is for Tattoos.  The process of selecting a tattoo is often described in gay magazines, not as the drunken lark of sailors, who once chose naked ladies and grinning skulls from cheesy "flash" boards, but as a task as complex as that of an upholsterer who pores over fabric swatches.  In an article entitled "Tattooed Tit Enhancement," in the gay S/M magazine Drummer, the author advises his readers that, before they engage in the common practice of enlarging and darkening the aureole around the nipple through tattooing, they collaborate with their lovers in sessions of "colorization foreplay" in which they decorate their breasts with felt-tip pens and experiment with the "design, color and size of the aureole"; such sessions make "great Tit Scenes in themselves," we are told, "as the Tit Coach works out with the Tit Jock savory visions of how big the aureole and how dark the ink of the burgeoning nipples."  As this example reveals, the gay man's body has become a living, breathing battlefield in which the queen and the clone grapple for supremacy.  No matter how macho the gay man tries to be, his strut inevitably becomes a mince, his deep voice a husky Marlene Dietrich contralto.  His tattoos and piercings are refracted through a deeply embedded and ineradicably bourgeois sensibility, which cannot be suppressed but pops up inappropriately right in the midst of the most manly rites of passage in which the real person emerges like a flower arranger or a window dresser who flounces around making tough aesthetic decisions, his brow furrowed, his pinkie stabbing the air.