The Little Prick

This is interesting because it’s LGBT related, it’s pop culture related, it’s artistic, and it’s sort of historical. A 24 year old artist has combined several mediums to gain one grand artistic result.

With the use of intricate, colorful embroidery and images of hot male icons from retro zines of the last century he’s taken the ordinary and turned it into something extraordinary. I love it.

In this link, he granted an interview about what he does and what he’s trying to achieve. There are images of his work you really should check out. It’s not like anything you’ve seen before.

How did you get started doing embroidery? What does that medium represent or symbolize for you?

I learned to embroider while taking a general textiles class in college. The time spent on it was minimal but I became completely obsessed with the medium — its intricacy, delicacy, beauty. Historically, embroidery has represented class, taste, worldly exposure and identity of its owner or commissioner. As I taught myself how to embroider over the years (on paper instead of fabric) the less obvious violent and physical nature of the process became very clear to me. Not only was the thread decorating a substrate with every stitch, its instrument was also puncturing and affecting the surface, creating holes in the paper and the image mounted to it. This physicality directed my focus toward the degenerative nature of continually re-forming identity. Its decorative function informed the expansive side of this process.

His Meat in Her Mouth

I don’t post much about feminism or women’s rights here on the blog because I don’t feel it’s the right thing for me to do. I follow everything that’s happening, but as a gay man I can’t understand how women feel, think, or even assume. And even though so many people who aren’t gay do this with gay men (they call us queer and don’t even realize how that word makes many of us feel…it’s like the word “bitch”…gay misogyny), I don’t want to be guilty of that same crime. So I remain silent.

But just yesterday I was having a discussion with a straight male friend about the possible misogyny in the new film Girl Gone, starring Ben Affleck, Mr. Straight White Liberal Male. I haven’t seen the film and neither did my friend, but we were discussing how various reviewers were dealing with misogyny and rape culture…and whether they should be topics of discussion with a film at all. I won’t go into detail about that now but let’s just say I disagreed with my straight white male friend because I see so much misogyny on a weekly basis it’s often worse than the passive aggressive homophobia I see (when they call me queer). And this next article to which I’m linking is really a perfect example.

To celebrate the Kansas City Royals’ playoff success, the Westport Flea Market Bar & Grill had rolled back its prices to 1985, the last time the Royals won the World Series.

So KCTV reporter Courtenay DeHoff was on the scene, asking owner Joe Zwillenberg if she could try a burger. To which he responded, “Courtenay, I would love to see my meat in your mouth.”
Outlets went after the owner with relish.

The rest is here. Imagine if a woman had said this to a man.

Mass Gay Kiss-In

I have a love/hate relationship with stories like this. I hate that they happen, but I love the outcry of support. In a supermarket in the UK two gay women were thrown out for kissing in the store. According to this source, it wasn’t even a hot kiss…just a peck and a security guard kicked them both out.

And this is what happened next:

Angry shoppers are taking a stand after a UK supermarket told a lesbian couple to stop kissing on Coming Out Day. 

In response, they will be holding a mass kiss-in in the very same branch of Sainsbury’s where a chaste kiss was branded ‘inappropriate’ by a security guard.

You can read it all here. The women were stunned and could not believe this had happened. The store did apologize and it offered a donation to the charity of their choice, but evidently that’s not going to be enough.

I might have thought this was extreme five or six years ago. But now I’m starting to think it’s necessary so nothing like that ever happens again (so they stop calling me queer). Now if we can only figure out a way to go after them with passive aggressive homophobia we’d be on a real mission. Intellectually, we (most of us who can think) know what happened to these women was wrong, but with passive aggressive homophobia we don’t always pick it up the way we should…like when straight guys praise the gays but make it clear they aren’t gay themselves because, you know, that would be weird.

Cover Reveal For Newest Book

I don’t have links yet, but here’s the newest cover for my next book. It’s a short story, it’s .99, it’s only being released in digital format through Ryan Field Press, and it’s a gay story about gay men in a gay situation. I’ll post more as I get the information from my tech guy. It’s not an actual romance like many of my other books and I like to make that distinction. But it is uplifting, highly erotic, and it does have a happy ending.