[vee-dmsr]

[kabber]

[moobenjoyer]

oh my god so many things I read are in conversation with so many things I need to read or have read and I will simply never Read All Of It but my tbr keeps getting longer

James Baldwin keeps coming up and I recently read the fire next time but I wanna read his fiction; sexuality and its discontents which I've had out from the library for over a year; one day I'll pick the mad man back up which I've also had out from the library for over a year; and "is the rectum a grave?" which ive had bookmarked for months; and Wilde and bataille and the sexual outlaw by John Rechy and epistomology of the closet and eight million other things and the culture of desire just referenced "notes on camp" which I *have* read and ahhhhhh. reading

[moobenjoyer]

opens sexuality and its discontents

immediately references sontag in the preface

[vasquez-rocks]

happy pride to this fucking thing susanna thompson does with her mouth

happy pride to this visible saliva that avery brooks decided to leave in the final cut of rejoined

[killadelphia]

[moobenjoyer]

love this chapter title

[moobenjoyer]

dog

"Hardly any of my colleagues over the years could quite have imagined that sort of encounter, a mixture of trash and grace, wantonness and repartee, foolhardy risk and thorough trust, that could come of two strangers wandering into each other late at night in a shadowy city alley. But that chancinesz is part of the lasting magic of gay life, a sort of radical plot twist that characterizes queer life and sets aside so many conventions of social judgement, class, race, and attitude, supplanting them with a direct and naïve faith that bonds of great value can be forged on nothing more than instinct.

Not that such bonds always occur (more often than not, these brief encounters are merely tiring and banal). But there is a genuine spiritual affirmation in discovering how often magic can arise between strangers—magic that in most of our waking moments we train ourselves not to see. The love of strangers, or the love of loving strangers, teaches us that one man can touch the soul of another before he knows the size of his companion's shoes or paycheck. From the fragmentary details one man shares with his stranger-friend—the private glades of a morning stroll, the suppressed angers of a family feud—from these random glimpses of identity a window can open between the souls of unconnected people, a window framed only by intuitive readiness and undimmed by a lifetime's accumulated judgements. Led on by nothing more than the broken line of a shoulder's scar or the wrinkle of a closed eyelid, strangers reveal themselves in confessions that more careful lovers may take years to express."

[moobenjoyer]

"“The first time you suck dick,” he begins, “it really is like Holy Communion. Mystical. Know what I mean?” Boone holds a Ph.D. from Berkeley. He is a specialist in contemporary French literature, a translator, a short-story writer in the modernist vein, a teacher without a seminar room. His head—gray hair at the temples, skull bones close to the surface—tends to tip forward on an overlong neck. His eyes peer out through thick round horn-rimmed glasses.

He expects me to be shocked.

I explain that I wasn't raised religious but that equating cock-sucking with communion seems like a cliché.

“No, you didn't listen carefully,” he answers. “I said Holy Communion. It's different.”

We pick at the slippery noodles from thick plates painted with red dragons. “This isn't shocking the way people think—it's about dissolving the self.” He reminds me that Holy Communion is not about fellowship, as Protestants might conceive of it; for those deeply driven by the spiritual quest, Holy Communion is literally to eat the flesh of God, and so to be one with God. To eat God is to be liberated from the alienated division of the self, to lose the self. In Boone's quest, to eat cock was in some profound measure to find the unity that divided the dictates of his spirit from the drives of the flesh, and so to eat cock became a Holy Communion."

[moobenjoyer]

"Self-serving gay propaganda might easily claim that men who get fucked are the anointed liberators of a world in chains—a notion so far from sense or reality that it hardly deserves note. Leo Bersani acknowledges that there is nothing inherently liberating in the classless nakedness of bathhouse and park orgies—or, as Armistead Maupin put it, one of the things bathhouses teach is how to identify a bastard in the dark. The pursuit and recovery of the sacred and the ecstatic in contemporary life is a journey separate from the path to equity, democracy, and justice. It promises only a quality of knowing unavailable to the Rousseauistic mind of social contracts. The impulse toward the ecstatic speaks of neither good nor evil, neither protection nor redemption. It speaks only to remind us that the permanent human condition is exposure, and it reveals that the new activist demand for sexual “safe space” is little more than a silly oxymoron. On the one hand, “safe space” denies the darkness and violence humans face in nature, and on the other it concocts a language of banal, “redemptive” sexual management that would suppress the inherently transgressive nature of desire. Fearful of facing the terror squarely, we invent a new “radical” mythos, complete with its own system of privilege and taboo. We actively contrive to inoculate ourselves from one another, struggling to sent that in the messiness of human affairs the only genuinely safe space exists in an urn of ashes. We forget the simplest, plainest truth: To be alive is to be at risk. Nowhere can sex be altogether sage, because sex is, for most of us, our primary, residual, atavistic connection to the realm of animal existence."

[moobenjoyer]

well now this book has me bawling in the airport

[moobenjoyer]

"On balance I wonder whether by making sex ordinary, even recreational, we have learned to re-form it into a tool for building diverse forms of companionship. By stealing sex away from the restrictive laws of marriage, by acknowledging its myriad meanings, gay men may have shown how lust contributes to the bonds of friendship. By devaluing the taboo of sex among friends, they may have begun to shine more light on the complex and various ways intimacy can be arranged in emerging gay families. This is not too deny that lust without constraint can be abusive, callous, selfish, ignoble; the point is only that through the persistent exploration of love and lust and nurturing, gay people have helped to open up the territory of family meanings."

[moobenjoyer]

"Neither love nor liking is without context, and it is within the context of shared commitment that Aristotle found the greatest power in friendship. We are useful to one another not only in providing practical utilities—status, income, care—but illuminating the search for meaning and understanding."

[moobenjoyer]

"Instead, he articulated a lament that runs through most of his fiction: He who clings to safety instead of reaching out toward freedom ends up having no life at all. To succumb to the security of mythic images is to be left in an empty cell. At the root of the problem, Baldwin said, is an inability to love “because they inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.... There's something in the structure of this country and something in the nostalgia that's at the basis of the American personality, it seems to me, that prohibits a certain kind of maturity and entraps the person, or the people, in a kind of dream love they can never stand the weight of reality.”"

[moobenjoyer]

"There lies the essence of camp sensibility, of queer sensibility: intimate acknowledgement that there is no centered, secure self, that the modern self is a fluid fiction. To that end, Susan Sontag argued, camp spoke most directly to the universal human condition."

[moobenjoyer]

"What has changed through the course of the century is not the nature of sex acts or how they are condemned by civic and ecclesiastical authorities. What has changed is this: Having failed to suppress forbidden desire, modern society has elected to isolate and assign it to a distant category of “other” people."

[moobenjoyer]

"The paradox of queerness is that it survives by continually collapsing and recreating itself. Traditional cultural separatists—black nationalists, radical feminists, Latin chauvinists, Hasidic communalists—secure their tribal meaning through the immutability of their codes, rights, and rituals. Queer culturalists recognize and realize one another through disruption and sabotage of their inherited traditions. Employing wit and the critical parody of camp, they unravel the hidden forgeries of their own inherited cultures and then self-consciously construct new cultural forgeries that they know are destined to dissolve. That is the essence of desire in the queer paradox. To persevere is to disappear. The community of identity exists only in the state of transformation. In the culture of desire, there are no safe spaces."

[gracerbasilisk]

airplane is a machine that loves you

[moobenjoyer]

love this chapter title

[moobenjoyer]

dog

"Hardly any of my colleagues over the years could quite have imagined that sort of encounter, a mixture of trash and grace, wantonness and repartee, foolhardy risk and thorough trust, that could come of two strangers wandering into each other late at night in a shadowy city alley. But that chancinesz is part of the lasting magic of gay life, a sort of radical plot twist that characterizes queer life and sets aside so many conventions of social judgement, class, race, and attitude, supplanting them with a direct and naïve faith that bonds of great value can be forged on nothing more than instinct.

Not that such bonds always occur (more often than not, these brief encounters are merely tiring and banal). But there is a genuine spiritual affirmation in discovering how often magic can arise between strangers—magic that in most of our waking moments we train ourselves not to see. The love of strangers, or the love of loving strangers, teaches us that one man can touch the soul of another before he knows the size of his companion's shoes or paycheck. From the fragmentary details one man shares with his stranger-friend—the private glades of a morning stroll, the suppressed angers of a family feud—from these random glimpses of identity a window can open between the souls of unconnected people, a window framed only by intuitive readiness and undimmed by a lifetime's accumulated judgements. Led on by nothing more than the broken line of a shoulder's scar or the wrinkle of a closed eyelid, strangers reveal themselves in confessions that more careful lovers may take years to express."

[moobenjoyer]

"“The first time you suck dick,” he begins, “it really is like Holy Communion. Mystical. Know what I mean?” Boone holds a Ph.D. from Berkeley. He is a specialist in contemporary French literature, a translator, a short-story writer in the modernist vein, a teacher without a seminar room. His head—gray hair at the temples, skull bones close to the surface—tends to tip forward on an overlong neck. His eyes peer out through thick round horn-rimmed glasses.

He expects me to be shocked.

I explain that I wasn't raised religious but that equating cock-sucking with communion seems like a cliché.

“No, you didn't listen carefully,” he answers. “I said Holy Communion. It's different.”

We pick at the slippery noodles from thick plates painted with red dragons. “This isn't shocking the way people think—it's about dissolving the self.” He reminds me that Holy Communion is not about fellowship, as Protestants might conceive of it; for those deeply driven by the spiritual quest, Holy Communion is literally to eat the flesh of God, and so to be one with God. To eat God is to be liberated from the alienated division of the self, to lose the self. In Boone's quest, to eat cock was in some profound measure to find the unity that divided the dictates of his spirit from the drives of the flesh, and so to eat cock became a Holy Communion."

[moobenjoyer]

"Self-serving gay propaganda might easily claim that men who get fucked are the anointed liberators of a world in chains—a notion so far from sense or reality that it hardly deserves note. Leo Bersani acknowledges that there is nothing inherently liberating in the classless nakedness of bathhouse and park orgies—or, as Armistead Maupin put it, one of the things bathhouses teach is how to identify a bastard in the dark. The pursuit and recovery of the sacred and the ecstatic in contemporary life is a journey separate from the path to equity, democracy, and justice. It promises only a quality of knowing unavailable to the Rousseauistic mind of social contracts. The impulse toward the ecstatic speaks of neither good nor evil, neither protection nor redemption. It speaks only to remind us that the permanent human condition is exposure, and it reveals that the new activist demand for sexual “safe space” is little more than a silly oxymoron. On the one hand, “safe space” denies the darkness and violence humans face in nature, and on the other it concocts a language of banal, “redemptive” sexual management that would suppress the inherently transgressive nature of desire. Fearful of facing the terror squarely, we invent a new “radical” mythos, complete with its own system of privilege and taboo. We actively contrive to inoculate ourselves from one another, struggling to sent that in the messiness of human affairs the only genuinely safe space exists in an urn of ashes. We forget the simplest, plainest truth: To be alive is to be at risk. Nowhere can sex be altogether sage, because sex is, for most of us, our primary, residual, atavistic connection to the realm of animal existence."

[moobenjoyer]

well now this book has me bawling in the airport

[moobenjoyer]

"On balance I wonder whether by making sex ordinary, even recreational, we have learned to re-form it into a tool for building diverse forms of companionship. By stealing sex away from the restrictive laws of marriage, by acknowledging its myriad meanings, gay men may have shown how lust contributes to the bonds of friendship. By devaluing the taboo of sex among friends, they may have begun to shine more light on the complex and various ways intimacy can be arranged in emerging gay families. This is not too deny that lust without constraint can be abusive, callous, selfish, ignoble; the point is only that through the persistent exploration of love and lust and nurturing, gay people have helped to open up the territory of family meanings."

[moobenjoyer]

"Neither love nor liking is without context, and it is within the context of shared commitment that Aristotle found the greatest power in friendship. We are useful to one another not only in providing practical utilities—status, income, care—but illuminating the search for meaning and understanding."

[moobenjoyer]

"Instead, he articulated a lament that runs through most of his fiction: He who clings to safety instead of reaching out toward freedom ends up having no life at all. To succumb to the security of mythic images is to be left in an empty cell. At the root of the problem, Baldwin said, is an inability to love “because they inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.... There's something in the structure of this country and something in the nostalgia that's at the basis of the American personality, it seems to me, that prohibits a certain kind of maturity and entraps the person, or the people, in a kind of dream love they can never stand the weight of reality.”"

[moobenjoyer]

"There lies the essence of camp sensibility, of queer sensibility: intimate acknowledgement that there is no centered, secure self, that the modern self is a fluid fiction. To that end, Susan Sontag argued, camp spoke most directly to the universal human condition."

[moobenjoyer]

"What has changed through the course of the century is not the nature of sex acts or how they are condemned by civic and ecclesiastical authorities. What has changed is this: Having failed to suppress forbidden desire, modern society has elected to isolate and assign it to a distant category of “other” people."

[moobenjoyer]

love this chapter title

[moobenjoyer]

dog

"Hardly any of my colleagues over the years could quite have imagined that sort of encounter, a mixture of trash and grace, wantonness and repartee, foolhardy risk and thorough trust, that could come of two strangers wandering into each other late at night in a shadowy city alley. But that chancinesz is part of the lasting magic of gay life, a sort of radical plot twist that characterizes queer life and sets aside so many conventions of social judgement, class, race, and attitude, supplanting them with a direct and naïve faith that bonds of great value can be forged on nothing more than instinct.

Not that such bonds always occur (more often than not, these brief encounters are merely tiring and banal). But there is a genuine spiritual affirmation in discovering how often magic can arise between strangers—magic that in most of our waking moments we train ourselves not to see. The love of strangers, or the love of loving strangers, teaches us that one man can touch the soul of another before he knows the size of his companion's shoes or paycheck. From the fragmentary details one man shares with his stranger-friend—the private glades of a morning stroll, the suppressed angers of a family feud—from these random glimpses of identity a window can open between the souls of unconnected people, a window framed only by intuitive readiness and undimmed by a lifetime's accumulated judgements. Led on by nothing more than the broken line of a shoulder's scar or the wrinkle of a closed eyelid, strangers reveal themselves in confessions that more careful lovers may take years to express."

[moobenjoyer]

"“The first time you suck dick,” he begins, “it really is like Holy Communion. Mystical. Know what I mean?” Boone holds a Ph.D. from Berkeley. He is a specialist in contemporary French literature, a translator, a short-story writer in the modernist vein, a teacher without a seminar room. His head—gray hair at the temples, skull bones close to the surface—tends to tip forward on an overlong neck. His eyes peer out through thick round horn-rimmed glasses.

He expects me to be shocked.

I explain that I wasn't raised religious but that equating cock-sucking with communion seems like a cliché.

“No, you didn't listen carefully,” he answers. “I said Holy Communion. It's different.”

We pick at the slippery noodles from thick plates painted with red dragons. “This isn't shocking the way people think—it's about dissolving the self.” He reminds me that Holy Communion is not about fellowship, as Protestants might conceive of it; for those deeply driven by the spiritual quest, Holy Communion is literally to eat the flesh of God, and so to be one with God. To eat God is to be liberated from the alienated division of the self, to lose the self. In Boone's quest, to eat cock was in some profound measure to find the unity that divided the dictates of his spirit from the drives of the flesh, and so to eat cock became a Holy Communion."

[moobenjoyer]

"Self-serving gay propaganda might easily claim that men who get fucked are the anointed liberators of a world in chains—a notion so far from sense or reality that it hardly deserves note. Leo Bersani acknowledges that there is nothing inherently liberating in the classless nakedness of bathhouse and park orgies—or, as Armistead Maupin put it, one of the things bathhouses teach is how to identify a bastard in the dark. The pursuit and recovery of the sacred and the ecstatic in contemporary life is a journey separate from the path to equity, democracy, and justice. It promises only a quality of knowing unavailable to the Rousseauistic mind of social contracts. The impulse toward the ecstatic speaks of neither good nor evil, neither protection nor redemption. It speaks only to remind us that the permanent human condition is exposure, and it reveals that the new activist demand for sexual “safe space” is little more than a silly oxymoron. On the one hand, “safe space” denies the darkness and violence humans face in nature, and on the other it concocts a language of banal, “redemptive” sexual management that would suppress the inherently transgressive nature of desire. Fearful of facing the terror squarely, we invent a new “radical” mythos, complete with its own system of privilege and taboo. We actively contrive to inoculate ourselves from one another, struggling to sent that in the messiness of human affairs the only genuinely safe space exists in an urn of ashes. We forget the simplest, plainest truth: To be alive is to be at risk. Nowhere can sex be altogether sage, because sex is, for most of us, our primary, residual, atavistic connection to the realm of animal existence."

[moobenjoyer]

well now this book has me bawling in the airport

[moobenjoyer]

"On balance I wonder whether by making sex ordinary, even recreational, we have learned to re-form it into a tool for building diverse forms of companionship. By stealing sex away from the restrictive laws of marriage, by acknowledging its myriad meanings, gay men may have shown how lust contributes to the bonds of friendship. By devaluing the taboo of sex among friends, they may have begun to shine more light on the complex and various ways intimacy can be arranged in emerging gay families. This is not too deny that lust without constraint can be abusive, callous, selfish, ignoble; the point is only that through the persistent exploration of love and lust and nurturing, gay people have helped to open up the territory of family meanings."

[moobenjoyer]

"Neither love nor liking is without context, and it is within the context of shared commitment that Aristotle found the greatest power in friendship. We are useful to one another not only in providing practical utilities—status, income, care—but illuminating the search for meaning and understanding."

[moobenjoyer]

"Instead, he articulated a lament that runs through most of his fiction: He who clings to safety instead of reaching out toward freedom ends up having no life at all. To succumb to the security of mythic images is to be left in an empty cell. At the root of the problem, Baldwin said, is an inability to love “because they inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.... There's something in the structure of this country and something in the nostalgia that's at the basis of the American personality, it seems to me, that prohibits a certain kind of maturity and entraps the person, or the people, in a kind of dream love they can never stand the weight of reality.”"

[moobenjoyer]

"There lies the essence of camp sensibility, of queer sensibility: intimate acknowledgement that there is no centered, secure self, that the modern self is a fluid fiction. To that end, Susan Sontag argued, camp spoke most directly to the universal human condition."

[bruzum]

[wonderarium]

this sewing pattern just touched me while i was in the middle of reading it

[moobenjoyer]

love this chapter title

[moobenjoyer]

dog

"Hardly any of my colleagues over the years could quite have imagined that sort of encounter, a mixture of trash and grace, wantonness and repartee, foolhardy risk and thorough trust, that could come of two strangers wandering into each other late at night in a shadowy city alley. But that chancinesz is part of the lasting magic of gay life, a sort of radical plot twist that characterizes queer life and sets aside so many conventions of social judgement, class, race, and attitude, supplanting them with a direct and naïve faith that bonds of great value can be forged on nothing more than instinct.

Not that such bonds always occur (more often than not, these brief encounters are merely tiring and banal). But there is a genuine spiritual affirmation in discovering how often magic can arise between strangers—magic that in most of our waking moments we train ourselves not to see. The love of strangers, or the love of loving strangers, teaches us that one man can touch the soul of another before he knows the size of his companion's shoes or paycheck. From the fragmentary details one man shares with his stranger-friend—the private glades of a morning stroll, the suppressed angers of a family feud—from these random glimpses of identity a window can open between the souls of unconnected people, a window framed only by intuitive readiness and undimmed by a lifetime's accumulated judgements. Led on by nothing more than the broken line of a shoulder's scar or the wrinkle of a closed eyelid, strangers reveal themselves in confessions that more careful lovers may take years to express."

[moobenjoyer]

"“The first time you suck dick,” he begins, “it really is like Holy Communion. Mystical. Know what I mean?” Boone holds a Ph.D. from Berkeley. He is a specialist in contemporary French literature, a translator, a short-story writer in the modernist vein, a teacher without a seminar room. His head—gray hair at the temples, skull bones close to the surface—tends to tip forward on an overlong neck. His eyes peer out through thick round horn-rimmed glasses.

He expects me to be shocked.

I explain that I wasn't raised religious but that equating cock-sucking with communion seems like a cliché.

“No, you didn't listen carefully,” he answers. “I said Holy Communion. It's different.”

We pick at the slippery noodles from thick plates painted with red dragons. “This isn't shocking the way people think—it's about dissolving the self.” He reminds me that Holy Communion is not about fellowship, as Protestants might conceive of it; for those deeply driven by the spiritual quest, Holy Communion is literally to eat the flesh of God, and so to be one with God. To eat God is to be liberated from the alienated division of the self, to lose the self. In Boone's quest, to eat cock was in some profound measure to find the unity that divided the dictates of his spirit from the drives of the flesh, and so to eat cock became a Holy Communion."

[moobenjoyer]

"Self-serving gay propaganda might easily claim that men who get fucked are the anointed liberators of a world in chains—a notion so far from sense or reality that it hardly deserves note. Leo Bersani acknowledges that there is nothing inherently liberating in the classless nakedness of bathhouse and park orgies—or, as Armistead Maupin put it, one of the things bathhouses teach is how to identify a bastard in the dark. The pursuit and recovery of the sacred and the ecstatic in contemporary life is a journey separate from the path to equity, democracy, and justice. It promises only a quality of knowing unavailable to the Rousseauistic mind of social contracts. The impulse toward the ecstatic speaks of neither good nor evil, neither protection nor redemption. It speaks only to remind us that the permanent human condition is exposure, and it reveals that the new activist demand for sexual “safe space” is little more than a silly oxymoron. On the one hand, “safe space” denies the darkness and violence humans face in nature, and on the other it concocts a language of banal, “redemptive” sexual management that would suppress the inherently transgressive nature of desire. Fearful of facing the terror squarely, we invent a new “radical” mythos, complete with its own system of privilege and taboo. We actively contrive to inoculate ourselves from one another, struggling to sent that in the messiness of human affairs the only genuinely safe space exists in an urn of ashes. We forget the simplest, plainest truth: To be alive is to be at risk. Nowhere can sex be altogether sage, because sex is, for most of us, our primary, residual, atavistic connection to the realm of animal existence."

[moobenjoyer]

well now this book has me bawling in the airport

[moobenjoyer]

"On balance I wonder whether by making sex ordinary, even recreational, we have learned to re-form it into a tool for building diverse forms of companionship. By stealing sex away from the restrictive laws of marriage, by acknowledging its myriad meanings, gay men may have shown how lust contributes to the bonds of friendship. By devaluing the taboo of sex among friends, they may have begun to shine more light on the complex and various ways intimacy can be arranged in emerging gay families. This is not too deny that lust without constraint can be abusive, callous, selfish, ignoble; the point is only that through the persistent exploration of love and lust and nurturing, gay people have helped to open up the territory of family meanings."

[moobenjoyer]

"Neither love nor liking is without context, and it is within the context of shared commitment that Aristotle found the greatest power in friendship. We are useful to one another not only in providing practical utilities—status, income, care—but illuminating the search for meaning and understanding."

[moobenjoyer]

"Instead, he articulated a lament that runs through most of his fiction: He who clings to safety instead of reaching out toward freedom ends up having no life at all. To succumb to the security of mythic images is to be left in an empty cell. At the root of the problem, Baldwin said, is an inability to love “because they inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.... There's something in the structure of this country and something in the nostalgia that's at the basis of the American personality, it seems to me, that prohibits a certain kind of maturity and entraps the person, or the people, in a kind of dream love they can never stand the weight of reality.”"

[bugs-are-buddies]

(via entomemeology)

[texasfartsupply]

reminds me of this unfortunate text exchange between my father and me

[moobenjoyer]

oh my god so many things I read are in conversation with so many things I need to read or have read and I will simply never Read All Of It but my tbr keeps getting longer

James Baldwin keeps coming up and I recently read the fire next time but I wanna read his fiction; sexuality and its discontents which I've had out from the library for over a year; one day I'll pick the mad man back up which I've also had out from the library for over a year; and "is the rectum a grave?" which ive had bookmarked for months; and Wilde and bataille and the sexual outlaw by John Rechy and epistomology of the closet and eight million other things and the culture of desire just referenced "notes on camp" which I *have* read and ahhhhhh. reading

[lamignonette]

[innerchildabortionclinic]

⚠️sweetiepie located

[zinesbycee]

(nods sagely) (nods basily) (nods rosemarily) (nods saltly) (nods star anisely)

[catcrumb]