Castrating the gay community in the name of body positivity.
Tags: Trans Man, Gay, Body Positive, Manieri, Transgender

This is is a part of a series of articles to form a movement of gays that are autocephalous. That is we think for yourselves and develop our own thoughts rather than have them impressed upon them. The Facebook group is Gay Partisan, I encourage you to join. We need to not have other groups dictate to the gay community how we should be and how we imagine ourselves.

I want to discuss a series of photographs being asserted to be progressive in the media that claims to serve the gay community. This also serves as an examle how gays and others in the alphabet LGBTQXYZ don’t always have common interests and have sometimes conflicting interests.

I am only going to focus on the stealth elements of including transmen in this photographic essay. There is the issue of obesity being represented as okay, when there are clearly health issues involved. Also, I am not seeing a lot of really older men in this series. Maybe one token individual who isn’t really old. There are gay men in their 70s and 80s, but they aren’t going to be in Manieri’s series, at least what I could see online. Perhaps the book has a token.

The following is a link to a photographic series “Arrested Movement” which is proposed to be Male Body Positivity. I supply two links here, but I will have more. The photographs are series by Anthony Patrick Manieri for a book “Arrested Movement.”

This is the article at OUT.com which is a major gay media outlet. Visit it first before visiting the site for the book.

This is the link to the webpage for the webpage for the book, “Arrested Movement.”

Again first go look at all the pictures in the Out.com article. You will notice something. You won’t see a single cock. They are all hidden in the shadows or the legs or hands or the body is positioned in such a way that the pensis is obscured.

This set of photos reminds a person of art and photography in earlier times that used shadows and positioning to censor images of penises but still have a nude in a picture or photo.

Men have pensis and testes but evidently they are not considered “positive” but negative such that they need to be erased in this photographic project.

How “positive” is this series really? Men have penises and the photographer has erased them. How comfortable is the photographer really with the male body. This photographic series isn’t progressive at all, but instead is regressive to an earlier time when penises were censored out of images.

Now look at Manieri’s webpage for the book at the link above. As you can see as you look at the pictures that the ommission of pensises in the pictures in the Out webpage wasn’t accidental. Manieri photos show oversize pixelation of the are where a penis might be seen. The oversize squares are to let you know that he is doing this on purpose. I am not going to purchase the book, so I can’t absolutely say that there isn’t a photo where a penis is visible. Online you won’t find such a photo.

What shouldn’t be overlooked is that Out ommitted these Supersized pixel pixelated photos so the viewer wouldn’t realize that Manieri was purposely ommitting penises. The gay media which supposedly is a champion of the gay community really is the champion of the alphabet.

So what is going on here with these photos that a penis-phobic. (Yes, we can say phobic also, the favorite word of some to shut down discussion or the expose of their agenda.)

So what is really happening here with these photos? You won’t find out from reading the Out article. It is only revealed in the webpage for the book, and other other webpages.

In the About page for the book we find out what the photos are about.

This inclusive series focuses on men of all races, from thin to large, Little People to super tall, men with physical disabilities, transgender men, as well as two-spirited men. All are welcome. All are beautiful.

“Transgender” is the operative word here. That is to say that Manieri is doing a photographic series which is going to include transgender men, which would be transmen, which is women who identify as men.

Under the guise of “inclusion” Manieri erases images of penises. For if the pictures did include men’s penises, transmen would stand out apart. So the solution for Manieri is an artful castration of the subjects.

However, if you wanted to know that transmen were included the pictures shown at the Out webpage, you wouldn’t find the word transgender at all.

There is some indirect references. In the beginning of the article there is this reference.

This conversation is even more important in the conversations of gay, and otherwise queer men.

Notice the phrase, “… and otherwise queer men.”

Similarly in a rather oblique way the article states as follows:

… that inclusion is not only race, but body shape and type, gender and sexuality, age, and more.

If you knew the ideological writing of gender theorists you would know that “gender” and “and more” might include transmen, but likely most readers wouldn’t pick on this and it is very likely in my opinion that the writer of the OUT article for these photos knew that many readers wouldn’t pick up on this.

The unstated objective of this series of photographs is to include transmen as a possibility of being desired by gay men by comparing bodies with the penis being erased so the transman body is one of several bodies without the pensis being part of the desiring gaze. The photographer wants gay men to desire transmen. That is one reason that you aren’t seeing really older gay men included in this series. The photographer doesn’t see them as fitting into a portfolio of his desires, though the author of this essay can tell you there are gay men who desire grandpa’s.

There isn’t a problem if a photographer wanted to include a transman’s photos in a group of men. It shouldn’t be done in stealth mode, and it shouldn’t be don’t with the erasure of gay men’s penises. If our bodies are positive, they are totally positive, not just parts of them.

Erasing men’s penises from photos as a policy is asserting an agenda that they are unsightly.

When photographers are uncomfortable photographing penises, they like to argue that there is an over emphasis on penises in the gay community. Who determines what these limits are? Instead of acknowledging their discomfort over penises, the photographer basically attacks the gay community. These photographers can take the pictures they want, they shouldn’t be surprised or complained if gay men aren’t interested.

Incidentally, I refer Manieri to the YouTube video of Zardoz at the end of this essay.

If the photographer wants it to be considered that transmen might be objects of desire that is alright also. It should be done not in the stealth mode.

Also, there is the issue of Manieri appropriating the Body Positive movement for a particular agenda.

If this was some stray art publication or some minor gay publication this wouldn’t be so much a concern, but it seems that a whole range of gay publications promoted this series of photos and also didn’t question the agenda behind them. I put some links after the end of this article to show how widely this series of photos was presented by media which purportedly supports the gay male community.

Likely no one questioned this photo series because they didn’t want to have a torrent of accusations of being phobic this, phobic that, phobic the other thing. They didn’t want a rain of denunciation upon them.

There is also a large contingent of middle class gays who are embarrassed by the more exuberant expressions of gay male sexuality, worry what the straight people will think, and have a respectability politics for gay people. For the respectability gays these means of repressing the gay community serve their purpose very well, because they aren’t represented as sexually repressive but instead as being something for social justice.

I think the gay community needs to push back and we need to have periodicals for the Gay community which are concerned for the gay community and not for various groups and elites who would want the gay community to be this or that for their purposes.

My writing on transmen is on this page, and again, links to other articles about the “Arrested Motion” series follow the YouTube video.

https://edwardsebesta.medium.com/anti-gay-attacks-by-transmen-and-their-allies-cb84729065ae

To Manieri I would like to present someone with one view common to yourself. Though I think you don’t like guns, it is that other thing.

The following series of pictures has little disks over the penises which aren’t in the Out magazine series. It appears perhaps this is the magazine’s censorship.

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