there is? Then let’s keep dancing!

counting syllables

Everybody knows that a haiku is a poem consisting of three lines, the first five line syllables, the second seven, the third five again.

But what is a syllable? Presumably, when setting up a scheme in which the poet counts pieces, each piece is intended to be equivalent. Otherwise, why do it? It’s always puzzled me that in English “wound” has one syllable, the same number as “it”; “strength” has one syllable, while “into,” which, it seems to me, takes less time to say, has two.

The Japanese, who invented haiku, have notions about syllables that I don’t think quite correspond to what we English speakers think.

According to Harold G. Henderson in his An Introduction to Haiku:

If anyone wishes to do ‘syllable-counting’ he should remember that Japanese count in “ji-on,” which corrrespond only roughly to English syllables. Most ji-on are either vowels or short syllables ending in a vowel; but the ‘n’ that in English would conclude a syllable (as in ‘ban’) is also a ji-on, as is the first of any doubled consonant. E.g. ‘teppatsu’ (te-p-pa-tsu) and ‘Onjo’ (O-n-jo-o) both have four ji-on.

This helps explain why translators often say that haiku in Japanese are very short, in experience shorter even than the seventeen syllables we English speakers think awfully clipped.

Fogbank, for example

Things decay. Just sitting around unused things decay. Even if protected from active agents of entropy like sun and wind and rain. Things by themselves, alone and untended, go through changes.

Knowledge gets lost. It’s hard to imagine in an era where information is supposedly expanding at an exponential rate, but some stuff we learned how to do once we no longer have the know-how for. Maybe the processes didn’t get written down comprehensively, or the instructions were misplaced. Maybe the people who had the skills dropped dead.

I confess I hadn’t considered the possibility of America’s nuclear arsenal being a victim of these two truths. Nuclear bombs just sitting around lose their effectiveness over time; internal chemical reactions make them unstable – and dangerous. Being a nuclear power requires maintenance of the stockpiles. But sometimes we don’t quite know how to do that, it seems.

Rachel Maddow discusses the difficulties in her book, Drift: the unmooring of American military power:

These … fixes … require[] real, hard-won technical nuclear expertise … Fuzes, for example, were failing, and there was nobody around who could fix them: ‘Initial attempts to refurbish Mk21 fuzes were unsuccessful,’ admitted an Air Force general, ‘in large part due to their level of sophistication and complexity.’ The fuze that previous generations of American engineers had invented to trigger a nuclear explosion (or to prevent one) were apparently too complicated for today’s generation of American engineers. …

Then there was the W76 problem. W76s were nuclear bombs based mostly on the Navy’s Trident submarines. By refurbishing them, we thought we might get another twenty or thirty years out of them before they needed replacing. The problem with refurbishing the W76s – with taking them apart, gussying them up, and putting them back together – is that we had forgotten how to make those things anymore. One part of the bomb had the code name ‘Fogbank.’ Fogbank’s job was to ensure that the hydrogen in the bomb reached a high enough energy level to explode on cue. But no one could remember how to make Fogbank. … [N]o one today remembers the exact formula …

It took more than a year just to rebuild the long-dismantled Fogbank manufacturing plant at the Oak Ridge nuclear lab … But even after years of trying, even after the Fogbank production program went to ‘Code Blue’ high priority, the technicians were never able to reproduce a single cauldron of Fogbank possessed of its former potency.

“You’re not supposed to look like popcorn!”

Retired as a principal dancer for the New York City Ballet, Jock Soto filled the dance need in his life with teaching. I like some of the metaphors he uses with his students:

[W]hen you take a ballerina by the wrists it shouldn’t look like you are riding a motorcycle.

Never paddle a ballerina in a turn. Stir her discreetly with your finger in finger turns, not like you have a spoon and she is a pot of soup.

I can’t quite picture what paddling a ballerina would look like. But that probably just indicates how ignorant I am of the art. Plus maybe I like imagining a ballerina as a canoe?

Soto says he finds himself using cooking metaphors while he teaches. I imagine Soto quietly giving the advice above, then shouting when the boys are on the floor.

”Don’t stir her like a pot of soup! She is not a pot of soup!”

“Don’t stand there like a frozen fish stick!”

When an ensemble exercise with eighteen boys was horribly executed I stopped them and scolded: “You’re not supposed to look like popcorn!”

source: Every Step You Take: a memoir by Jock Soto

word of the day: tyro

word in context: “[O]nly a tyro asks what a poem ‘means’; the only thing that matters is what effect it has.”

definition: a beginner in learning : novice

source: An Introduction to Haiku: an anthology of poems and poets from Basho to Shiki by Harold G. Henderson

“a death of fabricated personhood”

For Laci Lee Adams being called to ministry and coming out as bisexual are intertwined stories. In one of her sermons she uses death as a metaphor in a way that is exciting, transformative, and kind of creepy:

There can be no new life without a death of an old life. Coming out is a death. It is a death of an old way of living! It is a death of a life of lies! It is a death of unhealthy expectations! It is a death of fabricated personhood! And let me tell you, death is difficult! And we need to be able to sit with death because when we can really embrace death, we can more fully appreciate resurrection.

Lies do not die a quiet death.

I can imagine being stirred as this sermon is delivered. But there’s something about the metaphor that disturbs me. We do not die every day. We do not die, only to be reborn every year like a crop of barley. “When we … embrace death,” Adams says, “we … appreciate resurrection.” Are we really talking about death here? Death is permanent. Except when negated by resurrection. In which case death is not death. For death is permanent. Death-with-resurrection is death-as-temporary-thing. “What happened to you?” “Oh, I died.” “You died!” “Yeah, but I got better.”

The paragraph quoted is from “A Quietly Queer Revolution” by Laci Lee Adams in the anthology The Full Spectrum: a new generation of writing about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other identities edited by David Levithan and Billy Merrell

words of wisdom from the Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Travis Stanton remembers a life-changing encounter:

I had the good fortune to hear Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak to an arena full of students and faculty at my small private liberal arts college in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Toward the end of the presentation, Tutu allowed for a brief question-and-answer period. One student stood up and addressed the archbishop. She noted the work he had done in his own country of South Africa to address the issue of gay and lesbian equality, and asked, “Isn’t that contradictory to what the Bible has to say about homosexuality?”

The archbishop paused for what seemed like an eternity. I remember naively thinking that his answer would change the world – either opening up the hearts and minds of the audience members, or forever slamming the door on my neatly appointed closet. Then he started to laugh. “The Bible says a lot of things I hope you don’t believe,” he chuckled.

quoted from “A Fairy’s Tale” by Travis Stanton in the anthology The Full Spectrum: a new generation of writing about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other identities edited by David Levithan and Billy Merrell

“So, you think you might be gay?”

Here’s a striking image from a coming out story:

I checked out every book the library had on queer youth, fiction and non-fiction. They had seventy-six. I spread the books over the house, stacked on the kitchen counter, balanced on the arms of the couch, perched by [the] desk chairs, piled on the coffee table, and liberally scattered around my bedroom. A few days later one of [my parents] said in passing, “So, you think you might be gay?” and I said, “Yes.”

quoted from “Queer: Five Letters” by Kat Wilson in the anthology The Full Spectrum: a new generation of writing about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other identities edited by David Levithan and Billy Merrell

The Most Famous Song Moldova Ever Produced

"[T]he minibus blasted a song I heard in every Eastern European country in 2004: O-Zone's tune 'Dragostea din tei,' which most of the world knows as 'Numa Numa.' It hit number one on the charts throughout Europe and was number three in the UK. YouTube amateur lip-synching video versions of the song have gotten over one billion views. ... Eastern Europeans consistently told me that they were a Romanian pop group. However, they originated out of Moldova. Sadly, Moldova rarely gets credit for the most famous song it ever produced."

source of quote: The Hidden Europe: what Eastern Europeans can teach us by Francis Tapon

That's the nice thing about the internet, it can provide the audio-visual dimension to what otherwise is flat text.

As long as I'm posting one goofy overplayed pop song, why not one more? Kent and I finally caught up with "Gangnam Style" by PSY, the most popular South Korean pop song ever:



Oh, why stop with two? Let's go on to Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe." Could it be the most popular Canadian pop song ever? We'll see.

giant artificial manhood

“The women are voluptuous and curvy, with enormous strap-on dildos that look like authentic if colossally oversized penises. The site is full of scenes of attractive, busty women stroking their giant artificial manhood until geysers of fake semen spray across the room.”

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

Ogas and Gaddam are describing a website devoted to futanari porn. It's big in Japan, it seems.

Puts me in mind of Steely Dan III in Burroughs' Naked Lunch - "Mary is strapping on a rubber penis. 'Steely Dan III from Yokohama,' she says, caressing the shaft. Milk spurts across the room."

I've posted about Steely Dan before.

"almost anything homosexual"

“During the 1992 Tokyo Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, an estimated 80 percent of the audience were straight women who wanted to watch men have sex. As journalist Richard McGregor writes, ‘In Japan, almost anything homosexual can attract an all-female audience.’ … [W]henever a Japanese animated television series or male-targeted manga series becomes extremely popular, the producers almost always issue a boy-love version, where the male characters have sex with each other. ‘It’s widely understood that the audience for these boy-love stories is women.’”

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

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

40% chance

“According to recent DNA analysis, through the history of the human race about 80 percent of the women reproduced, but only 40 percent of men reproduced.”

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

I remember a primate researcher saying that human sexual dimorphism (in regard to the relative sizes of men and women) is consistent with our being the descendants of families of one father and two mothers. In a species that is primarily monogamous the males and females are much the same size and weight. Gibbons, an example. On the other extreme would be gorillas – big big male, several much smaller females.

the single most popular

“[W]hat is the single most popular search term users enter into the PornHub search engine?

“Mom”

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

Glenn Ingersoll in silhouette at 2012 Berkeley Poetry Festival

This was in May of this year. The sound is fairly good. Crank it up!

update: When I first watched this I couldn't see my face, but it looks like the contrast has been improved quite a bit. Thanks, litseen!

More Berkeley Poetry Festivals vids at the litseen youtube channel.