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I did the steam test this week in Chicago, which has been colder than Siberia, Antarctica, and Mars. I filled up a measuring cup with hot water and tossed it out of the window of my storage room. I was temporarily blinded by that amazing, but sadly fleeting, release of energy I had created.

And all that steam, an explosive combination of extreme heat and extreme cold in this case, got me thinking of not just what steam is, but how authors and artists and filmmakers use steam to convey multiple ambiguities in their works of art.

But steam is not the fog that hides haunted houses, though it resembles it superficially. Steam is released physically under conditions of great thermodynamic pressure. Once released into the air, it dissipates, but it can also be harnessed to provide more power. (No steam engine, no Industrial Revolution!)
 

For example, the song “Steam Heat” compares the steam heat of a radiator to what will become the heat of passion, however unfavorably. Kissing is what gets that energy, sexual energy released:
 

I got (clang) (clang) s-s-s-steam heat, 
I got (clang) (clang) s-s-s-steam heat, 
I got (clang) (clang) s-s-s-steam heat, 
But I need your love to keep away the cold,

I got (clang) (clang) s-s-s-steam heat, 
I got (clang) (clang) s-s-s-steam heat, 
I got (clang) (clang) s-s-s-steam heat, 
But I can't get warm without your hand to hold,

The radiator's hissin', still I need your kissin'... 
To keep me from freezin' each night, 
I got a hot water bottle, but nothin' I got'll... 
Take the place of you holding me tight

The sound of the hissing and the clanging is dissonant and mechanical, the heat; the thermodynamics reveal great struggle to be harnessed, to work, to produce, in contrast to the organic steam produced by the physical and emotional interaction between the lovers.

And in the vintage gay porn movie Turned On!, Al Parker wanders in a fantasy sexual world that resembles a literally steamy gay bathhouse. The steam blurs conventional physical and emotional boundaries. It dissipates, but in its dissipation somehow creates more energy rather than declining into entropy or freezing into rigid crystals. Thus the men multiply, the cocks multiply. Energy is eternal delight, according to William Blake, and in this film it transcends thermodynamic laws.
 

 

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London in 1974 was a turbulent place. The 1970s inflation global crisis was in full swing, and thus the average Briton was suffering more than usual difficulties in making ends meet. Disillusionment with the welfare state was beginning to show, and the monarchy, not immune to criticism but still beyond the reach of the tabloid culture, was viewed as either dowdy and out-of-touch or useless and decadent (compare Queen Elizabeth to her sister Margaret).

On January 25, the New York Times laconically reported that James Pope‐Hennessy, the writer, died in a hospital of injuries received in a knife attack at his home. He was 57 years old. The police said they believed he was the victim of a gang that raided his house in Notting Hill. His valet escaped from the house and raised the alarm. Mr. Pope‐Hennessy was found bound and gagged with knife wounds and head injuries.
 

James Pope-Hennesy was gay, or rather, using the term more suited to his cultural milieu, homosexual. Born on November 20, 1916, the son of an army general and an author, he was most famous for his still seminal biography of the current Queen’s grandmother, the indomitable Queen Mary (yes, the ship was named after her, and her fabulously jeweled tiaras will soon become the properties of Kate and Megan). He began writing after choosing not to pursue, like most males of his class, an education at Oxford.
 

Lately some interest in his career has resurfaced, as notes he made while researching his famous biography have been published by another Royal historian, Hugo Vickers. In these notes, James reveals a detached yet deliciously insightful perspective on who were the celebrities of that day and those who interacted (or didn’t) with them.
 

For example, his description of Queen Mary’s mother, Princess Mary, Duchess of Teck, a granddaughter of Geroge III of American Revolution fame (Fat Mary; she was, unusually so in a day where one mostly burned off calories despite a high calorie diet) waving to the adoring crowds. The Duchess of Teck with her popularity and tireless charity work, as well as her spontaneity and love of children, made her a kind of proto-Diana without the physical beauty:
 

The eye-witnesses recall the Princess’s quick, graceful movements, despite her bulk; the nimble way she stepped from a carriage, the easy gesture with which she would give her hand to be kissed. It was part of her charm that she herself made jokes about her weight and would allow small relatives to test it on her velvet-covered scales…

Or, his description of the Duchess of Windsor, which one could argue is horribly elitist, remains quite vivid, and given James’ penchant of detail, accurate in its evocation of her unique appearance and personality:

I should be tempted to classify her simply as An American Woman par excellence, were it not for the suspicion that she is not woman at all. She is, to look at, phenomenal. She is flat and angular and could have been designed for a medieval playing card. The shoulders are small and high; the head very large, very large… the expression is either anticipatory (signaling to one, “I know this is going to be loads of fun, don’t yew?") or appreciative – the great giglamp smile, the wide, wide open eyes, which are so very large and pale and veined...
 

All in all, he evokes in words a non-PC world long-gone, of which the Queen is perhaps the last representative, of shooting parties, armies of servants, German princelings, hyphenated last names, gilding, and real, painted, yes painted, pictures that hang in actual homes, not museums or galleries. And lots of smoking and drinking.

But all the while, despite his success, he was drinking and spending (he mentions in his notes of knocking out two Blood Marys in quick succession, and that was just the beginning of a long, long day and evening) prodigiously, and apparently, picking up rough trade or other unsavory characters. Despite the originality of his writing style, his personal life seemed to have followed the pattern for many well-heeled gay men of that time, split between the grand (and one might say campy) artistic and café society circles and the sexual underground of back alleys and dark bars.
 

And, to add another layer to the portrait, he went to Mass. He was staunchly Catholic in a culture that moved in his lifetime from the establishment Anglican of the deeply religious current queen, her mother, and grandmother, to a secular nihilism.

By the early 1970s, despite his social and literary successes, James was broke, and he had lost his somewhat dashing good looks (I find the photo of him by the campy gay photographer Cecil Beaton enticing), but he had just gotten a cash advance for a new book on the late Noel Coward (one can see a confluence in this paragraph of three “old queens.”) James’ killers assumed the money was in the house, but they were wrong.
 

After the murder, over the next few days three men were arrested and charged with the murder.  They were: John James O’Brien (aka Sean Seamus O’Brien), 23, Ladbroke Grove, Edward John Wilkinson: 22, Arlington Road, Southgate Terence, Michael Noonan: 25, Tisdall Place, Walworth. They eventually stood trial and were each found guilty of murder and burglary.  

But it turns out that these guys hung about in the rough trade or rent boy set of those days, “Dilly Boys.” O’Brien had been living at Pope-Hennessy’s flat for a few months prior to the incident.  He had been in a sexual relationship with both Pope-Hennessy and his valet Leslie Smith (who also lived there).  In fact, Pope-Hennessy and Smith were both users of the ‘rent boy’ scene in Piccadilly.
 

And what was even more humiliating, it turns out that James did not die of actual stab wounds, but from choking on his own blood from a lip wound suffered in the attack.

According to Smith, he was lying on the floor with three men standing over him.  One was hitting him with a ‘wooden thing’ whilst the other two were holding him down by his arms.  He then heard one say “Kill him, Chris,” and “You are going to die."  Standing over him with a knife, one said, “Do you want this in you?"

Smith escaped, but by the time he returned with the police, the perpetrators had fled.

James’ legacy as a writer remains untarnished despite his frankly sordid end, but one wonders in these days of unsafe Grindr hookups, social media shaming, and Instagram if something of the schizophrenic split between talent and celebrity and public and private James suffered has resurfaced, but in a more virulent way.

I think the appeal of James to me is his way with words, painstakingly detailed but not pedantic, which really stands out in a time when reality becomes a nanosecond photo or a quick video on a smartphone. James struck, in his life and in his death, to the heart of realities that were built on illusions. Can we do the same?

Sources:

James Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary

Hugo Vickers and James Pope-Hennesy, The Quest for Queen Mary

https://scepticpeg.wordpress.com/2017/07/12/the-soho-connections-murder-of-the-royal-biographer-1974/

I've written about this phenomenon before, the ubiquity of sex on trains, but this time it made international news.

A man, his boyfriend, and another man enjoyed a threesome (some sources say orgy, but does a threesome qualify as an orgy? That's a whole other issue) on the London tube on February 18, 2018.

Nicholas Mullan, George Mason and a third guy (his face pixellated and thus unidentifiable) engaged in a variety of sex acts, which they filmed (something of a shift from the usual filming of violence on public transportation). Mason is a porn start of sorts, and advertised the video as “Complete on live sex at front of general public on subway train!,” reads the description for the video. "And there are lots of normal members of people watching in disbelief. Genuine naughty Brit lads suck n f*ck uncooked and don’t.”
 

They just pleaded guilty to one charge of “outraging public decency.”

It occurred on the long and busy Northern line on the Underground, between the Leicester Square and Waterloo stops (these stops are in densely populated areas of London). (And apparently the Northern Line seems to attract sexual activity, according to vague gossip on sites such as Datalounge. I used to take that line often when I studied English literature in London in the early 1980s. Sex workers frequented the King's Cross stop, a pretty raunchy area during that time, but I don't remember seeing any sex on the trains. Hmm… )
 

And here's the clincher: another gay man, who saw the porn video online, reported them, claiming that “it overstepped the mark and was morally unacceptable,” according to the story on Pink News.

Now, I know many of my gay friends would laugh this off, or maybe make catty, campy comments, like I would have asked to join in, or, how big were the schlongs? I bet the supposedly outraged passengers were really getting off too, I can imagine the number of growing bulges on that train, if I were there, I would have laughed, yada, yada, yada. Ah, such bravado.

That may be a fun reaction looking at the incident from distant time and space, but as an actual physical spectator, perhaps the boundary crossing between sex and danger in this case could have been more an act of narcisisstic voyeurism than an aesthetic choice, as in Peter de Rome's 1972 short film Underground, sex on a moving subway car in New York City.
 

I make this distinction, because public sex does not necessarily imply an audience of willing or unwilling voyeurs, and Mason claims he made the scene to encourage the fetish object of his fan's desire: him. In the de Rome film, they filmed the act, itself, in an empty car, contrasting the fantastic intimacy of that act in a public space gone private with an image of crowds of people in occupied cars. The bifurcation here is intentional, mediating the danger element, but also, by framing the sex act with this image, both blurring and expanding the boundary between public and private social spaces rather than, in the George Mason video, ruthlessly and crudely mocking it.

Mason and Mullan face fines, curfew, and even jail time.

And I don't think they will be filming an actual jailhouse sex video.

Yes, nudes. Nudies. And not just Greek sculptures. (In fact, one might think Tumblr would not block these images. Hmm … )

And famous Greek sculptures, like the Eros of Praxiteles (see below) enabled Chuck Renslow, the pioneering gay erotic photographer and pretty much the founder of the contemporary gay leather/BDSM community, to stay in business. In other words, a full-frontal male nude can be aesthetically beautiful. It's not “dirty” and, in line with the Romantic sensibility that correlated truth with beauty, not morally offensive.
 

The famous sculpture of Eros by Praxiteles was so lifelike and seductive, that according to one source, a visitor to Thespiae named Allketas fell in love with it and jacked off against it. Pliny, the famous historian, claimed he left “traces of lust” on it. Cum stains? Scandalous. Nero also fell in love with it, but it perished in the great fire of 64 A.C.E. Of course, now someone would end up doing something that Allketas did and put it on Pornhub.

The seventeenth century Italian artist Caravaggio, one of the LGBTQ family, was always in trouble with his prudish Counter Reformation employers for using hot models for his mostly religious paintings, including street hustlers (who frequented the streets around the palaces of the Cardinals). In fact, one of his patrons, the creepy Cardinal Francesco del Monte, cultivated young men (some things never change). Caravaggio's painting “Victorious Love” or “Amor Vincit Omnia” shows Cupid as a naked youth “trouncing various symbols of human achievement and sophistication,” according to Leigh Rutledge. Ouch.

In the eighteenth century, a nude marble statute of an obscure local saint, Guignole, was supposedly able to cure infertility and frigidity. Keep in mind that many of the medieval saints were closely tied in person and function with pre-Christian religious practices, which usually focused on keeping life forces going, that is sex. According to Leigh Rutledge, women took scrapings from the statue's big cock, mixed them with water, and then drank the mixture. The monks - yes monks, supposedly chaste males - who tended the statue ended up having to keep repairing the mutilated penis. Thus, they drilled a hole through the statue's groin and inserted a long phallus made of wood down through it. As followers of the big-cocked saint scraped the penis down to size, a blow with a mallet from the rear would cause the dick to regain its original length. Oh my. So much is going on there.
 

Jumping to 1972, in the wake of the age of sexual liberation, Burt Reynolds appeared naked for Cosmopolitan magazine. Well, not completely, his dick was covered … but still, wow.
 

Yes, the audience was women, but this spread paved the way for Playgirl magazine, the publication for women and gay men. In fact, Playgirl's first centerfold was the hunky Lyle Waggoner of Carol Burnett fame. Even the incredibly talented Carol needed some eye candy hanging about for the benefit of the ladies and her gay fans.
 

Overall, one can see an objectification of the male body, but at the same time, a complex relationship of that body to the surrounding culture. The big dick here may be the god or God here in these scenarios, but it's not just the dick itself, but what it does and what you can do with it. Nature is just the inspiration point for the creative process of the human imagination.

Source: Leigh Rutledge, The Gay Book of Lists

Who is Paul Rappalo? Paul calls himself, in an interview with Manshots magazine in December 1992, an iconoclast, and based on the variety of and attitude toward his porn making, I would agree.

Manshots caught up with Paul aka David Rappalo aka Rappalo aka Rappalo Fox when he was doing a show at NYC's Show Palace, and the interviewer noted that he spoke Japanese to the guy at the sushi bar.

There's the paradox: he does shows that show off his tautly sculpted, Greek god physique, he speaks a language which is not easily learned, and, looking at his oeuvre on the trusty Gay Erotic Video Index, a good number of his films are bondage/BDSM flicks. Who is Paul Rappalo?

Paul divulges plenty in the interview, but what is interesting is the information he claims he doesn't want revealed. For example, he mentions he is Cherokee Indian. He also claims he likes high heels (he likes others to wear them).

He learned Japanese, one of five languages he also speaks, as part of his personal protection/anti-terrorism training. Rappalo is unclear as to what this training entails and its results, which adds to the mystery. No, he is not lying.

He hustled for a while (he claimed both guys and gays had long admired his cock).

He was also imprisoned for an assault case, and the prison doctor knew about his by then extensive porm film career; in the interview, he imitates the doctor's “minty” voice, “With all the money you've been making, seems that you would have been bailed out a long time ago.”

In the annals of porn history, however, some of his best work (and that includes acting, and he did do a bit of “legitimate” acting in Los Angeles) occurs in Toby Ross's award-winning Tough Guys Do Dance.
 

The second vignette in this flick, “Love Bug,” tells the story of a man who bugs his straight neighbor's house in an effort to share vicariously in the man's lovemaking to his wife. When the neighbor's wife leaves him, however, the gay man comes over to console and seduce him. Paul Rappalo plays the sensitive straight neighbor and David Bach is the wily gay man.

Now, what could be a sleazy take off on Reagan-era yuppie drama is actually sensitively done, and Rappalo manages to be both vulnerable and confidently sexy at the same time.
 

I like to think of him as the many faces of the Eternal Male. He wears a white shirt and tie and exudes sexiness wearing it, but when he gets naked, he can submit to getting tied up by an older, more experienced guy, enjoys, even relishes sex with women, but, as he honestly reflects in his interview, “one thing I would change is that it takes me forever to learn one lesson.”

Based on his variegated interests, I would counter that he wasn't afraid to keep learning. And that for him, life was best lived when one is aware that it is a theater where one discovers oneself by acting so many roles.