Hand-crafted, hand-distressed, hand-some. Except for the fact that there’s no place to carry your power cord, this is the most gorgeous Macbook case ever. $80 from TwelveSouth.

       person for miles around approach unawares,

Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or

      some quiet island,

Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,

With the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss or the new husband’s kiss,

For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.

Text: Walt Whitman,
Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand (excerpt), 1881-82

Image: Subjects, photographer unknown,
via miss magnolia thunderpussy/ipernity

Text: Jim Croce, Time in a Bottle, lyrics
Photo: Subjects unknown, via varones/flickr

                                                                  i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

text: ee cummings
image: subjects/photographer unknown,
via varones/flickr

Thanks Stacy and Michele

Matt Alber

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
     Half of the night with our old friend
          Who’d showed us in the end
     To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
          Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
          Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
          Your instep to my heel,
     My shoulder-blades against your chest.
     It was not sex, but I could feel
     The whole strength of your body set,
       Or braced, to mine,
          And locking me to you
     As if we were still twenty-two
     When our grand passion had not yet
          Become familial.
     My quick sleep had deleted all
     Of intervening time and place.
          I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

Text: The Hug, Thom Gunn
Image: Photographer, subjects unknown,
via Miss Magnolia Thunderpussy/ipernity

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example–
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people–
even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees–
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery–
which is to say we might not get up
from the white table.
Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast. . .
Let’s say we’re at the front–
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We’ll know this with a curious anger,
but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind–
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet–
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space . . .
You must grieve for this right now
–you have to feel this sorrow now–
for the world must be loved this much
if you’re going to say “I lived”. . .

Text: ‘On Living,’ Nazim Hikmet
Translated by Mutlu Konuk and Randy Blasing
Image: Photographer, sitters unknown; via Osvaldo E/flickr

Back from Christmas break, Happy New Year to all from Woolf and Wilde.

Text: Edgar A. Guest
Image: Photographer, sitters unknown; via Osvaldo E/flickr

Equally revealing is what isn’t on your list. I never asked for baseball mitts or footballs. At age seven, the closest I got to boy toys were my G.I. Joe and Major Matt Mason. Were these early crushes, or dolls that a boy could legitimately own? Probably both.
[Bonus links -- photo: G.I. Joe Steals a Barbie Jeep, and video: homoerotic subtext of 1968 Major Matt Mason commercial?]

I didn’t dare ask for the things I really coveted. With all my heart, I wanted an EZ-Bake Oven and a doll whose hair you could brush and it would “grow” like my friend Helen across the street had. I knew full well that those things were for girls though. The mere suggestion that I might like to have them too was not only off limits, it also said something about me that I wasn’t yet prepared to defend.

It’s sad to think that even little gay seven-year-olds know what they’re not supposed to want. For those whose desires are outside of what is considered gender appropriate, society gets an early start on teaching them to hide certain parts of themselves.

Enter my baby brother Brian who, in all the wisdom and innocence of a five-year-old, took it upon himself to put in a good word to Santa on my behalf. In effect, my brother outed me to Santa with this:

The photo above is of Brian’s actual Christmas list, a document that is now almost 40 years old. Our grandmother stashed away things like this and it surfaced several years ago, framed, a gift to Brian from Grandma.

What my brother asked for shows him to be the boyish young fella he was. His list: football, electronic shooting gallery and trucks. Keep reading and you will see that scribbled in the lower right corner were also these four powerful words:

Kenny wants a doll.

I didn’t get the doll. What I did get was a brother who saw me for who I was and asked Santa to bring me something I couldn’t ask for for myself. Looking back, that’s a pretty great Christmas present.




PS: Here I am with Santa. He’s a slightly creepy-looking Santa if you ask me, and obviously doesn’t know how to wear a belt, but I had a huge crush on this guy my whole life and even had dreams as a teenager (OK, it’s still a fantasy) in which St. Nick and the grown-up me would make sexy-time on Christmas Eve. But that’s a whole other flashback.