Fellatio … pronounced fel-lay-she-o. (But you knew that.) That would be the noun. To fellate, the verb. But what the heck is fellatial?

Fellatial, of course, is the adjective. Rhymes with palatial . Never heard it before? That’s because it’s only a week old. Of the rage and fury attending its birth, we are about to tell. But first let us review this word’s happy little root — fellatio – for a moment.

The Urban Dictionary defines it like this:

“The term used in polite company which refers to the subservient act of orally stimulating the male sex organ with, but not limited to, the lips, mouth and tongue, during which suction pressure is applied to the male organ, usually resulting in the need to shampoo.”

Use it in a sentence, please.

Fellatio is not a city in France. (We sort of adore the Urban Dictionary.)

It’s a wonder so useful a word was never put in adjectival form until last Sunday when it was invented by conservative gay pundit Andrew Sullivan, the man we hate to love.

He used it in a book review, to indicate the fawning, on-their-knees way conservative blowhards write about this, the worse of all possible presidents (save one: Nixon still wins that derby.)

That’s not Andrew, at right, by the way. That’s a sex doll from Japan. But may we say, by way of illustration, that our blow-up geisha is looking very fellatial this morning. Please keep this picture in mind as you read on.

Sullivan wrote: “And Fred Barnes‘ fellatial biography of Bush. (He makes Powerline read like the Daily Kos.)”

That’s it. Two sentences total, in his blog

But it was enough to set off wails from pudgy right-wing columnist John Podhoretz. (Shrill, shrill, these schlumpy straight guys can be so piercing when they fly into their gay panics.) Here was JP on the pages of that small-circulation echo chamber of right-wing think-tankery, the ever absurd National Review :

ANDREW SULLIVAN’S ANTI-GAY INVECTIVE

Andrew Sullivan calls my old friend Fred Barnes’s admiring book about President Bush ‘fellatial.’ Imagine if someone had used such a word about an Andrew Sullivan blog item about, say, John McCain. Andrew would have been OUTRAGED! He would have demanded an APOLOGY! Andrew, you see, is gay. So any comparison of his rhetoric to homosexual conduct would be UNACCEPTABLE.

But Andrew, being gay, is free to use slighting sexual references to homosexual conduct when discussing the rhetoric and ideas of others. Why? Because, in Andrew’s eyes, he is beyond reproach solely because he shares a bed with other men.

And Fred Barnes? Married to a … (I know it’s unimaginable) woman. How contemptible of Fred. Doesn’t he know marriage is only for gay people?

UPDATE: Yes, the act Andrew S. analogizes to Fred Barnes’s treatment of President Bush is not exclusively one performed by homosexuals. But since Sullivan uses the word for a male writer’s analysis of another male, his use of the word “fellatial” therefore has an unmistakably gay tinge.

It’s always amusing when John Podhoretz takes on this way. Like his father, Norman and mother Midge Decter, he has a long, vocal history of opposing gay civil liberties in the form of marriage rights and the decriminalization of homosexual acts.

The Podhoretz’s are no friends of Dorothy — or of such fellatial pairings as the two athletes above (one sitting, one standing) or the young pups at left in a … sodomical? — would that be the word, Andrew? … reverie.

The Family Podhoretz, in fact, is quietly appalled by us, as they have indicated many times in many articles, in ways that are both subtle and direct, under the guise of being “thoughtful,” “fair-minded” and tastefully intellectual.

The son’s sudden distaste for homosexual slanders and “anti-gay” rhetoric — two mainstays of his beloved Republican Party — is not so much surprising as convenient. Especially since Podhoretz makes a living writing exactly the sort of open-mouth-at-the-ready (see sex doll) love poems to the president that Sullivan is nailing.

A fact that was not lost on James Wolcott of Vanity Fair, a Republican basher of great wit. Long an amused watcher of right-wing think tanks, Wolcott took Podhoretz apart, soft flabby limb by soft flabby limb, on his blog :

Shouting in caps like a crazy person, Podhoretz is understandably sensitive on the subject, still nursing his own sore throat after his Linda Lovelace inhalations in that epic motion picture, Bush Country [Actually Bush Country was a book Podhoretz wrote, subtitled How George W. Bush Became the First Great Leader of the 21st Century---While Driving Liberals Insane.]

“Gay tinge” is a rather prissy phrase on Podhoretz’s part, as if Sullivan were trying to slip by a sly innuendo. There’s no need to be sly. I won’t presume to speak for Sullivan, but it’s clear that there’s a homoerotic ardor for Bush by neo-conservatives that bypasses reason and reduces them to hero-worshiping mush.

By any rational measure and traditional conservative standard, Bush has been a disaster: exploding the budget, burdening future generations with back-breaking debt, packing the government with incompetent cronies (so much for meritocracy), committing the nation to an aggressive, fiction-based war in Iraq that it can’t win and will weaken the country in the region, alienating traditional allies (to the point where Spain tells us to bug off re its air transport sales to Venezuela), and inflating the powers of an imperial presidency to an arrogant degree that would have horrified the original editors of National Review.

The Bush mystique is a cult of manhood based upon the fantasy belief that America still stands tall, proud, brave, and unopposed in the world, basking in God’s love and the Western sun.

Even Clint Eastwood, whose movies have gotten progressively darker, doesn’t buy that masculinist myth anymore. Only warmongering pundits and bloggers do …

Sullivan deserves congrats for adding the word “fellatial” to spice up our political discourse. It’s not a word I’ve heard bandied about on the M5 bus, it’s not in my Webster’s, and I can’t bring myself to ask lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower for his informed take on it The fact that it rhymes with “facial” gives it added piquancy.

Not so incidentally, Podhoretz’s sarcastic riff about gay/straight marriage — “And Fred Barnes? Married to a … (I know it’s unimaginable) woman. How contemptible of Fred. Doesn’t he know marriage is only for gay people?” — is really quite embarrassing.

Oh well, what can you expect, his parents have never been exactly the most enlightened and accepting when it comes to gay aspirations, a topic dear to Gore Vidal’s wicked heart in the pages of United States: Essays 1952-1992. [A reference to Vidal's famous skewing of Podhoretz's mother, Midge Decter, after she wrote an astoundingly misinformed piece on the "beautiful but useless" gay men she saw one summer on Fire Island]

So lets make it official, the Nightcharm definition of this handy new word:

fellatial (fel-lay-shel) adj. 1. Of or suitable for a blowjob. 2. Of the nature of blowjobs, servile, fawning, with involvement of the mouth in a hoovering motion.
3. Ready to suck off those in authority, usually in exchange for favors, prestige or political appointments. 4. The way things work in Washington.

The photos of the athletes come from
Dieux du Stade calendars, past and present.

Many of the photos have been gathered
in a large-format photo book
Locker Room Nudes / Dieux du Stade:
The French National Rugby Team

We have inferred a homosexual context from the calendar photos here. The photos, however, are aesthetic studies, and the actual sexual orientations of the models are unknown to us. We make no claims in that regard.

See Also: Nightcharm’s
Gay America’s Secret Weapon:
Hot-assed Calendar Boys