or much of 1996, The A to Z of Weird Sex has endeavoured to demonstrate that there is little in the human erotic imagination that has not already been experimented with, labelled and classified.
As part of the Hot Press mission to explain, we have provided you, the regular reader, with a rich lexicon of perversion and depravity, and will continue to so in the new year. Never again need you find yourself at a loss for the correct word to describe a lascivious attraction to statues (agalmatophilia), short people (nanophilia), insects (formicophilia) or armpits (axillism).
At dinner parties and society fetes, you can confidently and eloquently state that a person who likes to have sex with trees is a dendrophile, a woman who is aroused by watching others smoke is a capnolagniaist and a man who gets into compromising positions with Saint Bernards is Michael Lowry.
For our Christmas special, we have decided to go one step further. Having named the acts, we now name the activists. With neither fear nor favour, we unmask some of the guilty men and women, all the while fully aware that fear, favours and masks are just a sample of the diverse elements utilised by the adventurous and imaginative in their sex play.
For your delectation, I have scoured the annals of the past. My mission? To find out what the most celebrated, distinguished and/or notorious figures in history got up to in the boudoir. You ve heard of hagiography, this is a shagiography.
I have omitted from my list the names of artists, writers, musicians and theatrical folk on the grounds that such people are almost invariably, by definition, degenerate. What I was on the lookout for was the sick little puppy that lurked inside the respected statesman, the deviant beneath the august cloak of power.
In passing, I was intrigued to discover that Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 to 1881) was a keen spanker and foot fetishist, Algernon Swinburne (1837 to 1909) was sexually obsessed with babies and delighted in intercourse with his pet monkey and Hans Christian Andersen (1805 to 1875) died a virgin.
Behind every great man or woman, there usually lies a dirty little secret. Here then is a modest rummage through the soiled underthings of a selection of titans and colossuses, both heroic and villainous.

Bonaparte, Napoleon (1769 to 1821):
The future French Emperor lost his virginity to a prostitute at the age of 18. Fearing he would be impotent with a beautiful woman his own age, the young Napoleon concentrated his attentions on women who were old enough to be his mother, or grandmother, as in the case of the 60-year-old Mademoiselle de Montansier. His notorious first marriage, to the tempestuous Josiphine de Beauharnais, was marked by frequent bouts of infidelity on both their parts. He subsequently wed Marie Louise of Austria, an 18-year-old virgin so sheltered during childhood that all male animals were kept from her view.
At 42, Napoleon s worst fear materialised; he was declared impotent. Throughout the final decade of his life, he suffered a progressively fatal malfunctioning of the endocrine glands. An autopsy after his death revealed that his pubis was feminine in appearance, his penis and testicles having shrunk to minuscule size. Glandular changes had also caused him to develop softly-rounded, creamy-textured breasts.
Cleopatra (69 to 30BC):
Cleopatra was a Macedonian Greek, descended from Ptolemy, Alexander The Great s general who ruled Egypt upon Alexander s death. An intellectual, she was the first member of the royal family who bothered to learn the Egyptian language, and was also fluent in other tongues.
Historians have recorded that Cleopatra staged weeks of nightly orgies, at which those in attendance engaged in various forms of debauchery. The lascivious atmosphere of her court intensified during her love affair with Roman leader Mark Antony, when she played to his notorious taste for obscene jokes, sexually provocative conversation and lewd entertainments.
Cleopatra is said to have had an enormous appetite for fellatio. She was known to the Greeks as Meriochane: she who gapes wide for 10,000 men. According to one account, Cleopatra is said to have fellated 100 Roman noblemen in a single night.
Ellis, Havelock (1859 to 1939):
Dubbed the Darwin of sex, Havelock Ellis is principally known as a sex educator and the author of a seven-volume work issued between 1897 and 1928, entitled Studies In The Psychology Of Sex. During his lifetime, he defended homosexual and women s rights, and pioneered open discussions on sex.
However, his own sex life was far from happy. He suffered from chronic impotence. Though he had many love affairs, and was married for 25 years, he did not have an erection in the company of a woman until he was 60 years of age. Many more followed and he enjoyed energetic intercourse throughout the last 20 years of his life. Both before and after he overcame his impotence, his favourite sexual act was to masturbate while watching one or other of his girlfriends urinate.
Franklin, Benjamin (1706 to 1790):
The Boston-born statesman, philosopher and draftee of the American Declaration of Independence was an avid advocate and practitioner of what he termed nude air baths. Well into old age, he would spend several hours a day wandering around the countryside in the nip. He claimed to do all his best thinking this way.
Gandhi, Mahatma (1869 to 1948):
Gandhi was married at 13, in the Hindu tradition. Three years later, his father died, at the very moment the Mahatma was sexually importuning his pregnant child bride. This left him with a lifelong sense of sexual guilt, which he eventually sublimated into political activism.
Gandhi shared the Hindu obsession with digestion and excretion. He worshipped semen, as the vital life force. Though highly-sexed, he believed ejaculation to be debilitating to both body and mind. For him, abstinence was the only morally acceptable form of birth control. After five sons, he decided to forswear sex, wishing to conserve all his energy for a life of service. However, he surrounded himself with hordes of beautiful young women who slavishly ministered to his every need. As well as taking dictation, they would feed, dress, massage and bathe him, much to his wife s displeasure.
In later life, Gandhi claimed to suffer from shivering fits and had a young naked woman from his inner circle (usually a virgin) sleep with him every night to warm him. His shivering fits were then replaced by regular nocturnal emissions, to which he confessed publicly as a form of atonement. When the bride of a grand-nephew began sleeping, in the nude, with the Mahatma, her husband was so upset he offered to keep the old man warm himself. Gandhi declined his offer.
If feeling unwell or feeble, Gandhi would lean on young women as his walking sticks when moving about. He also had one of his favourite girls administer an enema at least twice every day.
Hitler, Adolf (1889 to 1945):
In 1932, Bavarian beauty Eva Braun became Hitler s mistress-in residence. She was 23 years his junior, and said to be intellectually-limited. However, she compensated for her lack of brains with a shapely, athletic body that had only one flaw: a vagina too small for normal sex. After falling in love with Adolf, she underwent painful corrective surgery, doggedly enduring secret and lengthy post-operative treatments.
According to Braun s diaries, Hitler preferred sex on the floor rather than in bed. He encouraged Eva to cavort about their living quarters naked in the evenings, hinting that she seemed too hot in her clothes. Outdoors, he insisted that she swim and sunbathe nude, while he took photographs to add to his huge pornographic collection.
Usually, the shots were close-ups of her buttocks. After his death, thousands of snaps of Eva s butt were discovered among Hitler s private possessions. Adolf defended his obsession with his wife s bottom with the assertion that if he were to photograph her full body, she might be recognised should the pictures fall into enemy hands.
Testimonies by some of Hitler s many mistresses suggest that he was an inveterate arse-man, with a penchant for spanking in particular but all sadomasochistic activities in general. According to a 1972 biography, by Walter C. Langer, Hitler, having once undressed for the German film star Renate M|ller, begged her to kick him as he lay on the floor, which she did repeatedly, but which, to her distress, succeeded only in making the F|hrer more and more excited.
Hitler s one true love appears to have been Angela Reubal, the daughter of his half-sister. When the 21-year-old Angela came to live in Munich, in September, 1929, her 40-year-old Onkel Adolf appointed himself her guardian-protector. He gave her a bedroom adjacent to his own in his lavish Prinzregentplatz apartments, and assigned guards to keep her a virtual prisoner.
Hitler forced his niece to engage in coprophiliac acts with him, both passively and actively. He had her pose in every obscene position he could devise, while he drew precisely-detailed sketches. In 1931, unable to bear such sex-slavery any longer, Angela shot herself through the heart with Hitler s personal 6.35mm Walther pistol.
Hitler s pathological hatred of Jews may have stemmed from his suspicion that his paternal grandmother, Anna Maria Schicklgruber, had been seduced by her Jewish employer s student son. While an unmarried servant girl, she gave birth to Hitler s father, Alois.
Ivan The Terrible (1530 to 1584):
The first Russian ruler to use the title Tsar, Ivan the Terrible had a novel way of finding a wife. He summoned 1,500 maidens to Moscow so that he could select a bride. When the first died, he chose a second. When the second died, he chose a third. However, before the third marriage could be consummated, the young woman died in 1569, reputedly from the shock of having been chosen.
Luther, Martin (1483 to 1546):
Clerical celibacy was among the aspects of Catholic Church doctrine that most offended the man who would become the leader of the Reformation and the founder of Protestantism. Luther insisted that sexual intercourse was a natural function ordained by God. He argued that an impotent man should supply a sexual partner for his wife, and he preferred bigamy to divorce. Shortly after he was excommunicated, he married Katharina von Bora, one of the many nuns he had helped escape from cloisters.
Luther believed that females were emotionally and intellectually weaker than males and that they craved sex more intensely. In his eyes, women were created to stay at home and keep house, for they have broad hips and a wide fundament to sit upon. He saw himself as in perpetual battle with Satan, and he often touched specified parts of his wife s body while being tempted by the devil.
Obsessed with his own bodily functions, he frequently waited more than a year to change his bed sheets, permitting them to become saturated with sweat. He kept a diary of his bowel movements and regarded defecation as a sexual act (it is said that he composed his famous 95 Theses while sitting on the can). In the throes of a clash with Satan, he would taunt his nemesis by crying out, I have shit in my pants, and you can hang them around your neck and wipe your mouth with it.
Luther boasted that he could drive away the evil spirit from his bed with a single fart.
Mussolini, Benito (1883 to 1945):
Mussolini was the undisputed master of the quickie. The Italian dictator would receive female admirers in his office and copulate with them on a window seat, in the doorway, on his desk or on the floor, rarely taking the trouble to remove his trousers or shoes. He was loath to allow ladies to spend the night with him, afraid that they might laugh at the old-fashioned nightshirt he slept in for good luck.
Mussolini liked to beat women after sex. As a teenager, he even stabbed one lover with the pocket knife he always carried. Her crime was to complain about the speed of his performance. Il Duce viewed females, in his own words, as mere objects to plunder, and plunder them he did, sometimes seven or eight in rapid succession.
A regular client of prostitutes who also enjoyed numerous dalliances with society matrons, Mussolini had an obstinate preference for women who were plump and wore no perfume. Skinny, scented girls make me sick, he declared. Italian peasant girls, now they are real women.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844 to 1900):
In his book My Sister And I, the sexually-repressed German philosopher wrote at length about his incestuous adolescent affair with his sister Elizabeth. Aside from his life-long ardour for prostitutes, the only other woman who he claimed to love was a blonde, nymphomaniacal countess who had seduced him when he was 15. Sexually hungry, yet castrating and cruel, the countess had goaded the young Nietzsche until he grabbed a riding whip and flogged her. One night, she sneaked into his school dormitory disguised as man, and beat him with a blunt instrument. As he was about to pass out, she became excited, and made love to him. Cruelty, he concluded, does not quiet down the lust of a woman, but, on the contrary, intensifies it to fever pitch.
Persn, Eva (1919 to 1952):
Marma Eva Duarte was born in Los Toldos, an impoverished slum on the pampas, about 150 miles from Buenos Aires. Barely literate, she ran away to the capital when she was 14, in search of theatrical stardom. She soon became one of the country s leading radio actresses. Her ambition led her to cultivate the company of widowed colonel Juan Piron, 24 years her senior. She married him in 1945. With Eva at his side, Persn became president dictator of Argentina.
Evita used sex throughout her life as a means to wealth and power. Before Persn, she had been mistress to a string of influential men, and was regularly paid for her services. At 14, she had secured her ticket out of Los Toldos by selling herself to a local cabaret singer. In Buenos Aires, she posed for pornographic photographs (later collected and destroyed) and peddled blow jobs in the financial district.
Old habits died hard; at the height of her affluence, in 1947, she met Aristotle Onassis during a trip to Europe, and they had sex together. She charged the tycoon $10,000 for the privilege.
Evita was revered by the poor. She promoted women s suffrage, organised workers but also pumped millions into her own Swiss bank accounts under the guise of the Eva Persn Welfare Foundation. She died of cancer of the uterus at age 33. After her death, Juan Persn carried on Eva s tradition of public service by forming the Union Of Secondary School Students, a nationwide organisation which procured comely young girls for his pleasure.
The Eva Persn story was immortalised by the stage musical Evita, a film version of which will be released shortly, with Madonna in the title role.
Rasputin, Grigori Yefimovich (1871 to 1916):
Equipped with a 13 inch-penis, the young Rasputin was the object of impassioned interest among the females in his native Siberian village. At 16, he was effectively gang-banged by the beautiful wife of a Russian general, and six of her maids, who, on visiting his locality, had heard rumours about his prodigious manhood.
Around 1900, Rasputin joined a heretical religious sect known as the Khlist. These were a group of enthusiastic self-flagellants who believed that humans must sin first in order to be redeemed later. They practised a bizarre series of sexual customs and rites, invariably including outdoor orgies and sadomasochistic behaviour.
Expelled from his native village by the local priests, Rasputin travelled throughout Russia, performing cures and initiating hordes of women into the rituals of the flagellants. By 1905, he had settled in the capital, St. Petersburg, where tales about his miraculous healing powers brought about an audience with Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandria. Rasputin s apparent ability to ease the suffering of the imperial couple s haemophiliac son won him immense favour, especially with Alexandria.
Feted by the wealthy and powerful, Rasputin s sexual adventurism intensified in St. Petersburg. He frolicked with both prostitutes and the wealthiest and most sophisticated women in the capital, often at the same time. He set up shop in a city-centre flat and ladies gathered to wait for an invitation to his bedroom, which he dubbed the holy of holies. So fashionable did his attentions become that the husbands of his conquests sometimes bragged to one another that their wives had belonged to the great Rasputin.
Even Rasputin s death had sexual overtones. His murder was plotted by men jealous of his power. His assassins invited him to a midnight feast, and fed him poisoned cakes and wine. One of the murderers, Felix Yussupov, was a homosexual prince. When Rasputin became groggy, Yussopov buggered him twice and shot him four times.
Rasputin fell, still alive. He was then castrated by another attacker who flung the severed member across the room. A servant recovered the penis and made a gift of it to a maid who, it is said, kept it inside a polished wooden box in her Paris apartment, until her death in the early 1970s. Its whereabouts today are unknown.
Young, Brigham (1801 to 1877):
Born in New England, Brigham Young took command as the second President of the Mormon Church after the death of its founder, Joseph Smith, in 1844. He was instrumental in leading the church to Salt Lake City, in Utah, where it established enduring roots, and in making polygamy an official Mormon doctrine.
A strict disciplinarian, Young s will was only usurped once, when Mormon women united in opposing his edict that they dress in a desert costume of his own design: a ludicrous ensemble comprising an 8 inch top hat, a baggy calf-length skirt over trousers, and an antelope skin jacket.
Young claimed that the injunction to adopt the principle of polygamy was revealed to him by Joseph Smith in a dream as divine truth. Initially, the idea faced intense objection from leading members of the church since The Book of Mormon specifically forbids plural marriages. Young, however, insisted on forcing through the new initiative. He lead the way himself, flamboyantly practising what he preached.
Before he issued his official blessing on polygamy in 1852, Young had married at least 22 times. By his death, it has been estimated that he had accumulated up to 70 Mrs. Youngs. The Mormon Genealogical Society credits him with a total of 53 wives. It is known as fact that he fathered 56 children.
The Lion House, a large mansion in Salt Lake City, housed most of Young s wives, each with her own bedroom suite. When he decided upon a partner for the night, he made a chalk mark on the selected wife s door. Young fortified himself for each carnal encounter by eating dozens of eggs, which, he believed, enhanced virility. n