"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." - Marcus Aurelius
Joined December 2009
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Never underestimate creative people,
And the depths that they will go..
youtu.be/M3E8YhNzGA8?si=Lvj3…
The Homosexuality as "Intersex" Theory
Between 1916 and 1927, Goldschmidt used his gypsy moth research to argue that human homosexuality was simply a biological form of genetic intersexuality.
The "Dodgy" Part: He eventually realized this theory was wrong and formally dropped it from his work in 1931. However, after he fled Germany, Nazi psychiatrists—specifically a doctor named Theo Lang (who helped found the association of Nazi doctors)—revived Goldschmidt’s abandoned theory.
They used his old research to claim homosexuality was a biological defect, weaponizing it as a pseudo-scientific justification for the persecution and institutionalization of gay men during the Holocaust.
Today, the terminology used to describe variations in reproductive anatomy, chromosomes, or hormones depends entirely on the context—medical professionals, intersex activists, and human rights organizations use different language.
The shift in terminology is a major point of ongoing discussion, with a sharp divide between the clinical world and the advocacy world.
1. The Medical Term: DSD (Differences/Disorders of Sex Development)
In 2005, a major international gathering of pediatric endocrinologists and medical professionals issued the Consensus Statement on Management of Intersex Disorders, which formally replaced the word "intersex" in clinical settings with Disorders of Sex Development (DSD).
Róisín Murphy retweeted
It’s a fucking lie to connect me with racism and white supremacy via your pathetic little hashtags. You’ll do or say anything to bring people like me down and shut down discourse you dislike. You’re a fascist.
I have a golly painting left to me by an artist who has long since passed away. I used it to show the difference between so-called edgy, institutionally approved art and the real censorship imposed on people like me through the deliberate, crude lies people like you tell daily.
Róisín Murphy retweeted
I can’t work from anything but the truth. That’s the ground it’s all built on. I can’t imagine what it’s like to create from a hiding place.
I’m going to chime in on the conversation about ugliness and degeneracy in art. The relentless nihilism and puerile fascinations in contemporary art keep sending the same message: give up, there’s no beauty, nothing to live for. I find it deeply depressing.
We seem to be elevating artists who lack the talent to achieve transcendence. Unable to produce or understand it, their work becomes a resentful rejection: “If I can’t have it, then nobody can.”
I’m tired of these mediocre deviants sucking up all the oxygen in our culture. It’s everywhere and utterly mundane. It lacks the excitement of breaking taboos because it doesn’t; it plays to permissible, even approved ideas. None of it is new, and it certainly isn’t dangerous anymore. It pays to be unoriginal and unable to access the talent that comes with ability to focus, critical thinking and sensitivity to beauty.
I know this because I lived with Simon Henwood, an artist who doggedly pursued transcendence. Early success with his giant gouache-on-paper pictures of teenagers wasn’t enough, so he taught himself to paint with oils. The painstaking process of building layer upon layer of translucent colour creates pictures of multi-dimensional space and form that simply can’t be reproduced in print, much less with AI. You need to stand in front of the painting; you may not understand why it affects you, but it will. He found such work difficult to push into the art scene because he didn’t have a story, a why, or a cynical bone in his body. He ended up as creative director for Kanye West, then Rihanna and Alicia Keys. He should have been at home in the attic working on his paintings, but he was thrown into a world of bullshit he simply could not handle, and the stress killed him.
He was an oddball, and his favourite thing as a kid was his Golliwogs. He collected all the Robertson’s Jam gollies and had a cuddly toy which was his favourite. I still have these objects. I also have a giant and very affectionate portrait of a golly that I have to hang in a shady upstairs landing, lest it be seen by visitors. A glimpse of this oil painting on one of my Instagram reels is regularly brought up as evidence of my “fascist leanings” or whatever. Even if I didn’t like the painting (I do), what am I supposed to do with it? Destroy it? The man is dead and won’t be painting anymore.
Of course a naked white woman on her knees with bruises, blood and excrement around her arse is institutionally approved and breaks no boundaries, but Simon’s happy golly with its hand hovering over its crotch is totally taboo. Taboo still exists. It’s taboo to be Christian, to be conservative; contemporary art won’t touch a great many things for fear of cancellation. So no, I don’t buy that this is brave or interesting. I know exactly what’s unacceptable in the arts. I’ve paid my own price for believing in biological reality, another huge taboo. I’m now very much an outsider myself.
I think it’s perfectly descriptive to call these people regime artists, and the regime wants degeneracy and hopelessness. Why is another question entirely, but I doubt it has to do with art.
What I don’t get is how this was accepted, even lauded, but the golly no. The Chapmans were handsome and charismatic and hung out with famous models; strange how that always helps the art world appreciate works of art.
That’s showbiz folks!
I’m not saying the golly transcendent but it’s part of the story, part of his childhood, a childhood marred by random violence. He created art out of necessity to escape, it was always his go to.
His later work was getting there, but then he had a massive heart attack.
This is a real oil painting using the technique I was trying to describe in the post. It’s huge and very effecting IRL.
It's always the creative ones, those who never fit in, and those brave enough not to try that they experiment on. Now it's the children.
In December 1960 the most famous writer in the world was checked into the Mayo Clinic under his own doctor's name, officially for his blood pressure, and given up to fifteen rounds of electric shock to the brain, and when he came out he could no longer write a sentence, and six months later he was dead.
Ernest Hemingway was 61. He had the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer, the houses in Cuba and Idaho, and a head that had been battered more times than anyone could count. He had been blown up by a mortar in Italy in 1918, split his skull open in a London car crash in 1944, been thrown from a motorcycle by a shell in France the same year, and walked away from two plane crashes in Africa on consecutive days in 1954, the second leaving fluid leaking from his skull. He drank enormously. By 1960 he was paranoid, convinced the FBI was following him, unable to finish the Paris memoir he had nearly completed.
The Mayo psychiatrist, Howard Rome, treated it as depression and gave him the treatment of the day. Electroconvulsive therapy was the modern answer in 1960, quicker than analysis and tidier than the lobotomy it had replaced. Hemingway went home to Ketchum in January.
He was worse. Asked to write a single line for a presentation volume for the new President Kennedy, he sat at his desk for a week, could not do it, and wept that it just won't come anymore. In April his wife Mary found him in a state that terrified her, and he was flown back to Rochester for another course of shocks.
At the Mayo he told his friend A.E. Hotchner what the treatment had done. His memory was his capital, he said, the thing his whole trade was built on, and they had wiped it and put him out of business. "It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient."
The clinic discharged him at the end of June as improved. On the morning of 2 July 1961, at home in Ketchum, he took his own life.
The psychiatrist who has studied his head injuries most closely, Andrew Farah, argues that the man in Rome's office was not simply depressed but living in a brain wrecked by a lifetime of concussions and drink, and that electricity was the last thing it needed. The FBI files released in the 1980s showed he really had been watched for years, which is a hard way to learn that a patient's paranoia was partly a report.
None of that got a hearing in 1960. The diagnosis was in the textbook, the treatment was in the textbook, and the patient's complaint that it was taking his mind was in the textbook too, listed as a side effect, expected and temporary.
They treated the most observant man in American letters for being wrong about what he was seeing, and the last thing he saw clearly was what they had done to him.
Ask yourself, were you in that 5% - 10% of kids in every class? What would’ve become of you and your misfit friends if you had been born into a post-Judith Butler world?
