Yankee Doodle went to town
A-riding on a pony
Stuck a feather in his hat
And called it macaroni.

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy.

Have you ever really listened to or considered the words to “Yankee Doodle?”  For many years, I never understood the why he called himself “macaroni.”  What is a macaroni?  He obviously wasn’t talking about the pasta.  I had always known that “Yankee Doodle” first started out as a song that was making fun of the the colonists as country bumpkins (an awkward and unsophisticated person), because that was how the English regarded most colonials at that time.  The term macaroni actually has more connotations than the song lets on.  Macaroni is a fancy and overdressed (“dandy”) style of Italian clothing widely imitated in England at the time.  Young Englishmen who went on the Grand Tour of Europe to finish their studies (I will do a further post on the Grand Tour soon), spent much of their time in Italy.  They began to adopt Continental, and especially Italian, manners, fashions, and attitudes.

Those young men who returned form Italy with Italian fashion and ways were often made fun of for being effeminate.  Being called a macaroni was not the same as the later terms of fops or dandy, which did not always, though mostly, had negative connotations.  Fop became a pejorative term for a foolish man over-concerned with his appearance and clothes in 17th century England.   A dandy (also known as a beau or gallant) is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies, pursued with the appearance of nonchalance in a cult of Self. Historically, especially in late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain, a dandy, who was self-made, often strove to imitate an aristocratic lifestyle despite coming from a middle-class background.  In present day, we often called these types of men metrosexuals.  A heterosexual man who takes on gay fashion and care in their appearance.

A macaroni in mid-18th century England, was a fashionable fellow who dressed and even spoke in an outlandishly affected and epicene manner. The term pejoratively referred to a man who “exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion” in terms of clothes, fastidious eating and gambling. Like a practitioner of macaronic verse, which mixed together English and Latin to comic effect, he mixed Continental affectations with his English nature, laying himself open to satire:

There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately [1770] started up among us. It is called a macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.

 

Young men who had been to Italy on the Grand Tour adopted the Italian word maccherone – a boorish fool in Italian – and said that anything that was fashionable or à la mode was ‘very maccaroni’. Horace Walpole wrote to a friend in 1764 of “the Macaroni Club, which is composed of all the traveled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses.” The “club” was not a formal one: the expression was particularly used to characterize fops who dressed in high fashion with tall, powdered wigs with a chapeau bras on top that could only be removed on the point of a sword. The macaronis were precursor to the dandies, who far from their present connotation of effeminacy came as a more masculine reaction to the excesses of the macaroni.

In 1773, James Boswell was on tour in Scotland with the stout and serious-minded essayist and lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson, the least dandified of Londoners. Johnson was awkward in the saddle, and Boswell ribbed him: “You are a delicate Londoner; you are a maccaroni; you can’t ride.”

More often the not, the term macaroni, fop, or dandy was considered synonymous with homosexual (though homosexual is not a term that comes into existence until the late 1800s and early 1900s).  Needless to say, it was certainly not compliment to say that he “Stuck a feather in his hat; And called it macaroni.”  So the next time you hear the song “Yankee Doodle”  I hope that you will have a different understanding of the song.

An Italian art historian claims some of the images depicted in Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment“—the fresco on the wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel—were inspired by acts the artist witnessed in homosexual bathhouses. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Elena Lazzarini, the author of a new book about the work, explains, “The virile male bodies are inspired by the physiology of laborers engaged in physical exertion, with taut muscles, strenuous exertion and pain etched into the expression on their faces.” (That is the most polite description of man-on-man intercourse we’ve ever heard.) Lazzarini goes on to say that Michelangelo drew inspiration from his fellow gays and the muscular prostitutes who regularly worked in the saunas.

The colossal work, which took the Renaissance master four years to paint and graces the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, is a depiction of judgment day, with the virtuous being called to heaven and sinners being dragged into hell. The full work was scoured for the queerest images, and boy were some doozies found.

This pile of men headed to heaven is a virtual orgy. Check out the two hunks on the left in a deep embrace, the two blond twinks making out in the center, and the bearded daddies next to them who are about to make out. Yup, this sure looks like heaven.

Here are a bunch of naked guys walking somewhere together and checking out the hot stud just out of view. (It’s hunky Jesus in this case.) Where do you think they’re going? Probably to get more lube.

One guy on his back with his legs in the air is getting reamed with a giant pole by a line of gorgeous muscle studs. Nope, nothing gay happening here.

Speaking of pass-around party bottoms, here is a gentleman bending over in a receptive position with another man’s hand—well, we’ll leave that to your imagination. But the line of boys behind him sure have a good view.

Someone is being dragged to hell by his testicles. This doesn’t look so much like torture, but more like your average Saturday night at a leather bar.

A group of men blowing. Yup, that’s what this is. They’re also showing off some sort of book. We imagine they are the world’s last remaining copies of Honcho magazine. For bonus points, check out the dude who just scored himself a bottom in the lower right quadrant.

Those angels and demons are so mean. They’re obviously breaking up a three-way between these two naked guys and their robed friend. This must be hell, because group sex is definitely allowed in heaven.

And one more bonus image to use your imagination on.

The Last Judgment is a fresco by Michelangelo on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. It took four years to complete and was executed from 1537 to 1541. Michelangelo began working on it three decades after having finished the ceiling of the chapel.
 

The work is massive and spans the entire wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel. It is a depiction of the second coming of Christ and the apocalypse. The souls of humans rise and descend to their fates, as judged by Christ surrounded by his saints.

The Last Judgment was an object of a heavy dispute between Cardinal Carafa and Michelangelo: the artist was accused of immorality and intolerable obscenity, having depicted naked figures, with genitals in evidence, inside the most important church of Christianity, so a censorship campaign (known as the “Fig-Leaf Campaign”) was organized by Carafa and Monsignor Sernini (Mantua’s ambassador) to remove the frescoes. When the Pope’s own Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, said “it was mostly disgraceful that in so sacred a place there should have been depicted all those nude figures, exposing themselves so shamefully,” and that it was no work for a papal chapel but rather “for the public baths and taverns,” Michelangelo worked Cesena’s face into the scene as Minos, judge of the underworld (far bottom-right corner of the painting) with Donkey ears {i.e.foolishness} while his nudity is covered by a coiled snake. It is said that when Cesena complained to the Pope, the pontiff joked that his jurisdiction did not extend to hell, so the portrait would have to remain.
The genitalia in the fresco were covered 24 years later (when the Council of Trent condemned nudity in religious art) by the artist Daniele da Volterra, whom history remembers by the derogatory nickname “Il Braghettone” (“the breeches-painter”). In the painting, Michelangelo does a self portrait depicting himself as St. Bartholomew after he had been flayed (skinned alive). This is reflective of the feelings of contempt Michelangelo had for being commissioned to paint “The Last Judgement”. The figure of St. Bartholomew depicts the satirist and erotic writer Pietro Aretino who had tried to extort a valuable drawing from Michelangelo. He holds the painter’s flayed skin as a symbol of attempted victimization.

Much of this post was borrowed from Gawker.com and was originally written by Brian Moylan.

After the jump you can see QueerClick.com’s very irreverent take on this masterpiece by Michelangelo.