Summer of Lust: A Retrospective
Well, it’s been about a year since my run-in with that smooth-talking, blue-eyed felon whom I ended up shagging. (Please refer to the “Summer of Lust” category of blog posts for more details on that, if you’re interested in that whole debacle.) He broke my heart and my bank account, but I think that whole ordeal was a necessary learning experience for me. In a way, Billy opened the floodgates; since him, I’ve, er… well I’ve not been a slut per se, but I’ve not been too shabby either, especially for a confessed gamer geek and computer nerd. So I’ve got that going for me too.
Here’s hoping this summer, I’ll find a nice chap that’ll teach me even more about life, love, and other accommodations.
PS. My fear at the time, that Billy would turn me into a cock-crazed size queen, was mostly unfounded.
Musings on Bruno
I finally went last night and watched Bruno. Being a casual fan of Sacha Baron Cohen and hearing the wide range of buzz the film was getting (both positive and negative), I felt I needed to check it out for myself and determine which buzz was more accurate.
In case you didn’t know, the gay community has been fairly polarized on the subject of Bruno. A fairly sizeable minority dislike the movie primarily because it reinforces common stereotypes about gay people. According to these people, when your average American straight who knows no openly gay people sees the bleach-blonde, leather-clad Bruno with various objects in his “arschenhaller”, it’s just going to confirm very negative views of gay people in their minds. Furthermore, some are saying the ignorant and petty Eurotrash with obsessions of sex, fashion, and fame is little more than a modern-day minstrel show, except now it’s “queerface” instead of blackface to ridicule the minority. The overall opinion of the movie’s naysayers is that Cohen doesn’t really care about any potential damage the movie does, as long as the movie rakes in the money.
On the other hand, there is another camp (no pun intended) that believes overall, Bruno will have a positive effect on the gay community. Sure it’s offensive, these people say–that’s Cohen’s schtick–but the movie hits homophobes hard, very hard. Many people may not realize the extent and depth of the homophobia in society at large, so in a way, this movie brings it to people’s attention where it can be exposed for all to see, a la that parable about sunlight being the best disinfectant. And by the way, homophobia isn’t the only topic of interest in Bruno–the movie utterly decimates in other areas also, highlighting ignorance, shallowness and hypocrisy on many fronts, regarding many topics. Furthermore, this movie works on two levels, because the people being targeted aren’t just the ones in the film. Like all of Cohen’s characters, Bruno is as much directed toward the audience as it is to the people Cohen is pranking, and with that, this film is bound to cause viewers to challenge their own views and question their own responses to what they’re seeing on the big screen.
Now, my two cents…
Having seen the film, I think both sides have it partially right. Overall I think Cohen is ridiculing both homophobia as well as some of the more vapid and shallow tendencies in a certain segment of gay culture. I do not think the film was made with any sort of humanitarian purpose in mind–Cohen plays both sides of the fence to make money. But this is to be expected, because his other characters all work the same way as Bruno. Consider a side-by-side comparison between the two characters.
| Borat | Bruno | |
| Non-American w. ridiculous accent? | Yes | Yes |
| Amalgamation of stereotypes? | Yes (the “ignorant backwoods foreigner”) | Yes (the “shallow, sex-obsessed queer”) |
| Plays on people’s prejudices? | Yes (xenophobia, etc.) | Yes (homophobia, etc.) |
| Exposes other kinds of ignorance? | Yes (racism, misogyny, etc.) | Yes (celebrity worship, ‘gay conversion’, etc.) |
| Uses crude humor to make people in the film uncomfortable? | Yes | Yes |
| Uses crude humor to make people in the audience uncomfortable? | Yes | Yes |
Finding so much similarity in Cohen’s general comedic approach, I feel fairly sure that this movie was not a jab at gays per se, just as Borat was not a jab at the real-life people of Kazakhstan. Rather, Cohen takes a sample from a culture unknown to many “mainstream” people in middle America, and uses their unfamiliarity with that culture for his comedic ends. The extent to which Cohen is ridiculing his own characters is debateable–I believe Cohen’s interest lies in the realm of perceptions and misperceptions, and I do not think Cohen focuses on any demographic defined by any physical characteristic. Via the presentation of his characters, it is clear that Cohen is opposed to the racist bigotry of Borat and the vapid trendiness of Bruno. But he is equally opposed to those ugly world views he draws out of people in response to his caricatures and contrived situations.
In the end, I can say that Bruno is probably the most intellectual movie I’ve ever seen that had full frontal nudity and unsimulated sex scenes. For that, I must recommend it. I’d also recommend seeing it with straight friends to see how they react. As my friend Matt remarked when we walked out of the theater, “it makes you think.”
Random Spiffiness
Athena
Reverend Mother Mohiam
Steampunk Beholder
A canned treat from Russia
A space shuttle passes in front of the sun
Iraqi Monument to GWB
Freshly-extruded Chicken McNuggets (before nuggetization)
Mario's Mistake
The Failings of Beautiful Boys
Not terribly long ago I blogged about an interesting gay vlogger who has developed quite a following. I counted myself among the Davey Wavey devotees for many months, as I allowed myself to fall for him in the same way that hundreds of other young gay men have fallen for him. Spout enough pseudo-spiritual truisms and random religious quotes, and do it while shirtless and while possessing a very fit and trim body, and you’ll have a cult following in no time. Here was a man who fell outside the mainstream with his views, but was still easy on the eyes. Quite the rarity indeed. Mr. Wavey regularly invites his following to contact him–to write him emails and comment on his blog and vlog posts. I suppose he is the type that likes lots of attention… but anyway.
Being ever the web savvy young fruit, our Davey Wavey has spread his presence to a variety of well-known web sites. Besides his blog, you can find him on YouTube (of course), Flickr, MySpace, etc. The other day, I found that you can also find him on a few, er… less well-known web sites; to wit: LifeOut, a social networking site not unlike MySpace but exclusively for LGBT folk. I know this because I am a member of LifeOut (it’s the only social networking site I bother with), and he uses the same nickname on there that he does on his main site.
Well, I’d never attempted to contact Mr. Wavey before, other than anonymous comments on his blog, so I thought I’d contact him and tell him that I appreciated his thoughtfulness, his charitable work, and his spiritual insights, and that it was refreshing that a prominent gay youth could be free of the empty trappings and viewpoints of ’standard’ gay culture… an antithesis to the Perez Hiltons of the world, as it were. (Didn’t use that exact language, but you get the idea.) I closed the note with a request that I might add him to my friends list.
One of the nice things about LifeOut is you can see what people have done with your message once you’ve sent it. So, about a week or so later when I realized I hadn’t heard anything, I looked into it, and found that Davey received the note, checked out my own profile, then deleted my note with not so much as a curt ‘Thanks but no thanks.’ Taking another look at his LifeOut profile, I found all his friends were people who’d posted pictures of either their hard-ons or their gaping anuses for their face pics–tasteless, IMO–and that the only people he paid any attention to or interacted with in any way were the gym bunnies and skanky twinks who were looking for nothing more than a hookup.
It was a bit disappointing to see that my optimism and esteem for this young man had been misplaced. There is of course the personal aspect of it–I wasn’t even asking for a hook-up or anything like that, just expressing a simple “I like what you do” sort of sentiment–but even if that hadn’t happened, there is still the fact that Mr. Wavey portrays in one location is very different from what he portrays in another. Which is very unfortunate, especially for people who took his musings seriously. Elsewhere, Mr. Wavey frequently says “everyone is beautiful and I love everyone” and that sort of thing, but that must only be the party line when people are looking. In the shadows, where the public won’t look, he reverts to a gloryhole attendee and common slut. I do not fault him for this behavior per se, but I fault him for being hypocritical and leading such a double life.
It’s the same sort of thing I’ve seen among people in my own area–folks who purport to be one thing but quickly prove to be something else entirely. Gay twentysomethings in particular have a large disconnect between what they *say* they are interested in and stand for, and what they actually *are* interested in and stand for. Rather than surpassing this expectation and being truly unique in his own right, Davey Wavey simply fits with this behavior, and is no different from any of the other young gay men I know who are “into Buddhism” or “are independent thinkers”, etc. It’s just contrived fluff to make them look like they have some depth to their personality other than a crude and raging sex drive, or a constant need for attention.
Needless to say, I’m not a Davey Wavey follower anymore.
Not Blind Yet… (NSFW)
…but this post might help, if the old adage about masturbation causing blindness has any truth to it.
Subtlety ought to count for something these days, but it really doesn’t, so I don’t know why I continue to pretend like it does. I like subtle, I like tasteful suggestions that allow the people to put two and two together in their mind and come to their own conclusions, but these are blatant times we live in, and there isn’t much room for subtlety when everything’s so blatant.
Plus it’s always good to give the people what they want, and if it’s gay porn, then…
*ahem*
Well, I’m giving people fair warning that they shouldn’t scroll any farther if they don’t want to see things that appeal to me (and you know what *things* I’m talking about.
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Porn for the Blind
First of all, I’d like to state that I first stumbled across Porn for the Blind about a year ago. (Okay, maybe “stumbled across” isn’t the best choice of words here, but whatever.) At first I thought it was just an elaborate joke, so I dismissed it as such and put it out of my mind. But lately, seeing it referenced elsewhere, I revisited and saw that 1) they were still around, and 2) they had grown since I last visited. From all indications, it appears this is actually a legit site. Which boggles my mind somewhat.
The premise is this: Blind people can’t watch porn, so as a “service” to the horned-up seeing-impaired among us, volunteers will go to web sites by request and record themselves describing in plain English the porn that they are seeing. The blind can then listen to the recordings to “enjoy” the websites they were interested in. Oddly enough, the creators of the site have stipulated that volunteer narrators use only “correct” language to describe parts of people’s anatomy–no dicks, cocks, fun bags, pussies, etc. While this does limit the sexy factor involved with recording these descriptions and giving the blow-by-blow (*ahem*), it does increase the potential for hilarity tremendously. Some of the more savvy volunteers appear to be in on this knowledge, while others, gentle and pure souls that they are, trudge on with their clinical depictions of “fellations” and “penetrations” with a dogged determination to help strangers get their rocks off.
The recordings are available for all to hear, and there are even multiple interpretations of the same clips, as well as different clips from the same sites. (There must definitely be some blind person out there who has a thing for Straight Boys Fucking–amusing that it’s this site in particular, given that the narrators themselves can’t use the term ‘fucking’ outside of mentioning the site’s title.) Inevitably there are descriptions of websites that are either not real websites or have since been removed from the Internet, so one cannot naively believe that all the contributors to the site are really taking the jollies of the blind to heart. There’s definitely some LOLs, probably a “hmmm”, and maybe a “Wow” to be had at this site folks, so check it out.
Birthday Musings
Tomorrow I will be 28 years old, which is like 45 in gay years. It looks as though I will survive my 27th year, which is fortunate, seeing as how lots of important people don’t. In a way I’m kind of disappointed though–maybe I’m not important or cool enough to had died when I was 27. Oh well, guess I have a few more years to rack up some kind of legacy…
I’m trying really hard to avoid thinking about posting dirty pics here for my birthday, but the temptation is strong…
The Old Popularity Index
