Oscar Wilde, Rest in Peace
One-hundred and nine years ago today, on November 30, 1900, Oscar Wilde died in France. Dozens will honor this anniversary by reminding us about his brilliant plays and unforgettable witticisms. I am grateful for these things, but they are not all that Oscar Wilde gave us. He also gave us homophobia, or at least modern [...]
Fun with Art: Precious
Usually, I reserve this column for my thoughts about paintings and sculptures that I run across in museums, but since it’s the very brief part of the year where good movies come out, I’m going to take a couple of columns to talk about movies I’ve seen. They say sex addicts can watch so much [...]
The Keating Paradox:On learning morality from dirtbags.
The current set of obscenity laws in the US was designed by Charles Keating, Jr. But that’s not all the man did, in his spare time from being an anti-smut campaigner, Keating ran a fraudulent banking / real estate empire, which peaked in the 1980s when he bankrupted the Lincoln Savings and Loan, costing American [...]
Fun with Art: Dueling Victorian Gang Bangs
In the bottom floor of the Musée D’Orsay, in Paris, hanging one room away from one another, are two very different paintings… of gang bangs. One is a realist painting by Henri Gervex called Before the Operation, 1887, subtibled Dr Péan Teaching His Discovery of the Compression of Blood Vessels at St Louis Hospital. Dr [...]
Framing Circumcision for the (Happliy)* Circumcised
I am very much a non-fan of male circumcision. You can read my previous writings on the topic here, here, here and here. An unfortunate holdover from our sex-negative Victorian past, the genital modification discards the most sensitive part of a man’s sexual organ and changes the way that organ functions. This kind of thing [...]
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