You know how I feel about sex history, baby. I LOVES IT! I can't get me ENUFF of it! Sex history is human history. Because so much of LGBT/Queer/Leather history has been systematically destroyed and censored in the name of God and country, it feels particularly vital to preserve all we can of every photo, every painting, every document that proves that sexual diversity is and has always been normal.
It's a good spiritual practice to celebrate sexual pioneers (below, poets Allen Ginsberg and his then-wife Peter Orlovsky in 1970's MOST unforgettable magazine cover).

And now, a long aside.
In one of my other lives, i.e., the poetic one, I interviewed Allen. Read this highly acclaimed interview here.
Actually, I interviewed Allen twice: once in the early 1990s and again after he'd been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Many ironies have accompanied the publication of my interview, which devoted considerable attention to the subject of censorship and its emotional tolls on society as a whole and artists in particular. The original magazine which commissioned it from me killed it because they balked at Allen's politics. So the piece sat dormant in my files until a few years later when, while serving as an advisory editor at ELF magazine, my beloved publisher hounded me into re-interviewing him and allowing ELF to run an updated version. The second interview was very difficult because he was so very ill by then, but ultimately Allen was so happy with it he selected it for an official anthology of his best interviews.
Allen died before the anthology was finalized. A few months later, I received a grovelingly apologetic letter from the editor. The publishers had kicked my interview out of the anthology...because they balked at (yes, you guessed it) MY sexual politics. Even though Allen and I talked about SM in the interview and he laughingly admitted he probably was a sadomasochist, the editors just didn't want a sadomasochist represented in this posthumous tome.
However, there's a final irony, and it's a happy one. Because I posted the Ginsberg interview on my website in 1996, long before most poets knew there was an Internet, the interview became a go-to resource when Ginsberg died. CNN linked to it from their obituary, as did the BBC. The link now resides at dozens of Ginsberg-related and Beat Poetry sites all over the Web, hopefully giving Allen's ideas a more global reach than the print anthology could.
Fuck censorship and long live the true sexual history of humanity.
(Of course, darling, I like to think that in my own small way, I fuck censorship with this blog every day.)
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