The weather this week has been about as perfect as it's bound to get.  In Boston the summer is a slow striptease — it can be August before we get down to g-strings and pasties (figuratively speaking, more or less), but it's usually worth the wait.

My daily commute takes me along the Esplanade and the Charles River Bike Path, a favorite corridor for joggers, too.  There's a newly renovated outdoor workout station (officially called the Soldiers Field Playground) along the path as well, and this provides those who want it some additional exercise, and even those who don't can get exercised in passing.  It's win-win.

I had worried earlier this summer when they bulldozed the old jungle gym — an austere launching pad for ROTC drills (you haven't experienced yoga until you've heard a drill-sergeant holler "I SAID DOWNWARD DAWG, GODDAMMIT! NOW GIMME TWENNY!" ) and a pit -stop for nearly-naked joggers — that this summer's gun show would be cancelled, and one of the innocent pleasures of my ride along the Charles to and from work along with it.  But the new state-of-the-art site was erected in record time, and can accommodate about three times the beefcake the old one did.
Coming from the North (roughly speaking) there's a long stretch of nothing on either side along the bike path that opens onto this glorious vista, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't motivate me on my way to work in the dog days. Passing through I always think of Whitman's I Sing The Body Electric ...

...the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face;
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists;
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees...
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more;
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

I mean, does that not describe this moment more or less precisely?....


I'll admit it's hard for us up here in New England to wrap our minds around public displays as blatant as those you'll find along the Charles River bike path in the summertime without suspecting some degree of prurience on the part of participants or spectators, but the area's not cruisy, although I'm sure it has its share of missed connections. 

It's not any remote possibility of sex that's electrifying here, but the sexuality itself.  The casting off for a brief season of society's stuffiness and hypocrisy is as liberating as blurting out an open secret.   This is what we are, and it's vibrant and easy and beautiful.

It's that display of sexuality inseparable from sport, the one place in our culture it's not only safe for straight guys to marvel at the beauty (however you want to define it) of other men's bodies, but where they're encouraged to clap, whistle, and cheer at them, and even wear the names of the ones they're smitten with on their shirts.   

Part of the logic to the rituals of praise and glory has to do with encouraging emulation.  But in children.  Which is why when I see fully-grown adults wearing their Big Papi jerseys to the Sox game, it looks to me like a case of arrested development.  But then sport is that nexus of childhood wishes and adults' dashed dreams, and anyone who's ever watched their dreams of glory die an agonizing, drawn-out death will tell you it's hard sometimes to tell exactly where the cross-over point is.

As for the gun show, I like to think I've given some back over the years. And while I enjoy a good show as much as the next guy, I understand there's a line between looking and leering. Not from personal experience with the latter (needless to say) so much as from having dated someone who, when we went out, thought every busboy, waiter, and bartender was hitting on him. 

Granted sometimes it's hard to tell.  Sometimes.  As with other relational perversions, the line between light-hearted flirting and lascivious leering runs through the gray area of consensual play and mutuality. It can be hard to gauge, and flirting does make sport of this ambiguity.  It seems we can't eliminate the possibility of making an ass of ourselves from the equation altogether.

Which is why there are designated (if unmarked) cruising spots where eye-play is understood to connote actual interest.  And for the rest, as I've already mentioned, there's Missed Connections.