Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

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A Happy Love Story Between Two Men - Revolutionary

As more details leak out about the Felon's illegal attack on Venezuela - and perhaps even more frightening, the Felon's announced plan to run that country - I'm taking a pause from politics for a day and waiting for more factual details.  In the meantime, I am again focusing on HBO's hit "Heated Rivalry" which is based on two of a series of books by Canadian author, Rachel Reid.  I've read the books and am happy that the show has attracted so many non-LGBT viewers and fans.  Each of the books is at essence a love story that faces the hurdles of homophobia, bigotry and negative stereotypes - things that every "out" LGBT individual has had to face and consciously overcome.  If one reads the early years of this blog, my own "coming out" journey was anything but easy and at darkest points included two suicide attempts - something that still takes the lives of LGBT individuals who buckle under the strain of stereotypes and too often family rejection.  In the past, gay characters in movies or television are either homogenized, depicted as superficial witty "best friends" of other characters, or the stories end in tragedy.  The reality is that being gay involves more than mere physical sex and involves love and intimacy - and regular boring lives of work and and social involvement with family, friends and co-workers.   Yes, there is plenty of sex in Heated Rivalry, but the real story is lovie and intimacy as demonstrated by Ilya saying to Shane in Russian that he loves him too much and doesn't know what to do about it.  A column in the New York Times looks at the series and how it goes beyond mere representation of gay characters to show lives, love and intimacy. Here are column excerpts:

“Heated Rivalry” has become a breakout hit. The hockey drama — adapted from an erotic romance novel for the Canadian streaming service Crave — just ended its first season on HBO Max and has left gay men crying at watch parties that feel more like 19th-century religious revivals.

If you want to understand why this show has become our community’s equivalent of a cultural earthquake, the answer is that watching a gay couple be mildly boring and in love is still radical. . . . in the season finale, which landed last week, the two men are secluded in an intimate cottage — grilling burgers, lying by firelight, taking daytime swims, scrolling through their phones on the sofa.

Culture has not kept up with queer people, despite major political strides, legal victories (including marriage equality) and growing social acceptance. Stories and art explicitly about queer life are being made, but they rarely find a wide gay audience. They’re not typically embraced the way “Heated Rivalry” has been.

For years, queer representation in mainstream culture was driven by a political imperative. We needed to be palatable, monogamous and mortgage-ready to be tolerated. You could see this impulse in “Will & Grace,” where queerness was domesticated through friendship and slapstick, and later in “Modern Family,” where the suburban gay couple were beloved precisely because they reassured straight viewers that nothing about them was too strange, too erotic or too much. A lot of what is being produced about gay men, even now, replicates a straight world in rainbow colors.

Maybe what we ache for now is not culture built to serve a political end but a focus on the intimate — someone on top of us, breaking down in tears as he confesses his love. What is turning us on is not the thrill of naked bodies but the shock of being emotionally known. That is what some of us have been missing.

“Heated Rivalry” often focuses on the flirtations queer people recognize instantly: the charged eye contact at the opening face-off, boyfriends nudging feet under the table during a coming out, a glance across a crowded gala. The literary critic Richard Kaye has argued that flirtation has long been central to Western literature, a serious erotic mode in novels from Jane Austen to E.M. Forster. Seeing that tradition evolve onscreen between two men — not as subtext but as text — feels like a revolution.

What feels especially new is the way that flirtation becomes true intimacy. When another player in the league comes out by kissing his partner on the ice — a game changer in every sense — Shane’s phone rings. Ilya tells him he’s coming to Shane’s secluded lakeside cottage. Not for a night. Not for a postgame hookup. He’s choosing to step into Shane’s life, transforming their yearslong relationship into something with a future.

“Heated Rivalry” resonates because it embodies our lives. After the religious right pathologized us during the H.I.V./AIDS crisis, we reclaimed the sex story by reviving bathhouses and sex parties, by unapologetically embracing hookup culture on apps like Grindr, by celebrating eroticism in our fashion and nightlife. And slowly, we became more visible in family life and at work. There are queer politicians and lawyers, Olympians and celebrities. But representation is not the same thing as intimacy. We still need more stories about us, our relationships, our romances, our desires.

As the show has gained popularity, the cultural conversation has veered, perhaps predictably, toward straight people’s responses to the show. Articles, TikToks and morning shows have fixated on the thrill of being, say, a straight woman witnessing two men falling in love. This commentary has felt uncomfortably reminiscent of bachelorette parties in gay bars — our spaces becoming someone else’s spectacle, our bodies becoming someone else’s backdrop.

But if straight women like the show, that is fine. They should enjoy it. After all, it was adapted from a novel written by a woman. Her stated goal — to make a sweet, sexy, happy love story between two men in which, as she says, “the sexual tension and romance isn’t subtext or a tease or something that ends in tragedy” — fits what so many of us have been missing. Her willingness to write toward our joy feels rare, and so does the result: our intimacy made central, not symbolic; love scenes that are not lessons; desire that doesn’t apologize for itself.

We do not need more stories to prove that we exist. We need stories that capture how we live — in the touch, the embrace, the everyday if boring intimacies that were never meant to be translated. Our next frontier is not mere acceptance but depth.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

The Felon's Risky War In Venezuela

Overnight the Felon authorized military attacks in Venezuela and the seizure of Nicolás Maduro and his wife.  All was done without advising Congress or Congressional approval - a requirement for going to war against a foreign nation.  The Felon's supposed justification was that Maduro has federal warrants out against him for allegedly being a drug kingpin.  Never mind the fact that the Felon just recently pardoned  the former president of Honduras who had been convicted of bringing hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States and numerous polls showing the vast majority of Americans oppose war in Venezuela. With the disasters of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq still in recent memory where wars were launched (albeit with Congressional approval) with no real plan for what would follow regime change.  The Felon's statements that "we would be running Venezuela" - which possesses the world's largest oil reserves - are troubling and suggest several possibilities: (i) another Iraq like debacle in the aftermath, (ii) the Felon and his cronies enriching themselves with plundered oil, and (iii) further distrust of America by South American and European allies. Will Greenland, Panama or some other country be the Felon's next targets? Pieces in both The Atlantic and Politico look at the illegality of the Felon's unauthorized war against a sovereign nation and the concern that chaos or the rise of someone even worse than Maduro.  First, this excerpt from The Atlantic:

This morning, President Trump unilaterally launched a regime-change war against Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, ordering strikes on multiple military targets in the country and seizing its leader and his wife. They were “captured and flown out of the country,” Trump stated on Truth Social.

After Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress and asked it to declare war on Japan. Prior to waging regime-change wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush sought and secured authorizations to use military force. Those presidents asked for permission to conduct hostilities because the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, unambiguously vests the war power in Congress. And Congress voted to authorize force in part because a majority of Americans favored war.

The probable illegality of Trump’s actions does not foreclose the possibility that his approach will improve life for Venezuelans. Like too many world leaders, Maduro is a brutal thug, and opposition figures have good reason to insist he isn’t the country’s legitimate leader. . . . . But “toppling Maduro is the easy part,” Orlando J. Pérez, the author of Civil-Military Relations in Post-Conflict Societies, warned in November. “What follows is the hard strategic slog of policing a sprawling, heavily armed society where state services have collapsed and regime loyalists, criminal syndicates, and colectivos—pro-government armed groups that police neighborhoods and terrorize dissidents—all compete for turf.” Two groups of Colombian militants “operate openly from Venezuelan safe havens, running mining and smuggling routes,” he added. “They would not go quietly.”

Now that the United States has involved itself this way, its leaders are implicated in securing a stable postwar Venezuela and in staving off chaos that could destabilize the region. Yet Trump is best suited to military operations that are quick and discrete, like the strikes on the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani or Iran’s nuclear sites, as they do not require sustained focus or resolve. He is most ill-suited, I think, to a regime-change war against a country with lucrative natural resources. I fear Trump will try to enrich himself, his family, or his allies, consistent with his lifelong pattern of self-interested behavior; I doubt he will be a fair-minded, trusted steward of Venezuelan oil. If he indulges in self-dealing, he could fuel anti-American resentment among Venezuelans and intensify opposition to any regime friendly to the United States and its interests.

Whether the outcome is ultimately good for Venezuelans, as I hope, or bad, Trump has betrayed Americans. He could have tried to persuade Congress or the public to give him permission to use force. He didn’t bother. He chose war despite polls that found a large majority of Americans opposed it. Perhaps, like me, they fear America is about to repeat the mistakes of its interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, where brutal regimes were ousted, then ruinous power vacuums followed.

This theme continues in the piece in Politico:

“Congress did not authorize this war,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) wrote on X. “Venezuela posed no imminent threat to the United States. This is reckless, elective regime change risking American lives (Iraq 2.0) with no plan for the day after. Wars cost more than trophies.”

“Maduro is an illegitimate ruler,” Himes wrote. “But I have seen no evidence that his presidency poses a threat that would justify military action without Congressional authorization, nor have I heard a strategy for the day after and how we will prevent Venezuela from descending into chaos.”

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, announced Saturday he would again force the chamber to vote on his effort to constrain Trump’s war powers next week.

“Where will this go next?” he wrote. “Will the President deploy our troops to protect Iranian protesters? To enforce the fragile ceasefire in Gaza? To battle terrorists in Nigeria? To seize Greenland or the Panama Canal? To suppress Americans peacefully assembling to protest his policies? Trump has threatened to do all this and more and sees no need to seek legal authorization from people’s elected legislature before putting servicemembers at risk.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a combat veteran who deployed to Iraq as an infantryman in 2005, wrote on X Saturday that “the American people did not ask for this.” And he wondered aloud about what comes next for the South American country, asking on X, “so who is in charge of Venezuela now?”

A December Quinnipiac poll found that Americans overwhelmingly oppose military action against Venezuela, with just 25 percent of respondents saying they supported an intervention inside the country. Even the White House’s strategy of targeting boats with alleged drug traffickers proved broadly unpopular.

“I fought in some of the hardest battles of the Iraq War,” Gallego wrote. “Saw my brothers die, saw civilians being caught in the crossfire all for an unjustified war. No matter the outcome we are in the wrong for starting this war in Venezuela.”

The sad reality is that the Felon sees himself as an absolute monarch - something that threatens every America.  He is a clear and present danger to the nation.

Saturday Male Beauty

 

Trump, January 6th and the Need for America's Redemption

As noted in a prior post, the husband and I are currently on a cruise to the Caribbean on a ship where much of the crew are from other nations, some with less than truly democratic governments. At times, it's been necessary to make clear to these crewmembers that we do not support and condone the lawless regime that currently controls the White House.  Indeed, being an American has become an embarrassment given the ugliness, cruelty and corruption of the current regime (this summer, we will be in France for a week and will no doubt feel the same embarrassment).  As the new year commences a  main editorial in the New York Times looks at the horror's of January 6, 2021, the Felon's guilt, complicity of the Republican Party, and the attacks against and malicious prosecutions of those who have sought to follow and enforce the law and the U.S. Constitution, and the corrupt sycophants who now hold cabinet positions and head federal agencies.  The column also looks at the few rays of hope that suggest that maybe America can redeem itself and find redemption from one the ugliest periods of its political history: Democrat victories in November, 2025, federal courts ruling against lawless policies the Felon and his minions have sought to inflict and a least a few Republicans putting the Constitution and rule of law over obedience to a would be dictator.  Here are are highlights:

It was a day that should live in infamy. Instead, it was the day [the Felon's] President Trump’s second term began to take shape.

Five years ago, on Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, hoping to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. After the sun set that day, Congress reconvened to certify Joe Biden’s victory. The rioters lost, and so did Mr. Trump, who had summoned them to Washington and urged them to march to the Capitol. The Trump era seemed to have ended in one of the most disgracefully anti-American acts in the nation’s history.

That day was indeed a turning point, but not the one it first seemed to be. It was a turning point toward a version of Mr. Trump who is even more lawless than the one who governed the country in his first term. It heralded a culture of political unaccountability, in which people who violently attacked Congress and beat police officers escaped without lasting consequence. The politicians and pundits who had egged on the attack with their lies escaped, as well. The aftermath of Jan. 6 made the Republican Party even more feckless, beholden to one man and willing to pervert reality to serve his interests. . . . in defiance of the Constitution, without regard for the truth and with malice toward those who stand up to his abuses.

Tragically, America is still living in a political era that began on Jan. 6, 2021. Recognizing as much is necessary to bring this era to an end before it has many more anniversaries.

With the political and legal systems failing to punish him, much of the rest of the country started to move on. Business leaders made excuses for him. The conservative media establishment promoted him again and cheered on the purge of Republicans who had criticized his role in Jan. 6. Many voters, too, forgave — or at least proved willing to overlook his crimes — and decided that a second Trump presidency was preferable to Mr. Biden’s or Kamala Harris’s leadership. Some 77 million Americans voted for Mr. Trump in 2024.

He learned that he could get away with more than he dared to try in his first term.

Once he was elected, his post-Jan. 6 experience inspired his administration’s goals and methods. He and his aides concluded that intimidation and lawlessness could yield victories even in seemingly unwinnable and sometimes illegal circumstances.

They used Jan. 6 as a litmus test to identify and promote loyalists. They asked prospective national security officials whether the Capitol assault was “an inside job,” The Washington Post reported. The administration gave senior jobs to extremists, opportunists and conspiracy theorists. Kash Patel, Mr. Trump’s current F.B.I. director, promoted the theory that the F.B.I. had secretly encouraged Jan. 6 violence. Mr. Patel and other administration officials retaliated against prosecutors and F.B.I. agents who had insisted on enforcing the law impartially. Many noble people have been fired or demoted. Some face unjust federal investigations.

On the first day of his second term, Mr. Trump granted clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged or convicted in connection with Jan. 6. The group included hundreds of defendants found to have assaulted law enforcement officers.

The pardons issue a message: If you break the law to protect me, you will be supported, and if you uphold the law to restrain me, you will be persecuted. Today, Ed Martin, who helped raise money for Jan. 6 defendants, holds a top Justice Department job effectively dedicated to hounding Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies. Mr. Martin and his working group are investigating prosecutors, F.B.I. agents and members of Congress whose jobs obligated them to investigate Jan. 6.

The thuggishness extends far beyond the people who were directly involved in Jan. 6 cases. The legacy of that day has taught Mr. Trump how to use power more aggressively to advance his interests. In his second term, he has surrounded himself with officials who accede to his lawless demands. One example: Bill Pulte, who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has accused outspoken Democratic lawmakers of mortgage fraud and gone after Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor whose views on monetary policy Mr. Trump does not like.

Mr. Trump has also learned that congressional Republicans will bow to him even when he treats them with contempt or ignores the Constitution. He has defied the War Powers Act by blowing up boats in international waters, set high tariff rates without consulting Congress and nominated preposterous candidates for the Senate to confirm. . . . In private, legislators acknowledge that they obey him partly because they fear violence from his supporters.

Mr. Trump likewise plays the courts more successfully than in his first term. The Supreme Court has helped him, first by ruling in 2024 that presidents have almost complete immunity from future prosecution. As a result, he knows that he faces little legal jeopardy for his most outrageous actions.

Again and again, Mr. Trump dares the system to stop him. He does so knowing that the same system that failed to hold him to account for Jan. 6 is unlikely to do so now. The effects might outlast him. He has shown his Republican would-be successors, starting with Mr. Vance, that they can rewrite palpable history, encourage federal crimes for political ends by pardoning guilty people, exact revenge on those who do their duty to uphold the law and manipulate a docile Supreme Court majority willing to hand sweeping, unprecedented powers to a president. . . . .In Mr. Trump’s second term, he has governed as if Jan. 6 never ended. The damage to the nation is severe.

As dark as this story has become, it is not over. Its next chapters will depend on what Americans do now, especially those who share some of Mr. Trump’s policy preferences but remain loyal to American democracy. Many people have already responded heroically to Jan. 6. Police officers risked their lives and suffered beatings to defend the Capitol. Hundreds of F.B.I. agents, prosecutors, congressional aides and others investigated the day’s events and created a historical record that Mr. Trump cannot erase. A small number of elected Republicans — including Liz Cheney, Anthony Gonzalez, Jaime Herrera Beutler, Adam Kinzinger, Peter Meijer and Mitt Romney — insisted on defending the Constitution, at the cost of their careers.

The past few months offer some new reasons for hope. Mr. Trump’s approval ratings have fallen. His party has lost elections. Lower-court judges, including some appointed by Mr. Trump, have blocked some of his policies and called out his brazen disregard for truth. . . . . These developments make it possible to imagine a better future.

The Jan. 6 era turns five years old on Tuesday. The anniversary will always be a mournful one for America. The nation’s challenge now is to ensure that the day is ultimately viewed as it initially was: as an aberration. Americans must summon the collective will to bring this era to an end and make certain that the violence, lawlessness and injustice of Jan. 6 do not endure.

I try to remain optimistic, but I truly worry about the type of country my grandchildren will live in.

New Year's Cruise and Reduced Posting

I apologize for the lack of posts this week, but the husband and I have been on a much needed escape and are on an eight night cruise to the Caribbean.   Although I grew up through high school in Central New York outside of Syracuse (which has been this slammed this past with snow), I truly have come to dislike winter and a cruise out of Norfolk was an easy and inexpensive means to enjoy some warm weather. We have one more full day at sea tomorrow and pull into Norfolk early Sunday. Beside the activities of the cruise and excursions the days in port, I have unfortunately had to spend time each work day dealing with office emails (usually 150 or more), drafting documents and keeping clients happy, all of which has been made more time consuming due to the poor quality of the ship's Internet which does not interface well with the law firm's cloud based email and file system.  The slow Internet speed has also not interfaced with Blogger at times as well. posting should resume either Sunday or Monday. I posted below are two photos from the Bahamas, Grand Turk and the Dominican Republic (I could not get any more to upload.

Friday Male Beauty