Jul 152018
- The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual rules the mental health landscape in the USA, but in the rest of the world, the keystone reference is the ICD, administered by the World Health Organization. The WHO recently took consensual sexual minorities out of the ICD-11 revision, following the work of many Nordic countries.
- The Japanese culture/tradition of BDSM is a separate thing from the European/American tradition that I haven’t delved into as much as I’d like. (Hopefully to be covered in future works.) I don’t understand any language other than English, which forces me to rely on secondary sources. Most of them are shallow or suspect. However, the Tokyo Bound blog has a couple of translated interviews with bondage grandmaster Akechi Denki, one from 1997 and another from circa 1976. They give an interesting glimpse of Akechi’s life in post-war Japan, his many brushes with death, and his involvement in the underground of SM performances and magazines.
- Speaking of shibari, is it cultural appropriation?
- Notches has an essay on the peculiar relationship between the early fascist movement in Germany and the nascent homosexuality movement of the same time. Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA stormtroopers, saw homosexuality, or a particular definition of it, as fully compatible with German fascism, and distinguished from the perceived effeminacy and decadence of other forms of homosexuality. “Röhm’s queer fascism was identical to the Nazi Party’s ideology in almost all respects, save on questions of male-male eroticism.” An anonymous stormtrooper wrote, “the hand of a Nazi militia man ‘can strike a blow but also caress.’ The blows being struck by those hands were against Jews, Social Democrats, Communists, and homosexuals.” I should emphasize that we should not fall into the “Nazis were gay” trope; Röhm was eliminated during the “night of the long knives” when Hitler decided he was no longer an asset.
- Another review of Katharine Gates’ Deviant Desires.
- An essay on the fetish classic Satan in High Heels (1962).
- An essay on the original Hellraiser (1987) film, strongly influenced by the gay SM subculture and the industrial music subculture of the early 1980s.
