The Warren cup

 The Warren Cup is an ancient Greco-Roman silver drinking cup decorated in relief with two images of male same-sex acts. It was purchased by the British Museum, London. 5-15 A D.

Dear homophobic people

Banana Land

Vintage gay fiction

The Kinsey scale

Drawn by M diMotta  (click to enlarge)

The truth is that in a world where being gay wasn't considered wrong or "unChristian" far more people would be in the middle categories from 1 to 5.  Why wouldn't you make out with a man you're fond of?  Of course, you might just love him and not find him sexually attractive.  But equally, if same-sex love was as accepted as other-sex love, you might well enjoy a male sparring partner.  Most people would prolly remain "wired" as straight, but a significant minority would not.  Once you stop accepting the orthodoxy, once you step outside of conformity, anything is possible.  Which, naturally, is why conservatives hate it.

Is it in yet?

A cartoon by Gerard Donelan.

Footy

Some time ago I started switching my website from http://www.nick-thiwerspoon.com/ to https://nickthiwerspoon.wordpress.com/

Lots of work, because each file has to be re-uploaded and each link redone.  And then I got depressed and unwell, so I didn't transfer the files at anything like the rate I'd meant to.  The good news is that I have started moving files across again.  I took the chance to re-edit the story and tighten it up, and I feel it's better for that.

Anyway, I've transferred 13 chapters out of 35, so there's still plenty more work,

You can read it here.

The man who walked through hell

Every gay man over a certain age has stories to tell of prejudice, disdain, contempt, unhappiness, loneliness, of being an outsider, of being shunned and excluded.  In my own life, the way I have been treated by straights, by the crackpot religious has scarred me, physically (I am blind in one eye as a result of bullying at school, and I was bullied because I was "effeminate"),  and mentally.  

But mankind is hateful to mankind.  This interesting article tells the story of a man who was imprisoned by the Japanese and forced to endure intolerable things, yet has somehow survived and is happy.  He does what I try to do, which is to focus of the good things.  Life brings good and bad, joys and woes.  This doesn't excuse the vile behaviour of the bigots and the narrow-minded religious fanatics.  But it's how we live that matters.  And to be happy we must count our blessings, not just all the bad things in our lives.

Is 10% of the population gay?

Alfred Kinsey

David Spiegelhalter in a Guardian article analyses new statistics which suggest that that's not a bad guess.  But it's a question of definition.  Which is pretty much what I've been saying for a few years now.


For a single statistic to be the primary propaganda weapon for a radical political movement is unusual. Back in 1977, the US National Gay Task Force (NGTF) was invited into the White House to meet President Jimmy Carter’s representatives – a first for gay and lesbian groups. The NGTF’s most prominent campaigning slogan was “we are everywhere”, backed up by the memorable statistical claim that one in 10 of the US population was gay – this figure was deeply and passionately contested.

So where did Bruce Voeller, a scientist who was a founder and first director of the NGTF, get this nice round 10% from? To find out, we have to delve back into Alfred Kinsey’s surveys in 1940s America, which were groundbreaking at the time but are now seen as archaic in their methods: he sought out respondents in prisons and the gay underworld, made friends with them and, over a cigarette, noted down their behaviours using an obscure code. Kinsey did not believe that sexual identity was fixed and simply categorised, and perhaps his most lasting contribution was his scale, still used today, in which individuals are rated from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual on a scale of 0 to 6.

Kinsey’s headline finding was that “at least 37% of the male population has some homosexual experience between the beginning of adolescence and old age”, meaning physical contact to the point of orgasm. He claimed that 13% of males were predominately homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55 (scoring at least 4) and that 4% of males were exclusively homosexual all their lives (scoring 6). For 30-year-old US men, he estimated that 83% would score 0 (totally heterosexual), 8% would be 1 or 2 on the scale, and 9% would be at least a 3. He acknowledged that people could move on the scale during their lifetime, and indeed Kinsey himself is said to have moved from a 1 or 2 when younger to a 3 or 4 in middle age.

When he published his study on women in 1953, Kinsey estimated that 20% of women had had some same-sex experience and 13% to orgasm. In unmarried females between the ages of 20 and 35, he claimed there was at least some homosexual experience in 11%-20%, and 1%-3% were exclusively homosexual.
So, in 1973, when Voeller was putting together the NGTF campaign, he went back to Kinsey’s estimates for those with predominantly homosexual experience (4 to 6 on his scale) for at least three years. As this was around 7% for women and 13% for men he took an average to get the headline figure: 10% of the population was gay.

This 10% claim was controversial, to say the least, and reignited old arguments about Kinsey’s poor survey methods. But even cleaned-up data gave similar answers, and Voeller stuck to the 10%, stating in 1990 that “the concept that 10% of the population is gay has become a generally accepted ‘fact’… As with so many pieces of knowledge (and myths), repeated telling made it so.”

However, later surveys gave much lower results, and of course the ChrisTaliban seized on them as proof that gays don't need rights (as if Jews, for example, who are much less numerous, shouldn't have rights either because there are so few of them)

The explanation lay in the terminology.  If you ask ppl whether they're "gay" or "lesbian" or "bi"  most say no.  Even if they have had same-sex experiences to orgasm.  

Same-sex sexual behaviour can come in all degrees of intensity. So Natsal carefully distinguishes a “same-sex experience”, which could be just a smooch in the dark, from a “same-sex partner”, who is someone with whom you have had any genital contact intended to achieve orgasm. Respondents are asked about activity at any age, so adolescent fumblings counted.

For women in the age range 16 to 44, the proportion who report having had some same-sex experience has shown a dramatic rise over the past 20 years: from 4% in 1990 to 10% in 2000, and to 16% in 2010 – a massive change in behaviour over such a short period. But this is not all just girls kissing girls in imitation of Madonna and Britney Spears; around half report genital contact, and around half of these in the past five years, so that overall nearly one in 20 women report a same-sex partner in the past five years.

But has there really been a change, or are women simply more willing to report what they get up to? Using some neat cross-checking, Natsal reckons that the change between 1990 and 2000 was partly due to more honest reporting, but the rise in 2000 and 2010 was all real.

And it is clear that there is a lot of experimental activity – roughly, for each woman who has had a recent same-sex partner there are two more of the same age who have had some same-sex contact in their lives, but no partner in the past five years.

Men show a different pattern. In 2010, about 8% of 16- to 44-year-old men reported having had a same-sex experience: this is higher than in 1990, possibly associated with both better reporting and the decline in fear of HIV, but there have been no substantial recent changes.

Overall the proportion of people with same-sex experience is far higher than the proportion who identify themselves as gay and bisexual. This must mean that many same-sex contacts are by people who do not consider themselves gay or bisexual. That’s just what we find in reputable surveys: in the last big US survey, 10% of women and 3% of men who identified themselves as “heterosexual” also reported a same‑sex contact.

Read more here.

Other pieces about this:

How many of us are there?

How many American Men are Gay?

What makes us gay?

The Cum-and-Go Culture

I kiss them because I love them

Labels

Transgender model

Very sexy bloke, the transgender model Aydian Dowling, on the left, Adam Levine on the right.

 [From PinkNews.]

When Albert met Anne

A story about gender and about the stupidity and cruelty of our laws.

When Albert met Richard, he offered to buy him a gin and tonic.

Homosexuality had been legal for almost a decade in Britain, and young men flocked to gay bars with a giddy ardour they were still reticent to display on the street.  

"You had to be careful. We had friends who were roughly treated. It still wasn't something you shouted about, because you could get derision, or worse," Ann Urch says.

Almost 40 years on, the light gleams on Ann's golden bracelets and ruby-coloured nails as she tells their remarkable story.

Their first lease on a flat (she still has the papers), migration to Australia and forays into local politics in Frankston. They settled in the bayside suburb of Mt Martha, in Melbourne.

Richard Urch, a nurse at Frankston Hospital, sits on the sofa opposite. He fills in the gaps in her tale, sometimes takes the lead.

For the first 34 years their relationship, Ann was Albert.

A tall, balding man with a deep Mancunian accent, Albert Knowles was a Frankston councillor and mayor in the mid-1980s, skilled in manufacturing and management, one half of a gay couple.

But Albert was also someone who - for as long as he could remember - had a deep conviction his gender did not match his body and he was a woman, a condition known as gender dysphoria.

As Albert grew older this gnawed at him and he became depressed. But he did not feel ready to tell Richard.

Read the rest here.

Turgid

I haven't written for so long that when I began writing again a couple of days ago, I found that I had lost the knack.  What I wrote was turgid and stagy.  And whereas I had been able to write easily and fluently before, now it was an effort to produce even a few hundred words.

I've been finding it harder and harder to write ever since the whole Henrik dėbâcle.  I used to believe that even though there were some bastards out there, fundamentally mankind was good, and that men could love and cherish each other selflessly.  And now I don't.

Ah well, I'll try again today.  Though to be sure, I am so tired I often fall asleep on the train.

Night and day

People often say, well, it's obvious--gay and straight are as different as night and day!  You're either one or the other!  Choose!

Yep, night is different from day.  But note--where it is something we know well, like 'night' and 'day'--how we are well aware of the subtle differences within 'night' and 'day'.  A summer's day, when it is 40 degrees outside and the sunlight is white hot.  A late afternoon, when the air is still warm and the sunlight slants through the trees and the air is golden.  A sunny winter's day, where the light is crisp and silver and so is the air.  An early morning, dewy grass, a pink tinge to the eastern sky.  Those are all 'days'.  A night sky of indigo silk, the stars  brilliant sparkles scattered across it.   A harvest moon, yellow and prehistoric, rising over the eastern horizon.  A sky of black velvet, rich and lush, with a silver scimitar of a moon at the west.  The wee hours, when all is silent and the moon's shadows lie sharp and clear in the garden.  These are all 'nights'.

The words 'night' and 'day' are convenient portmanteau terms for real things.  But we also all know that it's more complicated than that.  We try and create words to convey these realities because we know that the words we have aren't enough.  Just as Eskimos are supposed to have 17 (or is it 12?) different words for snow.

'Gay' and 'straight' are nice convenient clichés/labels for the unthinking, the-not-very-perceptive.  But the truth is that  it's more complicated than that.  Even if you add 'bisexual' to the mix, what does that mean.  Some men like serial sex with male strangers even if they're married, happily married.  Others have just one male partner with or without their wives' knowledge and acquiescence.  Some (like me) remain faithful to their wives yet feel the emotional attraction of men.  Some call themselves straight but love a single man. A very queeny man I know is with a guy but says that his next partner, if there is one, will be a woman.  I feel closer to women, he says.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate the vast diversity of human sexuality.  Once I too thought it was nice and simple and just a matter of correctly labelling and all would be clear.  Now I am more humble, more aware of just how complex and rich all our sexualities are, of how many different ways there are of seeing and experiencing 'night and day'.


 

Ryan Kwanten Begged for 'True Blood' Gay Sex Scene

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.  Times change, and we in them change too.

Who would have thought that a straight actor would have asked for a "gay" sex scene?  My generation still bears the scars of the intense homo-hatred we grew up with.  But younger people shrug off these taboos, indeed, welcome a chance to do something different.  Which is as it should be.  Note though that there are still the hate-filled comments from the unhinged brain-dead in the comments sections below the articles.

Read more here and here.

The myth of gay affluence

Chart from this article

This article in The Atlantic skewers the myth that all or even most gays are rich.  In fact, it's the opposite.  More gays and lesbians are poor than straights.

Who are America’s gays? To hear it as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would have it, gays are a privileged set, living it up in cities across the country. As the justice wrote in his dissent to Romer v. Evans—a landmark 1996 case that overturned a Colorado state constitutional amendment prohibiting legal protections for gays and lesbians—“Those who engage in homosexual conduct tend to reside in disproportionate numbers in certain communities.” Even more ominously, to Scalia, they have "high disposable income," which gives them "disproportionate political power… to [achieve] not merely a grudging social toleration, but full social acceptance, of homosexuality.”

In reality, gay Americans face disproportionately greater economic challenges than their straight counterparts. A new report released by UCLA’s Williams Institute found that 29 percent of LGBT adults, approximately 2.4 million people, experienced food insecurity—a time when they did not have enough money to feed themselves or their family—in the past year. In contrast, 16 percent of Americans nationwide reported being food insecure in 2012. One in 5 gays and lesbians aged 18-44 received food stamps in the last year, compared with just over 1 in 4 same sex couples raising children. The LGBT community has made huge political strides over the past decade, but in economic matters they still lag far behind the rest of the country.

Read the rest of the article here.

Gay love ballet

I don't know which ballet this is from.  Note the discarded dance thongs on the floor.

Many splendoured

These two blokes ("Brandon" & "Brent", from Sean Cody) are porn actors.  They fuck each other on camera.  One doubts that they are in fact actors, in the sense that they can convincingly portray an emotion they don't feel.  So their obvious affection for each other is likely real.  It's abundantly clear that they are very fond of each other. For all we know, they might be gay for pay.  I know so many stories of blokes who primarily identify as straight but are nevertheless capable of being very, very fond of another man, of finding him (and only him) sexy and attractive and fuckable.

 Love comes in so many forms.  We love our dog or cat, we "love" chocolates, we love our parents, our children, our friends, our lovers, our spouses, a favourite uncle or aunt or niece or nephew.

Yet, somehow, our culture still devalues sexual love, unless it's in a tightly contained context.  But the truth is that people who are not in love with each other can nevertheless love each other.  When they fuck, they are making love.  Even if they aren't "in love".

We spend a lot of time judging sex by its contexts (are they married? are they being unfaithful? are they ....?) when the really critical factor is love, in all its many splendoured glory.  If you truly care for, are concerned for, value, consider and are affectionate towards your partner, why is is that wrong, or less valuable than the kind of love which is supposed to be the only valid kind?

We are perhaps the most successful species on Earth (except for those species, like rats and dogs and cockroaches, who associate with us) and the reason is that we co-operate. And we can co-operate because we are capable of love, not romantic fluff, but something more solid: the kind of solid fellow-feeling which allows us to interact without slaughtering each other.  Men are capable of loving other men, deeply, even if they are "straight".  Even if they are porn actors.

[I talked about this before, here and here]

Cary Grant

Did y'all know he was gay?  Kept secret from hoi polloi, of course (Homos?  Can't have that, now can we!)

Lived with a bloke for 12 years.

Somewhere, over the rainbow

Ian McKellen and friend

From Artistry of Male

Hustler

One of the fascinating blogs I've discovered in my often tedious wanderings round the interweb is this one, the thoughts and ideas of the artist and designer John Coulthart.  Erudite, intriguing, different, entertaining and full of  insights into art.  You can follow it in the links on the left hand side of this blog.

These images are from this piece.