The Cock that Changed Her Mind.*

July 3, 2008

whips it out

Just when I was ready to dump my membership at Brazzers, they bring back the MASSIVE reason I ever joined to begin with: CRISS STROKES. While there’s no shortage of big meat here, Ramon (the hung super thick, playful Spaniard); Scott (tattooed, HUGE-perfect-dicked, babyfaced beauty) Nails (more Nails, please); Johnny (”I’d do his laundry and cook and clean”) Sins; James (”anytime, anywhere, anyplace”) Deen; Criss‘ towering presence remains unrivaled. His current scene, Lesson Learned the Hard Way with cute as a button, fully-equipped, security guard Ralph Long and men’s room intruder Lexi Love is this little piggy boy’s dream. I’ve never been happier to see a big-dicked male porn star seated rock hard on a toilet since Lee Ryder in Huge. Five (out of five) squirts.

*Title from upcoming Brazzers’ Teens Like It Big scene with Criss Strokes, July 8th. See more here [18+], (password = “criss”).


Do you love me?*

July 2, 2008

How extraordinarily dangerous love is.

And wouldn’t it be nice, I think (absurdly recalling that old Beach Boys song about two lovers waking up “in the kind of world where we belong”), if for once, just once, we could achieve redemption without blood, if the empty cross would mean not only the resurrection that gives life but a vision of life beyond this constant, dismal, stupid need we have for sacrificial lambs, and all because we are less afraid of violence than of love.

GARRET KEIZER, Turning Away from Jesus: Gay Rights and the War for the Episcopal Church. Harper’s Magazine, June 2008.

*Jesus to Simon Peter, John 21:16


Smitten.

June 30, 2008

The first sigh of love is the last of wisdom.

ANTOINE BRET


In choosing my “destruction,” I’ll choose joy.*

June 25, 2008

With the greatest enthusiasm, I suggest we embrace the very threatening principle of joy. The poet Audre Lorde once said that sexuality stems from a deep wellspring of joy. Gay people are by definition, and in my experience, joyous people. We have found a way to turn everything into a celebration; in our lives dancing resembles a sacred act. We should not look at this as a sign of moral weakness, as our enemies and the more self-hating among us do; we should consider this gay impulse toward pleasure to be a central part of the gay and lesbian character. The disdain of some gay activists toward what Michael Bronski has termed “the pleasure impulse” reflects our adoption of straight morality’s condescending attitude toward pleasure, joy, and desire. But in gay life pleasure serves a very different role. We do not fear it; we embrace it, ritualize it, and are transformed by its power.

URVASHI VAID, Virtual Equality

Yes, I’m asking you to become a sex radical. It’s the best sort of radical to be. Because when you get more information about your own sexuality, the quality of your life improves immediately. When you free your body from the invisible control of church and state, you not only challenge some of the most evil authoritarian institutions in the world, you have more fun and better orgasms.

PAT [now Patrick] CALIFIA, Forbidden Passages: Writings Banned in Canada

To be homosexual [in America] is to have learned to resist one particularly powerful form of societal conditioning. Some of us take that lesson much further, questioning all manner of conditioned behaviour. Unfortunately, being gay or HIV+ guarantees nothing about one’s readiness to shed conditioned thoughts. Consider how many gay men continue to whine about the display of flesh at pride celebrations. Their letters of complaint appear in gay papers and in the mainstream media. Why must we show our dark side to the world, they ask. Maybe these people miss the point because it’s so simple: some of us have no respect for societal taboos about nudity and sexual expression. We feel that a society that cannot accept a naked human being walking down the street is rotten to the core.

TOM ACE, Diseased Pariah News, No. 8.

Artists: MICHAEL BAKER and PHILIP HARE @ Propeller through July 6th. (Opening Reception, June 26th, 7pm.) OTHER PRIDE PICKS: Will Munro’s Vazaleen/Shame Party at Wrongbar, June 27th (sold out). The Hidden Cameras South Stage (Church Street), June 28th, 10pm. Free.

* Kirby, Letters. Xtra. January 8, 2004.


“Sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows.”

June 24, 2008

I get older. I grow old. Somebody starts to tell me about their dreams, and I get so bored I have to escape. I flee to the craft superstore down the street from the hardware superstore, down the parkway from the office superstore. I wander its aisles, looking for the seed of an idea to help me escape from myself—I walk past artificial lilies and unpainted birdhouses and crewel kits that allow me to make images of koi swimming in Tokyo ponds. And then, in the scrapbooking aisle, I see 79 [cent] stickers packs with little rainbows and unicorns that say DREAMS CAN COME TRUE! and it makes me want to cry the way we feed nonsense crap like this to kids, who are going to inherit a century of ugly wars started by people who died long ago, but who were sick and damaged enough to transmit their hatred down through the centuries. Dreams don’t come true. Dreams die. Dreams get compromised. Dreams end up dealing meth in a booth at the back of Olive Garden. Dreams choke to death on bay leaves. Dreams get spleen cancer.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND, The Gum Thief

Pictured: DOUGLAS COUPLAND, Corporate Safety Blanket No. 1


My idolatry.

June 23, 2008

Password is behold. [18+]


What will happen to all that beauty?

June 22, 2008

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

. . . in the realm of morals the role of Christianity has been, at best ambivalent. It is not to much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself, from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

But I cannot leave it at that; there is more to it than that. In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare. Perhaps we were, all of us—pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children—bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love. I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about “the man.” We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not. This is the freedom that one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz. In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been “down the line,” as the song puts it, know what this music is about. I think it was Big Bill Broonzy who used to sing “I Feel So Good,” a really joyful song about a man who is on his way to the railroad station to meet his girl. She’s coming home. It is the singer’s incredibly moving exuberance that makes one realize how leaden the time must have been when she was gone. There is no guarantee that she will stay this time, either, as the singer clearly knows, and, in fact, she has not yet actually arrived. Tonight, or tomorrow, or within the next five minutes, he may very well be singing “Lonesome in My Bedroom,” or insisting, “Ain’t we, ain’t we, going to make it alright? Well, if we don’t today, we will tomorrow night.” White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality and do not any longer understand it. The word “sensual” is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can only be oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more then they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

JAMES BALDWIN, The Fire Next Time

Did I mention you must read this book? The fire next time is now.

Photo: NYTimes.


heart, again

June 20, 2008

VAUCANSON

It was snowing as he wrote.
In the gray room he felt relaxed and singular,
But no one, of course, ever trusts these moods.

There had to be understanding to it.
Why, though? That always happens anyway,
And who gets the credit for it? Not what is understood,
Presumably, and it diminishes us
In our getting to know it

As trees come to know a storm
Until it passes and light falls anew
Unevenly, on all the muttering kinship:
Things with things, persons with objects,
Ideas with people or ideas.

It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension
To life, when life is precisely that dimension.
We are creatures, therefore we walk and talk
And people come up to us, or listen,
And then move away.

Music fills the spaces
Where figures are pulled to the edges,
And it can only say something.

Sinews are loosened then,
The mind begins to think good thoughts.
Ah, this sun must be good:
It’s warming again,
Doing a number, completing its trilogy.
Life must be back there. You hid it
So no one would find it
And now you can’t remember where.

But if one were to invent being a child again
It might just come close enough to being a living relic
To save this thing, save it from embarrassment
By ringing down the curtain,

And for a few seconds no one would notice.
The ending would seem perfect.
No feelings to dismay,
No tragic sleep to wake from in a fit
Of passionate guilt, only the warm sunlight
That slides easily down shoulders
To the soft, melting heart.

JOHN ASHBERY, Notes from the Air


Heart

June 19, 2008

All man’s internal organs are bald and smooth. The stomach, intestines, lungs are bald. Only the heart has hair—reddish, thick, sometimes quite long. This is a problem. The heart’s hair inhibits the flow of blood like water plants. The hair is often infested with worms. You have to love very deeply to pick these quick little parasites from your beloved’s cardiac hair.

ZBIGNIEW HERBERT, The Collected Poems: 1956-1998


“Life is not meant to be easy, my child

June 17, 2008

but take courage: it can be delightful.”

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Back to Methuselah

“You should have to pay to go to church and the theatre ought to be free.” - MARK RUFFALO quoting G. B. Shaw on Inside the Actors Studio.