Stanza Stance

Stanza means room. In the valley of its making one finds a room of one's own to share, to let …

What does it matter if I don't exchange names with a man, if I never see him again, why should that lessen the value of the pleasure we give one another, a bodily pleasure and also a pleasure of knowledge and recognition? "Now we have met, we have look'd, we are safe," says Whitman, our great poet of cruising, who doesn't hesitate to use the word love for transient encounters between otherwise strangers. Like the stanzas of a poem, which offer such unlikely, durable shelter from the crash of public speech, the cramped spaces of back rooms and toilet stalls serve not to lessen value, but to concentrate it. As is the case for poetry in the valley of its making, cruising offers an experience that might look like privation but feels like luxury, a hidden richness, a secret world.

Garth Greenwell
"How I Fell In Love With The Beautiful Art Of Cruising"
Buzzfeed
https://www.buzzfeed.com/garthgreenwell/how-i-fell-in-love-with-the-beautiful-art-of-cruising?utm_term=.vp3VzzDk9#.dlpLqqA96

Greenwell leads me to return to Earl Jackson Jr. "Explicit Instruction: Teaching Gay Male Sexuality in Literature Classes" Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature edited by George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman.

The cultural and psychological significance of gay male pornography for its intended audience cannot be understood within normative heterosexual morality. In its role as a medium for self-understanding within a repressive social regime, gay pornography configures visibility in its erotic and political senses.

And brings me to share with trepidation an image of the cover of the first porn mag that I bought as a very young man in small town Kapuskasing ...

Putting the carnal back in carnival?

And so for day 1762
10.10.2011