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Silverfoxesclub-digest In this issue:
-That rascal Aretino, again!
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In 1524, Aretino wrote sonnets to accompany the drawings of sixteen sexual positions by Giuliano Romano, Raphael's talented twenty-five-year-old pupil. Their collaboration produced one of history's most notorious works of erotic art. Casanova in his memoirs mentions spending New Year's Eve 1753 with a nun doing Aretino's "straight tree" position, which he says featured the man standing and holding the woman upside-down for mutual oral sex. Aretino barely escaped prison for his involvement in the Sixteen Postures, but it certainly didn't teach him to mend his ways. He attained considerable wealth and influence, in part through literary flattery and blackmail. Little is known of his early years, but by 1527 he had settled permanently in Venice. Among Aretino.s friends and patrons were some of the most prominent figures of his time, several of whom gave him gold chains such as the one he wears in the Titian portrait attached to this posting. Clement VII made Aretino a Knight of Rhodes, and Julius III named him Knight of St. Peter. He was on intimate terms with Titian, who painted at least three portraits of him. Despite the exclusively heterosexual natural of his naughty sonnets (one of which does, however, praise anal intercourse), Aretino himself was a well-known homosexual, and wrote such works as "Il Marescalo," a play in which a Mantuan courtier marries a girl whom he later discovers - to his delight - to be a young man in disguise. We have already met Aretino on the list, in Digest 257, June 2001, in a bawdy selection from "The Wandering Whore" featuring a gay priest in Rome. He was called "Aretino," by the way, because he came from the town of Arezzo in Tuscany, which you visited if you saw Roberto Benigni's beautiful Italian film, "Life is Beautiful." Arezzo is also Benigni's town, and was the setting for much of the film. Here is a brief selection from one of gay Aretino's Renaissance sonnets, heterosexual in nature, but homosexual in spirit. All except a very few copies of this book were promptly burnt by the Church. No surviving complete copy is known to exist. It's easy to see why the Church tried to destroy his work. He pulled no punches. His writings were as salacious as anything in the pornographic genre today. Sampling of a sonnet:
SHE: "Jon Kepler" wrote: My question is, why choose such a difficult one to control? I suppose that if you can control such a strong urge as sexuality you have reached the control pinnacle."
Dear Jon,
Examples include the following: and in our modern period technology has expanded the range of possible control to include (5) control over abortion and use of contraceptives. These controls have not always been exercised exclusively by religious leaders. Government leaders today as always find control of sexuality to be very appealing. The price paid by sexual non-conformists has usually been highest among the parts of the world where the three "religions of the book" have been prominent. I mean Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Both Christianity and Islam had periods of many centuries in which they tolerated same sex sexual behaviors, then seemingly had a change of heart. As Jon said so well, "... if you can control such a strong urge as sexuality you have reached the control pinnacle".
George of Boston (Boston Bill)
Headline:
Text: The play, "Mother Clap's Molly House," set in London in 1726 in a "molly house" - a homosexual meeting place - and interspersed with a contemporary story line, is a new work by Mark Ravenhill whose first play, Shopping and F******, provoked outrage for its explicit content and the desolation of its characters. Critics fear his move to the National, which is part-funded by taxpayers and whose most recent success has been Martine McCutcheon in My Fair Lady - will prompt a row of proportions unseen since The Romans in Britain was staged in 1980. That play, which featured Roman soldiers raping a young Briton, caused Mary Whitehouse, the taste and decency campaigner, to attempt to bring a private prosecution under the Sexual Offences Act. "Putting it [Ravenhill's play] on at our National with taxpayers' money seems to me to be designed to affront traditional family values," said Gerald Howarth, chairman of the Lords and Commons Family and Child Protection Group. The National has recently come under criticism that with Trevor Nunn's directorship it has staged too many "safe" and commercial plays. Mother Clap's Molly House seems likely to change all that. "There is sodomy, but I think National audiences can probably take sodomy on the chin, if that's where you take it," Ravenhill said last week. The play opens on September 4. John Beyer, director of Mediawatch UK, the new name for Whitehouse's National Viewers and Listeners' Association, said: "What goes on at the National is the face of modern Britain and I think people will be very surprised."
Despite his confidence in modern audiences,
Ravenhill's mother has yet to see one of his
plays. "I haven't come up with one suitable
yet," he said. End of silverfoxesclub-digest V1 #276
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