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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

Pan God Images – Browse 1,381 Stock Photos, Vectors, and Video | Adobe Stock

Male-Male Transgression in 17th-Century Basque Witchcraft

 

In 1608, King Henri IV appointed witch-hunter Pierre de Lancre* to investigate a troubling outbreak of witchcraft in the French Basque country. According to de Lancre's report, this outbreak was fueled by the expression of forbidden sexuality.

When having sex with young men or women, the Devil, he reported, “took as much pleasure in sodomy as in the most ordered and natural voluptuousness.”

Men that he interrogated confessed to “performing sodomy” with one another, frequently with relatives, in order to “please the devil.”

One male witch confessed both to having frequently bottomed for the Devil, and topped other warlocks.

In the end, the judges decided that the Basque witches did not really believe in the Devil; rather, their witchery amounted to a mere smokescreen for the sex.

“And so they gathered,” they wrote, “and the naughtiest one among them pretended to be Satan.”

 

So, at least, claims Benjamin Ivry—without, I might add, providing any documentary evidence—in his 2000 biography of composer Maurice Ravel (8).

(What, you might ask, has any of this to do with Maurice Ravel? Item: Ravel's mother was Basque. Item: Ravel was born in the French Basque country. Item: Ravel was gay. Item: Ravel had a lifelong fascination with witchcraft and the occult. Item: As reflected in his music, Ravel had a lifelong devotion to the god Pan. Item: For the ancient Greeks, the phrase “to honor Pan” meant male-male sexual activity [16].)

While I have yet to confirm all of Ivry's historical claims concerning Basque witchcraft, my own research has turned up enough similar evidence to tentatively accept what he says as historical.

Certainly—as evidenced by the furor over “homosexuality” in contemporary conservative Christianity—in a hetero-normative Christian society, transgressive behaviors like witchery and same-sex sexuality quite naturally go hand-in-hand.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 FIREWORKS in North East - North East Chamber of Commerce

A Pride Moment

 

There was once a woman who had three sons, each more handsome than the next.

It sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, doesn't it? In fact, it's a true story, and one of my favorite Pride moments: up there, in fact, with my first dorm-room kiss from my first boyfriend.

 

Scene: The community Beltane Pancake Breakfast.

(I live in Paganistan; things like that happen here.)

I'm sitting at a table, talking with the woman with three beautiful sons. Across the table from us, her youngest sits in his boyfriend's lap. They're kissing.

The room is filled with festive pagans. No one even notices the passionate same-sex lip-lock.

A bubble of happiness expands to fill my chest. “I've worked my entire life to get us to a place where two boys can make out in a crowded room, and no one so much as blinks an eye,” I think. “And here we finally are.”

Of course, in the gold of the human heart, there are no unalloyed emotions.

Oh, that lucky, lucky boyfriend.

 

Out of the blue one night I get a call from my first boyfriend. We haven't spoken since our explosive break-up decades before.

(A convert to Catholicism, who would eventually enter the priesthood, he told me once, “I love you more than I love God,” and then promptly freaked, because it was true. Poor benighted Christian, it never occurred to him that one best does the one precisely by doing the other.)

As we reminisce about our times together, he confirms something that I had long thought I remembered about that very first wine-fueled kiss.

There really were fireworks going off in that room that night.

He saw them too.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 Fire Island (2022) - IMDb

Not a Review of Kim Joel Booster's Fire Island

 

I am pagan. Therefore, I support the right to discriminate

As pagans, we understand the importance—not just the importance, but the value and, in fact, the cultural necessity—of any given self-selected group's right to exclude non-members while associating freely within itself: with the necessary proviso, of course, that such a right cannot be universal, but always (by necessity) time- and place-bound.

If this is so, then Kim Joel Booster's Fire Island may well be the most pagan movie of the summer.

 

Can't stand feel-good movies. Don't like rom-coms, especially gay ones. No big fan of Jane Austen, whom I really can't help but suspect would, if she weren't a woman, be read today only by English Lit grad students.

Here's what I really liked about this summer's gay feel-good rom-com, the newest iteration of the Pride and Prejudice franchise, though: with the exception of one nightmarish flashback scene, there are no straight people in the film. None.

A group of gay friends go to Gay Island for one last dizzying swirl of what passes for gay male “culture”, in all its shallow, abs-obsessed dysfunctionality.

Gods: how incredibly refreshing.

One lesbian. (Margaret Cho's character, though, is anything but token.) No straight characters. No (current media darlings that they are) trans characters. Not even any bisexuals. Just men for men telling our own story, for a change, with lots of gratuitous nudity, sex, and good-looking guys.

The Horned One be praised.

Not that I have nothing against trans folk, straight folk, or lesbians, mind you. Those stories, too, I value. It's just that everyone deserves a chance to talk about themselves every now and then. Enough about you: let's (finally) talk about me for a change, OK?

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 Sexual Content

 

The Marinos Poems

Three Lost Epigrams from Book Twelve of the Greek Anthology


I

You turned down Marinos?

Marinos the Golden, heart-throb of Athens,

muse to ten thousand epigrams, this one included?

Well, Daphne fled from Apollo, they say,

fairest Olympian, gayest of gods,

for whom boys dance naked.

More the fool her.

 

II

"Bet you a blow job," said Marinos.

Now that's what I call unfair.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 Sexual content

 

“I mean, one of their initiations is letting yourself be sodomized,” says my friend, with obvious distaste. “Really, what's up with that?”

We've been discussing the OTO; he's alluding to the Ordo's XI° initiation. I'm not OTO myself, though I have friends that are. I am, though, gay. I could easily tell him what's up with that.

I will never, never get used to hearing a sacred act of love, one of the most intimate things that it's possible to do with another person, be spoken of with such visceral loathing. To my surprise, though, I don't find my friend's clumsy faux pas offensive. Rather, I find myself loving him for it. He's actually just given me a gift.

All too often, being gay, like being a member of any minority, means being reduced. You don't merit full personhood; you're always the gay guy. In this reducing atmosphere, of course, gay men, distressingly often, become synonymous with a single act of love, which (ironically) some of us don't even like. “Nothing like being reduced to one action,” a gay friend of mine once remarked, bitterly.

(Talking with an acquaintance at Pagan Pride one afternoon, I listened with increasing confusion as she spoke effusively about something that I'd supposedly done recently. Finally, I realized what was going on: she had confused me with D, the other prominent gay elder in the local pagan community. [You know, those gay guys all look alike.] I thought of telling her: “No, I'm the other gay guy.” I didn't, though; she would have felt humiliated to have made such a mistake. Aînesse oblige: elderhood obligates.)

What my friend has just told me, without realizing it, is that in his mind, I hold full personhood; I'm not gay first and foremost. It's an odd, and maybe even pathetic, thing to be grateful for, but I am.

The two of us have been friends for a long time; there's a lot of love between us. Still, there's an important point to be made here.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

You may have seen the controversial scene in Skyfallso controversial, in fact, that it was nearly cut from the film—in which the epicene Silva unbuttons Bond's shirt (Bond, of course, being tied to a chair at the time) and runs his finger slowly down Bond's chest.

“There's a first time for everything, James Bond,” he says.

Bond, of course, remains utterly unfazed.

“What makes you think it's the first time?” he asks coolly.

Was this, did you wonder at the time, mere Bondian bravado?

Or was it something more?

Let me tell you the story of James Bond's first and truest love, the beautiful Lin Yu Xian, and how his tragic, and premature, death made our James the man that he was to become.

(If you're wondering what any this has to do with Pagan Culture, my friend, let me suggest that you may want to consider getting out a little more often. Same-sex love is always inherently pagan.)

It all started when young James was only 16...

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Well, that's disappointing.

In the most recent season of camp-fest The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Sabrina's current love-interest, warlock Nicholas Scratch (get it?) has saved everybody's butt by absorbing the Dark Lord into himself.

(I'll spare you the back-story. Trust me, this is TV: none of it makes any sense anyway.)

So, is anyone grateful to Nicholas? Ha. Instead, the girls at the Sabrina-universe equivalent of Hogwarts are giving poor brave Nicholas shit for being the Dark Lord's bitch because he's taken him inside of himself.

(This, of course, is ridiculous. Just because I give you access to my butt doesn't make me your bitch.)

Now—sorry as I am to say it—we know very well that this kind of homophobia goes on in literally every high school in America. Still. (Gods help us, if there's a queer high school out there somewhere—which I'm virtually certain that there isn't—this kind of homophobia goes on there, too. Alas, queer people are not exempt from homophobia.)

Of course, it's disheartening to see this kind of behavior on a show which—if not exactly good on queer issues—has been at least passable, if barely.

(The supposedly “bi” cousin's bisexuality lasted for all of one season; now he's paired off with a woman. The “gay” relationship is between a fae and a trans guy. [In these tokenistic times, straight screenwriters just love pairing up the gay guy with the trans guy. That way they get to check two boxes at one fell swoop.])

I mean: talk about unrealistic. It's easy to tell that these are TV witches, not real ones.

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