BijouBlog

posted by Madam Bubby

I remember on this Canadian sex advice show Talk Sex With Sue how the host encouraged a woman to give her husband a hand job (while he watched porn). Her advice seemed eminently sensible; one, because rather than the woman complaining her husband watched porn and masturbated, she could participate in the event, and two, this activity certainly added variety to their sex life.

Let's face it: not everyone is necessarily turned on or can even orgasm through penetrative sex. From what I have read, most women don't orgasm from “the act,” often needing clitoral stimulation (orally, manually, or with toys). And the male g-spot (or “p-spot”), the prostate, is often stimulated in the fuck bottom, and can bring the receiver to orgasm, but what if one doesn't probe it the right way, or what if one needs additional stimulation to climax?

And if you don't want to orgasm with your only partner as your own Mr. Hand, why not find the sexy hand of a Mr. Right to bring you ever so slowly, even “edge” you to that climax? And depending on your position, you might even be able to admire other parts of his beautiful body, because you aren't bent over. The possibilities are limitless.

Beyond the factor of necessity, many people enjoy manual stimulation for its own sake. Imagine being tied down and worked over by several hands (much like in a segment of Goodjac Too, whose director Michael Goodwin made a series of movies focused on handjobs). I am getting carried away and must stop. Wait, no, don't stop!

Hands groping Keith Ardent in Goodjac Too

 

On the subject, here at BijouWorld, we just released the hot 1981 Joe Gage classic, Handsome (typically originally written as HANDsome). Though blowjobs and cum-eating are also plentiful in this film, it (as the title suggests) focuses on the eroticism of handjobs and jacking off, full of circle jerks, mutual masturbation, and all things manual.

 

Handsome images

 

For an extensive analysis and historical coverage of the making of Handsome, check out the in depth Ask Any Buddy podcast episode on it, which goes into Joe Gage's fascinating connection to the 1980-established jack off club, the New York Jacks. (The still-active New York Jacks' website also touches on this connection.) And look over our blog on jack off clubs for a little more historical and cultural context.

Find Handsome on DVD and streaming through Bijou!

Posted by Madam Bubby

Vinyl is still around and actually thriving, especially in indie music and hipster circles, but I the same revival hasn't quite happened for the VHS, which means those old video tapes one sees in thrift stores may end up in landfills or supporting window air conditioners.

According to this source, Japan's Funai Electric, who claimed to be the last VCR manufacturer, stopped producing the machines several years ago, in July of 2016. This source also gives a brief history of the medium, which for readers of a certain age, will certainly bring back memories.

Beta tapes? Wow. I remember my Dad got every James Bond movie he could find on Beta. Yes, Beta, which did not last. What happened to all those Beta tapes?

And those bulky cameras. People started to get really obsessed with them, I remember, at least initially, and this before the days of easy selfies and youtube videos. Want a movie of someone eating mashed potatoes at a 1980s christening celebration? It's on a VHS tape, and probably now remastered digitally and streaming somewhere on youtube.

 

Some even attributed the supposed narcissism of Generation X and millenials to this phenomenon. Hey, can I see the tape of me when I was four throwing water balloons at the next door neighbor? Or how about when I got ten Atari video games for Christmas when I was ten and threw a tantrum (captured for time immemorial) because my brother got a more expensive one?

Digital hoarding perhaps started with the VCR. There was the woman on the show Hoarders taping constantly on a multitude of TVs. Think walls of tapes. Her son said, well, I guess if you want a Phil Donahue show from the 1980s, this is the place to go.

 

Of course, the advent of this medium totally revolutionized the porn industry. Instead of having to go to a porn theater like Chicago's late, great Bijou Theater, one could rent and even buy tapes and watch porn at home. Or even tape amateur porn. Porn creators made a killing for a while on these often very expensive tapes, but now with streaming and youtube, the sex exists in cyberspace rather than captured on a concrete medium like a VHS tape.

 

Will VHS make a comeback? Some grassroots indie artists and retro collectors may be rediscovering the medium (and also the major consumer movie format before video, Super 8 film). Is it the appeal of retro, or some other specific component of the medium? Time may tell.

25 years ago, Chicago experienced a deadly heat wave; 739 heat-related deaths occurred in Chicago over a period of five days. Most of the victims of were elderly, poor, and parallel to the demographic of the victims of coronavirus death toll, people of color, who could not afford air conditioning and did not open windows or sleep outside for fear of crime.

The hottest day was July 13, where the temperature soared to 106 °F (41 °C). The weather had been exceptionally hot and humid for some days before. At that point, I was working in an air conditioned office in at a low-level law firm support staff job.

I was also in the primal, exciting throes of my first major BDSM relationship (in fact, relationship of any kind), albeit a long-distance one (he lived in New York). Essentially, I was expending my energy on living LGBTQ rather than a career.

I had bought a condo. It was not air conditioned. I could not afford at that point to purchase and install the special air conditioner needed for a casement window.

 

After another boring day at the office, I figured I would take cold showers and sleep my way through it. If it got really bad, I was going to see If my brother would perhaps let me stay with him and his family (I was not counting on that option; family support was generally limited in scope during that period).

I got home. The electricity went out.

I called an elderly neighbor, one half of a gay couple in the building I was very good friends with. He said he was fine, and he was waiting for his partner to get home.

Then I remembered: a former friend of mine and I were scheduled to see a performance by a lesbian called The One-Woman Sound of Music.

He showed up at my place, and we were thinking, go to the play, which was in an air conditioned building with functioning electricity, come back to my place, and see what happens.

The play was literally a scream (her imitation of the Mother Superior saying “The borders have closed” especially), though the overly lecherous captain impersonation (too many jokes about “teddies”) was a bit coarse. Still, I was impressed with her energy and commitment.

 

Anyway, we got back to my place. No electricity.

We talked to my next door neighbors, who were fleeing down the staircase with luggage to find a motel.

My friend said, “You can’t stay here.” I fumbled for underwear, socks, and a shirt in the darkness, and we went to his place, a condo he shared with his somewhat … er … “older” partner.

I spent the night, the partner made frittatas in the morning, and by the afternoon I was back at my place. The lights were on. The humidity had decreased, I was getting a lake breeze, and I relaxed.

I called my partner/Sir in New York City, who told me to thank my friend. I called my elderly neighbor. He told me he was able to fall asleep, waking up only briefly bathed in sweat.

Meanwhile, an apocalyptic scenario was occurring. Just a couple blocks south of me, people had been trapped in elevators. Even in the gentrifying and gentrified north side of Chicago, swaths of neighborhoods were without electricity for a couple weeks. People slept outside and at the lake (according to my grandmother, a common occurrence in her life when air conditioning was primarily limited to movie theaters). Food rotted in refrigerators. People fled the city.

And people died. So many people in areas that I still have never visited.

Source: National Weather Association

 

A couple weeks after the event, I wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune, which was published. I claimed a “hot but cold” Midwestern culture of not knowing one’s neighbors and racial segregation was responsible. An anonymous person mailed me a piece of paper with Nazi symbols on it.

It’s almost become a cliché to talk about LGBTQ persons choosing a family, having to choose and build one because of familial and social rejection. I think the story reveals that like blood family, the “gay family” looks out for each other.

Compared to so many people who suffered in that heat wave, I lived a life of comparative privilege. What’s really tragic is that many who died couldn’t or even, in some cases, wouldn’t get help from not just their blood families, but from a human being. For them, the borders were indeed closed, and for many like them, they still are.

Recommended reading: Klinenberg, Eric (2002). Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

The current national anthem of the United States is extremely difficult to sing. As someone who has done some professional singing and is now currently trying to rejuvenate his voice, trust me on this one.

It keeps plunging down into low notes or what some vocal pedagogues call chest register, which can drag the rest of the voice down, and at the end, one is supposed to sing a high note on an “ee” vowel, “land of the free.” Because of this difficulty, it even gets transposed down even lower, which means it ends up sounding like a growling monotone.

The composer, Francis Scott Key, was aiming for a heroic line that matched the bombastic lyrics, and he perhaps was thinking of situation like those that occur at baseball games where one listens to trained singer sing it.

Times have changed in that manner, and unfortunately we have been subjected to travesties like the dreadful yowling of Roseanne, or in the manner of many pop singers, adding to what is already difficult by adding vocal turns and coloratura and the like (perhaps to keep the voice flowing as it tries to surmount the line’s irregular see-sawing movement).

Vocally it’s problematic, but regarding the text, many have complained about the militaristic imagery, especially “rockets’ red glare/bombs bursting in air.”

More significantly, given the social changes now occurring because of the Black Lives Matter movement, some activists say the United States should replace “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Why? Its lyrics were written by Francis Scott Key, a slaveholding lawyer who expressed white supremacist views.

Songs that some have suggested as replacing it have included “America the Beautiful,” “This Land Is Your Land,” “My Country ‘tis of Thee” “God Bless America,” and “Lift Up Every Voice and Sing.” John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Dolly Parton’s “Color Me America” are also on the list.

See this link for some performances of the some of the above songs.

I have in the past tended to move with the “America the Beautiful” replacement crowd. Why? It’s easy to sing, with a range, and more significantly, meter that matches many of the hymns people were used to singing in church. In fact, it’s got the same meter as “Auld Lange Syne,” the common meter, which means one can sing the lyrics and melody for each song interchangeably.

Common hymn meter - Source: https://poemshape.wordpress.com/category/guides/about-common-ballad-meter/

 

Now, some have noted the text by Katherine Lee Bates tends to read like a travelogue or landscape; it doesn’t really proclaim and develop an idea as much as describe a landscape, vast mountains and plains and “spacious skies” surrounded by “shining sea.” But that’s the part of the lyrics we usually sing. There’s much more!

In 1893, there’s the verse:

God shed His grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain,
The banner of the free

Which was then changed in 1904 to:

May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine

The 1893 verse actually sounds more radical, given the context of the previous lines, which refer to “liberating strife,” which could refer to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, “once or twice” events that liberated Americans from “selfish gain.” Ultimately, war is vain and degrades the human person to a number, an impersonal body, rather than as earlier in the verse, “a precious life.”

Katherine Lee Bates - Source: https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/cambridge-harvard/katharine-lee-bates/

 

In 1904, and in a later revision in 1911, one encounters stereotypical imagery of heroes sacrificing themselves for America and tying in more the Manifest Destiny idea. The result of the liberating strife veers between martyrdom and material prosperity; I am getting more than a hint of the Prosperity Gospel. Success, in whatever shape or form, means one is blessed by God.

Overall, this conversation ultimately ends up being a “tough call,” and as the LGBTQ Pride Flag has now undergone a transformation to include people of color, one wonders if the traditional staples need to be cast aside as we confront the injuries in the name of those American, using Bates’ word, “glory tales” that oppress rather than liberate, enclose rather than include.

Update of the Pride flag with black & brown stripes introduced at 2017 Philadelphia Pride as an inclusionary revision highlighting people of color

2018 update of the Pride flag by artist Daniel Quasar that also includes the Trans Pride flag colors

 

Music moves flexibly in time; it’s not an immobile statue in physical space. As long as there is someone to sing a song, it will exist.

Ultimately, the act of singing itself is an act of vulnerability but also empowerment. Every time one sings, one re-creates, just as all are “crowned with good,” because they were created in the image of the Divine.