SEX: THE QUEEREST FRONTIER

How do you shock when every taboo is dead, buried and passé? Oh, sure, some mediaeval mud-brains- Mister Pope- object to non-standard sexual preferences, but frankly, points of view are as relativistic as Einstein’s space-time, and where was God during Auschwitz, Hiroshima and 9/11? 

Still, one guy’s street-meat is another’s pouting poison, and gloriously, queer culture – much to the shock and awe of heterosexuals – has turned even sex, gender and porn into shock-jock art! But there’s nothing new under the sun, and gay culture’s always run effortless, pink triangles around the clueless, dick and pussy majority, with gender 2011 simply a matter of surgery or personal presentation.

And guess what? Way before Pete Burns and Ru Paul, drag was stringing sexual hypocrisy alive! Welcome to the 1890s, the glorious heyday of Oscar Wilde and English decadence. Back then, drag was freakier than Alice through the looking glass; only the hunkiest hookers breathing dressed in drag, the more broad-shouldered and heavily-muscled the better.

And in an ironic mirroring of gay London epicentre Heaven, the Victorian LGBT hot-spot was Haxell’s, a plush hotel dead-smack in Charing Cross. Each night, staid, secretly green carnation gentlemen would cruise the clustered, hefty beauties in their petticoats, the majority of the drags usually off-duty troops or labourers. In a sexual aesthetic peculiar to Victorian rules of attraction, frills and flounces merely enhanced masculinity for breathless drag-fags, the punters who stalked cocks in frocks.

So, no wonder famed artist and occasional tranny Aubrey Beardsley failed miserably trolling for punters; the poor honey-bun was rake-thin and tubercular, the living epitome of ill-health. More Abattoir Auntie than British Beef, she relieved her sexual frustration in her astonishing artwork, drawing penises as elaborate and baroque as the Taj Mahal!

So, do you see where we’re going? Well, of course you do; it’s the origin of LGBT sex as transgressive performance art, from 1900’s drag star Julian Eltinge to Lady Gaga, David Hoyle, and Bourgeois & Maurice. Frankly, when it comes to bling and scandal, London’s LGBT art-history makes the Royal Family look like nuns on Valium!

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