(Moves quickly into the male body and man-on-man sex, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
Terrible days in the heat, barely functioning, while I accumulate promises to write on various topics, praise scholars of note, and follow up on earlier postings. So I’m feeling singularly inadequate — have in fact reached the point of taking a posting, any posting, off the gigantic heap of things in preparation, just to get something, anything, done. (Meanwhile, I’m supposed to be cheered that the day is predicted to be “much cooler” than yesterday — a high of merely 86F instead of 98F. That would still leave me breathless, profoundly exhausted, and unable to think clearly. I did go out at 6:30 am to water the plants in the cool of the morning, to protect them from heat death, and that actually was pleasant. Now I’m just avoiding going outdoors.
In any case, this is bringing you a follow-up to my 5/11/24 posting “The gay handshake”, which was about the trope of the blowjob as gay handshake. Today it’s the penis as gay scallop shell, on (images of) cocks as a gay equivalent of (images of) scallop shells — penises as a design motif in decor. Dicks treated like not only scallop shells, but also thistles, dolphins, pineapples, roses, tigers, bumble bees, lilies, elephants, and peacock feathers (and many other things) as figurative motifs. Alongside more abstract motifs, like the fleur-de-lis, Greek key, quatrefoil, genital triad, Chinese knot, chevron, star, and paisley motifs. And color motifs, like the Princeton orange and black, the Ohio State scarlet and gray, and the gay rainbow flag colors.
First, to recap. From “The gay handshake”, on
[Stanley Stellar] recording the places of cruising and tricking for men who have sex with men: what I’ve called the subterranean world of sex between men in public
This subterranean world: cruising spots in public parks, the famous trucks in NYC’s West Village back in the day, gay baths and sex clubs, t-rooms (mensrooms repurposed for sex between men), and so on — including Stellar’s special province, the West Side piers in NYC.
(#1) Illustration added 7/6/24: June Blowjob, 1982 from Stanley Stellar, The Piers (Kapp Kapp, 2024)All places where sex between men (especially cocksucking, which is quick and easy, and requires no special preparation or clean-up, so can be smoothly managed pretty much anywhere) is available in spaces that are in some sense public and are open to other like-minded men but are carefully concealed from outsiders (hence, subterranean).
Man-on-man sex in such places is not just an encounter between men, but is a social experience as well, a form of homosociality, and it’s socially regulated; every place has its customs, and the loci of subterranean sex between men are no exceptions. Beyond the regulation, such places are significantly celebratory, involving shared delight in what takes place in them — the sort of celebration experienced by crowds at rock concerts, fans at sports events, enthusiasts at the opera, and the like. Note also: shared delight; in such places, men join with others, maybe even share bits of their lives and feelings with them; they are places of social experiences.
The trope of the blowjob as gay handshake. And so Stanley Stellar views the sexual encounters at the piers, which (like those in t-rooms) are very largely blow jobs, as routine social enjoyments, roughly analogous to catching a burger and a beer with a buddy. This way of looking at things turns the received wisdom of straightfolk on its head: it’s not that gay guys are obsessed with sex, especially with giving and getting blowjobs; it’s that they think of blowjobs as a casual bonding ritual among men — pleasant and gratifying, but ordinary and of little consequence. Stellar and plenty of men who have sex with men hold this view as one piece of their social construction of reality; and it has found expression in the trope of the blowjob as gay handshake.
Design motifs in decor. My little condo is visually rich, awash in design motifs of many kinds: comic collages combining famous artworks and popular culture; comic collages of mine on academic themes, flowers, gay rainbows, attractive men, penguins, elephantids (mammoths and elephants), artwork by my friend Max Meredith Vasilatos, Zwicky cats, phallic symbols (but not actual phalluses), and of course family photographs. This stuff is all over the house, including the bedroom. But as I’ve reported in a number of postings, the bedroom is another land entirely.
As I wrote in my 10/14/22 posting “Male art: the hidden talent of the conch”:
My bedroom is a virtual forest of images of and simulacra of penises, but elsewhere in the house they’re concealed. My living room is scarcely a woodland of innocence, but I draw the line at confronting visitors with dicks on display and penises on parade.
My 12/12/21 posting “Dioramas of Phallusia” imagines my bedroom as Phallusia, the Land of Phalluses, with its complexly penis-saturated decor. Among the things in it: three penis-oriented dioramas in my bedroom, two of them incorporating recently acquired play figures with prominent dicks in places not provided in nature; and gay-sex alphabet cubes (by Vadim Temkin) arranged to spell out F U ARNOLD (which I take to be a wish that I be well and truly pedicated).
Two of those play figures:
(#2) A bunch of Dicky Bananas
(#3) A pair of Dickephants
Separately, an enormous collection of my XXX-rated comic homerotic collages (packed with dicks and guys engaged in a variety of sex acts with one another) covers the bedroom walls — plus (recently added) several hypersexual pages from Tom of Finland calendars.
So there are penises everywhere you look, in extraordinary profusion. Also a great many penguins and elephantids (mammoths and elephants), of course, but mostly the effect is of being transported to Dickland. Then, since they’re everywhere, they melt into the background, the way design motifs do, and no longer arouse the emotional responses that a big hard dick on one actual sweaty naked stud would; they have become mere design motifs, like scallop shells.
But wait, it’s better than that. With very few exceptions, every one of dicks in Phallusia is meant to be funny, in one way or another. When I attend to them individually, I don’t get a hard-on, or even a dick twinge; instead, I smile, or even laugh out loud. But mostly, they’re just pleasantly there, like the penguin mobile hanging in the middle of the room, or the stuffed mammoth toys in the room. Or the scallop-shell figures on flatware, as in this lovely place setting of Frank Smith Fiddle Shell pattern sterling silver:
(#4) On sale on eBay
