Saturday, January 06, 2007

SILLY GOOSE

Katie Wolf’s favorite schoolgirl riddle involves an important zoological discrimination:

Q. What’s the difference between a snake and a goose?

A. A snake is an asp in the grass, a goose is a grasp in the ass.

But really, whose fucked up idea was it to have an army march goose-step? Maybe it’s just historical prejudice, but, let’s face it, when we Americans see a bunch of soldiers goose-stepping along, we’re NOT thinking, “Hey, here come the good guys."


Pud speculates, “Maybe goose-steppers have tighter buns.”

The two armies I think of as goose-stepping, Germans and Greeks, have way different uniforms, I mean, just the footware. Germans wear those tall black boots, Greeks soldiers wear these little pumps with a floppy pompon on each toe.

The Greek army uniform is the closest that military fashion gets to negligee.




Over the years I’ve been slightly aware of a subset of gay people who are uniform fetishists.

One time a first baseman on my team gave me the gruesome details of a bitch fight he was having with another guy over a particular rare belt buckle needed to complete a Marine uniform of a particular vintage. A tedious boring account indeed.




A couple of early evenings in Eureka Valley (“the Castro”) I saw guys in spit and polish uniforms of many genres, parking their cars and moseying all toward what must have been a uniform gala. These photos are from the Phoenix Uniform Club of San Francisco.




But, can you imagine… A gay wedding in which the groom-guy is wearing the full black SS get-up, with the bride-guy tritzing down the aisle in a Greek army uniform?

Parents, cousins, coworkers, favorite teachers, are all there at the reception to go “ahh” as the two guys feed each other wedding cake, and maybe mist up a little as the happy couple goose-steps off into their new life together.

On the other hand, some guys just look good in uniforms.

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