Bad sex was ironic: Tom Wolfe

CBC News: Bad sex was ironic: Tom Wolfe:

"Slither slither slither slither went the tongue."

The 12 STIs Of Christmas

The 12 STIs Of Christmas

Make Love Not War?

News & Politics:

"A National Guardsman who pleaded guilty to killing a 17-year-old Iraqi soldier said he shot the young man after they had consensual sex in a guard tower, a newspaper reported Saturday, citing court-martial records. "

Recipe

Who Knew?:

"· ascorbic acid (vitamin C, for tissue maintenance)
· blood-group antigens (from immune system)
· calcium (mineral)
· chlorine (oxidizing agent)
· cholesterol (steroid alcohol present in body fluids)
· choline (base, part of the vitamin B complex)
· citric acid (occurs during cellular metabolism)
· creatine (nitrogenous substance found in muscle)
· deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
· fructose (sugar used for energy)
· glutathione (peptide amino acid)
· hyaluronidase (enzyme)
· inositol (sugar found in muscles)
· lactic acid (byproduct of muscle use)
· magnesium (mineral)
· nitrogen (gas found in all living tissue)
· phosporus (mineral)
· potassium (mineral)
· purine (compound of uric acid)
· pyrimidine (organic base)
· pyruvic acid (formed from either glucose or glycogen)
· sodium (salt)
· sorbitol (body alcohol)
· spermidine (catalytic enzyme)
· spermine (ammonia compound found in sperm)
· urea (from urine)
· uric acid (from urine)
· vitamin B12 (for proper function of nervous system and metabolism)
· zinc (mineral)"

The Boy And I: We Delivered

Nelson opened up even more last night. We both did. I can't get over how comfortable I was, how deep the conversation got. I noticed he was wearing the faded, skin-tight jeans that highlight his amazing ass: I used to make such a fuss over them, but now it felt inappropriate to comment.

He talked a lot about his out-of-town boyfriend. The problems all sounded typical, surmountable. I could hear how Nelson's insecurities and needinesses—which had been an issue in our fling earlier this year—were manifesting with this new guy. And I fucking adored listening to him. His new boyfriend sounds somewhat like me, emotionally and neurotically speaking; perhaps in my feedback last night I was able to shed some light on where this guy might be coming from, without defending him (or myself).

Above all, it was how my eyes felt. They held nothing back as I looked at 23-year-old Nelson; the beam was palpable, intense. I've (literally) never seen him like that before.

I kept hearing Nelson blame himself for the problems in his new relationship. He did that with me—with us—too. Last night I challenged him not to take it so personally. I had never challenged him like that, and I kept repeating it: finally I exclaimed my challenge loudly, beaming at him, wanting to hug him.

He paused, looked at me vulnerably, made some wisecrack and changed the subject. Oh well, I tried, I thought.

Our conversation hummed away, and then around 11 pm Nelson said he'd better get going. As he walked through the living room he glanced down and saw my DVD of The Pizza Boy, He Delivers on a pile beside the TV. I leave stuff like that lying around all the time—if I ever had to "straighten up" my place, it would be empty!—but Nelson has always ignored the homoerotic stuff. Last night, he picked up the DVD box—I told him this was an important porn for me back when I was about his age—and to my surprise he asked if we could watch a bit of it together.

A most interesting turn of events. What would happen now?

We sat back down together on the couch. The first scene of the movie features two delivery boys going for beers after their shift ends; they're drinking and yakking on a picnic table until one guy seduces the other. Once we'd seen both their huge dicks, Nelson said he wanted to see an actual pizza-boy-gets-picked-up-while-delivering-a-pizza scene. I skipped ahead. Conscious of how gropeable the distance was between Nelson's luscious young body and mine.

The pizza boy rang the doorbell. The hot blond stud answered, wearing tight jeans and a white tee-shirt. He was drinking beer, and his girlfriend had stood him up, he said: would the pizza boy like to have a beer with him? Sure. Fast-forward to when the blond stud pours the pizza boy another glass of red wine, "accidentally" spilling it all over his crotch. "Oh, red wine really stains bad," blond stud says, caressing pizza boy's groin with paper towel: "we better get these clothes off and into the washing machine right quick!"

It was fairly predictable—and totally hot—from there on in. Never would I have predicted watching this, um, seminal film with young Nelson; he's always been so uptight about sex.

As the pizza boy rimmed the blond stud's splendid ass, Nelson said: "If that was being done to me right now, I'd be making a lot of noise!" He added that he also wouldn't be able to hold still like the blond stud was; he'd be wriggling all over the place. It was all I could do not to gasp. I'd so wanted to lick Nelson there; his callipygian curvaceousness is breathtaking. But this was one of those intimacies he would allow only within a monogamous relationship.

Was he hinting?, I wondered, as we watched the pizza boy munch away. Was he waiting for me to make a move? Perhaps. But no: sex would prevent too much. I didn't respond to the ambiguous signals, and Nelson didn't transmit any more of them. We watched the scene until it got to the boring Tab A/Slot B close-up.

As Nelson left, we hugged and he said "I feel like I'm starting to get to know you now." I agreed. "And it was really powerful," he continued, "when you said 'Don't take it personally!' earlier. I really needed to hear that."

I'm not much into Yuletide anything but I felt downright Christmasy after he left. As the spasms in my crotch subsided, Nelson's parting words rang in my ears.

For a few moments, everything connected. The stopped-up places in me began to flow. I'll probably never be a conventional guy, but last night my body sang its truth: friendship is radical.

Emancipating Lincoln?

The New York Times > Books > Finding Homosexual Threads in Lincoln's Legend

December 16, 2004
Finding Homosexual Threads in Lincoln's Legend
By DINITIA SMITH

Was Abraham Lincoln a gay American?

The subject of the 16th president's sexuality has been debated among scholars for years. They cite his troubled marriage to Mary Todd and his youthful friendship with Joshua Speed, who shared his bed for four years. Now, in a new book, C. A. Tripp also asserts that Lincoln had a homosexual relationship with the captain of his bodyguards, David V. Derickson, who shared his bed whenever Mary Todd was away.

In "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln," to be published next month by Free Press, Mr. Tripp, a psychologist, influential gay writer and former sex researcher for Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, tries to resolve the issue of Lincoln's sexuality once and for all. The author, who died in 2003, two weeks after finishing the book, subjected almost every word ever written by and about Lincoln to minute analysis. His conclusion is that America's greatest president, the beacon of the Republican Party, was a gay man.

But his book has not stopped the debate. During the 10 years of his research, Mr. Tripp shared his findings with other scholars. Many, including the Harvard professor emeritus David Herbert Donald, who is considered the definitive biographer of Lincoln, disagreed with him. Last year, in his book "We Are Lincoln Men," Mr. Donald mentioned Mr. Tripp's research and disputed his findings.

Mr. Tripp was the author of "The Homosexual Matrix," a 1975 book that disputed the Freudian notion of homosexuality as a personality disorder. In this new book, he says that early biographers of Lincoln, including Carl Sandburg, sensed Lincoln's homosexuality. In the preface to the original multi-volume edition of his acclaimed 1926 biography, Sandburg wrote: "Month by month in stacks and bundles of fact and legend, I found invisible companionships that surprised me. Perhaps a few of these presences lurk and murmur in this book."

Sandburg also wrote that Lincoln and Joshua Speed had "streaks of lavender, spots soft as May violets." Mr. Tripp said that references to Lincoln's possible homosexuality were cut in the 1954 abridged version of the biography. Mr. Tripp maintains that other writers, including Ida Tarbell and Margaret Leech, also found evidence of Lincoln's homosexuality but shied away from defining it as such or omitted crucial details.

Mr. Tripp cites Lincoln's extreme privacy and accounts by those who knew him well. "He was not very fond of girls, as he seemed to me," his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, told Lincoln's law partner William Herndon. In addition, Lincoln was terrified of marriage to Mary Todd and once broke off their relationship. They eventually had four children.

But in "We Are Lincoln Men" Mr. Donald wrote that no one at the time ever suggested that he and Speed were sexual partners. Herndon, who sometimes slept in the room with them, never mentioned a sexual relationship. In frontier times, Mr. Donald wrote, space was tight and men shared beds. And the correspondence between Lincoln and Speed was not that of lovers, he maintained. Moreover, Lincoln alluded openly to their relationship, saying, "I slept with Joshua for four years. " If they were lovers, Mr. Donald wrote, Lincoln wouldn't have spoken so freely.

Mr. Tripp charts Lincoln's relationships with other men, including Billy Greene, with whom Lincoln supposedly shared a bed in New Salem, Ill. Herndon said Greene told him that Lincoln's thighs "were as perfect as a human being Could be."

Lincoln's fellow lawyer Henry C. Whitney observed once that Lincoln "wooed me to close intimacy and familiarity."

Then there is Lincoln's youthful humorous ballad from 1829, "First Chronicles of Reuben," in which he refers to a man named Biley marrying another man named Natty: "but biley has married a boy/ the girles he had tried on every Side/ but none could he get to agree/ all was in vain he went home again/and sens that he is married to natty."

Mr. Tripp tries to debunk the popular opinion among scholars that Lincoln's lifelong depressions were caused by the death of his first love, Ann Rutledge. He writes that at the time she was supposedly involved with Lincoln, she was engaged to John McNamar and that her name appears nowhere in Lincoln's letters.

Mr. Donald also takes issue with the conclusion that Lincoln had a sexual relationship with Derickson, his bodyguard at his presidential retreat, the Soldiers' Home, outside Washington. Mr. Tripp writes that their closeness stirred comment in Washington, and cites a diary entry from Nov. 16, 1862, by Virginia Woodbury Fox, wife of Gustavus Fox, assistant secretary of the Navy. She recounted a friend's report: " 'There is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the president, drives with him, and when Mrs. L. is not home, sleeps with him.' What stuff!" But Mr. Donald writes that "What stuff!" meant she was dismissing the rumor.

Mr. Tripp cites a second description of the relationship in an 1895 history of Derickson's regiment, the 150th Pennsylvania Volunteers, by Thomas Chamberlain, Derickson's commanding officer: "Captain Derickson, in particular, advanced so far in the president's confidence and esteem that, in Mrs. Lincoln's absence, he frequently spent the night at his cottage, sleeping in the same bed with him and - it is said - making use of his Excellency's night-shirts!"When Derickson was to be transferred, Lincoln pulled strings to keep him. But Mr. Donald wrote that if their relationship was romantic, they would not have separated so casually when Derickson finally left Washington in 1863.

Despite Mr. Donald's criticism, Mr. Tripp has won support from other scholars. Jean H. Baker, a former student of Mr. Donald's and the author of "Mary Todd Lincoln: a Biography" (W. W Norton, 1987), wrote the introduction to the book. She said that Lincoln's homosexuality would explain his tempestuous relationship with Mary Todd, and "some of her agonies and anxieties over their relationship."

"Some of the tempers emerged because Lincoln was so detached," Ms. Baker said in a telephone interview. "But I previously thought he was detached because he was thinking great things about his court cases, his debates with Douglas. Now I see there is another explanation."

"The length of time when these men continued to sleep in the same bed and didn't have to was sort of an impropriety," Ms. Baker said.

The question of Lincoln's sexuality is complicated by the fact that the word homosexual did not find its way into print in English until 1892 and that "gayness" is very much a modern concept.

Ms. Baker said the focus of 19th-century moral opprobrium was masturbation, not homosexuality. "Masturbation was considered more dangerous," she said. "For homosexuals, there was a cloud over them, but it seldom rained." People, she noted, "were accustomed to these friendships between men."

In researching Lincoln, Mr. Tripp created a vast database of cross-indexed material, now available at the Lincoln Library in Springfield, Ill. He began the book working with the writer Philip Nobile, but they fell out. Mr. Nobile has charged that Mr. Tripp plagiarized material written by him and fabricated evidence of Lincoln's homosexuality.

"Tripp's book is a fraud," Mr. Nobile said in an interview. He declined to say what was fraudulent, however, because he said he was writing his own article about it.

After Mr. Nobile made his charges, Free Press delayed publication. "We made some slight changes," said Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for the publishing house, "and we are satisfied that we are publishing a book that reflects Mr. Tripp's ideas and is supported by his research and belief." The manuscript was edited by Mr. Tripp's friend Lewis Gannett.

Larry Kramer, the author and AIDS activist, said that Mr. Tripp's book "will change history."

"It's a revolutionary book because the most important president in the history of the United States was gay," he said. "Now maybe they'll leave us alone, all those people in the party he founded."

Michael B. Chesson, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and another former student of Mr. Donald's, wrote an afterword to Mr. Tripp's book supporting his thesis. The book is "enormously important to understanding the whole person," he said in an interview. He likened the criticism to early objections to Fawn Brodie's 1974 biography of Thomas Jefferson in which she claimed that Jefferson had children with his slave Sally Hemings; later genetic studies suggested that they had at least one child together.

Finding the truth is a sacred principal for historians, Mr. Chesson said, adding, "It's incumbent on us as scholars to present to readers material if historians have ignored it or swept it under the rug because they don't agree with it."

Still, if Lincoln was gay, how did it affect his presidency? Ms. Baker said that his outsider status would explain his independence and his ability to take anti-Establishment positions like the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation. As a homosexual, she said, "he would be on the margins of tradition."

"He is willing to be independent, to do what is right," she said. "It is invested in his soul, in his psyche and in his behavior."

A Flu(mmo)x of Selves

This is where I once was. Funny it's taken me so long to link back. The urge to reinvent oneself is human, I guess: and silly.

Curiouser, still, that what I most wanted to leave behind—in terms of blogging anew—was the assault. That's beyond silly. Suffice it to say that, a year and a half after the ordeal, I'm coming along fabulously well. Scathed, yes, but not too diminished.

Sometimes I feel lonely, having endured something that few people can relate to. A big reason I've recovered so well is because of the love and support from family and friends. Occasionally, though, I've encountered overt criticism and misunderstanding from people who don't know me yet, or well; when meeting new folks, it's the awkwardly silent reactions I sometimes encounter that bother me most. I shouldn't worry so much about that. We all have experiences—facets of self—that discomfit others. But more positively, I feel challenged to give words to the awful, beautiful, ordeal I survived, to communicate this to folks who don't already know me well, who aren't able to fill in the blanks.

I'm working on that, and my selves are getting a workout in the process. But I don't plan to do much about it here. I'm doing some other writing about the assault which is immensely healing; the succor comes from crafting, from feeling more deeply into the words I find.

What I've been through doesn't matter so much as how I'm being. Today's usually always about yesterday; an open moment refers only to itself.

Yesterday, today, this moment: it's all so fucking important.

Homoerogenous Zones

When Kamal suddenly spread my buttcheeks apart, I gasped.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"Um yes, I most certainly am," I said. He carried on.

Kamal advertises his massage service in the "non-sexual" category of the gay classifieds. Me, I can't imagine a man's touch being non-sexual. Ever. Besides, it's the massages not specifically advertised as "erotic" that most arouse me. Often, all "non-sexual" means is "I don't have to jerk you off unless I want to!"

The suspense—of what might or might not happen—wriggles me up into a dither. And if Kamal—a gentle, muscular, attractive late-20s or early-30s East Indian guy—keeps teasing me like this, I'll be his loyal client for years to cum....

I've now been to see him for a half-dozen or so rub-downs, and each time he pushes the envelope another millimetre. A millimetre. Fuck!

He works out of his apartment in my neighborhood. I strip off my clothes, lie on the table in the living room, incense and eastern music wafting. Kamal drapes my extremities with sheets, but always leaves the centre of me bare.

During the first session, while massaging my inner-inner-thigh, maybe once or twice Kamal jostled my balls with his fingers. Each massage since then has contained an utterly brief, intensely erotic surprise. I go for 90-minute massages—wouldn't you?—and I swear, he now spends 40 of those minutes rubbing my butt! Including, last time, a traversal all the way up and down its cleavage, right across my magic spot. Boy, did I squeal.

I'm getting a woody as I write this.

After the massage is over, it's all I can do not to masturbate like a fiend the moment he leaves the room. We have this little ritual now: Kamal goes into the washroom, then comes out a minute later and offers me a glass of water. I hoist myself off the massage table to accept the glass, woozy and naked and, usually, still throbbingly erect. But by then Kamal has always reverted to benign friendliness: I have trouble pinning the quick and dirty jostlings onto the thoughtful, kind man he turns back into.

But then, ball and ass play's a type of kindness, no?

(I think I'm going to have to book one last rub with Kamal before I go home for Christmas...)

What Do You Say?

Marn's Big Adventure:

"It's not supposed to be like this.

We talked about it all the time as we worked out together at the gym. They were going to put another couple of years into the bed and breakfast, sell it and spend the rest of their lives kicking back. They'd been saving. Planning.

Then a month ago a blood vessel exploded in Michael's brain and when it did, it blew up all their dreams, too.

The brain is an amazing thing. For a while it looked as if a recovery of sorts might be possible, but those hopes have faded now. They've taken Michael off life support and now all that's left is the wait.

What do you say to someone who is about to lose the man they love?

What do you say to someone who's forsaken all others for almost 20 years now, endured the for better or for worse, the richer or poorer and is just a few years short of the big shared dream?

What do you say to someone who has spent a month looking over the precipice of what the words in sickness or in health can become?

Someone, please, tell me what to say. I've had my pen hovering over a card for an hour now. I just can't get the words to come.

Glen and Michael were married, even if they couldn't have the piece of paper."

A Day Off

Two men are sitting at the table, a birthday cake is flaring. You can see the back of a third person's head poking out above the lap of one of the gents. The other guy exclaims: "No, sweetie, I said blow out the candles! The candles!"

Nate loved it. His birthday card, that is.

I just got back. It worked out well: I booked today off for no special reason, and it's Nate's 38th birthday. Went over at lunchtime, with flowers and the goofily perfect card. His trill of a Caribbean laugh fills me with joy.

As do his big sensuous lips, those dreadlocks, that ass.

Who knew? Almost a year later, we still ravish and excite one another.

After lunch at Nate's place, and then "dessert"—which, sweetie, most certainly did not involve birthday candles—we sticky boys had a nap. I don't think I've napped so deeply in years. At 4 pm we finally roused ourselves.

I'm in such a good mood: it feels like my birthday.

What happens when....

"...a sexually free-spirited, HIV-positive dentist becomes the unofficial custodian of his 9-year-old nephew?"

Spanish film 'Bear Cub' defies expectations