Where is Beautiful Downtown Sodom, and why have they said those terrible things about it?
CULTURE WARS…Bible…sex…homosexuality…God…Lot’s wife…family values in the Bible…Tanakh…cancel culture…LGBTQ+…..Qur’an…Yahweh…feminism…Jehovah…cultural appropriation…Gomorrah…Orientalism…documentary hypothesis…Cities of the Plain…Dead Sea…Sodomtology…inverts…yadah…angels…MAKE SODOM GREAT AGAIN.
Whatever you know about the ancient fiction of Sodom and Gomorrah as recounted in the Book of Genesis, Chapter 19, you’re in for a shock. What if the so-called “Sin Cities” never existed except in the mind of an ancient scribe? How does the rickety story in Genesis match up with representations of Sodom and Gomorrah in culture high and low? And how to combat the endlesshomophobic lies of fundamentalist religion?
All that and more, coming in January. Only on Substack.
Sodom und Gomorrha (1922), an Austrian film by Mihály Kertész. A few years later he came to Hollywood, anglicized his name to Michael Curtiz, and directed such films as Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945)
Biblical salt and pepper set…notice that Lot’s saline wife looks back toward Sodom; wicked Sodomite drag queens from John Huston’s The Bible (1966); the Hebrew word yadah, meaning “to know,” as in send them out that we may know them. That’s the verb that has caused all the trouble.
Human stepping stones for the Queen of Sodom in Hollywood’s Sodom and Gomrorrah (1962), directed by Robert Aldrich
In the same film, left to right: Lot’s wife, Lot, and the Queen of Sodom
His novel takes place nowhere near Sodom and Gomorrah but rather in gay Paree
A trashy novel by a preacher’s wife
Is it over, or is it just beginning? Lot and His Daughters by Albrecht Altdorfer. This painting from 1537 hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. What you won’t hear in church or synagogue: Lot’s daughters made their father drunk (notice wine bottle and glass), then seduced him. Each daughter bore a son by Daddy…a rather uncommon instace of a male raped by females. PS: Imagine what Carol Burnett, Vicki Lawrence, and Harvey Korman could do with this raunchy tale!
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