Some gay fetishes are predicated on change of identity or simply hiding – pup hoods, fursuits. (For autistics, even some gay ones, they’re hiding because they can’t deal with themselves.) Almost any gay fetish that can be expressed in public revolves around dressing up (leather, rubber). What I think is unexamined is fetishes’ tactility.
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Leather is too easy an example (fabric thickness and aroma are confabulating factors there), but rubber is a classic case. You have to be in basically awesome shape, and hirsuteness is a contraindicator. Rubber gear, if skin-tight, is borderline impossible to get into, disintegrates if left in contact with the wrong materials (e.g., coat hangers), and rips if you so much as sneeze. Baggier rubber gear is about enclosure (also aroma) and carries an apocalyptic tinge, or at least a yearning to be a robot (cf. Rubberdrone).
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You can be Neil Z. Page (q.v.) and find a pair of brothers or lovers or both who are hirsute and in good enough shape to wear rubber.
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You can be Si or Sly Hands, a youngergay rubberqueen photographer who died mysteriously last year (I assume by suicide).
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This externalization of the sexual self stops an infinitesimal distance from the epidermis. It’s fun wearing things while you’re all by yourself – you don’t even need a boner. One thinks back to Mark Christopher’s Alkali, Iowa (q.v.), which still holds up well 20-odd years later, in which the young gay farmboy discovers his gay granddad’s lockbox, then raids his closet, paging through the grandfather’s evocative snapshots while wearing his military overcoat but no shirt.
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Externalize this sexual self to its limit, dematerialization, and you get the opposite of rubber armour, gunge. Great name, and the Recon video about gunge is pretty good.
(So’s the quiz show!)
The semiotics can be a bit hard to figure out.
Gunge is a regression to the womb, with near-submersion in amniotic fluid. The operative word is viscosity – also slime, but you don’t end up defiled. Plus the only other way to experience a pool with swirled colours on its surface is to sit in an oily puddle. And if you get a boner doing that sort of thing, there’s really something wrong with you.
You can stand imperiously aloof in your rubber, leather, or faux-fur armour, but if you’re in a pool of slime with other slimelords, you get up close. Like triplets in the womb, though we dispense with placentas. Like a single body, the core dream of sexuality. And again, you don’t need a boner.
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Do rubber and gunge trace past the womb to deprival of touch as children? I assume so. Hence there’s not that great of a chasm spanning rubber, gunge, and autistics in fursuits.
On another day, I’ll tell you how nice the other gay furfags have been to me all along, and how functional they are, and how many hockey teams they play on.