BijouBlog

A former friend of mine who entered a lavender marriage with a former female friend (yes, I am a big gossip) reeled in horror when I told him my little kitten (who passed away from feline leukemia in 1989 after I had her for only six months) was in the room when I was jacking off. Yes, that little kitten might pick up some unsavory habits. Yikes!

In 2002, I got my cat, “The Honey,” (she passed away in 2013) who developed into the attention whore of the century. She would not only watch, but sometimes, while various sexual acts were going on, would do her usual “show the belly” routine, which in cat body language, means, ultimate trust. Once, my late partner was getting a blow job in my living room from another guy (I was out that afternoon), and he told me she was in fine “show the belly” form.

I don't think The Honey was getting off on the sex. Instead, another human was there who could supply her with attention. And given that cats are territorial, rather than trying to mark boundaries by excluding outsiders, she wanted to be inclusive, on her terms. As I used to say, if something major (a hot guy in full leather cop mode getting his cock sucked and boots licked, certainly major) was going on in her queendom, she had to be involved in it somehow.

The presence of cats seems to be a common trope, perhaps, in our classic gay films.

One of our classic films, The Night Before, does involve a gay couple picking out a kitten as part of their bonding. I'm not sure if one could imply the kitten was present when they have sex later.
 

In Always Ready, a cat sleeps on Casey Donovan's bed, the scene of many interesting activities, of course.

In From Paris to New York, a white fluffy cat jumps on the furniture and hangs out during the sex scene.

A cat in Wanted: Billy the Kid rolls around, trying to get attention, while two men have sex.

And in In Heat, during the frightening BDSM scene, a cat is chilling out in the background, indifferent to what is basically a home invasion.

(I'm not sure if cats can consistently function as “watch cats.” And they're definitely not “man's best friends.” They're not dogs.)

Tumblr, source of all things weird, even offers a site, Indifferent Cats in Amateur Porn.

Well, it certainly fits the criteria as it focus on the two most popular  Internet obsessions: cats and porn.

Just think: not too long ago, Chicago's landscape was covered with filthy, lumpy ice.

Now, in the Middle Ages, people really celebrated spring: so many songs about flowers blooming and animals and people screwing:
 

That was a time when life was much more precarious, and so when the inevitable cycle of nature began anew after a long winter (often a time of deprivation but also semi-hibernation, depending on the state of the autumn harvest). When spring arrived, the people celebrated, but they also had to participate in that cycle by literally sowing seed: a cycle of work and pleasure.

We've lost that intimate working connection with the land; thus our bodies and souls can't really hibernate or prepare to rejuvenate the way nature intends.

Sex in front of a fireplace in the dead of winter is wonderful, but if one is exhausted from commuting across windswept tundras, a cup of steaming hot tea is more enjoyable. (I wonder how the inhabitants of lands near the Arctic Circle fare with their long, sunless winters and short summers.)

T.S. Eliot claimed April is the cruelest month. I might say March is more cruel, which lately seems like the last, often vicious in-your-face blast of winter rather than a harbinger of cute lambs, bunnies, baskets of pussy willows, sprouting crocuses, and dewy grass. The weathermen Tom Skilling on WGN-TV Chicago actually called the month “schizophrenic” because of its extreme weather contrasts.

But there's one day, usually in early May, when I wake up and it everything has bloomed, like it happened overnight through some miraculous intervention.

It's unexpected, like the best sex. I want it to happen, but I won't know it has happened until it actually has happened!
 

 

One totally awesome perk for working at the Bijouworld office (it isn't sex) is you never what you might find in the files.

Yes, files, think beige manila folders, not computer directories. We pretty much have anything, yes anything, related to gay sex dating to the beginning of the last century. Just ask!

I was looking for a retrostud to do a blog on for this week, and I pulled a file that contained a list of former jobs of 12 gay “porno” stars, by Leigh Rutledge, author of the book The Gay Decades.

Interestingly enough, these retrostuds didn't just work as the stereotypical bartenders or escorts or strippers.

Al Parker (below) worked as a butler, a video technician, and a personal aide to Hugh Hefner at Playboy magazine.
 

Keith Anthoni (below) was a waiter, an actor in Pepsi commercials (which one?), a stage actor, and a male stripper.
 

Steve Scott worked in the publicity department at Universal Studios.

Kip Noll (below) was very blue-collar; he was a machinist, an auto mechanic, and a carpenter.
 

Roy Garrett (below) was employed as a supervisor in a New Jersey cosmetics factory, as well as doing the bartender/male stripper thing.
 

Jamie Wingo (below) worked in marketing for a gay advertising agency and also, guess what, stripped.
 

Jack Wrangler (below) was a child television star with his own NBC series, Faith of Our Children. He also did bit parts on the Mod Squad and Medical Center. If my mother only knew …
 

Scorpio (below) was a male stripper in straight bars. He tried to get into modeling but found out from an agency that his job as a stripper killed his chances.
 

Richard Locke (below) worked very diverse jobs. He was a tank commander in the army, a gas station attendant, an insurance claims adjuster, and a baths attendant.
 

Jayson MacBride (below) danced and sang as a chorus boy. He later enjoyed a successful career in corporate market research.
 

Mike Davis (below) was a set designer.
 

Christopher Rage worked as a talent manger for cabaret acts, as a male escort, and then joined an ad agency promoting X-rated films.

I just can't get the picture out of my mind of Al Parker as a butler wearing some tight-fitting livery! One can only dream …

Hope you enjoy this very photogenic blog!

Ra

Are euphemisms for sex or bathroom actions becoming dead words?

Now, when types of slang words that have been stigmatized as obscene have become pretty much prevalent in a majority of social situations, why, to use another euphemism, beat around the bush?

In fact, that sound that bleeps out the offending words seems to be occurring more and more on television (on some reality shows, that sound seems to drown out the dialogue), perhaps showing we don't bother to even code anymore language that refers to those taboo sex/bathroom actions.

Too bad, I say, from just a creative standpoint. The richness and humor of coming up with ways to convey pooping and fucking ... it was a linguistic freedom that flourished within oppressive constraints, and some of the words mockingly confronted such oppression.

Here are some awesome euphemisms from The Big Book of Talking Dirty:

catch a horse (20thC) (Aus.) to urinate

fie for shame (19thC) the vagina; from the image of the vagina as something shameful

four­legged frolic (mid 19thC) sexual intercourse

gentleman of the back door (18thC) a homosexuality

get one's hair cut (20thC) to visit a woman for sex

give the Chinaman a music lesson (20thC) to urinate

give one's gravy (19thC) to give someone an orgasm

hundred­and­seventy­fiver (1990s) a homosexual (para. 175 of the German penal code outlawed homosexuality)

massaging the one eye'd monk (1990s) masturbation

One a much more serious note, there's one taboo area I still think we still use euphemisms for, because, in a time when any sign of aging can supposedly be quick­fixed by botox and billions of dollars are spent on prolonging life (not to be confused with finding cures for diseases): death. We're more and more uncomfortable with it, even when it happens naturally.

Often the young try, like the young of generations past, to sublimate their fear with a carpe diem attitude, or they end up scapegoating older people, inflicting a social death upon them, because they see in them their own future.

We all fuck and piss and shit and die: that's the reality all human culture confronts in a myriad of ways.

How many ways can you say that?

Some person (I was going to use a naughty word, but I am trying to remain calm) on the Huffington Post claimed that homosexuals started the Nazi Party. This type of ignorance (and this claim has been going around for some time, thanks to Scott Lively and others of his ilk) really makes my blood boil. It's the type of defamation that LGBT persons are still suffering from people like Scott Lively (again, I was going to use more naughty words), Bryan Fischer, and now Sally Kern of Oklahoma, who wants to allow people who may be against what they term sinful homosexual behavior (think: a certain type of Christian of the fundamentalist persuasion) to deny LGBT persons access to public services in her state, among other infamies. Check out this site for more information on Kern's bills.

Ernest Rohm, one of the original compatriots of Hitler, was gay, but he did NOT start the party. And he and his cohorts were “purged” soon after Hitler took over because they Hitler saw them as a threat. He couldn't deal with what was developing into a possibly dangerous internal army (Rohm's Brown Shirts) rising up against him. And he before that point was pretty much willing to “look the other way” about Rohm's predilection for blond, “Aryan-looking” studs. Himmler was the one who pretty much decried Rohm's orientation and influenced Hitler to add gays to his list of Final Solution victims.

By the time the Holocaust was occurring, gays, according to the Nazi world view, had been deemed not acceptable humans. This view was based on their distorted eugenics; degenerate gay men (or lesbian women) could not produce future master race babies. Gays were sent to concentration camps and made to wear the pink triangle. Straight prisoners were encouraged to beat up on them, just as they often would have done in a non-prison setting. It's not clear how many LGBT persons were killed, but of the 5,000 to 15,000 incarcerated, as many as 60 percent may have died, according to one leading scholar.

And we also need to remember that the injustice continued for gay men especially after Hitler's defeat. Many gays who survived the horrors of Nazism still had to live lives of secrecy and continued persecution sometimes based on evidence found during the Nazi regime. Both Germanies (at that time) eventually overturned their “fornication between men” laws in 1957 (in the East) and 1969 (in the West).

We recently remembered the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and we remember all the victims of the Nazis, but was also need to still remember that the Sally Kerns of the world are still perpetrating a similar mechanism of scapegoating those whom they see as threats to the supposed “purity” of their systems. In 1938, after the Kristallnacht pogrom, the Nazis pretty much denied the Jews basic public services in Germany.

In 2015, Sally Kern and other government officials in the United States now seek to do something similar, though many of them are probably operating under the different assumption held by her co-religionists that LGBTs offend by their behavior, not their genetic makeup.

Even though we now know Kern has withdrawn her offensive bills, the fact that people support her bills (and that she was even elected) really makes me both frightened as well as angry.

I think we all have to start not just throwing around this saying by Martin Niemoller as a cliché, but using it as a constant call to action, not just vigilance:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
 

 

Martin Niemoller