May 26 + 

The time will come⁠—it’s a great way off⁠—when a joke about sex will be not so much objectionable as unintelligible. Thanks to Christian teaching, a nude body is now an obscenity, of the congress of the sexes it is indecent to speak and our birth is a corruption. Hence come a legion of evils: reticence, therefore ignorance and therefore venereal disease; prurience especially in adolescence, poisonous literature, and dirty jokes. The mind is contaminated from early youth; even the healthiest-minded girl will blush at the mention of the wonder of creation. Yet to the perfectly enfranchised mind it should be as impossible to joke about sex as about mind or digestion or physiology. The perfectly enfranchised poet⁠—and Walt Whitman in “The Song of Myself” came near being it⁠—should be as ready to sing of the incredible raptures of the sexual act between “twin souls” as of the clouds or sunshine. Every man or woman who has loved has a heart full of beautiful things to say but no man dare⁠—for fear of the police, for fear of the coarse jests of others and even of a breakdown in his own high-mindedness. I wonder just how much wonderful lyric poetry has thus been lost to the world! + 