On our last visit to Australia (in “Bruce Bruce Bruce” on the 27th), we started out in Aussie underwear (the Daily Jocks AUS line), moved through Monty Python and Bruce as a  stereotypically Aussie name (and in the U.S., as a stereotypically gay name) and on to Barry Humphries and two Australian characters he created, with notes on the Aussie celebration of working-class masculinity (amiable crudity, matiness) and disdain for effete Pommies (Brits). At the end, a promise:

For a later posting, on Aussie masculinity (and class): aussieBum underwear, Shearing the Rams by Tom Roberts, and Slim Dusty.

Now’s the time. Looking ahead: two images of Aussie men in their aussieBum swimwear and underwear, a surfer and a jackaroo:

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First, two linguistic notes.

Note 1, on Aussie, the national nickname, usable as (count) N or Adj. This is pronounced Oz-ee /azi/ by Australians, but often /ɔsi/ (from the spelling Aussie) by outsiders (including, I see, NOAD2), to the great annoyance of actual Australians.

Note 2, on the bum of aussieBum. In both BrE and AuE, this noun has the same ambiguity as AmE ass and BrE/AuE arse. Green’s Dictionary of Slang has ‘the posterior, buttocks’ and ‘anus, rectum’ (from the 14th century on). Then also:

in a sexual context, the vagina (from the 17th century on)

in s sexual context, the anus as a target for sodomy (from 1681 on); in this sense, used in a number of compounds (bum boy, bum bandit, etc.)

BrE bum (probably also AuE, though I have no cites for this) has been verbed, as a transitive meaning ‘to sodomise’. Two cites from the collection Green gives for this usage: the first, [orig. published] 1970 in Angry Young Man Alan Sillitoe’s A Start in Life:

(1979) 347: If he pansies after a young man he’s buggering his son [undersood as: then in his imagination he’s buggering his son] … If he gets off with an older man he’s being bummed by his father [same proviso].

and a harrowing quote from Mark Manning’s Get Your Cock Out (ok, it’s fantastical fiction):

(2000) 57: When I was seven the fucking idiot started using my arse like a dartboard, bumming me stupid every fucking night.

Interestingly, Green has various senses of transitive arse (a verbing of the noun) in BrE and AuE, but none in a sexual sense (in particular, no cites for a sense ‘to sodomise’), and also cites for the very common intransitive arse about, arse around ‘waste time, idly wander about (1984), ‘fool around’ (1973) etc., again none sexual.

Brief conclusion: otherwise very similar lexical items can go their own ways morphologically and syntactically.

aussieBum. Back to the underwear. From Wikipedia, in a rockily written entry:

aussieBum is an Australian men’s swimwear and underwear manufacturer.

All aussieBum products are manufactured in Australia with the business run completely out of the company’s headquarters in the Sydney suburb of Leichhardt.

The company has achieved international recognition for several products such as the Wonderjock, and Essence underwear; which contains vitamins locked in the fibre which releases through the skin

… In November 2006, the Wonderjock was launched in the aussieBum underwear lines. Wonderjocks have been designed to lift and enhance a man’s genitals, through the use of a fabric cup used to protrude everything out instead of just down. 50,000 pairs of the new underwear were sold in the first seven days of being released. The name was chosen as a pun on [well, an echo of or allusion to] the popular Wonderbra line of women’s push-up bras.

Yes, push-up men’s underwear, a step above mere pouchwear. It’s All About (perceived) Size. Here’s an extreme variant, the Wonderjock Pro:

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Then there’s the PocketJockIt, “a hidden pocket in your brief” (for condoms, lube, a cock ring, a small address book, a shopping list, or whatever, though it looks too small for a cellphone, so you’ll never have to say, “Excuse me, my briefs are ringing”):

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And the LoverBoy special:

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The aussieBum lines are sexy, playful, showy, outrageous (lots of cock-tease shots in their ads), and, most of all, high-masculine Aussie: cocky underwear (in several senses). You can watch a montage of their tv commercials in their video “My Australia”. And here’s the image from a famous ad campaign of theirs:

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This is a take-off on the Tom Roberts painting Shearing the Rams:

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From Wikipedia:

Shearing the Rams is an 1890 painting by the Australian artist Tom Roberts. The painting depicts sheep shearers plying their trade in a timber shearing shed. Distinctly Australian in character, the painting is a celebration of pastoral life and work, especially “strong, masculine labour” and recognises the role that wool-growing played in the development of the country.

One of the most well known and loved paintings in Australia, Shearing the Rams has been described as a “masterpiece of Australian impressionism” and “the great icon of Australian popular art history”. The painting is part of the National Gallery of Victoria Australian art collection.

(I can’t help imagining the expression shearing the rams turned into slang for sheepsex.)

And that brings us to Slim Dusty.

A while back, at a Saturday breakfast involving my daughter Elizabeth, my grand-daughter Opal, and me, we rambled into the difficulties of explaining war to little kids (think kindergardeners) who’ve never experienced war close-up or personally, and that somehow led Elizabeth and me to Australians and war (Opal’s dad is Australian, and she has relatives in AU, PNG, and NZ), and the fact that Australia has WWI memorials everywhere but relatively few WWII memorials — because WWI had a gigantic impact on the country, something like 30% of its young men having been killed in the war.

Elizabeth has been trying to educate Opal about her Australian heritage, and at this point in breakfast she was reminded of the iconic figure Slim Dusty, From Wikipedia:

David Gordon Kirkpatrick …, known professionally as Slim Dusty (13 June 1927 – 19 September 2003), was an Australian country music singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer, who was an Australian cultural icon and one of the country’s most awarded stars, with a career spanning nearly seven decades, the archetypical “Father of County Music”. He was known to record songs in the legacy of Australian poets Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson that represented the Australian bush lifestyle and also for his many trucking songs.

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Australia has an official national anthem, “Advance Australia Fair”, but its unofficial national song is certainly “Waltzing Matilda”, a ballad cebrating the lives of swagmen (itinerant transient laborers) in the Australian bush. You can watch a Slim Dusty performance of the song here.

Then a trucker and beer-drinking song, “Pub With No Beer”, which you can watch here.

And finally, another comic beer-drinking song, ringing changes on Australian men’s names, “Duncan”, which you can watch here.

The lyrics for the last:

I love to have a beer with Duncan
I love to have a beer with Dunc.
We drink in moderation
And we never ever ever get rollin’ drunk
We drink at the Town and Country
Where the atmosphere is great
I love to have a beer with Duncan
‘Cause Duncan’s me mate, yeah

I love to have a beer with Colin
I love to have a beer with Col.
We drink in moderation
And it doesn’t really matter if he brings his doll
We drink at the Town and Country
Where the atmosphere is great
I love to have a beer with Colin
‘Cause Colin’s me mate

I love to have a beer with Kevin
Oh I love to have a beer with Kev.
We drink in moderation
And he drives me home in his big old Chev.
We drink at the Town and Country
Where the atmosphere is great
I love to have a beer with Kevin
‘Cause Kevin’s me mate

I love to have a beer with Patrick
I love to have a beer with Pat
We drink in moderation
And it wouldn’t really matter if the beer was flat
We drink at the Town and Country
Where the atmosphere is great
I love to have a beer with Patrick
‘Cause Patrick’s me mate

I love to have a beer with Robert
I love to have a beer with Bob
We drink in moderation
Just one more and back on the job
We drink at the Town and Country
Where the atmosphere is great
I love to have a beer with Robert
‘Cause Robert’s me mate

The song has high earworm potential.

… the item of PUMP! underwear featured in this sale ad from Daily Jocks yesterday. With my caption:

(#1)

Cruising in his Jogger, Joe
Enjoyed feeling himself up in those
Hot pockets, which
Drove the boys wild

He got one for
His guy Kev, so they could
Cruise as a couple. They loved
Three-ways, and the
Boys all wanted it

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Joe and Kev are seriously into shirt-lifting and displaying their pits. Joe in his neon green Shockwave Tank, Kev in his dark blue Star Tank:

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(#4)

(Though there’s a substantial amount in this posting on art, books, and fashion, there’s also quite a lot about men’s bodies and man-man sex, in very plain language, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Posted on AZBlogX on the 31st, “X-rated Colby Keller”, with five shots of artist and gay pornstar Colby Keller (who appeared on this blog in a 5/7/13 posting “The protean Colby Keller”, about “mail art”, gay porn, and playfulness): three from Mike McKinley, which can be arranged in a sequence, though they were taken at different times: CK unzipping in preparation for sex, CK exhibiting his body, and especially his substantial hard cock; and CK with gay pornstar Duncan Black, immediately post-fuck. Then two from Chris Ambidge: one showing CK doing a stool-lift, exhibiting his very considerable strength and balance; and one with CK displaying a favorite art book (more on the book soon), which had to go on AZBlogX because that substantial hard cock of his is standing up right in front of the book.

Before I get into the art and the steamy sex, here’s a pleasant, somewhat eccentric shot of CK amidst a field of flowers in Maine in 2014:

(#1)

CK is red-haired and changes his appearance fairly often. He’s 35 and thinking about retiring from porn. Meanwhile, he’s a strong presence in social media: he tweets (under several identities, but @colbykeller is the basic one), maintains a blog with a very large following, Big Shoe Diaries, and has a busy tumblr account (i-see-penis by cheese helen; CK is “Colby as in Cheese, Keller as in Helen”). He is endlessly playful and also constantly outrageous, and enthusiastic about sex, especially fucking (where he’s equally into topping and bottoming; asked by an interviewer about his sexual orientation, which is in fact gay gay gay, he paused for a moment to consider the question and then firmly replied, “anal”); he’s also thoughtful, widely read, and gives wonderful interviews.

From Wikipedia:

Colby Keller (born October 18, 1980) is an American visual artist, blogger, and adult actor. His career in adult film started in 2004 at Sean Cody and has since expanded to include such studios as Cocksure Men, Randy Blue, Titan Men, Falcon, CockyBoys and Men.com. Keller has amassed a large fan base with both his films and his long-standing blog, The Big Shoe Diaries.

… Born October 18, 1980 in Michigan, Colby Keller was raised in Texas,where he graduated from the University of Houston, with a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology. In addition he is a graduate of The Maryland Institute College of Art, with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Visual and Performing Arts.

He has two identities and (until recently) largely separate lives. One is as a university-trained artist (in several forms, but much of it one kind of performance art or another) and scholar of artists and art history; in this guise, he hangs out a lot with artists, and they pay him the favor of drawing him, painting him, and taking photographs of him. Here are two drawings, one by Sai Hendrij, one by Paul Rob Wright (cropped here so as not to have to go onto AZBlogX):

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His other identity is as a very public personality, the gay pornstar Colby Keller. Recently, his gay porn work has more and more taken on the character of a kind of performance art, and his performance art proper has increasingly incorporated deeply X-rated gay sex acts. In addition, he’s taken up male modeling, but not the usual sort of modeling celebrities in sports and porn go into because of their very attractive bodies; instead, he’s been modeling women’s clothes for the designer Vivienne Westwood (there will eventually be photos). I did say outrageous above.

But first, some more art, in particular the art book he’s displaying, along with his hard dick, in #5 on the AZBlogX posting: Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist, ed. by Harald Falckenberg & Peter Weibel, MIT Press 2009.

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From the publisher’s blurb on amazon.com:

Paul Thek occupied a place between high art and low art, between the epic and the everyday. During his brief life (1933-1988), he went against the grain of art world trends, humanizing the institutional spaces of art with the force of his humor, spirituality, and character. Twenty years after Thek’s death from AIDS, we can now recognize his influence on contemporary artists ranging from Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman to Matthew Barney, Mike Kelley, and Paul McCarthy, as well as Kai Althoff, Jonathan Meese, and Thomas Hirschhorn. This book brings together more than 300 of Thek’s works — many of which are published here for the first time — to offer the most comprehensive display of his work yet seen. The book, which accompanies an exhibition at ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art presenting Thek’s work in dialogue with contemporary art by young artists, includes painting, sculpture, drawing, and installation work, as well as photographs documenting the room-size environments into which Thek incorporated elements from art, literature, theater, and religion. These works chart Thek’s journey from legendary outsider to foundational figure in contemporary art. In their antiheroic diversity, Thek’s works embody the art revolution of the 1960s; indeed, Susan Sontag dedicated her classic Against Interpretation to him. Thek’s treatment of the body in such works as “Technological Reliquaries,” with their castings and replicas of human body parts, tissue, and bones, both evoke the aura of Christian relics and anticipate the work of Damien Hirst. The book, with more than 500 images (300 in color) and nineteen essays by art historians, curators, collectors, and artists, investigates Thek’s work on its own terms, and as a starting point for understanding the work of the many younger artists Thek has influenced.

(Unfortunately, the book is out of print, and the prices for used copies are sky-high.)

CK in earlier enties on AZBlogX:

4/1/13: Easter threesomes (link): one shot of CK displaying his body; two shots of CK, Conner Habib, and Girth Brooks in a threesome (from Laid Off)

5/7/13: Sex with Colby Keller (link): on Big Shoe Diaries; entries about CK getting fucked by John Magnum, fucking Zach Alexander; videos of In Bed with Colby Keller, giving sex advice

5/22/13: Dale Cooper (link): two shots of Cooper and CK, goofing around in the water and crossing swords/penises

4/6/15: Cumshots and cumfaces (link): shot of cumfaced CK (another thing he likes a lot)

And in “The protean Colby Keller” on this blog: mail art and the Fluxus movement; Keller’s self-description on his Twitter account (“Artist, Blogger, Porn Star, Video Sexpert for Manhunt.Net’s Get In Bed with Colby Keller, I SEE PENIS aficionado: I SEE PENIS refers to Keller’s enthusiasm for finding phallic images all over the place); publicity shot of CK; shot of CK getting his chest hair shaved; shot of CK displaying an art book (not the one on Thek); penis-hugging Paper Colby doll (made by Canadian comic book artist and writer J. Bone)

Now from a 1/25/16 interview by Tim Teeman in the Daily Beast:

From Porn Star to Fashion Star: Colby Keller on Vivienne Westwood, Sex for Money, and Fighting Gay Conservatism: As Colby Keller becomes Vivienne Westwood’s muse, he talks candidly about a tough coming out, attempted suicide, and how sex and porn liberated him.

In one shot for Vivienne Westwood’s new womenswear campaign, the gay porn star Colby Keller is in red thigh-high boots, a tiny pair of bikini briefs, and a tatty-looking — though probably very expensive — housecoat.

In another picture he is in a green mesh dress, and in another an off-the-shoulder, skin-tight frock, with a cutout over an impressive pectoral. In a third, he is wearing a blue T-shirt, blue briefs, and yellow ankle boots.

He poses full frontal, with modesty cleverly protected, in another Westwood shot, in a black evening coat and black boots; and another picture has him in a kind of white jumpsuit meets Regency dandy that recalls New Romanticism at its most gender-blurry.

The 35-year-old Keller — a 6-foot, 200-pound, handsome drink of water, with beard, big arms, hairy chest, and friendly smile — might not appear to be the first choice for a male model for womenswear: He is far from waif-like and androgynous.

He is — as his fans know him through his videos for distributors including Sean Cody, Randy Blue, CockyBoys, and others — rugged, bearded, and muscular.

The shoot was a break from Keller’s Colby Does America project, in which he aims to have sex [actually, he says “fuck”] on camera with someone in every state (he is up to 49).

The Westwood shoot was his first high-profile non-porn gig. When we met at The Daily Beast offices — he with his husband and publicist, the fabulously named Karl Marks — Keller said the fashion shoot may have derived from a picture of him in vintage Westwood trousers that his friend, the designer Bernhard Willhelm, sent to Andreas Kronthaler, Westwood’s husband.

The bits of life story that follow are thoughful, moving, sometimes harrowing. CK has some nice things to say about the mysteries of sexual chemistry, a matter of obvious concern to a man who makes one part of his living as a pornstar and who is engaged in digging up new partners in every state of the union.

Some shots from CK’s Westwood gig, starting with one that could have been a standard (male) underwear shot, except for those cute yellow boots:

(#5)

Then CK looking slutty in those big red boots and that tatty housedress (and those minimal bikini briefs):

(#6)

And finally, fetching in white and black:

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These are not even remotely drag performances, or even performances in an area where one sex might be seen as blending into the other, but instead are boldly gender-mixed performances, with strongly asserted masculinity combined comfortably with trappings of femininity.

Now to Colby Does America. First the title, a play on Debbie Does Dallas, but without the alliteration and entirely with guys. Digression on DDD: from Wikipedia:

Debbie Does Dallas is a 1978 pornographic film starring Bambi Woods. The plot of the film focuses on a team of cheerleaders attempting to earn enough money to send the titular character to Dallas, Texas, to try out for the famous “Texas Cowgirls” cheerleading squad. The fictional name “Texas Cowgirls” was seen as a take on the real-life Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Woods had previously tried out for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders in real life, but was cut during auditions. The film was highly successful, selling 50,000 copies when it made it to videotape, making it the most successful video release of a porn film in its time. It is regarded as one of the most important releases during the so-called “Golden Age of Porn”, and remains one of the best-known pornographic films.

Contrary to the title, the film is not set in Dallas nor does the eponymous Debbie “do” anyone in or from Dallas.

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Back to CK and his cross-country fucking. Here’s CK in one of a number of come-ons:

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(Some political content here, in sympathy both with those begging for work and with sex workers.)

The Colby Does America site has all sorts of stuff, including an appeal for money and a Whorestore, where you can buy stuff of CK’s (at substantial prices) to support the project. The News section has updates on the progress of the project, And you can browse through the states and select the video for any state that’s been finished, where “finished” means that CK chose his partner(s) and the setting for their encounter, selected collaborators for the project, had the encounter videotaped, and got it edited it down (often supplying music, and sometimes accompanying text with commentary). The videos are wildly disparate in tone and content (and length, though none is very long) — each one is in fact an art porn project on its own — and they’ve been edited to highlight parts that appealed to CK, so if you were hoping to see CK fucking (in either role) in every state, you’ll be disappointed: sometimes the fuck scene didn’t make the cut.

Three states. First, Ohio. Brief clip (1:38) set in the woods, CK getting his cock sucked.

Then, California. An ambitious piece directed by Justin Jorgensen, ““Plywood Wilderness”, set in The Zone: A Private Playground for Men, a Los Angeles sex club. CK wanders through the plywood wilderness for sex. A few from a fairly long section in a cubicle with three glory holes, two on opposed walls, one on the floor. Cocks appear in all three, and CK takes them all, sucking the one on the floor and jacking the two others. Later a rose appears in one of the holes; CK studies it in awe, smells it, fingers his anal rosette, inviting someone to fuck him.

Commentary by the director:

“Like much of my work, themes of masculine presentation, environment design, and solitude, are all in this piece.

I’m interested in sex spaces, how we choose them and/or design them, and our behavior in those spaces.

LA is a massive metropolis, but the nature here remains a part of the city. Coyotes on the sidewalk, deer crossing Mulholland, vines draping off the freeway overpass.

I wanted to bring that nature into the sex club space, which is artificial and fabricated. Synthesized techno playing. No windows. It’s the indoor (legal) version of (illegal) cruising in a public park or “wilderness” area. The act of sex, and literally “being on the prowl” is a very natural, maybe our most natural, animal behavior. So I wanted to address that tension, maybe excitement, that happens when we flirt with being an animal in an urban space.

In this film, amid the plywood partitions and cinder block passages of the sex club the outdoors to creep in like a memory or subconscious longing, and the experience becomes surreal and dreamlike, which is exactly what going to a sex club can be like.“ – Justin

Digression on Jorgensen. JJ has an Instagram page here and his own webpage here. And here, from the amazon.com page for his first book (with a foreword by Todd Oldham), Obscene Interiors: Hardcore Amateur Decor, Baby Tattoo Press 2004, paperback 2015:

From Publishers Weekly: Very post–”Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” this hilarious collection of photos drawn from Internet personal ads put the average Joe’s interior decorating under close scrutiny. What’s funniest about this slim and trim collection is that the men who originally placed the ads have been “grayed out”—reduced to solid silhouettes so as not to detract from the full effects of their decorating faux-pas (though likely Jorgensen’s initial impulse to obscure them had more to do with legal reasons). Those effects are heightened by arch captions from Jorgensen (justinspace.com), who writes of a gray figure sprawled out on a hideous plaid couch: “Who really cares if the couch clashes with the carpet? … It’s your place and it should make you happy.” Other highlights include a figure manacled to a bed made up with leather sheets. “And, you’d better condition the leather before you use them,” Jorgensen quips, “or your sweat will leave white sweat marks that will look like mildew.” The photos are smallish and low quality, in keeping with their Internet sources, with Jorgensen commenting (with a wealth of double-entendres) on each crime against good taste. Will this book make men rethink what’s around them when they’re posing for their photos? As Todd Oldham says in his foreword, “as evidenced in almost every photo, we have tragic spatial issues when it comes to hanging art and objects.” Or perhaps some people actually find fake wood paneling, bow-hunting equipment and overused leather armchairs irresistibly sexy.

About the Author: Justin Jorgensen, born in Fargo, North Dakota, moved to Los Angeles and began working as a designer. [BFA, 1997, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia] In 1999 he created the pop culture based, JustinSpace.com and the hysterical online feature “Obscene Interiors.” Now an Internet Provocateur, he has also designed music videos, created theme park attractions and sold candy at the circus.

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One sample:

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Back to Colby Does America and another state with a complex video, namely New York, which can be viewed here. This is a festival of cross-dressing, piles of gay sex (cocks in action every 4 or 5 seconds), outrageous costumes and props in intense hallucinogenic colors, and (performed by CK) masturbation as an art form. You have been warned.

The piece is a collaboration involving three parties: CK. the NYC avant-garde gay designer Brad Callahan under his label’s name BCALLA (the video served as an introduction to the BCALLA Fall/Winter 2015 collection), and the NYC gay porn studio CockyBoys (love the name), for which CK has acted a number of times; in addition to CK, the CockyBoys participants in the video are Levi Karter, Levi Michaels, Liam Riley, Ricky Roman, and Tayte Hanson.

Here’s a pair of stills from the video in which cocks are not, at the moment visible:

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The same actor (I think Ricky Roman, but I could be wrong) fucking a toy, on the left, and offering his ass for fucking, on the rght.

CockyBoys is not your run-of-the-mill gay porn studio. From Wikipedia:

CockyBoys is a New York City-based producer of gay internet pornography. Managed by CEO Jake Jaxson and his two partners, RJ Sebastian and Benny Morecock, the site has drawn attention from inside and outside the adult industry for blending arthouse erotica and experimental film with mainstream-style genre films. The 2012 reality television feature film Project GoGo Boy is considered the studio’s breakout hit.

Though CockyBoys primarily releases content through its website, the studio also manufactures a popular DVD line through EuroMedia Distribution. In addition to digital media, CockyBoys partnered with Bruno Gmünder in 2014 and published a book of erotic photography titled A Thing of Beauty, leading to an international book tour.

Footnote. I have seven CockyBoys DVDs, all released in 2010-12. With one exception, these are strictly episodic flicks, with four or five scenes, each with different actors, and with no unifying thread beyond some goal of gay desire — fucking / being fucked hard, mostly. The exception is 2011’s Name of the Game, CockyBoys’ first “narrative” DVD, with an overarching theme about three guys trying to make it in New York. It even has some “arty” editing. The rest of the set, interesting perhaps because of their names:

Revenge (2010), Ride Me (2010); Fuck the Pain Away (2011), Tough Love (2011); Break Him In (2012), Crazy for Cock (2012)

When The Name of the Game was released, the studio promised a sequel The Making of a GoGo Boy; it looks like this is what turned into Project GoGo Boy.

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?):

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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.

Today is Lunar New Year — and tomorrow is the religious holiday Shrove Tuesday, widely known in the U.S. (not just in New Orleans) as Mardi Gras ‘fat Tuesday’ (for the consumption of rich and fatty foods, before Ash Wednesday inaugurates Lent, a period of fasting and prayer) and a number of other names (more below). The name Mardi Gras has now been fixed on by a number of charitable organzations as the basis for the punning name Mardi Bras or Mardi Bras and Boxers (using the name of the women’s undergarment, the bra), money-raising events of many kinds held on Mardi Gras. Here’s an announcement for one in McKinney TX:

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Some other names for Shrove Tuesday: Pancake Day / Tuesday, Fastnacht Day (in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, where there are several alternative spellings), Fasching, and Carnival.

Though Shrove Tuesday is originally a Roman Catholic occasion, it also figures in the calendars of other Christian churches, notably the Lutheran and the Anglican churches. But you don’t have to be religiously observant, or even a Christian, to participate in and enjoy the food customs and the carnivals (lower-case C) of the day.

Mardi Gras beads seem to feature generally in Mardi Bras (and Boxers) events, some of which are charity balls framed as Mardi Gras celebrations. All have some connection to bras, often by way of fanciful bras fashioned for display, taking advantage of the fact that bras (and men’s boxer shorts, especially if they have briefs on underneath) are acceptable as indoor, if racy, wear in some contexts (and women can wear boxer shorts too). Like this rainbow number:

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And for men, here are boxers with Mardi Gras masks and beads on them:

(#3)

(The usual warning: not for kids or the sexually modest)

Two recent ads from Daily Jocks, both with double entendres (for Teamm8, in the header for the ad; for C-IN2, in the body of the ad), which I have of course expanded on in my captions.

Come Down Under

(#1)

Sex in shorts

They exhorted him to
Come Down Under, so he
Came in his shorts, right there in
Public, and it felt fan-bloody-
Fuckin’-tastic, but it was
Damn messy, and he got a lot of
Dirty looks.

(#2)

Hard time

Nasty boys, committed to
Underwear Jail, where you
Fought hard in the yard, no hands on
Dicks allowed, until one of you
Came – White always came
Rabbit-quick, so aroused by Black’s
Body, the smell of his
Sweat, knowing that Black would soon
Fuck him delirious.

C-IN2’s Underwear Jail, showing new inmates — fish — being initiated into the ways of the institution. (This is genuinely from C-IN2. The company’s website is a riot of sexiness. And jokiness.)

(#3)

Ad copy for #1:

Teamm8 2016 has been released with hot new swimwear and shorts now available. Featuring Teamm8’s innovative print technology, new colour combinations and designs to make you look good.

And for #2:

C-IN2 Men’s H+A+R+D Lowest Punt Trunk: Bold C-IN2 logo repeating around waistband and leg-straps contoured pouch with center seam and functional fly [in black, white, and grey]

Today’s Daily Jocks ad, for an offer featuring BCNÜ underwear (in this case an Atletico Sports Brief), showing the model alluringly posed on sheepskin:

(#1)

The same model, in a similar but darker pose, in a Grip Retro Brief:

(#2)

My caption:

Man-Dragon

He chose the name Mandrake,
His conventionally handsome veneer
Concealing a magical, dangerous
Creature, the taste of whose body drove
Men into delirium. Posing as an
Underwear model, he transformed
Men into beasts.

Background: on mandrakes, from Wikipedia:

A mandrake is the root of a plant, historically derived either from plants of the genus Mandragora [roughly ‘man-dragon’, in the nightshade or potato family, Solanaceae] found in the Mediterranean region, or from other species, such as Bryonia alba, the English mandrake, which have similar properties. The plants from which the root is obtained are also called “mandrakes”. Mediterranean mandrakes are perennial herbaceous plants with ovate leaves arranged in a rosette, a thick upright root, often branched, and bell-shaped flowers followed by yellow or orange berries. … They are very variable perennial herbaceous plants with long thick roots (often branched) and almost no stem. The leaves are borne in a basal rosette, and are very variable in size and shape, with a maximum length of 45 cm (18 in). They are usually either elliptical in shape or wider towards the end (obovate), with varying degrees of hairiness.

Because mandrakes contain deliriant hallucinogenic tropane alkaloids and the shape of their roots often resembles human figures [and allegedly shriek when pulled from the ground], they have been associated with a variety of superstitious practices throughout history. They have long been used in magic rituals, today also in contemporary pagan traditions such as Wicca and Odinism.

One species:

(#3)

And Mandrake the Magician, again from Wikipedia:

Mandrake the Magician is a syndicated newspaper comic strip, created by Lee Falk (before he created The Phantom). Mandrake began publication on June 11, 1934. Phil Davis soon took over as the strip’s illustrator, while Falk continued to script. The strip is distributed by King Features Syndicate.

Mandrake, along with the Phantom Magician in Mel Graff’s The Adventures of Patsy, are regarded by comics historians as the first superheroes of comics. Comics historian Don Markstein writes, “Some people say Mandrake the Magician, who started in 1934, was comics’ first superhero.”

Davis worked on the strip until his death in 1964, when Falk recruited current artist Fred Fredericks. With Falk’s death in 1999, Fredericks became both writer and artist. The Sunday Mandrake strip ended December 29, 2002.

Mandrake is a magician whose work is based on an unusually fast hypnotic technique. As noted in captions, when Mandrake “gestures hypnotically”, his subjects see illusions, and Mandrake has used this technique against a variety of villains including gangsters, mad scientists, extraterrestrials, and characters from other dimensions. At various times in the comic strip, Mandrake has also demonstrated other powers, including turning invisible, shapeshifting, levitation, and teleportation. His hat, cloak and wand, passed down from his father Theron, possess great magical properties which in time Mandrake learns how to use. Although Mandrake publicly works as a stage magician, he spends much of his time fighting criminals and combatting supernatural entities. Mandrake lives in Xanadu, a high-tech mansion atop a mountain in New York State. Xanadu’s features include closed circuit TV; a sectional road which divides in half; and vertical iron gates.

Lothar is Mandrake’s best friend and crimefighting companion. Mandrake first met Lothar during his travels in Africa. Lothar was “Prince of the Seven Nations”, a mighty federation of jungle tribes; but forbore to become king and instead followed Mandrake on his world travels. Lothar is often referred to as “the strongest man in the world”, with the exception of Hojo — Mandrake’s chef and secret chief of Inter Intel. Lothar is invulnerable to any weapon forged by man, impervious to heat, cold and possesses the stamina of a thousand men. He also cannot be harmed by magic directly (fire bolts, force bolts, spell incantations). He can lift an elephant by one hand easily.

Mandrake and Lothar:

(#4)

(Some explicit talk about man-man sex, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Today’s Daily Jocks ad, announcing in a shriek that CURBWEAR IS BACK!, with a shot of model Ben advertising one of his identities (on briefs in the British firm’s IDENTITY line):

(#1)

And here advertising another one of his identities (on an IDENTITY singlet and briefs):

(#2)

My caption:

Greek receptive, French insertive, that’s the way
Ben swings, and he has underwear to
Advertise his identities. His boyfriend likes
Sandwich sessions with Ben: blow him for a while,
Screw him – well, really, provide Hungry Ben with a
Dildo dick and a cum load – then finish Ben off in his
Mouth. Works for them both, and Sam gets a long time to
Look up into Ben’s handsome face, and into
The astounding eyes that once
Beckoned Sam to pursue a perfect
Stranger off the street for
Risky sex in a
Grubby alleyway.

We’ve visited Curbwear’s IDENTITY line before, in a 2/27/15 posting “Color and advertising your preferences”. Available slogans: Blow Me, Power Bottom, Total Top, Versatile, Circuit Boy, Active.

Ben is the model’s name on the Curbwear site. Sam is my invention. In any case, Ben and Sam are characters, not actual people.

Now, shots of Ben displaying his body and his identities out and about in London:

(#3)

(#4)

(Not about language. No direct discussion of sexual acts either.)

The most recent Daily Jocks ad, showing a model wearing a Supawear jock in the Supacharge line, with Lightning theme (there’s also a Thunder theme, but Lightning has the more startling colors):

(#1)

Jonas adored his
Lightning-themed
Jock strap, and
Pranced around in it
All day long, though he was
Reluctant to get
Plugged by that
Two-pronged
Electric monster.

For enthusiasts, here’s a close-up of the jock:

(#2)

Today’s Daily Jocks ad (for Marcuse swimwear, showing a model in the very low-rise line of swim briefs Jagger, in the color Ivory), and another model in the same swim briefs, plus a caption:

(#1)

(#2)

Both in their Marcuse Jaggers in Ivory, the
Spare intellectual end of extreme low-rise
Swim briefs, Mick and his brother Keith would
Troll the surf together for cute boys to
Double-team while disputing political economy
With them – the Jaggeds bewitched the pups with the
Smell of their sweat, the feel of their tight
Muscular bodies, and the
Acuity of their reasoning.

(Possibly relevant linguistic fact: there is a verb jag ‘stab, pierce, prick’, with a derived agent noun jagger.)

(Brothers Mick and Keith Jagged use a combination of heady sweat/muscles and acute reasoning to bring boys to their knees in sexual submission, just as Monty Python’s brothers Doug and Dinsdale Piranha used a combination of violence and sarcasm to intimidate the London underworld and bring the city to its knees.)

We lack helpful tattoos to distinguish the men, who are otherwise pretty similar. Different hair, different beards, but these are easily altered. However, Mick’s torso seems to be longer and his pecs bigger, and Keith’s inguinal crease looks much more pronounced, so I’ve given them different names.

The DJ ad copy:

New Marcuse Swimwear + Underwear have arrived. Explore new low-rise styles including Brave [has an Indian brave on the front panel], Rider [has wild horses on the pouch and rear panel], and Patrol [has a badge on the front panel].

Ouch on the “Indian brave”. Older styles (still available) include Jagger, Sunset, Flash, Vamper, Ibiza, Champion.

Here’s a different model in Rider, front and rear:

(#3)

(#4)

Omigod! There are
Wild horses stampeding
On my dick and ass!

(Almost no language stuff: it’s about mythic, in one sense, performances by hunky men. Yes, I have my shallow moments.)

The appearance on my cable tv menu of the playing of the 2012 Wrath of the Titans got me to check the movie out. That brought me to a list of (relatively) recent movies and tv shows with mythological themes and hunky actors in starring roles. By actor, reverse chronologically:

Sam Worthington (film: Perseus in Clash of the Titans (2010) and Wrath of the Titans (2012))

Brad Pitt (film: Achilles in Troy (2004))

Ryan Gosling (tv: Young Hercules (1998-9))

Kevin Sorbo (tv: Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995-99))

Worthington as Perseus. On the films, then on Worthington, who’s new to this blog:

[the Titans films:]  Clash of the Titans is a 2010 British-American fantasy adventure film and remake of the 1981 film of the same name produced by MGM (the rights to which had been acquired by Warner Bros. in 1996). The story is very loosely based on the Greek myth of Perseus. … it received generally negative reviews from critics and received two Golden Raspberry Awards nominations. The film’s [financial] success led to a sequel, Wrath of the Titans, released in March 2012. A third film titled Revenge of the Titans was in development but then later cancelled.

[Worthington] Samuel Henry John “Sam” Worthington (born 2 August 1976) is an English-born Australian actor, best known for his portrayals of main character Jake Sully in the second-highest-grossing film of all time, Avatar; Marcus Wright in Terminator Salvation; Perseus in Clash of the Titans and its sequel, Wrath of the Titans; and Alex Mason in the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops and its sequel Call of Duty: Black Ops II. … He performed predominantly in leading roles in a variety of low-budget films [before moving to major studio films], ranging from romantic drama and comedy-drama to science fiction and action.

Poster for the first film:

(#1)

Worthington as Perseus:

(#2)

Haven’t found a shirtless shot of Worthington in character, but here’s one of the man at the beach:

(#3)

The man is well-built and nice to look at, but not record-breaking in physique — but he’s well-represented on the net as enormously built and muscular (thanks to software manipulations), apparently in the form his fans would like to fantasize about his having. As the mythical Sam Worthington, you might say.

Brad Pitt as Achilles. The Titans movies were stinkers from the critics’ point iof view, but they made a ton of money. Troy, on the other hand, got critical acclaim and big bucks as well.

On the film, from Wikipedia:

Troy is a 2004 American epic adventure war film written by David Benioff and directed by Wolfgang Petersen. It is loosely based on Homer’s Iliad, though the film narrates the entire story of the decade-long Trojan War rather than just the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon in the ninth year. Achilles leads his Myrmidons along with the rest of the Greek army invading the historical city of Troy, defended by Hector’s Trojan army. The end of the film (the sacking of Troy) is not taken from the Iliad, but rather from Virgil’s Aeneid as the Iliad concludes with Hector’s death and funeral.

A poster:

(#4)

Pitt in costume as Achilles:

(#4)

and shirtless, but still as Achilles:

(#5)

Pitt is quite proud of the body he achieved for this role, and the net is full of postings about Pitt as Achilles, almost all of it providing advice on how to use Pitt’s rigorous workout routine to get a body like the one in #5 — if you’re a man and really really dedicated to the project.

My 8/6/13 posting “Seven Supermen and Brad Pitt” has a final section on Pitt with a write-up about him, a photo of the beautiful young man (Thelma and Louise), and one of the bulked-up mature hunk (Fight Club).

Back on 2/18/09, in “The Curious Case of B. B.”, I posted about someone who misquoted the movie title The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which stars Pitt) as The Curious Case of Benjamin Britten — which prompted someone else to post a womderful photo of Pitt as Britten with Tom Cruise as Peter Pears (actually Pitt and Cruise in Interview with the Vampire).

Gosling as Hercules. On the tv show, from Wikipedia:

Young Hercules was a spin-off series [framed as a prequel] from the television series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. It was aired on Fox Kids Network from September 12, 1998 to May 12, 1999. It lasted 1 season with 50 episodes and starred Ryan Gosling in the title role. The series was based on the Greek mythology hero, Hercules.

Gosling as the young Hercules in the show:

(#6)

An unusually beautiful hero, but then he was playing the young Hercules.

Gosling on this blog:

on 10/22/11, “Annals of taboo avoidance:’, about the site Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling

on 8/15/13, “Hollywood Sparks”, with a write-up about Gosling and shirtless photos

Sorbo as Hercules. About the earlier show, from Wikipedia:

Hercules: The Legendary Journeys is an American television series filmed in New Zealand. It was produced from January 16, 1995 to November 22, 1999, and was based on the tales of the classical Greek culture hero Heracles (Hercules was his Roman analogue). It ran for six seasons, producing action figures and other memorabilia as it became one of the highest rated syndicated television shows in the world at that time. Later it would be surpassed by its own spinoff show, Xena: Warrior Princess.

… The show starred Kevin Sorbo as Hercules; Michael Hurst, who had become a naturalized New Zealand citizen, first guest-starred in Season 1 to 2 as his sidekick Iolaus, and became a series regular from Seasons 3 to 6. Rotating as Hercules’ other regular companion, particularly in the first three seasons, was Salmoneus (Robert Trebor), a wheeler-dealer ever looking to make a quick dinar. In the later seasons, particularly after Kevin Sorbo suffered a serious health issue in Season 4, Michael Hurst, Robert Trebor and Bruce Campbell as Autolycus, King of Thieves, featured prominently along with the late Kevin Smith (1963-2002) as Ares, to ensure Kevin Sorbo could reduce his front of camera workload.

And very briefly about Sorbo:

Kevin David Sorbo (born September 24, 1958) is an American actor best known for the roles of Professor Radisson in God’s Not Dead, Hercules in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Captain Dylan Hunt in Andromeda, and Kull in Kull the Conqueror.

Sorbo as Hercules in the show:

(#7)

(Sorbo with a half-smile is entirely appropriate, since the show had a lot of humor in it)

and shirtless, still as Hercules:

 (#8)

(in his woven leather plants).

Gosling has a very nice body, Sorbo is a serious muscle hunk (fitted for playing a Greek hero). Both fine to look at, but different body types.

I found the show immensely enjoyable, and as a bonus you get (in it and in Xena) really stunning New Zealand scenery.

From Daily Jocks on the 2nd, a set of three images for 2eros underwear, with this ad copy (untouched here):

X MARKS THE SPOT

Australian luxury brand 2eros have released The X-Series, a new active underwear collection. Each styles comes in two marle colours, grey and black. It features 2EROS’s signature form fit and singled lined pouch for that enhanced but natural lift. Made from premium Lenzing Modal® which has epitomized pure luxury and softness for over 40 years.

Give your skin the ultimate sensual feeling, the fibre remains wonderfully soft even after repeated washing and retains its color brilliance.

(As you will see in #2 below, the spot that X marks seems to be the anus.)

[Quick addition: I neglected to explain marle. This is the British spelling corresponding to American marl. From NOAD2:

a mottled yarn of differently coloured threads, or fabric made from this yarn: blue marl leggings. ORIGIN late 19th cent.: shortening of marbled.

Similarly, red marl, navy marl, and, yes, grey/gray marl and black marl.]

Below the fold, the three images, in the sequence they came in, with a little tale of a romantic triangle in my captions.

(#1)

Scene 1: Negligent ebony and yearning ivory

Jamal, wanting nothing to do with a
White faggot looking for a black stud to
Top him, ignores the bitch; Tommy is
Wicked hot for him, but averts his gaze,
Wouldn’t want to be staring blatantly at the
Object of his desire.

(#2)

Scene 2: The dance of the two skivvies

Desperate, Tommy becomes openly
Seductive towards Jamal, does a
Bold ass tease, a sly cock tease for him,
But no dice: Tommy is
Devastated.

(#3)

Scene 3: The third man in grey

Comes muscular Brad, commanding in
Grey — Whoa! Jamal seriously
Reconsiders white guys.

Unpacking the titles of the three scenes is left as an exercise for the reader. But I’ll unpack part of the main title, “Tinging the scalene triangle”. Here’s one such triangle:

(#4)

Put Tommy at the left vertex, Jamal at the top right, Brad at the bottom right, so that the distances between their verticles corresponds to the emotional distances between the men.

Now, from the Know Your Meme site:

“Ah, the Scalene Triangle” is an expression associated with a video in which the narrator seductively repeats the phrase “ahh the scalene triangle” while zooming in on an illustration of the geometric figure.

On September 8th, 2012, Tumblr user Drawing Guitarist posted a video in which the narrator repeats the phrase “Ah, the scalene triangle” with increasingly sexual overtones [climaxing in “Aaaah, fuck me, scalene triangle!”] while zooming in on an illustration of a scalene triangle. Within 11 days, the post received over 35,000 notes.

The video is on the Know Your Meme site.

(To recap from your school days: equilateral triangle, all three sides the same length; isosceles triangle, two sides the same length; scalene triangle, three sides of different lengths.)

In my Trent Atkins posting yesterday, photo #3 had the man in briefs apparently labeled Pigskin, which I took to be an invention of the Michael Lucas studios, expressly for a film in which a number of actors (Atkins among them) behave piggishly. But no, it’s a real thing, and the name is PigSkin (now corrected in the Atkins posting). It’s the company that conveyed the piggish, edgy, even raunchy associations by their choice of name, meanwhile allowing themselves plausible deniability by playing on the word pigskin as a sports term (for a football).

Cover image for the line, showing an intense nude model:

(#1)

From an Underwear News Briefs bulletin by UNBTim on 12/13/11:

This is a underwear that has a bit of a darker side. It was photographed by Timoteo Ocampo. The model is Israel Zamora. The underwear line is called PigSkin and this is the new line with styles called the Mechanic, Grappler, Gridiron, and Prizefighter.

(All high-masculinity names, three of them sports-related.) Here’s Zamora in a Grappler jockstrap in yellow and a Mechanic brief in blue:

(#2)

(#3)

What Trent Atkins was wearing in yesterday’s posting was a Mechanic in yellow.

(There will be stuff about music and some incidental stuff on translation, but there’s also crude mansex in very plain language, so this is certainly not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The latest Daily Jocks ad, with a caption of mine (one you can sing!):

Randy Handy stands in the shadows
While his johns walk in the light
You see the rich guys shine in brightness
But their stud hustler’s out of sight

Randy is prime meat in his rentboy stable, so a 50%-off sale is a real money-saver, guys.

Some background notes on the fantasy in the caption, then lots of words on the source of the caption (meanwhile, think “Mack the Knife”).

[Added: oh yes, there’s now a Page on this blog, on “Male prostitution”, under “XBlog essays”, with an inventory of postings on male hustlers, rentboys, escorts, etc.]

In the caption world, Randy works for an escorting agency that books tricks for him, but he also loves the excitement of being a street hustler, “loitering for the purposes of prostitution” (as the laws say) and working face to face with his prospects: showing his body off at his station in a dimly lit alley, clutching his junk invitingly, using his face to dominate the men and simultaneously offer himself to them. He cruises in nothing but minimal briefs (always from really hot companies, like TeamM8), an unusual  arrangement made possible by a trade he made with the local police (they don’t harass him in any way, in exchange for which they get unlimited free access to his services, whatever they want, whenever they want it). Randy seals the deals on the spot, negotiating on services to be rendered and price and then providing these services right there in the alley (or, if the john wants,  in a somewhat more secluded alcove a few feet away). The vision of a hunky man hooking in public virtually naked and (randily) ready for immediate sex, right there, really pulls the johns in in droves; they stand in line, and so get a sex show while they’re waiting their turn.

Mostly the johns just want to suck Randy’s cock or get fucked by him, and he’s happy to oblige (even better, his refractory period is something like two minutes, tops, so he can easily satisfy one after another, and he has the stamina for it). Early on in the business, Randy discovered that many men would pay big bucks to be abused verbally and physically, so after some coaching from his stable-mates, he got to be a master at these acts. Later he realized that many of these men gained even deeper satisfaction from the humiliation of being abused in public, in front of an audience, and would pay extra for it.

In fact he’s about as versatile as a man can get, willing to do virtually anything (so long as nobody actually gets damaged), and good at taking either role in any of these acts. Although he’s solidly, deeply gay, he can convincingly portray a contemptuous straight guy taking over a faggot, or a curious straight guy being converted to panting queerness by a superior man, or, for that matter, an affectionate lover together with an equal partner; it all depends on what the client needs / wants. His philosophy is that getting truly comfortable with receptive, submissive, etc. roles in mansex has made him better at taking the other roles (the ones that are his first preference), has taught him to appreciate what an insertive, dominant, etc. man can provide to a male sexual partner.

Although he has no drive towards sex with women, he likes women and also isn’t at all uncomfortable with their bodies. So, off work, he’s willing to provide supportive sex to a needy female friend. And, on the job, he’s up for doing a client’s female partner — and if the client wants it, him as well.

Of course, he’s fine with male couples hiring him to take care of both of them, however they want the roles to be distributed. And if a john wants to hire a pair of guys, to do whatever, Randy has buddies in the stable who work well with him.

Outside of work, Randy has clear preferences in sex, but on the job, he’s sexually transparent, completely adaptable to his customer’s wishes.

Now, Randy Handy as Super RentBoy is a fiction — no one is this perfect at the job, not to mention this extravagantly flagrant in his sexual behavior — but a potentially enjoyable one. Just imagine Randy in that dark alley, already nearly naked, ready to give or take whatever.

The caption. Lovers of the musical theatre probably recognized the meter of “Mack the Knife” even before I handed you the title. But there’s more, much more.

The background, from Wikipedia:

“Mack the Knife” or “The Ballad of Mack the Knife”, originally “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer”, is a song composed by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht for their music drama Die Dreigroschenoper [DGO], or, as it is known in English, The Threepenny Opera.
… A moritat (from mori meaning “deadly” and tat meaning “deed”) is a medieval version of the murder ballad performed by strolling minstrels. In The Threepenny Opera, the moritat singer with his street organ introduces and closes the drama with the tale of the deadly Mackie Messer, or Mack the Knife, a character based on the dashing highwayman Macheath in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (who was in turn based on the historical thief Jack Sheppard). The Brecht-Weill version of the character was far more cruel and sinister, and has been transformed into a modern anti-hero.

Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne,
Und die trägt er im Gesicht.
Und Macheath, der hat ein Messer,
Doch das Messer sieht man nicht.

[literal translation:]
And the shark, it has teeth,
And it wears them in the face.
And Macheath, he has a knife,
But the knife can’t be seen. [more literally: ‘… you don’t / can’t see’]

In the best known English translation, from the Marc Blitzstein 1954 version of The Threepenny Opera, which played Off-Broadway for over six years, the words are:

Oh the shark has pretty teeth dear,
And he shows them pearly white
Just a jack-knife has Macheath dear
And he keeps it out of sight.

The rarely heard final verse — not included in the original play, but added by Brecht for the 1931 movie — expresses the theme and compares the glittering world of the rich and powerful with the dark world of the poor [and the thieves and the whores; note that my character Randy Handy is a whore, like Jenny Diver in DGO]:

Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln
Und die andern sind im Licht
Und man siehet die im Lichte
Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.

[literal translation:]
There are some who are in darkness
[Blitzstein has ‘shadows’, not ‘darkness’, and I use that in my caption]
And the others are in light
And you see the ones in brightness
Those in darkness drop from sight.
[even more literally: ‘…you don’t see’; but that loses the rhyme]

You’ll see the echo of the street singer’s line in his opening verse, Doch das Messer sieht man nicht,  in his closing line in the movie, Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht. Note that the Brecht-Weill productions (the stage version, which opened in 1928, and the movie, directed by G. W. Pabst and released in 1931) were intended as Socialist critiques of the capitalist system (but with musical-comedy features as well); the economics and politics pretty much vanished in all the later versions of the work (of which there are a great many; I had the great pleasure of seeing Lotte Lenya, who played Polly Peachum in the 1928 and 1931 versions, in this role, using the Blitzstein adaptation, at the tiny Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village, more than once in the late 1950s, but it was nothing like the movie, though it has mostly the same songs). Their intentions are clear in the movie, throughout which the rich and powerful are presented as vain, grasping predators upon the poor and dispossessed, workers who are viewed with great sympathy as sufferers under this system. At the very end of the movie we get the Dunkeln – Licht(e) quatrain, powerfully illustrated by a crowd of shabbily dressed poorfolk shuffling silently off away from the viewer into darkness.

I haven’t been able to find a clip of this final scene. But you can get the whole movie, with English subtitles, on YouTube here (which will allow you to appreciate just how different it is from versions you’re likely to be familiar with) and then forward to very close to the end.

Other German versions on film of this third finale (yes, third finale; the story is complicated) to the show are available on YouTube, in particular a performance directed by Nacho de Paz in which the light and darkness bit is harsh and biting rather than sad and despairing. But not funny or heart-warming.

A follow-up to my 2/18/16 posting “Ben, advertising” about Curbwear model Ben (with four photos on him in briefs), a man I was much taken with, and it now turns out that he has quite a following, among people who praise him for his “male beauty”, citing his handsome face, gorgeous eyes, and hot body (sometimes also his cool hair, beautiful smile, or notable bulge). Since the photos in the earlier posting showed an unsmiling (but not challenging or threatening) Ben, after a little background I’ll give three photos of him smiling (and shirtless and looking athletic) and go on to analyze his male beauty and compare him to some other beautiful men, of several types.

Ben — Ben Riches (aka Ben Hunt) — is now officially The Face of Curbwear, under an exclusive contract with the company, which means that he appears all over their advertising . The company specializes in the sexy, the outrageous, and the decidedly gay-oriented, but unlike many firms with that profile their models are not presented in a stud-hustler persona; instead they are mostly amiable, fit and athletic, young men, with Ben Riches as the prototype.

Ben in three smiling photos, shirtless, looking athletic:

(#1)

Ben, not in briefs for a change, waving a trophy

(#2)

Featuring Ben’s smile and his upper body

(#3)

Ben flexing for the camera, showing his lean muscular body, and a serious bulge

(As far as I known, this is as close as Ben gets to nude photos or more overt penis display. He’s photographed apparently out and abroad in London in nothing but Curbwear briefs, but that’s as outrageous as he gets.)

Ben’s widow’s peak and neat beard frame a heart-shaped face (a shape usually taken to be feminine), and he has big, beautiful eyes (again, a feminine attribute), but the man has masculine hair, that beard, and a neat mustache, and his hair is dark rather than blond, so he’s decidedly masculine, and also not boyish (much less feminine): a beautiful man.

References to male beauty usually focus on beautiful male faces, and there are collections of facial photos. In these collections, the young Brad Pitt, especially smiling, is a famous beautiful man, and he also had a beautiful body and a strongly masculine physicality in motion. My 8/6/13 posting, “Seven Supermen and Brad Pitt”,  has a section on Pitt with two shirtless photos: #12 the beautiful boyish man from Thelma and Louise, #13 Pitt in training for Fight Club, bulking up, though still with a beautiful face. Then in a 2/29/16 posting, “Four mythic hunks”, we see Pitt hugely bulked up for the part of Achilles in the movie Troy, in three photos (#4-6, the third shirtless), into a much rougher presentation of himself, with a handsome face, but not a beautiful one.

For some people, Robert Redford as Sundance in the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the model of facial male beauty. A close-up of him in this role:

(#4)

A beautiful face, and blond hair as well. His mustache serves as a masculine counterweight to the beauty of his face. Here’s Redford side-by-side with Paul Newman as Butch:

(#5)

Both very good-looking men with strongly masculine physical presences, but Newman is more on the rugged side, Redford more on the beautiful side.

A more recent actor often nominated as a model of male beauty is Robert Pattinson, who came to fame in the role of the vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight series of movies. My 4/3/13 posting “scruffilicious” has two maximally contrasting (though both lightly scruffy-faced) photos of Pattinson: darkly (bad-boy) beautiful in the seventh photo in that posting, broadly smiling beautiful in the eighth. Then Pattinson plays the central character in the movie Bel Ami:

(#6)

From Wikipedia:

Bel Ami is a 2012 drama film starring Robert Pattinson, Uma Thurman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Christina Ricci and Colm Meaney. The film is directed by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod and is based on the 1885 French novel of the same name by Guy de Maupassant.

Now several Bel Ami digressions,

the first on the expression bel ami, an Adj + N phrase, with the masc. N ami as head. The N ami (fem. counterpart: amie) translates most neutrally as ‘friend’, but depending on context it can refer to a buddy / mate, or to a boyfriend.

The masc. sg. Adj beau (fem. counterpart: belle) translates as ‘beautiful, handsome, good-looking, pretty (as in pretty boy)’ or in an extended  sense just ‘nice’;  beau has the variant bel before a vowel-initial N, hence bel ami rather than beau ami.

The combination bel ami is idiomatic, in that it doesn’t normally refer to good looks in a male friend, but instead to that friend’s niceness or to the closeness of the friendship. Typical neutral translations are ‘fine / nice / good / close friend’; or if the friendship is romantic or sexual, ‘boyfriend’ (usable by both women and gay men). Beyond that, the phrase can be used ironically or sarcastically, conveying something like ‘scoundrel’ — and indeed the usual translation of the novel’s name is The History of a Scoundrel.

bel ami ‘pretty boy’. Unlike the examples above (and the ones to follow after these digressions), there are styles of male beauty that  feature adolescents (or those who look like adolescents) sometimes referred to as pretty boys: smooth-faced, smooth-bodied, young-looking, with a boyish rather than rugged face (“weak” chin, large eyes), slim rather than muscular bodies, “soft” rather than “tough” presentation, attentive to grooming and men’s fashion, unaggressive, playful. This is pretty much the Twink Package, but real-life twinks are in fact very variable, and a fair number of them have beautiful, rather than pretty, male faces, while pretty boys are, well, pretty.

A Korean pretty boy from a tv series:

(#7)

More Bel Ami! From Wikipedia:

Bel Ami …, also known as Pretty Boy, and Pretty Man, is a South Korean romantic comedy television series starring Jang Keun-suk, IU, Lee Jang-woo and Han Chae-young. Based on the same-titled 17-volume manhwa [Korean comic, and cartoon, also animated cartoon] by Chon Kye-young, it aired on KBS2 from November 20, 2013 to January 9, 2014 … for 16 episodes …. Dokgo Ma-te (Jang Keun-suk) is a pretty boy.

(Korean names get variously represented in English spelling; Jang Keun-suk also appears as Jong Geun Suk, though both versions have the family name first.)

Still more Bel Ami, this time for gay porn slanted towards the twinkish. From Wikipedia:

BelAmi is a gay pornographic film studio with offices in Bratislava, Prague and Budapest. It was established in 1993 by filmmaker George Duroy, a Slovak native who took his pseudonym from the protagonist Georges Duroy in Guy de Maupassant’s novel Bel Ami.

The intention in the name of the studio seems to have been to play on beau/bel referring to male beauty — the studio specializes in beautiful young men, who are framed as being considerably younger than they actually are — and on bel ami ‘boyfriend’ (the characters are presented as being each other’s boyfriends, who can then be fantasized by gay male viewers as being theirs). From a 4/28/11: AZBlogX posting “Lukas and Johan (and Chance)”:

Bel Ami is the world of Gayboys’ Dreamtime — of adolescent companionship, buddy-play, and incandescent horniness. This world is especially well portrayed in An American in Prague, a big Bel Ami hit whose main story line has an American hunk, Chance, visiting Johan [Paulik] in Prague while getting ready to do a porn shoot there and being taken on a four-day tour of gay-sexual Prague. Their scenes together are full of adolescent horseplay as well as hot sex. (A bonus disc has an assortment of backstage scenes, including a delightful one of the two stars goofing off in bed, with a lot of playful talk about their dicks; King Missile’s “Detachable Penis” figures prominently.)

On Johan Paulik, who was the studio’s first big star and (under this name) in some sense the embodiment of the studio’s ideal, from Wikipedia:

Johan Paulik (born [Daniel Ferenčík] 14 March 1975) is the stage name of a Slovak former gay pornographic model. In 2000, he was inducted into the GayVN Hall of Fame with Lukas Ridgeston and George Duroy, owner of Bel Ami, the studio Paulik worked for his entire career. In 2002, Paulik became general manager for Bel Ami in Europe.

(#8)

Yet another beautiful man, not really a pretty boy, but certainly more twinkish than his acting colleague and near-contemporary Lukas Ridgeston, seen here in an early photo:

(#9)

A strikingly beautiful man, closer to muscle boy than classic twink (and he became more muscular as he aged).

Almost all the Bel Ami actors are straightforwardly G4P (gay for pay). This is the case for the actor who plays Johan, despite his having spent virtually all of his working life in the gay porn business (as actor, director, and now business manager). The actir who plays Lukas, exceptionally, is cagey about identifiying his sexuality.

In any event, the Bel Ami films are chock full of boyish playfulness. I recently watched Mating Season (Bel Ami, 2006), featuring a crew of boys on bikes in the Slovakian countrside, with lots of adolescent horsing around, but also with an appetite for tons of enthusiastic mansex.

Four more beautiful men. Now, out of the world of bel ami and back to male beauty in mainstream actors. Some time ago I had the opportunity to consult two authorities on this world: two teenage girls. My deep thanks to Maggie and Opal, who pretty quickly nominated four men, starting with one who seems to have some fame as a man with a perfect beautiful face, Jensen Ackles (Dean Winchester in the tv show Supernatural). In my 8/20/13 posting “Five television hunks”, you can see Ackles in #5; Jared Padalecki (playing his brother Sam Winchester) in #4; and the two paired in #7, where you can compare their faces. My consultabts say that Padalecki is really cute, but Ackles is beautiful.

Next up: Johnny Depp, seen here in a head shot:

(#10)

Depp was a teen idol in the tv show 21 Jump Street and then a great commercial success in the Pirates of the Carbibbean movies, while taking on a very wide range of other roles.

Then Orlando Bloom in a head shot:

(#11)

Bloom is most famous as the elf Legolas in the Lord of the Ring trilogy of movies.

Finally, actor and fashion model Richard Grieco, shown here as a beautiful bad boy in 21 Jump Street:

(#12)

Yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, introducing Lukas for Helsinki Athletica:

Lukas had a solid career doing
Gay porn in the Czech Republic — his
Muscular body, dark good looks,
Dominating presence, and high
Sex drive earned him a big
Fan following, among them a Finnish
Enthusiast in search of a model for his
Sportswear — so Lukas trekked North to
Craft a career in sporty shorts, and,
Sometimes, out of them.

The DJ ad copy:

Introducing Lukas by Helsinki Athletica: Be one of the first in the world to get your hands on the Lukas Shorts from Helsinki Athletica. These Sporty Stretch Shorts made from a lightweight mesh fabric grab you in the right spots and can help enhance your body with with body-hugging properties. They also feature slim contrast pockets and subtle logo print, perfect for the gym, running or lounging.

Yes, yes, get your hands on Lukas Shorts.

My posting on breakfast cereals for kids and the way they are marketed focused on Kellogg’s Froot Loops, an extraordinarily sweet cereal in the shape of small rings (or loops), whose rhyming name was chosen to suggest, mendaciously, that the rings are made from fruit, or at least fruit juice — but in a spelling that avoids making such a claim explicitly; the spelling is not merely orthographically playful (as commercial names often are), but deliberately misleading.

Meanwhile, fruit loop came to have at least two slang senses, both distinctly North American and, apparently, neither current before (roughly) 1950: ‘a crazy or foolish person’; and, incorporating the slang slur fruit for a gay man, ‘locker loop’ (a feature of certain men’s shirts, also known slurringly as fag tag or fairy loop).

That discussion will lead tangentially to another informal use of fruit, in fruit machine, BrE corresponding to AmE slot machine.

fruit loop ‘a crazy’. This one takes off from the cereal. From NOAD2:

North American informal   A crazy or foolish person. Origin 1970s: from Froot Loops, trademark for a breakfast cereal.

In combination with an allusion to the slang adjective loopy. Again from NOAD2:

informal   crazy or silly: the author comes across as a bit loopy.

Not in the OED, but Green’s Dictionary of Slang has it (from Scot. loopy ‘cunning’) as orig. Naut. ‘eccentric, crazy’, with a first cite from 1921.

Locker loops and Ivy League shirts. On to some chapters in the history of men’s clothing that aren’t so easy to make out. A locker loop is a loop at the base of the yoke — a section of fabric in the upper part of the back behind the neck and over the shoulders (hang on, there will be pictures) — on an American dress shirt. The loop is intended to hang onto the lower piece of a coat hook in a locker, freeing that piece up for hanging other pieces of clothing on it:

(#1)

(Commenters on locker loops sometimes point out that it’s much better for shirts to hang on proper hangers — but many lockers can’t accommodate hangers.)

A home-sewn dress shirt with a locker loop on the back:

(#2)

I haven’t found a thing about when locker loops first appeared on men’s shirts.

But locker loops are part of a package that I’ll call the Ivy League shirt, since it seems to have appeared as standard dress for college men in the Ivy League (me included) in the 1950s, where it was dressy but also casual (not usually worn with a tie). The Ivy League shirt is a button-down collar (not spread collar) shirt made of Oxford cloth, prototypically blue, with a box pleat and a locker loop on the back:

(#3)

The shirt went along with chinos (jeans were not yet acceptable parts of the costume) and brown loafers. After all these years, the costume remains as standard casual business dress in many settings; I see men so dressed all over the place here in Silicon Valley (except that the shirts and pants are now permanent-press, which they certainly weren’t then).

Note 1: Oxford cloth. From Wikipedia:

Oxford is a type of woven dress shirt fabric [originally in cotton], employed to make a particular casual-to-formal cloth in Oxford shirts. The Oxford weave has a basketweave structure and a lustrous aspect making it a popular fabric for a dress shirt.

Note 2: button-down collars. From Wikipedia:

Button-down collars [vs. spread collars] have points fastened down by buttons on the front of the shirt [with a third button on the back of the collar]. Introduced by Brooks Brothers in 1896, they were patterned after the shirts of polo players and were used exclusively on sports shirts until the 1950s in America.

And so we get the Ivy League shirt of my young adulthood, which then diffused to adolescents (on a path I know little about), where they still carried class associations — possibly the result of mothers buying Ivy League shirts for their sons in middle school and high school, as “nice” and “classy”. (The shirt in #2 seems to have been sewn by a mother for her son. The locker loop is its only Ivy-League feature: it’s not Oxford cloth, not button-down, not blue, and it lacks the box pleats.)

(I used to have a pile of Ivy League shirts. The dress shirts in my closet now are not Oxford cloth and have neither box pleats nor locker loops.)

For the next development, the class associations of Ivy League shirts seem to have been important: they were apparently seen by many kids as “snooty” and “fancy”, not “regular-guy” wear, hence potentially as faggy. This resulted in a kind of adolescent gay-denial assault (starting in the 1950s but continuing at least into the 1990s) on the most peculiar feature of the shirts, their locker loops. Boys “taught a lesson to” other boys by ripping the loops off, and tried to protect themselves from accusations of homosexuality by cutting them off on their own clothes — actions that seem to have distressed quite a few mothers.

The linguistic assault on locker loops. From a poster to Straight Dope in 2006:

Back in the 70″s in high school we gleefully tore off the cloth loops from the yoke of guys’ dress shirts. They were impolitely called fruit loops.

Another poster recalled the name from the 50s and 60s. From still another:

In high school in the late 90’s, several young teens (mostly male) referred to them as “fag tags”, which would basically be the same intent as fruit loop.

Still another: “We called ’em fag tags in the ’60s as well” and still another: “Southeastern Massachusetts, 1960s, fairy loops”.

So, a pile-up of sexuality insults: fruit, fairy, fag. Fag I’ve looked at before on this blog, at some length, and (more briefly) fairy as well, but I think fruit is new here (not that it’s not long familiar to me). More on it shortly. But first a note about timing: what do Froot Loops and homophobic fruit loops have to do with one another?

The short answer would appear to be: at least in the early days, nothing at all: the cereal name (which is entirely explicable as a combination of a modified spelling for fruit and the rhyming loops ‘rings, circles’) appeared in 1962, and early reports of homophobic fruit loops go back to the 1950s. Unfortunately, people’s recollections of what they said at certain times in the past are famously unreliable; they need to be backed up by actual attestations (in their cultural context).

In this case, I’m inclined to believe that the homophobic label is an indeendent innovation of a rhyming expression combining the existing slur fruit with loop referring to the object by virtue of its appearance and possibly building on locker loop. (Compare homophobic fag tag.) But then its use would eventually be facilitated and reinforced by the cereal name.

The slur fruit. An overview from Wikipedia:

Fruit and fruitcake, as well as many variations, are slang or even sexual slang terms which have various origins but modern usage tend to primarily refer to gay men and sometimes other LGBT people. Usually used as pejoratives, the terms have also been re-appropriated as insider terms of endearment within LGBT communities. Many modern pop culture references within the gay nightlife like “Fruit Machine” and “Fruit Packers” have been appropriated for reclaiming usage, similar to queer and dyke.

… In Polari [orig. 19th century British gay slang], fruit means queen, which at the time and still today is a term for gay men and can be used positively or negatively depending on the speaker, usage and intent.

Several origins of the word fruit being used to describe gay men are possible, and most stem from the linguistic concepts of insulting a man by comparing him to or calling him a woman [especially via the sense ‘prostitute’].

(Contrast nutty as a fruitcake ‘really crazy’, which has fruitcake in it because fruicakes contain nuts (as well as fruits).)

OED2 takes a different view, based on criminal usage. It has fruit, glossed as ‘a dupe, an ‘easy mark’ (from 1895 on) and from it, possibly, ‘a male homosexual’ as slang (orig. U.S.), attested from 1935, in a dictionary of underworld and prison slang, with other cites from 1957, 1970, and 1971.

Gambling machines. Now for something truly tangential. From Wikipedia:

A slot machine (American English), informally fruit machine (British English), puggy (Scottish English slang), the slots (Canadian and American English), poker machine (or pokies in slang) (Australian English and New Zealand English) or simply slot (American English), is a casino gambling machine with three or more reels which spin when a button is pushed. Slot machines are also known as one-armed bandits because they were originally operated by one lever on the side of the machine as opposed to a button on the front panel, and because of their ability to leave the gamer impoverished. Many modern machines are still equipped with a legacy lever in addition to the button. A gambler strategically operating multiple machines in order to draw the highest possible profits is called a multi-armed bandit.

Slot machines include a currency detector that validates the money inserted to play. The machine pays off based on patterns of symbols visible on the front of the machine when it stops. Modern computer technology has resulted in variations on the slot machine concept. Slot machines are the most popular gambling method in casinos and constitute about 70 percent of the average US casino’s income.

Very common symbols on slot machines are in fact fruits, which is where the British slang comes from:

(#4)

(No payoff, since the three symbols don’t match.)

On the heels of my posting on the “Ivy League shirt” and its complex associations with class, status, masculinity, and sexuality, I finally got to a thought-provoking piece by Troy Patterson in last Sunday’s NYT Magazine: “The Politics of the Hoodie”, beginning:

On a recent night, shopping online for a light jacket or a cotton sweater — some kind of outerwear to guard my body against a springlike breeze — I clicked on the ‘‘new arrivals’’ page of the website of a popular retailer and encountered, unexpectedly, another instance of the complex oddity of race. Here, projecting catalog-model cordiality in the sterile space of an off-white backdrop, was a young black man in a hoodie.

On the street, a black guy in a hoodie is just another of the many millions of men and boys dressed in the practical gear of an easygoing era. Or he should be. This is less an analysis than a wish. The electric charge of the isolated image — which provokes a flinch away from thought, a desire to evade the issue by moving on to check the sizing guide — attests to a consciousness of the hoodie’s recent history of peculiar reception. In a cardigan or a crew neck, this model is just another model. In the hoodie, he is a folk demon and a scapegoat, a political symbol and a moving target, and the system of signs that weighs this upon him does not make special distinctions for an Italian cashmere hoodie timelessly designed in heather gray.

Patterson traces the origins of the hoodie as a practical garment for protection from the weather and for warming up; athletic teams were early wearers. They became not merely practical but also started picking up fashionability (I still have my man Jacqies’s excellent Stanford hoodie in the university’s color, cardinal) and eventually became, on some wearers (like Mark Zuckerberg), symbols of amiable informality. (Illustrations on the NYT site.)

In the midst of this, black men wore hoodies for the much the same reasons as white guys, but then we entered

… an era in which the hoodie became at once an anodyne style object and a subject of moral panic, its popularity and its selective stigmatization rising in proportion. A glance at almost any police blotter, or a recollection of the forensic sketch of the Unabomber, will confirm the hoodie as a wardrobe staple of the criminal class, and this makes it uniquely convenient as a proxy for racial profiling or any other exercise of enmity. The person itching to confirm a general bias against hip-hop kids or crusty punks imputes crooked character to the clothing itself.

(We then, of course, get legislators calling for making the wearing of hoodies illegal.)

Now we have an opposition between clothing companies that specialize in good-looking fashion hoodies worn mostly by good-looking All-American white guys — American Eagle, for instance, with most of its models smiling broadly (who could possibly be terrified by these guys?); here’s a serious American Eagle white dude:

(#1)

— and, in response to the demonizing of black men in hoodies, a company called Thug Life (the name comes from Tupac Shakur), which  sprang up to market various kinds of in-your-face hoodies, from the relatively restrained:

  (#2)

to the deliberately provocative (indexing Tupac, the hip hop group N.W.A., and the 2015 movie Straight Outta Compton):

(#3)

The firm is happy to sell to women and to white guys, by the way, so long as they’re comfortable with the labeling.

To backtrack some, my own postings on the social meanings of clothes have focused almost entirely on clothes for men (though I have posted about bras) and the messages they might send about styles of masculinity, especially of the gay variety: so, men’s underwear postings and postings about related garments (the jockstrap, the dance belt, the codpiece, the wrestling singlet), plus, more generally, jeans, the (white) t, the wife-beater, the leather jacket, the leather harness, chaps, etc.

Troy Patterson has (in frequent NYT Magazine pieces) become a serious observer of the social meanings of clothes, focussing generally on race, gender, class, and status, but exploring very specific social meanings in some detail. He’s black, male, and Ivy League (he’s a Princeton grad in English lit), and he makes a living as a free-lance writer for significant publications, on a variety of topics: he’s a book critic, film critic, and tv critic, and he writes as the Gentleman Scholar for Slate. Here he is in Handsome Black Scholar mode:

(#4)

(He has somehow managed to suppress any Wikipedia entry about himself.) In any case, he’s perceptive, passionate (go back and re-read the extracts just above), and often wryly funny. I have admired his NYT pieces for some time; I hope he’s going to package them as a book.Here’s a complete (I think) inventory of them, in chronological order (the subtitles re brief abstracts):

3/8/15: How the Army Jacket Became a Staple of Civilian Garb: Miles from battle, what does it mean to wear a green field jacket?

3/16/15: The Lost Glove Waves Farewell to Winter: As winter recedes, we remember the many accessories it claimed.

4/5/15: The Common Man’s Crown: The baseball cap is ubiquitous but not anonymous; with a tilt of its bill or a curve of its brim, it conveys a point of view.

5/3/15: Who Gets to Wear Shredded Jeans?: Distressed denim turns punk rock’s bad attitude into a commodified style for those with the social capital to dress in tatters.

5/5/15: Stan Smith, Accidental Sneaker Icon: The tennis legend on the unexpected second life of the shoe that bears his name, and why he wouldn’t necessarily play in it now.

6/14/15: See and Be Seen: Glasses, once a nerdy punchline, have become a personal statement — the bigger the better.

7/12/15: Unstarched Shirt: The polo used to be part of a preppy uniform. But as it shed its Ivy League lineage, its meaning became elastic.

8/9/15: He’s Got Legs: Nothing exposes a man to more judgment and ridicule than wearing shorts, whether they’re Boy Scout cargo-style or fashion-designer formal.

9/6/15: Is the Blue-Collar Shirt Still Blue Collar?: As the chambray shirt has evolved into a staple of casual style, its workingman’s identity has become a slippery social construct.

9/21/15: The Understated Elegance of the Airline Scarf: The last glamorous thing about flying commercial.

10/4/15: The Politics of Pantyhose: How hosiery became instruments of control over women’s lives — and what happened once bare legs became acceptable.

11/1/15: How the Motorcycle Jacket Lost Its Cool and Found It Again: The ‘moto’ was once a caricature of masculinity. After women put it on, it became something else.

11/29/15: The Winter Hat Trick: When the temperature drops, no one can argue against the need for a hat. But is it possible to find a way to wear one that isn’t ridiculous?

1/3/16: Can the Turtleneck Ever Be Cool Again?: Despite its unfortunate recent past as a sexless preppy basic, the turtleneck is being repositioned as a statement of resistance.

1/31/16: Buffalo in the City: Once an icon of masculinity, the plaid pattern has become an accidental camp classic.

3/6/16: The Politics of the Hoodie: It has become a ubiquitous piece of American sportswear — but the question of who can wear one without challenge persists.

Assumed in all of this are several positions on the social meanings of clothing (quite parallel to the social meanings of linguistic items, the social meanings of gestures, etc.): much of the association between clothing and social meaning is below the level of consciousness, not a calculated performance; different people see different social meanings for the same clothing; these perceptions of social meaning vary with context; and these perceptions of social meaning change over time.

A Daily Jocks ad (for their underwear club, but featuring Pump! wear) from the 14th, with the man we know as Lukas (sometimes as Joe) in the Pump! Cruise Boxer (with pockets), in Pump!’s home town of Montréal:

(#1)

And Lukas’s boyfriend Ken, doing a cock tease in his Pump! Touchdown Cruise Boxer (with a fly):

(#2)

My caption for #1:

He boasted he was
Monosexual – “Only guys,
All the time” – not any kind of
Multisexual, but he was
Aggressively multicultural,
Multilingual, working in
Gay porn in several languages,
Hustling guys in many countries,
Lukas in Czech in his
Native land, Joe in English with his
Boyfriend Ken in San Francisco.
Eventually, proudly, Lukas everywhere:
Finland (for Helsinki Athletica),
Montréal (for Pump!), and he’s a damn good
Papi.

The DJ ad copy for the Touchdown Cruise Boxer:

This varsity and surfer styled boxer will cause a huge splash wherever you go.

The PUMP! Touchdown Cruise boxer offers ultimate support and breathability with it’s athletic elastic trims and light body contouring fabrics. Its vivid blue, white, and neon orange color combination illuminates a provocatively playful and endearing aesthetic that makes this a true statement underwear that will take your normal everyday style to new, edgier horizons.

Ah, fly-front boxers with a provocatively playful and endearing aesthetic! Underwear that makes statements, possibly at press conferences, at the edgy horizon, where underwear performs in gay porn (“Mr. Touchdown Cruise, what’s your position on international pouch support?” “Who are you paired with in your forthcoming feature Jockstrapped!?”, “Any truth to the rumor you’re finally going to work with Ken in a short called Pocketman Does Flyboy in Greektown?”).

Previous history, starting with the 1/31/16 posting “Cruise jogger” (Joe and Kev), which gives us:

#1 darker Lukas/Joe in the Pump! Cruise Jogger (with pockets)

#2 blonder Kev (with a notable left-shoulder/arm tat) in his Pump! Cruise Jogger

#3 Lukas/Joe shirt-lifting in a neon green Shockwave Tank from Pump!

#4 Kev shirt-lifting in a dark blue Star Tank from Pump!

Then in 3/11/16, “Boxer in shorts”, Lukas as a boxer, in Helsinki Athletica shorts, with the story:

Lukas had a solid career doing
Gay porn in the Czech Republic — his
Muscular body, dark good looks,
Dominating presence, and high
Sex drive earned him a big
Fan following, among them a Finnish
Enthusiast in search of a model for his
Sportswear — so Lukas trekked North to
Craft a career in sporty shorts, and,
Sometimes, out of them.

Another shot from Lukas’s Finnish Period, showing him lounging muscularly in a different color short:

(#3)

Mr. Multilingual is out of his boxing gear here because he’s been practicing his Greek, which is virtually flawless, right up there with Papi’s Spanish, Joe’s English, and Lukas’s Czech, Finnish, and (Canadian) French. (Ken is sexually pretty much totally adaptable, though inclined to the receptive side, but linguistically he’s almost exclusively an anglophone, though on occasion he’s willing to switch to his school French to please Joe/Lukas. Athletically, Ken is an exhibition-sports guy — swimming, diving, gymnastics, skating — a complete foil to powerfully agonistic Joe/Lukas, with his passion for boxing above all, but also wrestling, martial arts, and (gay) rugby; Ken loves to watch Joe sparring, all that grunting and hot sweat, but he’s uncomfortable with Joe’s actual bouts, which involve pain and, often, blood.)

From Daily Jocks yesterday (with my caption):

(#1)

Joey Jockstrap was a cheap con man who
Preyed on gullible gay men, luring them through his
Intriguing slicked-back retro look and his
Intense, urgent sexual presence – but he couldn’t
Restrain himself from ripping off his clothes to
Parade the jutting package in the jockstrap.that
Gave him his alliterative street name.

Lift! Support! Enhance!

It’s the new Joey Sports Jockstrap from BCNÜ, designed to (as the DJ copy puts it)

with Push-up technology to lift, support and enhance your package. Get sporty and playful in one hit.

Joey Jockstrap, the character, is aiming for a look he models on, among other men, the actor Ralph Forbes:

(#2)

From Wikipedia:

Ralph Forbes (30 September 1904[2] – 31 March 1951) was an English film and stage actor in the UK and the United States.

An enormously versatile actor.