Massively Ordinary Penetration
Is that a GBU-57 in Uncle Sam's pocket or is he just desperate to see me?
Welcome to another episode of my flagship scroll, The Book of Sean M. P.
On Easter Sunday I went outside to smoke some 420 on 4/20. Not more than several tokes in did a family come for an egg hunt on the front lawn of the elementary school—Columbus—on whose front bench I sat. So I moved around the corner to a low stone border between a curved row of plants and another patch of grass and perched there in the sun. It was a beautiful day and even though I was irritated to have to relocate, I was better off for it in the end. That’s a lesson I try always to remind myself of: that change is good, no matter how bothersome it may seem initially. Indeed, it’s the fundamental law of existence.
I note that No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary whose name and message inspired one half of my new video series, The Armenian Quarter or No Other Land, recently streamed in the U.S., ending a de facto viewership ban. It’s a brilliant work of guerrilla cinema that shows the degree to which the Israeli state—backed by the U.S.—goes to maintain dominance in the West Bank, ceaselessly killing and injuring residents and destroying homes, schools, businesses, and other foundations of life and society. That level of violence has only been exceeded in Gaza, where the U.S. and Israel continue to defy the U.N. and international law in their war of attrition.
Meanwhile, for anyone who can spare a Lincoln, I’ve launched a “Buy Me a Coffee” as a modest but very meaningful way to appreciate the labor I donate to create all the “free” content on this site. And it’s all free—there are no paywalls here.
On the flip side of the coin, I’m patiently awaiting an angel investor to join my Pantheon, for which you’ll receive both my boundless gratitude and a one-of-a-kind personalized artifact from my archives.
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Now on with the show. <3
The New Juicebox Mafia
Contrary to the pronouncement of the Israeli foreign ministry that “Trump wrote his name tonight in golden letters in the history books,” the White House’s attack on Iran this weekend was no marquee moment for POTUS.
For one thing, it occurred during a Saturday when nobody was paying attention in the U.S.—a fact bolstered by Trump’s address to the nation at 10 p.m. Eastern, a time slot that remains among the least-watched of the week.
For another, by all accounts—except for those from Trump and his bosom buddy, Netanyahu—Iran has no nuclear weapons, which the history books already know. So there’ll be nothing to add to the record here but for the fact that Trump and his squad of lunchtime bullies—Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth, or the new juicebox mafia—effectively tried to hide the intervention, such as it was, by doing it under the radar. And all they have to show for it so far are some holes in the ground that weren’t there before—although supposedly a ceasefire has now been agreed to by Israel and Iran, making this whole “12 Day War” all the more useless.
And it was useless, because Iran still has its nuclear program. It may still even have its underground infrastructure at sites like Fordow, the big prize that the GBU–57 bunker busters “completely and totally obliterated”—a lie that was later updated to “severe[ly] damaged,” a more plausible but still unproven claim.
We’re currently living through a peak 1984 moment in national and global politics, which means anything the U.S.—or Israel, or the UK, et al.—says is the opposite of the truth. So when Vance says Iran’s “just not very good at war,” the truth is that—as a supporter of Hamas, which the White House would like you to read as sponsoring—Iran is very good at war, since the U.S. and Israel still haven’t defeated the Palestinian freedom fighters after 20 months of combat.
In contrast, the U.S. isn’t very good at war, as revealed by its own recent history in Iraq and Afghanistan but also by Vance himself, who bragged about America’s ability to “fly a bunker buster bomb from Missouri to Iran completely undetected without landing once on the ground.”
Maybe Vance doesn’t know the planes in question are B-2 stealth bombers, the whole purpose of which is to fly undetected, and that they refuel in the air, but nevertheless, he wants to be taken seriously so let me do that: If this is the test for American military might in 2025, no wonder the attack on Iran was a “wham, bam, thank you ma’am.”
Meanwhile, we’re also living through generational change, as my buddy Zohran Mamdani’s surging campaign for the New York City mayoralty shows. And the Trump administration—like the Cuomos, Clyburns, and Clintons of the Democratic Party—is a lagging indicator of that change.
So even if Zohran doesn’t win the Democratic primary this week and Netanyahu’s lawyer Andrew Cuomo does, it’s hard for me to see Mahmood’s son losing in a three-person race in November.1
After all, Mahmood Khalil has returned to upper Manhattan more powerful than he was four months ago.
I’m no fan of Khalil—I have a hard time with settlers of all stripes—but Zohran’s the real deal.
And the juicebox mafia takes him very seriously: the attack on Iran was also a symbolic attack on him.
By all accounts—except for those from Trump and his bosom buddy, Netanyahu—Iran has no nuclear weapons, which the history books already know. So there’ll be nothing to add to the record here but for the fact that Trump and his squad of lunchtime bullies—Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth, or the new juicebox mafia—effectively tried to hide the intervention, such as it was, by doing it with a minimum of attention. And all they have to show for it so far are some holes that weren’t there to begin with.
Brain Break
This Juice WRLD classic was served to me by YouTube Music as I composed this post and I couldn’t have picked a better interlude myself. That’s metaphysics for you.
But I also frequently drove near the late artist’s Encino home my first couple of years out here when I tutored kids on that side of town, so he’s as much a part of my L.A. story as anyone is.
From the Archives
In the weeks between my dissertation submission on 13 May 2020—what happened to be the 35th anniversary of the city of Philadelphia bombing a house full of Black people—and my move to the City of Brotherly Love on 4 July, I tried and failed to place several freelance pieces for academic and lay audiences alike.
The last thing I felt like doing at the time was writing, but I was seeing the ball as sharp as ever and I wanted to keep pushing to the tape, leaving everything I had in my brain on the screen as it were. But when I didn’t succeed in landing any of my pitches, I proceeded to go all in on my oratorical development. After my lifelong practice of writing, I wanted, at age 42, to practice speaking.
One of my failed pitches was to Zach Stafford, then at BuzzFeed and just before that the editor-in-chief of The Advocate, my own former employer the previous decade (from 2006 to 2009). (Had I known this connection at the time I would’ve mentioned it to Zach in the email.)
I share the pitch below not just because it’s the departure point for Quimica Divina (one of two, along with my presentation on Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On for the American Studies Association in 2015) but also because people might enjoy or appreciate the work sample. It’s a solid idea (pun intended after the fact) and I’m glad to develop it fully in the book.
The gambit of early queer theorist Leo Bersani’s 1987 essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” was as simple as it was (potentially) scandalous: that to end violence against marginalized people—homophobia, sexism, racism—more cisgender men, including straight men, should be penetrated anally. This inversion of men’s usual dominant position, not just sexually but in the world at large, would also reverse their perspective on vulnerability and power, Bersani averred, thus compelling them to rethink domination—a radical about-face that would ultimately lead to the demise of oppression as a structure of political, economic, and social relations.
It was—and remains—an audacious argument, but Bersani was writing at the height of the U.S. HIV/AIDS crisis, when so much violence was being directed towards gay people, the latest victims of a national obsession against prurience and moral contamination as old as the country. At a time when receptive anal sex—“bottoming,” in gay-male parlance—was denigrated as a practice of mortal infection, Bersani turned that idea upside down, emphasizing the revolutionary possibilities of pleasure to reorder people’s normative understandings of life.
I read “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in a queer-theory course during my undergraduate days in the late 1990s as I was coming into my own identity as gay, and its TL;DR message—that sex could make you free, but also the whole world free—set a baseline aspiration for me that I continued to ponder as I got older. It wasn’t till the last couple of years, though, as I entered my 40s, opened up (and then exited) my last relationship, and initiated a new one, that I really started to understand what bottoming, as both a sexual and political activity, is.
That’s because I myself began to “open up”: I consciously allowed myself to be penetrated by men more often than I did when I was younger, and more deeply, too. Indeed, I felt other men in the core of my body, physically and emotionally, like never before, and that process has opened up my mind to the world-changing implications of being fucked unreservedly—that is, with enthusiasm and mutual care. Opening up anally—or rectally, to be precise—has also helped me work through my lingering issues around sexuality, masculinity, and race, while re-orienting my idea of service: what it means to be of service to someone else, and what it means to be in service to change—social and otherwise.
I propose to tell my story of opening up for BuzzFeed in the vein of last year’s features “Why Some Guys Like Jerking Off Together” and “Realizing I’m Bisexual Helped Me Learn How to Have the Sex I Wanted.” And as BuzzFeed informed readers in 2017, increasing numbers of people, across the spectra of gender and sexuality, are experimenting with anal sex; I believe my narrative will have insights for them as well.
Unfortunately I can’t find the link for that 2017 BuzzFeed piece, but from what I hear on the L.A. comedy scene, the number of people allowing visitors in the backdoor has only escalated.
Ciao for now,
Sean M. P.
ICYMI⥥⥥
If Zohran wins the Democratic nomination, I don’t expect Cuomo to get out of the race, which would leave the two of them plus a Republican challenger (Eric Adams, running as an independent, is an also-ran). And if Cuomo wins the nomination, Zohran should most definitely run on the third-party line available to him (the Working Families Party). Timing is everything, and his time is now.