Dirty jokes: The Pearl

Yeah, scraping the barrel. Been doing a lot of non-gay history reading lately.

The Pearl, a dirty Victorian magazine, ran between July 1879 and December 1880, when it was forced to shut down for obscenity. I found a 1968 edition that collected the issues, including all the poetry and jokes, and on my initial flip through I found a reference to Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, two young men who enjoyed traipsing around London in drag in the 1860s and 70s, and who were arrested and tried for 'attempt to commit sodomy' in 1870. There's quite a bit of info about them on the web, including news pieces (go a little ways down the page, or ctrl-f), their letters, and even the complete trial record. Here is a blog post with a good summary, complete with pictures. Anyways, that's background. This limerick is another sign of mass media, popular culture, and the love of a dirty joke, all alive and well in Victorian England:

There was an old person of Sark,
Who buggered a pig in the dark;
The swine, in surprise,
Murmured "God blast your eyes,
Do you take me for Boulton or Park?"

It's also interesting that the author/submitter would expect people to remember a non-celebrity scandal that occured almost ten years before, and the names involved. I haven't studied the progression of our modern short attention spans and quick-aging references.

The other joke I found while searching through the book for that. (I eventually resorted to Google Books, our new evil overlord.) It's not related, except in its reference to sodomy.

"An old and favoured servant of two maiden ladies had been frequently reprimanded by him for his free behavior with the female servants. Caught one day in flagrante delicto, he was summoned to their presence, and while the girl was sacked, he was told that if he did not do better and turn over a new leaf, much as they valued him- his next escapade would be the last. He promised amendment and matters went on very well for a time. One evening, he was not to be found when wanted, and on a search being made, was discovered in the beer-cellar, buggering the page boy.
"How now," he was asked, "is this your amendment? You promised to turn over a new leaf." "So I have,", said he, "only I have begun at the bottom of the page!"
History does not give the conclusion of the matter."

Amazon, if you're interested; it's cute and full of the old staples of erotic stories like fake lesbians and men named Mr. Loveshaft. One reviewer says there are stories with male homosexuality, but I haven't read it through.

History in the making: Perry vs. Schwarzenegger

Perry vs. Schwarzenegger is going on right now in California. The case is two same-sex couples who were denied marriage licenses last year against Proposition 8 and its defenders (wikipedia). Schwarzenegger's name is on it technically- he and his legal counsel refused to support Prop. 8, and the defendant in the case is ProtectMarriage.org, which makes this case gloriously direct. The Good Guys vs. The Bad Guys.

Here is the Prop 8 Trial Tracker, hosted by some dedicated people at Courage Campaign to bring day-by-day coverage of the trial. I've been following along with wide eyes and bated breath- for this is, indeed, history in the making, and may result in gay marriage bans being ruled unconstitutional in the United States. There are a lot of prayers, emotions, and tears all over the country right now. Their site has all the in depth legal info about what makes this case historically interesting (besides the obvious) such as comparisons to the tactics of Brown vs. Board of Education. The issues at stake are not just marriage, but gay rights in general and federal recognition of the oppression of gays as a class of people. Three states have ruled gay folk a "suspect class"- people discriminated against as a group, including California.

Go there and read it, and possibly take a break to cry of joy. Read the comments to each post too, if you have the time; there are a lot of stories and memories there that people have shared.

Review: Here and Always Have Been

I don’t usually deal with modern fiction on this blog, but the very nice Kenneth “Craigside” offered to send me his book to review (free book! For free!). How can I resist? Here and Always Have Been is a collection of erotic and semi-erotic short stories ranging in time from prehistoric cavemen to the 1950’s.

I have to say first that I liked a lot of the little things and the plots. He displays a lot of original thought. There are a lot of funny bits that made me smile or laugh out loud. Clearly he did some research and at least knows his way around a list of dead white queers. I was disappointed that there was not really a lot of historical detail for him to have gotten wrong, though- it wasn’t the emphasis, merely the setting.

The porny bits are not really to my taste, which is partly biological on my part and partly the style and tone, which somehow manages to be coy and clinical simultaneously. The settings, actions, and characters are not very realistic, not because he didn’t do his research but because they’re driven by sexual fantasy rather than true character development. I like emotion powering my sex rather than kink, which takes a pride of place in many stories. I think my favorite story was “The Ballad of Sadie”, which has no sex but only innuendo, and in the others I liked such as “The Last Roman God”, “Saladin’s Loom”, and “Will’s Best Bed” it was the ideas I enjoyed more than the execution. (Saladin's men kidnap Richard Lionheart with a sexy plan to get him out of the Holy Land? Tell me more!) A lot of these stories were disappointing because they have such potential and I didn’t see it filled the way I’d like.

Overall impression: it’s clear to me he’s new to the genre. He sent me the book for my history perspective, and I had no problems there, but the writing is unpracticed. I enjoyed it at first, but it wore thin after reiterations of the same thing over and over with different names and kinks. Very possibly a lot of my critique comes of my not being the target market- I don’t generally enjoy the style of mainstream erotica.

All that said, I’d like to read his next work, if he chooses to continue on this path. I love witnessing people improve, and Kenneth Craigside shows some promise.

Go buy it. Maybe you'll like it.

LJ options

So I totally could have made an RSS feed and been versatile, but Livejournal is what I know, so I made an LJ to crosspost everything at:

http://hyakinthia.livejournal.com

Fun! Icons! A better user interface (imho)! Go. Put me on your friends. And even if I go months without posting, there one will come one day, like a surprise present. It'll be great.

"New" schools of thought on Puritan sexuality?

I have a really good book here by Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America. His first chapters detail the research into Puritan sexuality (and, following logically, homosexuality), which I found pretty surprising, though I hadn't really looked into the subject that much. He cites Nathaniel Hawthorne as creating or at least spreading the image of the dry, strict, hardhearted Puritan.

From page 77:
"Ministers encouraged their flock to feel Christ's love as a romantic, voluptuous experience. 'Here he comes,' rhapsodized [Samuel] Willard, 'to give us the caresses of his love, and lay us in his bosom and embraces. And now, oh my soul! Hast thou ever experienced the love of a savior?' The redeemed would 'ly in Christ's bosom, and be ravished with his dearest love, and most intimate embraces.'"

Earlier in the chapter he quotes some Edward Taylor.
Page 53:
"In poetry written between the 1680s and 1720s, Taylor envisaged Christ as "a spotless male in prime" and addressed his savior in language of utter infatuation:
Thou art the lovli'st object ever spread
With brightest beauty object ever wore
Of purest flashes of pure white and red
That ever did or could the love allure.
Lord make my love and thee its object meet
And me in folds of such love raptures keep."

Cotton Mather is quoted of the phrase "heavenly ejaculations". Not really scientific, because he also meant "spontaneous prayer", but it did give me a little pause.

It occurred to me that the Ganymede metaphor for souls going up to Christ makes an odd sense in this new light. Also this is a really short version of his stuff, go read the book, there's a lot more where this came from and it looks less sketchy when you don't read it on the internet.

Oh yeah! Katz! His comment is less funny now that I've gone and looked it up. But it does indicate that the above short statements were pretty well accepted historical fact even in the 1980s. His footnote, from page 43 of Gay/Lesbian Almanac: "My reading of the documents, and my stress of the Puritans' negative valuation of erotic lust (as opposed to child production), contradicts the now generally accepted interpretations of Edmund Morgan, William and Mallerville Haller, and other historians responsible for the revisionist line that the Puritans were not as "Puritanical" as the popular stereotype would have it. The stereotype, I think, is closer to reality than the prevailing revisionism."

DAMN YOU, REVISIONISM. DAMN YOU.

In which our hero returns from the grave

Been in Florida. Sorry.

I have a couple topics for posts lined up. Uno: the Epic (and funny) Historian Infighting between Gary Leupp and Paul Schalow, as documented in Monumenta Nipponica. Dude, you guys are two of the (maybe) four (white) people in this field! I thought you'd be buds or something. Dos: 17thC Puritan homoerotic visions of Your Relationship With Jesus Christ, and the following cries of "Revisionism!", especially coming from Katz where I hadn't expected that much vitriol. That's a fun sentence. When did you last see "Puritan" and "homoerotic" in the same place?

Book

Homosexuality in Modern France edited by Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. (Not to be confused with its counterpart by the same editors, Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection, because both Amazon and LibraryThing seems to think they're the same book, or the same person is uploading the wrong cover. For the latter, the cover on my copy shows a statue of Ganymede and the eagle.)

It's a good book! There's ten good essays by smart people, covering the Enlightenment, the French Revolution (one is specifically on the pornography starring Marie Antoinette that was published against her), legislature and its lack in early and mid 19th century Paris, a murder case from 1877 involving a gay couple, the medicalization of "inversion", working class lesbian subculture at the turn of the centuty, Gide's Corydon, and Foucault in the context of French history and politics.

I always remember the things I complained about better. Have some funny excerpts.

"Invisible Women", Sautman, page 186: "According to Julien Chevalier, homosexuality was an aberration rare in high society, "regarded with horror" by the working class, and completely unknown in country areas. It was a vice in which only the "cafe society and theater" engaged. In something of a contradiction, Chevalier argued that gender nonconformity in physical appearance led directly to sexual inversion and that women from the working class and peasantry were more likely to display virile aberrations. Because of promiscuity in servants' quarters, the nervous tension resulting from working in a sitting position too long, and the "physiological harm" caused by the sewing machine, Ali Coffignon also saw women workers as being particularly prone to sexual corruption."

Sewing machines=lesbianism. Got it.
Later in the same essay there's some translation failure: a phrase from Jean Lorrain's La Maison Philibert (1904) is translated as "fags and lezzies". The footnote is only a citation, and there's no modern edition that I can find. "Lezzies" might be gougnottes (girlfriends), as used elsewhere in the text with better notes, but I have no idea what "fags" was originally. It irritates me when liberal translations show up in academic works. If that's the best connotative selection, make a note and explain your choices.

"Natalism, Homosexuality, and the Controversy over Corydon" by Martha Hanna is very interesting and has a lot of stuff I was glad to learn. In one part, discussing (at the time) modern reactions to Greek homosexual practices, there's a paragraph on Dr. Riolan's 1909 Pederastie et homosexualitie that's just comedy gold:
"Unlike modern pederasty, which Riolan characterized as the predilection of dissipated older men bored by heterosexuality, Greek pederasty was, he argued, a culturally specific aesthetic response to the ugliness of Greek women. "In Greece, pederasty was the result of the admiration the Greeks professed for beautiful forms. Like all women of the Orient, Greek women quickly lost their youthful shape, and the citizen of Athens, returning from the Olympic Games, could not help but compare the women whom he saw in Athens to the athletes he had applauded in the arena." If, as Riolan suggested, pederasty was understandable in those societies where women quickly lost their sexual allure, it was neither understandable, permissible, nor defensible in a nation like France, famous for its beautiful- and desirable- women. Riolan was not the only medical expert convinced that beautiful women constituted a nation's best protection against homosexuality."

I think my housemate's reaction was "Oh my god, there's so many things wrong with that I don't even know what to say!"

Maybe I need an "adventures in stupidity" tag.