directorcommentary | jasonbentley.org

From a boy's health pamplet, c1920.

Oh, for a return to the salad days of local news. The 1970's. These guys were the hard-hitting newshounds during the mid-1970's at WAAY, Channel 31, in Huntsville, Alabama - for years the most-watched all-white UHF prime-time newscast in the Solid South.

My friend Don Dorsey sent me a link yesterday the website of Randy Constan, a 50-year-old "5-year-old" in a page-boy haircut that likes to dress up not only as Peter Pan, but in just about anything that's skin-tight and dainty. It's not simply a clothing fetish - this is a lifestyle for this man that informs all aspects of his personality and interpersonal relationships. And to-wit, he's had guest slots on Conan O'Brian and, god help us, Jimmy Kimmel as a result. Well, good for him.


Like any guy, I've my fetishes, as anyone that knows me well enough can attest. None of those fetishes, however, fall under what I'd call the "arrested development" category. Say all you want about my behavior patterns and delayed adolescence, I don't get off on the man-baby trip. When I'm having sex (or even when I'm not) I don't like to pretend that I'm a child or a toddler or an infant. Now, if this is your thing, more power to ya. I'm all about diversity and doing whatever it is you want to do that makes you feel as sexy as you can be, provided all parties are of age and consentual and all that. And while in the grand scheme of things, I'm what they call "vanilla," in the end very little squicks me or offends me and as such I've been party to interesting people and interesting times. And oh, the things I've seen. And photographed.

But the man-babies...the man-babies wig me out. Psychology is worn so boldly on the sleeves of sexuality, that when it involves a regression to toddlerhood, I get squirmy. It seems like a lot of guys are really, really into this. This is not merely a gay phenemenon. In fact, like in S&M, infantile fetishism seems to boast as many straight acolytes as gay. Or, as in the case with Randy "Peter Pan" Constan, where sexuality is in a strange middle ground between asexuality, and um, pansexuality.

What does infantile fetishism look like? Well, Constan links to http://www.foreverakid.com/, a provider of clothing for the "Adult Baby (AB), Big Baby, Infantilist, Diaper Lover (DL) and Juvenile Adult market." Their online catalog offers a pretty good idea.

Most of the man-babies I've met are also heavily involved in furry fandom. What's that? Well, in its strictest definition, furry fandom is a comic-book style subculture in which people characterize themselves and others based on collectively agreed-upon traits of certain "animals." Furries anthropromorphize these animals and then project assumed characteristics on themselves or others. That's about as narrow a defination, however, as you can get.

Furry is a highly fetishistic global subculture that operates in the same art- and Internet-fueled strata as comic book fans and Star Trek geeks. There are conventions every year where furries from all corners of the world decend on a midscale hotel-convention center and engage in a menu of activities that range from buying and trading furry art (usually comic book-style drawings of human bodies with animal heads and character traits, engaged in everything from Valkryie-style posing to S&M sex), to drug-fueled orgies that any given time can involve the aforementioned adult babies (they really come out at orgies), people having sex with each other while dressed in elaborate Disneyland style character-costumes ("fursuits"), and yes, some people even having sex with real, honest to goodness animals.

All of this plays out against a backdrop of more mainstream geeks attracted to furry fandom for the same reason they're attracted to comic books - the cartoonish, bold-stroke emotionalism of the lifestyle provides a reasonable Brechtian lens through which life is much easier to deal with - like the news cameraman so used to the dispassionate viewfinder of his camera that his images only affect him emotionally when viewed after the fact. Furry makes it easy to face a harsh world of insane, inconsistent people and say, "oh, well...that's just what a [insert animal here] would do," and expect those around them to leave it at that.

I know - this sounds crazy. But I'm not making any of this up. You remember that scene in The Shining where Jack Nicholson looks down a carpeted hotel hallway into a room where sees the ghosts of a well-dressed party guest getting a blow job from some guy dressed in an animal costume? Well, it's a lot like that. Don't believe me? I took my then-housemate Jerry to the convention because he expressed the same healthy skepticism that most do - surely such oddities don't exist among adults.

Then he saw what I photographed. In one of the Marriott's "ballrooms," a dance was in full swing...





Yep, it's a vision straight from Kubrick - especially when you consider many of these fursuits are "anatomically correct." See the Minnie Mouse character in the polka-dot dress in the first photo? I think I deliberately avoided taking a frontal picture of the fursuit, because it was home-made and Minnie's mouth was sown into a frozen, sphincterized, elastic "O." I think everyone at that hotel that weekend remembers the horror of seeing that.

Anyway, why do adult babies and furries overlap? Well, in both subcultures there's a great emphasis placed on the costume - the uniform as a transformative, distancing experience. I've had experience as an actor (and even worked as Baloo at Walt Disney World straight outta high school), and I can personally vouch for the transformative experience of costuming. When you dress like someone/something else, you become someone else. Or it's easy to believe you have.

Here's where the whole adult-baby thing gets a little icky. A few of the guys I've met that are really into it - get really into it. They like to see themselves as helpless kids, and when in a certain headspace, they feel transformed into a childlike state. Curling into a fetal ball and shitting yourself is one thing, but often man-baby schtick masks (though barely) a brazen pedophilia. Among many adult-baby-furry types, their chosen genre of furry art often includes adult-child sex (though anthropromorophized for the aforementioned distance), often with S&M and macrophilic overtones.

Furry culture, and indeed "adult baby" culture, are by nature insular. Insulation leads to bubbles. And bubbles always distort the reality of the outside world. The hotel furry convention is a perfect example of this, where the shock and discomfort of the hotel staff and other hapless guests is held as a badge of authenticity, and any recoil is greeted with an common whine of disdain for those that haven't set their animal totems "free" (as though shielding a real 5-year-old's eyes from a man-sized chipmunk in a leather harness sporting a flopping erect dildo is askin to shutting off Sesame Street).

In these bubbles, the world of fetish can become a little too blurred with reality and it can bleed out into the "real world." Think of the S&M bottom that demands humiliation, say, at the airport. Or the vegetarian that refuses to let you enjoy your "fleshburger" as they graze. Their highly fetishized exceptions start to seem like real-world rules, and therein lies a problem. When Michael Jackson answers all queries with the same phrase, "I would never hurt a child," I'm not convinced the guy's speaking as an adult. If a diaper-man can molest party guests while they sleep because "babies are innocent" and he's a baby, of course Jackson isn't "hurting a child" when he and a boy "keep it in the closet" because to him, they're both boys.

So what's the point here? Well, I dunno - this was just what came up from looking at one man(boy's) webpage. Though I think a widening trend toward infantalism is interesting in our culture (and like so much that matters - entirely unspoken and subterranean). Like the oft-heard gay male whine of "there are no good tops anymore, only bottoms." Well, yeah, that's true. And going back once again to Kubrick - are we all heading toward life as a big planetary Star-Baby?

Baby...baby not.

But consider this...the evening I took the above pictures, several attractive partiers retired to my (now storied) apartment in Cupertino for a night of debauched revelry. Within an hour, the scene looked like this:



Before you could say "I do believe in faeries," three of the four blokes in this picture had put on diapers. One is hidden under the long-haired fellow's panajams and dungarees. The guy on the far right is wearing a diaper - over a one-piece maroon lycra unitard. Did this happen at most furry-related parties?. In my experience, yes. Peter Pan's nursery, indeed.

For these reasons and many more, I miss my place in Cupertino. It was the stage for an amazing series of characters for a good six years during the late 1990's (even if I spent most of my time as an host/observer), and this far more adult, sober decade more often than not feels like a hangover I can't quite shake away.

Oh yeah -- the title of this entry refers to the first time my mom came to California andmet some of my more esoteric friends. My mom and I went out to dinner with a few friends and my neighbor Claire in 1996. A couple friends were furries and one was an avowed infantalist. So avowed, that he typically felt compelled to wear diapers under his every day clothes.

All things considered, dinner had gone as well as can be expected. I shot a few icy darts with my eyes over to the furries when their banter waxed a little risqué, but all in all my mom remained her fiesty, friendly self and a fun dinner was had by all. Then we got to the car.

"Jay, why did [name deleted] crinkle when he walked?" I slowly closed my eyes and had to patiently explain to my mother that, yeah, this guy was wearing a diaper. No, not because he had to like June Allyson. Cuz...he liked it. After she stopped laughing she started asking about a couple comments the furries had made, and I had to fill in that context too. My mom smiled and nodded and tried not to snicker too hard.

Some months later, I was pissing and whining to my mom on the phone about somethingorother, and I made the comment, "God, mom, sometimes it feels so hard to relate to people around me."

To which my mom replied, "Well, hon, if you'd quit hanging around with diaper-wearing puppyfuckers, you wouldn't have a problem, would you?"

SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA (jasonbentley.org News Dispatch) -- The Bush Administration faced another day of damage control after former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik withdrew his nomination as head of the Department of Homeland Security, prompting many Washington insiders to wonder if the ensuing embarassment could have been averted had President Bush taken blogger Jason Bentley's advice and nominated celebrated character actor Barry Corbin to the post in the first place.

"Sadly, the prospect of Congressional crucifixion over an alleged illegal maid, a practice inaugurated by Republicans during the Clinton era, has sent another worthy cabinet nominee into the sacrificial fire," said Mr. Bentley, speaking from his home in Santa Clara. "I called for Corbin's nomination even before Tom Ridge tendered his resignation (see "Pissing on the Sparkplug," 11/18/2004). Let Kerik go back to his multi-million dollar job with Giuliani. It's time a man of honor like Barry Corbin gets the recognition he deserves."

"Hell, now that he's lost his hair to alopecia," Bentley added, "Mr. Corbin even looks like Bernard Kerik. And this is the Department of Homeland Security we're talking about. Appearance is everything."

Recent photographs, indeed, show a distict resemblance between Mr. Corbin, whom Jason Bentley recommended in his November 18 weblog entry, and the President's eventual choice on December 3rd. When pressed for an explanation of this coincidence, Mr. Bentley smiled and said, cryptically, "The President and I both like to piss on good sparkplugs."


Neither Barry Corbin nor Bernard Kerik were reached for comment. Sources at the White House, speaking on condition of anonymity, said only that the President "knows good advice when he hears it."