Welcome to the 11th season of the taboo podcast series from Las Vegas. Hear series creator Madeira Desouza as he takes you on a journey to taboo.
Full Transcript:
Announcer: And now, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to season eleven of the taboo podcast from Vegas. This episode is a commentary from Madeira Desouza, the creator of this podcast series. And here he is.
Desouza: How do you think a person learns about being masculine? It’s a simple question, really.
Do you grow up to be manly or giving off the vibes of a male person just automatically and through some natural process? Are you born that way?
Not how it happened with me. I struggled with an awful lot of painful self-discovery. Who did I want to be? Well, I recall clearly to be myself in a natural or organic way.
My parents and other authority figures such as religious leaders or cultural influencers like teachers and community leaders had their own agendas. They were not my agendas. I faced humiliation and prejudice starting in school during the years before I was a teenager. I felt I was different somehow.
Maybe it was only because of how my mind worked compared to other boys. My thought processes were different from those of other boys. I knew I was not like the others. That much was crystal clear to me as a kid. But who was I?
I learned how to minimize humiliation and prejudice by acting or performing like professional performers do in the entertainment industry. I learned how to function as a method actor who puts forth a convincing version of one’s true self in a role like a movie character works within.
I put forth one version of myself that would gain some measure of acceptance while I concealed my genuine or authentic self. This type of “method acting” approach to everyday living led directly to my selecting for myself which aspects of me were true and real versus which aspects of me I created for myself to protect myself from what was coming at me: humiliation, non-acceptance, and prejudice.
As a pre teenage boy, I never cared about who won the World Series or the Stanley Cup. I had no sports world heroes.
I had to look up and then memorize names of baseball players so I could at least fake my casual conversations with other boys at school. Yeah, guys, I would say the power of Sandy Koufax was so real in yesterday’s game. It was the sixties. Okay? Give me a break.
Never once watched a televised game of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Totally true.
But faking conversations about sports heroes was not enough. I still stood out as different. Nobody wanted to choose me for playing basketball at school. I was uncoordinated and awkward, not in the least bit athletic. So how was I supposed to learn about being masculine? I framed some ideas in my mind. That’s all I had to go by.
Well, I had other clues in popular culture. There were all those Warner Brothers westerns on television at the time. Those TV shows at least taught me what Hollywood considered to be masculine. The cowboys on those shows became role models of mine.
But was that realistic? I could fantasize about a world I could live in that emphasized cowboys. No need to know or quote baseball statistics. The nineteenth century cowboys I saw on television boys I saw on television never seemed to pay attention either to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Maybe all this focus upon cowboys started much earlier in my life. I was seventeen months old when my mother’s father, my maternal grandfather, was in his mid-forties. I was too young to form any memories of him at all, But in my imagination, I envisioned him strictly in black and white, like the Warner Brothers westerns.
Half his face is obscured in darkness. He’s wearing vague western wear. And, yeah, he wore a cowboy hat. That man in real life made front page news in the slow little town where I was born. He murdered his wife, my mother’s mother, who was only in her forties.
He used a shotgun to kill her at their kitchen table. Then he used the weapon to blow his brains out, not at all like what happened in those Warner Brothers westerns. My grandfather was a very angry person. That’s what I learned about him from others. But to his death, I discovered many things about him and learned what kind of man he was.
He had “anger issues” as we would say here in the twenty first century. Together with that anger, he had a reliance upon alcohol maybe to help ease the pain of the anger. When you add the two together, an angry person and alcohol, out of that mix you get real trouble. I would say that mix of anger and booze was at the root of all of my grandfather’s failings.
Everything ended for him on that night when he killed his wife and himself. But from that night forward, the effects of his anger and his drinking and his violence remained as an emotional scar upon my entire family and especially me.
And I have his blood. I took his name. I started calling myself Madeira Desouza.
I grew up trying to figure out what goes on in a man’s mind. How does a man’s mind on an everyday basis? What kind of thoughts does he routinely hold in his mind? What happens when he loses control of his temper? How does his mind work when he drinks too much to numb thoughts of anger and violence?
My grandfather shot his wife, my grandmother, because he believed she was having sex with another man. He thought she was unfaithful to him in marriage. Nobody knows the truth now.
The only thing that’s known is he wanted her all for himself and was willing to kill her because of his intense desires and his unbridled passion. Is that what defines a man? Intense desires and unbridled passion or perhaps other traits?
Especially because of how he died, my maternal grandfather became the primary masculine male role model, not in the positive sense, during my youth that set the stage for how I would develop into adulthood to adulthood. Nobody should be surprised that I would grow up to become an artist and storyteller with inner drives compelling me to depict violent and often life-threatening themes.
I took a journey into taboo and it felt so good. Let me be honest about that for you here. I looked at the world I saw around me. I saw men often wearing cowboy costumes out in real life. Such attire was normal to see by anyone on the Central California coast where I grew up. Most people also know that wearing such clothing is common in cowboy themed tourist shows in the Western States.
My own sexual identity or sexual orientation apparently was influenced by this traumatic event during my youth involving the deaths of my grandparents. I grew up feeling attracted to masculinity in males more than I ever was to females.
Yet I persisted in deceiving myself and the world. I lied to myself that I was a straight man who preferred the company of women instead of men. In my formative years, I saw men in real life who looked and behaved in what I would call the masculine way using today’s terms.
I had no label for what I saw in those days. I can describe what I saw growing up in that small rural California community, however. Men wearing cowboy clothing signaled to me their chosen emphasis upon physicality and gruffness, such when they wore tight blue jeans that revealed bulges below the belt, bicep hugging shirts, and well-worn cowboy boots.
You should not be surprised or put off as a man if you respond with arousal to depictions of masculine men who are shown to be in peril being hurt by other men. This kind of response has happened to men for countless years, down through the centuries.
The components of the storytelling often repeat in recurring themes. You can see the men being hurt, have physical strength, lantern jawed, virile faces, and outwardly convey the reality that they can defend themselves quite well. So why are they in peril at the hands of other men? Why can’t these strongly masculine men defend themselves?
Because of the mind of the beholder, you respond. The men you see in peril lead you to feel aroused. And you don’t quite understand why this is so. I bring you into these responses by way of my storytelling in both the visual form and as text.
Once I made a journey into taboo, my creative works incorporate erotic cruelty to men which can arouse male viewers sexually when they view images or read stories of vulnerable and defenseless men in distress and jeopardy as other storytellers have done down through the centuries.
It is a journey into taboo. Wanna go there with me? There’s a signpost up ahead. You’ve just crossed over.
Be sure to visit Male Gallery Vegas dot com. That’s my online gallery.
See what can happen on a journey to taboo. Visit Male Gallery Vegas dot com. No purchase necessary. No obligation.
Just feel what you feel and accept yourself for being genuine and authentic. What more could you ask for?
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, the online gallery address once again is Male Gallery Vegas dot com. We appreciate your support and thank you for listening to a commentary from Madeira Desouza, the creator of this podcast series.
We have arrived at season eleven. All of us who work on this podcast series, sincerely thank you for listening today.
