[net.motss] Platonic love

dis2@houxm.UUCP (A.NESTOR) (12/20/83)

W. S. Gilbert, as so often, has words on this subject:
        An attachment a la Plato
        for a bashful young potato
        or a, not too French, french bean
        must excite your languid spleen.
        For, if you walk down Picadilly
        with a poppy or lily
        in your medieval hand,
        every one will say,
        as you walk your flowery way;
        "If this young man is content,
        with a vegetable love
        which would certainly not content me.
        Why,, what a very pure young man
        this pure young man must be!"
                  - Patience -

The subject of the humour is, of course, our own  Oscar  Wilde.   This
was  written  before  Oscar  got  caught "feasting with panthers".  Of
course Oscar Wilde was one of 'those' gays who give 'us' gays  such  a
bad image and enflame ussusceptible homophobes!!
                                             Creighton Clarke

asente@decwrl.UUCP (Paul Asente) (12/30/83)

Actually, the model for Bunthorne in "Patience" by Gilbert & Sullivan
is not Oscar Wilde as so many people suppose but James Whistler.  At
the time of Patience Oscar was not quite so <insert appropriate
adjective here> as some of the other aesthetic artists.

	-paul asente
	    ...decwrl!asente