The Problematical Penis

Prurience, Pupils and Propriety

I know, I know. I’m Alliterative AF (is that a thing?). I love English—such a bizarre language. I love words. I also love quotations and aphorisms. I have, for many years, posted a Wisdom Quote of the Day on my Facebook, so I’m constantly Googling to find quotes about this and that.

TRIGGER WARNING: PENISES AHEAD.

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So, I collect quotes about this and that. For this piece, the “that” was the Penis. I Googled “Penis Quotes” and do you know something? I scrolled page after page, and couldn’t find a quote that didn’t either ridicule, or belittle, or shame the male member. I’m not kidding! I couldn’t find a paean in praise of the penis. Not a one. But ballads about breasts? My friends, boobs loom large in literature!

Well, duh. We all love breasts. They bring back comforting memories of infancy for most of us. But I’m not here to talk about real life body parts. I’m here to try and wrap my brain around the funhouse mirror culture we’re in, that allows certain kinds of false genitalia to parade before our kids, but not others, even though NONE of them are actual “naughty bits.” See below:

NOW, CALM DOWN MARY. I CAN HEAR YOU FROM HERE. UNCLUTCH THE PEARLS, GURL, AND HEAR ME OUT.

I love me a marble penis. I love penis in general. Penises are great, penises are good. Rah, Rah, PENISES! And Michelangelo? Come on, he’s a gay icon. He clearly loved penis too. Small ones, admittedly—but he was a fan.

AND YES, I HEAR YA MARY! YEAH, YEAH, YEAH, I SHOULD BE STANDING WITH MY QUEER DRAG SISTERS, BLAH BLAH, YADDA YADDA, SASHAY SHANTAY.

Calm down, hon. No one loves a drag queen more than I do. I was a drag performer, professionally, for almost a decade. Go check out my YouTube channel. I know the work and artistry that go into it, and the rich history of drag culture—I’m part of it. I also know that drag queens are currently a target—which is frankly about homophobia—not the art of drag. Homophobia is hate. Period.

This is not about that, okay? Breathe, hon.

This is about what we’re teaching children and young adults to feel about their bodies and sexual organs.

So. There’s a current craze for full frontal male nudity on the streaming networks, in shows like Euphoria, Pam & Tommy and The White Lotus. Except… the dudes aren’t really nude.

Take the HBO/Max series Minx. It’s a comedy set in the ‘70s in which a strait-laced young woman takes over a ladies’ erotic magazine, a la Playgirl. Anyway, it’s fun—but what was shocking, and, I thought, quite historic, was its uncensored, unrestrained (ahem) use of full frontal male nudity. Penises on Parade. It was clearly a feminist message, was Minx, and I thought: hats off to ya. Some minxes like penis! Nothing to be ashamed of. Amen, sistah! Things took a creepy turn, though, when hunky co-star Taylor Zakhar Perez revealed (ahem) that the magnum-sized phallus in his nude scenes was a prosthesis. Now, this thing was realistic, friends. I mean, his rubber dong is to Mark Wahlberg’s strap-on in Boogie Nights as the CGI of Star Wars: The Last Jedi is to the special effects of Star Wars: A New Hope. Next level realism. And in HD?? Child… But I digress.

The weirdness got really weird when I read an interview with Mr. Perez in Men’s Health (March 2022). The actor praises the intimacy coordinators on set for making him feel “safe” in his nude scenes (he plays a construction worker-cum (ahem)-centerfold). Except… HELLO?! He wasn’t nude. The Emperor wasn’t naked at all. He was wearing more latex over his privates than Brendan Fraser wears on his face in The Whale. A g-string would have been more revealing.

So let me get this. The message is, if we give the correct trigger warnings and viewer discretion disclaimers and an MA Rating, we can show rubber male genitalia? Cover your eyes, kids, you’re about to see a dildo? IMHO—honestly—as a gay man who’s (ahem) held his own around a rubber dick or two—they’re waaaay more obscene than the real thing. Conversely, the marble gonads on perhaps the greatest representation of masculine beauty in all of art? To this queen? Not obscene.

You know where I’m going, right? I don’t need to relate to you the recent story of the teacher in Florida under fire because she showed 6th graders a photo of Michelangelo’s David during a unit (ahem) on Renaissance art. It’s difficult to know the actual motives of the three parents who campaigned with their school board to demand the instructor’s firing. Was it the fake penis in the room with twelve year olds (half of whom have a real one themselves already)? Did they suspect some subliminal endorsement of homosexuality, due to what we (sort of) know about the sculptor’s predilections?

In a delightfully tart piece for The Palm Beach Post (3/29/23), Frank Cerabino, pointing out the absurdity of teaching Renaissance art without the David, nails it: “It’s like teaching a class on Gladys Knight and only talking about the Pips.”

I see what you did there, Frankie. “Pips!” (giggles like Dylan Mulvaney behind hand). So it was the penis in the room, after all.

I have run up against the Tight-ass Parents Brigade before. When I was doing the musical theatre juggernaut, Les Miserables, a decade ago in Orlando, we were well into our sold out run when we were called in for a company meeting. Two parents had written outraged letters complaining about the sexual content of the piece, pointing out the inadequacy of the theatre’s parental guidelines and warnings. What they referred to was the “Lovely Ladies” number in which prostitutes plied their wares to willing johns and felt each other up in dark corners of the stage (through layers of petticoat and corseting and wigs and microphone transmitters). In response to the protest, and with the director no longer present, the producer announced we would be re-staging the scene. REALLY? Didn’t these parents read the Cliff’s Notes in high school? Don’t they know the leading female character in Les Miserables is a prostitute who dies giving birth to an illegitimate baby?

As Thenardier in Les Miserables

I was playing the role of the comic villain, Thenardier: amoral, venal, and in my performance, appropriately lewd. In the moral panic following the complaints of these two parents, the artistic director himself pulled me aside and asked me not to grab my dick anymore in my big number, “Master of the House.” I refused. He was flummoxed. I said, “What’s wrong with these people, that they’re outraged seeing anything sexually suggestive played out before their children, but have no issue at all with what happens in Act Two—when a ten year-old is shot to death on the barricade?!”

*crickets*

So, kids can’t sit at a musical and witness an old character guy grab his crotch for comic effect… but a drag queen with bouncing silicone boobs can shake ‘em in Junior’s face whilst his grade school teacher shows him where to stuff the dollar bill?

I cannot begin to fathom this current movement of cisgender white women shredding each other over trans rights and drag bans. So terrified of being labeled a TERF like JK Rowling (without a Scottish castle to retreat to) that they will go to the mat defending not just inappropriate, but—sorry gurl, I call ‘em like I see ‘em—tacky adult performances for kids. I likewise cannot get into the mind of someone who’s outraged that a twelve year-old is shown a masterpiece of antiquity, depicting the nude male form in all its glory (including a small, elegant, flaccid marble penis with gloriously curled pubes).

What are you saying? Are you telling boys to hate their penises? Or that penises are something so shameful that, if shown or depicted, can cost a teacher their job? And then simultaneously scream at everyone that it’s hateful to be uncomfortable with a vulgar drag show, one a seasoned Gay like me would be made queasy by during the midnight show at the old Parliament House. Another Orlando reference. Good times, good times.

We should be telling young boys and girls—and others—to love their miraculous bodies, including their glorious, mysterious sexual organs. And we should be parenting them truthfully and clearly about what will happen when they reach puberty, taking shame, obscenity and ridicule off the table. Teaching them that their libidos are natural, and that their bodies are beautiful and deserve their respect, and the respect of others. We no longer seem to teach personal responsibility.

I’m frankly ashamed of both sets of parents and educators—the bible-thumping Right and the over-the-top Left. Come on, people! Let’s practice some restraint, thoughtfulness, mutual dignity and respect. Stop telling boys they’re stupid and violent and their penises are disgusting, and telling girls they’re victims and targets that have no agency over their bodies, all the while hooting, “YOU GO GIRL!” to men burlesquing women in outrageous ways in front of the children.

Me at 13, left, as Baba Yaga with my buddy, Buddy, 1978

One last share. This photo is of me and my old friend Buddy. My mother started a theatre company when I was an adolescent, circa 1978. One of its offshoots was “The Truckin’ Company,” a participatory children’s theatre troupe that brought little shows right into grade school classrooms. Mom wrote all the plays, which were performed by three costumed actors, schlepping their props to gigs in the back of our old Datsun hatchback. One of the plays was based on folk tales about the Russian witch Baba Yaga. I was about thirteen, and I would skip school sometimes to play Baba Yaga’s little boy victim, Grisha, for delighted third graders. A few times, the actress who played the witch was unavailable, so yours truly donned comic drag and camped it up as Baba Yaga! So I guess, it might be possible that I invented drag queen story hour.

My point here is, I was thirteen. And while I was precocious, and must have had gay sensibilities even then, I didn’t know what “drag” was. I knew from my theatrical parents the “Pantomime Dame” tradition in England, and the clownish men in skirts who played them; and the male actors in Shakespeare’s theatre who portrayed all the female roles. To my thirteen year-old brain, dressed in fright wig and witch makeup, I was playing a funny part. I wasn’t in drag. The children I performed for saw me as the actual Baba Yaga, or as just some funny ham actor playing a funny part.

Dealing with body parts, funny or otherwise? That was a few years off.