Showing posts with label Central Asia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Central Asia. Show all posts

My nephew sets me up with a Kazakh stud and "wants to talk about something." Coming out or the Book of Leviticus?


Every year my father celebrated his birthday by hosting a barbecue on the Saturday afternoon closest to June 6th.  I always tried to schedule my summer visits to Rock Island and then to Indianapolis to coincide with it.

Dad died last year, so I assumed that the barbecues were over, until I got a text from my sister's son Joseph,  a doctoral student in Japanese at Indiana University.

"I'm continuing Grandpa's tradition of Memorial Day Barbecues." Of course he wouldn't realize that they were birthday barbecues.  Who knows when his grandfather's birthday is? 

"At Mom's house, or...."

"At my house in Bloomington.  Can you make it?  .I want to talk to you about something."

"Sure, no problem," I responded, curious.  

What could he want to talk about? Maybe he wanted to come out!

Since I lived 500 to 2000 miles away through Joseph's life, I saw him only once or twice a year.  We weren't close, but I always thought that he was gay.  He was flamboyant and theatrical, swishing and limp-wristed, with that nasal "gay accent" voice.  He wore bright pastel shirts and tight bulging jeans and plastic bracelets.  He occasionally brought a girl to Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, but surely that was just a screen.

Definitely coming out.  

But -- he graduated from a Catholic high school, and did his undergrad at the Quaker-run Earlham College.  His mother was music director at a Nazarene church.

Maybe he turned fundamentalist, and wanted to quote Leviticus at me?

I'd better stay with my friend Tyler in Indianapolis, in case I needed to retreat quickly. 

And bring David from San Francisco for moral support.  He was an ex-Baptist minister with a master's degree in Classics, an expert on the Biblical passages used to promote homophobia.

We arrived on Wednesday and saw my mother and my sister and brother-in-law, but not Joseph, not until Saturday afternoon, the barbecue: hot dogs, hamburgers, and tofu burgers grilled in the back yard of Joseph's 100-year old house just outside Bloomington.

How did they afford it, when he and his roommates were all graduate students?

We said hello to Joseph, gave him the plate of brownies we brought, then pushed our way through the crowd, saying hello, getting introduced.  I counted over 20 people. All heterosexual as far as I could tell -- with one exception.

A young guy on the far side of the yard, talking to someone I didn't recognize. Shorter than me, dark-skinned, square head with heavy eyebrows and a big smile, a v-shaped torso, a hard smooth chest with prominent nipples, a little belly, and heavy, square workman's hands.

"I call the hunk," I whispered to David, and walked over to introduce myself and cruise him.  

Then Joseph grabbed me.  "Can I talk to you for a second.  Without David?"

He took me onto the screen porch.

Uh, oh -- this is it! I thought.  He's either going to come out or pull out a Bible!

But he said "Is David your boyfriend?"

"Uh -- no,"

"Ok, good.  I didn't expect you to bring anyone...um...so I got a date for you."

"What?" A blind date?

"I know what it's like to feel out of place at these family gatherings, so I invited Ravi, from Kazakhstan.  He's just come out, and looking to meet people.  And he likes older guys."  He grabbed my knee.  "I got you tickets to a dance concert tonight -- but I didn't know David would be here, so I just got two."

"Oh, no problem, he sounds great.  We can get a third ticket."








Kazakh, the language spoken by the Turkic tribes that descended on Central Asia a thousand years ago:

I like to eat big sausages.
Turkish: Büyük sosisleri severim
Kazakh:Men ülken şujıq jewge unaydı





More after the break. Caution: Explicit.

Studs from the Steppes: Twelve Mongolian musclemen, Uzbek boyfriends, and Kyrgyz cocks


When I was in about sixth grade, I bought an atlas of world history in the gift shop of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. One of the maps showed the Khanate of the Golden Horde covering most of Eurasia, from Mongolia to Poland.  Who wouldn't be fascinated by that?

Later I read The Empire of the Steppes, with Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, and Tamerlane shaping world history, and did a research project on gay personal ads in Central Asia.  I got my M.A. from Indiana University, where you can study Central Asian languages, but I decided on Mandarin instead.

 I don't want to actually visit these places: endless steppes sound a little boring, and they have some of the most homophobic governments on the planet.  But a quick look at some Central Asian hunks might be fun.


1. Mongolian guy on a gay dating site, top photo.

 Mongolia is not all nomads living in yurts. Check out the skyline of modern UlaanBataar.  





2. Ulaanbataar boy on Grindr.  A little skinny; I'd hold out for the wrestler.




3. Kazakh guy from Almaty. previously Alma-Ata, previously the capital.








4-7. Shirtless dinner in Koshetau, Kazakhstan


8. Tatar sheep-wrangler from Kazan, which is actually in Russia, a 13-hour drive from the border of Kazakhstan.   But he's cute, so who's complaining.

More after the break. Warning: explicit

Max Brumberg: Slovakian flute crafter, drag theologian, Russian-Austrian-Uzbek actor. With bonus Uzbek dicks

 

I don't know what led me to the 2021 movie Play it Cool, with someone named Reggiemolo (Alex Jason Lee King) on a cross-country trip where he's mistaken for a criminal and meets The Girl -- the trailer shows them kissing a thousand times, so it's definitely a "no way!"  But far down the cast list was a cute guy named Max Brumbaugh.

The name resonated because when I was a kid, there was an abandoned "haunted house" on my grandfather's property that belonged to the Brumbaugh family.  So I decided to research him.

Rather a difficult task.  First, his last name isn't Brumbaugh, it's Brunberg.  No, it's Brumberg, with an "m," and there are a lot of Max Brumbergs out there. 


1. Max Brumberg who makes flutes in the traditional manner, with traditional materials.  He makes Slovakian fujaras, Moldavian kavals, overtone flutes, double flutes, and many other types, out of his store in Sainte-Croix-Vallée-Français.



Another Max Brumberg is Max Brumberg-Kraus, he/him or they/them, the co-founder of the House of Larva Drag Co-operative.  They perform as drag persona Çicada L’Amour, produce both small acts and full-length queer peformance art, and belong to ARC community: "a creative collaboration for theopoetics."

They graduated from the United Theological Seminary in 2020 with a  M.A. in theology and the arts, and research interests in queer temporality, queer and feminist theology, cosmology, mythopoetics, ancient tragedy, midrash, embodiment, and reception theory.   They're the author of The(y)-ology: Mythopoetics for Gay/Trans Liberation.

Then there's the grad student at the Institute of Russian History in Moscow, and his aroused cucumber.


From Linkedin, IMDB, and an article in Voyager, I've pieced together the life of Max Brumberg, actor.  Of Uzbek and Russian Jewish ancestry.

Top photo: Uzbek guy

Fluent in English, French, German, and Russian.  Not Uzbek?

 Grew up in Vienna got a M.S. in real estate from Newcastle University in Britain, and took a job in Real Estate Structured Finance Sales, traveling between Vienna, Belgrade, and Bucharest while acting in commercials and doing stand-up comedy. 


Left: Tajik guy from Russia

While he was working as a manager at Saxon Bank in Zurich, Max realized that "something was missing...there was a void in my life." So he moved to L.A. and enrolled at the Stella Adler School of Acting. 

So far he has only six acting credits on the IMDB:

More after the break