Harvard University Press Blog

Celebrating Pride Month, Part III

Rounding out our blog posts for Pride Month is an excerpt from Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, which looks at the cost of gay assimilation into mainstream culture and makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now threaten to disappear.

Queers face a strange choice: is it better to move on toward a brighter future or to hang back and cling to the past? Such divided allegiances result in contradictory feelings: pride and shame, anticipation and regret, hope and despair. Contemporary queers find ourselves in the odd situation of “looking forward” while we are “feeling backward.”

A particularly jarring version of this disjunction appears in Without You I’m Nothing, John Boskovich’s 1989 film of Sandra Bernhard’s one-woman show. In one sequence, Bernhard takes on the persona of a homophobic straight man whose friend takes him to a gay bar. The scene is the 1970s, the height of both sexual liberation and the gay liberation movement. Bernhard’s character begins his monologue looking forward to a night on the town with his best bud and hoping to meet some Playboy bunnies; soon after climbing into his friend’s Camaro, he ends up in an unfamiliar part of town, following his friend into a bar with no girls—or not “his kind of girls” anyway. He notes a “couple dancing together in the corner with flannel shirts and jeans, with big fat asses.” Initially frightened and disgusted by this scene, Bernhard’s character warms up quickly; within a few moments he is doing poppers and mixing with the locals. The story takes a sudden turn as Bernhard begins to play the tambourine, and three black leathermen magically appear at her side, back-up singers for her rendition of the Sylvester anthem “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” The conversion is complete a few moments later: Bernhard’s character gives himself sexually to a drag queen and likes it. In this absurdly sped-up sequence, racial fantasies of overpowering desire and authentic being effect a turn from hatred and shame to joy and self-revelation. The sad and lonely patrons of a backstreet bar are transformed into luminous creatures “here to take you higher!”

This moment is absurd, and yet what is absurd about it is not its content but its pacing. The story is, after all, a familiar one: the movement from abjection to glorious community is the underlying structure of the story of coming out of the closet, and it informs both personal and collective histories of liberation. The origin story of gay liberation describes how on one particular night an underground bar turned into the front line of a struggle for freedom and civil rights. Early work in lesbian and gay studies was marked by the legacy of Stonewall and by the sudden turn of this moment of reverse discourse; the emergent field’s powerful utopianism, affirmation of gay identity, and hope for the future resonated with the seemingly magical power of this new movement to transmute shame into pride, secrecy into visibility, social exclusion into outsider glamour.

I do not think we can or should forego the strategy of reverse discourse, and I would not deny the power of queer alchemy. Our very dependence on this strategy demands, however, that we recognize how tenuous it is. We can turn shame into pride, but we cannot do so once and for all: shame lives on in pride, and pride can easily turn back into shame. We need to take as our starting point the reversibility of reverse discourse and to keep our gaze directed toward the past, toward the bad old days before Stonewall.

Although we cannot do away with the notion of progress, I want to attend more closely to what remains unthought in the turn toward the future. The commitment to affirmation should not shut down the possibility of the kind of radical intellectual experiments that gave birth to queer theory in the first place: Foucault’s challenge to the ideology of liberation; Cherríe Moraga’s attention to betrayal and sexual exposure in Loving in the War Years; Leo Bersani’s critique of the “culture of redemption”; Judith Butler’s gender trouble, which I take to mean not only acting up but also feeling bad.

These interventions are, I would argue, what has made queer studies “queer,” but the vibrations they set off are what is hardest to keep alive in queer studies as it ages. In 1993 Judith Butler wondered if the term “queer” would ever “overcome its constitutive history of injury.” It has not entirely, although its regular appearances in both college classrooms and on popular television shows suggest that it is moving in that direction.…What counts as political in the contemporary context is, however, out of touch with the longer history of queer experience. Rather than disavowing the history of marginalization and abjection, I suggest that we embrace it, exploring the ways it continues to structure queer experience in the present. Modern homosexual identity is formed out of and in relation to the experience of social damage. Paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage that we live with in the present.

Celebrating Pride Month, Part II

To celebrate Pride Month, we are highlighting excerpts from books that explore the lives and experiences of the LGBT+ community. This second excerpt comes from How To Be Gay, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, in which David M. Halperin, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies, dares to suggest that gayness is a way of being that gay men must learn from one another to become who they are. 

The official line of the post-Stonewall gay movement in the United States has gone something like this: “We are not freaks or monsters. We are the same as you: we are ordinary, decent people. In fact, we are just like heterosexuals except for what we do in bed (which is nobody’s business but our own—and, anyway, the less said about it, the better).”

For a short time, around the birth of the “queer” movement at the turn of the 1990s, it became fashionable to claim the opposite. Those who embraced a queer identity (or non-identity) used to take a line that exactly reversed the official post-Stonewall one: “We queers are totally unlike anyone else; we do not resemble you at all. We are completely different from heterosexuals—except for what we do in bed (which is more or less what everyone does in bed, with some minor, insignificant variations).”

But that queer fashion didn’t last long, and a lot of lesbians and gay men in the United States…have now gone back to claiming that gay people are defined, if at all, only by a non-standard sexual preference which in and of itself does not strictly correlate with any other feature of the personality. In all other aspects of their lives, gay people are the same as everyone else. (That tendency may actually reflect a recent development of international scope, what Rogers Brubaker has called “the return of assimilation.”) In American popular usage nowadays, to be sure, the word “gay” may mean “stereotypically gay” or “culturally gay,” while men who are defined by their sexuality, by the sex they have with men, are more likely to be termed “homosexual.” But in the official language of the gay movement, “gay” remains an identity marker attached to sexual preference. To be gay, according to this latter outlook, is to have a sexuality, a sexual orientation; it is not to have a distinctive culture or psychology or social practice or inner life, or anything else that is different from the norm. Especially if—in the case of gay men—that difference implies any identification with women or femininity. Merely to question this doctrine is to risk conjuring up the dread specter of sexual inversion, opening the door to a return of Victorian psychiatry, with all its ancient prejudices about the congenital abnormality and psychopathology and gender deviance of gay men.

But so long as we cling to the notion that gayness is reducible to same-sex sexual object-choice, that it has nothing to do with how we live or what we like, that our homosexuality is completely formed prior to and independent of any exposure to gay culture—and so long as we hold to that belief as to a kind of dogma—then the persistence of gay culture will remain a perpetual embarrassment, as well as an insoluble analytic puzzle.

Celebrating Pride Month

To celebrate Pride Month, we are highlighting excerpts from books that explore the lives and experiences of the LGBT+ community. Nathaniel Frank’s Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America tells the dramatic story of the struggle for same-sex couples to legally marry, something that is now taken for granted. Below, he describes the beginnings of the gay rights movement.

For homophiles of the 1950s, identifying as gay was almost always a risky and radical act, even if their ensuing demands were “merely” to be treated like everyone else. The first gay Americans to picket the White House without hiding were bluntly challenging the status quo even if their suits and dresses marked them as conventional, as did their engagement with traditional centers of political power. Defying views of gay people as sick, immoral, criminal, and disloyal was revelatory, but it could be undertaken with the goal of replacing such views with approval by churches, doctors, politicians, and the law. Conventional tactics do not always mean limited goals, and vice versa, since an activist can adopt an incremental approach as a strategy with the ultimate goal being radical change. Liberating Americans from traditional constraints on sex and other roles had the potential not just to be transgressive, disruptive, and destabilizing but also to serve as a safety valve for social pressures, thus spurring reform instead of revolution. There was a fine line between self-respect and respectability, and the process of throwing off internalized shame was often helped along by winning the imprimatur of others. And legalizing marriage for same-sex couples, some early advocates recognized, could be transformative, even as it also reaffirmed the role of the state in both governing private relationships and neglecting the needs of single people.

Such ideological and strategic tensions help explain the context for what happened on the hot summer night of Friday, June 27, 1969. A motley bunch of 200 drag queens, cross- dressing lesbians, hustlers, students, tony gay men, and what one admirer called “flaming faggot types” had gathered, as they often did, at the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York City’s West Village. That afternoon and into the night, 20,000 fans and well-wishers had lined up outside the Frank Campbell funeral home uptown to say goodbye to Judy Garland, the gay icon whose life had ended with a barbiturate overdose in London the previous week. Some at the Stonewall Inn may have been toasting her memory (more than one had used “Judy Garland” as a nom de plume when signing in at the door, a practice required because the bar branded itself a private “bottle club” instead of a public establishment that would need a liquor license) when, just after midnight, a group of police officers filed in to raid the place. Normally the authorities gave the owners, who were associated with the Mafia, a warning before their raids, but for whatever reason, that night’s intrusion was a surprise. And for whatever reason—the cumulative weight of decades of derision and persecution, the inspiration of a new generation of youthful protestors, the rebellious spirit of the 1960s, the collective sadness and anger over Judy Garland’s death—this time the patrons fought back.

As the police began hauling off a few employees and drag queens in paddy wagons—wearing gender-atypical clothing was still illegal in New York—the crowd spontaneously erupted. The city during this period was not the well-kempt model of urban luxury it later became, and the small park across the street was littered with bottles and other debris that the throng gleefully converted into weapons. They hurled whatever they could get their hands on—including a parking meter they yanked from its socket—shattering windows and driving many of the raiding police inside for cover. When other officers turned a fire hose on the demonstrators, someone cried, “Grab it, grab his cock!” while others yelled, “Gay power!” The protestors taunted the raiders with references to the regular payoffs the corrupt police took from the mob bosses who owned the bars. Early on, a cross-dressing, biracial lesbian, Stormé DeLarverie, struck a police officer in retaliation, she said, for being hit. By the end of the night, four officers had been injured and many others had been terrorized. “There was never any time that I felt more scared than then,” recalled one of the leading police officials, who said their guns had been trained on the door from inside. “You have no idea how close we came to killing somebody.”

No one died, but a movement was born—or reached its rebellious adolescence. It was no doubt indebted and deeply connected to the rudimentary efforts of Mattachine [Society] and Daughters of Bilitis during the previous decade, but it was newly emboldened in palpable and ultimately enduring ways. The unrest continued for several nights that summer, as hundreds of additional gay and non-gay participants and curiosity-seekers, including press, made their way to Christopher Street. One was the gay Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who noticed right away a change in gay men’s bearing and poise. “The guys there were so beautiful,” he said. “They’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.” Other gay observers echoed the sentiment, calling the event a “homosexual revolution” that young activists should study and carry forward into the anti-gay churches, psychiatric offices, “councils of the U.S. Government,” and city and state legislatures that “make our manner of love-making a crime.” Many saw Stonewall, even then, as part of something bigger, “a larger revolution sweeping through all segments of society” that carried the promise of upending long-standing forms of repression and prejudice.

Why the Supreme Court's Marriage Decision Won’t Be the Next Roe v. Wade

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, many have looked to the Roe v. Wade ruling in an effort to forecast the cultural and political impact of federally sanctioned same-sex marriage. But as Mary Ziegler shows in After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, the narrative that now surrounds that decision and its effects overly simplifies what was a very fluid situation, projecting today’s polarities further back in time than the history supports. Below, Ziegler outlines the folly in declaring Obergefell the next Roe when we still have such trouble understanding the first.

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Critics of the Supreme Court’s recent marriage equality decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, have predicted that it will be the next Roe v. Wade. Indeed, comparison of Obergefell and Roe has become almost mandatory for Republican presidential candidates and conservative activists.

Some use the analogy to criticize the Court for short-circuiting political debate about marriage in the states. Others clearly want the Court to worry about the consequences of striking down marriage bans in so many states. Politicians turn to these arguments because they might appeal to voters otherwise supportive of marriage equality. If Obergefell is indeed the next Roe, the Court may have once again escalated the culture wars, making it harder for Americans to agree on issues of sexuality or gender, much less on same-sex marriage itself.

Are the Court’s critics right? At first blush, the comparison between Roe and Obergefell seems unconvincing. While the nation remains divided about abortion, polls have shown increasing support for marriage equality, particularly among younger Americans. For many, the moral issues also seem easily distinguishable. Pro-life Americans argue that a woman’s decision to choose abortion harms a person not included in the decision. Longstanding agreements about fetal personhood aside, the argument that abortion is not a purely self-regarding act is much easier to make than any related claim about marriage equality.

Gay Marriage and Gay Culture

“Same-sex desire alone does not equal gayness. In order to be gay, a man has to learn to relate to the world around him in a distinctive way.” So writes David Halperin in How To Be Gay, expressing the contentious notion behind his controversial University of Michigan course of the same name. “‘Gay,’” he continues, “refers not just to something you are, but also to something you do... Gayness, then, is not a state or condition. It’s a mode of perception, an attitude, an ethos: in short, it is a practice.” American gay male life, he argues, is reflective of “a common culture” and “shared sense of self” that must be acquired, a “characteristic relation to mainstream culture” that must be “discovered” by gay male subjects who “resist the summons to experience the world in heterosexual and heteronormative ways.”

To Halperin, gay culture is something of value, able to enhance or enrich the perspective of people of any sexual orientation. But for Halperin, as for others, the gay rights movement seemed to have prioritized “normality” in ways that both denied and jeopardized gay culture, perhaps nowhere more so than in the effort to legalize gay marriage. With the U.S. Supreme Court having deemed same-sex marriage a right, we look to Halperin’s take on what “gay marriage” might mean for “gay culture.”

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When gay people are deprived of a common, communal existence, of a social world of their own, the keynote of gay politics ceases to be resistance to heterosexual oppression and becomes, instead, assimilation—that is, accommodation to the mainstream, the drive to social acceptance and integration into society as a whole. It’s all about the need to fit in, to adapt yourself to the locality in which you already happen to be living and working. Issues like gay military service or marriage equality, which had formerly been about access to benefits, distributive justice, and the removal of discriminatory barriers, now become struggles over the symbolism of social belonging. They are reframed to center around social recognition, the definition of citizenship, the meaning of patriotism, the practice of religious worship, the idea of family. There are still important material demands behind such struggles for inclusion, but they tend to be subordinated, at least in the rhetoric of the movement, to the goals of assimilation and conformity.

In such a context, gay culture seems an increasingly bizarre, insubstantial, intangible, nebulous, irrelevant notion. It is the sign of a failure (or refusal) to assimilate. What would gay people want nowadays with a separate culture anyway? Such a thing might have made sense in the Bad Old Days of social oppression and exclusion. Now it is simply a barrier to progress. It impedes the achievement of assimilation. No wonder we keep asking, with barely suppressed impatience, why gay culture doesn’t simply disappear. Surely social acceptance and integration will spell the end of gay culture. Since gay people are no longer so oppressed, there is little reason for them to band together in separate social groups, let alone to form distinct cultural communities. The assimilation of gay people into straight society has put an end to all that. Gay culture is a vestige from an earlier time. It is archaic, obsolete. Gay culture has no future.

These predictions, I believe, overlook a crucial consideration. Social acceptance, the decriminalization of gay sex, the legalization of homosexual social and sexual institutions, the removal of barriers to same-sex marriage, to military service, to the priesthood and psychoanalysis, along with other previously off-limits professions, should not be confused with the end of sexual normativity, let alone the collapse of heterosexual dominance.

What Is Rape?

As publishers, with our list forever in mind, there’s an involuntary reflex to filter all the day’s news through the books we’ve worked on. Sometimes that’s welcome; it’s nice to see it validated that the Press’s books are relevant to events in the world. Other times, as with Estelle Freedman’s Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation, not so much. From Todd Akin’s comments on “legitimate rape,” to congressional Republicans debating rape’s definition while attempting to tighten requirements for federal funding of abortions, to Dr. Phil’s noxious Twitter poll on the meaning of consent, to the dismissal of countless survivors and acts that don’t satisfy the classic definition of rape, one need barely be attuned to notice the ongoing cultural and political battles over the answer to what may seem a simple question: what is rape?

As Freedman shows, the question is hardly new. Today’s debates about sexual assault, and the role of race and class within these debates, have a long prehistory in the US. The definition of rape, Freedman demonstrates, has been central to sustaining gender and racial injustice—and contesting its definition has been central to activists’ pursuit of greater equality.

Beginning her story in the 18th century, when many women, especially enslaved and non-elite women, had little or no legal recourse when sexually assaulted, Freedman traces the work of suffragists, black activists, and their allies to redefine rape. By expanding the definition of sexual assault to include women of color and non-elite and sexually experienced women, by raising the age of consent, by combating street harassment, by agitating for the prosecution of coercive sex, and by fighting lynching, activists sought to achieve civic equality for women and for people of color.

As Freedman explains in the video below, across our whole national history of debating its definition, the politics of rape have always been bound to questions of power and justice.

 

Catharine MacKinnon on Lovelace

The pornographic film Deep Throat, released in 1972, was a cultural sensation whose star, “Linda Lovelace,” was said to put a girl-next-door face on the sexual revolution. But the actual life of Linda Boreman, as depicted in the new biopic Lovelace, was one of beatings, rape, and terror. Feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, author of such works as Toward a Feminist Theory of the State and Only Words, represented Boreman after she came forward with her story, and later, with Andrea Dworkin, pursued civil rights litigation as a means to fight pornography. We asked MacKinnon about Boreman, Lovelace, and the potential impact of the film.

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Q. You’ve noted that prior to the 1980 publication of Linda Lovelace’s Ordeal, you had no view of pornography one way or the other. For those unfamiliar with her story, who was Linda Lovelace?

“Linda Lovelace” was the fictional name of Linda Boreman, later Linda Marchiano, who was forced into captivity and made to perform fellatio and other sex acts by pimps, including organized crime, so that pornography, notably the notorious film Deep Throat, could be made of her. The film was instrumental in establishing pornography as culturally legitimate in the 1970s. After her escape, Linda’s valiant opposition to the sex industry included chronicling her abuse in Ordeal and extensive public testimony. Her revelations enabled a change in the way pornography was debated legally and socially, shifting the focus from morality to harm.

Q. This film comes decades after the landmark pornography civil rights hearings at which Marchiano testified, as documented in In Harm’s Way. Can you remind us what was at stake in those hearings?

The anti-pornography civil rights hearings collected in In Harm’s Way created a space for people victimized by pornography to speak about what had been done to them in its making or through its use.  Up to that point, the legal argument over pornography had essentially only considered the freedom of speech issues.

The hearings documented the inequality that is foundational to the industry: that the “speech” of the pornographers is the use and abuse of the bodies of mainly women, who were far from free and were not speaking for themselves. The consequences of the distribution and use of the materials was shown to be equally silencing and endangering to legions of women and children who are abused by its consumers.  Thus the sexual exploitation of women and children in making pornography is mass-produced through its consumers to become violation of other women and children.

The civil rights ordinances the hearings debated were passed several times, then found to violate the First Amendment on the theory that the more harm the materials do, the more protected as speech they are–an incorrect, indeed reversed, view of First Amendment law. The ordinances could still be passed and found constitutional today.

Practical Ways to Beat the Sexting Impulse

When news broke this week of former Congressman and current NYC mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner’s further indiscretions, we were put in mind of a forthcoming book, David Lewis’s Impulse: Why We Do What We Do Without Knowing Why We Do It.

Informed by the latest research in neuropsychology, the book explores all the mystifying things people do (and do again) despite knowing better, from blurting out indiscretions to falling for totally incompatible romantic partners. Seems an apropos book for a man in Weiner’s position.

On closer consultation, though, the book was found not to speak directly to the issue of impulsive sexting. It does, however, offer practical ways to beat the overeating impulse, some of which we’ve adapted below.

1. Eat Sext from smaller plates and bowls phones. Because we eat sext with our eyes as much as with our mouth hands, using smaller plates and bowls phones is a quick and easy way to reduce the number of calories consumed sexts sent. In a study I conducted in London as part of a Channel 4 television documentary entitled Secret Eaters Sexters, we found that volunteers who served themselves ice cream into a sexted with a large bowl phone took sexted 44 per cent more than those with a smaller bowl phone.

2. Eating Sexting with chopsticks without autocorrect, rather than a knife and fork with autocorrect, obliges you to take smaller mouthfuls use shorter words and eat sext more slowly. Eating Sexting more slowly allows time for the digestion process to work effectively. It also gives you a better chance of recognising when you have eaten sexted sufficient food sexts.

3. Put ice in your drink sext. Because the body has to use energy to heat up the beverage sext, around 1 calorie per ounce word of fluid sext is consumed. If you drink sext the recommended not recommended eight 8-ounce glasses of water sexts a day with ice cubes you will burn up between 60 and 70 extra calories each day.

4. We eat sext significantly more when dining sexting in company than eating sexting alone. For Secret Eaters Sexters, I asked diners sexters to have lunch sext alone, as a couple or at a table of six friends. The group consumed sent some 600 more calories sexts than the solitary diner sexter and over 80 more than the couple. What happens is that we tend to pace ourselves on the fastest eater sexter in a group. Also, distracted by conversation and banter we fail to notice how much we are eating sexting and are more susceptible to offers of second helpings sextings. Be aware of this risk the next time you eat sext with a group of friends or colleagues. Refuse second helpings sextings. Pace yourself to the slowest eater sexter at the table. Try to be the last person to start eating sexting.

5. When dining sexting out in an upmarket restaurant be aware of the effects of soft lights and classical music. Both encourage you to linger longer and so eat or drink sext considerably more than you realise.

6. When snacking on popcorn sexting in the cinema, use your other hand. That is, if you normally hold the popcorn container in sext with your right hand and pick don’t sext with your left, then swap around. By making this small change in your eating sexting habits you force yourself to think more about what you are doing and are, therefore, likely to eat sext less. During a study to test the effects of this tactic in a London cinema, I provided half the audience with an oven glove worn on the normal popcorn picking sexting hand. Their consumption sexting fell by a quarter compared to their non-handicapped companions.

Okay, that’s six solid tips. Maybe take them under advisement? Food Sext Food for thought, at least.

Making Sex, From the Greeks to Akin

After Missouri Congressman and Senate candidate Todd Akin shared his view that the female body could mysteriously and miraculously prevent conception in cases of “legitimate rape,” his remarks were swiftly condemned by even his own Republican party. Much of the response, and Akin’s own apology, focused on his use of the word “legitimate” when in fact he’d meant “forcible,” a modifier whose political implications are, to many, no less offensive. Of course, the reaction to Akin’s politics has in some quarters overshadowed consideration of his complete lack of understanding of the female reproductive system. As explained last week in an op-ed by Jennifer Tucker, and further considered on Saturday’s episode of Up With Chris Hayes, the long-dismissed “logic” of Akin’s thoughts on conception stem from the ancient notion that female reproductive organs were merely inward-turned analogues of male. If the male needed to achieve orgasm for conception to occur, then so did the female; the victim of a “legitimate rape” would take no pleasure; hence no orgasm; hence the raped woman’s ability to “shut that whole thing down.”

For more on the trajectory of Akin’s medical fairytale, we turned to Thomas Laqueur’s indispensable Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, from which the following passage is excerpted.

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An interpretive chasm separates two interpretations, fifty years apart, of the same story of death and desire told by an eighteenth-century physician obsessed with the problem of distinguishing real from apparent death.

The story begins when a young aristocrat whose family circumstances forced him into religious orders came one day to a country inn. He found the innkeepers overwhelmed with grief at the death of their only daughter, a girl of great beauty. She was not to be buried until the next day, and the bereaved parents asked the young monk to keep watch over her body through the night. This he did, and more. Reports of her beauty had piqued his curiosity. He pulled back the shroud and, instead of finding the corpse “disfigured by the horrors of death,” found its features still gracefully animated. The young man lost all restraint, forgot his vows, and took “the same liberties with the dead that the sacraments of marriage would have permitted in life.” Ashamed of what he had done, the hapless necrophilic monk departed hastily in the morning without waiting for the scheduled interment.

When time for burial came, indeed just as the coffin bearing the dead girl was being lowered into the ground, someone felt movement coming from the inside. The lid was torn off; the girl began to stir and soon recovered from what proved not to have been real death at all but only a coma. Needless to say, the parents were overjoyed to have their daughter back, although their pleasure was severely diminished by the discovery that she was pregnant and, moreover, could give no satisfactory account of how she had come to be that way. In their embarrassment, the innkeepers consigned the daughter to a convent as soon as her baby was born.

Soon business brought the young aristocrat, oblivious of the consequences of his passion but far richer and no longer in holy orders because he had come into his inheritance, back to the scene of his crime. Once again he found the innkeepers in a state of consternation and quickly understood his part in causing their new misfortune. He hastened to the convent and found the object of his necrophilic desire more beautiful alive than dead. He asked for her hand and with the sacrament of marriage legitimized their child.

The moral that Jacques-Jean Bruhier asks his readers to draw from this story is that only scientific tests can make certain that a person is really dead and that even very intimate contact with a body leaves room for mistakes. But Bruhier’s contemporary, the noted surgeon Antoine Louis, came to a very different conclusion, one more germane to the subject of this book, when he analyzed the case in 1752. Based on the evidence that Bruhier himself offered, Louis argues, no one could have doubted that the girl was not dead: she did not, as the young monk testified, look dead and moreover who knows if she did not give some “demonstrative signs” in proof of her liveliness, signs that any eighteenth-century doctor or even layperson would have expected in the circumstances.

Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray

Word came recently that, in a rush to satisfy the overwhelming desire for Fifty Shades of Grey-style erotica, the UK-based erotic romance eBook publisher Total-E-Bound will be releasing a series of “Clandestine Classics.” The books, they say, will present the likes of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre “as they’ve never been seen before.”

The old fashioned pleasantries and timidity have all been stripped away, quite literally. You didn’t really think that these much loved characters only held hands and pecked cheeks did you? Come with us, as we embark on a breathtaking experience—behind the closed bedroom doors of our favourite, most-beloved British characters. Learn what Sherlock really thought of Watson, what Mr Darcy really wanted to do to Miss Elizabeth Bennet, and unveil the sexy escapades of Mr Rochester and Jane Eyre. We’ll show you the scenes that you always wanted to see but were never allowed. Come on, you know you can’t resist...open the pages and delve inside.

Surely the likes of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Android Karenina have prepared us for these modern meme-ings of classic lit. But, we must insist, there’s at least one beloved work of 19th century British literature that needs no 21st century co-author tarting things up in order to give today’s readers those scenes we’ve “always wanted to see but were never allowed”: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Before Wilde’s novel saw first publication in Lippincott’s in 1890, the magazine’s publisher censored several of the passages that most fully explored the nature of homoerotic and homosocial desire. Even still, the work was met with such hostility that Wilde himself made further cuts prior to the novel’s 1891 publication in book form. Wilde’s original uncensored text went unpublished until just last year, when we released Nicholas Frankel’s lavishly illustrated and wonderfully annotated edition of the novel. And now Wilde’s original text is available as The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray, a paperback edition that includes general and textual introductions from Frankel.

As Frankel explains, this original version of the story is “a more daring and scandalous novel, more explicit in its sexual content” than previously available editions. So, should you come across a copy of The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray you may mistake it for a mash-up, a “clandestine classic,” but rest assured: this is the novel as Wilde envisioned it.