A Brief Interlude

I received an Undergear catalog in the mail a few days ago. I don't remember getting one for quite some time, but it was inevitable that one day I would receive another one. International Male and Undergear have the most powerful gaydar in the world. if you are gay, not matter where you go or what you do, they will find you and your mailbox.

Looking through an underwear catalog is like looking at a wall of toothpastes in a store. How many choices do you need for something that is largely utilitarian? You only need a comfortable wrap for your best peeps, not a smiley face on the crotch for an extra $20.

It's amazing how much variety the producers can make with a few square inches of fabric. It's just a waistband, leg bands, a crotch piece and some connecting material. Well, in some cases you don't even get the connecting material, which strangely, you will then be charged more for less.

My TMI on the subject is underwear is that I wear only boxer briefs. I thought it was only a personal preference until I heard Will on Will & Grace talk about it as a hallmark of a gay man's wardrobe. I wonder if that is true. It seems odd since the skimpier varieties are the ones normally pitched to gay men.

The truth is probably that most are like me, with a few of the expensive ones and a lot of the Hanes and Jockey. When I say expensive for me I mean only the original price. I would only buy when there is a super discount. Macys closing Ayres in Indianapolis was a good time to snatch up the premium designers at going out of business prices.

For convenience I have my unmentionables separated into four categories: special, cotton, stretch and boxers. The boxers could be worn under pants if necessary but they are more for lounging around in.

People should wear whatever makes them happy and pay whatever it is worth to them. I admit I have some non-basic genital jammies myself, although I think the purchase is best made first for comfort and value/durability second.

The one thing I don't like is seeing men wearing child-like underwear. Strippers wearing underoos is not pleasant to me. Likewise I'm tired of seeing pictures of Ginch Gonch Boys. Talk about being overexposed. The shelf life of fad underwear models is short and it's time to put on a fresh pair.

Gay-ja Vu & DIY

Deja vu is the feeling that you have experienced something before. What would be the feeling that something you are experiencing will not happen again? That's a sense I wish I could have had as certain routine events and interesting adventures one day ended with no sign that they would not reoccur.

One routine event was going with a group of people from work every Friday to a local bar. We would play pool and play songs on the jukebox and the evening would be filled with fun, gossip, and storytelling. We did this for several years while rarely missing a Friday out. Other people from work would come to the same bar for a special occasion like a birthday or going away party and they would thank us for coming to their event. They didn't realize we had no idea that they would be there. We were always there.

One Friday it seemed that everyone had something else they needed to do and we didn't go. The next Friday for whatever reason we didn't go again. After that we never returned as a group. To this day I don't know what made it so, but I miss it. I wonder if I had known ahead of time that the occurrences were numbered, would I have acted differently to take advantage of maximizing the enjoyment of every possible moment? Would I have never left early, but rather held out till closing so as not to lose a single moment of such a finite part of my life?

There has been one situation that I have been well aware of its limited duration: the classic one-night stand. In some cases I couldn't have cared less, but in others, where it felt like in some alternate universe it would have been the start of a life long relationship, the awareness of time caused me to capture in my mind what I could in the time available. As what's-his-name would start to drift off to sleep next to me, I would try to memorize every sight in the room, every sound, every tactile sensation, so that I could retain it all as an extension of the experience, keeping it ongoing after real life had ended it too soon.

In truth, I have only a few vague remembrances of any such affairs, and this is how it should be. The memories of past events only exist to help shape your future. Pleasant thoughts of times past encourage you to find similar feelings in ever new adventures. That which was will not be again, but that which will be needs only your active seeking of it to make it so. Everything before is prequel. The main story starts now.

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Speaking of time, one of my minor wastes of it is occasionally to check the "missed connections" section of the local craigslist. For some reason I want to see myself mentioned there. Maybe its an ego thing. Maybe its just one of those things you want to accomplish someday in life (e.g. see the Parthenon, win Hoosier Lotto, get mentioned in Missed Connections). Well, I am not a person who is willing to wait on somebody else to do something for me. If I can't expect someone else to do something, I do it myself. I think in this case I want to leave a "desperately seeking" message looking for me. It's not like I would have responded to a real request anyway, so what the hell? If you should check the site and see people across Indianapolis spotting and looking for the same charming, debonair, well-dressed gentleman, it's just me.

Print Out

Why subscribe to magazines anymore? When I want to read about what is going on in the world I read it on the web. Unfortunately for me, I still have subscriptions to eight print magazines, including Out, The Advocate, Instinct, and Genre. I try to make sure I read them since I paid for them, but I still have a large stack of unread magazines from this year (or maybe from last year too, I don't know).

I see most print magazines becoming obsolete. The information they provide is available on the internet quicker and more usable and generally for free. You can get all the news, columns, photos, and yes, ads, that you could ever want. It's also more convenient on the net. When I see things in magazines I want to save, I rip out pages, but I just add them to the magazine stack so I will probably never see them again. I also rip out scraps that have something on them that I want to look up online. In a world of bookmarks and cut-and-paste, this action seems very inefficient and anachronistic.

They say that a computer screen can't replace a book, because it can't replace the enjoyment of curling up with a good one. That's true, but a magazine is not a book. I don't curl up with AAA Hoosier Motor Club's Home & Away magazine and I don't think I'd enjoy it anyway. I'm not a green person, but I think I would enjoy more not to pollute the landfills with more reams of bleached, glossy paper.

The evolution is going to need to be a migration to online versions only. Planet Out's magazines aren't doing so well but maybe they would do better if they jettisoned the hard copy. Genre should be hurting a little too as they indicate that the magazine is printed in Canada and the current exchange rate doesn't make that such a deal anymore. (It also kills my Fall travel plans, but that's another story). There must be money to be made with online periodicals or the New York Times wouldn't have decided to end their paid online subscription service in favor of a free, advertisement supported site.

To slow down the growth of my magazine stack I need not to renew at least one of my subscriptions. Unfortunately for you, Genre Media LLC, I think yours is the one to go. From an economical point of view, Genre has seemed to offer the least value. This is not a critique of quality, just the value for the money. The kind of material that the magazine includes is similar to what you get from a well chosen set of 3 or 4 RSS feeds.

The least value has been for whatever part of my subscription cost has paid for the "Genre Man" section in the back. The inane comments from the chosen few are far less interesting that a sampling from Craigslist's "casual encounters" (e.g. "m4m - 26, Want me to suck you off tonight? I'm 26, 6'1" 170lbs. I suck and I swallow. I might even let you f*** me. I prefer big c***s that shoot thick loads." Isn't that more informative than "What brands of clothing do you like to wear?")

There will still need to be some magazines in print. One is the required reading Vanity Fair. It's the perfect companion for air travel. It will get you through two legs and a long layover easy (and then some). The other is the ubiquitous two month old People magazines that clutter doctors' offices. There is nothing like reliving the catastrophes of celebrities as if they just happened again. Actually, with Britney, etc., there is a good chance they did just happen again.

Majoring in Physical Education

Irish college students are turning tricks to pay for their education expenses (link). It been reported that some students in Ireland are doing high-paying escort work to offset their huge tuition bills. The thing that is surprising about this is that more college students aren't doing it.

Young people are graduating from college with great loads of debt that they have to start paying back almost immediately, even though they can ill-afford doing so early in their careers. Conceptually, escorting seems like a good way to pay for tuition as you go, rather than by borrowing tens of thousands of dollars. Other part-time jobs available to students, like pizza delivery or house painter, won't pay enough or take too much time away from students' proper focus, which is studying. With escorting they can set their own work schedules, make a year's worth of tuition in a few weeks, and then get back to hitting the books, the gay bars, and the fraternity parties.

The article at the link assumes that its readers would be as appalled as the government officials it quotes. I've never understood how jobs like dentist, where you put your fingers in someone's spit filled mouth, or doctor, where you put your lubed finger in someone's rectum for a prostate exam, can be exalted while anything that involves s-e-x is considered repugnant. Older people forget that when most college students are not in class or studying, they are thinking about sex, talking about sex, or repeatedly having sex. Since they are already doing it, it shouldn't matter that besides taking the time to put on a condom, they also take a few minutes to get the approval on their sex partner's Visa card.

Young guys today have less inhibitions about advertising their valuable physical attributes. The internet is flooded with pictures from every Tom, Dick, and Harry of them photographing their naked selves in the bathroom mirror. It's time they applied the lessons from Economics and intersected their supply curves with the consistent demand.

Besides the money, there may be other benefits to this after-school job. Students can start networking with clients in the business world. They can acquire sources for letters of recommendation. Their possibly well-connected clients could remark about the students' punctuality, their attention to detail, their perseverance, and maybe their creativity in the performance of their work.

Needless to say, I am a Libertarian. If somebody wants to escort it's not the government's business. I don't believe in government interference in people's personal lives as long as no one else is adversely affected. On the matter of using an escort, my view is that it seems like a waste of money to buy something that is so readily available for free. On the other hand, if you have a situation that hinders you from being successful in the non-profit market, or you are unskilled in doing something yourself, hiring a professional to do it can often be an effective choice.

Junior UK entrepreneurs.

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Speaking of Irish boys:

Westlife with the irresistable Mark Feehily

Straight As A Rainbow

As previously mentioned, there were several gay or gay relevant shows at the recent fringe theater festival in Indianapolis (IndyFringe). I saw five of them. One was Greg Haskins' Almost Walking A Straight Line, a one person comedic story telling session about the gay performer's religious upbringing. It was good but not great. The funniest bit to me was the segment on attempting to speak in tongues. Greg tells of the great effort he put into trying to do this while working on it with his religious leaders. He is finally considered "successful" when he knowingly spouts some gibberish. When he is told that that is all there is to it, he says if he had known that earlier he would have just exclaimed "Chang chang, chang-it-ty chang shoo-bop" from Grease at the start of it (with the proper hand motions).

The part that troubled me was when he mimicked a stereotypical, effeminate gay friend of his. He used the caricature for comedy but also to show how he learned from it to act more "straight". I'm uncomfortable being in a theater with a lot of straight people watching stereotypes of gay behavior being reinforced. Worse, I find it unsettling to see a macho man mincing and prancing and Greg is definitely a manly man. The incongruity of it is like watching Rosie O'Donnell french kissing Donald Trump.

Two other shows were Thanks For The Scabies, Jerkface and Somewhere In Between. Scabies was pretty much a monologue about several real-life events that happened to the gay performer. This show really inspired me. It inspired me to realize that even I could write and perform crap as bad as that. Somewhere In Between on the other hand was a powerful performance by a troupe from Israel that focused on asking what makes a man a man and a woman a woman. The actors off stage were kind of weird but I really enjoyed the performance and I loved the Israeli accent. I am reminded that on my to-do list is to capture an IDF soldier for a night of debauchery before his Day of Atonement. I want me a big Hebrew National.

Speaking of over the top performances, I have watched the following clip so many times and I'm still finding additional hysterical parts in it.

I have done the same routine many times when entering a movie theater but I have always had to do it solo.

When Straight Men Stray

Senator Craig from Idaho gets arrested for allegedly making improper advances to a male undercover cop. He claims afterwards that he is not gay. I for one have no reason to doubt his statement. Straight men performing sexual acts with other men is not unusual. If anything good could come from this unpleasant situation, it would be a better understanding of the fact that straight men occasionally stray "gay".

I wouldn't want to wade too deep into the question of what does it mean for a person to be considered gay or straight. However, I will mention one interesting thing I heard on the subject some numbers of years back. It was a statement from the then director of the Kinsey Institute (located in sexually active Indiana). She said that, 1) science didn't know yet what caused heterosexuality, and 2) straight/gay were defined by who a person falls in love with. I liked that the definition steered away from who you have sex with, since there are gay people who don't have sex with their own gender and there are straight people who sometimes do.

Still, I'm not sure if this makes the discussion clearer since it would be easy to fall into a side discussion of loving someone versus being in love. Instead let's go with the sense of attraction, skipping love and sex altogether. I don't think Senator Craig wanted to go for long walks on the beach with his cop, or spend a evening with him at a romantic candlelit dinner. He would want to with his wife or at least some female, but with his potty paramour, he would only want to take care of business. It's just an extension of masturbation.

So why wouldn't a straight guy just wait until he got home to the missus or just jack the hammer himself? I think straight men would deviate into stall balling for two reasons. One is that when they need to get off, they need to do it right now and with whatever is available. Two is that men need variety in their sexual activity. Same-sex sex provides the unusual thrill that makes up for the other 90% of the time when they are harpooning their hag in the stale old missionary position.



Straight men, whether they be politicians or twenty-something internet studs, can and will have sex with other men. Thank goodness or we wouldn't have some of our favorite adult entertainment websites. The only problem really is that we need to get people out of public restrooms, parks, and bookstores. I think the best solution would be to add darkrooms to sports bars. I would put up with a few quarters of watching football for a little backroom Monday Night Bar-balling.

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When straight men have to do that gay thing

Too Real When I Feel

Reality TV creates an ever increasing number of instant celebrities and with the celebrity status comes fans. For some of these now famous people, the fandom can be understandable because their TV appearance showcased their entertainment talent and boosted their career in the fan supported performing arts. For the others, the ones who are more or less ordinary people, the concept of having fans can seem odd.

I think the draw that these reality TV stars have is that they seemingly expose their inner self and this satisfies a human need in the viewers to find and really get to know other people. Socially, we all wear our masks but we long to know what is behind the other person's. That's why reading other people's minds is traditionally the most wished for super power after flying. We want to know and in turn perhaps be known.

It's debatable that anyone shows their true personality on TV, but the kind of shows that seem to are not the talent shows, like American Idol or SYTYCD, but rather the communal endeavors, such as Amazing Race, Survivor, and Big Brother. On these shows there is an induced level of stress that intended to cause the participants to throw off their facades and reveal what they are really like. These revelations are then caught by the omnipresent camera, usually in a solitary situation to emphasize that the thoughts expressed are of a deeply personal nature (shared only with the cameraman and a few million viewers). To the people watching at home, it's an easy way to look inside someone and determine if they are someone with whom one would want to be friends or lovers or whatever. The result is that the likable contestants get a lot of fans who wish they could get to know the person on TV or someone like them because they are just so special.

The interesting thing about this is there are plenty of ordinary people all around in real life who may fit the bill just as well but whom you'll never know because they don't come with a "confessional" video with which you can preview their personality. With television you can watch who you want to learn more about and then turn them off when you decide you don't care for them. Obviously, it's not that simple in real life. People would rather not invest the time and effort in learning about the strangers all around them, forgoing the reward of finding a splendid friend in order to avoid the surprise of what else they might find instead.

Unfortunately, it is hard to get to know people on a deeper level. There is a societal condition that thwarts the human nature to know others. It is often expressed with the well known letters TMI. In real life we only let each other reveal enough to stay within the comfort zone, which isn't much. I know that there is no one other that me who really knows who I am completely and I can't decide if it's because I withhold the information or I feel others don't want to know.

With such interpersonal constraints, it's no wonder we turn to television to see what people are "really" like.

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Freddie Mercury "The Great Pretender"

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I posted picturea of some of my more recent favorites of reality television: James Rhine from Big Brother 6, Jesse Brune from Work Out, and Goil Amornvivat from Top Design.