More on Lincoln's homosexuality

From Is That a Stovepipe Hat or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

Some Republicans have been distressed in recent years to hear that the icon of their party, Abraham Lincoln, may have been playing for the other team. It had been whispered for years that Lincoln was gay, and there is no doubt that some of his behavior would point that way today — most notably, for four years he shared a bed with his friend Joshua Speed. The intense relationship began in 1837, when a 28-year-old Lincoln — then a tall, calloused-hand frontiersman with mournful eyes — turned up at Speed’s general store in Springfield, Illinois, hoping to make it as a lawyer. Lincoln couldn’t afford the bed on sale, so Speed immediately offered to share his own mattress upstairs. From that day on, the pair became passionate and all-but-inseparable friends. When Speed finally did move out of the mattress to be married, Lincoln was shattered, sinking into such a black depression that friends removed all sharp objects from his room. For years afterward, he wrote Joshua long and tender letters signed wistfully “Yours forever.” As one biographer put it in 1926, the friendship had “streaks of lavender, and spots as soft as May violets.” At the same time, biographers had long noticed that Lincoln as a young man seemed indifferent to women: Although he eventually fathered four children, his marriage to Mary Todd Lincoln was a tortured, almost masochistic affair.

Then, in 2005, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln by gay activist and former Kinsey researcher C.A. Tripp brought the whispers into the open by revealing a broader pattern of male bonding. Before Josh Speed, Lincoln had another close bedmate in New Salem: his 18-year-old cousin Billy Greene, who drooled over Abe’s muscular physique, writing, “His thighs were as perfect as a human being Could be.” Later, as president, Lincoln developed a crush on Elmer Ellsworth, a debonair assistant to his election campaign, and arranged a high military position for him. When Ellsworth was killed by a sharpshooter while removing a Confederate flag from a hotel in Alexandria, Virginia, the disconsolate Lincoln began spending his nights with a studly young bodyguard at the presidential retreat outside Washington, D.C. Thirty years later, the regiment’s official historian proudly recalled that this new favorite, the young Captain David Derickson, “advanced so far in the president's confidence and esteem that in Mrs. Lincoln's absence he frequently spent the night at his cottage, sleeping in the same bed with him, and — it is said — making use of his Excellency’s night shirt!'' The pressures of hiding his homosexual urges, Tripp argues, help to explain Lincoln’s recurring depressions.

Post coitum omne animal triste est sive gallus et mulier

Anyone who has lived in a Catholic monastery (as I did at one time) knows that saying. It's used as a justification and rationalization for celibacy.

Usually the only part that is translated is "post coitum omne animal triste est" which means "after sex all animals are sad." Usually ignored is the second part: "sive gallus et mulier" which means "except for the cock and the woman."

(And I use the word "cock" correctly. It means a male chicken. A hen is a female chicken. Both male and female chickens roost; therefore they are both roosters. The word "rooster" was a first used as a euphemistic substitution for "cock" in the 19th century when the word "cock," which was commonly used by the "lower classes" to mean penis, was discovered by the "middle classes." When the "petit bourgeoisie" realized that "cock" was also the slang word for penis they switched to a less troublesome word, rooster, for the male chicken.)

I was taught in the monastery that the saying came from Aristotle (or maybe Spinoza) but the contributors to Language Hat disagree.

According to Wikipedia:

Sexual intercourse can sometimes lead to a feeling of melancholy called PCT, or post-coital tristesse (from Latin post-coital, and French tristesse, literally — “sadness”). This is more common in men than in women. Many PCT sufferers may also exhibit strong feelings of anxiety, anywhere from five minutes, to two hours after coitus.

The phenomenon is referred to by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza in his Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione when he said "For as far as sensual pleasure is concerned, the mind is so caught up in it, as if at peace in a [true] good, that it is quite prevented from thinking of anything else. But after the enjoyment of sensual pleasure is past, the greatest sadness follows. If this does not completely engross, still it thoroughly confuses and dulls the mind."

Anyone who has had sex with women or observed chickens (as I have) knows that both cocks and women do not feel any lassitude after sexual intercourse probably because they do not expend as much energy as males. Ejaculating semen is draining for all males except cocks and probably the other lower orders of the animal kingdom.

William Morris Meredith and Richard Harteis

The poet, William Morris Meredith.

We watched the movie Marathon tonight and enjoyed it so much that I decided to Google it. It's based on the book by Harteis who was Meredith's partner for 36 years.

From IMdB:

Explores the relationship between two poets Richard Harteis and William Meredith, former US poet laureate and winner of every major American award for poetry including the 1988 Pulitzer prize.

In the 17th year of friendship, William suffers a debilitating stroke. Richard stands by his partner fighting for his right to care for him, despite the inevitable restrictions on his own life and against the wishes of William's family. The strength to overcome disability with dignity becomes a lesson in physical and spiritual endurance, hard won knowledge indeed.

Meredith died in 2007 and Harteis published a book of poems, Legacy, the same year. From Peter Klappert's review of Legacy:

Legacy is a series of poems for Richard Harteis’s lover of 36 years, the gentle, quietly elegant and rather traditional poet William Meredith.
...
If Meredith’s poems are less read today than the work of Robert Lowell and John Berryman, his friends and contemporaries, it may be because he employs his mastery more quietly and because he was, as Harteis says in “Evensong,” a “model of / civility, the ultimate good guy,” a poet who did not expose, let alone exploit, his private, most personal life. Emotion in Meredith’s poems is no less honest and intense, but it is subtle and more objectified. Loneliness is a recurring theme. The Open Sea begins with its title poem:

We say the sea is lonely; better say
Ourselves are lonesome creatures whom the sea
Gives neither yes not no for company.

The next poem is the lovely, delicate “Sonnet on Rare Animals”:

Like deer rat-tat before we reach the clearing
I frighten what I brought you out to see,
Telling you who are tired by now of hearing
How there are five, how they take no fright of me.
I tried to point out fins inside the reef
Where the coral reef had turned the water dark;
The bathers kept the beach in half-belief
But would not swim and could no see the shark.
I have alarmed on your behalf and others’
Sauntering things galore.
It is this way with verse and animals
And love, that when you point you lose them all.
Startled or on a signal, what is rare
Is off before you have it anywhere.

...
In an inspired act of matchmaking, Maxine Kumin introduced William Meredith and Richard Harteis around 1971, and despite the 28-year difference in their ages William and Richard were devoted to each other for the rest of William’s life.

Legacy opens on “Memorial Day, 2007,” as Richard keeps vigil by William’s bed “in the hospital penthouse,” “alone with / my dying lover contemplating / hospice decisions, what to hold / what to give.” Richard uses “lover,” rather than the asexual and antiseptic “partner,” to convey the depth and intimacy of their bond and to make it unequivocal that they were more to each other than simply devoted companions. Anyone who has had to make “hospice decisions” will recognize the anguish in Richard’s phrase. As he struggles, alone, with such awful responsibility, William, who had been a navy aviator in World War Two and the Korean War, breathes

steadily into the blue
oxygen mask, preparing for lift off.
What adventure awaits you? This
private mission we all must undertake.

The succeeding poems, all addressed to William in a kind of conversation Richard has with silence, record a survivor’s adjustments and the way dailiness is infused with memory, loneliness and grief.

From Wikipedia:

William Morris Meredith, Jr. (9 January 1919 – 30 May 2007) was an American poet and educator. He was Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1978 to 1980.
...
He worked briefly for the New York Times before joining the United States Navy as a flier. Meredith re-enlisted in the Korean War, receiving two Air Medals.

In 1988 Meredith was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and a Los Angeles Times Book Award for Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems and in 1997 he received the National Book Award for Effort at Speech.

That book was about his struggle to relearn speaking.

In 1983, he suffered a stroke and was immobilized for two years. As a result of the stroke he suffered with expressive aphasia, which affected his ability to produce language. Meredith ended his teaching career and could not write poetry during this period. He regained many of his language skills after intensive therapy and traveling to Britain for treatment.

Harteis is still alive. Here's his pic from his Facebook page:



















Harteis and Meredith in 2006, the year before Meredith died:

Abe Lincoln and Joshua Speed

I've read about how Lincoln and Speed slept in the same bed before but was Abe gay?

“We are getting closer to the day that a majority of younger, less homophobic historians will at long last accept the evidence of Lincoln’s same-sex component,” John Stauffer, chair of Harvard University’s Department of American Civilization, told Gay City News, adding, “ We’re already seeing the beginnings of a trend that will amount to a major paradigm shift.”

Stauffer is one of the nation’s leading experts on the Civil War era, and in his latest — and best-selling — book, “Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln,” he supports the thesis that Joshua Speed was, as he put it, “Lincoln’s soulmate and the love of his life.”

And in the latest issue of the scholarly journal Reviews of American History, Stauffer hammers home this point, writing, “In light of what we know about romantic friendship at the time, coupled with the facts surrounding Speed’s and Lincoln’s friendship, there is no reason to suppose they weren’t physically intimate at some point during their four years of sleeping together in the same small bed, long after Lincoln could afford a bed of his own. To ignore this, as most scholars do, is to pretend that same-sex carnal relationships were abnormal. It thus presumes a dislike or fear about such relationships, reflecting a presentist and homophobic perspective.”

In his groundbreaking 2005 book “The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,” the late C.W. Tripp meticulously assembled the considerable body of historical evidence for Lincoln’s same-sex affinities, including his love affair with Speed.
...
A majority of Lincoln scholars dumped on Tripp’s book when it was published five years ago, but the “paradigm shift” on Lincoln of which Stauffer speaks is not only being led by younger historians like himself.
...
In a lengthy article entitled “Abraham Lincoln and the Tripp Thesis” in a recent issue of one of the oldest scholarly journals devoted to the iconic president, the Lincoln Herald, a senior Lincoln historian and author of numerous Lincoln books, the octogenarian William Hanchett, professor of history emeritus at the University of California/ San Diego, “challenges historians to either refute the Tripp thesis or to rewrite Lincoln’s biography. Hanchett believes that Tripp is correct at least in the broad outline of his work and finds it frustrating that most historians, rather than confronting this pioneering study, choose to ignore it,” as the Lincoln Herald’s editors put it in introducing Hanchett’s revealing, carefully footnoted essay on Lincoln’s same-sex affinities.

Hanchett in particular breaks new ground when he deconstructs what we know of the much-ignored secret Memo books kept by Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon as he spent a quarter century intensively researching his massive “Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life,” published in 1889. The UC/ San Diego scholar details how he believes that the otherwise thorough Tripp missed the evidence there that backs up Hanchett’s view that “Lincoln’s secret” was homosexuality.

“A significant number of Lincoln’s contemporaries,” Hanchett writes, “must have known of or strongly suspected his secret. The existence of Herndon’s Memo books proves it. His rowdy friends in New Salem must have wondered why [Lincoln] declined to participate with them in their revels, and almost certainly some of them must have figured it out. They knew about homosexuality, only the word was unknown to them.”
...
One of the few traditional Lincolnists to describe — however obliquely — the lifelong Lincoln-Speed relationship as homosexual was the Illinois poet Carl Sandburg, in his masterful, six-volume Lincoln biography. In the 1926 tome titled “The Prairie Years,” Sandburg wrote that both Lincoln and Speed had “a streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets.”

“I do not feel my own sorrows more keenly than I do yours,” Lincoln wrote Speed in one letter. And elsewhere: “You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting.” In a detailed retelling of the Lincoln-Speed love story — including the “lust at first sight” encounter between the two young men, when Lincoln readily accepted Speed’s eager invitation to share his narrow bed — Tripp notes that Speed was the only human being to whom the president ever signed his letters with the unusually tender (for Lincoln) “yours forever” — a salutation Lincoln never even used with his wife.

Speed himself acknowledged, “No two men were ever so intimate.” And Tripp credibly describes Lincoln’s near nervous breakdown following Speed’s decision to end their four-year affair by returning to his native Kentucky.
...
Tripp’s book was remarkable and precedent-shattering because, for the first time, he restores names and faces (more than just Speed’s) to a number of those previously invisible homosexual companions and love objects of the most venerated of America’s presidents, among them: Henry C. Whitney, another of Lincoln’s law colleagues; the young Billy Greene, a New Salem contemporary of Lincoln’s and another bedmate (who admired Lincoln’s thighs); Nat Grigsby; and A.Y. Ellis. Another was the handsome David Derickson, by nine years the president’s junior, captain of President Lincoln’s bodyguard. Tripp describes in great detail how Derickson was the object of “the kinds of gentle and concentrated high-focus attention from Lincoln that Henry C. Whitney, from having himself once been on the receiving end, well described: ‘[It was] as if he wooed me to close intimacy and friendship, a kind of courtship, as indeed it was.’”

The rest of the article is the predictable Bush-bashing using former Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman as punch-bag.

Lincoln and Speed:

Name-dropping: famous people I have met - the porn star edition

I have not liked most of the famous people I have met. One of the few that I liked was Alicia Silverstone who came to dinner one night in the restaurant that I owned in San Francisco. She was nice and friendly.

The first famous people that I met were Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski who were on vacation in London in 1969 and came into the drug-store at which I worked. She was lovely and very pregnant. He gave me the creeps. She was murdered by Charles Manson's ghouls a few months later.

Then in 1976 I worked in a restaurant one of whose owners was Yehudi Menuhin. He was okay but a bit distant and snobbish.

In 1979 I moved to San Francisco. The woman who had gotten me the job in Menuhin's restaurant in London also immigrated to the USA and got me a job catering a birthday party for George Lucas' daughter. I did not like him at all.

Around the same time I met then California Governor Jerry Brown at the Zen Center in San Francisco. I like him even though I did not agree with him politically but he was friendly and seemed sincere. Later I met Tom Haydn, the politician who had once been married to Jane Fonda. I took an instant dislike to him and probably would have loathed him even if I had agreed with his politics.

In 1979 and 1980 I also met two other people in San Francisco who were not yet famous. At the time that I met them they both worked as "masseurs" (a "job" that I, and many others, did at the time.) Soon after I met them, they both started making porn movies. (I was also good-looking in those days and I probably would have done so too if I'd had a bigger dick.)

I met Neal Shaw on the number 43/Masonic bus which we both used to catch at the same bus-stop. I was headed home from my job in a restaurant and Neal was headed for night-classes at City College. He was a very sweet guy; a strange mixture of natural shyness and a superficial but very boldly assertive sexual personality. I was very attracted to him but was far too shy in those days to accept his come-on.

(Also there was something about him that warned me off. I've always been the "marrying kind" which means that I usually fall in love with whomever I have sex with and I sensed a certain aura of danger about Shaw.)

One day he stopped catching the bus and soon after that I saw him in a couple of porn movies made by Buckshot or Colt. Then he disappeared altogether and I hope that he wasn't one of the 14 friends that I lost to AIDS in 1981-2.

You can see Neal's G-rated pics here and the X-rated pics are here.

A few months later I met Kristen Bjorn through a friend of mine from England. Kristen also was a very sweet guy. Again I was attracted but, as I said I've always been the "marrying kind" and, in those days, I was very into astrology and decided that he was not the right guy for me. I also did not trust my friend from England. He had played match-maker for Kristen and me and, knowing how sneaky and manipulative he was, I feared that he would intrude on my relationship.

A while later Kristen made a few porn movies for Falcon and then went on to become a famous porn movie director.

You can read about Kristen here and see his X-rated pics here.

Name-dropping - porn stars I have met: Neal Shaw

For the story of how I met him, see here. For X-rated pictures of Shaw, go here.

Name-dropping - porn stars I have met: Kristen Bjorn

Kristen Bjorn:

His real name is Robert Russell. He was born 12 October 1957 in London, England, the son of a Russian mother and a British father. He was raised in Washington, D.C., where his father was stationed as a diplomat.

Bjorn arrived in San Francisco in 1978, where he encountered the gay community for the first time. “[I]t was all very strange to me.” Encouraged by the ideal of male beauty that he found in gay erotic magazines, Bjorn took up working out and paying attention to his own physique. Around 1980, he was photographed by Fred Bisonnes for Mandate magazine. This was followed by two appearances in Falcon videos: “Biker’s Liberty” (Falcon Studios 30, 1983) and “The New Breed” (Falcon Studios 32, 1983). Falcon chose the pseudonym Kristen Bjorn for him due to his resemblance to the Swedish tennis player Björn Borg.

In 1982, Bjorn arrived in Brazil, where he was to spend eight years, until 1990. Initially, he worked as a photographer, producing as many as 20 or 25 photo sets a month. His first video, Tropical Heatwave, appeared in 1989. This production set the pattern for the dozens more that were to follow:

1. Given his interest in travel and foreign cultures,[6] many of Bjorn’s videos feature men of clearly identifiable ethnic backgrounds and nationalities in typical surroundings. The titles of his videos are indicative of this characteristic: Carnival in Rio (1989), Manhattan Latin” (1990), Caribbean Beat (1990), A Sailor in Sydney (1990), “Montreal Men” (1992), The Vampire of Budapest (1995), and so forth.

2. Bjorn prefers to work with amateur models rather than with porn stars. In his early films, the majority of his performers identified themselves as heterosexual.

3. Bjorn places great emphasis on the quality of his photography; it usually takes him about four days to film a single scene. Consequently, his production budget is unusually high given the standards of the gay porn industry.

4. Bjorn typically lives in the country in which his videos are produced. Thus, his emigration to Australia in 1990 gave rise to what he calls his “Australian trilogy” of movies;[7] when he returned to Brazil in 1993, a number of South American-themed films followed.

Kristen Bjorn currently resides in Barcelona, Spain.

The bottom picture of Bjorn directing a movie in Costa Rica was taken many years after I knew him. For the story of how I met him, see here. For X-rated pics, see here.

Merchant- Ivory

Ishmael Merchant (b. 1936 in Bombay) and James Ivory (b. Berkeley in 1928) were "long-term life partners" for 44 years until Merchant's death in 2005 at the age of 68 following surgery. They produced nearly 40 films.

Jack Kerouac: "Life is too sweet to waste it on self propaganda"

Ouch! I guess this applies to mini-bloggers in spades:

Among the items sold at the literary auction at Bonhams and Butterfields on Monday was a 1961 letter from Jack Kerouac to two friends, Jacques Beckwith and Lois Sorrells. Kerouac had been typing on the page, got a letter from Sorrells then switched gears, abandoning his thought (mostly) to write a letter to them. This is what he typed at the top of the page, before the letter:

I can just see the shabby literary man carrying a "bulging briefcase" rushing from one campus to another, one lecture club to another, nodding confirmation with his hosts that he is right, hurrying to the next town ... a whole gray career of proving himself to others, to as many as can hear him, that he was right ... till finally people say: "Here comes the self-prover again, O dear ... bring out the papers and the canapes." This my friend is what I will become if I accept all lecture offers, TV appearances, radio interviews and start arranging with reviewers and critics who want information and my books through me, a great long lifetime in a briefcase proving my work and my work itself stopped dead at the level where I took to proving myself. So, I say, life is too sweet to waste on self propaganda, I quit self promotion, I enter my page.

This was four years after the publication of Kerouac's greatest work, "On the Road." None of his other books would have the reach or impact of that book -- few do -- but he'd been publishing regularly in the years after. There was a 1958 follow-up, "The Dharma Bums," and "Lonesome Traveler" in 1960.

If you know Kerouac's biography, you know that in 1969 he died of internal bleeding associated with cirrhosis, brought on by years of excessive drinking. It is easy to look back at this refusenik Kerouac, the one crying against self-promotion, as the one who would hear the call of self-destruction, who was resigned, miserable, dissipated.

And yet.

Kerouac was only 47 when he died. Click to read the rest.

The Platonic Blowjob

The highlight of this weekend's New York Times Book Review is Dan Chiasson's highly entertaining review of The Best American Erotic Poems, a new anthology of humpy verse edited by David Lehman. After calling John Updike's "Fellatio" "perhaps the worst poem ever written on any subject," Chiasson gleefully quotes the poem: "It is beautiful to think / that each of these clean secretaries / at night, to please her lover, takes / a fountain into her mouth.” But Chiasson teases us with his description of the dirtiest poem in the anthology, W.H. Auden's "The Platonic Blow," which Chiasson can only call "is the dirtiest verse written since Rochester — I can’t even talk about it here."

So how dirty is it, really?

It is really, really, really, really dirty. Like a Penthouse Forum letter, except in lively verse, and with no women. It's sort of great, and also sort of cheesy and awful, and also occasionally hilarious. ("'Shall I rim you?' I whispered. He shifted his limbs in assent.") We feel compelled to reprint the entire thing, just because we never had any idea that W.H. Auden wrote an unbelievably filthy poem about an anonymous blow job.

According to the editor's note, Auden wrote the poem in 1948, and copies were circulated among friends and fans for years, before Ed Sanders (of the Fugs) printed an unauthorized version in 1965. Auden publicly denied authorship, which is why we can reprint this without permission and with impunity (as does the anthology, which doesn't include Auden's poem on its copyright page). Enjoy!

The Platonic Blow by W. H. Auden

It was a spring day, a day for a lay, when the air
Smelled like a locker-room, a day to blow or get blown;
Returning from lunch I turned my corner and there
On a near-by stoop I saw him standing alone.

I glanced as I advanced. The clean white T-shirt outlined
A forceful torso, the light-blue denims divulged
Much. I observed the snug curves where they hugged the behind,
I watched the crotch where the cloth intriguingly bulged.

Our eyes met. I felt sick. My knees turned weak.
I couldn't move. I didn't know what to say.
In a blur I heard words, myself like a stranger speak
"Will you come to my room?" Then a husky voice, "O.K."

I produced some beer and we talked. Like a little boy
He told me his story. Present address: next door.
Half Polish, half Irish. The youngest. From Illinois.
Profession: mechanic. Name: Bud. Age: twenty-four.

He put down his glass and stretched his bare arms along
The back of my sofa. The afternoon sunlight struck
The blond hairs on the wrist near my head. His chin was strong.
His mouth sucky. I could hardly believe my luck.

And here he was sitting beside me, legs apart.
I could bear it no longer. I touched the inside of his thigh.
His reply was to move closer. I trembled, my heart
Thumped and jumped as my fingers went to his fly.

I opened a gap in the flap. I went in there.
I sought for a slit in the gripper shorts that had charge
Of the basket I asked for. I came to warm flesh then to hair.
I went on. I found what I hoped. I groped. It was large.

He responded to my fondling in a charming, disarming way:
Without a word he unbuckled his belt while I felt.
And lolled back, stretching his legs. His pants fell away.
Carefully drawing it out, I beheld what I held.

The circumcised head was a work of mastercraft
With perfectly beveled rim of unusual weight
And the friendliest red. Even relaxed, the shaft
Was of noble dimensions with the wrinkles that indicate

Singular powers of extension. For a second or two,
It lay there inert, then suddenly stirred in my hand,
Then paused as if frightened or doubtful of what to do.
And then with a violent jerk began to expand.

By soundless bounds it extended and distended, by quick
Great leaps it rose, it flushed, it rushed to its full size.
Nearly nine inches long and three inches thick,
A royal column, ineffably solemn and wise.

I tested its length and strength with a manual squeeze.
I bunched my fingers and twirled them about the knob.
I stroked it from top to bottom. I got on my knees.
I lowered my head. I opened my mouth for the job.

But he pushed me gently away. He bent down. He unlaced
His shoes. He removed his socks. Stood up. Shed
His pants altogether. Muscles in arms and waist
Rippled as he whipped his T-shirt over his head.

I scanned his tan, enjoyed the contrast of brown
Trunk against white shorts taut around small
Hips. With a dig and a wriggle he peeled them down.
I tore off my clothes. He faced me, smiling. I saw all.

The gorgeous organ stood stiffly and straightly out
With a slight flare upwards. At each beat of his heart it threw
An odd little nod my way. From the slot of the spout
Exuded a drop of transparent viscous goo.

The lair of hair was fair, the grove of a young man,
A tangle of curls and whorls, luxuriant but couth.
Except for a spur of golden hairs that fan
To the neat navel, the rest of the belly was smooth.

Well hung, slung from the fork of the muscular legs,
The firm vase of his sperm, like a bulging pear,
Cradling its handsome glands, two herculean eggs,
Swung as he came towards me, shameless, bare.

We aligned mouths. We entwined. All act was clutch,
All fact contact, the attack and the interlock
Of tongues, the charms of arms. I shook at the touch
Of his fresh flesh, I rocked at the shock of his cock.

Straddling my legs a little I inserted his divine
Person between and closed on it tight as I could.
The upright warmth of his belly lay all along mine.
Nude, glued together for a minute, we stood.

I stroked the lobes of his ears, the back of his head
And the broad shoulders. I took bold hold of the compact
Globes of his bottom. We tottered. He fell on the bed.
Lips parted, eyes closed, he lay there, ripe for the act.

Mad to be had, to be felt and smelled. My lips
Explored the adorable masculine tits. My eyes
Assessed the chest. I caressed the athletic hips
And the slim limbs. I approved the grooves of the thighs.

I hugged, I snuggled into an armpit. I sniffed
The subtle whiff of its tuft. I lapped up the taste
Of its hot hollow. My fingers began to drift
On a trek of inspection, a leisurely tour of the waist.

Downward in narrowing circles they playfully strayed.
Encroached on his privates like poachers, approached the prick,
But teasingly swerved, retreated from meeting. It betrayed
Its pleading need by a pretty imploring kick.

"Shall I rim you?" I whispered. He shifted his limbs in assent.
Turned on his side and opened his legs, let me pass
To the dark parts behind. I kissed as I went
The great thick cord that ran back from his balls to his arse.

Prying the buttocks aside, I nosed my way in
Down the shaggy slopes. I came to the puckered goal.
It was quick to my licking. He pressed his crotch to my chin.
His thighs squirmed as my tongue wormed in his hole.

His sensations yearned for consummation. He untucked
His legs and lay panting, hot as a teen-age boy.
Naked, enlarged, charged, aching to get sucked,
Clawing the sheet, all his pores open to joy.

I inspected his erection. I surveyed his parts with a stare
From scrotum level. Sighting along the underside
Of his cock, I looked through the forest of pubic hair
To the range of the chest beyond rising lofty and wide.

I admired the texture, the delicate wrinkles and the neat
Sutures of the capacious bag. I adored the grace
Of the male genitalia. I raised the delicious meat
Up to my mouth, brought the face of its hard-on to my face.

Slipping my lips round the Byzantine dome of the head,
With the tip of my tongue I caressed the sensitive groove.
He thrilled to the trill. "That's lovely!" he hoarsely said.
"Go on! Go on!" Very slowly I started to move.

Gently, intently, I slid to the massive base
Of his tower of power, paused there a moment down
In the warm moist thicket, then began to retrace
Inch by inch the smooth way to the throbbing crown.

Indwelling excitements swelled at delights to come
As I descended and ascended those thick distended walls.
I grasped his root between left forefinger and thumb
And with my right hand tickled his heavy voluminous balls.

I plunged with a rhythmical lunge steady and slow,
And at every stroke made a corkscrew roll with my tongue.
His soul reeled in the feeling. He whimpered "Oh!"
As I tongued and squeezed and rolled and tickled and swung.

Then I pressed on the spot where the groin is joined to the cock,
Slipped a finger into his arse and massaged him from inside.
The secret sluices of his juices began to unlock.
He melted into what he felt. "O Jesus!" he cried.

Waves of immeasurable pleasures mounted his member in quick
Spasms. I lay still in the notch of his crotch inhaling his sweat.
His ring convulsed round my finger. Into me, rich and thick,
His hot spunk spouted in gouts, spurted in jet after jet.

Rimbaud and Verlaine: The Arsehole Sonnet

Dark and wrinkled like a violet carnation,
Humbly crouched amid the moss, it breathes,
Still moist with love that descends the gentle slope
Of white buttocks to its embroidered edge.

Filaments like tears of milk have wept
Under the savage wind that drives them off
Through little clots of russet earth
To disappear where inclination led them.

Oft did my dream suck at its vent;
My soul, envious of physical coitus, made it
Its musky dripstone and its nest of sobs.

'Tis the swooning conch, the fondling flute,
The tube from which the heavenly praline drops,
A female Canaan cocooned in muggy air.

Arthur Rimbaud et Paul Verlaine, 1871

Why Do All These Fags Keep Sucking My Cock?

Look, I'm not a hateful person or anything—I believe we should all live and let live. But lately, I've been having a real problem with these homosexuals. You see, just about wherever I go these days, one of them approaches me and starts sucking my cock.

Take last Sunday, for instance, when I casually struck up a conversation with this guy in the health-club locker room. Nothing fruity, just a couple of fellas talking about their workout routines while enjoying a nice hot shower. The guy looked like a real man's man, too—big biceps, meaty thighs, thick neck. He didn't seem the least bit gay. At least not until he started sucking my cock, that is.

Where does this queer get the nerve to suck my cock? Did I look gay to him? Was I wearing a pink feather boa without realizing it? I don't recall the phrase, "Suck my cock" entering the conversation, and I don't have a sign around my neck that reads, "Please, You Homosexuals, Suck My Cock."

I've got nothing against homosexuals. Let them be free to do their gay thing in peace, I say. But when they start sucking my cock, I've got a real problem.

Then there was the time I was hiking through the woods and came across a rugged-looking, blond-haired man in his early 30s. He seemed straight enough to me while we were bathing in that mountain stream, but, before you know it, he's sucking my cock!

What is it with these homos? Can't they control their sexual urges? Aren't there enough gay cocks out there for them to suck on without them having to target normal people like me?

Believe me, I have no interest in getting my cock sucked by some queer. But try telling that to the guy at the beach club. Or the one at the video store. Or the one who catered my wedding. Or any of the countless other homos who've come on to me recently. All of them sucked my cock, and there was nothing I could do to stop them.

I tell you, when a homosexual is sucking your cock, a lot of strange thoughts go through your head: How the hell did this happen? Where did this fairy ever get the idea that I was gay? And where did he get those fantastic boots?

It screws with your head at other times, too. Every time a man passes me on the street, I'm afraid he's going to grab me and drag me off to some bathroom to suck my cock. I've even started to visualize these repulsive cock-sucking episodes during the healthy, heterosexual marital relations I enjoy with my wife—even some that haven't actually happened, like the sweaty, post-game locker-room tryst with Vancouver Canucks forward Mark Messier that I can't seem to stop thinking about.

Things could be worse, I suppose. It could be women trying to suck my cock, which would be adultery and would make me feel tremendously guilty. As it is, I'm just angry and sickened. But, believe me, that's enough. I don't know what makes these homosexuals mistake me for a guy who wants his cock sucked, and, frankly, I don't want to know. I just wish there were some way to get them to stop.

I've tried all sorts of things, but it's all been to no avail. A few months back, I started wearing an intimidating-looking black leather thong with menacing metal studs in the hopes that it would frighten those faggots off, but it didn't work. In fact, it only seemed to encourage them. Then, I really started getting rough, slapping them around whenever they were sucking my cock, but that failed, too. Even pulling out of their mouths just before ejaculation and shooting sperm all over their face, chest, and hair seemed to have no effect. What do I have to do to get the message across to these swishes?

I swear, if these homosexuals don't take a hint and quit sucking my cock all the time, I'm going to have to resort to drastic measures—like maybe pinning them down to the cement floor of the loading dock with my powerful forearms and working my cock all the way up their butt so they understand loud and clear just how much I disapprove of their unwelcome advances. I mean, you can't get much more direct than that.

Semen therapy

From Health benefits of eating semen:

Semen Therapy is the practice of swallowing the ejaculation of a healthy man, three times a week or more, for the health benefits.

Semen is a natural source of proteins, vitamins, minerals and human specific components (TGFbeta etc.). Health building elements: Selenium, Glycoproteins, Testosterone, Blood-Group Antigens, Spermidine (a catalytic enzyme), Fructose, Zinc, Vitamins B12 and C.

The donor must be healthy: The man must not have STDs (Sexually transmitted disease) or a blood borne contagious disease. He must not have had acute long term exposure to poisons, heavy metals, radiation or intravenous injections.

The receiver must not be allergic to semen, sensitive to testosterone or have cancer tumors that could contact concentrated ejaculate (due to prostaglandins).
Swallowing semen three times a week or more does help prevent and fight cancer. source

Studie show that semen exposure reduces the risk of breast cancer "not less than 50%" source

University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine Department of Research Medicine source

Journal of Clinical Epidemiology source

Also semen content Selenium and Glycoproteins fight cancer
1. source

Another new link

I will ad this website to the sidebar - Affectionate Men:

A Photographic History of a Century of Male Couples

I found these photos to be both beautiful and profound. The times between 1860 and 1930 men were more free to hold hands, hug, even kiss, without the fear of being riduculed, beaten or labeled.

Regardless if the men pictured here were lovers or friends, the photographs let us all realize that today we live in a society where our emotional freedom and tolerance of others should have moved forward. Instead we seem to be moving backward every day.

Here is one of the pics:

Androphilia

Recently we saw a documentary about masculine homosexuals - mostly about famous football players and other athletes. But the author Jack Malebranche was also interviewed. His real name is Jack Donovan but he writes under the name Jack Malebranche. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his long-time male partner.

From the Free Library:

Androphilia by Jack Malebranche Scapegoat Publishing 15608 S. New Century Drive, Gardena, CA 90248 9780976403586, $12.95 www.SCBDistributors.com

Jack Malebranche, the author of Androphilia: A Manifesto Rejecting the Gay Identity Reclaiming Masculinity, is a bisexual man who prefers the company of and sexual relations with men--to the extent that he shares a long-term sexual and personal bond with another man. Yet he emphatically rejects the label "gay" because in today's culture the concept of "gay" has become intermingled with the concepts of feminization, abandoning masculinity, underachievement, and irresponsibility to the lengths of false victimhood.

Androphilia: A Manifesto rejects the baggage-laden gay identity, and calls for humankind to recognize homosexual desire as apolitical.

[He writes:]

The Gay Party tells us that we homosexuals must band together to fight against high-school bullies, and to encourage kids to 'come out' and ghettoize themselves into little gay support groups where they can become conversant in Party dogma and avoid ever having to learn to deal effectively with their straight peers.
...
The Gay Party insists we learn that we are victims of heterosexual oppression, and imagine that everyone is out to get us.

Malebranche prefers to substitute the word "androphile" for "gay" to describe himself, as he is an unrepentant advocate of the positive aspects of masculinity and male culture. Androphilia: A Manifesto does not attack or criticize those men (homosexual or heterosexual) who want to emulate effeminate qualities.

The crux of matter is not that men should be forced to be manly, but rather that the majority of them simply are manly, and should not be pressured by the gay culture to despise or reject their masculinity. Nor should a man's sexuality automatically define his hobbies, his politics, his interests, or who can or cannot be his friends. Though readers, regardless of gender or sexual orientation sexual orientation may not agree with all Androphilia has to say, Androphilia is invaluable for its core messages of being self-reliant and true to oneself, and for its frank discussion of whether "gay marriage" (as opposed to less radical measures like domestic partnerships, which are more likely to be successfully accepted nationwide) is needed at all to govern same-sex relationships incapable of producing children who are the biological offspring of both parents.

From Heathen Harvest:

Jack Malebranche was certainly not looking to make friends within the worldwide and ever expanding “Gay Community” when he set about writing Androphilia. Much like the massive upheaval of Lutheranism, Androphilia threatens to collapse the “Gay Identity” in upon itself revealing a new ideal by which to lead the homosexual community forward. Jack has come to liberate homosexual men from the trappings of sissydom by revealing the inherent but largely shunned masculinity in many homosexual males.

Written like a man impassioned to rescue his people who have been led astray to wander a barren and desolate domain divorced from their very nature Jack rains down blow after blow on “Gay Culture” breaking away the definitions and inhibitions of social and political agendas revealing the raw and undiscovered force of the true homosexual male identity. It comes as no surprise that such an ambitious declaration would find a home with Scapegoat Publishing whose motto reads “Blame Us.” No doubt with a title like roots. Androphilia – A Manifesto “Rejecting The Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity most of the magazines and publishers within the “Queer Press” would find Jack’s revolutionary ideas to be a threat to their investment in “Gay Culture.”

So what is Jack really attempting with Androphilia and is he successful? With so many books attempting to hand homosexual men theories on identity, community, sexuality, etc. is Androphilia a revealing or relevant voice in the din of self help books and feel good declarations of homosexual elitism? Testifying as a man loving homosexual I am compelled to declare this as one of the most relevant books on the subject of homosexuality that I have ever read.

Jack leads the reader on a journey buffered with historical and social references that trace the progression of attitudes and ideas about homosexuality and the men who participate in it from the glorified days of such masculine homosexual icons as Alexander the Great to the modern day gay ideal of female and feminine idealization. Through various approaches and angels Jack explores the historical / social progression of homosexuality becoming related to effeminate behavior and the eventual progression of homosexual males being defined as something “other” than their heterosexual male counterparts. This distinction has had devastating consequences leading homosexual males to become identified with anything but traditional masculinity in the rag tag rush to establish a new identity.

As naturally masculine homosexual male I found Jack’s book to be the missing link in my own life journey. Androphilia casts out a rescue rope to those of us floating in the ocean of “Gay Culture” adrift and alienated from the deification of femininity and the celebration of all things sissy and trivial. In order to break these stereotypes and liberate the queer community from these chains of self-imposed restriction Jack has had to deconstruct some of the highest held tenants of “Queer Culture” such as the myth that homosexuality is not a choice. Jack discusses how homosexual men in past centuries chose to marry women and have productive families whilst ignoring their homosexual impulses or else acting on them in secrecy. This proposition that homosexuals have choice as to whether they act upon such sexual impulses flies in the face of the “Queer” agenda yet no one can deny that having sex with anyone is indeed a choice driven by sexual impulse. The book is filled with many such taboo ideas that threaten to deconstruct the current Gay Rights political agenda. Though some may see this as threatening I found the idea empowering that I choose to share my flesh with men rather than being victim to some uncontrollable influence of nurture or nature that leaves one with a sense of victimization. Another revealing discussion is the idea that queer men lack respect in the eyes of their heterosexual male counterparts because they have largely abandoned the ideals and responsibilities of manhood and masculinity thus not making them men in the eyes of other men who shoulder the burden of masculinity. Ideas such as these reveal painful revelations which if addressed could heal the rift and alienation felt by homosexual from society and mainstream culture.

The core theory of the book is the proposition of a new identity titled “Androphile” which describes a male love of the masculine. This Androphile is in many ways the counter image of the modern “Fag”. The Androphile enjoys the company of his fellow man, enjoys traditionally male pursuits and forms of recreation and as an extension of this enjoyment of the masculine his sexuality is also indulged by enjoying the fraternal sexual company of his fellow man. This new “Androphile” identity is exactly what has been missing in the modern gay culture whose only emulation of the masculine is embodied in such staged like productions as the Village People who fall far from an authentic representation of masculinity. Jack is careful not to dismiss the effeminate queer man but rather offers those who fall outside this stereotype a shelter. Jack acknowledges that though some queer men are inherently feminine somehow we have all become defined as such leaving no place in queer or mainstream culture for the masculine identified homosexual male.

In addition to proposing some very compelling ideas and arguments Jack also offers suggestions for homosexual men looking to deprogram their queer / sissy identity and begin exploring their inherent masculine nature. The author discusses the roots of the “queer inferiority” complex and offers encouraging ideas on how to find your niche amongst other men regardless of their sexual orientation. By laying claim to traditional masculine roles, ideals, and responsibilities masculine inclined homosexual men might find that missing something that gay culture threw in the gutter as they stampeded into the mainstream spotlight.

I found Androphilia to be a gripping read. The book flows easily between chapters and the progression is nicely structured leading from one conclusion to another. Concise is another word which applies to the book. Wrapping up at a mere one hundred and forty- three pages Androphilia is anything but excessive. The author trims the fat and delivers his ideas without much waste of the readers time. Though the book is rather short the ideas inside may take the reader some time to digest. Some of the suggestions where so foreign to me I had to set the book aside for a week at a time in order to fully ponder the suggestions and allow my own thinking to readjust to the new ideas. At times I found myself rejecting some of the ideas the author suggesting only to later find myself agreeing after my initial defenses relaxed. And that is nothing to say about the discussions this books has spurred amidst me and my friends.

Lastly, this book is a worthwhile read not only for homosexual men but for any man. It is the first discussion about masculinity of its nature I have ever read and it left me wondering what we have yet to discover about ourselves as men in light of the feminist movement which has published countless books addressing the reality of womanhood.

I thank Jack for going out on such a tenuous limb to write and publish this much needed manifesto and I encourage all the men and women reading this to purchase a copy and allow your hard set ideas about masculinity and self under go the trial of Androphilia! For very dismissive or denouncing review this book might receive in the mainstream queer press it is sure to be held in high regard by the many refugees of “Queer Culture.”

Matt Moody in the Gay and Lesbian Times:

“I am not gay.” Jack Malebranche’s first four words hooked me from the start – an epiphany, a rallying call, a simple declarative statement that revoked the emasculating and encapsulating power of the word, “gay.”

As a manifesto, Malebranche’s Androphilia: A Manifesto Rejecting the Gay Identity Reclaiming Masculinity asserts a point of view I’ve long shared which is that despite my personal sexual preferences, I really have very little in common with so-called gay culture – a culture broadcasted, controlled, and encouraged by the Gay Party, a radically leftist group of past counter-cultural rebels who have now congregated into a truly corporate machine, rolling dollar after dollar into special interest legislation bent in one direction, not open to dissent or self-reflection. It’s a party so desperate for normalcy that it ignores the many problems plaguing its own members – a disparate hodgepodge of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender, and myriad other confusing neo-liberal labels too complex and arbitrary to list, a party so hungry for acceptance and inclusion that it consistently seeks approval and acknowledgement from a society that would rather see it disappear.

Androphilia as a concept is a rebuttal of the word gay and everything it connotes and promotes. Per Malebranche, “the word gay describes a whole cultural and political movement that promotes anti-male feminism, victim mentality, and leftist politics … gays stand for the notion that sexuality engenders ethnicity and complete social identity.”

Androphilia, on the other hand, is at once a rejection of the gay identity and its clichéd effeminate stereotype, and reclamation of masculinity via the quest for an authentic masculine identity. Not the uber-queer choose-your-own-form-of-masculine definition, which is often just another way to say effeminate, and not the hyper-masculine invention by leather men and bears which is just another form of drag, but a qualified masculinity based on physical, essential, and cultural elements outlined in the text.

So the book addresses how reclaiming a masculine identity is necessary to counteract the negative and effeminizing forces of modern gay culture. It promotes a masculine ideal of self-reliance, independence, and personal responsibility through achievement, respect, and integrity. Best of all, the author suggests that men should build alliances with other men, including heterosexual men. Androphile men should develop strong relationships with heterosexual men, not just others with the same preference. Because the fact of the matter is, the forces emasculating gay men are doing the same to straight men. If you disagree, think about the political-correctness of metrosexuality and other gender blending in today’s popular culture. The author’s belief is that only through building an alliance with other masculine men will the tide turn in the favor of reclaiming and establishing a masculine identity again, for all men, yet especially for men who love or prefer men – androphiles.

In this age of squalid political correctness, to speak out as a homosexual or androphile against organizations such as the HRC or GLAAD could be equivocated by some as biting the hand that feeds you. However, the named powerful organizations do so little to counteract the negative characteristics and qualities of the loosely knit and contrived communities they represent.

GLAAD glorifies effeminate affectations and representations of gay men as positive developments in the mainstream media. They aren’t. Effeminate gay men on television are like blackface actors in southern theaters during segregation. They do nothing but promote an emasculating stereotype that continues to further weaken gay men in the eyes of heterosexual men. HRC gushes about its achievements in corporations and political campaigns. Each organization touts ephemeral qualities of inclusion, diversity, and the intoxicating idea of equality. Yet anyone who speaks out against either organization out of a sense of pragmatism is castigated, shunned, or patronized for their dissent.

Republican homosexuals are treated as villains. Libertarians are scoffed at. Constitutionalists are trivialized. Anyone who doesn’t agree with a feminist perspective is ridiculed. Masculine-identified men are labeled as internally homophobic. But it is worse than that. The current gay “culture” fosters young adults into a world of designer drugs, materialism, body dysmorphia – bigorexia and anorexia, classism and a plethora of other social maladies.

The community is, in actuality, a disaggregated and forced collection of people who frankly don’t really like each other that much. Nor should they. If you disagree, ask a lesbian how much she really likes going to a circuit party – and perhaps she could take the kids, too! Ask a military officer how comfortable he or she would feel on a Pride float. Proud of what? The GLBT alphabet soup with all of its anti-war Democrats? Or proud of their service to the country, which seems to matter to gays only if you reached veteran status and came out? Online profiles for horny gay men tout list after list of racial, HIV-status, age, money and political preferences. Gay bars are segregated along the same lines. Do we really have that much in common, or are we just pretending to?

The author studies and criticizes the rationale behind the research of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and his urning theory on homosexuality and argues instead that there should be a more libertarian approach to sexuality, the same approach that resulted in the decriminalization of sodomy laws in the Western world. Greek culture, Roman warriors, and other non-gay forms of male relationships are examined to contrast with the current anti-masculine gay sexuality.

Another critical point in the book is how men who disavow gay culture should also remove themselves from what he believes is a culture of victimization and being the underdog. He asserts that if someone defines themselves by their travails, they will never truly be free of them. Most GLBT people these days haven’t faced that much harassment, if any, so gay culture continues to promote a victim mentality even in those who have never been victims.

Personally, the vindication I feel in reading this book is that finally, finally, another gay man is advocating what I’ve believed for years: the belief that men who admire or love men should be more responsible, not give into the effeminate gay cultural fad, avoid the personal, career, and social pitfalls common to those who live in a completely emasculated world, and build stronger ties with heterosexual men who share common interests.

I agree. I am not gay, either. I’m an androphile.

From Jack's own website selling his book:

The word gay has never described mere homosexuality. Gay is a subculture, a slur, a set of gestures, a slang, a look, a posture, a parade, a rainbow flag, a film genre, a taste in music, a hairstyle, a marketing demographic, a bumper sticker, a political agenda and philosophical viewpoint. Gay is a pre-packaged, superficial persona—a lifestyle. It’s a sexual identity that has almost nothing to do with sexuality.

Androphilia is a rejection of the overloaded gay identity and a return to a discussion of homosexuality in terms of desire: a raw, apolitical sexual desire and the sexualized appreciation for masculinity as experienced by men. The gay sensibility is a near-oblivious embrace of a castrating slur, the nonstop celebration of an age-old, emasculating stigma applied to men who engaged in homosexual acts. Gays and radical queers imagine that they challenge the status quo, but in appropriating the stigma of effeminacy, they merely conform to and confirm long-established expectations. Men who love men have been paradoxically cast as the enemies of masculinity—slaves to the feminist pipe dream of a ‘gender-neutral’ (read: anti-male, pro-female) world.

Androphilia is a manifesto full of truly dangerous ideas: that men can have sex with men and retain their manhood, that homosexuality can be about championing a masculine ideal rather than attacking it, and that the wicked, oppressive ‘construct of masculinity’ despised by the gay community could actually enrich and improve the lives of homosexual and bisexual men. Androphilia is for those men who never really bought what the gay community was selling; it’s a challenge to leave the gay world completely behind and to rejoin the world of men, unapologetically, as androphliles, but more importantly, as men.

The book, Androphilia, also has a Facebook page.

There is also a blog called Androphilia.

Jack's Bio.

Jack's blog.

Jack and his partner and some friends (Jack contacted me to say, "One quick correction - the guy with me in that first photo is not my partner. He's a good pal of mine named Trevor Blake, and while I'm certain he wouldn't be offended, his girlfriend would probably disapprove of the confusion."):

New Age Redneck

I not only own a farm but a business and I'm a capitalist pig, a libertarian who usually votes Republican mostly because I own guns and value the Second Amendment and don't like socialism/welfarism.

But I'm also tree-hugger. Most of the farm is actually forest and it's in the middle of a national forest. I recycle and aim for sustainable living. Yep, I'm a Green Red in a Blue state. And yes I'm "spiritual" - practice kriya yoga (meditation) and study the I Ching.

I guess I am pretty serious. I was not born in America. I was born and raised in a Third World police state. Life for me was a heavy serious business from the get-go. I immigrated to the USA when I was 30 and my character had already been formed. So, yes, I'm quite serious about serious things but I have a wicked sense of humor and love being a clown in the right situation.

My seriousness is probably the reason that I don't enjoy chatting. I'm not good at small talk and prefer to get right down to business. So, yes I can sometimes be overly blunt and impatient.

Like our Founders, I believe that government is a necessary evil and that it's only purpose is to maintain law and order and protect our "unalienable rights" and private property. I vote Republican not because I agree with it 100% - I only agree with about 60% of the GOP agenda but I disagree with the Democratic Party's agenda almost 100%. The GOP is the lesser of two evils.

I'm a Republican for the following reasons:

I'm an immigrant from a police state. (I also lived in Europe for 8 years before coming to the states.) The USA is the best place in the world. I don't take American for granted and I don't think Europe is more civilized than the USA. It's simply more socialist and the problem with socialism is, as Margaret Thatcher said and as Europeans are now discovering, that eventually you run out of other peoples' money.

I own guns because I have to for protection and hunting. There is no police force in the boonies. We're on your own. Us country bumpkins do not rely as much on government services as city slickers do and I'm a businessman. Which party taxes us less, protects our property rights and defends our Second Amendment rights better?