10 Ethnic Groups on My Bucket List

On The Simpsons, Homer sings "I could love [e.g., have sex with] about a million girls."

A million?

Assuming a 50-year sexual life, that's 20,000 per year, or 384 per week.

That's a lot more than gay men could ever hope for.

If you spent every waking hour in the bath house, and if you were extremely attractive, you might get as many as 10 partners per day, or 70 per week.

But in real life, people have other interests and obligations, they don't have a superheroic physique, and they're usually involved in relationships that require monogamy or "sharing."  They might average 10 partners per year.

Or only one.

Homer goes on to list the various ethnic groups he is interested in: "I could love a Chinese girl, an Eskimo, a Finn. I could dig a Deutschland chick...."

That sounds more promising.  There are only about 6,000 ethnic groups in the world.  Could you "love" someone from each one?

For the purpose of this study, "loving" will be defined as "an event in which you see your partner naked in a private setting."  Clubs, bath houses, nude beaches, and dates that don't end with a bedroom won't count.

An "ethnic group" will be defined as a group identified by a distinct language and culture.  Generic white Americans and African-Americans don't count.

After careful calculation and checking my journals, I find that I've "loved" guys from 41 identifiable ethnic groups.

18 European
8 East or Southeast Asian
5 African
5 Latin American
2 Middle Eastern
2 Native American
1 South Asian

5,959 to go.

If I really want to sample the vast variety of  masculine beauty in the world, there are a few left on my bucket list:

1. Faeroese: from the Faeroe Islands far to the north of Britain (population 44,000).  Like the famous swimmer Pal Joensen (top photo).

2. Yakut: a Turkic-speaking people of Siberia.  There are 478,000 Yakut speakers, including 10,000 in the United States, so there's hope (second photo: a Yakut wrestler).

3.Ainu (left): the original inhabitants of Japan were not of Asian ethnicity, and their language was like no other in the world (there are only about 10 native speakers left).  They liked beards so much that the women got their chins tattooed to make it seem like they had beards, too.  Today there are an estimated 25,000-100,000 Ainu in northern Japan.  The most famous is Oki, who performs electro-pop versions of traditional songs with his Oki Dub Ainu Band.

4. Chukchi: from remote northeastern Siberia, near the Bering Sea.  The 16,000 Chukchi speak a Paleo-Siberian language.  Their shamans change from male to female when they travel to the spirit world.

 5. Hawaiian (left): 400,000 people claim to be part Hawaiian, but only 140,000 claim to be Hawaiian alone, and only about 2,000 speak the language.

6. Jivaro (left): about 20,000 of the former head-hunters, divided into several different tribes in the western Amazon region of South America, mostly in Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia.  I visited Colombia, but didn't meet any Jivaros.

7. Tuareg: there are about 1.2 million Tuaregs, a nomadic people of the Sahara, mostly in Niger and Chad. Formerly called "the blue people" because the blue dye in the men's turbans rubbed off onto their faces, they speak a Berber language.

8. The Mbuti (left): one of several "pygmy" tribes in the Congo, there are about 30,000 Mbuti, most still living as traditional hunter-gatherers.  The men have an average height of 4'9."  Sounds like my kind of guys.

9. Greenlander: The northernmost country on Earth, Greenland has a population of about 60,000, most of whom are Greenland Inuit.

10. Aboriginal Australians: The original inhabitants of Australia have the oldest cultural traditions in the world.  They have legends about walking to Australia over a land bridge that hasn't existed for 14,000 years!  There are about 600,000, divided into many different tribes with distinctive languages and customs.  Ritualized same-sex behavior is commonplace as an initiation rite.

I visited Australia 20 years ago, but didn't get a chance to meet -- or "love" -- any aboriginal guys.

But there's always next year.  Maybe these guys are on Facebook.

See also: The Day I Turned Japanese

In Search of Sex and Languages in South Africa

Durban, South Africa, July 2006

One of my passions is meeting -- and preferably hooking up with -- men who speak unusual languages (unusual in the United States; they may have millions of speakers).  When I visited South Africa in 2000, I met speakers of Zulu and Khoisan.  In 2006, my friend Doc and I returned for a conference, eager for more sex and languages.  The conference lasted for three days, but we decided to stay for eight, to give us a chance to look for speakers of:  Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Tswana, and Sotho.

Tuesday: Jet-lagged.

Wednesday: Zulu

Spoken by 1.1 million people near Durban.

Your baseball bat is big: bat yakho baseball kuyinto enkulu

Ok, I've been with a Zulu guy before, but Doc hadn't.  A night at the Lounge, Durban's biggest gay bar, yielded a meeting with Zulu-speaker Joseph, a biology teacher in his twenties. 

Thursday: Xhosa, a "click" language spoken by 8.2 million people in the Eastern Cape province.

I want to go home with you: ndifuna ukuya ekhaya kunye nawe

There are a lot of Xhosa speakers in Durban.  After we told Joseph about our quest, he introduced us to an ex-boyfriend, Wushi, a Xhosa speaker worked in a garage:  a gym rat in his 30s, rather hefty, with a little belly.









Friday: Afrikaans


Spoken by 7.1 million people, mostly descendants of Dutch Boer settlers.  Unfortunately, they are mostly on the west side of the country, a day's drive from Durban.

I like to eat sausages: Ek hou daarvan om wors te eet

We rented a car and drove to Johannesburg, six hours north of Durban, to the Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg, that offers courses in both Afrikaans and English.

We walked on the campus.  Nothing.

We went to the Department of Afrikaans and talked to the only professor who was there during the winter break.  He was, surprisingly, black, or what they call "Colored" in South Africa.

He told us that Afrikaans was very much a "mother tongue," spoken at home but not on the streets.

In the evening, we went to the Melville, Johannesburg's gay neighborhood, hoping to meet an Afrikaans speaker in the Factory or the REC Room.

At the REC Room, I picked out a likely looking candidate: white, shorter than me, solidly built, a little chunky.  Light brown hair, round face, nice smile.

"Ik heet Boomer," I said in what I thought was Afrikaans.  "Ik kom uit..."

"Are you from Amsterdam?"  he exclaimed.  "I would love to go there!  Is it as hot as they say?"

We didn't meet anyone who spoke Afrikaans

Saturday: Tswana

We visited Constitution Hill and the Lion Park before driving about an hour north to Pretoria in search of Tswana, spoken by 4.4 million people in Botswana and nearby.

What is your name? Leina le gago ke mang?

This time we were smart.  We logged onto a chatroom in advance and arranged a meeting with  Tswana-spaker Thabo, who worked in information technology.  He took us to dinner at an Indian restaurant.

Sunday: Break

We visited the Vortrekker Monument, Church Square, and the Transvaal Museum, then had Chinese food and stayed in our hotel room for the night, watching Malcolm in the Middle, The Simpsons, and Family Guy.

"We're doing something wrong," Doc said.  "We're meeting lots of completely Western guys, the same that you would meet in Vienna or Amsterdam.  I want to meet tribal Africans."

"What do you mean?"  I asked.  "Grass huts and talking drums went out in the 1930s."

"Not that, but some of the old culture.  Same-sex relations that were age and gender-stratified, before the Western gay culture took over."

"So...street cruising?"



Monday: Sotho.

Spoken by 5.6 million people.

Which way is the toilet? Batekamore e kae?

We selected a likely village, Zwelisha, in the heart of the Drakenburg Mountains near the border of Lesotho.  Not much there but tin-roofed houses, a clinic, and a high school, a low yellow building.

Even though it was a cool winter day, we ran across a group of high school boys walking along the side of the road, naked except for loincloths, their bodies covered with white clay.  They made flexing body-building gestures to us.

We stopped in at the clinic to ask what was going on.




The young doctor on call -- actually a medical student from Johannesburg -- told us that it was a manhood ritual.  "They spend a week in a lodge, bragging and bonding.  They used to fight with spears, but now it's usually wrestling.  Same thing. Hoe meer dinge verander, hoe meer het hulle dieselfde, we say."

Wait -- was this guy Afrikaans?

He was.

Tuesday: Back to Durban

Four out of five languages isn't bad.

In Search of Sex and Languages in Tijuana

I'm running low on Alan stories, but I hate to let him go. so here's the story of me, Alan, and the bathhouse in Tijuana.

Tijuana, August 1987

It's a sedate cultural center now, but in the 1980s, it was synonymous with sleaze.

Watch your wallet.
Drink only bottled water
Be careful of the bathrooms.
Don't walk too close to alleys.

"We should go," Alan the Pentecostal Porn Star said one day in 1987.  "You speak Spanish, so you can impress all the locals.  And the bathhouses are still open.  Have you been to one?"

"Just once, four years ago in Chicago.  My friend Viju took me.  I didn't like it."

"They're great!" Alan exclaimed.  "Darn homophobic Department of Health closed them down here, thinking we're all having unsafe sex and getting AIDS in them, but you can have unsafe sex anywhere.  You just have to be careful, stick to French.  That won't be a problem for us, right?"

Alan rarely topped anyone, and I never knew him to bottom.  Interfemoral, oral, and sometimes 69, although he was a little too big to do that comfortably.

"Sex with strangers?"  I said, dubious.  Even casual hookups were frowned upon in West Hollywood.

"It's a foreign country.  Our rules don't apply.  And we're both single, right?"  He paused.  "Besides, I know a place where you can meet Indios."

Mexico is a racially segregated society.  The elites are white, of Spanish ancestry only.  The middle class is usually Mestizo, of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry.  And the working class and poor are primarily Indio, from about 60 different language groups:

Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, like nothing else I have ever seen:
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year: Cualli netlācatilizpan īhuān yancuic xihuitl

Mayan, the language of the ancient Mayan civilization of the Yucatan, nothing like Nahuatl:
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year: Ki'imak Navidad yéetel ki'imak ja'aba' túumben

Mixtec, Zapotec, Otomi, Mazatec, Tlapenec

The prospect of hearing Indio languages convinced me.

So one Saturday in the summer of 1987, we drove down to Tijuana, skipped over the usual tourist haunts, and drove directly to a crazy galleria on the south side of town, where, Alan told me, the Banos Vica catered to Indios.

Talk about sleazy!  You undressed, dumped your clothes in a bag, and went upstairs through a dirty shower room, then wandered through creaking corridors, dimly lit by bare bulbs, paint chipping on the walls, trash on the floors, sleazy looking naked guys in the shadows.

There were steam rooms and showers, but mostly you just did things right there in the shadows.


"Oh, boy," I thought.  "Indios!  I'm going to meet some Nahuatl and Mayan speakers!"

The only question was, how did I actually meet them?

Alan stood in the shadows.  He only had to wait a few moments before a slim, smooth guy with a bubble butt knelt to go down on his porn star-sized Kielbasa.

I could hardly say "Hola!  Hablas Nahuatl o Mayan?"

I waited.  Another slim, smooth guy with a thin moustache went down on my smaller but still respectable Bratwurst+.

After a few moments, I drew him to his feet and tried to kiss him, but he turned his face away.  "Quenin timotōcā?" I said, one of the Nahuatl phrases I memorized.

He shrugged and moved on.

Idiot! I told myself.  There are 60 native languages.  He could speak any of them, or none!


I went down on another guy, short, with a round face,  a sly smile, and an uncut Bratwurst.  After a few minutes, someone else roughly pushed me out of the way to go down on him, so I stood and drew him into a kiss.  The on-his-knees guy worked on both of us for a few moments, then stood and left.

"Hablas Nahuatl?" I asked.

He didn't answer.

The third guy was dark, muscular, with average beneath the belt gifts.  I went down on him until he finished with a moan.

"Hablas algo lengua India?" I asked. Do you speak any Indian language?

"Como?"

Frustrated, I said loudly, "Hay alguien que hablan una lengua Indio?"  The men standing in shadows glared at me.

I sought out Alan, and we shared a light-skinned, curly-haired guy.  He went down on Alan while I went down on him.

Afterwards, I had almost given up, but I still managed to ask, "Hablas Mayan o Nahuatl?"

"Are you the one who was yelling earlier?" he asked in English.

"I wasn't yelling, I was just talking loudly."

He laughed.  "Got a Indio thing, huh?  Sorry to burst your bubble, but I'm from San Antonio."

We left after a couple of hours.

"Well, that was fruitless," I said.

"You were with about five guys," Alan said. "How is that fruitless?"

"I didn't meet anyone who spoke any Indian languages."

"Were you there for sex or languages?"

"Well, languages, mainly," I admitted sheepishly.

"Why didn't you say so?  No one talks in a bathhouse.  But I know a place we can go."

On the way out of town, we stopped at the Club Habanero, a gay bar on the Calle Benito Juarez that specialized in Indios.  We met Alejandro, a slim guy from Veracruz who spoke no English, just Spanish -- and Nahuatl!

By the way, the Nahuatl word for penis is huiloti, or "dove," but when it is aroused, it's a moquauhquetza.

Alan wasn't happy with my ability to monopolize the conversation.

And even less happy when I failed to seal the deal and get an invitation back to Alejandro's apartment.

Apparently you can learn the Nahuatl word for penis, or you can go down on a Nahuatl penis, but you can't do both.

See also: My First Bathhouse; In Search of Sex and Languages in South Africa

Ari, the Linguist on My Sausage List

Columbus, Ohio, September 2007

People who hear about the various languages I've studied always ask "Why didn't you become a linguist?"

Because linguistics is not about world languages.  It's about phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, how ui changes to eu in some dialects of Farsi, but only before glottal consonants.

But that doesn't stop people from trying to fix me up with translators and polyglots of various ilks.

The latest, when I was in Dayton, was Ari, a professor of linguistics at Ohio State, about an hour away.

"He's got four of the five traits you find attractive," my friend enthused.  "He's a gym rat, religious, a swarthy Mediterranean, and gifted where it counts!"

So we exchanged a few emails and photographs.  Ari was muscular, in his mid-30s, dark-skinned, with curly black hair.  He said he was born in Israel, and moved to the U.S. when he was five years old.  He was a lapsed Orthodox Jew.  And a linguist!

Sounds perfect.

One Saturday afternoon, I drove into Columbus and met Ari at, of all places, an upscale hot dog place -- Dirty Frank's Hot Dog Palace.

"So Hebrew must be your first language," I began.  "It's fascinating that an extinct language was revived..."

"I don't remember much Hebrew," Ari said.  "I did my dissertation on Tlingit, a Na-Dene language of British Columbia and Alaska.  It has fifteen pronomials, which vary depending on the locative.  For instance, if you're going out to sea, it's dak-dei for a n-dei locative, but daki-naa for an n-naa locative."

"Many of the Native American tribes had third genders..." I began, hopefully.

"No, Tlingit doesn't have gender categories.  But it does have telic punctuals..."

"It's very important for your telics to be punctual."

He stared.  "Um...I just finished a paper on Jingulu, an Australian aboriginal language with six cases."

"I'm interested in Australian aboriginals, too" I said.  "They have a culture dating back thousands of years...."

But Ari wasn't interested in culture.  "Jingulu has four genders: masculine, feminine, neutral, and vegetable, but everything rounded is masculine, like kiyinarra, which means vagina."

This was probably the first time that I ever heard the term vagina on a date.  It didn't increase my amorous expectations.

"The Basque word for man is gizon, which is similar to the phrase big penis in ancient Sumerian," I tried.

He frowned.  "You're not trying to suggest a Basque-Sumerian link, are you?"

"No...um, I was just...."

"The interesting thing about Basque is its compound benefactive case.  Have you ever heard of a compound benefactive before?"

And it went on like that, through dinner, through browsing upscale clothing at Torso, through "a beer" at the Exile, and back to Ari's apartment.

"Not a problem," I thought.  "Being gifted beneath the belt can more than make up for a few hours of boredom."

He was.  My friend who set us up hadn't exaggerated.

But:

He wasn't.  He spent every moment of our time together with his mouth open.  Talking!  Directing, exhorting, commenting, murmuring.

I tried a variety of ways to shut him up, but to no avail.  He kept talking.

I'm going to resist the temptation to make a dirty joke about linguists using their mouths.

We dated a few more times -- he was nicely muscular, and very gifted beneath the belt (#6 on my Sausage List).  But I could never get Ari to shut up

See also: Getting the Chinese Food Delivery Boy into my Bed; 8 Harvard Yard Hookups

6000 Ways to Say "Penis"

As an undergrad Modern Languages major, I studied Spanish, French, German, and Greek.  In grad school in Comparative Literature, I studied Italian, Russian, and Turkish.  Since then, I've studied several other languages.  Of course, I didn't get far in most, and they fade away over time; today, about all I can get by in are the original Spanish, French, and German.

But I'm still interested in languages, particularly isolates, the remnants of ancient language families that have somehow managed to avoid the encroachment of economically-superior English, Spanish, Urdu, Chinese, or Arabic.

Actually, I don't really want to learn these languages; I just want to meet men who speak a language unlike any other in the world, and maybe learn a few new words for penis or My hotel is nearby.

1. Burushaski: 87,000 speakers in mountains of far northern Pakistan, near the borders of China and Tajikstan.

Their valley, Hunza, was the source of the Shangri-La legend.  Travelers said that they had no wars or disputes, and eternal youth.  So this Burushaski gym rat could be over 100.  He's had a shipen since he was about 20; before that, it was a sushun.

Tash chom means pull, sex appeal, and to find someone to spend the night with.



2. Tarascan (Purepecha), the remnants of an empire that threatened the Aztecs in precolonial Mexico, now has 240,000 speakers in Michioacan.

Kuini in Purepecha means penis, bird, and prison term.  I'm wondering about the prison term.

3. Mapuche: 250,000 speakers in southern Ecuador.  Their leader Capulican is memoralized in a Beefcake statue.

The slogan of the Mapuche civil rights movement is Newen penis, "Power to Mapuche Brothers."

The Mapuche word for penis is punun, which, by the way, is the same as the Quechua word for bed. 

They specialize in a novelty carving called an Indio Picaro, a smiling Mapuche Indian who, when you raise him up, displays an erect penis.

4. Basque, with 720,000 speakers in the Pyrenees of northern Spain. Yuri and I visited Basque country in 1999 in search of the world's largest penis.

Which, in Basque, is zakil.

5. But the biggest of the language isolates is Korean, with 78 million speakers.

The average Korean penis length is 3.8", the smallest in the world (the U.S.is 5.0").

There's a blog that attempts to answer this unjust accusation, offering proof that the Korean eumgyeong is just as big as anybody else's.

See also: 18 Yiddish Words for Penis; In Search of the Lapp Penis.

The Klingon and the Sword Swallower

Upstate, February 2009

When I moved to Upstate New York in the fall of 2008, my social calendar was soon crowded with invitations from members of the Gang of Twelve, guys who had known each other for years, and who shared everything, from gossip to boyfriends.
1-2. The Rich Kid and the Crying Truck Driver.
3-4. The Rapper, and the Grabby Nurse.
5. The Satyr and his roommate Chad, who I dated through the fall and winter.

A few days after Chad and I broke up in February, the Klingon emailed me for a date.

We met last fall, and saw each other occasionally at the Neptune or the Gay Men's Potluck in Utica.  But when I asked him out, he refused.  Later I figured out that the Gang of Twelve was a class-based society.

The Upper Class -- the Rich Kid, the Male Nurse, and the Satyr -- got the first chance with all of the New Kids in town.

If no romance resulted, or if a romance began and then ended, The Middle Class got their turn. (The Truck Driver and the Rapper were middle class, but cut in line due to the special circumstances of their recent breakup).

So the Klingon had to wait until the Upper Class guys (and Chad) were finished with me.

Date #6: The Klingon

He was in his 30s, shorter than me, husky, with a round face,  a beard, and a very hairy chest, very cute.  And a science fiction fan!  I figured we would be wildly compatible, maybe even soul mates.

On our date, we saw Coraline, an animated movie about a girl who discovers a secret world, followed by gyros and a visit to the Bearded Dragon Comic Book Store, and then back to the Klingon's apartment.

In case you don't know, Klingons are an alien species on Star Trek with cranial ridges and a warlike culture, a favorite for costume play at fan conventions.  A linguist developed a complete Klingon language, which people learn and use to talk to each other.  At the San Diego Comic Con, trolley signs are posted in Klingon.

Discussing the Klingon language was lots of fun, but I got a little bored hearing about role playing games, anime, manga, and the Dark Knight.  He was like the Comic Book Guy, who I dated in Florida.

Except the Klingon's bedroom was perfectly comfortable.

On our second date, we ordered Chinese food and watched a DVD of X-Men: The Last Stand.  His bedroom was still perfectly comfortable.

On our third date, we drove 1 1/2 hours into Albany for a very boring role-playing championship at the Zombie Planet, followed by a visit to the bear bar, and then 1 1/2 hours back to Delhi, where the Klingon lived.

The 3 hour trip and 2 hour role-playing made me realize that the Klingon and I would have been soul-mates in college, or maybe in West Hollywood, but not anymore.  I hadn't played role-playing games, bought comic books, or read fantasy and science fiction for about 30 years.  I last saw a Star Trek movie in 1982, and a Star Wars movie in 1983.  It was like hanging out with my teenage self.  Time to yell "Next!"


There was only one problem: in gay communities, after the first or second date, it's perfectly acceptable to just not call him back.  But on the third date, you become a romantic couple, and you have to go through the same break-up process as couples who have been together for years.

I invited the Klingon to lunch, but before I could say anything, he gave me the "it's not you, it's me speech."  Then he sent notes to the Gang of Twelve: "Cute, but dull!  Doesn't have any hobbies or interests!"










Date #7: The Sword Swallower.  This one didn't take long.

I invented all of the other nicknames, but the Gang of Twelve really did call this guy Sword Swallower.  I assume because he liked to swallow...um...swords and things.

He was in his 40s, tall, lanky, with a long face and thick, wavy hair.  Long fingers and rings -- an immediate turn-off.  ...

On our date, we went to dinner at the Mid Town Grille in Delhi, where he talked about his rather dull job doing things with numbers, and I talked about my job teaching sociology.

Things were a little awkward, but when he invited me back to his apartment, I thought "Well...he's good at swallowing..um, swords and things."

We sat on the couch, talking and drinking coffee. And talking and drinking coffee.  He didn't make any moves.  He didn't even touch me.  I checked the clock. Then, suddenly, he reached over and took my hand.

"Well, it's not sword swallowing, but it's a start," I thought.

Staring intently, he brought my hand to his lips as if he intended to kiss it -- but instead he swallowed it!

 My hand was in his throat!  Saliva and mucus,and his tongue!

With a shriek I ran into the bathroom, splashed water on everything I could think of, and then said I wasn't feeling well and ran out the door.

It wasn't a lie.  I felt like I was going to be sick.

I went home and called the Satyr.  "Oh, he does that with everybody. And then the poor boy wonders why he doesn't get many second dates."

"When you have a crazy fetish, you should tell people in advance, not just dig in!"

"It's a rite of passage around here," the Rapper told me.  "Once you've been swallowed by the Sword Swallower, you know you belong."

The Sword Swallower sent notes to the rest of the Gang of Twelve: "Cute, but not into sex.  I tried my best move, but I couldn't get him interested!"