Has Cory ever been followed by a Moon Shadow?

American Breeder Boy

Dear ABB:

Cory lives in a rainforest. On those rare nights when mist and cloud evanesce and the moon is risen, yes, he has been followed by a moon shadow. He prefers it, though, when the moon is behind and his shadow dances in front so he can keep an eye on it. Cory is nothing if not watchful -- some say hypervigilant. After the many tabs of LSD he used to ingest, things like shadows still tend to fibrillate, melt and transform. If he may be permitted to wax personal rather than the usual self-referential (there is a difference), Cory would like to recall long, stoned walks in June when the shortest nights were filled with electricity and nature’s glistening fecundity.

You capitalize Moon Shadow, which leads to a suspicion that your question has some hidden meaning. Surely you do not lie awake of a night, your milky thighs sprawled atop the coverlet, wondering about Cory’s corporeality expressed in shadow, though that be a worthy pastime. Are you remembering the Cat Stevens song “Moonshadow” of 1970? Are you interested in the journey that led Cat to embrace Islam, take the name Yusuf Islam and work for peace and charity? If you are, you may, in his friend Dolly Parton’s words, think him “a precious man”, and with Dolly, recoil from Yusuf’s having been on Homeland Security’s watch list due to a “spelling error” and, for a time, excluded from the United States wherein you dwell. On the other hand, you might side with Salman Rushdie who took exception to Islam/Stevens saying on the ridiculous British television show Hypotheticals in 1989 that he wouldn’t mind if he saw Rushdie burned to death for his alleged blasphemy in The Satanic Verses. This might suggest Islam/Stevens was sometimes less a man of peace and more a fundamentalist approving the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwahs. More recently, Islam/Stevens is evolving into Stevens/Islam with a new popular album and explanations of his former fundamentalist statements (claiming for example, that his remarks about Rushdie were typical British “humour”). Say what you like, Jews and Christians are usually more forgiving of our society's near-constant blasphemy despite the Bible’s recommending that blasphemers be stoned to death (Leviticus 24:16). Cory doesn’t want to be that stoned.

Or are you more literal in your question, perhaps thinking Cory is one of the moon mission astronauts of that same hallucinogenic period? He is not, being far, far too young. But what a rush it would have been: clad in a rubbery suit, in low gravity, “leapin’ and hoppin’”, as Cat wrote, with a moonshadow on our satellite’s silvery dust and the earth hanging in the black sky. The astronauts’ first steps – and shadows -- on the moon took place on Cat Stevens’ twenty-first birthday.

Your mysterious question evokes in Cory blissful recollections. He thanks you for it!

Dear Cory:

What do you think of the parlous state of our educational system? Or is it really just national daycare with a dusting of book-larnin' to throw the rabid free-enterprisers off the scent?

Miss Nomer


Dear Miss Nomer:

Reading the words “parlous” (a lovely old variant of perilous) and “larnin’”, with your skillful use of assonance, evokes for free-associating Cory The Beverly Hillbillies, the haunting 1860 hymn “For Those in Peril on the Sea” (and how fine it is someone remembers to pray for terrified sailors, the seasick and the shipwrecked), sturdy lesbians named Beryl, and the way in which certain flutey Brits pronounce peril’s last vowel, making it a true two-syllable word. None of these associations, though, seems to emanate from Cory’s actual education. The interesting things happen outside of the classroom, as you no doubt recall from your own recent youth. Whiting’s hymn includes the line “chaos dark and rude” referring to a rough sea, but what better metaphorical description of classroom psychology could there be?

Education today seems to focus on the acquisition of skills or attitudes that will enable one to survive, as you imply, in the free enterprise system. Thus the ideal graduate would be selfish, nationalistic, greedy, irresponsible, materialistic and lacking in empathy. This is achieved by giving praise that is not linked to performance, through advancement without accomplishment, and by cheating rather than remembering: the elimination of consequences for behaviour. It is essential to be blind to consequences of behaviour in free enterprise or we would be bothered by our mountains of waste, our impact on other nations, our profligate use of resources, our contamination of the world and the emptiness of our lives.

Curiosity is what drives learning, and the best learning comes from following curiosity into unusual or unexplored areas, especially when one suspects that received wisdom is not wisdom at all. Facts are just what we all believe today. Tomorrow facts will be different*. When in a classroom of peers, one is surrounded by the equally ignorant, and the entire burden of teaching falls on the teacher plugging on with whatever curriculum the school board has dreamed up. As far as curiosity is concerned, this is a killer. And socially, we produce people who are obsessed with conformity and uncomfortable with people not their own age. Many prisons have education programs that have far better and more relevant content and, in the classroom, much more interesting peers.

Daycare it is, especially since parents must now both work to feed the mill of perpetual “economic growth”.

The real tragedy, however is the disappearance of charm schools. If our crowded society needs anything, it’s charm, politeness, generosity and consideration. The first twelve years of school, Cory believes, should be mostly concerned with these things. The science, languages, literature, math and history (international, not national) can be thrown in by leaving books lying around for the curious. Schools should canvas for the most charming people in their communities to teach, and magnetic, charismatic older students should mix with the younger to show how appealing a later age can be. Cory can imagine passing by a high school with his heavy bags of groceries and his library books, being eagerly begged by bright eyed, if pimply, youths to allow them to assist him. In Cory’s world, they would walk him home, where Cory would press lemons for fresh lemonade and then draw down a vellum-bound book of poetry to read to them. And after that, a pickup game of road hockey, where there would be no trash-talking, just witty, endearing asides.

*An example: Yesterday, space was empty. Today, according to string theory, it’s boiling with dense energy at the Planck level.

Dearest Cory:

An acquaintance has been encouraging me to listen to a bunch of "podcasts", but I haven’t the faintest idea, beyond that it has something to do with radio, of what a Podcast actually is or how one should make use of it, except that I surmise from the name that it probably has something to do with this digital Walkman that I was once given as a gift.

I can take a computer apart and reassemble it, and I’m a part-time Linux geek, but when it comes to modern audio-visual equipment, I’m even more a Luddite than my deceased grandparents ever were when still breathing, so I'm a bit ashamed to admit to my friend my ignorance.

Can you shed any light on this, Cory?

Not one of the Pod People


Dear NOOTPP:

If you try to follow the seductive, deceptive and bewildering names that are given to new, recycled or repackaged technologies you will most assuredly run mad in the streets. Cory pictures you clutching your temples, trying to tear out your pre-frontal lobes in abject frustration, and can readily understand the impulse: enough with the technology. Cory has a tiny 1984 television of remarkable durability and has been trying to purchase a larger model, despite his abiding belief that something working perfectly shouldn’t be replaced. He was eroded by his friends’ nagging. His forays into the malls of commerce have been a ghastly exercise in trying to decipher the unintelligible offerings of various manipulative manufacturers, and not a success.

Will you permit Cory a historical example? When radio manufacturers in the early years of the twentieth century wished to pump up their products to increase sales, they described their radios’ improved circuitry as “Superheterodyne”. Admittedly, this term is impressive and mysterious. To modern ears, it may seem like a novel sexual orientation involving foodstuffs, but alas, nothing so interesting. You may be certain not one in a hundred radio purchasers in those days had the faintest idea what this term meant and how superheterodynamism might enhance their auditory experience. And so it can be with you: just because you are offered consumer bait does not mean you should gnaw on it.

Ned Ludd, for whom Luddites are named, had the insight, so needed in our own time, that new technologies have unforeseen (or uncared about) social side effects. Mr. Ludd dealt with new technologies by smashing them. Inspiring. How Cory has wished to take a ball-peen hammer to cellular telephones and to I-Pods whose scratchy headphone leakage he cannot escape on airplanes and buses. You must resist, NOOTPP, the urge to denigrate yourself for not understanding everything invented or not embracing every new gizmo and its arcana.

Cory can explain podcasting, but do you really want to know what aggregators, URIs and bitTorrent trackers are? Of course not. You need your evidently capacious brain for worthier, juicier cogitation. All you need to know is that podcasts are something to listen to and/or watch.

Be guided, if you will, by the “rule of two”. If a new technology cannot show you pictures and/or make sounds for you -- on machines you already have -- after no more than two movements from you (mouseclicks, knobs turned, buttons pushed), it is a technology trying to involve you in its inner workings and therefore not ready for reasonable people. If a technology fails the rule of two, you should next apply the “rule of delegated responsibility”. Here’s how: this acquaintance of yours needs guidance in moving from the category of savvy acquaintance to that of useful person or – let’s shoot for the moon – friend. You might approach it this way:

“How very kind of you to suggest something to bring pleasure and edification to my life! Let me tell you that I have an Edison cylinder phonograph, a compact disk player, some type of digital Walkthingie, and a DVD player in my computer. Would you be so gracious as to use your technotalents (of which I am in awe) to prepare me something containing these “podcast” whatchamadoodles and load it seamlessly at my house into one of the devices I already own and test it for me?”

He will undoubtedly respond that podcast downloading is something so simple a special-needs chimpanzee could do it, but you must be firm. He needs to finish what he starts.

Dear Cory:

Will Mitt Romney be the first gay Republican Mormon presidential candidate?

Uncle B

Dear Uncle B:

Cory thanks you, a regular correspondent from the United States, for your loaded question. Deconstructing such queries is what keeps him interested in living; the ego parade of U.S. politics, now reduced to such formulaic blandness, does not. Ever indulgent, however, Cory will not only predict the future, but attempt to explain the bizarre phenomenon of Mitt Romney as well. We had best deal with this quickly, as Mitt Romney is speeding, almost certainly, to the dustbin of history.

Attentive readers will know that the terms gay and Republican are not mutually exclusive. Apparently, there are those gays who do not mind fascism, as long as they can profit from sucking on one of the many hind teats of unregulated “free” enterprise. The term gay cannot be applied to Mitt Romney, though. If you have ever been visited by a pair of earnest, corn-finished Mormon youths, you will have been struck by the degree to which hormones can be vanquished by crackpot creeds: your mind must inevitably compensate for this by imagining alternative activities for the poor, bored creatures. Perhaps it is such a closety, repressed vibration that makes you think Mitt Romney is gay. But if you have direct evidence, please call Wolf Blitzer and share; Cory will be man enough to admit he’s wrong.

Mitt Romney believes that one can hold private religious views that have nothing to do with the public policies he supports. This used be called “phoney” -- a stance accounting for Romney’s many contradictions. To stay with the gay theme, he is for gay rights and the military policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell”; against gay marriage and judges who seek to redefine marriage to include gays; for housing and credit benefits for gay couples (the aforementioned hind teat); has said “If we are to achieve the goals we share, we must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern”; supports a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexuals; believes that same-sex unions undermine support for the traditional family. This repellant mass of contradictions is of course related to the fact he has opposed Senator Ted Kennedy -- and doesn’t want the gay vote to go to Kennedy -- and that he also wants to court conservative and “christian” Brownshirts. His shifts of position on many controversial issues suggest multiple personality disorder or, more likely, extreme opportunism and lack of principle.

Sadly, Cory must admit that Romney is quite good looking (is this why you think he’s gay?). The fact that he utterly lacks sex appeal will not be an obstacle to many people finding him “presidential” when they are really seeing “superficial”. This is the wild card, Uncle B. Since Bush has escaped impeachment, Cory is forced to admit that anything is possible in U.S. politics – yet regarding Romney’s candidacy, the phrase “outlook not so good” swims up in the magic 8-ball of your scribe’s mind.

Revered One:

My neighbour recently purchased a DVD player because the local video rental shop no longer rents tapes -- Beta, VHS or otherwise. I offered to connect it to her television and hi-fi. Afterwards she asked if I had any DVDs that we could use to test out the newfangled DVD player.

Men will be men, and the only DVDs I own are films of men DOING men. My neighbour (in her forties) thought that this was a grand idea, so we tested her DVD player with two Colt DVDs (one from the 80's and a recent one). That was a month ago. When I last asked feebly, "How's your DVD player?" she snapped back, "I'm still watching them!"

Oh Revered One, how long do fortyish women need to watch a couple of DVDs of muscled men flexing, sucking and poking one another with boners the size of baguettes? Shall I suggest other genres? Twinks? Solo? Fisting? Auto-fellatio? Will I ever see these DVDs again? So many questions, I know. Any insight is truly appreciated.

Quasar


Dear Quasar:

Cory did not recently arrive in town on the deck of a turnip truck (a “swede lorry” for our readers in Britain: see the poetry section of HHCIB) and knows a short story when he sees one. Thank you for your terse, affecting tale, and for including both the quaint term “hi-fi” – nothing is more evocative of 1969 – and the word “newfangled” (meaning addicted to novelty: how perfect). These deftly create a theme of obsession and a sense you are conflicted about technology and the passage of time.

You pose but one question (about “other genres….”), albeit with sub-questions, that Cory can answer. The remainder fall into the realm of the psychic, so they were referred to HHCIB executive soothsayer, Kay Seurat-Seurat. Ms. Seurat-Seurat noted dryly that given the pace with which Cory responds to his readers, her services would be redundant: no doubt your DVDs have been returned by now with a humble note of apology and a dozen yellow roses.

The innocent reader might be spoiled by the knowledge that Colt Studiogroup, the producer of the pornography you own, specializes in very muscular men interacting (more than acting) in various stereotyped masculine settings: the ranch, the grease pit, the sports venue, etc. They are so buff and prepared as to be quite unlike anything encountered in life; they almost constitute their own gender. Cory, with his taste for the ragged and accidental, does not find this remotely erotic, so he can only guess at the appeal of such films as “Big Rig” and “The Hard Way” to a heterosexual woman.

Perhaps your neighbour has been wounded by the perfidy of men as they are and takes pleasure in Colt’s idea of men as they’re not while still maintaining her sexual orientation. Perhaps she has been twisted by the conflicting demands of underpaid work in a fascist workplace, a ticking reproductive clock and a boyfriend she found by visiting the penitentiary. Who can blame her for slipping “Wide Strokes” into the slot of her player of an evening? You, whose neighbourliness is above reproach given your helping with cables and such, might sweetly ignore the long loan period and meditate gratefully upon the privileged position of gay men with their ribald, wanton ways. You have so many more available resources than she.

You will have noticed that pornography recharges itself erotically if left unviewed for a period of time. In this way your neighbour could be doing you a favour.

A shuddering array of sexual practices and objects is now available on DVD, including those in your motley list. For once, Cory is not going to explain the terms you employed; since Google is now a public company, let them have the responsibility. A careful enquiry as to your neighbour’s “type” might elicit ideas that would broaden her man horizon. In that enquiry it is best to stick to terms and concepts that a heterosexual might understand.

While on the subject of organized pornography, Cory respectfully suggests that it would be far more dramatic and engaging if filmed in 3D. He cannot understand why this isn’t done. After all, one doesn’t usually have to look one’s best while viewing pornography, so those little green and red glasses should not be an esthetic obstacle.

You inspire Cory with your use of language and your kindness to others.

Dear Cory,

I was raised without benefit of religion and from a very tender age given to believe that not only was Santa Claus just a story, Jesus was not God's only begotten son, and that God didn't even exist!

Once, while walking near my home I heard rousing gospel music blasting from a church. The energy and enthusiasm pulled me in like God's own fish-hook. By the end of the evening I was holding hands with Christians, singing and beaming. No other experience has made me want to be Christian more. And yet I remained a heathen. I am writing to you because I have recently corresponded with good Christian people and it’s left me confused. Can you help me understand what went wrong?

Here's what I wrote and the return message:

To: Xxx
Subject: gospel music

Hello,

I'm coming to New York the week of March 10 and a friend tells me he's heard the best gospel music ever at your church. I would like to have this experience too. Is that possible during the week I'm in town?

Thanks for your time.

Yyy


Her response:

Dear Mr. Yyy

In response to your request, we are not a concert, performance, entertainment center to display gospel music.

We are a House of Worship that celebrates the God the Father of all, and His son, Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. During the course of our Worship Services held on Sunday mornings at 9 and 11 a.m., we support our worship service with music of all types, styles and composers. From Bach, Handel to James Cleveland and the Blind Boys of Alabama -- we support our worship services with song and instruments.

If you are interested in an opportunity to WORSHIP with members of The ______ Baptist Church on Sunday morning at the 11 a.m. service, please let me know; and on which Sunday you are able to attend.

May God continue to bless you.

Xxx
Membership and Ministry Manager
"Ministry means ... to serve"

Ouch! Upon reading her response I felt the cold wind of shame. I felt dirty. Though I am not too familiar with Christianity I have heard crushing guilt is a common theme. Am I too sensitive? Is Ms Xxx being uncharitable?

Sensitive Traveler Affronted by Testy Evangelicals.

Dear STATE:

How have you managed to reach adulthood and yet maintain such delightful naivete and unworldliness? Of course Santa Claus exists! Were you a Bubble Boy unable to get to a mall? Cory prays that your awakening to the arbitrariness of the naughty and nice assessments of this world, which you have recently brushed against, will not be too brutal – just brutal enough to be fervid.

Ms. Xxx seems to have been having a bad day. She has seized on the poor encoding of your email, which fails to use the word “worship”, evidently some sort of key to the state of your soul and your general worth. The subtext of her message might be something like:

“I bet you’re a honkey who thinks of us as some sort of minstrel show for your patrician pleasure. This world isn’t about pleasure, it’s about denying pleasure to yourself in this life in the hope that a very jealous, controlling, narcissistic God will accept your constant worship of him – if you do it just right, with an appropriate music mix – and admit you to heaven.

God picks and chooses, and we’re pretty darn sure he’s chosen us. You, well, while not exactly hopeless, you could contaminate our service and upset God. So, if you want to change your unbaptized attitude, you can come, I suppose.”

Cory isn’t expert on Christianity, but that has seldom stopped him from having an opinion and it certainly won’t now. Kindliness, service, patience, tolerance and love are at the heart of Jesus’s messages, surely: a way of being in this world that could bring the realization of interconnection and sacredness without resort to cramming for an afterlife. Cory can find no evidence of any of these five in Ms. Xxx’s communication. It is ironic that she includes the phrase “ministry means … to serve” in her closing. The only things she’s serving here are dollops of rudeness and presumption on a crisp bed of heresy. What Cory simply cannot forgive, though, is her misuse of a semi-colon.

Cory trusts that your enlightenment is developing satisfactorily through your current regimen of random musical wanderings, beaming, singing and hand-holding. Don't you think those activities would have brought an approving smile to Jesus’s face, a smile that would have faded quickly had Jesus been able to bring Ms. Xxx’s email up on his divine laptop? May “God’s own fish-hook” (thank you for that phrase) be firmly embedded in your cheek.

O Revered Mr. Cory:

I am but an unreconstructed fag of the late '60s and '70s genre, who knows most of the key sex words of his generation (verily, even much of the arcane Hanky Code), but am baffled by current Gangbangsprache. Can You, O Knowing One, shed any light on key terms in the appended solicitation from the pages of craigslist? Some words ring true; others simply puzzle. Do community colleges offer courses in relearning English as a Sexy Language?

looking for bator buddy – 29

29 y/o GAM, 5'7", 130, slim/toned, 6" cut, looking for guys who are into chronic bating, edging, gooning and doing it with a bud. porn + lube + dick + 420 + j/o bud = good times. pics to trade tho attitude more important than appearances.

Yr humble, etc…

All Confusulated


Dear AC:

Cory is charmed by your writing style and humbled by your referring to him in terms suitably applied to a holy relic. He can see how the cryptic advertisement you attach might make an experienced gay man pine for the pre-text-message era, when eyeballing was favoured over keyboarding, and brightly-coloured handkerchiefs signaled sexual preferences where obscene gestures failed. You may recall a response to a reader wherein Cory alluded to the Hanky Code’s demise caused by a host of paraphilias coming of the closet and crowding the spectrum, making it all but impossible to distinguish fetishes in the dusky venues homosexuals frequent.

Craigslist.org is an internet elegy to free trade in all its dimensions on which people have been known to advertise for sex, protected readers should know. It is one of thousands of electronic ways in which one can meet romantic or sexual partners. In practice, moving mating and sex into the realm of electrons makes it more likely that you will be exposed to rudeness (it’s easier when one is anonymous), to stupendous mendacity (what are they thinking, that you don’t own a tape measure?) and that you will spend much more time at it than you would at your local gay bar (where the visual and olfactory are hugely helpful in narrowing the choices). This is not progress, nor is it efficient.

Cory is now going to translate the message you have quoted into standard English. In the square brackets you will find helpful translation and things you should be thinking about for your safety and sanity -- Cory is nothing if not protective of his readers’ sensibilities and innocence.

“I am Looking for a Man With Whom to Masturbate:

I am a 29 year old [statistically, more people than actuarial tables would confirm have internet ages which end in 9. Probably this man is already past 30] male homosexual of Asian extraction, 5’ 7” in height, weighing 130 lbs. I am slim [redundant] and have some muscle tone [vague]; my penis is 6 inches in length [measuring protocol is not mentioned: since this measurement is above average, it should be doubted] and I was circumcised. I am a compulsive masturbator who seeks others similarly inclined with whom to engage ["j/o bud": a buddy with whom to "jerk off"]. As we masturbate together, we should like to repeatedly approach and withdraw from the threshold of orgasmic inevitability [“edging”], and be prone to so losing ourselves in masturbating that our entire consciousness is focused on the process [“gooning”, or as they say in Sex Addicts Anonymous, being “in the bubble”: unaware of one’s surroundings]. As adjuncts to this activity, I like pornography, personal lubricants [well, yes, he has no foreskin and compulsive masturbating without one is rough on the penis], smoking cannabis [“420”] and believe that these things together constitute a good time. I have pictures of myself to exchange for pictures of you prior to our meeting, but the attitude we each bring to this event is more important than appearances [this is likely code for “I am not very good looking”, since attitude is a difficult thing to assess; it could also mean ‘If you’re stoned and “gooned” enough you will forget I’m not good looking’]”

Cory hopes this helps you in your quest, but respectfully suggests that this advertiser is arrested psychologically at age 13, so you might adjust expectations accordingly.

Offering an ESL course in a community college about e-parlance and the benefits and pitfalls of cruising online seems a worthy endeavour! Cory would be happy to advise on curriculum or make a cameo appearance, given the receipt of a first-class rail ticket.

Dear Cory:

Thank you to you and your readers for all of the troublesome insight! I particularly enjoyed the prose section - uplifting to the life-long "burro-crat". The poetry was also as well done as anything my mother wrote - 'tis a gift.

So, my question, why is it that Cory refers to himself in the third person? Have we in truth discovered why Bob Dole has disappeared from the front pages? Better that than a personality disorder perhaps! Ah well -- thank you again. Where is your communication strategy for HHCIB? - we need to spread the word! You wouldn't want to consider taking other US politicians north of the line would you?

Taxation Without Representation

Dear TWR:

Your little communiqué has four questions and a generous review of howhardcanitbe.com. What a busy mind you have! “Troublesome insight” is as good a description of our web mission as we are likely to find. Your gracious and appreciative letter was read at our Friday morning prayer breakfast, when the lords and minions of HHCIB assemble over frittatas after running naked in the snowy predawn (this activity is illustrated elsewhere on our site). Needless to say, we are ecumenical in the extreme.

Cory does indeed refer to himself in the third person. He wishes he could cite literary precedents and then bathe in the glow thereof. The truth is that Cory cannot recall how this started, but it can certainly be nothing more than a tic or affectation which now must go on as long as this column lives. While Cory is in the mood for self-revelation, he could surmise about other factors that led to the development of this column’s “voice”: his native narcissism, a bewilderingly irrelevant, lengthy education, and the internal competition of lewdness and propriety. No one has ever stated that his personality is ordered.

Cory has scanned the list of America’s poets laureate to see which one might be your mother. Or is she one whose monumental talents have not been recognized in that way?

Those readers who have withdrawn from the U.S. political scene for reasons of self-preservation may not realize that Bob Dole sometimes referred to Bob Dole as Bob Dole and not as “I” or “me”: that pesky third person again. Cory is not Bob Dole; while he is repelled by Bob Dole’s beliefs and his wife Elizabeth (nicknamed “Lippy”), he cannot but admire him for his war record, his sense of humour, and the chutzpah to tell America about his wilting penis in Viagra® advertisements (granted, it could be greed, not chutzpah, but Cory is unfailingly generous to WWII vets).

Cory furrows his brow when he thinks about Canada becoming a haven for U.S. politicians. We would rather have your nuclear waste; its half-life is apparently shorter than that of corrosive Puritanism.

Our marketing strategy at HHCIB is modest to the vanishing point; we just try to avoid being sued. Anonymity is a treasure, and we are trying to enjoy it before Oprah discovers us and pumps us up until we pop into a million little pieces.

Dear Cory:

Why do gay dudes need brand name designer underwear?

Baffled at the gym


Dear BATG:

Cory understands your pain. He can only feel pity for the degree of insecurity and suckerhood that would compel any “dude”, no matter which fly he’s flagging, to purchase the high-priced offerings of Tommy, Calvin, Undergear, 2Xist and other fashion raptors. You are an astute observer, dear correspondent: gay men are in the Special Victims Unit of underwear designers. Do homosexual men really have that much disposable income? Couldn’t they give to the poor instead?

Men’s underwear in all of its practical and attractive manifestations was well worked out by 1945. If you doubt, please read the exhaustive study at: http://www.vintageskivvies.com/pages/archives.html Note the thong is not included in this working out – to adapt the late Jack Paar’s definitive assessment of the briefs or boxers crisis of 1964, it’s like wearing a slingshot (but much less manly).

It seems gay men often cannot resist taking items straight men wear and re-designing them so they lose their male magnetism. This is a tragic misapplication of creativity. In the immodest parade of designer underwear at Cory’s gymnasium, tiny tight briefs are in right now, as are acidic colours and little redundant straps. Cory does not know what this display is intended to communicate, but what he perceives, after he suppresses a shudder, is a want of erotic awareness. Who did not find Steve next door devastating when he peeled to his white t-shirt and his white briefs or his manly, baggy, patterned boxers? Why is it wrong that Steve’s mom shopped at Sears? Why do we need to fix this? Sex appeal is a fragile thing and we mess with it at our peril (see also Cory’s answer entitled Gas! Gas! Gas!).

Cory,

It sounds like you've been around the block and might have heard talk of such things: what is the deal with sugar daddies? How hard are they to find? Where does one get one? How much of one's liberty must one expect to relinquish in exchange for, say, free rent? Is there such a thing as a sugar mommie? (I won't bother asking about sugar trannies).

I'm tired of selling my soul to corporations for 40 to 60 hours a week. Am I nuts to consider renting my skin to a discerning, mature, and generous person in exchange for a little this and that?

Starving Student Seeking Sustenance through Sex (Sensibly)


Dear SSSSTS(S):

To answer your questions, we must examine tyrannies rather than trannies, so you are right not to bother asking about the latter. Gender dysphoria and its frightening sequelae are not something Cory cares to consider without being well paid – it’s just too postmodern.

The first tyranny, as you know all too well, is administered by corporations, whose ridiculous expectations of their employees’ conformity and servility are only increasing now that unions have been busted and outsourcing to slaves in poorer countries has driven down the cost of labour. Cory wonders how the vassals in retail, for example, who suffer the added indignity of being called sales associates as if they somehow shared in the big box’s profits, manage to house and feed themselves on what they are paid. One of the most unintentionally honest phrases in the last thirty years is “trickle down economics”. The trickle was bad enough, now it’s barely a drip.

The second tyranny is the tyranny of looks. It seems bred in us that we just can’t wait to seek out, reward and insert ourselves into the good looking. Yet the needs of the unbeautiful are no less piquant than those of the beautiful and even the loveliest of us are subject to the vagaries of aging.

Given the contamination of our society by a money mentality – soi-disant free enterprise -- and the merchandizing of everything, Cory is hard put to think of a relationship that does not have a financial aspect to it (we read now how much it costs to raise a child, for example). The unbeautiful person who wishes to leverage some intimacy from a beautiful person is certainly no rarity, nor is the beautiful person, such as yourself, who is ready to go on special. The methods and labels vary.

Let us say that you provide enthusiastic intimate services for someone while you both know that this is not something you particularly want to do. Acting skill is necessary. How is this different from showing up at a job you despise on a Monday morning and acting as if you cared about the laughable mission statement and the dangerous product you’re selling, excepting that your genitals are still inside your polyester uniform? God knows, a corporation will use all your other organs. What concerns Cory on your behalf is that both situations are potentially corrosive to you. It will be much better if you like the person for whom you are providing the services, and you have a mutually respectful relationship. Life is full of things we don’t want to do, but they are leavened by the goodwill of those around us, just as an awful job is made tolerable by amusing co-workers.

You are a student. No matter your age, if you are a student you are by definition half-educated, fresh, partly feral – and therefore to be forgiven any mistakes. Experiment! If you decide to market your student allure, you will first need a very different resume. It could be three-dimensional. Cory suggests that you then peruse the apparently abundant supply of those who style themselves “generous” on the internet and in other media. HHCIB’s comely phalanx of research assistants tells Cory that this is a code for “really quite unattractive, but willing to pay for sex”. Such persons are nearly always male; sugar mommies tend to favor young prisoners who will abuse them after release in a September-May marriage parody. Then, in your interviews, rather than focusing on the contractual aspects of acts, frequency, time off and other boring details, decide whether or not you and your sugar person could conceivably be honest about needs and form a warm, respectful relationship. Cory has faith that the rest will flow from there.

Cory is not entirely sure he likes the phrase “been around the block” applied to his dewy person.