tatte's blond boy

i have found a handsome blond boy at the tatte in harvard sq., he is beautiful and probably 19, which makes me a lech, as ever. i'm wearing the pink max headphones this morning, and with my autumn corduroy trucker's jacket (which i also have in white, though that one is less serviceable than the light brown i am currently sporting), with light jeans, new new balance lows, and madras belt weaving its way down the shaft of my penis, which is soft at the moment. sporting this dangling belt is an unexpected look (i haven't seen anyone with this specific fetish), but it's a good luck, for me, as it distracts from my in process dad bod, which is sexy as it is. i probably look pretty gay to him, my hair perhaps giving the whole game away. he smiled at me as i walked past to the toilette, really nice smile, which was surprisingly friendly, given his age, and i by default gave him bitch face, which i'm wont to do with any guy who surprises me with direct eye contact, at first.

like in jeremy lin's "gay bar" book, all gay men tend to loathe each other at the get-go, only to become tolerable (and decently social) in later interactions. i feel positive toward gay men now (at 45/6), but that is after years of being gay and feeling uncertain about other gays and their desires, or rather their needs. anyway, bitch face is probably my response to anyone at first, and i think a rather sour, sober face is my general default toward the world. sorry —

i assigned a rather lame book the last time i taught a gay course, titled "why are faggots afraid of other faggots?" — and besides the title, which is a crucial question that we probably don't ask enough, even as its manifestations circulate at the most "liberated" gay bar, the book is a series of memoirs that in no way approach the question teased in the title of the book.

from my angle now, the sweet boy with the blond hair is caught behind the cap machine at the bar, and so i can only see the top of his head — hair — which is just totally gorgeous. in general, the barista crush seems to rarely work out, there are a couple of exceptions, but those were long ago when i was closer to the age of the archetypal barista boy.

class was well yesterday, lots of chatting, i showed the pilot for "the l word," as part of the historical queer archive, it was such a smash at its first release, as was the american version of "queer as folk," a few years before. of my group in grad school, i was the one who ordered the showtime and paid for the privilege to be represented in a rather trashy show. but we loved it, and the lesbians loved it. i showed the students the "chart" scene in the pilot to "the l word," which shows a dramatic, hot sex scene between two hot women having a pretty good time with themselves, a proto-porn kind of scene. i was pleased, at the time (2002-4), as were my lesbian friends, that there was at least some representation of lesbian sex, even if it seemed a bit pornographic (which i considered to be to its credit) and, as such, unreal.

But the queer female students in the class ("bisexual") dismissed the scene as of the "male gaze," and i think they got that wrong. if anything, the lesbian is sexually neutered in the representational system (with the exception of straight porn), and this representation of lesbian sex, in "the l word," is certainly phallic, in that sense, but it is clearly for a lesbian audience. if we're going to dismiss representations of lesbian sex as a photo snapped by the "male gaze," then it's hard to see how a "lesbian gaze" would see lesbian sex otherwise. How would a "lesbian gaze" see this scene differently, what is a "lesbian gaze," or even a "gay's gaze"?

one student offered that a "lesbian gaze" is a representation that is made by a lesbian, but that is not only a strongly essentialist argument, which otherwise all of these kids would dismiss, but a direct contradiction of "the l word," which has a strong lesbian presence in its production staff. what's wrong with a male (lesbian) "objectification" of the female body? Why is the fetishization (Freud, Mulvey) of the body and image an affront to feminists, and even to gay men, who are perhaps the objectifiers and fetishists par excellence?

Were we could all be fetishized and objectified! I'd love to be a porn star — unfortunately they haven't invented a category for old, intellectual, soft twink. as if! older brother —

the cappuccino machine has become a real problem here at tatte. it's too low, or this guy is not tall enough, to make himself visible to the patrons. this was also a problem for rich at 1369, and even more so.

i don't have the will to write a sex scene about me and this beautiful boy, as i might have had earlier in my career. but i can say that it would be hot, i'm the top, and his dick is a mass of magical flesh, for white 69 heaven.

tinky winky pinky, to you —

andy pinkster

here is your old, intellectual twink, add former queen and future older brother. you might say that this is my bitch face. i do smile, but only when it actually is funny.