Joe Orton's Cottage Orgy

The artist Banksy has become famous through his graffiti now sold for thousands of dollars. Last week a Banksy exhibition opened in New York for many thousands of dollars. Not existing works, but a completely new 3-D piece representing a pet-shop where budgerigars are represented by chicken-legs on feet, pigs having sex are represented by hot-dogs, and a monkey watches TV. A visual farce.

I have just re-read the biography, Prick Up Your Ears, of the playwright Joe Orton, the 20th century version of Oscar Wilde, by John Lahr. I am now re-reading the diary he kept during the last year or so of his life before he was killed by his lover Kenneth Halliwell who then committed suicide.

Joe Orton's plays root back through Ronald Firbank, Oscar Wilde (both acknowleged by Orton himself and Lahr) and, even further, to Moliere and the Comédie Francaise, and the Italian comic theatre that resulted in the Punch and Judy puppet shows of British seaside resorts.

In early 1960s Orton and his partner, Kenneth Halliwell, each earned six months in prison for defacing books in their local public library. They would legitimately borrow or illegally steal books and replace pages and photo-plates with images of classic paintings and sculptures ... and then replace them for future readers.

Later, Joe publically satisfied his own voice in the press media as Mrs Edna Welthorpe who roundly criticised the immorality of his plays.

How times do change ... but they don't as elements of the US Public are offended by Banksy's show..

The following extract from the diaries which reminded me of a couple of my earlier post and, although it had me giggling, it may offend you ... so if homosexual male debauchery is not your cup of tea ... don't read on!

"... popped into a little pissoir - just four pissers. It was dark because somone had taken the bulb away. There were three figures pissing. I had a piss and, as my eyes became used to the gloom, I saw that only one of the figures was worth having - a labouring type with cropped hair and, with cropped hair, wearing jeans and a dark short coat. Another man entered and the man next to the labourer moved away, not out of the place altogether, but back against the wall. The new man had a pee and left the place and, before the man against the wall could return to his place, I nipped in sharpish and stood next to the labourer. I put my hand down and felt his cock, he immediatley started to play with mine. The youngish man with fair hair, standing back against the wall, went into the vacant place. I unbuttoned the top of my jeans and unloosened my belt in order to allow the labourer free rein with my balls.The man next to me began to feel my bum. At this point a fifth man entered. Nobody moved. It was dark. Just a little light spilled into the place from the street, not enough to see immediately. The man next to me moved back to allow the fifth man to piss. But the fifth man very quickly flashed his cock and the man next to me returned to my side, lifting up my coat and shoving his hand down the back of my trousers. The fifth man kept puffing on a cigarette and, by the glowing end, watching. A sixth man came into the pissoir. As it was so dark nobody bothered to move. After an interval (during which the fifth man watched me feel the labourer, the labourer stroked my cock, and the man beside me pulled my jeans down even further) I noticed that the sixth man was kneeling down beside the youngish man with fair hair and sucking his cock. A seventh man came in, but by now nobody cared. The number of people in the place was so large that detection was quite impossible. And anyway, as soon became apparent when the seventh man stuck his head down on a level with my fly, he wanted a cock in his mouth too. For some moments nothing happened. Then an eighth man, bearded and stocky, came in. He pushed the sixth man roughly away from the fair-haired man and quickly sucked the fair-headed man off. The man beside me had pulled my jeans down over my buttocks and was trying to push his prick between my legs. The fair-haired man, having been sucked off, hastily left the place. The bearded man came over and nudged away the seventh man from me and, opening my fly, began sucking me like a maniac. The labourer, getting very excited by my feeling his cock with both hands, suddenly glued his mouth to mine. The little pissoir under the bridge had become the scene of a frenzied homosexual saturnalia. No more than two feet away the citizens of Holloway moved about their ordinary business. I came, squirting into the bearded man's mouth, and quickly pulled up my jeans. As I was about to leave, I heard the bearded man hissing quietly, 'I suck people off! Who wants his cock sucked?' When I left, the labourer was just shoving his cock into the man's mouth to keep him quiet. I caught the bus home.

I told Kenneth who said, 'It sounds as though eightpence and a bus down the Holloway Road was more interesting than £200 and a plane to Tripoli.'