5 More Famous Authors That Were Perverts
By Sami on June 19th, 2008
Following on the original perverted authors article, these are 5 more famous authors that were perverts. This will be the last test format/style for the history trivia articles, let me know if you love/hate it.
5 ) T.E. Lawrence
Better known as Lawrence of Arabia, the Welsh archaeologist and British intelligence officer became famous because of his memoirs. Lawrence was celibate most of his life – claiming to have been raped and tortured by a Turk – and a pederast (which I’ve discussed here), but his most interesting perversion was the fact that he was a masochist. Lawrence used to hire a man, along with a witness, to beat him with birches under the claim that an uncle demanded it because Lawrence had stolen money. After the beatings he would ask them to write an account of the flogging which he would read later for kicks. In a sense, he was creating masochist porn for himself through himself. According to some of his biographers this wasn’t the first time either. There are doubts over if he ever had been raped and tortured or if it was just him writing out his masochistic fantasies and hiding them in plain sight.
4 ) Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Speaking of masochism, the term originated from the last name of the 19th century Austrian romance novelist. Born into nobility, he discovered that he enjoyed being humiliated by strong women that wore furs through his aunt, Countess Zenobia. As the story goes, one day she asked him to help take off her furs and as he was undressing her he found himself kissing her feet. She responded by kicking the young boy away with a sinister laugh. He enjoyed this so much that he spent the rest of his life trying to replicate it. Not surprisingly, he had a collection of things that he wanted his lovers to hurt him with: chains, whips, and razors. Sacher-Masoch couldn’t get aroused without fur and owned numerous cats that he kept with him as he wrote. (This makes friends of mine that own cats only slightly creepier.)
3 ) Hans Christian Andersen
The Danish fairy tale writer is best known for “The Little Mermaid”, “The Ugly Duckling”, and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Most of the fairy tales he wrote were based on events in his own life: “The Ugly Duckling” was based on growing up as a lanky child with a big nose and “The Little Mermaid” was based on a personal crisis after a man that he considered his soul mate got married to a woman. He was a lifelong celibate that used to visit brothels to have conversations with prostitutes. Afterwards, he would return to his hotel room to furiously masturbate and chronicle it by drawing a cross in his dairy. As a result, he kept meticulous tabs about how many times he masturbated in his life – and apparently he masturbated a lot.
2 ) James Joyce
The Irish author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Finnegans Wake was influenced by his daughter, Lucia, who was a schizophrenic. Both were locked up in the same room while he wrote it, spurring on questions over if they had an incestuous relationship. There is very little evidence to support these allegations, but there is plenty of evidence to support the fact that Joyce loved farts on his face. He wrote a series of dirty love letters to his wife in 1909 and one gushes about her “fat dirty farts.” He complimented her over the various types she possessed – “big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush” – and even believed he could pick out her farts in a “roomful of farting women.”
1 ) Oscar Wilde
The Irish author of The Picture of Dorian Grey Gay Gray was also one of the biggest celebrities of the 19th century. London’s most famous Dandy, he made Perez Hilton seem like Rambo by wearing peacock feathers, carrying sunflowers everywhere he went, and wearing blue china. Today he is a gay martyr, but I’ve never understood why anyone would want Wilde to be the face for any movement since he was a pederast. He befriended Uranian poets, the 19th century’s version of NAMBLA, and developed a voracious appetite for young prostitutes, servants, and newsboys, showing off that “the danger was half the excitement.” Then he pissed off Lord Queensberry by introducing his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, to the Uranian lifestyle. Queensberry was a swarthy man that loved fighting (hell, the boxing rules are named after the guy), and he launched a personal crusade against Wilde, famously leaving him a calling card that called him a sodomite. Wilde responded by suing him for libel. This backfired and resulted in Wilde being tried for gross indecency and being sent to jail at a hard labor camp.
Bonus: Eric Gill
Since he isn’t an author I didn’t use him, but not using him would be a sin. Gill was a sculptor and designer of Gill Sans – Philips, Saab, and Wikimedia all use this typeface – that seemed to have lived a somewhat boring, extremely Catholic, life. But in the ’80s a Gill biographer shocked his fans by stating that Gill had been sexually abusing his daughters, had sex with his sisters, and had even raped the family dog.
Credit where credit is due: Hubso for Gill and MadHooks for Sacher-Masoch/Andersen.
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