Morbid Outlook - Heart of Darkness IV, Libertines and twisted kinks.

Darkness and death are conceivably the two deepest topics to preoccupy the gothic mindset. Within this article series, we intend to examine some of the more gothic murderers of times past; some of them familiar to the average goth, at least by name, and some you may not be so familiar with.

Disclaimer: The following installment of the Heart of Darkness series is not for the faint of heart or queasy of stomach. It is no doubt unfit for minors as well, so be forewarned. Also, it is in no way to be construed that either the author or the zine advocate any of the acts described in this article.

During the era of the Marquis DeSade, there existed a large and diverse group, especially in France, of people known as “libertines”. Of course there are libertines around today, but the libertines of yesteryear made the term notorious, indulging in amoral extravagance.

If one is to take DeSade seriously (and there is little reason not to), the French libertines indulged themselves in all vices available to them, including murder. In perusing the works of the Marquis, one finds ample reference to murder combined with sex in the most astonishing ways. This is especially true in the work “120 Days In Sodom”. This work depicts a fictional gathering at a remote castle of libertine aristocrats and members of the clergy along with select family members and a number of other participants (kidnapped children among them) chosen especially for their desirability and/or experience. Among these chosen ones are four extremely corrupted old prostitutes whose duty it is to narrate “The 600 Passions” on a nightly basis after dinner.

The 600 Passions are divided into four groups of 150 by DeSade: the Simple Passions (the “simplest” of which involve things like priests masturbating while pre-adolescent Catholic schoolgirls are made to watch, as well as other relatively slight departures from “normalcy”); the Complex Passions (these involve more bizarre kinks, often including mechanical contrivances and other sexual aids as well as exotic groupings of people of both genders in highly complicated scenarios); the Criminal Passions (involving the combination of sex with any form of crime, from petty theft or doing it in public to really violent activities which inflict great pain and suffering); and finally, the Murderous Passions (which involve the black subject of this article in some of the most deviant permutations known to mankind).

The 600 Passions section of 120 Days In Sodom reads like a catalogue of kinks, each given in a brief yet detailed description. Any serious reader of the work will conclude before getting all the way through The 600 Passions that many, if not all of these bizarre descriptions are based on actual kinks possessed by actual libertines. It is likely that the Marquis himself had indulged in a number of them; he either knew the participants, witnessed them in action, or had heard their activities described to him by his many beloved whores, with whom he was intimate on many levels.

The Murderous Passions, by their very nature, also include the Criminal Passions in their realization. Many of the victims are kidnapped. It was not uncommon for a murderous libertine to have family members of a rival abducted by “procurers” and then to inflict upon them the most horrific tortures and sexual violations, climaxing in some kind of fatal blow. Sometimes it was as simple as starving a chained-up father to death while daily raping a wife or children (of either sex) in front of him to rub it in. These others were then tormented by the father’s death before they too are murdered. Often the entire scenario takes on symbolic meaning in its execution – the details of the torture and sexual intrusion being an analog of social or business activity in the sane world from which the victims were torn. Such vengence is hardly the case in all the Criminal Passions, however; many of them just involve killing to heighten the sexual joy of libertine animal indulgence.

For example, there is a description of one savage brute whose special kink involved having a naked woman’s head locked into a metal device that slowly drew her into it; a sort of meat-grinder contrivance that rendered her head into a bloody pulp. All the while, the man stood behind her and, without any physical contact to his member, achieved a six minute orgasm as the victim writhed and screamed in agony. Numerous of these passions involve things like suspending someone by nails through the nipples and then flaying them alive with whips and canes. Boiling alive is also not uncommon; all manner of other fire-tortures may also be involved. Some of them simply involve murder in a secondary role, to prevent the victim of really severe sexual perversions from telling all to the rest of the world.

Murder was not the exclusive province of male libertines. Women were often involved in setting up the entrapment of potential victims as well as in the execution of the death blow, and there were any number of women who indulged in murderous sadism for their own pleasure. The predominance of males in this extreme territory of kinkdom, though, parallels the predominance of males among serial killers throughout history. There is just something phallic about sexually motivated murder.

It is well known that there are still groups of libertines around today who practice such deviant behaviour, though not in the sort of proliferation one finds among the decadent French aristocracy of the DeSade era. I shudder to think of how many “milk-carton kids” might have been “procured” for “snuff-freaks”, or how many of the nameless corpses that show up in morgues around the world on a regular basis are actually the residue of outre libertine sex rituals. One example might be the infamous unsolved case of the death of Hollywood “he-man” actor, Albert Dekker, in 1968.

“Dekker was kneeling nude in the bathtub, a dirty hypodermic needle sticking out of each arm. A noose was around his neck but not tight enough to have strangled him. A scarf was tied over his eyes and something like a horse’s bit was in his mouth. Fashioned from a rubber ball and metal wire, the bit had chain ’reins’ that were tightly tied beneath his head. Two leather thongs were stretched between the leather belts that girded his neck and chest. A third belt, around his waist, was tied with a rope that stretched to his ankles, where it had been tied in some kind of lumber hitch. The end of the rope, which continued up his side, wrapped around his wrist several times and was held in Dekker’s hand. Handcuffs clamped both wrists. Written in red lipstick, above two hypodermic punctures on his right buttock were the word, ‘whip’, and drawings of the sun. Sunrays had also been drawn around his nipples. ‘Make me suck’, was written on his throat, and ‘slave’ and ‘cocksucker’ on his chest. On his stomach was drawn a vagina. He had apparently been dead since Friday and his awkward position had colored his lower body a deep blood purple. ‘This one had everything but a vampire bite’, remarked a deputy coroner.”

While a number of people familiar with the case have concluded that it was death by auto-asphyxiation while performing some kind of bizarre masturbation ritual, the fact that a large sum of cash as well as much expensive stereo equipment was missing from Dekker’s apartment gives the lie to this idea. He was obviously not alone or among “friends” when he died. It is something of a pet theory of mine that Dekker was murdered by a libertine rival, someone he had offended publicly or with whom he was in competition in the “Holly-weird” film community. It seems obvious that a savagely vindictive personality (or personalities) was involved in this matter. I believe this libertine rival, or rivals, tortured and molested him and left him in this condition in order to humiliate and discredit him.

Many references to this sort of libertine activity can be found in books, films and other arts. In the movie “Eyes Wide Shut”, for example, we find the modern portrayal of a vast and dangerous libertine secret society much like the one described by DeSade in the novel “Juliette”. In the book and also the movie of “Liasons Dangereuses/Dangerous Liasons”, several of the major characters are libertines who prey upon the innocent, causing all manner of mayhem and even death. LaClos, the author of that work, was a monogamous and honorable military officer of his time, and may have intended his single published work to be something of an exposé of libertine machinations in French high culture.

The George C Scott film, “Hardcore”, deals with a distraught father who traces his runaway daughter through the sleazy sex underworld and manages to barely save her from “snuff flick” pornographers. Snuff film makers cater to a libertine elite who have this taste for murderous blood among their kinks. “8MM”, starring Nicholas Cage, is another film dealing with this phenomenon. The fact that such films exist at all is evidence that sex murders are probably practiced in real-time as well by seasoned Cytherian vetrans. Much of their nefarious activity is found in Southeast Asia, where a life can be bought for a pittance and exploited without fear of retribution. I could cite examples endlessly, but enough is enough. Suffice it to say that the dark side of human society can be very dark indeed, beyond your wildest nightmares.