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Love Cults, Drugs and the Hypnotic Arts: A Valentine’s Day Lecture and Rare Film Screening

February 14, 2015 @ 8:00 pm - 11:00 pm

| 13-20

An Illustrated Lecture with Rare Film Clips with Mel Gordon, author of “Voluptuous Panic” and “Grand Guiginol”

Date: Saturday, February 14
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $12 ($20 for Double Feature with Superstition Party, February 13) Tickets Here
Location: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424 Third Avenue, Brooklyn 11215

***Refreshments sponsored by Art in the Age

From time immemorial, love-lost women and men have fallen victim to the erotic manipulations of power-mad gurus and religious confidence men. This is a Valentine Day’s admonition from one of America’s foremost sex culture historians. Beginning with Franz Mesmer, it reveals how unsavory cultish leaders used narcotic concoctions and mind-altering techniques to stimulate sexual acquiescence and unnatural orgiastic desire.

During the 1920s, over two-dozen religious sects devoted to bizarre love rituals sprang up across North America. Their members included many of New York’s social elite and best-known celebrities from Broadway and Hollywood. Mel Gordon’s lecture discloses the erotic procedures and shameful public exposés that transformed contemporary culture and American courtship habits.

Mel Gordon is the author of Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant,Grand Guiginol: Theatre of Fear and Terror, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, and many other books.Voluptious Panic was the first in-depth and illustrated book on the topic of erotic Weimar; The lavish tome was praised by academics and inspired the establishment of eight neo-Weimar nightclubs as well as the Dresden Dolls and a Marilyn Manson album. Now, Mel Gordon is completing a companion volume for Feral House Press, entitled Horizontal Collaboration: The Erotic World of Paris, 1920-1946. He also teaches directing, acting, and history of theater at University of California at Berkeley.

Details

Date:
February 14, 2015
Time:
8:00 pm - 11:00 pm
Cost:
13-20
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