Let's Talk About Sex ...

I never thought I'd learn more about sex (sexuality, and STDs) from a book about the bubonic plague: Norman F. Cantor's In The Wake of the Plague. Take for example:

There is thus--if [Stephen J.] O'Brien is correct--a genetic relationship between the Black Death and AIDS. If you are descended from a Caucasian who contracted the plague of the mid-fourteenth century and that ancestor survived, you may have complete immunity to HIV/AIDS. And it is believed that up to 15 percent of the Caucasian population could fall into this lucky category. (21)

Almost inevitably Henry of Lancaster, John of Gaunt's heir, threw out his gay cousin Richard II and seized the crown with parliamentary approval. (57)

As Edward III aged (he didn't die--from gonorrhea--until 1377), the Black Prince took over leadership of the English continental armies, laying waste to huge parts of France and Spain. (38)

The last front-rank philosopher and theologian who had been archbishop of Canterbury was St. Anselm in the early years of the twelfth century. He did poorly as an archbishop, getting into needless quarrels with kings, exasperating the pope, and turning the monks of Canterbury into an ingroup of young gays. (111)

The three pandemics were smallpox and gonorrhea from A.D. 250 to A.D. 450 and bubonic plague from 540 to 600. Where smallpox and gonorrhea came from is unknown. Some historians have guessed from the black hole in Central Asia. They may have just as well have come up the great mortality chute from East Africa. Certainly that is where the bubonic plague came from after A.D. 500. (191)

And the one that takes the cake:

The dispossessed King Edward II was killed by a red-hot iron poker shoved up his anus. This savagery partly reflected hostility on the path of the Church and other opinion-makers to the king's homosexuality and his favoritism toward his young French male lover, but it also reflected the general malaise, anger, and pessimism of the new age of global cooling. (75)


Now the question is: Did Willie Shakespeare know?


If this day wasn't quaint enough already, of course, while on break outside, we beheld a bronzed fifty year old man exercising at the back of a nearby work building in his undies--his bike, and pilate ball parked nearby. All we were looking for was the kitten we saw amble by earlier. Is this supposed to be an 'Alice in Wonderland' moment?