me, applying a copious amount of butter to my toast: I’m so blessed not to be a butterless man on this morning

So I’ve been listening to an audiobook of Moby Dick in my downtime, and omg this book is weird. Like prepare yourself for it being super racist, but it’s also intensely gay??? The main character gets gay married to his Pacific Islander roomie like the night after he meets him???? Also I just got to the part with Captain Ahab and omg he is so Extra™ like he actually throws his pipe overboard because it doesn’t fit with his ~*~aesthetic~*~ Let me tell you Great American Literature is wild

UPDATE in this chapter the narrator can’t shut up about how hot his particular friend  boyfriend Queequeg is and describes in loving detail how they’re tied together by this rope while he holds Queequeg over the side of the boat (actually he says “wedded,” WEDDED, i ask you) and he’s never felt more intimate with another human being in his life

JUST WHALERS BEING BROS

FURTHER FUCKING UPDATE OH MY GOD

okay so item 1: this book recently went from “somewhat racist at brief intervals” to “let’s have a whole chapter of unremitting racism” so like. be aware of that if you ever plan on reading this? it was not fun times

ITEM TWO 

Y’ALL.

There is a whole chapter about Our Hero holding hands with his fellow whalers.

WHILE THEY MASSAGE WHALE SPERM.

I could not make this shit up. Here it is, in all its slimy glory, Chapter 94: A Squeeze of the Hand – 

“Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,- Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.”

THIS IS THE GAYEST THING I’VE EVER READ. MELVILLE IS LEGITIMATELY JUST TAUNTING ME NOW. HE’S CREEPILY ROLLING HIS LITTLE WHALER HANDS IN WHALE SPERM AND DARING ME TO SAY SOMETHING WHILE I JUST STAND THERE WITH MY FUCKING JAW ON THE FLOOR. THIS BISEXUAL ADMITS DEFEAT. I HAVE BEEN OUTFLANKED BY HERMAN FUCKING MELVILLE AND HIS GAY-ASS WHALE SPERM

FINAL. FUCKING. UPDATE.

this is what i said to @manicpanic88 earlier today, so naïvely: i said, “Meville is straight up thirsty for whales.” I added, “This man truly wants to fuck a whale.” 

Let me be clear (and by the way SPOILERS up to antepenultimate chapter of the book follow this parenthetical): I am now on chapter one hundred thirty-something and we have only just now found the whale. Like. This book has been one hundred and thirty chapters of Real Nantucket Whale Thirst™ and almost no actual (Moby) Dick, do you get me? You out there who like pining fic, THIS BOOK IS THE ULTIMATE. Melville did it first, but GAYER, and WITH WHALES.

Anyway so this whole book everyone who has seen or even heard about Moby Dick is like “whoa my sweet fancy aunts, don’t go lookin’ for that there whippersnapper” (this is my attempt at imitating Melville’s weird imitation of a Nantucket accent, it’s not going well for me but it didn’t go well for him either), “whoa, THAT’S A BAD FISH, I heard he took someone’s head clean off / killed his twelve best mates / blew up a ship with the power of his LASER FLUKES!!” i mean no one actually says “laser flukes” but THIS IS THE LEVEL OF BADNESS WE ARE DEALING WITH. THIS IS NOT A NICE WHALE. YOU SHOULD NOT TAKE THIS WHALE HOME TO MEET YOUR PARENTS AT SPRING BREAK, HE WILL DRINK ALL YOUR BEER AND LEAVE THE HOUSE SOMEHOW FULL OF DOG POOP, WHILE IT IS ALSO ON FIRE.

and yet.

here is what Melville has to say about this bad motherfucker when we finally, finally see him for the very first time:

“A gentle joyousness - a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.”

RAVISHED EUROPA. STRAIGHT FOR THE NUPTIAL BOWER. WE GET IT, HERMAN. WE GET IT. YOU WANNA FUCK A WHALE. YOU WROTE A WHOLE ENTIRE BOOK ABOUT WANTING TO FUCK THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WHITE WHALE IN THE WORLD, WHO PROBABLY ALSO HAS PURPLE EYES AND PUTS ITS FLUKES UP WHEN SOME PREPS STARE AT HIM. WE GET IT.

reader, i hope he married it.

I can certify that this is 100% true and is a basically accurate summary of how my professor taught Moby Dick to all of the English majors at my college.

Moby Dick might be the most homosexual thing ever written that has the word “Dick” in the title.

@seagodofmagic, thoughts?

TBH I have nothing to add, this is an accurate summary of not just this book but pretty much everything Herman Melville ever wrote, except sometimes instead of gay whales it’s gay commanding officers, gay Chaucer fans with hipster beards, and/or gay fake incest marriages (usually with a similar side of You Tried And Failed depictions of race and cultural difference).

THE MOST HOMOSEXUAL THING EVER WRITTEN THAT HAS THE WORD “DICK” IN THE TITLE

Its not just Moby Dick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPOX2kNAZ6I

I distinctly remember that when I read Moby Dick a few years ago and got to the “sperm of kindness” bit, I straight-up put the book down, laughed until I cried, and felt my soul leave my body with NOPE. This book. Hooooly shit.

(I vaguely recall that we read “excerpts” in high school English class. Let me tell you, the excerpted bits were not the ones about men holding hands lovingly in vats of sperm.)

Herman Melville wrote many, many gay things. As in like, almost everything he wrote. Much of it centered around sailors and intimacy between men at sea. He was also in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne, saying: “ “A man of a deep and noble nature had seized me in this seclusion… . The soft ravishments of the man spun me round about in a web of dreams… . But already I feel that Hawthorne had dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further and further shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil in my Southern soul.”

So yeah. Herman Melville. Super gay.

Though, just for the record for folks who don’t know: “sperm” here means “spermaceti”, “a waxy substance found in the head cavities of the sperm whale (and, in smaller quantities, in the oils of other whales). Spermaceti is created in the spermaceti organ inside the whale’s head.”

And still no one has mentioned the scene where a flenser peels the skin off a dead whale’s dick in one piece and goes around wearing it like a poncho with his head through the piss-hole.

Wow, okay, I read this book years ago and I vividly remember all this other stuff, especially the gay group grope in the oil vats, but my reading comprehension skills apparently failed me when it got to the whale dick poncho because I don’t remember that at all, and that seems pretty damn memorable.

Here is the whale dick poncho passage.

“Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale’s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,- longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which, King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th chapter of the First Book of Kings.

[Airy interjects: IT’S THE WHALE’S DICK]

“Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.

“That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator’s desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishopric, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!”