#malelove

After the fire… comes the part that matters. Staying.

Definitely No Homo. 2.

Terry & Bill 🤍 Characters from Twinbrook.  Love knows no age 😘

“I couldn’t utter my love when it counted” is a reference to the fact that for many queer people coming to terms with their sexuality, it’s much harder to say I love you. The rest of verse 1 reinforces this idea and also tells us to pay attention to bird imagery. It’s about to get important. —The first chorus is where things start to get interesting. “Words hung above, but never would form” continues the idea from above. The reference to a cry at a final breath could be drawing our attention to birds of prey. Now our speaker tells his lover that he’ll be reborn “As a shrike to your sharp and glorious thorn.” Shrikes are birds that use thorns to kill their prey by impaling them. They also use these thorns in mating rituals. Now, it’s easy to read the lyrics and think that sharp and glorious are both adjectives describing the thorn. However, Hozier deliberately pauses every time after the word sharp. When we consider that maybe he’s using “sharp” to also refer to a sharp-shinned hawk, a bird of prey who commonly hunts other birds, things start to make more sense. Glorious thorn is a euphemism for a male part. He’s saying that he’ll be the little bird that will submit to this more dominant hunter with a glorious part. — verse 2 says that this lover erased our speaker’s preconceived notions of (straight) virtue. Easy enough. In the second chorus, “hung like the pelt of some prey you have worn” suggests that the sexual relationship these two shared was just another conquest for this lover. However, our speaker can’t let go of that experience. In verse 3 he tries to run away to the city but finds himself “flying like a bird” back to the country “hedgerows where bodies are mounted.” In the countryside he can embrace his sexuality and finds himself drawn to this lover who can mount him again. “I was housed by your warmth, thus transformed” suggests that he housed this lover inside of him and thus came to terms with his sexuality. If you’re still with at this point, notice that Hozier never uses pronouns to describe the lover in this song, unlike in his other ones. We know that he’s traditionally been awesome about queer politics. This song is about two gay men and it’s really ashame that this isn’t being talked about more.

Another beautiful valentine couple #GayValentine #CharlesMonizPhotography #GingerBeards #GingerBears #GayBears #MarriageEquality #Same-sexValentine #nakedadventures #beefcake #photographercharles #gayfantasy #malelove #gayarmpitfetish (at Palm Springs, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt43amUAnOm/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=ntzejhgawx73

Home is wherever you fall asleep in my arms.