What Are Sex Addicts Doing Now? Is Promiscuous Sex Still A Thing During The Pandemic?

Mike Huckabee's 10,000 square feet $6 million McMansion looks out over Walton County's Gulf Coast. Mother Jones reported that he's been complaining about people walking on his beach-- and says he once "saw a young couple strip naked and have sex on a YOLO board there at two in the afternoon. But now that the county has finally closed the beach and kicked out all the spring breakers as part of its pandemic response, Huckabee has sued the county because he can’t go out there either. I wonder if Huckabee wants to have sex on a YOLO board. Are people still having promiscuous sex with strangers? Dan Savage says NO-- No, No, No! "We're not supposed to come within six feet of anyone we don't live with, NR, which means you can't invite this guy over to play cribbage and/or fuck you senseless. If you wanted to invite this guy over to stay, you could shack up and wait out the lockdown together. But you can't invite him over just to play."

Brothels and prostitution are basically legal in Europe-- but not during the pandemic. Sex workers in countries like Holland and Germany-- most of them foreign-- are now unemployed and many also now homeless-- and unable to get home through closed borders. There were between 100,000 and 200,000 prostitutes-- 80% of them foreign, mainly from Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and Ukraine-- working in Germany before the brothels were shut down in March along with other non-essential businesses like restaurants and nightclubs. Some of these sex workers are now are soliciting for clients on the streets to survive meet until brothels reopen.

Nevada has a similar story-- legal prostitution and, as of March 19, closed down brothels and strip clubs. Nevada's brothel industry brought in between $35 million and $50 million that year, and served about 400,000 clients. But there are sex workers everywhere across America. Are some of them disregarding social distancing and working now? Are some of their regular clients been driven by whatever drives them under non-pandemic circumstances?

On Tuesday, L.A.'s David Kordansky Gallery opens a month-long Tom of Finland exhibition-- online. They represent the Tom of Finland-- Touko Laaksonen-- estate and emphasize that the artist "has long been recognized as one of the 20th century’s great visual innovators. As he confronted the stigmas and stereotypes that long burdened homosexual desire, his depictions of empowered gay men fully enjoying their sexuality proved liberating on social and aesthetic levels alike. The sheer range of his influence on the culture at large is immeasurable. His work assumes a key role in the art historical discourse (Tom’s drawings are in the collections of institutions like The Museum of Modern Art, New York and regularly appear in museum shows throughout the world), while also occupying a place in every corner of the popular imagination."

Can an online exhibition of his erotic work serve as a substitute for sex? Or a provocation to go out and look for the real thing? I don't know. I asked the gallery's publicist. She didn't know either. I also asked a young friend of mine who is sexually active with strangers-- or was. He no longer uses Grindr and is strict about social distancing. But... he knows of underground parties in L.A. "Some people wear masks and gloves," he said.

Writing last week for the New Yorker Masha Gessen asked about lessons from the AIDS crisis that can be helpful today. Gessen-- who prefers the pronoun "they"-- wrote that "Over the past month, those of us who lived through the aids epidemic have searched for ways in which that experience can inform the covid-19 crisis. Do we know something that can be useful now? Can this knowledge help us survive?

Even in the middle of a nearly nationwide lockdown, at no level do we think of the pandemic as our problem. That allows the Supreme Court to rule that Wisconsin cannot extend its deadline for absentee ballots, deciding, in effect, that it’s the voters’ problem if they would not risk their health to go to the polls and the state didn’t have enough ballots for them. This is a problem not only on the right of the political spectrum-- back in March, Joe Biden’s campaign was encouraging voters to go to the polls, when he should have been imploring them to self-isolate.

Before it’s over, the pandemic will get much worse, and so will we. Then it will end. And, unless we start the work of noticing and remembering now, we will forget how low we went. We will assimilate the ways in which the virus has changed our perceptions. We will romanticize the heroism and ingenuity of people who were betrayed by their government, rather than confront the people responsible for the betrayal.

I Think Danger Bred A Different Kind Of Gay Back Then

I was lucky; I came out when I was living in Amsterdam. I worried there was something wrong with me so I went to see a psychiatrist. I told him I thought I could be gay. He asked me why I was coming to him and if I was looking for addresses of gay bars and other places where gay people met. I didn't. I lived right across the street-- literally, 30 steps-- from a side gate into Amsterdam's biggest park (like their version of Central Park or Griffith Park). And it was a special entrance, as it turns out. At night there were always gay men in that part of the park eager to meet other men. So much better than a dark, smokey bar!

Being gay is easy and almost without a sense of social opprobrium nowadays. Gays can get married. It's no biggie. When I was a kid it was very different. And... well-- how do I put this? If you were gay, you were an outlaw, a rebel... like Jean Genet, like Truman Capote, William Burroughs, John Rechy, James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, Gore Vidal, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Bowles, Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, Anaïs Nin, John Waters, Jack Kerouac... role models. You know, who's a better role model Plato or a ribbon clerk?

Danny Fields, who I met when I was in college when I had booked The Doors to come play at my school and he worked for their record label, was the one who put the idea of ribbon clerks in my consciousness. He and Dee Dee Ramone wanted to go someplace "exciting" after The Ramones first show in San Francisco. I had no idea where to take them so I suggested the Eagle's Nest, a forbidding gay bar on Folsom Street. Danny made a face. "Ribbon clerks playing dress up," he sneered in his charming way. Eventually I started taking out of town guests to Mr. B's Ballroom instead. The DEVO guys, who I don't think were even gay, wrote a song about the night I brought them there.

Three cheers!
They're yellin' again
Three cheers!
They'll be at it to the end

So drink some big beers and go crazy tonight
They're all dressed up and they'll be gettin' it tonight
Big swingers in double knits tonight
Big babies gonna get in a fight
Actin' crazy, bustin' up the chairs
Doubled over gettin' sick on the stairs

They know the limits 'cause they cross them every night
The dull sensations as it turns real hot
Why, the guys in the back with their heads on the floor
Surrounded by their buddies, they're all hollerin' for more
Whoa, whoa, whoa
It's Mr. B's ballroom

Party time, turn the music up loud
Party time, lose your head in the crowd
Yellin',, laughin' tryin' hard to act smart
Put 'em under pressure and you watch them fall apart

Freeze! Come on out of there
Freeze! You ain't goin' nowhere
Freeze! Put your hands on your head
Freeze!
It's Mr. B's ballroom

Someone slipped in semen and fell down and we left. Books were easier-- and I've always been a bookish guy. There's a new movie that screened in NYC this week, Tom of Finland, and it's opening in New York on October 13 and in L.A. and San Francisco October 20... all the towns I lived in. Watch the trailer up top. I think Finnish director Dome Karukoski conveys what I'm trying to talk about far better than I am.

Tom of Finland was the pseudonym for Touko Laaksonen (1920-1991) and Wikipedia describes him as "a Finnish artist known for his stylized highly masculinized homoerotic fetish art, and his influence on late twentieth century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits, wearing tight or partially removed clothing." At the time, all his work had an implied sense of danger. The film company reminds critics that he was "a decorated officer" and that the film describes him as returning "home after a harrowing and heroic experience serving his country in World War II. But life in Finland during peacetime proves equally distressing. He finds post-war Helsinki rampant with homophobic persecution, and gay men around him are being pressured to marry women and have children. Touko finds refuge in his liberating art: homoerotic drawings of muscular men, free of inhibitions. But it is only when an American publisher sees them and invites Tuoko over to the West Coast that his life really takes a turn. Finally being able to walk free and proud in Los Angeles, Tuoko dives head first into the sexual revolution, becoming an icon and a rallying point. His work-- made famous by his signature ‘Tom of Finland’-- became the emblem of a generation of men and fanned the flames of the worldwide gay revolution."

But not today's gays I don't think. Yes, this is a real stamp:

"A man, a plan, a canal, Pana-" . . . oops, wrong canal!

Possibly there's a school of thought somewhere which holds that all canals look pretty much the same. But you don't have to be a canal whiz to know that this sure doesn't look like the Suez Canal. Why, it looks more like, like . . . .

"The man [the head of the Egyptian postal authority] didn't notice that the stamps show greenery on both sides of the canal while the Suez Canal runs in the middle of the desert!"

-- Amr Adeeb, host of TV's Cairo Today

by Ken

In fairness, Amr Adeeb, perhaps the gentleman in question, the one who "didn't notice that the stamps show greenery on both sides of the canal while the Suez Canal runs in the middle of the desert," was simply under the impression that Egypt's current military strongman President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi had formally decreed that the Suez Canal is now lined on both sides with greenery.

As we were noting just recently, the Finnish postal people seem to have gotten everything triumphantly right with their stamps honoring legendary homoerotic artist Tom of Finland; they've been overwhelmed with worldwide demand for the stamps.

You'd think there would be even more to celebrate with the Suez Canal, especially now that it's undergoing a dramatic expansion that will include the digging of a brand-new 45-mile channel. Alas, the path to Suez Canal stamphood encountered a wee glitch. Somebody seems to have gone to Google Images, typed in "canal," and downloaded the first image that came up.

Hmm, doesn't this canal look familiar?

Hint: This particular canal comes in handy if you want to sail your ship between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans without having to circle all the way around the southern tip of South America and making that perilous connection. (The Suez Canal has only the most tangential connection to the Atlantic Ocean, out the opposite end of the Mediterranean Sea, and has the entire Indian Ocean between it and the Pacific.)

When images of the about-to-be-issued stamps were circulated online, it didn't take long for international social-media users to cry foul. Our pal Mai Armstrong, tireless blogger for the Working Harbor Committee, flagged this oopsie-daisy on the WHC blog, drawing on this post from Gulf News:

Oops! Suez Canal stamps showcase Panama Canal
Mix-up has in the past few days been the butt of sharp criticism on local TV stations

By Ramadan Al Sherbin i Gulf News Correspondent

CAIRO -- Egyptian postal authorities have halted the official launch of stamps commemorating a new waterway after they were found to have mistakenly featured an image resembling the Panama Canal.

The state-run Egypt Post drew online rebuke and sarcasm after the stamps were leaked. The controversial stamps show a map of the Suez Canal and its building along with an image of a green area in which a two-lane waterway is seen looking like the Panama Canal that links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

The mix-up has in the past few days been the butt of sharp criticism on local TV stations and from artists.

“This is an extraordinary scandal!” said celebrated TV host Amr Adeeb on his popular show Cairo Today. “The head of the postal authority must be sacked or step down to show regret over this disgrace. The man didn’t notice that the stamps show greenery on both sides of the canal while the Suez Canal runs in the middle of the desert!”

To Mohammad Abla, a prominent artist, the blunder is “an artistic, ethical and legal crime”.

“Stamps are very important because they publicise the country that issues them. This crime shows that those carrying out such designs at the postal authority are bureaucrats.”

Urgent investigation

He added it showed their “cronies lacked professionalism.”

The Ministry of Telecommunications, of which Egypt Post is an affiliate, said it would open an urgent investigation into the incident.

Meanwhile, Egypt Post admitted the mix-up in what it called an “initial design”. “The initial design of the stamps will be revised and modified so that the new stamps will be officially launched in the next few days,” the agency said in a statement.

The stamps are aimed to celebrate a 72-kilometre-long waterway, which Egypt is building parallel to the existing Suez Canal.

The route, launched by President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi, is part of a multi-billion-dollar project to develop the Suez Canal zone and establish Egypt as a major global trade and industrial hub. It features the establishment of facilities for refuelling and repairing ships, a high-technology hub, and plants for chemicals, lumber, textiles and car assemblage, resorts and vast expansion of land reclamation in the area.

Will the real Suez Canal please stand up?

-- Farwa Rizwan/ Al Arabiya News (click to enlarge)

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Since Vlad "Pudding Boy" Putin likes to play dress-up (and dress-down), maybe he might consider suiting up as a mailman

The caption for this photo accompanying this week's update on the website of Yle Uutiset (described by Wikipedia as "the main news program" of Yle, the familiar short form of Yleisradio, the Finnish national broadcasting company) reads: "Yle's Moscow correspondent Marja Manninen said postal workers showed 'not the slightest bit of interest' in the homoerotic stamps."

by Ken

I've been meaning to catch up with this story since I was alerted to it by a friend's Facebook pass-along, which directed me to a Bilerico Project post by John M. Becker, "Finland Trolls Russian with Tom of Finland Stamps," which in turn directed me to a post on Finland's Yle website, "Yle stunt tests Russia's reaction to Tom of Finland stamps." It's a great little story; a commenter on my friend's Facebook pass-along noted that it had made her day. But what really interested me about the story is some of the side stories it generated.

The story itself is easily told; in fact, it's more or less told in the above photo caption. You remember that appalling "Let's All Fuck the Gays" legislation that Russia's Tsar Vladimir "Pudding Boy" Putin gleefully signed into law in 2003? The one that classifies virtually any nonthreatening mention of homosexuality as "homosexual propaganda" and a crime punishable by death if not worse? Okay, that wasn't the exact name of the law, but you don't have to be a mind-reader to divine its intent. And you have to hand it to the Pudding Boy, who knows maybe better than anybody alive how to energize people's basest instincts to get them to both follow him blindly while taking their minds off of real problems. Come on, if not for some trivial ideological differences, Pudding Boy could be a hero to the American Far Right -- he's their kind of people.

On September 8, Itella, the Finnish postal company, issued a set of stamps honoring that estimable national favorite son Tom of Finland (1920-1991), the master of gleefully homoerotic art.

Yle Uutiset (which, as I noted in the photo caption above, is described by Wikipedia as "the main news program" of Yle, the Finnish broadcasting company) reported at the time that, according to Itella,

the risqué stamps are the country's biggest seller ever, with pre-orders made in 178 different countries. The stamps, which hold pride of place in the newly-opened postal museum in Tampere, attracted a long queue of individuals eagerly anticipating the first day issues. . . . Apart from Finland, the greatest interest came from Sweden, Britain, the United States and France.

Itella officials were jubilant. They expected widespread interest, but nothing like what actually happened, with the stamps appearing around the world in traditional and social media and online outlets. "We haven't seen this kind of interest before in Itella's history," said Itella's head of development, Markku Penttinen, "and we probably won't again soon."

"Our starting point," Penttinen said, "was to get Touko Laaksonen's artwork in our stamps." He noted that Finland has a history of boldness in its stamps, with naked women appearing as far back as the '50s. He said they knew there would be global interest in the Tom of Finland stamps, but the results exceeded even their wildest expectations.

The stamps' designer, Timo Berry, said he was "reallly over the moon" about getting the assignment. "I jumped around the office." Berry was on hand to sign autographs at the new Postal Museum in Tampere, Finland's second city, whose opening coincided with the new stamps' issue. "Tom of Finland's greatest significance," he said, is that his gay figures, instead of being portrayed as "girlish," the way they customarily had been, "were given their masculinity." He added: "It's great that these sketches that had to be sold in secret can now be publicly viewed on envelopes and postcards."


OKAY, SO WHAT ABOUT THE MAILING STUNT?

The idea, originating in the Yle Tampere bureau, was to mail two letters and two packages to Russia using the Tom of Finland stamps, to see whether the stamps would fall afoul of Russian officials for their emphatically positive homoeroticism. The answer turns out to be no.

This week's Ule Uutiset update reports: "One of the packages posted by Yle last week has already been picked up by its recipient in Moscow, who said that postal authorities did not bat an eyelid at the drawings of muscular, entwined men." So that's that, more or less. Assuming the other package and the two letters also arrive.


BUT WHAT INTERESTS ME IS --

(1) There are real, live Tom of Finland stamps, with which Finns can mail stuff anywhere they like. Cool!

(2) It actually occurred to those blithe souls at Yle Tampere to attempt such a stunt. Can you imagine staffers at the American nightly network news shows, or even the people at, say, CNN, doing such a thing? Cool!

(3) There were in fact concerns at the outset that the experiment might prove inconclusive because Russian mail service, at least between Russia and Finland, isn't exactly reliable.

The letters are expected to take up to 9 working days to arrive, while the delivery time for the parcels is normally 14 working days, according to Finland’s postal operator. . . .

However Yle’s Russia correspondent Marja Manninen warned that the stunt may turn out to be inconclusive, adding that even correspondence unadorned with gay imagery can take an extremely long time to arrive.

"I’ve had New Year’s cards sent to me from Moscow that don’t arrive until March,” Manninen said, “so in any case you can expect to wait a few weeks. And with these stamps they may not get there at all.”

But she added: ”On the other hand, the stamps might go completely unnoticed. Tom of Finland is probably not as well known in Russia as elsewhere in the world.”

And at the top of this post we can see the lovely Marja showing off the actually delivered package.

Now, it may be that Russia's domestic mail service is better than the international situation Marja describes above, but it's not hard to imagine that crap postal delivery is just one of the lesser instances in the panorama of indignities the Russian people are expected to bear, as they've been bearing basic life indignities going back through the Communist era to the time of the tsars.

Maybe instead of scapegoating homosexuals and fomenting revolution in Ukraine and strutting bare-chested, the Pudding Man might want to don a Russian mailman's outfit and, you know, try to get the mail moving.

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Ribbon Clerks/Little Cowboys And Your Republican Party

I hired the Doors to play at my college and the bonus was that I met Danny Fields the night of the show. I had never met anyone in the music industry before but after becoming friends with Danny, I intuited what my career path would be. Many years later Danny was managing the Ramones and I was a punk rock dj and music journalist in San Francisco-- and one of the world's most devoted Ramones fans. It was their first trip to San Francisco and Danny asked me to help him find an environment for a photo that had a vaguely threatening feel. I brought him and Dee Dee to the Eagle on Folsom Street. Danny couldn't stop laughing. There were all these über-macho dudes sauntering around... darkly. In black leather outfits. Danny didn't find it vaguely threatening. "This is a roomful of ribbon clerks."

He was right. They were playing dress-up. That was 14 years ago. You know who's playing dress-up now? Yeah... that guy with the pink handgun up top (and this is the soundtrack that goes with the picture). He wants to come across as the big, hard talking, macho guy in the race-- a contrast to the awkward, weird, mealy mouthed corporate elite guy-- but he's as macho as the ribbon clerks at the Eagle with the red, yellow and blue hankies and the black leather assless chaps. And now he can't go back on that Ponzi Scheme/monstrous lie third-rail thing. That kind of crap-- and a bizarre, gratuitous anti-Galileo screed-- can win a Republican primary-- I think-- but it's death in a general election. Romney made mincemeat out of him and macho macho man Perry was whining he felt like a piñata.

According to Anzalone Liszt Research, Republican primary voters are mad about Slick Rick-- no, no, not angry he's a fraud and a doofus... mad like in love with, drooling over, got a woody for. They even love him without knowing much about him at all... although the more of his hype they hear, the harder the collective woody gets.

Recent public polls among Republican primary voters since Perry officially entered the race show him in a comfortable lead over the remainder of the field, despite not being as well-known as some of the other GOP candidates. With three-quarters (74%) of Republican voters able to identify him according to Gallup, Perry's name ID lags behind Mitt Romney's (88%), Newt Gingrich's (86%), Michele Bachmann's (84%), and Ron Paul's (79%). As Republican voters are becoming more familiar with Perry (his name ID is up from 54% at the end of July), his performance in the polls is climbing. Gallup also calculates a positive intensity score, based on the favorability ratings and intensity among voters familiar with each candidate-- Perry's positive intensity score leads all other Republican candidates', with 29% of voters "strongly favorable" towards him, while only 15% of voters familiar with Romney are "strongly favorable" towards the Massachusetts Governor.
  
In just three weeks, Perry has pulled from trailing Romney by 8 points when his candidacy was a merely speculated, to an 8-point lead over Romney in a Fox News poll out last week (26% Perry-- 18% Romney, with Sarah Palin trailing at 8%, Paul at 7%, and Bachmann at 4%). Quinnipiac polling finds the same trend, and Perry leads in their most recent GOP polling, 24% Perry- 18% Romney, with Palin receiving 11%, and Bachmann at 10%.

...Perry has also pulled ahead of his competitors in the majority of state GOP primary polls. Just weeks after Bachmann's Ames Iowa Straw Poll win, a poll among likely Iowa caucus-goers finds that Perry now leads Bachmann 23% - 20%, with Romney in third place at 16%. Paul (9%), Herman Cain (8%), and Jon Huntsman (2%) do not break double-digits. Perry also leads in South Carolina (31% - 20% Romney - 14% Bachmann) and Nevada (29% - 20% Romney - 7% Cain).
 
In California, Romney and Perry are tied with 22% of the Republican primary vote, however among California's Tea Party supporters, Perry leads him 33% - 23%. Among California Tea Partiers, Congresswoman Bachmann only receives 11%, putting her one point ahead of Ron Paul (10%), both candidates who have actively courted the Tea Party vote.
 
Romney still holds a sizable lead over Perry in New Hampshire, with his 36% doubling Perry's 18%, which puts him closer with 3rd and 4th placing candidates Paul (14%) and Bachmann (10%). Romney also leads in Florida, 28% - 21% over Perry.

...Much of the media coverage of late has honed in on the how much coverage the Republican candidates are receiving. Rick Perry is a recent darling, but many also believe that Jon Huntsman is earning a disproportionate amount of media attention given his lackluster performance in the polls (he does not garner more than 2% in any poll over the last month)... A search and tally of Google News finds that Rick Perry has dominated the news over the last month, with 23,800 mentions in the last month alone (remarkably, his total mentions in 2011 is just 5,000 more than this - 28,900). Top tier candidates Michele Bachmann receives the next most mentions over the last month, 13,000, only 200 more than Mitt Romney during the same time (12,800).

And what does all the hype say? The leather jock strap looks sooooo butch and the deranged Republican nihilists are eating it up. He's such a man! And didn't he get the biggest applause of the debate when he bragged about frying so many people WITH ALACRITY? What a man-- perfect for today's GOP!

Mr. Perry defended his record of overseeing the execution of 234 inmates in Texas. When asked by one of the moderators, Brian Williams of NBC News, if he had lost sleep over the decision, Mr. Perry replied, “No sir, I’ve never struggled with that at all.”

The invited audience, made up of supporters of the candidates and patrons of the library, broke out into applause when Mr. Williams noted again that 234 people had been executed.

This morning, one of the Blue America House candidates sent me this picture of Perry eating a corndog. Can you guess which one?


Never mind the other three, keep your attention focused on Rick Perry in this clip: