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Jun '06
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The Gender Prison
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Miss Poubelle is not usually a big fan of the "prisonhouse of language" theory. Proponents of this view claim that the sorts of things we might think or do are severely limited by the kinds of words and structures found
in our languages. If we don't have the word for something, it is hard or impossible to think about it or to act on it. Thus language acts like an invisible prison that keeps us confined to a certain mental or behavioral area. |
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May '06
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'Stemming the Rose'
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Blanche's friends have been asking her about an apparently new gay idiom from
Brokeback Mountain. In the film, there is a scene where the character played by Randy Quaid
(Joe Aguirre) refuses to rehire Jack Twist. Aguirre has witnessed Ennis and Jack kissing and wrestling affectionately, and knows what's going on between them. |
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Apr '06
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Gay Life Decoded
By: Blanche Poubelle
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In ancient times the 70s and 80s, for example it seemed that many gay men were fond of labelling exactly what they did, and did not do, sexually. In addition to the usual
age/height/weight/dick-size information, personal ads would often give detailed information about preferred activities. This information was provided in a coded form, where
Greek stood for anal intercourse and French
for oral sex. |
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Mar '06
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The Quim Police
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Miss Poubelle was out playing Scrabble with the church ladies the other night when she was fortunate enough to draw the Q. As all Scrabble players know, the Q and Z tiles are worth
10 points each, and playing them in a good position on the board can often be the key to winning the game. |
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Feb '06
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Nothing Hetero About 'Marriage' or 'Wedding'
By: Blanche Poubelle
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As the debate over gay marriage continues to rage, Blanche found herself wondering about the history of the words that describe the institution. Some defenders of the
traditional heterosexual monopoly on marriage have claimed that the very meaning of the word
marriage implies a relationship between a man and a woman. |
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Nov '05
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Jumping the Counter
By: Blanche Poubelle
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When you visit the local Wal-mart or Sears, do you look suspiciously at the men behind the counters, suspecting them of effeminacy? Blanche suspects that few readers would make this odd connection between swish and sales. |
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Oct '05
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GLBT (YY/YX)
By: Blanche Poubelle
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J. Michael Bailey's 2003 book The Man Who Would be
Queen outraged many transsexuals through its linguistic insensitivity. And that is a shame, because it seems that its ideas are not essentially offensive, and may help us
to better understand sexuality. |
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Sep '05
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The Meaning of Marriage
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Blanche congratulates our progressive friends in Canada, where same-sex marriage has recently become legal for the entire nation. They join Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain as
the countries with full marriage rights for gays and lesbians. (Same-sex marriage had been legal in many Canadian provinces due to court decisions that began in 2003, but the
recently-passed legislation extends this right to the whole country.) |
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Aug '05
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Hitting That
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Blanche has recently noticed a new slang term for sex-- alternately
to hit that or to hit it. These two variants seem to have appeared in the last two or three years, and are
particularly concentrated in music that appeals to young urban men. |
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Jun '05
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Unholy Ho-moles
By: Blanche Poubelle
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The phenomenon of homophobes being exposed as gay has now become commonplace enough that Miss Poubelle thinks we need a snappier way to talk about it. She suggests that we
call these people ho-moles. Like the
moles of the cold-war spy business, they pretend to be on one side of a struggle, while secretly being members of the other team. And like the furry burrowers, they hide from the light of day while doing their best to cause collapse around them. |
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May '05
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Blanche Goes Bugfuck
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Miss Poubelle was surprised to see in Rolling Stone
a movie review that included the sentence
"Sin City has a restless bug-fuck vitality." Despite her best attempts to keep up with contemporary slang, she had no idea what
bug-fuck meant. Not so long ago, one might have had
to live with the shame of not knowing a new bit of slang-- but luckily we now have Google. A search revealed dozens of examples. |
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Apr '05
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Cock and Bull
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Freud famously wrote that anatomy is destiny. Being born as male or female has traditionally determined many of the most important things about our lives-- how others will treat us, how we will dress, what jobs we will have, where we will live, and what we can say. |
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Mar '05
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The Science of Obscenity
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Miss Poubelle has recently been enjoying a fascinating book
Cursing in America, by Timothy Jay. Jay's object in the book is to study dirty words from a scientific point of view-- trying to understand their meanings and how they are used. |
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Feb '05
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MSM and the Fuck-it factor
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Miss Poubelle has been intrigued by the recent rise in the use of the illuminating
term MSM men who have sex with men
as a phrase to describe the full range of gay men, regularly bisexual men, and men who are primarily straight but occasionally or infrequently have sex
with other men. MSM primarily seems to be used by health-care workers to describe the sort of men who are the potential audience for information about HIV, syphilis, and other sexually-transmitted diseases. |
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Jan '05
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Sex dopes
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Miss Poubelle tips her chapeau to the folks at
Wired magazine for catching a story that much of the larger media ignored. This was the November testimony before the US Senate on the alleged dangers of pornography by several
soi-disant experts in human sexuality.
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Dec '04
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Manboobs
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Blanche was fascinated by a recent documentary
Men with breasts, which recently aired on the cable network TLC. The subject was
gynecomastia, a medical condition in which men have breasts like those of women. |
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Nov '04
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A Dirty Shame
By: Blanche Poubelle
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In upstate New York last month, Dr. Phillip Riback, a pediatric neurologist, was sentenced to 48 years for 28 counts of molesting male patients. Cases of doctors abusing patients are not uncommon. But it was the details of these alleged encounters that raised eyebrows among locals. |
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Oct '04
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The Mangina
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Perhaps the most shocking Halloween costume Miss Poubelle ever witnessed was worn by a woman dressed as a naked man. She was slender, small-breasted women wearing a flesh-colored body suit to which she had added pubic hair and a fabric phallus. This was surprisingly
effective-- from a few feet away, she gave a convincing impression of a guy in the buff. |
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Sep '04
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All the ways...
By: Blanche Poubelle
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We know that homosexual men have always been around and always will be. But what does it mean to be homosexual? And what does it mean to be gay? At a minimum, male homosexuality must include one male with an erotic attraction to other males. Beyond this bare
minimum, however, it is astonishing to see how much variation-- how many ways to be gay-- are possible. |
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Aug '04
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Sickos
By: Blanche Poubelle
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In Graham Robb's fascinating study of homosexuality in the 19th century,
Strangers, he discusses the persistent idea that homosexual activities-- by virtue of their unnaturalness-- cause disease. He gives an amusing list of the various maladies thought to result from homosexuality. |
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Jul '04
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Ronald Wilson Reagan
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Will the Guide readers' occasional Latin club please come to order? Today Miss Poubelle will be teaching you three useful phrases, and hopes that they will come in handy during this
period of public comment on President Ronald Wilson Reagan. |
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Jun '04
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GIs Gone Wild
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Blanche was shocked by the graphic photos of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners that hit the media in early May. It is not surprising that the military mistreats prisoners. Any careful reading of
news accounts about prisoners at Guantanamo Bay would reveal that abuse is widespread in military prisons. But Blanche had not suspected the degree to which such abuse was
homosexually oriented. |
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May '04
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Cocks in locks
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Miss Poubelle recently stumbled across a website for men who have
a fetish for wearing a chastity device
(http://www.tpe.com/~altarboy). Chastity devices go over or around
the genitals of the wearer and prevent
sexual activity till the device is removed. |
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Apr '04
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Tattleware
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Miss Poubelle was visiting her local coffee shop last week and went to the magazine rack for something to read along with her drink. There wasn't much to choose from, so she
grabbed something called New Man and took it back to her table. |
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Mar '04
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Carl's Revenge
By: Blanche Poubelle
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During the frigid Northeastern winters, anything involving sex and heat starts to sound good. But Miss Poubelle draws the line at the
hot carl, a practice brought to her attention by
a thoughtful reader. What is a hot carl? The internet has a variety of definitions and disagreements about the details. |
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Feb '04
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Too frigging bad
By: Blanche Poubelle
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It was not until Miss Poubelle went away to college in the North that she met her first
frigger-- the roommate who described our dorm as a frigging dump, the food as frigging swill, and in general, anything he disliked as a frigging something or other.
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Jan '04
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Don't be a pussy
By: Blanche Poubelle
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In today's high school culture, there may be a somewhat higher degree of tolerance for gay students, but hatred of pussies continues unabated. |
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Dec '03
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Zhuzh
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has made quite a splash on the Bravo cable network this year. For those readers unfamiliar with the show, it involves the Fab 5-- five gay men who are experts in fashion, hair, design, food, and culture-- who do a make-over of a slobbish straight man in each episode. |
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Nov '03
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Holy Mackerel!
By: Blanche Poubelle
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Miss Poubelle's straight male friends have often expressed envy at the relative ease gay men have in getting laid. This is not necessarily a tribute to the superior looks or charms of gay men-- it's just due to the fact that they are
trying to pick up other men, and men are notoriously easy lays. |
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Oct '03
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The Lowdown on the Down-Low
By: Blanche Poubelle
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HIV educators have recently been directing their attention to black men who describe themselves as being
on the down-low or on the D.-L. |
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