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The five guys are swishy as all get-out, but they don't spend the entire hour parading around in Speedos or anything.

No, the grooming guy and the cooking guy are fairly masculine, making only a few obligatory queer remarks for humor. Actually, the entire gay dialogue is camp upon camp. I think the cook and the grooming guy would, in ordinary life, be rather normal and personable, rather unremarkable even. They might even post here at FR. Perhaps using names like...oh, I don't know...MineralGuy or in-man-69. But I digress...

Oh, yeah, when Tivoing through the show, I saw the fashion queen try to lure the straight guy into trying on a pair of Speedos. He refused but got the fashion queen to try them on for him. And I noticed another scene where they were fitting one of these guys for a pair of trousers and it looked like they groped him while fussing over the crotch line and fit.

I think the show is pressing something of a psychological strategy for physical intimacy between sodomites and normal men. There is a definite sense of trying to knock down the barrier. This should not surprise greatly given the number of sodomites whose sole interest is in seducing normal men to their degraded lifestyle. Sodomites are as tweaky over normal men as some normal men are over lesbians.

Perhaps it's all too German for me to explain.

...I think the show is pressing something of a psychological strategy for physical intimacy between sodomites and normal men. There is a definite sense of trying to knock down the barrier. This should not surprise greatly given the number of sodomites whose sole interest is in seducing normal men to their degraded lifestyle. Sodomites are as tweaky over normal men as some normal men are over lesbians.

Lesbians? It's getting more and more confusing, tangled, and ambiguous. It's been a dozen years since I started first working out at a "Rally's Health Club". After moving to the trendy, hip, east side of town, and becoming accustomed to dressing and undressing around guys who were, uh, "different" than me (among other signs, you could often tell by the ox-eyed looks and stares), I thought I was more or less inured, or used to that sort of thing. "Live and let live". As long as it's not intruding into my invisible comfort zone.

Ha! I even supposed I was pretty good at sensing who was and who was not a buggerer. It was a little over a year ago that I found myself with a new co-worker who seemed like a great guy-- verbally agile, good sense of humor, quite a few similar interests... He was married and played amateur hockey in his spare time. Rode a Harley. Lucky me, I got to find out that, although he was married, he liked having "something on the side... something a little different..."

[Musical cue, Maestro, please: (wink, wink)

"One Night in Bangkok"/"Putting on the Ritz"...]

To say I was taken by complete surprise would be an understatement. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I sort of pretended I hadn't heard when he asked if I'd ever had any 'gay experiences'. (Thereby learning the meaning of what gay folks refer to as "denial", I've been told.) I told myself I really hadn't seen what I knew I'd seen in his face.

Wow, did that ever turn out to be fantastically helpful... Finding out this man's "secret" has been one of the most painfully awkward things that's ever happened to me. It made working on the job--in the next cubicle over-- uh, more than a little tense. I tried to bury everything with jokes, ignoring the subject (not asking, not telling) but after much initial success that strategy failed completely. It also didn't stop him from continuing to make subtle and not-so-subtle come-ons. That was to my face, of course. When I wasn't around (I eventually discovered from other co-workers) he was "stabbing my back", especially with our department head.

Anyway... to make a long story a little less painfully tedious... I found myself in the store with his wife a couple of weeks ago. I didn't know what to say, or how to continue the conversation--which I'd started-- about "Jellyhead", her husband. She's an only child, incapable of having kids, who stands to inherit A LOT of money when her aging sole surviving parent kicks off. I just didn't know how to blurt it all out--clearly, concisely, unambiguously--in 2 or 3 short, simple, declarative sentances. ...It's not my story. How do I tell it...?

So, to get to the point for this thread, yes, I think I agree with you that there are "sodomites interested in seducing normal men"... But whether or not they satisfy community standards for publicly visible swishiness is completely irrelevent. The biggest part of the issue is the secrecy, and with it, the double-standard that these guys think they own.

It's not even a liberal/conservative issue. After talking to one very happily "outted" gay guy and finding out just how many married guys go to "the bars", I'm convinced there are plenty of these kinds of guys who think of themselves as "conservative" (and often, "libertarian"). I'd also be willing to wager heavily that, as a group, this particular sub-stratum of society is given to misogynism (contempt for women) and the more overtly crude sorts of racism. (Possibly because they can't risk acknowledging their own self-hatred, but have to find some sort of outlet.) I'd be willing to go out on a limb and bet they're evenly divided between "liberals" and "conservatives", or that their actual place on the political spectrum tends equally towards both extremes of the scale. For every Jean Genet, there is an Ernst Rohm. Or something like that. The socially liberal and socially traditional conservatives on this board (along with the lurking socially conservative liberals and the more-or-less broad-minded centrists) can keep beating each other to death, but I think it's a waste of effort.

Some of you sound like you're talking about completely eliminating men on TV giving fashion advice or cooking or style tips. Geeze, what a boost to the economy that will provide. People prevented from pursuing personal goals by (presumably) some sort of state-sponsored, heavy-fisted legal injunction. Leaving that particular field wide open for all the Harley-riding, hockey-playing *invisible* buggerers. What was that you were saying about 'Germans', Dubya?