A Sausage Sighting of a Straight Elitist Philosophy Professor

Plains, May 2016

8:45 am.  I go to a seminar on teaching writing, led by a philosophy professor named Taylor.  There's no space left at the conference table, so I have to sit all by myself in a little chair off to the side.

I'm already in a bad mood.

This Taylor guy is about my height, in his 30s, with rather long hair, combed back, and a beard.  He is wearing a pink button-down shirt, a sports jacket, jeans, and yellow shoes.

Who wears a sports jacket with jeans?  Who wears a pink shirt with yellow shoes?  How pretentious can you get?

When I approach the table, he is talking about Lisbon, "off the beaten path," so it's not so touristy as other European capitals.

Yeah, yeah, I've been places, too, but I don't go around place-dropping.  "Oh, Reykjavik is so off the beaten path, and have you been to Tegucigalpa?"

I hate elitists.

Then comes the proclamation of heterosexuality.  Straight men can't go more than a sentence without proclaiming their straightness, either by referencing their wives or by making a universalizing statement like "my son is at the age when boys begin to notice girls." Taylor does both.

I go to the break room for a banana and yogurt.  He appears and says "I can't resist the siren call to get another bagel."

Ulysses reference?  Ugh!

Then: "My wife loves..."

Proclamation of straightness again?  What is it about this guy?

9:00: Morning Session

Pretentious heterosexual lit.  Have we read The Unbearable Lightness of Being?  It's about a Czech intellectual who is a womanizer, but abandons his many affairs to find true happiness with his wife in Geneva.

Yeah, Geneva, off the beaten path.  Lovely this time of year.

This is going to be a long day.

Then Taylor scoots back in his chair and spreads his legs.

Enormous bulge, full outline of what has to be a semi-aroused Kielbasa+, hanging to the left!

Doesn't he notice?  Or does he not expect anyone to look beneath the belt?

How to introduce pretentious heterosexist lit into your classes.  Students like writing that addresses their interests, like how to get along with the opposite sex.

Ugh.

"When we were in Vienna last summer, my wife and I...."

Double Ugh.

At least there's a memorable bulge to look at, and I might even get a sausage sighting out of the deal.




11:00: Bathroom Break

Taylor heads for the bathroom.  I wait a moment, then follow, timing my entry to get there just as he has unzipped.

He's not at a urinal, he's in a stall!

30 free urinals, and he picks a stall.  Is he that worried about another guy seeing his Kielbasa+?

Back to the seminar.  We discuss technology and student writing, using Turnitin to catch plagiarism, how foreign students don't have the same understanding of plagiarism as we do in the U.S.

Taylor spreads his legs again, letting his heterosexual semi air.

12:00:  Lunch.

Instead of eating the turkey sandwiches, chips, and cookies provided, I hit the gym and lift weights.

 Pumped up, I am cruised a couple of times by callow undergrads on the way back to the seminar room.  A nice break from the heterosexual pretentiousness of my seminar.

1:00: Afternoon Session.

Grading student writing assignments.  Using rubrics.

Watching Taylor spread his legs.

Sample free-writing exercises:
What do you find most attractive about the opposite sex?

Describe your last date as if it was a story.  Begin with the boy calling the girl....

Ugh.

"I was visiting Robert Bly at his summer house in the south of France, and..."

Double ugh.

Taylor's hand falls against his bulge and gives it a brief squeeze.

Everyone pretends not to notice.

3:00: The seminar ends.

I go upstairs to the second floor stacks, anxious to immerse myself in gay lit after a day of heterosexual pretension.  But first I have to use the bathroom.  My favorite facility is secluded, down a hallway from IT Services, with a long row of urinals and three stalls.

The restroom is deserted.  I choose the farthest stall.

It doesn't occur to me that it might be occupied.  Really.The door isn't latched.  I push it open.

Taylor is sitting on the toilet, looking at something on his cell phone.  Aroused.

A Kielbasa+ sticking straight out from beneath his pink shirt!

"Oh, excuse me!" I exclaim, and hastily retreat.

It almost makes the day of heterosexist elitism worthwhile.

See also: My Sausage Sighting List; Teacher Hookups

A Hookup with a Hobbit

Plains, May 2015

Last night I was on Grindr, trying to coax a skittish Cute Young Thing with blond hair and an enormous Mortadella into coming over.  He asked question after question:

"How big is it?"
"What do you want to do?"
"What do you want me to do?"
"Are you hot?"
"How long will it take?"
"Do we have to have chit-chat first?"
"How old are you?"
"How big is it?"
"What do you want to do?"
"What do you want me to do?"
"Do you do this often?"
"What are you into?
"Will anyone else be there?"
"Do you like younger guys?"
"What do you want to do?"
"How big is it?"

I was getting more and more frustrated.  Hookups are supposed to be a form of recreation, not arduous chores!  But I had put so much time into this guy, I hated to just tell him to forget it.


Then I got buzzed by one of those guys with a blank profile, no name, age, height, weight, or description of interests, just a face and chest.  A bear cub: in his 30s, bearded, chubby, hairy.

"I don't have much time, I'm just passing through town, but I'd like to stop by."

I don't invite guys over without getting some background information, including a phone number for insurance, but I was frustrated, and besides, I haven't seen a hairy chest for awhile -- all I seem to meet  nowadays are smooth twinks -- so I said "Fine."  I gave him the address and the access code for the apartment building, so I could buzz him in.

Less than five minutes later, he was knocking on my door.  How did he get here so fast? How did he get into the building without being buzzed in?

He looked like a hobbit from The Lord of the Rings: about 5'3", with dark curly hair, and a short beard.

He was evasive during the pre-bedroom chitchat.

Boomer: "What do you do?"
Hobbit: "I hang out, you know, a little of this, a little of that."

Boomer: "Where do you live?"
Hobbit:  "Oh, it's a very small town.  You've never heard of it."

Boomer: "Are you gay or bi?"
Hobbit:  "I'm not into labels."

Boomer:  "Ok...um...what was the last movie you saw?"
Hobbit:  "Something on Netflix, I forget the title."

Sighing, I took him by the hand and led him into the bedroom.

He was very much into kissing.

We took off our clothes --except he wouldn't take off his socks.

The Hobbit's penis was average sized, uncut, very thick, which looks enormous on a short guy.

He put me on my back and threw my legs in the air.

"Um...I'm not into anal..."

"That's ok."  Apparently hobbits use that position for oral!

He was very adept, but the position was so strange that it took me a long time to finish.

Then I turned him on his back, kissed him for a while, and went down on him in the same position.

He finished quickly, with a gigantic spurt that kept spurting.  I have never been with a guy with such a large burst.

Afterwards we cuddled for awhile, but then the Hobbit said "I really have to be going.  Pressing business to attend to."

I stood, pulled on my pants, and did a quick check of the room to see if anything was missing.

We walked out into the living room.

"Hey, can I get a picture?"  I asked.  None of my friends would believe this!

"Sure."  His pants on but his shirt still off, the Hobbit grinned for my smart phone camera.  Then he shook my hand and left.

The evasive answers, refusing to take off his socks, the extraordinarily large spurt -- something was a little off about this guy.

I checked my smart phone.  Somehow I managed to take a picture of the bookcase to the Hobbit's right, not him!

Weird paranormal hookup, and no way to prove it.

When I checked, the Hobbit's Grindr profile was gone, but the Cute Young Thing was still up:

"Are you there?  How big are you?  What do you want to do?"

See also: Gay Ghosts, Vampires, and Supernatural Beings

Lane and I Track Down the Gay Baron of Eindhoven

West Hollywood, February 1992

Have you ever wondered what happened after Allies liberated the Jews and other prisoners from the concentration camps in 1945?

A few of the prisoners returned to their homes.  But 800,000 had no homes to return to, or refused to go back to the neighbors who wanted to kill them.

 They were put into displaced persons camps or residential facilities for up to two years, until a friend or relative could send for them, or until they could be repatriated

When she was liberated from Auschwitz, Lane's mother Rosa was sent to a residential facility run by some Catholic nuns in Weert, Netherlands, just over the border from Germany.  She spent her first two weeks walking up and down the streets, stopping in every pastry shop, and eating all she could hold.

Then she set about returning to life again.  She was planning to become a journalist before the War, so she found a typewriter and began writing.  She brought articles around to the local newspapers, first in German, then, as she learned the language, in Dutch.  Soon she was making enough money to move into an apartment with a female friend.

But in August 1947, an American cousin found Rosa and offered to bring her to Los Angeles.

Palm trees and movie stars!  She eagerly agreed.

That's all we knew about Rosa's life in the Netherlands until after she died unexpectedly in February 1992, a few days after her 67th birthday.

When Lane and I were sorting through four decades of cards, bills, business papers, old school assignments, clipped magazine and newspaper articles, Jewish society newsletters, playbills, programs, and miscellaneous records, we found a packet of old letters addressed to Rosa at the Zusters Birgittinessen, and then at her apartment in Weert, and finally at her cousin's house in Los Angeles, with the postmark Eindhoven, Netherlands.

It's hard to decipher one side of a conversation in a foreign language after 47 years, but we got the general plot: Rosa was dating a member of the Dutch nobility, a Baron Hein Van Tuyll, who lived about twenty miles away in the Eymerick Castle.

In February 1947, Hein apparently proposed, and Rosa turned him down.  She explains why: Je niet moet trouwen.  We zullen vrienden altijd (You should not marry. We will always be friends).  

He gamely continued to write to her every week through 1947, when the letters suddenly stop.

The Van Tuyll family is important in the Netherlands.  Hein's father was the first president of the Dutch Olympic Committee.  This statue outside the Olympic Stadium was erected in his honor.

This is the family coat of arms: three hounds, a crown, and two half-naked wild men carrying flowers.

"You should not marry," I repeated.  "Maybe Hein wasn't the marrying kind.  Could your Mom have been dating a gay guy?

"We should go to the Netherlands next summer," Lane said, "And look him up."

"Look up your mother's old boyfriend, and ask if he's gay?"

"It wouldn't hurt.  Or...maybe he has a hot gay son who will invite us to live in his castle.  We would be sort of like brothers, after all."

I was hesitant.  We spent last summer looking up Lane's heritage in Poland, and now we had to do it in the Netherlands?  But I could wrangle a side-trip to Amsterdam out of it, and maybe even Paris, so I agreed.

In the days before Google, family research was tough.  We couldn't track down Hein, but we found his son: 41 year old Sammy, the current Baron Van Tuyll.  We made the call, and got an invitation to visit.

Disappointingly, he didn't live in the family castle.  He had a house in Den Haag, where he worked for the Dutch Ministry of Finance.

Den Haag, Netherlands, June 1992

We spend three days in Paris (not nearly enough time), overnight in Brussels to look at the Grand-Place and the Mannekin Pis, and then take the 2 1/2 hour train trip across the border to Den Haag.

We're only going to spend a few hours: in the late afternoon, we'll get on the train to Amsterdam, where the bars and bathhouses of Warmoesstraat await.

But we have time to see the Escher Museum, walk through the Haagse Bos, an ancient forest in the city center, and meet the Dutch deputy minister of finance at the Allard Restaurant.

Sammy is youthful-looking and athletic, surprisingly hip, a rock musician as well as an economist.   But straight -- he shows pictures of his wife and four children.  We show him the letters.

"You must not marry.  We should be friends," he translates.  "I can't imagine what your mother meant.  Papa married in 1947.  There were never any problems between him and my mother, none that I could see."

Remembering the evidence that my grandfather was gay, I ask "Did he have a lot of male friends?  Maybe Rosa didn't want to compete."

"Oh, yes, Papa was very sociable.  He had a passion for sports.  He was always bringing home athletes: football players, rowers, bodybuilders...."

Lane and I exchange glances.  "Was he into bodybuilding?" I ask.  "I used to work for Muscle and Fitness."

"He didn't lift weights himself, but he loved bodybuilding as an art form.  I remember when Reg and Marian Park came to dinner -- a former Mr. Universe -- he was as excited as a schoolgirl with a crush on a pop star.  And this in a man who is the godfather of Queen Beatrix!"

A crush on Reg Park?  Shouldn't marry?  Was Hein gay or bi?

We keep our suspicions to ourselves.

Lane offers Sammy some of the letters. He takes four, including the last, written to Rosa in Los Angeles.

It ends with "After all, my dear Rosa, vriendschap is het enige dat telt."

Friendship is all that matters.

See also: A Beefcake Tour of Amsterdam