Publisher's Synopsis
This limerick, and thousands like it, was vandalized over time:
. An envious man named McMeanusWas jealous of his boyfriend's big penis.
It was small consolation
That the rest of the nation
Of men were with him in weeness.
This gay original was eventually disfigured and disseminated with a heterosexual context. The popular hetero version shoehorns in a woman, identified with the same masculine surname, whose small consolation is that "the rest of the nation of women were with her in weeness." A nation of women does not, in fact, sport small penises. This awkward, absurd, and inexplicable erasure of the original gay context and meaning is a prime example of the limerick genre's shameful, homophobic history. The Freudian "penis envy" overlay is just the cherry here, exposing the deeply twisted mind of the revisionist poet.
This collection of endangered gay limericks is herein restored from the oral tradition, having been propagated by linguists, English professors, and sexologists over the decades. Most all of these poems are in print for the very first time. May their publication go a long way toward correcting the homophobic wrongs that others boldly printed in the face of common decency and morality. The reader is invited to imagine these poems vandalized (as indeed they were) into non-gay language and to wonder over the needless, unethical corruption of natural expressions into abominations.
