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!