Beefcake and Homophobia in the Cayman Islands

I was looking for beefcake photos from Grand Island, Nebraska, but Google Images kept giving me the Cayman Islands instead.

Ok, so who am I to dispute a search algorithm?  Cayman Islands it is.



The islands had no inhabitants before the first Europeans arrived, so no archaeological sites, no native language.

The only major town, George Town, has 28,000 people and 600 banks and financial institutions.  Apparently it's a tax haven.

Other than counting your money, what is there to do?

The Cayman Islands National Museum, housed in a rather small house, has some historical exhibits.

No gay bars, no bath houses, no gay organizations.  The Islands are a British overseas territory, so their sodomy law is gone, and same-sex marriage was legalized in court but is under appeal.  The Islanders really seem to hate gay people. (Most of the Caribbean is the same way.) Your visit will have to be closeted.

No museums, no archaeological sites, no gay activities.  Is there at least some physique watching?  There must be some beefcake among the 15,000 adult male residents.

Surprisingly, not a lot of swimmers.  The top photo depicts the winners of the Foster's Food Fair 800 m sea swim.

No wrestling, since this is a British colony, but there is a boxing club.

Well, what about the 400,000 tourists  who visit every year to go swimming, snorkeling, scuba diving, boating,and parasaiing.  Surely some of them have physiques.

Not many.  But there are a lot of entitled sneers.

I forgot.  They go fishing, too.

And they pet stingrays.

The Top 10 Problems of Summer

For teachers and college professors, summer lasts for about 3 1/2 months, begins when you turn in the final grades in May, and ends when you stand in front of that first class in August.

I hate it.  3 1/2 long, hot, boring, miserable months of nothing.

But I've survived it before.  Here are my solutions to the top 10 problems of summer.

1. There's nothing to do during the daytime.

I envy those people with office jobs that stay the same all year round, so they can keep their same structure and routine through the summer.  I have no appointments, no obligations, nothing to do, no one to see.

At least when I was a kid, there were summer enrichment classes, summer camps, Vacation Bible School, and the weekly visit of the bookmobile, but as an adult, it's sitting around the house for three months waiting for fall classes to begin.

Solution: Pursue a new hobby, like BDSM or hooking on Grinder.



2. There's nothing to do in the evening.

TV is all reruns, and the theater, opera, and ballet seasons are over.

Solution: Host a M4M party.  Advertise on Craigslist, and invite 20 gay and bi-curious guys over.  Nudity optional; prizes for the biggest and smallest endowments.

3. There is no nighttime.

The sun doesn't go down until 9:00 pm.  Then it's an eerie twilight until 10:00 pm.

It should be dark before dinner.  Eating dinner in broad daylight is just creepy. I especially hated it when I was a kid, and my parents sent me to bed while the sun was blazing.

Solution: spend 6 pm -10 pm in a bathhouse, where it's always dark.

4. You gain weight.

When classes are in session, you walk from your car to the parking lot, from your office to class, to the student union, to the library, to various committee meetings, plus pacing around while teaching, so you cover 5 or more miles a day easily on top of your daily run.  In the summer, your daily run is all the cardio you get, 3 miles.

But you're within arm's reach of snacks all day, so you take in more than 5 miles worth of calories.  Between May and August, you could gain 20 pounds.

Solution: Spend more time at the gym, particularly if it's a gay gym where you can do more than work out.









5. You're forced to "enjoy the outdoors."

Come on, "the outdoors" is what you go through to get places.  What is there to "enjoy" there?  It's like enjoying a train station, or standing in line for a movie.  

Yet your friends get upset when you "waste" a day indoors, and drag you off for swimming, boating, canoeing, or just wandering about.

Solution: when you are forced to "enjoy the outdoors," insist that everyone take their shirts off.  Concentrate on the muscles, and it will soon be over.

More after the break.

6. You're even forced to eat outside.

I challenge you to find anyone who actually enjoys eating on hard wooden benches, with the wind blowing napkins and paper plates around, and leaves and twigs and bugs falling all over the food.  We put our dining rooms inside the house for a reason.

Yet summertime is a mess of barbecues, picnics, festivals, and baseball games with food being chomped done on outside, and your friends even want to serve you dinner on the back yard patio.

Solution: Again, shirts off.

7. It's ungodly hot outside.

In the winter you can bundle up, but there's nothing you can do about getting drenched with sweat after walking half a block,

Solution: I had this problem all the time in Los Angeles and Florida.  Hot weather means clothes off, so there lots of opportunities for guy-watching.

8. It's ungodly cold inside.

After getting drenched with sweat, you walk into a building in a tank top and shorts, and face an Artic wind -- air conditioners are blasting away, and it's 60 degrees!

Solution:  Carry a warm sweater with you, and every time you walk into a building, put it on and pretend that it's December.  This will help alleviate your summer depression, too.

9. There are no good holidays.

Fall has Halloween and Thanksgiving, winter has Christmas and Valentine's Day, spring has Easter and St. Patrick's Day.

What does summer have?  In the U.S., Independence Day, the 4th of July, a holiday of jingoistic patriotism, noisy fireworks, and eating outside.

Solution: there are Gay Pride Festivals in hundreds of cities, mostly in June, some in July and August.  Go to as many as you can.

10. There's no escape.

If you don't like cold winters, for some crazy reason, you can fly south to balmy Los Angeles, Fort Lauderdale, or Phoenix.

But there's no place in North America that's cold during the summertime -- even Fairbanks, Alaska can hit 80 degrees.  You'd have to summer in Australia.

Solution: Only 88 more days until fall.

See also: Playing Outside; 34 Reasons to Like Summer

The Moline Morons

Looking for beefcake in my home town of Rock Island,Illinois has proven fruitless.

Too little, late.












But Moline, the town next door, is a beefcake paradise.

It literally abuts Rock Island.  Five blocks from our house, 18th Avenue in Rock Island instantly became 19th Avenue in Moline. 

But the two towns could not be more different in structure and ambiance.

Rock Island was the poorest of the Quad Cities, with 15% of the population under the poverty line. Moline was richer.  Not as rich as Bettendorf, across the river, but only 5% of the population under the poverty line.

Rock Island was about 20% black.  Moline, almost all white.

When I was in college, Rock Island's main employer, J. I. Case Company, closed.  Many young adults left  town.  Some of the grade schools were demolished, no longer needed.  Rock Island became a town of the past.

Moline's main employer, John Deere, is still around.

Look at Moline High -- all glass and steel, sleak and modern.  We were going to high school in a relic from the 1930s.

Of course, Rock Island had the Arsenal Island, Augustana College, the Centennial Bridge, the Hauberg House, and Harris Pizza. What did Moline have? A mall.

Their high school team was the Maroons (the color),but of course we called them the Moline Morons. 

They had better training facilities and high-end coaches, so they usually won the games.

Looks like they still have excellent fitness facilities.

Ok, what's with the proliferation of beefcake photos of the swim team? It's almost as if they are bragging.

Plus wrestling, track, football, tennis, and even powerlifting.

Ok, Moline athletes are buffed.  I get it.

But at least at Rocky High, we weren't all blond.

See also:  The Better-Dorks of Bettendorf, Iowa

What do the Crazy Cowboys of Craig, Colorado Do for Fun?

Moffat County, Colorado, population 13,000, is advertised as "literally where the Old West comes to life."

It's in the far northwest part of the state, with Wyoming on the north and Utah on the west, and Denver 200 miles away.  70% of the population lives in Craig, the county seat, advertised as the "Elk Hunting Capital of the World."

The Old West and elks?  What more could you want?

Although there were ranches and farms in the area since the 1870s, Craig was founded in 1908, and named after one of its financial backers, the otherwise forgotten William Bayard Craig.

It's a long, flat town, 3 miles long and 1/2 mile wide, amid the endless brown scrub of the Wild West.  There are some cowboy-type businesses, like Murdoch's Ranch and Home Supply, but not many.

Restaurants: mostly chain, Wendy's and such. I'm interested in J.W. Snack's Gulf Coast Bar and Grill, which is nowhere near the gulf of anything, and doesn't feature any gulf coast cuisine.  According to one review, it has "the worst burgers in the world."

Doesn't look great.

City Hall, which is on a street next to Snyder and Counts Feed and Seed and the Goodrich Mud Company, is built in modern Brutopian style.  I was expecting Wild West Rococco.

There are 14 churches in town.  A lot of Catholic, Lutheran, Church of Christ, and Latter-Day Saints.  One interesting name: The Church of Destiny, which turns out to be generic fundamentalist, and not very big.

Two museums:

1. The Museum of Northwest Colorado, the only semi-attractive building in town, has one of the largest cowboy gun, leather, and spur collections in the world
.
2. The Wyman Living History Museum: "the result of years of collecting beginning in 1949 when Lou wyman discovered an abandoned 1932 Lincoln automobile in Elk Springs, Colorado, while he was filling water barrels to take to his sheep herders. He paid $15.00 for it and has been collecting ever since."

But it's not nearly as campy as it sounds.  It's not really living history -- no costumed actors explaining the Wild West.  And the collection is not weird or unique.

What do the cowboys of Craig, Colorado do for fun besides eat bad burgers and look at old guns?

Moffat County High School, motto "I Choose," although I don't think you can really choose to go there, is the biggest building in town., so it must be the seat of culture.

Its activities include a "No Sugar Day," a rodeo, a jazz concert, the musical "Cinderella" in the fall and "You Can't Take It With You" in the spring.

Sports: football, baseball, basketball, soccer, wrestling, and...swimming.

LOTS of swimming.

Who knew that cowboys were such avid swimmers?













I recken it gets powerful hot in the Old West, and a swimmin' hole looks mighty inviting.  Particularly with small town swimmers  lined up beside it. 

Palm Springs: Not Just for Heavily-Tanned 70-Year Olds

Palm Spring is a small, ritzy town in the desert 120 miles east of West Hollywood, too far to go for a day.  Gay men over 50 went there for weekend visits.  Around age 70, they moved there permanently. got a deep tan (who cares about melanoma?), drank a lot, and cruised the cabana boys.

I only visited once, in the company of a Geezer whose name I no longer remember.  It was kind of fun being the youngest guy in the room by at least 20 years, and the hookups were plentiful: once you hit 70, you are no longer concerned about such old-fashioned concepts as marital fidelity.

I had the impression that it consisted entirely of elderly gay men, but in fact only about 10% of the population consists of gay couples, and probably another 20% of single elderly gay men.  There are lots of heterosexuals about, and you can see lots of beefcake (other than heavily tanned 70 year olds).

There are about as many gyms as West Hollywood.





There are three high schools (public, fundamentalist, Catholic).  Strangely, the public school has a water polo team.

Water polo in the middle of the desert?

And of course a wrestling team.  Presumably you have to be 18 to get a job as a cabana boy and get cruised by heavily-tanned 70-year old gay men.

Adjacent Palm Desert has four high schools (two public, two fundamentalist Christian), plus the College of the Desert.  The wrestling teams appear to hold matches in hot desert sun.

And the football team holds meetings in...um...a swimming pool.

Well, I'm in favor of anything that gets cute guys' shirts off. 

Especially if they are not too heavily tanned and under 70.

The Forced Skinny Dipping of Wanomie, Pennsylvania

An article in the Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania Times-Leader on 5 June 1947 states that a 20 year old Wanamie youth,Leo Garvey, forced 11 boys to disrobe and jump into the Wanamie Reservoir at gunpoint.

They had to stay in the chilly water until he had enough "pleasure" at their discomfort (he said) and let him go.

The boys went home and told their parents, who called the police.  Leo was arrested, but released into the custody of his father on a $1,000 bail.

At his hearing before Alderman Stanley Salva, Leo said that he didn't know why he did it.  He received a $25 fine and was sent home.

This story bring up many questions.
1. Did Leo know the boys before?
2. Was he a swimming instructor or camp counselor?
3. Why were the boys shivering?  This was Pennsylvania in June.
4. Why a hearing before an alderman (city councilman) rather than a judge?
5. Why such a small fine?  Today he'd be going to prison.

Wanamie, Pennsylvania is in the southern Wyoming Valley, about 10 miles from Wilkes-Barre. It's a tiny village of 600, but in 1947 it was much bigger, drawing many immigrants to work in the coal mines.

But still small enough so that everybody knew everybody, so most likely Leo was acquainted with the boys before the incident.

Wanamie Dam, on Reservoir Creek, created a reservoir of 15-20 acres.  It was torn down in 2007.

I was unable to find any information about Leo except that his father, also Leo, was a secretary at the State Police Barracks, Wyoming, and his uncle was the Principal of the Columbus School.

That's why his punishment was so low.  He had connections.

In 2009, Ryan J. Garvey of nearby Nanticoke, age 18, shot at two teenage boys and their mother during an altercation at a bazaar in Sugar Notch.  I'm guessing it's our Leo's grandson.

Of the list of boys forced to skinny dip that day, I could only find one: Eugene P. Ziemba, owner of a multimillion dollar pipe company, passed away in 2016 at the age of 79.

His obituary doesn't mention the incident.

The Beefcake of Galicia, Spain

"Agrupación Deportiva Fogar da Xuventude nace e legalízase en Carballo no ano 1988 como unha entidade privada deportiva, social e cultural."

I knew that was not Spanish, but I could read it, so it must be close.  Portuguese?

No, the Portuguese word for "youth" is juventude,  

Catalan?  No, it doesn't look like Catalan.

One of the Iberian languages that are often labeled "dialects: Asturian, Valencian, Aragonese?

Turns out that it's Galician, a "dialect" that is actually closer to Portuguese than Spanish, 80% mutually intelligible.

I want to sleep in your bed tonight.
Galician: Quero durmir na túa cama esta noite
Portuguese: Eu quero dormir na sua cama a noite

Galician is spoken by 2.1 million people in the  northwest corner of Spain, a poor region, its people stereotyped as backwards, even barbaric, like the hillbillies in the U.S.

So imagine Galician as Appalachian English.

Other than the infinite number of swimmers and triathlon competitors at the AD Fogar, the main tourist draw in Galicia is  Santiago de Compostela, a famous pilgrimage site in the Middle Ages with a marvelously ornate Gothic cathedral.


You can still attend Pilgrim Masses several times a day. They are held in Galician, Spanish, French, German, English, and Polish, but not Latin.

Santiago de Compostela also has a water polo team.

And some bulgeworthy cyclists.

The biggest city in Galicia is La Coruna, a port and industrial center.  Its main tourist draw is the Tower of Hercules, the oldest intact Roman tower in Spain.

Plus some semi-pro boxers.

Pontevedra has banned automobiles in the city limits.  The results are a pedestrian paradise.  It's easily the most beautiful city in Galicia, with an excellent museum displaying Galician and Spanish art from the middle ages to the present.

And, of course, there's a water polo team.