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Wednesday Wetness #12
21 Wednesday Mar 2012
Posted It's A Gay World, Wednesday Wetness
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21 Wednesday Mar 2012
Posted It's A Gay World, Wednesday Wetness
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21 Wednesday Mar 2012
Posted It's A Gay World, XXX Games
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Moms, for some unfathomable reason seeing as how neither of my parents ever learned to swim, decided to enroll my brothers and I – at the age of three – in the Red Cross’ swimming classes at the local high school during the summer months. At that age it’s not so much about learning to swim as it is about learning how not to drown. That’s not a bad skill to master at any age. Quickly passing through the various levels of water safety over the next two summers, by the age of five all three of us began swimming competitively. My older brother and I both continued through college.
When you join a swim team at the age of five, you start off in the ‘six and under’ class, competing with others like you who are still mastering the art of walking without falling down. At that age the competition is more about reaching the other end of the pool than it is about racing, though someone manages to hit the wall before the others and gets rewarded with both a nasty looking bump on the head and a ribbon. As you get older you move up in age class, learn how to hit the wall with your hand instead of your head, and through either persistence or talent learn to specialize in and perfect a stroke.
I was drawn to the backstroke. One of my early coaches was a backstroker and watching her glide across the pool spouting a mouthful of water into the air that would make Moby Dick jealous sealed my fate. That it is one of the few sports events in the world that you can engage in while lying on your back didn’t hurt either. It’s not the fastest stroke, in fact it is the opposite. But backstrokers master the flip turn, a fairly impressive feat if done correctly since you hit the turn blind, which is always a crowd pleaser. And if you are any good, the backstroke is the initial leg in the medley relay – you can put your team far out in front of the other competitors from the start, which always makes you popular with your teammates.
Spending your youth in California hanging out at the pool during the summer is not a bad way to grow up. Spending your youth as a gay man in the making surrounded by buddies who all are wearing what amounts to nothing more than a skimpy pair of underwear ain’t bad either. By the time you enter High School and have glommed onto the fact that there is something besides peeing that your dick is good for, spending a good part of your year hanging out with a bunch of almost naked guys, most of whom have bodies to die for, for a gay boy, can’t be beat. And entering High School as a nationally ranked swimmer negates the trials and tribulations all of your classmates suffer through as freshmen from your life.
While your classmates attempt to find standing in the community, most failing miserably and becoming social pariahs for life, you are automatically accepted into the world of jocks. Lettering as a freshman puts you in the top ranks at school; you’re popular, teachers all cut you slack, and you learn to swagger at an early age. Lettering as a swimmer means you get respect from the other jocks while everyone else at school knows you aren’t really a jock. Most swimmers adapt equally well with the world of stoners, and you end up being part of two cliques while a good number of your fellow students never manage to fit into even one. And then there is all the male nudity.
Going from suited to naked for a swimmer is a matter of a single garment. One that hides little in the first place. As a swimmer it is important to hop into the shower as soon as you’ve hopped out of the chlorinated water of the pool (I don’t know why that is important, but it’s one of those benefits you just don’t argue with). Swimmers are naked by the time they’ve fully entered the dressing room. And most stay that way until their next event. I’m sure if more gay boys knew this, even more would join a swim team at an early age. I’m not sure why young gay boys have been drawn to diving as much as they seem to have been, but since the diving team is part of the swim team, they too get to take part in the naked camaraderie of competitive swimming. Though being divers, they are always a bit suspect.
In High School, diving was an afterthought, an event turned to by those who wanted to be on the swim team but who swam like a rock. Most of the other schools we swam against didn’t even have a diving team and when they did judging was a capricious and arbitrary process that relied more on school lines than it did on skill levels. One of our two divers, Tracey, was a tall thin blonde who I’m sure became a tweaker after he graduated. He was always stoned during meets and had developed the build of a meth addict by the age of 16.
At 5’ 10” he weighed in at 100 lbs. on a good day, and the only time any of us bothered to watch the diving competition was on especially windy days. Being an obvious masochist, Tracey liked inverted dives the best. Just as he got himself balanced, hanging at the edge of the 1 meter board clinging to his mount with nothing but the power of his toes, a gust of wind would come along and blow him off the board. Tracey is the only diver I’ve ever known whose degree of difficulty fluctuated with wind direction. Our team’s judges awarded points for how far off the board a breeze had carried him. Yup, swimmers are not generally known for their compassion.
But they are known for their skimpy swimsuits. Speedo has that market wrapped up worldwide and has had ever since I started swimming. From my initial floundering that passed as a stroke at the age of five through my college years, Speedos were made of nylon. The only change from one year to the next was the color of the suit, which was dictated by the team you were on. Around the time of Junior High School, you learned to wear your suit about an inch lower on your waist than the manufacturer intended. That had nothing to do with cutting friction to improve speed. It was all about style.
With the crack of your ass almost exposed at the back, the suit fit your butt like a glove. Up front, regardless of the size of your bulge, the extra inch in material formed a pocket to nestle your junk. An impressive bulge was the way to go, outlining your cock for the world to see was not. And as soon as you hopped out of the pool, win or lose, you pulled your suit away from your body in a quick tug that allowed air to smooth out your bulge and re-undefine your best buddy. What you were packing was not for spectators’ enjoyment. That was a thrill reserved for your teammates back in the dressing room.
College was no different; instant acceptance in any group or clique you cared to join except for motley groups of future IT nerds. Some swimmers joined fraternities, most just opted to attend their parties. That photo of Michael Phelps hitting a bong should not have surprised anyone; swim practice with a hangover is no more excruciating than the pain involved in getting out of bed or off the floor.
Swimming in college took on a slightly more serious tone; some actually believed they had a future in the sport. Even though Mark Spitz had set new world records sporting a pornstache, serious competitors shaved their bodies to lessen friction in the water. Real serious competitors even shaved those parts of their body that were not exposed to water. And the rest of us ridiculed them back in the dressing room. The fraction of a second shaving resulted in meant little if you still failed to qualify for the final heat. But then the real heat was among the swimmers living away from home for the first time in their lives who felt free to explore new worlds. Records set in college for me were not so much about swimming but scoring teammate booty.
Unless you were born with gills and won a berth on the Olympic team, your competitive days as a swimmer come to an end when you don your cap and gown at the university. There are no professional swim teams to join and be paid millions of dollars for engaging in the sport you’ve enjoyed most of your life. I spent a few years during the summer months performing for a water skiing show, which paid diddly, swam for the enjoyment of it, and lounged around pools in my speedos to catch the eye of available hotties. Competitive swimming became a thing of the past. And, a few years later while watching swimming at the Olympics I learned how quickly one can become an anachronism.
In my day, part of the coolness of being a backstroker was the start of the race. Huddled into a tight ball perched on the side of the pool, the gun would go off and you’d burst into the air like a breeching whale. A quick, shallow dip on landing, perfected to be kept at a minimum, and you were off. Now backstrokers finish almost the first lap of the race under water performing a dolphin kick and moving not unlike that mammal glides beneath the surface of the ocean. That would have been an automatic disqualification when I swam. I haven’t a clue as to when, or why, they changed the rules. Not all progress is a good thing, regardless of the speed it allows for. But then Speedo made some changes, quit resting on their laurels and started manufacturing new suits too. And in my book, that was a good thing.
Lycra is one of the greatest achievements of mankind. The traditional Speedo swimsuit stayed the same in shape, but its new material did away with the demure pocket the old suits allowed to stash your junk in. There was no longer any guess work in determining just how well a swimmer was built. Even if you did not have the advantage of a viewing spot back in the team dressing room. Size, shape, cut or uncut . . . it’s all now on display. I can’t tell you the exact date Speedo made the change but have a strong suspicion it was due to some designer taking one look at Greg Louganis’ incredible body and thinking how much better he’d look naked. And that man deserves the Nobel Peace Prize at the very least.
Unfortunately, Olympic television coverage, concerned with the sensibilities of the prudish, ensures close-up shots of swimmers and divers are from the waist up. I think diving has become as popular as it has for no better reason than they can’t avoid televising full body shots during the diving competition. And I don’t care how straight a viewer thinks he is, he’s still a guy and still checks out any other guy’s bulge. Some of those Olympians have some pretty impressive bulges. Ian Thorpe isn’t known as the Thorpedo because of his speed in the water. When I graduated from college I shoulda gone the coaching route. I might not have the money I do, but damn if that eye candy wouldn’t have been worth it.
Along with the bulge, the Speedo brand was branded and became known to those outside of competitive swimming. Guys who could barely float started showing up a pools all over the world in bulge defying swimsuits and Speedo became a style of suit on top of being a brand. Unfortunately, guys way past their prime started turning up beachside wearing speedo knockoffs too. Speedo needs to start suing for damages, singling out the elderly and obese for wearing their suits. And they can start in Pattaya. But possibly thinking that would not be a good public relations move the company has gone with a different mode in protecting its brand and instead has switched over to the body suit. Fatties may be able to cram their bloated balls into a skimpy pair of Speedos, but they’ll never get the rest of the suit up over their stomachs. And on the well-built, on the studs their suits were designed for, their newer line highlights the bulges that the gods intended.
The LZR Racer is Speedo’s new design. When they first came out I was a bit disappointed. The whole purpose of watching swimming was all the skin on display. And they’ve covered all that skin up. The new ‘spray on’ suits leave little to the imagination, but then they are so form fitting that what they do show is often a shadow of its real self. And where swimmers once only had to decide if they would dress to the right or left, with the new suits its more of a ten o’clock, noon, or two o’clock positioning choice. I don’t know if the new style of competitive suit was a good move for the swimming world. Men of less stature surly shy away from the sport now. Having the world know you are built like a fish can not be a good thing.
Body defining technology aside, the new high-tech suits made from polyurethane made their Olympic debut at the Beijing Olympics and have been controversial ever since. At those Games, twenty-three world records were broken by swimmers who wore LZR Racer suits, compared with only two that were broken by swimmers who didn’t. Speedo claims 89 percent of all the medals in swimming, including 94 percent of the gold medals, were won by LZR Racer wearing swimmers.
The new full body suits incorporate polyurethane panels over the parts of a swimmer’s body that produce the highest drag. The material also acts as a full-body girdle; it squeezes and slims down swimmers “so the skin doesn’t wobble around as they go through the water,” allowing the athlete to slide through water faster. This has caused many within the sport to complain that it is the suit, and not the swimmer, who is winning races. The controversy came to a head at the 2009 World Championships when German swimmer Paul Biedermann broke two world records while wearing a suit of similar construction manufactured by Arena. Biedermann’s breaking of both Ian Thorpe’s 400m world record as well as Phelps’s 200m record have been largely attributed to the superiority in the design of his swimsuit.
Claiming that the LZR and its competitors were in effect ‘technological doping’ strict rules banning these types of swimsuits in professional swimming have been put in place. And skin is once again on display. In March 2009, FINA stipulated that swimsuits should not cover the neck, must not extend past the shoulders and ankles, and also limited the suits’ thickness and buoyancy stating that the governing body wanted to reiterate that the main and core principle of swimming is that it is a sport essentially based on the physical performance of the athlete.
Four months later during the 2009 World Aquatics Championships FINA took it a step further and banned all body-length swimsuits from competition. The new policy stated that men’s swimsuits may maximally cover the area from the waist to the knee, and that the fabric used must be a textile (i.e. woven rather than a foil). The new regulations took effect in January 2010 making Speedo’s original LZR and several styles of its even more advanced Fastskin line obsolete.
Speed records are not the only thing being broken though. An inherent problem with any skin tight clothing is that it leaves little room to expand. And the muscular build of swimmers needs room to bulge freely. As high tech as the polyurethane suits are, like a cheap knock off pair of jeans bought at a night market in SE Asia, they don’t hold up well even to normal wear. U.S. swimmer Ricky Berens discovered the suit’s downside when just before his leg in the freestyle relay at the World Championships in Rome a split appeared in his suit exposing his backside. With no time to change into a new suit he swam the race with his ass cheeks exposed helping the U.S. team to a fourth-place finish in its heat and securing a critical slot in the night’s final for his teammates. Spectators were equally thrilled with his performance.
In late 2011 Speedo introduced a new Fastskin3 suit that meets with FINA’s most recent suit requirements. The suit comes in a normal waisted style and a high wasted style that covers the space in between the belly button and waist of male swimmers. Speedo has high hopes for its use in the London Games, but the suit is not popular with some swimmers. Unhappy with Speedo’s revolutionary but ill-fitting and unpopular suits several members of the Australian team shunned them at the most recent national trials which prompted the Australian Olympic Committee to offer unprecedented uniform exemptions before the London Games. This allows all swimmers on the national team to ditch Speedo, a sponsor of Australia’s Olympic swimming team since 1956, although, under the agreement rival logos will be blacked out for competition.
Speedo’s rival for the hearts of Olympic swimmers are the Arena brand’s high-performance suits. The company has had to more than double its supply in the past three months in light of Speedo’s less-than-ideal introduction of its new line and the Australian launch of Arena’s Powerskin Carbon-Pro suit has been moved up. Whether Speedo can produce a suit acceptable to competitors in time for the London games and avert a public relations disaster remains to be seen.
Perhaps Speedo should concentrate on the bulging beauty of Olympic divers wearing their brand instead. With NBC scheduled to televise that competition in 3D this year, divers will be scoring 10s regardless of their performance in the air. And the hunky men of water polo have remained traditionalists too. The party boys of Aquatics know how to please the crowd and their team suits always show off their best assets.
[‘The XXX Games’ are a series of posts about hot Olympians, gay competitors – both present and past – and general articles about the 2012 London Olympics of interest to gay men. So, yeah, lots of hot male eye candy. Click the XXX Games graphic above for additional news, stories, and pictures.]
20 Tuesday Mar 2012
Posted It's A Gay World, Tighty Whitey Tuesday
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20 Tuesday Mar 2012
Posted Thailand Travel Tips and Tales, Tips
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Darwinism fails to account for why there are still so many stupid people in the world. By now the gene pool should be in better shape than it is, but instead it seems to become more diluted with every generation. I just ran across a scam that evidently is not new, but is quite prevalent in Thailand. I’d think you’d have to be brain-dead to fall for it, but then scammers rely as much on greed as they do stupidity so maybe it’s just that there are more greedy than stupid people in the world. Or maybe it’s that greedy people are stupid. Or is it that stupid people are greedy?
Recently, I was reading Stickman’s column. He covers the straight gogo bar scene in Thailand, has been around for years, and while he seldom delves into the gay bars the similarities in the two worlds are so prevalent it’s always an interestingly read. Hearing the money the bars and girls charge make the fees the gay bars charge seem dirt-cheap too. When same sex marriage is legalized, I think every gay man headed to Thailand should be required to read a year’s worth of the Stick’s columns as a warning. Not that that will stop those who shouldn’t from falling in love with a Thai boy and marrying him, but it’s always nice to be able to say I told you so when gazing down at the bloody carcass of some fool who failed to heed the warnings. But then that’s not about greed. It is about stupidity to some degree, but more about matters of the heart. In that we are all a bit stupid. Matters of the wallet are a different subject.
The dangers of scams in Thailand are numerous and well known. And just as many people continue to fall for them anyway. In those cases too you get to say I told you so when gazing down at the bloody carcass of some fool who failed to learn from the experiences of others. This week Stick wasn’t writing about scams though. He was interviewing escorts. It was an interesting read to see what they thought about their customers.
One of the girls he was talking to made a comment that trying to open a business with money made from escorting never worked because you were using ‘black money.’ I’d never heard that phrase used before, but the sentiment rang true. Especially from a Thai. They tend to be a superstitious lot, and it kinda had a karma ring to it. I thought it may be one of those well-known Thai phrases that I’d not yet run across so I Googled it. And instead was introduced to the Black Money Scam.
Locals, more than visitors, seem to be the willing victims in this scam. And it seems to include locals throughout SE Asia, not just Thailand. But in my internet research on the scam I found instances where it was reported being used in Great Britain and the U.S. too, so it’s nice to know stupidity is a world-wide phenomenon. Sometimes also know as the ‘wash wash scam’ the black money scam is a variation on the always popular advance fee fraud scheme. In this one, the victim is lured by a trunk full of money that has been dyed black to avoid detection by customs. With the victim’s help (that’d be money) special chemicals are purchased to wash the black money to remove the dye and then the victim gets part of the profits.
Initial contact is often made via email, though many locals in Thailand have fallen for this scam after being approached in person. The basics are always the same: someone died, there’s a large trunk full of cash involved, moving the currency over the border risks taxes and governmental fees so it has been dyed black to fool customs inspectors, and if the lucky winner pays for the pricey solutions needed to clean the cash he’ll soon be rich. But even before the washing part of the scam takes place, the idiot victim is often asked to pay for a host of associated costs and fees.
After being swindled for large chunk of cash, the financial wizards who’ve fallen for the scam often demand to see the trunk full of money. And in many times have to travel to whichever foreign country the money is being held in, usually Ghana or Nigeria, but often India plays host too. When he arrives, he’s shown the loot which includes authentic bills that have been coated with a protective layer of Elmer’s glue, and then dipped into a solution of tincture of iodine. The bills, when dried, look and feel like black construction paper. The trunk full of notes are real construction paper; when the victim picks a “note” for cleaning, it is switched with the iodine coated bill. And then miraculously cleaned before his very eyes, usually with a “magic cleaning solution” which is actually crushed Vitamin C tablets dissolved in water. Now all the victim has to do is purchase more of the magic cleaner and the clean money will be his.
You’d think that anyone even considering allowing their greed to run wild would check the internet these days to make sure they are not being offered the chance to play in a well known scam. But then like fans of FOX news, most people only read what already fits in their minds. There are numerous sites warning about this scam. And there are just as many offering the magic cleaning solution for sale. There is even a YouTube video demonstrating the correct way to clean black money. I even ran across one forum devoted to warning people about this scam on which every other posts was a link to where you could buy the ‘real’ cleaning solution as opposed to the fake stuff.
For the truly stupid, after they have purchased the cleaning solution and still have not been sent their payola, additional fees are added by the scammer until the victim is either broke or suddenly finds an active brain cell. Most victims do not report the crime to the police; the scammers cover this early on warning potential victims that by participating in the scam they are violating local and international laws. Too frightened of facing jail time, the victims go broke quietly.
Some victims do go to the police. And make public just how stupid they are. At the beginning of this year, Mr. Thep Jantornvattana, the 68-year-old is the owner of the Cozy Villa hotel in Bangkok contacted the Boys In Brown after handing over 200,000 baht to a pair of scammers, a Liberian and Sierra Leone citizen, who’d lured him with a promise of black money totalling 5 million U.S. dollars. He wised up just before he was supposed to pay another 300,000 baht to the criminals.
The police arrested the swindlers who were in possession of two fake passports, papers coated with liquid, two small safes, a bottle of water and counterfeiting equipment to produce fake U.S. dollars. The pair had been staying at the victim’s hotel. After their arrest, the police found the Liberian had been previously arrested in 2009 charged with advanced fee fraud, having scammed two Thai nationals, a Malaysian, and a Singaporean with the black money scam.
The idea that you could get rich off of a trunk load of money that has been dyed black that only requires you pay for washing it is obviously ridiculous. Savvy financial wizards know the real path to instant wealth is through sound investment strategies. Like picking up tons of undervalued Iraqi dinar.
A year ago in October, a friend called having finally decided that I was worthy of being let in on how to make millions investing in dinar. She’d been busy stocking up herself and had already shared her secret with several others, all of whom daily poured over the latest news coming out of Iraq that sounded the date that the dinar would once again be an actively traded monetary unit. Payday was only a week or so away.
She’d learned of the investment opportunity through an anonymous email. Being no dummy though, she’d done due diligence, checking to see what Google had to say. And sure, there were numerous sites warning that this was a scam. But there were just as many offering to sell dinar and tons where savvy investors decried the idea this golden opportunity was a scam; naysayers were those who just didn’t want the general public to know about this quick route to becoming a millionaire.
I was noncommittedly dubious, tried to be supportive of her venture, didn’t mention the stupidity in opening email from foreign banks you’ve never dealt with and those whose subject line promises a share in recently found riches, and went on-line as soon as I hung up the phone. She was right. Those bastard naysayers were everywhere. The fools!
The idea behind this scam investment opportunity is that Blackwater alone shouldn’t be making a killing off the war in Iraq. It uses the reference of what happened with the dinar in Kuwaiti following the first Gulf War where the undervalued currency took off when peace broke out. According to those offering dinar for sale, Iraqi dinar are valued today at about 1,000 to the U.S. Dollar. So they are cheap to buy. When the war is over, the dinar will be actively traded once again and the rate for the investor will increase to 1,000,000 to one. At least.
For those who want to believe, the logic offered behind this scam is hard to argue with. When Iraq starts rebuilding its economy will boom, its money will go up in value, and we’ll all be rich. When you want to believe, it’s easy to ignore that the more likely scenario will be that the Iraqi government will lower the value of their currency. Allowing the value of their money to skyrocket while the country pays off its debts, rebuilds its infrastructure, and attempts to recapture its export base requires a stable dinar, not a wildly fluctuating one. The Iraqi dinar is not the sleeper investment of the decade. Unless you are one of those selling the worthless money.
I called my friend back and explained what I had found and why she may be better off not investing in dinar. I was as successful as trying to convince a right-wing nut case that President Obama is not a Muslim. She instead went with the in for a penny in for a pound adage and picked up several more thousand dollars of dinar. And is still waiting for the pay-off. The scary thing is she is still bragging about the money coming her way and still trying to convince others that they too can become rich by investing in dinar.
Maybe it’s not greed. Maybe it’s not stupidity. May be she is more savvy than I when it comes to international money investments. Maybe I should pick up a few thousand dollars worth of dinar. But instead I’ve been banking my extra cash in an easily liquidated account. Dead water buffalo are not cheap to replace, and I’m sure to be buying a few in the near future.
19 Monday Mar 2012
Posted It's A Gay World, Monday Muscle
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19 Monday Mar 2012
Posted Gay of the Week
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Talk about Thai bar boys and sooner or later someone brings up how many of them are straight. Someone else questions if that is true how is it possible they can ‘perform’. And then someone else yet weighs in on the whole gay-for-pay thing, and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Labels are always a bitch. Few people fit perfectly into the narrow confines we set when we start labeling someone as gay, straight, or bi. Even back in the repressed days of the 1950s, Kinsey’s studies showed most men fell somewhere in the middle. Guys may identify as straight, but that doesn’t stop them from having sex with a buddy. Or a stranger. Throw in some big bucks and it’s amazing what a straight guy will do. Like getting into a cage and allowing some other dude to pummel him into a bloody mess.
But that’s cool. That’s machismo at its finest. Sucking dick, not so much. But okay, a little stray dick in your mouth can possibly be overlooked. Bottoming for not one but several guys at one time, or showing off your dildo collection (with live demonstrations) might just be pushing the envelope. When you start off a porn career with a little JO scene, then a dildo butt-play scene, then fucking guys, then getting fucked, then threeways and all-out orgiastic four and then six-ways, at what point do you stop and admit you might just be a bit queer? Evidently you don’t. Not when your next career move is with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).
Sean Cody’s stellar star and go-to guy for all gay things sexual, Dakota Cochrane, made thousands of dollars performing naked and lubed up for the camera – and for the enjoyment of thousands of men. Now he’s doing it again, but this time he’s fighting instead of fucking; on the Ultimate Fighter Live reality series on the FX channel. Dakota, along with 31 other Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighters duke it out on the network’s first season of the UFC’s full contact combat reality television show. As ‘Danny’ he already did full contact for Sean Cody’s on-line gay porn site. And his dildo won.
The 25-year-old Cochrane currently has an 11-2 pro record as an MMA fighter, including a victory over World Extreme Cagefighting champion Jamie Varner at the Titan Fighting Championship 20, which qualified him for the reality show. He fully disclosed his gay porn past to the producers of the show and has not denied his days as a porn star to the media. Though he does say his days as a gay porn star may have been a bad career move.
“It’s definitely a decision I regret,” he told MMA Fighting. “If I would have known what would happen I definitely wouldn’t have done it. But I had money issues and I needed help. I went there to do pictures, and they started throwing pretty high numbers in front of me. I didn’t really think. It was a big mistake.”
Unlike the gay porn past of a recent Real World cast member, neither the fighter or the UFC has shied away from Dakota’s guy-on-guy career. ”I think it’s a little bit courageous for both of us,” Cochrane said of the UFC’s decision to include him on the show.
Of course when thousands, if not millions, of gay guys have already seen you at your best, hiding a former life of explicit gay sex performed for internet fans is difficult these days. And if his past came out after the television series was already on-air, the resulting bomb blast would have been much bigger. Getting out in front of the headlines allowed Dakota to put his gay-for-pay life in the proper context. Which, evidently, is the ‘I-was-young-and-dumb’ tack, second most popular to the ‘boy-was-I-drunk-last-night’ excuse straight guys have used for years to explain why their ass is so sore the next morning.
”Every time I was down there, I hated it,” Cochrane says of his days performing for the camera. He earned around $80,000 overall from taping the videos, which he made while a college student at the University of Nebraska-Kearney, where he was an all-league track athlete as a pole vaulter and 4×100 meter relay runner. Dakota gives his girlfriend Lacey Sechtem credit for um, straightening him out. When he told her what he was doing she asked him to stop, and quicker than you can say, “I’m gonna cum!” his gay porn career came to an end, wadded up like a cum drenched Kleenex and tossed into a corner.
Now claiming to be completely straight, the baby-faced ultimate fighter faces the tribulations he’ll experience in the ring from opponents who will not want to lose to a guy who has spent his early years being other men’s bitch.
Meanwhile his gay fan base will grapple with the issue of what defines a gay man. According to Dakota, it’s not sucking dick or taking it up the ass. While according to gay guys, being paid $80,000 doesn’t make you straight. It’s the battle over labels again because face it, cash or not, your dick just doesn’t get hard (and stay hard while some other guy sticks his in your butt) unless you are enjoying it.
The label thingy too plays a role in the broader context of Mixed Martial Arts, the fastest growing sport in America. According to many, including the WBA’s light heavyweight Champion Bernard Hopkins, the sport is rife with homoeroticism. Or as he put it, “The UFC and MMA is gay porn.”
But then professional boxing which has seen a large share of its fan base gravitate toward MMA has always been quick to accuse their rivals of promoting gay porn masquerading as athletics. Boxing promoter Bob Arum described MMA as “guys rolling around like homosexuals on the ground.”
MMA fans disagree. Vehemently. With as much chance of being believed as Cochrane when he claims he’s 100% straight.
There have been no openly gay UFC fighters, though Nick Ring, a competitor on the last season of The Ultimate Fighter made such a point of ‘acting’ gay his sexuality was a forgone, but incorrect, conclusion. But the obvious gay undertones of two near naked studs, hot, sweaty and grabbing each other in places no straight man would dare go, while grunting loudly with equal parts of exertion and excitement are hard to miss. MMA is all about fighting for being on top. Or maybe for being a not to willing bottom. And it’s mostly a horizontal sport – one that requires multiple zoom lenses and a wide screen TV to enjoy properly. Keeping your cum towel at hand is optional.
Acknowledging MMA’s sexual appeal to gay men, Dana White, the president of the UFC, recently became the first head of a major sports league to welcome gay athletes. “I’ll tell you right now, if there’s a gay fighter in the UFC, I wish he would come out,” he said. “I could care less if there’s a gay fighter in the UFC. There probably is, and there’s probably more than one. It’s 2012. Give me a break.”
Despite homophobic slurs he has made in the past, and that many of his fighters continue to utter, White believes there is room within the sport for gay men. “Any guy involved in grappling is the furthest thing from homophobic in the world,” White said. “I honestly think it would have no impact whatsoever with not only our fighters or our fan base. The guys in the UFC, everybody is so cool, it’s great sportsmanship, everybody has respect for each other. I honestly, it wouldn’t be a big deal to me and most of the guys I know in this sport, it wouldn’t be a big deal for them either.”
Whether White is attempting to be inclusive, or stepping over a thinly drawn line into accepting that his chosen sport seems gay despite its violence and macho attitude, he can not deny that MMA is attractive to those who like to ogle fit, handsome men.
Jim Buzinski, the publisher of Outsports.com, a web site devoted to gay sports fans and athletes calls MMA “intrinsically homoerotic,” citing his site’s most viewed article A Straight Guy’s Guide to the Top MMA Hotties as proof. Buzinski says readers routinely send links of who they think are the hottest MMA fighters, so fans clearly pay attention to more than just their skills. “UFC welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre in tight trunks brings in a high number of page views,” he says.
Buzinski calls Spike TV’s Ultimate Fighter reality series, in which a group of fighters live together in a house and compete for a UFC contract “the most homoerotic show on TV.” Even the gang of skanks on New Jersey Shore hasn’t stooped as low in their run for tops in the ratings game. Last season, in episode 8, the housemates engaged in a bit of semen eating one upmanship. But that’s not gay. Spunky for sure, but evidently not gay in the world of MMA. Because afterwards they all enter the cage and beat the shit out of each other. Or at least some type of body fluid flies.
And it flies in globbing hunks thanks to the sport’s own porn spin-off, sporno, with websites like matbattle.com which is devoted to “helping homosexual grapplers explore and express their fetish in a welcoming environment.” The site features movies and photos of non-sanctioned MMA bouts in which no one hears the bell until someone has a happy ending. But then what else do you expect from a sport in which one of the ways to win is through an act called submission?
Cock fighting is how Senator John McCain described it in 1998. But back then MMA was a bit more violent, a bit more bloody, and tad less homoerotic. To make the sport more appealing to 90 year-old has been politicians, as well as the general public, rules were established to ensure the survival of MMA and keep it from being banned. The UFC replaced the previous bloodfest with an opportunity of watching near–naked men grapple and grunt, embraced in the arms of another man while locked in a cage.
The homoerotism of the sport is, perhaps, not so surprising, since MMA owes a lot to those notorious warrior ‘mos, the ancient Greeks. The roots of modern mixed martial arts can be traced back to the ancient Olympics where one of the earliest well documented systems of codified full range unarmed combat was utilized in the sport of Pankration. With deadly purity, pankration had two primary rules: no eye-gouging or biting. Fingers were often snapped off. Sometimes death, and often unconsciousness, was the end of a pankration match.
Today, the UFC has taken MMA, essentially a semi-organized barroom brawl in the ’90s, cleaned it up, introduced some rules – including no stomping, no spitting, no throat strikes, no punches to the back of the head, and no groin attacks of any kind – and turned it into an event that is rapidly replacing boring old traditional boxing, especially among young men, as the #1 fighting sport.
An omnivorous blend of boxing, wrestling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, muay Thai, kickboxing, taekwondo, karate, and judo that allows the use of both striking and grappling techniques, both standing and on the ground, MMA relies on Muay Thai as the fighting style for the stand-up game within the cage. Muay Thai originated in Thailand, and is known as the “art of eight limbs” which refers to the use of the legs, knees, elbows and fists. It is a very aggressive and straight forward style from which kick boxing is derived. And all would be good – and straight – except that bouts quickly dissolve into a homo-like hugging match between contestants. And MMA fans love it.
The cage-fighting craze has seen increased popularity with a pay per view business that rivals boxing and professional wrestling ever since the UFC – currently the largest MMA promotion company worldwide – brought the sport to the United States in 1993. According to Forbes magazine, its pay-per-view shows have drawn well over 2 million viewers, most of them male between ages 18 and 49, and the franchise is today valued at roughly $1 billion. That’s some big bucks for what is ultimately nothing more than gay porn for straight men. Though just how straight those men are is questionable.
A recent study by the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that 98.6% of all self-proclaimed hardcore MMA fans were able to identify a fighter from a picture of him that showed nothing more than his trunks-encased buttocks and the back of his meaty upper things. Fans may not acknowledge their sport’s homoerotic underpinnings, relying instead on its violence to justify the intimate, protracted, eye-popping physicality of MMA, but it’s a bit like how in gay porn ‘real’ tops never bottom – for the sake of the bottoms watching.
And the fighters themselves are often as heavily immersed in denial. War Machine, a popular combatant, was arrested for battery after an incident involving a 300 lb. doorman that occurred at a New York gay club called Krave. After his arrest made headlines on MMA blogs he explained himself via a post on his personal web page: “I want to address my recent arrest because there is a lot of B.S. information on-line. I was not out drinking, and I wasn’t hanging out in that club. I was employed there.”
Uh, that’s kind of like a Thai bar boy claiming he doesn’t samoke, he just works for a bar that provides male prostitutes to its clientele. Rather than denying that he was drinking, War Machine might have been better off using the old standby Boy-Was-I-Drunk-Last-Night. It’s an excuse many of his fans are undoubtedly familiar with.
The sport’s homophobia may well have to do more with fear than with hatred. Guilty of participating in or being a fan of an activity that barely qualifies as a sport and which even the most casual observer can not help but note is filled with homoerotism makes the straight boys nervous. And that may be the answer Dakota Cochrane needs to turn to for a successful career with the UFC. Now that it is well known that Dakota was tapping ass on a gay porn site before tapping opponents out for the UFC, he may have a psychological advantage when he steps into the ring. Because no straight boy wants to be known as a gay boy’s bitch.
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18 Sunday Mar 2012
Posted It's A Gay World, Stay In Bed Sundays
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