Sofia Petrillo Smokes a Blunt

Thanks to some major public demand, the Golden Girls series continues to Sophia.

For those of you who missed Blanche Devereaux with Giant Boner, this is all happening because I wanted to show my "gay" male friend how not weird it is that he idolized a Golden Girl growing up, because - as I told him in No Church in the Wild and most other times we spoke - the dicotomies between gender and sexuality are actually onerous bullshit.

So, here's Sofia.  The model who thought of himself as "a Sofia" generated this pose when asked to act her out, and I matched a concomitant facial expression from a real episode of Golden Girls.

She's showing live at the Poptag.it Gambit Pop-up Store + Gallery this Black Friday, where your drinks are free if you want to check her out.  If she makes you feel a little weird, imagine how a trans person might feel looking in the mirror....we imposed that weirdness as a society with all our hardcore, unnecessary dichotomies...

PS - if you download the Popt app use the invite code "bacchus" for $5 credit to spend...

Where have all the Bathrooms Gone?

I got into a fight at JT/JZ.  Seriously. 

I drunkenly screamed at a dude seven inches taller than me and said very not nice things in his general direction.  Because I was in the men's bathroom, and I didn't wanna leave.  Instead, I've decided to crusade for my right to use it.

 I was at the Jay Z and Justin Timberlake concert at Candlestick.  It was a shockingly open and anti-discriminatory place.  Example: at one point they played "Forever Young." For Trayvon Martin. And the above tribute occurred. But before that, JT intro'd "Mirrors," and he begged everyone to sing along if they felt it, whether they were a guy with their girl, a girl with their guy, a girl with their girl, or a guy with their guy."

What was not at all open about the evening were the stalls in the women's restrooms. The event was 70% woman in a venue designed for crowds of 25% women.  More importantly, all bathrooms were so crowded that no one could have so much as coughed without 30 people hearing about it, and therefore no one was in danger of any kind of assault.  Except from me.

Because I really don't get why under those circumstances [cisgender] men would have the audacity to yell at a long line of desperate women about to piss themselves that the "men's room" was somehow sacred space, that the men's stalls were not available to women.  Well, fuck that. Bitches gotta piss too.  And it's about time we stopped pretending like gendered spaces are culturally important; they maintain distinctions that are totally unnecessary.  And they made 50,000 women nearly piss themselves during the Legends of Summer Tour.

An Evolutionary Reason You Get Off From Getting Head

One of my many flaws is reading far too many pop science books and drawing conclusions. Here's one such conclusion, drawn after receiving something of an overshare from a friend:

I think we evolved to feel pleasure getting head because it fights STDs.  Not kidding.

I'm not quite talking about the lower incidence of HIV transmission from oral sex as opposed to vaginal or anal sex, or the claim that saliva carries a sparser population of the HIV virus. Though that is certainly interesting.

I'm talking about saliva's generally antibiotic properties.  Like, if you're trapped in the desert and you cut yourself, you should probably spit on it.  For an entertaining discussion about the many capabilities of saliva, check out Mary Roach's Gulp.  Since Mary Roach has editors, I assume I can use this antibiotic property as a baseline.  Now for a little story.

My friend [Bella] is dating a newish girl, been a couple months.  They see each other weekly or thereabouts at this stage, and the oral sex is great.  Suddenly, Bella finds herself with what she suspects is a UTI. Seems they've been riding dirty.  Now there's a dilemma, she says.  Should she tell this girl not to go down there and miss out on the VERY excellent head, or do just keep her mouth shut and risk an infection but enjoy the face-ride?

My response will anger fundamentalist Islamists, Baptists, ancient Roman senators and perhaps certain Jews alike: Definitely let her eat it!  Tell her to lap it wet.  Mary Roach says saliva is like a microbial brigade of awesomeness.  It might make it better!

Worth a shot, we concluded. 

And it worked! UTI faded with more-frequent head.

So now, armed with this singular piece of anecdotal evidence, I've begun to wonder... Is this a novel trick?

Take, for example, two prehistoric women, one who really enjoys - craves - oral sex and one who doesn't care for it any more than doggy style or whatever.  If there's an antibacterial effect to having someone salivate all over your pussy, wouldn't natural selection pick the lady who craves head?

That's even if the head doesn't easily lead to procreation...

I think oral would similarly clean house for men.  Especially with those old diseases they used to have before humans made medicines that made the diseases sturdier.  So why not crave it?  It's good for you, you were born to love it!  That's one more thing religions get wrong about sexuality.

Transgender Summer Camp

If you are an 11 year old born with a penis who likes to dress in makeup and pink dresses, there's a camp for you.  The only sad part is that I can't tell you where to find it, because it's name and location have to stay secret to protect the campers.

Credit: Lindsay Morris

The owner calls it "You for You," which isn't the real name, but it is the real idea.  The idea is that if you are the parent of a gender nonconforming child, you can come to this camp with your child and allow your biologically male child to participate in beauty pageants and wear heels with other kids who like to do the same thing.  Nobody's judging them.

Bu my favorite part of the whole article describing this heretofore-secret camp is that the manager doesn't expect (or encourage or discourage) these kids to grow up to be any particular way.  She accepts that some may want gender reassignment surgery one day just as she accepts that some will stop wearing girls clothes in the next few years, marry women, and identify as straight at 30.

She doesn't think of gender as polar and permanent, and that's exactly what the rest of us need to notice.  Because her point of view allows these kids to be really happy. (Check out her photos, because these kids do look like they're having a blast).

I painted Blanche Devereaux with an erection and wrote No Church in the Wild to make the same point.  We have to stop thinking about gender and sexuality in terms of permanent polarities that don't really apply.  It's much easier for a boy who wants to dress as a girl to say "I feel like wearing heels today" than it is to say "I want to be a girl forever."  Just because the former is true doesn't mean the latter is.  Describing only the present circumstances is much easier and much more honest than "coming out" as an identity or orientation.  And it's much easier for us bisexuals to say "I want to date this [same-sex person] right now," which is about an action, than to say, "I'm a bisexual," which is a lifetime label with a number of nasty connotations that discourage the vast majority of bisexuals from ever coming out or using it.

So let's talk about our actions, now, instead of trying to cabin ourselves into permanent identities.

Reply to Anonymous

Due to technical difficulties, I'm responding to the following comment via post:

Anonymous1:29 PM

Do you identify as both cis gender and gender queer in this posting?

I have don't favor labels, generally.  I am comfortable with my body in my birth gender most of the time and would never want to remove my breasts, though sometimes I desperately wish I had a penis.  I exhibit many "masculine" behavioral characteristics, but I don't think that I act "like a boy" when I watch football, I think I act like a person who likes football.  So it's fair to say it's inconsistent to refer to myself with both labels - "gender queer" and "cisgender" - but in some circumstances both could be said to apply.  That's the problem with labels, I guess.

Cynthia Nixon Speaks

Lovely quote from her piece in the documentary The Out List:

"There are a lot of people who really don't believe people when they say they're bisexual, so I try to avoid the bisexual label because it just brings so much grief down on you.  People think you're faking, wishy washy, or people think you're a sex addict or something who doesn't wanna make up their mind, I wanna be a political fighter, and I wanna be in there fighting, so I call myself gay.  And certainly I'm delighted to be in the gay club.  People all the time talk about you know when I came out, but I don't feel like I came out.  I feel like I fell in love with someone and that person was a woman, and I don't wanna minimize that in any way.  What I'm attracted to about Christine is her butchness and her gayness.  But I didn't feel like all of a sudden there was a part of me that was denied or living in the shadows that finally could come out. gay people are fighting really really hard for our civil rights.  What's important is that the world looks at all of us and sees us as gay and so we need to be cohesive and we need to fight...it can't be us and them anymore, we have to understand, we're all us."

Let Me Explain Myself

I painted a gay boy's aroused figured with a face reminiscent of Blanche Devereaux for a reason, as I've explained before.  In response, I got an uproar of vicious Facebook messages.  Some claimed that I had insulted the actress with my work.  Some claimed that it was trash and I was not activist, just a "cockroach."  I've never been called a cockroach before.  Fortunately, some members of the community spoke up to say they appreciated the message I was sending.

So now I want to explain a bit about why I chose to send that message.

It certainly wasn't meant to insult the actress. The character of Blanche Devereaux was a childhood idol of mine, and I've often noted that it was my idolatry of Blanche that made me feel comfortable exercising my hypersexual tendencies.  [Bobby], the model, felt the same way.  This painting is a celebration of the love and taste he and I share for Golden Girls, and Blanche in particular.

But I assumed most people would find the painting at least a little disturbing.  Why?  Because the image feels "wrong" or "gross" to a cisgender person - one who feels they are physically and mentally their birth gender - because it mixes genders in a way that puts them off.  For a transgender person, they could see this SAME kind of "disturbing" or "disgusting" disconnect when they look at the bodies they were born with in the mirror because they feel so alienated from their birth gender (more on why/how science explains that trans and cisgender persons are born as a result of the same quirks of the gestation processes in a moment).  So, imagine taking any disturbing sensations you got from this painting to the bathroom mirror with you every single morning.

One guy on the web accused me of making the word "cisgender" up when I told him why I made this painting.  I assure you, I did not.  It has been used academically for quite a while.  I didn't know the term myself until recently because I am cisgender and never had a reason to define myself as different until I began interacting more deeply with the trans community as a result of No Church in the Wild.  Cisgender is just an academic way of referring to persons whose birth gender and "psychological gender" match, as opposed to trans or gender queer persons who identify as a different psychological gender.  "Cisgender" is left off most speech for the same reason "white" might be: Most of society would say "I saw a man running" if they meant a white dude but would say "I saw a black man running" if they meant a black dude.

A cisgender bias is a manner of thinking of the world with reference to persons who feel a "match" - as a white person sees the world without reference to the difficulties minorities experience -  but I'd argue that oftentimes parts can match and parts cannot.  As I have argued with my painting of Bobby as Blanche, which is a physical male's embodiment of a female-stereotyped persona. 

You may have noticed that I'm opposed to dichotomies like "gay vs. straight" and "male vs. female."  In my scale of sexuality fingerprints,  I use "active to passive" instead of "male vs. female." A human's graph point on the fingerprint mold below moves according to the extent to which one is "same-sex interested to opposite-sex interested" - or, "hypersexual to asexual."  Each rating is just a point along an axis, an one's graph point may change over time as our brains age.  I don't have a point for "Trans to cis" gender because I don't think personality/sexuality characteristics need to be thought of in terms of gender at all to understand sexuality (or sexual compatibility).  Here's where the figure in my previous painting of Blanche Devereaux with Giant Boner falls on the graph, with the curve representing the range necessary because the face and boy have different birth genders.

Birth gender is set by your genes during your first trimester as a fetus.  The traits that place a human in a particular spot on this graph all develop later in gestation, across genders, when the makeup of the fetal brain is structured, in part, by androgens.  Androgens are sex hormones (estrogen, testosterone, etc) coursing through a pregnant woman, and they depend on the mother's environment, mood, biology, etc rather than the child's sex.  Specifically, later brain development, when we get traits like aggression built into our neurons - which people often simply identify as a birth gender trait - is guided by the mother's androgen levels rather than the child's sex.  I've blogged before about the scientists who first made this claim and suggested why it explains my bisexuality and my gender queer traits.  If you don't think in terms of birth gender, Blanche doesn't look so creepy.

So, I've painted to make the world aware of how deep-seated their misconceptions and biases of gender really are.  If you hate it, I hope you'll at least think about why.

Blanche Devereaux with Giant Boner

Blanche Devereaux with Giant Boner

Read on for the story of its making:

My friend Bobby (name changed for anonymity’s sake, although given the above I’m not sure why he wouldn’t want a bit of credit) read my book, and we had a bottle of wine between us and started chatting about it one night.  Bobby identifies as predominantly into men, cisgender (for those playing the home game, a cisgender trait is where one’s behavioral/mental gender and birth gender match in a given circumstance), hypersexual, mostly active.  I’ve blogged about why we might exhibit these characteristics before, and it’s not about birth gender in the least.

“[The book] made me think about what attractions I do have to women.  And I really have none,” he said.

“Everyone’s different.  Sexuality is more like a fingerprint than a gender or an orientation.  Like you, you’re hypersexual, predominately same-sex interested, very active/toppy.  But you still exhibit some behaviors that are stereotyped as ‘feminine,’” I told Bobby.

“Like a love of Golden Girls?” he asked, and I think he might have been joking…

“I know you’re really only into dudes, but you do that same kind of rewriting and reconceptualizing that pervades No Church in the Wild because you neglect to consider all the parts of you that aren’t a perfect match for your birth gender. I like football, that’s not really ‘feminine’ in the stereotypical sense.  And loving Golden Girls isn’t stereotypical ‘manly’ for you either.  But if you destroy the dichotomy of gender and stop trying to fit yourself into one of two imperfect boxes with everything you do, you’ll see your have more in common with the Golden Girls than you have different.  Did you ever identify with a biological female? Like, have a female heroine? Maybe, divaesque?”

“Indeed. Blanche Devereaux,” Bobby said.

At that precise moment in our lives Bobby happened to have much free time.  I am a painter from time to time, and I haven’t had a good live model in about eight years.  In the interim, I’ve painted myself.  But now, I had a thought.

“Would you model for me?” I asked him.  It was too good to be true.  His sexuality (though obviously not his birth gender) - hell, even his personality - was pretty much identical to that of Blanche Devereaux.  Playful hypersexual who pursues men actively and frequently.  Only men.

“Naked?” Bobby asked, tentative.

“Ideally.”

“I don’t know if I want people to see my face.”

“They don’t need to see your face…” I explained.  Because it would be Blanche’s.

I told Bobby he could keep his clothes if he needed to when he showed up at my apartment to sit.  But we both agreed Blanche would be naked.  We’re all ultimately, naked, after all, if we’re portrayed realistically.  Clothes hide a painful amount of expression.  As he sat, I asked him what struck him about Blanche and watched as his body followed his thoughts, waiting for the perfect Blanche moment.

“What about my penis?” he asked.

“Is the part of you that identifies as Blanch Devereaux sexual?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then I suppose this being would be erect… I want to paint the part of you that feels like Blanche Devereaux.  That being is genderless and both genders at once…if you’re comfortable with that?”

“No,” Bobby said, “ I think you’re right.  She’d be erect.”

“She’s pretty much always erect, as far as I can tell.”

Bobby was eventually able to manifest Blanche’s erection, but only if he handled the erection piece outside of our modeling session, during which he reclined on my bed, interchangeably smoking weed and drinking, with gay porn on in the background, while I photographed him until the perfect Blanche moment emerged.

I chose an image of Blanche from an episode where she was extra-flirty, as she comments flippantly about a lover.  It reminded me of Bobby.

So, here you have it – my painted expression of the end of gender and sexuality dichotomies a la No Church in the Wild.  If you like, comment.  I plan to do a series of gay men channeling Golden Girls.  I’ve already got a wonderful expression for a Sophia.

Happy Gay Day, Castro!

When there is a landmark court case for gay rights, the City breaks into a rave, generally.  But, when TWO landmark decisions come in one day...well, that's when Muni stops even trying to travel through the Castro.

This is what the street looked like around 7:00PM yesterday, the ecstatic funeral of DOMA and of Prop 8.  One friend was photographed by a news crew in a wedding dress as he walked down market, an "Equality Now" sign in the background.  Another walked down Castro street randomly hugging strangers.  The atmosphere of communality was pervasive.  In fact, as I waited for a bus to take me to the Castro, I found myself in a group of happy travelers with a similar wait, all updating one another on the Google maps arrival time status, all smiling, and someone actually said, "well it may take us a while to get there, but we'll get there, and we'll have each other along the way."  I'm starting to understand how "gay" and "happy" are truly synonymous.

Perhaps the best part of this eruption of joviality was the newbie gays: boys and girls recently transplanted to San Francisco for work or play or desperation and had no idea what kind of party they were joining, who all wore bright-eyed wonder smattered on their faces at the sight of their new San Francisco Reality.

It's going to be a hell of a Pride weekend.

Friends of Amina

Amina Siboui made news last year when she posted pictures of herself topless on the web with the slogan "My Body is My Own" painted across her chest.  She was speaking out against the web of patriarchy she and most other women in the world live under.  She felt so threatened afterward she began to carry pepper spray at the behest of a friend.

Image from BBC

When the Tunisian government arrested her after a later protest in May, they charged her with carrying a weapon (the pepper spray) in addition to public indecency and some other totally fabricated charges.

But it seems like all Amina was trying to say is "hey, I'm a chick, but I have human rights too."  Like, no shirtless male Tunisians are getting arrested for indecency, are they?  What's with the double standard?

I was in Tunisia before the Arab spring, in late summer 2008. It had beautiful Mediterranean beaches, striking deserts, wonderful Roman ruins.  It was also the biggest sausagefest I've ever seen in my life.  All the cafes and stores were full of men, just men, especially at night.  Women, we were told, were safely at home.  We did see women, covered, on the streets occassionally, but not once during my trip did I have the chance to talk to one.  What I suspect Amina was trying to say is, "hey, you treat all your women like prisoners!  That's not okay!"

And now, she's been found guilty of public indecency, etc.  In response, a number of women throughout Europe and the Middle East have taken to the streets in topless protest, like the one pictured above.  many are being tortured on the streets as they protest for the same chauvinist reasons Amina is in jail.  If you see them, please help them out.  They do us all a service.

SwingerTown Kauai

Last week I visited a lovely little hamlet out in the middle of buttfuck Hawaii, complete with serene views and ocean breezes and lanai a la Golden Girls.  The only problem: it was otherwise stocked with married couples, most of them carrying children in tow.  This was of course a beautiful display of familiar affection, but more than that it was a real cramp in my gay guy friend's and my licentious style.

Looking about the sea of couples, we decided early on to look for swingers on Kauai who could entertain both of us with one web message.  Targets were otherwise just too scarce on the island.  In case you didn't know, Kauai is pretty small, though not so small as to totally lack swingers.  We found a veritable smattering of couples touting at least one bisexual member.  The problem: they were mostly over 50, and they were uniformly, well, non-sexable.  Like, not even approaching the mediocre attractiveness of the folks in the above photo.

We tried harder; we signed up for a swingers' commune on the web as a couple, but still no dice.  Then, we had an epiphany.  Thanks to the grand power of the Internet, we were not restricted to finding a swinger's spot on the island; we could make one.  All it would take is a few well-placed Yelp reviews and some comments on other swinger sites.  We could pick any hotel, any destination, any week, and publicize a swingers' week at the chosen hotel coming up next year at the "same time" with all the casual sex your heart desires for the taking.

So, I challenge you, fair reader, to elect the sexual delight you are most likely to desire on your next vacation and use the hashtag #swingergeneration to tell everyone you can that your delight is featured at the lodging of your choice.  This shall become a grand experiment in viral media likely to get at least one of us laid.

Jesus is my Dildo

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What Made Me Bisexual

I always sort of thought that most women watched porn and just didn't disclose that fact, but A Billion Wicked Thoughts has not only clarified that issue, but has explained why I would have guessed as I did:

Only a minority of women watch porn, they say, but "One particular group of women reported higher amounts of porn viewing, larger porn stashes, greater comfort with their partner watching porn, greater enjoyment of bondage, and more interest in using the Internet for porn.  Who were these women?  Self-identified bisexuals."


Oh.  I see.

And then, "On OKCupid, the pattern of bisexual women's responses to questions was distinct from straight women and lesbians- but quite similar to the responses of heterosexual men, as shown in the figure below."  In fact, their chart displays bisexual women's answers as almost the perfect midpoint between those of straight men and those of straight women.  In addition, "Among registered users on the visual porn site Fantasti.cc, 38% of the women identify as bisexual."  Actually, it looks like bisexual women are more into lesbian porn than lesbians; and, all women are WAY more into GAY PORN than anyone has ever suggested ("In Japan, almost anything homosexual can attract an all-female audience," for example) - why is this?

The authors suggest that (1) the fact that women like gay porn is not really surprising because it removes the gender dynamics that women can find distasteful and therefore that turn women off from porn; it keeps the power dynamics and hot male bodies they like; and (2) bisexual women may watch porn more like straight men because their brains are more like "straight" men's than "straight" women's brains.

Let's unpack this, because this last bit is what I draw from what they wrote rather than an explicit claim the authors make.  They talk a lot about the physical difference between the stereotypical male brain and the stereotypical female brain, but they also explain that brain structure is determined in large part by pregnancy hormone balances; while your sex organs are determined early, the bulk of brain development that might give one a taste for masculinity or femininity, as well as a toppy nature or a bottomy nature, happen later - and may happen at slightly different times.  Hormones called androgyns course through our veins during pregnancy (ultimately we're talking about estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, but depending on how much we have of each one hormone might be automatically converted by the mother's body into another).  You might have already guessed the implication of this claim: these hormones vary with every single pregnancy, so no two sexualities are ever going to be completely alike!

A fetal boy, therefore, can be subject to androgyns that trigger the development of aggressive brain structures popularly associated with men OR, at a certain point, androgyns that develop communicative, perhaps more passive brain structures - the type we find most commonly in males who identify as "gay."  They might be subject to both types, too, along the way (maybe ending up as a gay top).  The authors don't talk about women here much (they have less evidence on women because of the smaller sample set of porn-watching and searching women).


But it can be easily extended, I think, and I'll use myself as an example.  After my first trimester I had my little vagina just growing along already, but somewhere in the next 6 months I got a heavy dose of testosterone at the precise moment it would make me slightly toppy and more aggressive than your average gal.  As a byproduct of this process I am more willing than the average woman to watch porn (I got me some brain structures that react to visuals alone without as much female-associated contextual need for a story).  The fact that I respond to the sight of either kind of sex organ doesn't appear dependent on this process, though - it turns out women have a physiological reaction to graphic imagery of members of either gender even when it turns them off psychologically - what's changes is what actually has the capacity to turn me off psychologically.

The combination of my male-like search for more partners over quality partners (experience has definitely borne this one out) and my indifference to sex organs makes me closer to the hypersexual pole of my graph.  I retain more of my ability to STAY turned on psychologically by sex images of any kind, which causes me to fall right in the middle of the hetero-homo axis.  My cocktail of androgyns building up aggressive brain centers makes me more toppy. 

Now let's take the graph of my character Jackson from No Church in the Wild - a self-identified gay man who says he's grossed out by pussy. 
 

Jackson is equally interested in topping and bottoming (the authors make a point that a bottomy nature may be the result of the greatest influx of testosterone during gestation, interestingly, perhaps converted to estrogen to explain the development of female-like reward cycles).  He's not particularly hypersexual or asexual, but he is a great communicator.  In fact, as teens, I talked on the phone with the man who inspired this character almost every day (the authors note that this is very common among young girlfriends, but almost no young men talk to friends on the phone for fun).  So, it seems that an influx of feminine-making androgyns hit him later in development, enough to make him communicate in a more "feminine" way, but not so much that he came to be stimulated entirely by passivity.

None of the axes can be determined with just the development circumstances that affected the other; you need a different calculus for each one.  But it does work if you split the analysis up...and the logical conclusion would be that MOST people actually get a little bit of hormones that trigger the development of male-like AND female-like brain characteristics.

Cue lifetime obsession with the effect of androgyns on fetal development!