Lady Sasha ventures to the sumptuously salacious 1898 Bal du Rat Mort at The Royal Academy.
Riddle me this, Batman – whatever happened to gay culture? When, precisely, did its notions of cutting-edge pleasure descend to dead-on-its-feet, tired clichés and tired drag queens? And my God, forget any remotely inspirational role models like Ian McKellen or Francis Bacon – these days, twinks aspire to be brain-dead Rylan Clark clones!
Excess wasn’t always so dire. Queen frontman Freddie Mercury’s legendary parties had actual sex-dwarves serving huge, sterling silver platters of pure coke to guests gasping for more. While in NYC’s Studio 54, world-famous celebutantes high on speed and poppers allegedly rode stallions on the dance floor, with eager masochists screaming to be their saddles! Yes, old school perversion had so much more panache, the shocking aplomb of a beautifully arrogant, admirable amorality!
Still, even the 1970s hardly compare to the fin de siècle of the 1890s. Dominated by Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, it’s also the era of Belgian artist James Ensor, the inspiration for the Royal Academy’s recent masked ball. Never heard of Ensor? Oh, touch your tablets now – you’ll be swamped by images of masked partygoers concealing unspeakable Dorian Gray sins!
The Damien Hirst of exquisite depravity, Ensor – like fellow Victorian Jack the Ripper – hid his twisted imaginings behind a conflicted façade of immaculately starched respectability. After all, why bother to act publicly debauched in 1890s London? Legal temptation was everywhere, from pure coke at sixpence an ounce from Harrods, to 24-7 gin palaces and appallingly young ‘renters’ of both sexes! No wonder Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde was the perfect, poster saint de jour! It was a living urban Hell that quite tragically, we’ve lost, and best sulphurously depicted by Pierre and Gilles’ portrait of Marc Almond as Lucifer himself.
But don’t get the wrong idea – the Royal Academy’s not remotely interested in recreating anything as banal as total, sexual excess. I mean, come on, don’t we all live in a constant, media tornado of porn that’s about as thrilling and unarousing as tapioca? Instead, their goal is much more deviant, subtle and thrilling, attempting to re-eroticize the artistic imagination itself! See, even the most extreme sexual anarchists – hello, de Sade and Foucault – merely explore the dull, semi-autistic porn mathematics of multiple partners and positions!
So no wonder Oscar Wilde – and probably Ensor – lapped up J.K. Huysman’s Against Nature, the absolute Bible of decadence, and blueprint for Dorian Gray. Why even bother with the boring, messy business of touching actual human sloppy bits? Instead, Huysmans married the sexual cynicism of Les Liasion Dangereuses, which saw emotional manipulation as faux-penetrative sex, to artistic perversion, creating radically new, orgasmic options!
The result? Beyond fabulous! So who, really, needed to gaze hungrily at some throbbing, penile poker raking sexual coals? The true elite – courtesans, aesthetes and dandies – could induce multiple orgasms by eroticizing anything from Christopher Marlowe’s sonnets to ancient Minoan mosaics!
And it’s that freely-eroticizing mindset that’s enshrined at the 1898 Bal du Rat Mort. Bizarre taxidermy displays combine crow skulls with crucifixes, and a towering Russian princess stalks the corridors dressed as a living chandelier. Downstairs, the ballroom twists and bites with the electric, python heat of truly shockingly intertwined tangos, and grotesque, if bewitching object d’arts constantly hijack the unwary.
Better still, masks are de rigueur, so the ball’s virtuoso caress of all possible senses can be enjoyed with perfect anonymity. There’s nude life drawing, blazingly intoxicating tequila cocktails, and stunningly evocative, period installations that kidnap the mind with the force of instant, telepathic orgasm. It’s a consummate, cultural connoisseur’s symphony of sights, sounds and sensations, and leaves one – like Oliver Twist – simply begging for more. When, oh when, will gay culture ever equal or eclipse these heights again? Hopefully, during our remaining lifetimes!
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