Words Worth Noting - July 3, 2025

“That the issue of sexual morality should become a vehicle of rebellion against bourgeois values for the modern movement was inevitable. In the art of Gustav Klimt, in the early operas of Richard Strauss, in the plays of Frank Wedekind, in the personal antics of Verlaine, Tchaikovsky, and Wilde, and even in the relaxed morality of the German youth movement, a motif of eroticism dominated the search for newness and change. In the United States Max Eastman shouted, ‘Lust is sacred!’ The sexual rebel, particularly the homosexual, became a central figure in the imagery of revolt, especially after the ignominious treatment Oscar Wilde received at the hands of the establishment. Of her Bloomsbury circle of gentle rebels Virginia Woolf said, ‘the word bugger was never far from our lips.’ Andre Gide, after a long struggle with himself, denounced publicly le mensonge des moeurs, the moral life, and admitted his own predilections. Passion and love, he had concluded, were mutually exclusive. And passion was much purer than love. Diaghilev’s sexual proclivities were well known, and he made no attempt to mask them; quite the reverse. Stravinsky said later that Diaghilev’s entourage was ‘a kind of homosexual Swiss Guard.’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era [so the modern rebellion over the issue of sexual morality is actually stale and reactionary]