Individuality: is it the human animal’s greatest foible, or it’s greatest folly?

Yes, when it comes to breaking from the pack in order to assert our uniqueness, we do so by not just perversely emulating the exact same thing everyone else is doing, but trying to outdo them at it. This has resulted in some abysmal trends over the years, the most ubiquitously current one being the tattoo. What was once a form of ritualized scarring for men entering the military, being initiated into biker gangs, or getting tagged as property/currency by a new prison hubbies is now the walk on the wild side for single-and-loving-it divorcees, midlife crisis fortysomethings, and drunk-ass teenage girls on spring break.

As for the gays, we’re not immune to such missteps. We went overboard on the high-end salon Caesar and crew cuts. We’ve label-whored and even donned camouflage. We’ve tanned ourselves like rotisserie chickens. Will it be us who ultimately put the tattoo in its grave after we wear it out? Haven’t you lost count of the number of Chinese characters, deltoid rising suns, and pec tats that look like gunshot wounds you’ve encountered? This is the real danger of The Gay: when we go over-the-top, we go way over in terms of signifiers and presentation, and our most heinous tribal markings — an overabundance of gay totemic icons, rainbows, overwrought sexploits, and anthropomorphized sex-beasts — perpetrate the most traumatizing eye-rapes imaginable.

Hyperbole? No. In this case, there’s no such thing as overstatement…

Bless The Beasts and Children

Look, I pride myself on being with-it, free-spirited, and largely hang-up-free. Still, I have to level with you. You could be, best case scenario, Eric Bana standing naked in my doorway save for a pair of jackboots, clutching a bottle of Tanqueray in one hand and handcuffs in the other, and still my first impression is going to be: Mister, you have a tattoo of a unicorn raping a flailing dolphin on your bicep. Seriously. It’s a unicorn fucking a porpoise… under a Crayola rainbow. What fit of inspiration would give rise to this? I get that even kids have ink nowadays, but is this your inner child having a total shit fit? If we branded ourselves with our childhood obsessions, I’d have Dungeons & Dragons or Saber Rider & The Star Sheriffs on my freakin’ face. Whimsy is great. I like whimsy, and I even dig unicorns, but there’s a line that’s been crossed here. Sometimes our favorite things need to stay compartmentalized. And private. One man’s chocolate and peanut butter is another’s chloroform and duct tape.

Flight of The Masturbator

Tunnel-visioned monomania, or profound metonymy? The hell if I know. I’ll give you credit for scope. I mean, you stepped into that tattoo parlor, looked at the guy in the bandana, and when he showed you a book full of Tweety Birds and mudflap chicks, you stridently proclaimed, “No sir. I had a dream last night. In my vision quest, I saw erupting cocks. Uncut cocks. Cocks with Prince Alberts. And those cocks took on the formation of a great butterfly like so many imperiled insects assuming the form of flowers to ward of predators. Then they took flight and swept over the world, sowing love and peace in their wake.” I get it. It’s supposed to be like the dream of the robins from Blue Velvet, only even more ironically bathetic and disturbing, right? It works, but at first blush, I have to confess I got the impression of some sanity-shattering Lovecraftian god-monster (The Crawling Cumshot? Dickman’s Model? The Boner Out of Space?), but it’s still wicked cool.

Good Bi/Cruel World

Every virtue has its debits. You can be too innocent for your own good. Too giving. Too faithful. And yeah, you can have too much chutzpah. That’s the only logical motive for having a giant dick etched into your arm. This isn’t some private slut stamp that your boyfriend Rocco made you get so he could mark his territory — this is a massive erection on your limb that anyone at the gym will see when you do lat pull-downs. And since every exhibitionist has their wounded, needy side that makes them crave attention even if it’s the wrong kind, I can only assume that having it done on the inner bicep rather than the outer arm is some sort of conflicted psychological tell; with ostentatiousness there is accompanying underlying shame, and a penis about to experience the Hellraiser-style agony/ecstasy of penetrating a barbed wire orifice is the most persuasive of visual aids to that effect.

I Have To See A Man About A Horse…

This one is just drowning in symbolism, which makes it my fave. There’s sloe-eyed ’80s hot rod Patrick Swayze — circa his bleached-out, pectacular Roadhouse/Point Break period — decked out in Chippendale duds, doubly sanctified for iconicity through untimely death and gay crush status. Personally, I’d have gone with Miles O’Keeffe from Tarzan, The Ape Man or Reb Brown in Yor — The Hunter From The Future, but I’m an avowed dork. Anyway, here Swayze is re-cast as the legendary centaur, depicted in Greek mythology as both a learned, benevolent substitute father and a doomed rapist, significantly with no female of the breed. There’s the rainbow, too — the compulsory shorthand in all gay tats for conveying pride, solidarity, and terrible lapses in judgment. Ultimately, it’s admirable how cohesive the concept is given all the disparate elements, even if it’s the bodily equivalent of Venice Beach van art.

My Body Is A Wonderland

When I first heard sex god supreme Xavier Red wax pre-ram philosophical about the image of Jesus tattooed on his dick in The Doom Generation, it never occurred to me that anyone would actually do such a thing to their own pocket rocket. Clearly, I was wrong. I imagine that getting one of these done is not unlike doing a dildo cast, with lots of concentration to stay hard while one or more artists do their thing. This one, happily, has a variation on the standard rainbow motif. Here we get rainbow thunderbolts seemingly hurled down from the heavens at the bearer’s defiant leviathan, while two mermaids marvel in veneration at the obelisk decorated like some kind of fertility totem pole. This was assuredly meant to open eyes, and like the Little Mermaid (the real deal, not the Disney whore), upon encountering this sight, I’d be left speechless, faltering on my feet, and borderline suicidal. So…thanks?

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