BijouBlog

I was born into a world where baby boys were routinely circumcised, whether they were Jewish or not. Hygienic purposes. (These were also the days when nurses wore caps, which were later deemed to be unhygienic. Go figure.)

These were also the days when women at least in middle class white America were knocked out in order to give birth. Babies were kept in rooms behind windows, often in incubators even if they weren’t under five pounds, held up for viewing like specimens by nurses in crisp white caps. (I am remembering the episode of the birth of Little Ricky on I Love Lucy, which corresponded to Lucille Ball scheduling a caesarian section for the birth of her son, Desi Arnaz, Jr.)

It's like anything that resembled the nitty gritty raw materials of sex and blood and birth and death was hidden, sterilized as much as possible. Dirt was disorder. Sex was dirty unless it produced babies, but giving birth to those babies was a disordered process that required forceps and scalpels and anesthesia to control it, get it out of the realm of actual living.

And of course any type of sex other than what took place behind closed doors in a missionary position for procreative purposes was generally deemed dirty and disordered. Thus LGBTQ persons themselves were deemed by the general population as irredeemably dirty, unless they could cleanse themselves and rejoin the pristine world of Father Knows Best, itself but an idealized fantasy.

Mary Douglas in her seminal book Purity and Danger explored this primal desire to contain dirt and disorder, like the way we still keep our basic bodily functions of urination and defecation in a toilet which is supposed to be sparkling clean and in a room that is also supposed to be sparkling clean. The toilet itself is an image that contains in itself this fraught tension which informs our attitudes toward sexuality and even to parts of the body that one uses to express that sexuality.

Thus, that foreskin had to be brutally cut off, to cleanse, make pure, the member of an appendage would make its appearance and its role sexual act even more exciting, promising deep, dark, rich scents and that pungent but also enticing smegma.

It revealed the mystery in order to contain it. When I experienced sexually a man who was uncut for the first time (in the bathroom, and in the shower, ironically), which could imply he was somehow more complete, even “holy” which word can also mean complete, I experienced mystery. And in that mystery, glory, and by glory, I am thinking of not a vague disembodied entity or feeling in the clouds, but physical reality itself charged with an energy that creates and propels the orgasm but also encompasses it.

His phallus contained on it a boundary, and it’s through crossing boundaries one grows, changes, lives, dies. I could experience at that time a fullness and as I said above, a mystery that transcended the rigid binaries which result from treating sexual, in fact, all human experience as something we have to dissect with scalpels and pull apart with forceps.

I’m not advocating for an end to circumcision, as it is a boundary-crossing, consensual ritual of initiation for males in many cultures, but, significantly, also a source of horrific pain and suffering for so many, especially women and girls who are circumcised in order to completely suppress their sexual desire, eliminate it like it is indeed something dirty and thus disordered. They in essence are forced into becoming objects only defined by what the culture deems as purity, but at the same time depriving them of living as full, complete persons.

Yes, there’s dangerous realities we do need to contain, as a virus plagues the world and we must first try and control it, then eradicate it, by amplifying up to the nth degree our bathroom rituals of cleansing and purifying. But our complicated, messy, exciting and ultimately glorious sexuality can and should become for humans both dangerous and pure, exploding the tension in that binary if only for a moment. A holy moment.

Greetings P(r)icksters!

Hopefully this finds you hunkered down until this Covid-19 virus crisis is over. The state shut down the bars in Illinois on March 16th and just today extended the closure order thru April 30th. So much for the Bloody Mary and Rusty Nail drink specials for Easter weekend.

It’s kind of hard to talk about what’s going on when in reality its absolutely nothing!

The weekend before the closure we were encouraged to limit the number of patrons in the bar, to keep it under 100. Was not much of a problem here, many folks had already started avoiding crowds and business was falling off steadily in the preceding weeks.

Since Saint Patrick’s Day was that coming Tuesday, we knew it would be a busy bar weekend. The city cancelled the parade to avoid the crowds downtown, but the crowds around the bars were too much for our Governor and we got the shutdown order that Monday.

Leather fetish events scheduled in March, April and May are all being cancelled or postponed. No big IML weekend over Memorial Day weekend to kick off our summer. But it was a necessary step to stop folks from gathering in large numbers and allowing the virus to spread.

Good thing, too, as since then it has become clear how quickly this virus has spread and how deadly it can be. It’s odd to see Chicago almost a ghost town. The food stores are busy all day but they try to limit the number indoors, hand out gloves and ask for “social distancing” while you shop. Still can't figure out the hoarding of toilet paper. The virus attacks your lungs, doesn’t give you the shits.

Reports of shortages of supplies for healthcare workers are the big concern. We’ve seen what’s been happening in New York, Boston and other east coast cities. We expect Chicago to peak in mid April and the city and state here are trying to stockpile supplies before it hits. Which has medical supplies coming in from all kinds of places - construction sites, businesses and more.

I even saw a report that over in the U.K. that a fetish dealer made a donation. Seems that MedFet U.K. provides medical gear for folks who like to play doctor & nurse. They donated their stock of masks, protection suits and gloves to local health officials. I wonder how many other fetish stores have supplies that could be used in this emergency.

So while we are just hanging out at home, we can play doctor, too. My P(r)ick of the Week first choice is Steve Scott’s Games from 1983. Featuring Al Parker, Giorgio Canali & Leo Ford during the first Gay Games in San Francisco. One of the scenes takes place in a hospital with the good doctor applying some therapy to an injured athlete.

Let’s stretch the doctor theme to 1985’s Blacklode. This Marksman Production centers around a doctor/scientist studying the human orgasm and his need for studs to provide “samples” for his work. Any excuse to watch some humpy black men pull on their big dicks works for me.

Take one or two and you’ll be feeling better in no time at all. Keep them handy if you suffer a relapse and need more therapy. Let’s play doctor!

David

Games (D00271) - On DVD and Streaming


Blacklode (D00826) - On DVD and Streaming

We’ve been seeing the word pandemic as we encounter at varying levels one throughout the world. A Greek root in the word, “pan,” means all.

It’s interesting how we have created many words with this root. The most famous example is pandemonium, a word the poet John Milton created in his epic Paradise Lost. It is the name of Lucifer’s city in Hell:

“Pandemonium, the palace of Satan rises, suddenly built of the deep: the infernal peers there sit in council.”

Based on its characteristics, one of its definitions has evolved into meaning a noisy cacophony, or an overall chaotic situation or experience, even though, analyzing the Greek, it literally means something like “all or every little demon.” Whose idea was it to build the city? In Milton’s universe, the figure of Mammon, who represents the greedy pursuit of material gain.

Geologists named the original supercontinent on Earth before it split up Pangaea, and related to the above, specifically, Mammon, a notoriously corrupt real estate company in Chicago is called Pangea (go to Yelp to find out more).

The word pansexual has become popular in today’s nomenclature as cultural norms about sexuality become more flexible, and some have even defined it as being attracted to the personality of a partner rather than that person’s gender identiity.

But there’s another Pan, and his name doesn’t literally correspond to the root discussed above. He’s that Greek god everyone recognized as a goat man who plays pipes.

But there’s more to him than the clichéd figure of the satyr. I found out via Wikepedia that, according to some myths, his father Hermes (associated with large phalluses), taught him how to masturbate. Pan liked to “chase girls” (yes, he was definitely a predator), but women devotees of his cult were sometimes called “pan girls.”

I don’t know if he had sexual encounters with males, but adding to the sexual elements of his personality and cult, his half-brother was Hermaphroditus, the intersex son of his father Hermes and the goddess Aphrodite.

The word panic actually comes from the story that Pan, possessed of a deep, authoritative voice, could create fear among humans by shouting, and he even was able to control a horde of giants attacking the gods by shouting. I assume he made a sound like that during his frequent sexual encounters.

Going back to the first meaning of pan, I like to think of what we sell at Bijou Video as “pan-porn.” Yes, the content is primarily gay male, but our products reveal a variety of bodies, personalities, identities, sexualities.

I think we need to remember that the “all” of human experience isn’t monolithic; many parts interact within that all; thus every day, if we keep our minds and hearts open, we discover what we thought was the “all” is something new and, in these days of fear, a matter of preserving life.

“There's one lady barber that made good,” croons Mae West, singing Delilah in the opera Samson et Dalila by Saint-Saens in an attempt to be a high-class dame.
 

Since my regular haircut lady retired and moved to Florida, I've been searching for a haircut place. After a few unsatisfactory visits to a salonesque male haircut place (blasting music, “cool” décor, a differentiation between a stylist and barber), I settled on a place in walking distance of my house that bills itself as a barbershop.

Think old-fashioned barbershop. Plan white walls and white floor tile, the iconic striped barbershop pole, a box for hot towels, straight razor shaves… The place bills itself as offering a “masculine” experience, emphasizing for example playing sporting events on the television (I go in the morning purposely as to not be subject to “the game”).
 

But lest one think this is some kind of man-cave redneck frat boy paradise, its clientele, because of its location, are mostly gay. And as far as I know, the place employs at least two lady barbers.

I've set myself up with a totally straight, married with kids, overall kind of nondescript by celebrity standards of beauty Russian barber. The heart to heart confidences I enjoyed with my regular haircut lady don't occur, but it's kind of a relief to go on about subjects such as lawn mowing and home repair.

But if the conversation isn't stimulating, I noticed I am feeling that twinge in my shorts when he grooms me. That's what he is doing, and he takes much time in grooming the beard and mustache and the eyebrows after the haircut. The last time, his bare hand touched my face, not purposely, but it was certainly stimulating, however brief.

And add to that sensation the shaving cream, the straight razor, and to provide some form of climax, the the hot towel on the face.

Perhaps the turn on comes from just being in that chair, not free to move, no glasses on my face. I can zone out and just let him in his manner “do me.”

Hmm... one might say, why don't you just go for a massage if you want some hand action, and you could get some young hot stud to touch you…

Yes, I could, but maybe it's the subtlety of the experience, and that it's homoerotic without being overtly sexual, and that it allows more room for fantasy, that creates that increasingly irresistible turn on.

For more homoerotic grooming/shaving imagery, check out of one of our best-selling posters, "Close Shave".
 

Two classic Steve Scott porn films feature related scenes: A Few Good Men (1983) opens with an extended sequence of a young military recruit having his head shaved and his mouth filled with dick (belonging to Al Parker, seen only from the waist down) and I Do! (1984) features a barber shop sequence between customer Andy Fuller and his beefy barber (Joe Marconi), who kneels to give him head at the shampoo sink.
 

And check out two Bijou original series: Love a Man With a Beard (Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 4) and Love a Man With a Mustache (Volumes 1, 2, and 3), collections of hot vintage porn scenes for fans of men with facial hair.
 

When I was in sixth grade (I didn’t go to a middle school or a junior high), the tougher boys were joking about rubbers. I did not make the connection to condoms until high school, climaxing in the time when, believe it or not, my dad gave me one to put in my wallet. He thought I needed one because I was hanging out with some girls (little did he or, most significantly, I know I was their gay friend, and one of the girls, nicknamed “Inch," was a lesbian).

I digress. Condoms weren’t always rubber. Before the invention of vulcanized rubber in the 19th century, condoms were made usually of some kind of linen smeared with chemicals or, ew, animal tissue or bladder. What’s interesting is that since ancient times they were used as both a means of birth control and a protection against STDs. (Ironically, usually birth control and/or abortion was the province of the woman, who was blamed for issues is in this area, even though, by the Middle Ages, the established view was that the woman was merely the physical receptacle of the life-giving, soul-containing male sperm.)

Some interesting facts about pre and early modern condoms and condom usage:

There’s a legend that the King Minos of Crete, subject to so many curses, used a goat’s bladder as a female condom to protect his partners because he suffered from a strange affliction; his semen was filled with snakes and scorpions.

Those short loincloths Greek and Roman guys wore (mostly those of the slave and laborer class), that in the sword and sandal movies showed off hot, muscular legs, often consisted of little more than a covering for the penis. If someone in a higher class wore one of these “lower class” outfits, some have speculated they may have served as form of condom.
 

Sexual norms changed during the Middle Ages with the rise of Christian theocracies, and the emphasis on sex and procreation tended to put condoms under the radar, so to speak, and we also lost some knowledge of their substance and use during the ancient world. Some writings by Muslims and Jews, who during this period in some areas comprised the majority of physicians, mentioned soaking a cloth in onion juice or other perceived spermicides.

The syphilis outbreak that began among French troops in 1494 prompted an Italian guy named Gabriele Falloppio (from whence we get the name fallopian tube) to pretty much invent the first item we now can define as a condom. He invented a linen sheath sized to cover the glans of the penis, tied to it with a little ribbon, smeared with spermicide. He claimed to have saved the lives of 1100 sailors with the device. Sailors. And with that word, one I think can pretty much imply that these guys weren’t always going after the clichéd wenches.
 

During the Renaissance, condoms were also made of animal intestines or bladders. By the 18th century, they were available in all shapes and sizes; one could buy them especially at the ubiquitous barbershops, which weren’t just places for haircuts. The barbers performed various surgeries, dental work, and especially bloodletting.
 

During the above periods, the upper, and later the burgeoning middle classes, were the ones who used condoms. The lower classes couldn’t afford them, and they also lacked education on STDs.

Now the omnipresent and mostly all-powerful Catholic Church during this time wasn’t exactly keen on the use of condoms as birth control, of course, but it was yet to make its views on the subject official in the Pope’s encyclical Humanae Vitae with the advent of the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

And in the early 19th century, after the invention of the rubber condom which increased usage and convenience considerably, the notorious Comstock Act pretty much made life miserable for anyone who wanted to use any form of contraceptive, much less educate oneself on the issue.
 

The deadly AIDS epidemic of course made the condom a matter of life and death, with the holy haters decrying what condoms had always been used for, saving lives, in favor of reviving the scapegoating of anyone with STDs.

By the way: there was no “Earl of Condom.” The etymology of the word is indeed unknown!

Source: mostly Wikipedia’s article on the History of Condoms, combined with some of my own knowledge of gender/sexuality history