Male Nudity in English Class: The Canterbury Tales

During my junior year in college, I heard The Word in my college class for the first time.  My Culture and Civilization of Modern Germany class was devoted to proving that no German ever wrote about homosexualitat, but the professor in my Chaucer class, a big, hoarse-voiced woman named Dr. Dorothy, thought that The Canterbury Tales was all about how terrible "homosexuality" was.

Ok, but the Pasolini adaption of The Canterbury Tales had the most impressive male nudity I had ever seen at that point.  I can't show a picture here, but those guys were huge.


















The Pardoner, one of the pilgrims who tell stories on the road to Canterbury, was thin and willowy, beardless, with long yellow hair and a high pitched voice.

"An effeminate homosexual!" Dr. Dorothy cried, obviously delighted to say a forbidden word.  "How grotesque!"

Ok, but look at the Squire: a powerfully built young man of about twenty.  But instead of jousting and fighting dragons, he spends his time dancing, singing, and embroidering, quite feminine pursuits. He is a "lover and a lusty bachelor," so busy having sex that he doesn't sleep much at night.  Yet who does he have sex with?  Chaucer leaves this vague, but traditionally squires were devoted to the knights they served.






In The Miller's Tale, a parish clerk named Absolon is infatuated with the Miller's wife, and asks her for a kiss through a peep-hole.  Instead, the Miller shoves his bare butt through and farts in Absolon's face.  But Absolon gets revenge by shoving a red-hot poker into the Miller's butt.

"Symbolic homosexuality!" Dr. Dorothy cried, enjoying the shocked expressions on the students' faces. "How humiliating for the Miller!"

Ok, but look at The Knight's Tale, about two bosom buddies, Arcite and Palamon, who are both in love with Emily.  A classic triangulation, with the quarrel over the girl an impediment to their love, which is described in lushly romantic terms:

Sworn as we are, and each unto the other,
That never, though for death in any pain,
Never, indeed, till death shall part us twain.

Medieval literature was filled with men in love, like Roland and Oliver.  Shakespeare and John Fletcher used the same story as the basis for The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), here performed by Tyler Neale and Tim Elliott.

A Knight's Tale (2001), starring Heath Ledger, tells a different story, but it does feature a nude Geoffrey Chaucer (Paul Bettany), plus a gay couple, the Knight's humorous sidekicks, Roland and Wat (Mark Addy, Alan Tudyk).

As I discovered in my classes in Modern British and American Literature, you can't always believe what you hear from a college professor.

See also: Pasolini's Canterbury Tales: More gay characters and cocks than Chaucer imagined

"Superman" (2025): You'll believe a man can queerbait

Pasolini's Arabian Nights: The less well-known tales told with penises and homophobia

Link to the penises

Between 1971 and 1974, Italian filmmaker Piers Paolo Pasolini produced and directed three adaptions of famous Medieval stories.  The Arabian Nights (Il fiore delle Mille et una Notte) was the last, and the most ambitious, with filming locations in Yemen, Iran, and Nepal.  

If you've seen the other two (The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales), this one will be familiar; most of the same actors, especially Pasolini's lover Ninetto Davoli (left) and his protege Franco Merli, whom he discovered working at a gas station in Sicily.

Some of the same annoying bits as in the previous movies: dozens of people sitting around singing for no reason; lengthy closeups of random people with bad teeth grinning idiotically at the camera; stories that merge into other stories, so you're never sure what you're watching.

Pasolini eschews the more familiar stories, like Aladdin and Ali Baba, to concentrate on Nur Ed Din (Franco Merli, left) who loses his favorite slave girl, and wanders around, crying and having erotic adventures while searching for her.

Inside that story is another, about Aziz (Ninetto Davoli), who depends on his girlfriend for advice on how to win The Girl of His Dreams.  It ends badly.

And a few others.  Prince Tagi (Francesco Paolo Governale) falls in love with a girl through hearing a story about her, but she doesn't like men. So he makes a tapestry in the garden that convinces her to give heterosexual love a try.

A man, Alberto Argentino, tries to save a woman from a demon, but ends up being turned into an ape.

More after the break

Pasolini's Canterbury Tales: more gay characters and cocks than Chaucer imagined

Link to the cocks

The Canterbury Tales (I Racconti di Canterbury, 1972) is my favorite of Piers Paulo Pasolini's Trilogy of Life (others include The Decameron and The Arabian Nights), maybe because the set-up and many of the stories are familiar from my college claasses, so I don't get lost in the abrupt sedgeways.

And because I saw it last of the three, so some of the cast was familiar: Pasolini's lover Ninetto Davoli as a comic-relief buffoon, Franco Citti as someone morose and frightening,  Although I'm still annoyed by the closeups of random people with bad teeth grinning at the camera for no apparent reason, and the groups of people sitting around singing for no reason.

There is less full-frontal nudity than in the others, but for some reason the penises on display are much more impressive. The biggest of the lot -- probably the biggest portrayed in any film anywhere -- belongs to John McLaren.

Pasolini includes adaptions of 8 stories:

1. The Merchant's Tale: An old man gets a young wife, who is having an affair with Damian,  Oscar Fochetti, so two naked teenage gods (left) decide to have a little fun with them. While a naked boy plays the flute.

2. A new tale: A professional blackmailer, who has just turned a man (Philip Davis) over to the authorities for a same-sex relationship, meets the devil.  The execution of the sodomite is uncomfortable to watch, especially when one considers that similar atrocities are still happening in the world today, but at least the blackmailer gets his comeuppance.

3. The Cook's Tale: The foolish Perkin (top photo), channeling Charlie Chaplin, invades a wedding, hangs out with the guys, and has a three-way relationship with a man and his wife.

More after the break

The Gay Arab World

During the famous summer of 1981, when I was working in the college library, taking classes in Chaucer and Modern German Culture, going to see Clash of the Titans, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Wolfen, Arthur, American Werewolf in London, Hell Night, and The Chosen, and finding subtext songs on the radio, the Film Club took a field trip to Madison Wisconsin for an Italian Film Festival, and I saw Pasolini's Arabian Nights.  

Somebody told me there was gay content.  Maybe a little.  But only as an aside in the main plot, where he searches for his lost girlfriend Zumurrud (Ines Pellegrini). In the final scene, Zumurrud, disguised as a man, buys Nur-e-Din as "his" slave.  "He" orders the boy to strip and lie face down on the bed.  Preparing for a sexual assault, Nur-e-Din complies.  Then Zumurrud reveals her true identity.  Heterosexual love wins out over a threat of homoerotic assault.  I left the theater sick to my stomach.  My complete review is here.

I was amazed to discover, years later, that Pasolini was gay.  Homophobic, but gay nonetheless.

Throughout my childhood, movies about the Arab world provided few hints of a "good place." They were mostly adaptations of the Arabian Nights, replete with Sinbads and Aladdins and Ali Babas who get girls, even when they were played by gay actors like Kerwin Mathews (I hadn't yet seen Sabu's homoromantic Arabian adventures.)

TV offered only I Dream of Jeannie, a heterosexist fable, and Shazzan, about a boy and a girl trapped in an Arabian Nights world.  

I was not yet aware of the homoeroticism of Medieval Arab, Turkish, and Persian poets, such as Abu Nuwas: 


I die of love for him, perfect in every way,
Lost in the strains of wafting music.
My eyes are fixed upon his delightful body
And I do not wonder at his beauty.

Or of the Orientalist fervor that sent hundreds of gay Europeans, including Oscar Wilde, W.H. Auden, and Andre Gide, to North Africa in search of Arab lovers.

But there were tantalizing hints in books.  Sonia and Tim Gidal's Sons of the Desert was about two Bedouin boys. 

The Stone of Peace, by Karah Feder Tal, has a Jewish teenager running away from his kibbutz in the Negev and befriending the Bedouin Ahmad. 

James Forman's My Enemy, My Brother had another Jewish-Arab friendship.

And Passing Brave was a real-life adventure about two Americans, William Polk and William Mares, armed only with a knowledge of Classical Arabic, crossing the desert in search of a "good place." 

See also: The Egyptian Professor of Political Science

Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom

Everyone has heard of 120 Days of Sodom, the much-excoriated novel by the Marquis de Sade, written while he was in prison in 1785, and not published until the 20th century.  But most people haven't read it.

I have, for a paper I wrote in grad school.  Or at least I skimmed through it.

Four wealthy libertines decide to try out every sexual gratification there is.  So they shut themselves up in a secluded castle for four months with 46 victims: their own daughters, some male prostitutes, some exceptionally attractive teenage boys and girls, and some exceptionally ugly older women.   They get ideas from four experienced prostitutes, who tell stories of "passions," or erotic acts.

Though the list is long -- 600 items -- it omits a lot of  common sexual acts, fetishes, and paraphilias, and includes a lot of weird ones.  All of them require the act to be non-consensual.

Sacrilege is apparently a big turn on: the victims are forced to renounce God, spit on crucifixes, desecrate communion wafers, and so on. And so is anal sex, which Sade perceived as a kind of sacrilege.

But violence is the biggest draw.  A month is devoted to the "cruel passions," various types of torture.  Another month is devoted to the "murderous" passions: burning alive, disemboweling, and otherwise killing victims.

Gay Italian filmmaker Piers Paolo Pasolini adapted it Salo (1975), substituting World War II fascists for libertines.  He adds a bit more plot, including a hetero-romance, and ups the humiliation factor.

There's a ton of male nudity, with many very attractive male bodies, and a lot more gay sex than in the original book -- but it's presented as much more shocking than audiences today may find it: "Look, that man is having sex with another man!"

Actually, the whole movie is somewhat less shocking than one expects from hearing its history of banning and censorship.  Today you can see much, much worse in the torture porn genre, like Saw and The Human Centipede.

Pasolini was killed on November 2, 1975, shortly before Salo was released.  If this is his "farewell" to the world, it's curious that he presents same-sex acts as universally degrading, as bestial, and gives the only hint of tenderness, compassion, and love to heterosexuals.

But maybe not so curious.  His other movies present same-sex acts as, at best pleasant diversion from the heterosexual romance that is the theme of everyone's dreeaming.

He was gay, but apparently he wished he wasn't.