The beloved David Shields (q.v.), Other People:

• The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses.

• In Laura,

  Lydecker, of course, can’t control his gun: He kills the wrong girl earlier in the movie, and when he later tries to complete the act, even Laura can outmuscle him, causing him to misfire. He’s quickly mowed down by McPherson‘s boys. There’s control (verbal), then there’s control (physical). There’s language, then there’s blood.

  Cf. Mr. DANA ANDREWS:

  

• In high school I was athletic and thus, to a certain extent, popular. However, I worked unduly hard at it, at sports, with very little sprezzatura, which made me extremely unpopular among the really popular, really athletic people. Why? Because I made popularity or grace look like something less than a pure gift. Only the really popular, really athletic people knew I was unpopular, so I could, for instance, be elected, if I remember correctly, vice-president of the sophomore class and yet be, in a sense, underappreciated.

• My father didn’t particularly mind my mindlessness, since… he was also a lifelong athlete (runner, swimmer, trophy-winning tennis player) and sporadic sportswriter who, even now, at 94, still writes an occasional sports column for his local suburban California weekly. My mother, on the other hand, disapproved. Once, she said to me, “Sometimes when people ask me if all you ever do is play sports, I want to tell them, ‘At least he’s devoted to something. At least he has an activity at which he excels,’ but other times I wish you were obsessed with something a little more permanent.”

  “Yes, I know,” I whispered; it was very late on some Sunday night.

  “Sometimes I just want to tell those people: ‘Leave me alone. Leave him alone. He’s like a dancer on that damn playfield or ballyard or what-have-you.’ But what I usually tell them, what I really feel, and what I guess I’m trying to tell you now, is that I wish you’d dedicate yourself with the same passion to a somewhat more elevated calling.”

  “Yes, I know,” I whispered again[.]

• I once felt joy in being alive and I felt this mainly when I was playing basketball and I rarely if ever feel that joy anymore and it’s my own damn fault and that’s life. Too bad.

Tom of Finland is the pretty good biographical feature film I ultimately saw in an actual movie theatre after vainly vying for Jon Bernthal to portray Kake.

Setting aside the hideously unreadable Arial “subtitles,” which are not the sort of thing one can really set aside, the picture betrays Touko Laaksonen’s entire life’s work and legacy in its last minutes.

• Who, Tom asks, falls within his pantheon?

  

  No. Just men who love, and fuck the living daylights out of, men. No straights.

• Who can be a “Tom’s Man”?

  

  Well, first of all, not a man in a dress, or a female (elsewhere seen, I thought – on review, it was this tragic cross-dresser all along).

  

  And really, probably not epicene stick-thin Gaysians, either.

Of course there is room to cast nonwhites in White literary roles when it comes time to shoot a filmic adaptation. Not a lot of room, but some, and if anything I would prefer so-called colourblind casting to intentional diversity propaganda.

But Tom of Finland illustrations, like any other visual work (including comic books), specify the visuals. It isn’t left to your, or an activist’s, imagination. Scarlett Johansson (q.v.) actually cannot play Major in Ghost in the Shell, except for the fact that she looks just like the animé progenitor.

Tom of Finland’s beloved men in uniform were not females, transgenders, or epicenes in uniform. We know that conclusively because he drew them for us and pictures are real.

Just as there aren’t two kinds of women (including those with penises [“Get over it!”]), in this context there’s a border, a fence, a wall between men in Tom of Finland’s imaginings… and everybody else. Nothing says you’ll be on the inside, and yes, we will tell you that to your face and we will keep you out.

(Cf. “Tom Girls.” Separate is equal here.)

A posting on DataLounge (q.v.), which I will not link you to out of propriety, offers a window onto how eldergays might view the insane petri-dish-like unbridled sexualism of Kids Today and their anti-HIV medicaments and the like. [continue with: Rather profane explication of gay generational psychology →]

(Via; q.v.)

This is why you hear the new public intellectuals grinding on about the necessity of civility and “good-faith” arguments. They feel disrespected by anyone who does not treat them as the head of the household[,]

wrote Mr. SICHA, the just-appointed Styles editor of the New York Times, who had described in several interviews midnight moves and raiding couch cushions for change. All that is rather quite over and done with now.

(“I assume your staff treat you like their boss, however,” I asked him. “I don’t let them make eye contact, obviously,” Mr. SICHA top-posted back.)

Some people are better than other people.

Venezuelan-American Mauricio A. Rodriguez has a unique skill in assembling half-nude collages that escape the leghold trap of grotesquerie. [continue with: Collagisme →]

I think this is the third straight year in which I was not de facto banned (“shadowbanned” in an early sense) from the OCA(D) graduation exhibit. Certainly nobody gave me a hard time, which was as it should be, if typically it has not been.

I met one lad who could actually draw and render. I made no bones about walking briskly past every “gender” and/or “Islamophobia” installation, all overrepresented, never actually welcome in the first place, and now quite useful as cudgels with employers-to-be. (Don’t want to hire a blue-haired and/or fat genderqueer, or a girl in a hijab, based on abilities and experience? She and her Twitter mobs will make you pay for that.)

Now one turns to the good news, summed up in two short syllables: Jess Tat. (I asked – that’s the actual surname, and yes, it’s unusual, as is the underlying Chinese hanzi.) She had a pretty good installation of mock consumer goods under the brand name Karōshi, so I had her walk me through it and them. This suite of affordable luxury products includes smelling salts to keep you awake through your 80-plus-hour workweeks, and space-age food in a pill to solve that 21st-century dilemma of finding enough time to eat.

I was asking her about obvious references (I didn’t mention poppers, but I did mention powerlifters snarfing ammonia before lifting; science fiction), and Jessica was halfway through acknowledging those references when it finally dawned on me, many minutes in, that this was a con!

“Wait. Five minutes in, I just realized this is a con,” I dutifully said.

“It’s satire,” Jess replied drily. Boy, is it ever.

I was totally duped by this whole thing and Jessica played me for a chump, which impressed the shit out of me. The proxy Web site (in deep black) was too believable. The products even came in squarish versions for males and rose gold for females. Every goddamned thing was dialled in just right. And you could sell these products.

I told Jess she’s got the rarest thing in design, or anywhere: ideas. In the olden days we used to call something like this “talent.”

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. [continue with: Tactility theory of gay fetishes →]