BijouBlog

When I was younger, much younger, I slept with a guy who one could safely say was blue collar. He worked at various constructions jobs (mostly unskilled). He was hot (muscles, beard, deep voice, big hands) and he was gay, and he was kinky. What more could one ask for? In fact, at a gathering I held when I was sleeping with him off and on, a cultured friend of mine who sold suits to mostly white collar executives met him. He blurted out to me, “You slept with him! Can I touch you?” He meant it jokingly, but I think much was implied in his reaction, much about class, education, sexual orientation, and how that all ties into how we view what is masculine.
 

Where does the term blue collar even come from?
 

The term blue collar was first used in reference to trades jobs in 1924, in an Alden, Iowa newspaper. The phrase stems from the image of manual workers wearing blue denim or chambray shirts as part of their uniforms.
 

Some blue collar workers have uniforms with the name of the business and/or the individual's name embroidered or printed on it.

Historically the popularity of the color blue among manual laborers contrasts with the popularity of white dress shirts worn by people in office environments.

The blue collar/white collar color scheme has socioeconomic connotations, which comes from the British class system, especially as it transmuted because of the Industrial Revolution.

The people who worked in factories were called the working class, and they varied in degrees of respectability, ranging from the skilled laborers who could afford a small house and raise a church-going family (think Archie Bunker types), to unskilled day laborers at the bottom of the social ladder.

These individuals, because of their lack of education, were stereotyped as coarse and ill-mannered, but also as physically strong and big-hearted; perhaps Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners exemplifies the best and the worst of this image.
 

The people who ran the factories and eventually created the big corporations of the Gilded Age and beyond, combined with the older, genteel professions of teachers and doctors, became the white collar middle and upper middle classes, and at the top of that ladder, the nouveau riche.

This structure pretty much held for a long time in the United States, but once factory jobs moved to China and other places because of globalization, a new working class replaced it, working lower paid service and retail jobs jobs, and also in office jobs, ostensibly white collar, but working mostly as servants to upper middle class and upper class high level professionals like lawyers and corporate executives.
 

Now, how do gay men fit into this social picture? The stereotype of gay men is definitely not the “rough” guy who works with his hands, but the effeminate artsy-fartsy queen who thrives in refined cultural environments, the “sissy.” If you weren't out in that way and consigning yourself to stereotypical gay professions like acting and hairdressing, you conformed to the social structure above, and if you were in the working class, you definitely didn't proclaim your sexual orientation.
 

Thus, in the book Maurice, the aristocrat Maurice is really taking a risk by loving Alec Scudder, a gamekeeper, much below him in social class.

So, what was a gay construction worker or trucker to do?

Hide their true selves, it seems. But note, so many gay porn fantasies involve these blue collar guys in places like truck stops and construction sites, but how much are they the projected fantasies of white collar gay guys who fetishize the conventional masculinity of these straight guys?
 

Tellingly, we saw this projection become dominant very soon after the initial liberation of Stonewall, when the gay clone look involved construction boots, denim, and keys hanging from belts.
 

And of course, one of the Village People guys was a construction worker.
 

Thus, in my case, it was almost a status symbol that I really slept with a real blue collar guy (I also slept with a fireman).

Neither relationship worked out, and it wasn't because of the social gap.

Yet, since the 1990s, when those relationships occurred, some social distinctions have blurred, but not all. Even in the increasingly mainstream LGBTQ community, upper middle class wealthy white educated males have wielded the most power and influence, ostensibly for the good of all in a diverse community, but the dynamic mirrors the class structure of the society as a whole.

The Veda Pierces (the snobbish daughter of Mildred Pierce) who looked down upon dollar days and men who wear uniforms (today what many retail employees have to wear) still exist, but they come from all social classes as the world of cyberspace creates a level playing field for everyone.
 

Yet, the world of Twitter can create identities that don't correspond with one's real life social status, and thus the opposite of the above can occur: an Amazon delivery person can show more class and education and insight than a nouveau riche person, the most powerful man in the world, who embodies the worst stereotypes of the blue collar worker every time he tweets.

Love bites, literally! 

To clarify, in this blog, when I use the term “bites,” I don’t necessarily mean it in the sense of “bite me,” like someone saying something or someone “sucks.” 

I repeat: Love bites, literally! 

My cat who is probably the most spoiled creature on the planet lately has been getting into the habit of nipping at me, mostly to get me up in the morning. But cats will often give their owners love nibbles. And I get plenty of them, especially when I wear shorts (she likes legs). In fact, one time after I finished doing my usual “get rid of the morning woody” activity, she nipped me in the thigh. Perhaps she was stimulated by my action. I’ll see if she does it again some time. Still, nipping in cats (as opposed to more aggressive biting), can be a characteristic of nonsexual play among kittens, or as I mentioned above, a sign of affection for a cat’s owner. 

Now, I remember as a child, if a child bit another child, someone was in big trouble. This action seems to produce great consternation, especially if said behavior keeps occurring at day care centers when the parents aren’t around. In this case, biting is aggressive and nonsexual. The biting behavior implies somehow that the child lacks certain “civilizing influences.” Dogs and cats bite, but not people, that is. 

People do bite, however. What is taboo in public becomes almost a norm in sexual play, where boundaries blur or even break, and the participants enjoy the danger and excitement of transgressing said boundaries. The skin is a boundary, perhaps the most tangible one; to bite, to fuck, to suck, to rim, to jack off, is to stretch that boundary to the limits in an aggressive way, and when any sex act ultimately produces the discharge of cum, that fluid represents in its viscosity and liquidity a dissolution of boundaries. 

Blatant biting occurs in both straight and gay porn. For example, in the scene We Haul from the Bijou classic Erection Set, a duo in jeans and jockstraps enter a warehouse and fuck hard and fast, on a ladder and in a wheel barrel! Spanking, finger-fucking and mutual j/o, too, are had before the older of the two men humps his youthful partner hard. The overall emphasis in this last scene is on fucking butt, tit-licking and biting, and large cum shots which are filmed in slow-motion and repeated in several angles.
 

Even the ostensibly lesbian Ida (continually lamenting her spinsterhood) in the movie Mildred Pierce uses biting imagery sarcastically (a masterful peformance by Eve Arden) in an interaction with the dumpy (and probably gay) accountant, Mr. Jones, saying in response to his petulantly laments about her constant interruptions, “It's only because I want to be alone with you. Come 'ere and let me bite you, you darling man! Ruff!” Ida’s overall caustic manner perhaps lessens the impact of the violent imagery here, but her language takes on a deeper dimension when one remember a previous scene when the mercenary Wally comes on to Mildred. His kisses resemble bites, and Mildred ends up telling him to stop “howling,” that is, cut his wolf-like sexually aggressive behavior. 

Perhaps the most familiar bites are the ones Dracula administers. Dracula, straddling the boundaries between life and death, bites his victims and drinks their blood (in the Bible and in many other cultures, physical blood equals physical life). How does he lure his victims? Through sexual aggression. In all the diverse stories about Dracula, sex and death intermingle literally in blood, the discharge of a bite. 

To experience more love bites (including some in a scene from the classic porn Gayracula featured in the Bijou original compilation Scared Stiff) watch movies instantly on our streaming site, bijougayporn.com, and use the coupon code for 35% off DVDs at bijouworld.com!

Bijou Video’s social media is literally out of this world, and a major social media blitz by our esteemed videographer Miriam Webster actually increased sales and customers. I credit the brilliant Miriam with this development, and we are actually going to feature a different movie on Twitter and Facebook every Monday. Call it Movie Monday, and Monday rather than Blue Monday might actually end up being for our customers and social media followers Sex Monday. 

I do wonder though, as I’ve also noticed on Twitter even more retweets of our posts than usual, if what is really going on is an escape into sex. Yes, escaping into it, but what is it an escape from? The obvious answer: the profoundly shocking upset to America that occurred on November 8.
 

Yes, so shocking, to the point where I actually called my mother (we don’t communicate frequently). There’s that line from the movie Mildred Pierce, “everyone has a mother,” and in my case, I felt like my mother was all I had. We wept together for about half an hour. 
 

Now, I wasn’t necessarily escaping into my mother, but the election, especially for those in what are now liberal enclaves (I hate having to use that word, but it is true), triggered a descent into the most fundamental core, so deep, like the tohu-va-vohu of Genesis 1 (the primordial, undifferentiated waters, like the amniotic waters of the womb) of our personal and social psyches. And in that dark place everything gets mixed up together, what is taboo and what is pure, what is violent and what is peaceful, what is evil and what is good. It’s the place where we decide whether to cross or maintain boundaries, build walls or make bridges in the world. 
 

Sex is crossing a boundary, physically, mentally, spiritually. I wonder if this crisis just made people unconsciously desire to do so, to cross that boundary, to voluntarily experience the petit mort of orgasm, especially in a situation where they felt utterly helpless and powerless. And the orgasms perhaps were even more intense, more powerful, given the raw emotions surging through the person. There’s an intimate connection between sex and violence, and perhaps the external climate violence we are all experiencing viscerally connected with our sex drives, like an electrical charge so strong it could blow a fuse. 
 

I know in my case my horniness has literally skyrocketed, and I experienced some of the best kinky sex play the weekend after the election to the point where my playmate and I even decided to commemorate the day in the future. Yes, we were escaping from the election and into sex, but I think we were also in our own way taking back the night because in, around, and above those dark, primal waters is a living, breathing spirit. 

“An overly sensitive person, incapable of dealing with any opinions that differ from their own. These people can often be seen congregating in ‘safe zones’ on college campuses.” 

Thus saith the Urban Dictionary, perhaps summarizing this new idiom bandied about by mostly conservative pundits. 

I find the comparison, actually, rather inept, because what is snowflake, literally? 

Wikepedia gives you the answer: 

A snowflake is either a single ice crystal or an aggregation of ice crystals which falls through the Earth's atmosphere as snow. Each flake nucleates around a dust particle in supersaturated air masses by attracting supercooled cloud water droplets, which freeze and accrete in crystal form. Complex shapes emerge as the flake moves through differing temperature and humidity zones in the atmosphere, such that individual snowflakes differ in detail from one another, but may be categorized in eight broad classifications and at least 80 individual variants. 

What I am getting from this definition is strength and diversity. In fact, no two snowflakes actually look alike (like people, even twins). Perhaps the fear of diversity could perhaps be read into the pundits’ use of the word here, but, as the definition above states, a snowflake or a group of snowflakes are originally ice crystal. Yes, the original ice melts, but its impact as snow can be quite powerful: 

Once snowflakes land and accumulate, they undergo metamorphosis with changes in temperature and coalesce into a snowpack. The characteristics of the snowpack reflect the changed nature of the constituent snow crystals. 
 

Yes, get a bunch of snowflakes together, and watch out. The resulting impact, morphing the sarcastic words of Ida in Mildred Pierce when she pointedly refers to Mildred’s gigolo boyfriend/husband/stepfather and lover of the spoiled Veda (eerily like the winner of the election in his narcissism and amorality): Don't look now, Junior, but you're standing next to a falling snowpack. 
 

I wish the retro Chicagoland figure Suzy Snowflake could, like Glinda threatens to do to the Wicked Witch of the West, just say begone, lest someone drop a house on you, to the forces of evil that are taking over this land. 
 

In fact, at this juncture, it’s small comfort to lapse into the cliché that after winter comes spring, which would not occur without the healing, cleansing darkness and beauty (just look at snowflakes close-up) of winter. 

I do think, though, that snowflakes like me who really believe in truth and beauty, if not causing a violent avalanche, can work behind the scenes, like the seed in the ground growing secretly, to overcome the evil so that we don’t face a silent spring where no birds sing.