Old Blue

VERY VERY SAD DAY. A good friend of mine, after 7 yrs of medical school and training has been fired for ONE minor indiscretion. He slept with one of his patients and can no longer work in the profession. What a waste of time, effort, training and money! Dude's still paying off school loans. Just goes to show you how ONE minor mistake can ruin your life. Please pray for him and his family. He is a really great guy and one of the best veterinarians I know.

An escort I hired many years ago while visiting Colorado Springs later appeared on TV as the escort who outed Ted Haggard in 2006. Ted Haggard, the pastor of a large church in Colorado Springs and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, had hired the escort over three years and once even asked him to procure some crystal meth to use. When the escort was in the gym one day, he happened to see Ted Haggard on TV excoriating gays and decided to publicly out him. All of this was reported by Jon Stewart who used interviews by Richard Dawkins to expose Ted Haggard's hypocrisy. The escort is incidentally pictured in the last half of the segment:

An escort I hired many years ago while visiting Colorado Springs later appeared on TV as the escort who outed Ted Haggard in 2006. Ted Haggard, the pastor of a large church in Colorado Springs and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, had hired the escort over three years and once even asked him to procure some crystal meth to use. When the escort was in the gym one day, he happened to see Ted Haggard on TV excoriating gays and decided to publicly out him. All of this was reported by Jon Stewart who used interviews by Richard Dawkins to expose Ted Haggard's hypocrisy. The escort is incidentally pictured in the last half of the segment:

During my life, I have had passionate affairs, albeit one sided, with William Hurt, Terence Stamp, and Paul Newman. Movies at one time had the magical ability to produce characters we could fall in love with--when real life provided no alternative--and actors to whom we could, at least in our imagination, transfer this infatuation.
 
Three older movies well worth seeing and scarcely mentioned in this thread:
 
1. Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
2. Billy Budd (1962)
3. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
 
William Hurt won an Academy Award for best actor in playing a gay Latin American political prisoner in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Although marginalized by straight society, his character was admirably honest, seduced his straight cellmate, and demonstrated his heroism in the end.
 
Terence Stamp was a handsome and innocent Billy Budd in this adaptation of the Herman Melville seagoing novella. Hard to believe this young stud is the same actor who later played one of the three major characters. the older woman, in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I fell head over heels for the young Billy Budd/Terence Stamp and readily perceived his treatment at the hands of the evil Claggart was based on the fact that he, too, had fallen in love with Billy Budd. Although there is nothing overtly gay about Billy Budd, the tension of its understated homoeroticism makes it one of my all time favorite gay movies.
 
Paul Newman (Brick) wouldn't make love to his wife Elizabeth Taylor (Maggie), which, of course, made Maggie like a cat on a hot tin roof. In this movie adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play, which is about way more than their marriage, the reason remains somewhat murky but the play makes it clear he is still carrying a torch for the quarterback he played high school football with who committed suicide by jumping out of a hotel window. Maggie the cat understands what's going on and her jealousy knows no bounds. Although Maggie triumphs in the end, the thought of Paul Newman getting it on with his quarterback--and later brooding about it--was delicious to contemplate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2020/09/28/loving-a-photographic-history-of-men-in-love/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=news_tab&utm_content=algorithm&fb_news_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJqdGkiOiJmYl81ZjcyOWJlYzA1MTRmN2E2NzY2MTIxMiIsImlzcyI6Imh0dHBzOlwvXC93d3cuZmFjZWJvb2suY29tIiwiaWF0IjoxNjAxMzQ2NTM4LCJleHAiOjE2MDEzNDgzMzgsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOlwvXC93d3cud2FzaGluZ3RvbnBvc3QuY29tXC9waG90b2dyYXBoeVwvMjAyMFwvMDlcLzI4XC9sb3ZpbmctYS1waG90b2dyYXBoaWMtaGlzdG9yeS1vZi1tZW4taW4tbG92ZVwvIiwidG9wX3N0b3JpZXMiOmZhbHNlfQ.67E-k1BlC-5aBXQ6VjiDkLsncdVeAvnZXuRiUBP5fXs

Montreal heads into partial lockdown:
 
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/montreal-heads-partial-lockdown-after-coronavirus-surge-n1241402

During my life, I have had passionate affairs, albeit one sided, with William Hurt, Terence Stamp, and Paul Newman. Movies at one time had the magical ability to produce characters we could fall in love with--when real life provided no alternative--and actors to whom we could, at least in our imagination, transfer this infatuation.
 
Three older movies well worth seeing and scarcely mentioned in this thread:
 
1. Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
2. Billy Budd (1962)
3. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
 
William Hurt won an Academy Award for best actor in playing a gay Latin American political prisoner in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Although marginalized by straight society, his character was admirably honest, seduced his straight cellmate, and demonstrated his heroism in the end.
 
Terence Stamp was a handsome and innocent Billy Budd in this adaptation of the Herman Melville seagoing novella. Hard to believe this young stud is the same actor who later played one of the three major characters. the older woman, in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I fell head over heels for the young Billy Budd/Terence Stamp and readily perceived his treatment at the hands of the evil Claggart was based on the fact that he, too, had fallen in love with Billy Budd. Although there is nothing overtly gay about Billy Budd, the tension of its understated homoeroticism makes it one of my all time favorite gay movies.
 
Paul Newman (Brick) wouldn't make love to his wife Elizabeth Taylor (Maggie), which, of course, made Maggie like a cat on a hot tin roof. In this movie adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play, which is about way more than their marriage, the reason remains somewhat murky but the play makes it clear he is still carrying a torch for the quarterback he played high school football with who committed suicide by jumping out of a hotel window. Maggie the cat understands what's going on and her jealousy knows no bounds. Although Maggie triumphs in the end, the thought of Paul Newman getting it on with his quarterback--and later brooding about it--was delicious to contemplate.

A young man moved into a new apartment and went down to the lobby to put his name on the mailbox. While there, a beautiful young woman came out of the apartment next to the mailboxes. She was wearing a somewhat revealing robe.
 
The young man smiled at the woman and she started a conversation with him. As they talked, her robe slipped open, and it was obvious that she had nothing else on. The poor kid broke into a sweat trying to maintain only eye contact. After a few minutes, she placed her hand on his arm and said, "Let's go to my apartment, I hear someone coming."
 
He followed her into her apartment. She closed the door and leaned against it, allowing her robe to fall off completely. Now nude, she purred at him, "What would you say is my best feature?"
 
Flustered and embarrassed, he finally squeaked, "It's got to be your ears."
 
Astounded, and a little hurt she asked, "My ears? Are you kidding? Look at these breasts; they are full and bouncy and 100% natural. I work out every day and my butt is firm and solid. Look at my skin - no blemishes anywhere. How can you think that the best part of my body is my ears?"
 
Clearing his throat, he stammered , "Outside, when you said you heard someone coming.... that was me."

Gman

He’s always been at the top of my Celebrity Pass List, but this clip has me dreaming about grabbing onto those massive arms for dear life as he nails me to the bed like Amy Schumer.
 
Also: it’s good advice.
 
https://thetruetruetruth.com/john-cena-2/

Good message, but I thought it was a poorly written article.
A large chuck of it came off as “poor me and my evil dead
boyfriend”, which really has little to do with today’s pandemic.
 
I’m never a fan when someone paints an unflattering picture of
a dead person who can’t defend themselves or tell their side of
the story. Not that it really matters, the connection is so tenuous
as to make the point irrelevant.
 
There are many things we can learn from the AIDS pandemic that
will help us get through this one. I just don’t think this article does
a great job of pointing out exactly what those lessons are.

Interesting study about to come out that suggests wearing masks may actually help lessen the severity of COVID infection. It's actually a meta-study that synthesizes many different studies suggesting mask wearing lowers the viral load of COVID even if you are infected. We've known for a while that all but the N95 masks do not offer 100 percent protection against COVID. But widespread mask use can mean you are getting much less virus from those infected and have a higher likelihood of having an asymptomatic infection or very mild infection. This could help explain why many Asian countries like Japan and South Korea have such low fatality rates compared to the US and Europe. They already have a habit of public mask wearing and while many still got infected, their viral loads were lower and they were more likely to have a less severe illness. There are many other anecdotal studies that taken together suggest mask wearing really does help prevent serious COVID illness.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/t-magazine/tom-of-finland.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/t-magazine/tom-of-finland.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage

He also looked pretty good when he was 19:
 

 
And here's a longer excerpt...around 15 min.
 

 
He was Sal Mineo's roomate when Sal was killed.

He also looked pretty good when he was 19:
 

 
And here's a longer excerpt...around 15 min.
 

 
He was Sal Mineo's roomate when Sal was killed.

Overlooked No More: Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Pioneering Gay Activist
Before the word “homosexuality” existed, he argued that same-sex attraction was innate, and that those who experienced it should be treated the same as anyone else.
 

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a lawyer and journalist, helped forge the concept of sexual identity as an innate human characteristic in pamphlets he wrote from 1864 to 1879.
By Liam Stack
 
(Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.)
 
 
By the time the lawyer and writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs took the podium at a meeting of the Association of German Jurists in 1867, rumors about his same-sex love affairs — and the subsequent threat of arrest and prosecution — had already cost him his legal career and forced him to flee his homeland.
 
Standing in Munich before more than 500 lawyers, officials and academics — many of whom jeered as he spoke — Ulrichs argued for the repeal of sodomy laws that criminalized sex between men in several of the German-speaking kingdoms and duchies that existed in the years before the creation of a unified German state.
“Gentlemen, my proposal is directed toward a revision of the current penal law,” he said, according to the historian Robert Beachy in the 2014 book “Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity.”
 
 
Ulrichs described a “class of persons” who faced persecution simply because “nature has planted in them a sexual nature that is opposite of that which is usual."
 
Same-sex attraction was a deeply taboo topic at the time; the word “homosexuality” would not even exist for another two years, when it was coined by the Austro-Hungarian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny. So the ideas in Ulrichs’s speech — that such attraction was innate, and that those who experienced it should be treated the same as anyone else — were revolutionary.
 
 
His remarks preceded by more than 100 years the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969, which are widely seen as the start of the modern L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement. They helped inspire the rise of the world’s first gay rights movement, 30 years later in Berlin. They foreshadowed the imposition of a sodomy law across the German Empire that would later be used by the Nazis to target gay men, thousands of whom were killed in concentration camps. And they made history: Ulrichs is believed to have been the first person to publicly “come out,” in the modern sense of the term.“I think it is reasonable to describe him as the first gay person to publicly out himself,” Robert Beachy said in an interview. “There is nothing comparable in the historical record. There is just nothing else like this out there.” His speech was also deeply unwelcome at the 1867 meeting, where the audience erupted in shouts of “Stop!” and “Crucify!” that ultimately forced Ulrichs off the stage.
 
 
For much of Ulrichs’s life, same-sex relations were widely seen as a pathology or as a sin to which any person could succumb if seized by wickedness. These views still exist in some parts of the world. Ulrichs helped forge the concepts of gay people as a distinct group and of sexual identity as an innate human characteristic in a series of pamphlets he wrote from 1864 to 1879 — at first under a pseudonym, but under his own name after he gave his speech at the 1867 conference.
 
 
“By publishing these writings I have initiated a scientific discussion based on facts,” he wrote in a letter published in 1864 in Deutsche Allgemeine, a pan-German newspaper. “Until now the treatment of the subject has been biased, not to mention contemptuous,” he added. “My writings are the voice of a socially oppressed minority that now claims its rights to be heard.”
 
 
His work was widely read by sex researchers. One of them, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, cited the pamphlets in his pioneering 1886 text, “Psychopathia Sexualis,” which described homosexuality as a mental illness.
In later editions, Krafft-Ebing published letters from men who had read about Ulrichs in his book. The letters showed that not only did Ulrichs’s pamphlets explore theories about sexuality, but they also helped foster a sense of community.
“I cannot describe what a salvation it was for me,” one of the men wrote, “to learn that there are many other men who are sexually constituted the way I am, and that my sexual feeling was not an aberration but rather a sexual orientation determined by nature.”
 
 
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was born on Aug. 28, 1825, in Aurich, in the kingdom of Hanover in northwestern Germany, to an upper-middle-class family that included several Lutheran pastors. He studied Latin and Greek before beginning his legal studies at the University of Göttingen.
He secured prestigious positions in the Hanoverian Civil Service, but rumors about his same-sex relationships — and laws against public indecency — led him to resign his post as an assistant judge in 1854. He became a journalist for Allgemeine Zeitung, a pan-German newspaper published in Bavaria.
 
 
In the years before the invention of the German word “homosexualität,” a term that eventually found its way into English and other languages, Ulrichs’s pamphlets provided readers with a morally neutral vocabulary to describe themselves.
 
 
He coined the words “urnings” to refer to people we now call gay men, “urinden” to refer to people we now call lesbians, “dionings” for people we now call heterosexuals, and “uranodionism” for what is today called bisexuality. Those terms were inspired by his study of the classics, in particular the story of Uranus, the god of the heavens, who was portrayed as both father and mother to the goddess Aphrodite in Plato’s “Symposium.”
 
The concept of transgender people as distinct from gay, lesbian or bisexual people did not exist at the time, said Paul B. Preciado, a transgender philosopher at the Pompidou Center in Paris who has written about Ulrichs. Ulrichs’s writings, including his pamphlets and a series of letters to his family, whom he informed of his same-sex desires in 1862, were based on an understanding of gender and sexuality as fundamentally interconnected.
 
 
For Ulrichs, urnings were a sort of third gender who possessed the physical body of a man but the inner spirit of a woman, which Preciado described as “a female soul confined within a man’s body.”
 
 
Ulrichs was a German nationalist, Beachy said, and in addition to the legal emancipation of urnings, his other great political passion was German unification. He used his writings to oppose the growing domination of the Kingdom of Prussia, a military and political powerhouse that seemed determined to bring the other German states under its control.
 
 
He feared that Prussia would succeed in uniting the German states and would introduce its sodomy law into lands that did not criminalize same-sex activity, including his native Hanover.
Ulrichs’s fears about Prussia proved correct. Prussia annexed Hanover in 1866, and Ulrichs was jailed twice in 1867 for anti-Prussian activities before he was banished from his homeland.
 
 
His personal papers were confiscated, including a list of 150 suspected urnings in Berlin that was taken to the desk of Otto von Bismarck, who orchestrated the unification of Germany in 1871.
By 1872, the Prussian sodomy law, also known as Paragraph 175, had been adopted by all the states of the new German Empire. It was a crushing blow for Ulrichs. He published one final pamphlet in 1879 and then crossed the Alps by foot and settled in Italy, where his public advocacy for urnings ceased. He spent his remaining years editing a small Latin-language literary journal. He died on July 14, 1895. He was 69.
 
 
Paragraph 175, which criminalized sex between men but did not address lesbianism, remained in place in some variation for more than 100 years. It was ultimately repealed in 1994.In 2017 the German Parliament voted unanimously to void the convictions of roughly 50,000 men who had been prosecuted under the law since World War II and to compensate thousands who were still alive.
 
Ulrichs was celebrated by early-20th-century gay activists like Magnus Hirschfeld, but after the rise of Nazism his contributions to history were forgotten for decades. Today there are streets named for him in Berlin, Munich, Hanover and other parts of Germany.

Gman

So hot in Texas right now!!!https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=100009275115083/posts/2648830208769457
 
Gman

Gman

If you think coronavirus is taking a break--- THINK again!!!

MASH on social distancing and not touching your face:
 

When I was 17 (few decades ago...) and living in Milan, Italy, very cute and shy (and a gay virgin), being a young opera lover I once saw a small music store basically dedicated to classical music and opera. I went in to buy an opera in LPs (LPs...!!) and there was the owner, a man in his late 40s/early 50s. He was very friendly and taken by my unusual passion for my age. Married with kids. I spent a good hour there, he started to tell me stories about past famous singers, all the famous old productions at La Scala which he saw, he would put records on for me to listen to. At the end he actually gave me a record for free (...) and told me to go back anytime to chat. (...).
I knew I was gay and I never told anybody, but I wasn't at all attracted to him. I felt something wasn't exactly "friendly behavior", but I was genuinely interested in his opera knowledge.
After 2/3 times I visited him, he told me I was very cute, he asked me if I ever had sex with a man, I said no, he smiled and he closed the door of his store. He took me to the back room and I lost my virginity there. I really didn't enjoy it particularly, but hey, what did I know? Before I left he gave me 10,000 liras (about 12$ of that time) because he wanted me to "enjoy some fun with friends".
I left a bit in shock for the loss of my virginity and for my extra 10,000 Liras I had in my wallet (I think my parents gave me around that amount for a month as a "salary" for my pocket money).
I went back I would say once a week during a couple of months to listen to records, to fuck in the back room and to get my 10,000 liras (once he gave 20,000 actually!), until I realized I really didn't like to have sex with him and I also felt it wasn't a "kosher" thing to do (also because I was totally in the closet, we are talking about the late 70s in Italy...), so after the last fuck I told him I didn't want to do it anymore, I proudly told him I didn't want money that time, and that it was better for me not to see him anymore.
So yes, I "escorted" in my teens! ?
 
6/7 years later (I already had totally come out of the closet, started to really enjoy sex and I even had a boyfriend) one day I was passing by his store and I decided to go inside. He greeted me, looked happy to see me, he told me I had become very handsome but he understood there was no chance anymore with me, so we chatted about music and life for a bit and I left.
I left Italy 32 years ago, but I went back to see my family at least once every year since.
 
About 10 years ago one evening I went to La Scala in Milan to see an opera, and in between acts while I was making time in the foyer I saw this older gentleman together with a guy in his early 20s. Of course I recognized the older man, so I approached him and told him my name, that I used to be an old client (...) of his store and that I really enjoyed our chats about music back then. He told me he wasn't really sure he remembered me, but anyway he introduced me to his "grandson", and after 3 minutes of chit chat I said bye and left.
 
I am curious to know how many Euros was he giving to his "grandson". ?

Only picture in which the fish is more impressive than the guy....that's one huge bass!!