Colonel Lawrence and the House of Saud

That's a whole lot of words for: "The women were ugly, so we fucked each other instead."

Because of course the women had nothing to do with it. That's a needy queer trying to pass himself off as straight and jerking off to every word in that paragraph.

One of the most interesting things about this passage is that it’s right at the start of the book - page two or three. He certainly let people know were his interests were.

I wonder how it went over in the 1920?

Was he beating his meat while he wrote this?

I like how he goes from "this sterile process" to "quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace" in one sentence. It sounds almost like a parody. I imagine it being said by one of Graham Chapman's officer characters on "Monty Python's Flying Circus".

For a second I thought you write Carol Lawrence and the House of Saud. I figured maybe she brought over some international coffees for all the sheikhs to taste.

He wanted to fuck him right up the ass.

I am intrigued by the last line. Soldiers hating themselves for desiring each other act out their misery in rituals of purported debasement. What did their "pain and filth" consist of? Would many of us agree with Lawrence's value judgment if we knew the specifics?

Is he describing common or merely kinky sensuality that he can't accept? Or is he describing men who hated themselves so much for their sexuality that they punished themselves with extreme masochism or other self-destructive forms of debasement?

R8, he's talking about buttfucking

I loved you, so I drew these tides of Men into my hands And wrote my will across the Sky and stars To earn you freedom, the seven Pillared worthy house, That your eyes might be Shining for me When we came

Death seemed my servant on the Road, 'til we were near And saw you waiting: When you smiled and in sorrowful Envy he outran me And took you apart: Into his quietness

Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, Our brief wage Ours for the moment Before Earth's soft hand explored your shape And the blind Worms grew fat upon Your substance

Men prayed me that I set our work, The inviolate house, As a memory of you But for fit monument I shattered it, Unfinished: and now The little things creep out to patch Themselves hovels In the marred shadow Of your gift.

It's just slaking one another's needs, y'all.

Ciaran is taking another passage that belongs in the unrequited love thread.

My parents had a good-sized library, and I remember this beautifully bound book in the highbrow section. I looked at it once, flipping trough some innner pages. Boooorrrring. If only I had read page 1. How proud of me they would have been, their lad taking this marvelous classic to bed.

I would have had questions with no one to answer them. Was "pain and filth" what I imagined it was? We think we have it rough sometimes - imagine all that goddamned sand and trying to find a douche kit in Arabia a century ago.

"imagine all that goddamned sand"

I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth.

TE never fully recovered from being cloven claved by his camel.

Lawrence was known to be be a masochist, so form your own conclusions, R4 and R8.

r9 I suggest Lawrence was talking about fucking in the earlier lines and in the last lines was talking about something else entirely.

I'd be surprised he was talking about fucking in the last lines. Wasn't Lawrence gay? Why would he refer to vanilla fucking between men as pain and filth? I would think he's referring to something much more extreme.

Not only was he gay, he had been through the British public school system. It would seem highly unlikely that he would refer to being fucked up the ass as pain and filth.

Then again, what would be "pain and filth" to someone who had been through the British public school system?

That poem was from the beginning of [italic] The Seven Pillars of Wisdom [/italic], R12. Lawrence dedicated it to “S.A.” - presumably Selim Ahmed, his beloved Dahoum.

I'm thinking when the Turks captured him as used him as an all around whore.

It's a sign of the pathetic level of historical discourse that Lawrence is so quickly deconstructed as a scapegoat proxy for closet queers who probably spend more time watching Oprah and Jerry Springer than reading history books.

He wouldn't know what the women looked like. They were covered from head to toe in black robes and veils with only eye slits made of black netting.

R21=Saudi gofer Dick Cheney

Today the iconic uncrowned Queen of the desert, T.E. Lawrence was born!!!!

As Bonzo Dog Band said in "Ali Baba's Camel"

"It's horrible to walk for miles with sand between your toes"

or between anything else.

Wasn't Lawrence buttfucked by a Turkish officer after being captured.

He was buttfucked by an entire company of Turks. And Kim Philby's dad was another one.

Reading this in the clipped tones of the late Peter O'Toole.

I heard he never wanted to leave that Turkish prison...

[QUOTE] He wouldn't know what the women looked like. They were covered from head to toe in black robes and veils with only eye slits made of black netting.

I’m sure he could smell them from a mile away though.

OP's passage is so excruciatingly fin-de-siècle, it sounds like Aubrey Beardsley's *Under the Hill* at its most winkingly perverse.

Yes, he was gang-raped in a Turkish prison, and of course the reality didn't belong on Nifty.org. He was horribly traumatized and it messed up his ability to enjoy sex and form relationships for the rest of his lie, not that he lived very long after the event.

Perhaps if he'd lived longer he'd have a chance to get over it, but his issues over his homosexuality combined with the aftermath of the rape really did a number on him mentally.

I remember reading seven pillars of wisdom and being surprised by how candid he was about the rape: you have to remember it was published in Britain in 1922, when Victorian values on homosexuality where still very prevalent. The fact that he alluded to homosexual experiences in the book (never mind the male rape) must have been quite shocking back then.

Is it just me or does TE Lawrence look like Erna.

R1 is funny , sage, and right.

Some Lawrence scholars believed that he fabricated the rape scene for his own sexual gratification.

The evidence resurrects the claim, made by some Lawrence scholars, that he had sado-masochistic urges and elaborated on the rape scene for his own delectation. Signs of Lawrence's alleged sexual deviancy first emerged when he admitted in letters to a friend that he paid a man to beat him with birches, to the backdrop of Beethoven playing on a gramophone. The electrostatic data films will now be passed onto the British Library, for examination by other scholars.

Many people now think the rape might have happened. He was obviously deeply traumatised by something after the war was finished. I think simply dismissing the whole thing as a fabrication is a convenient excuse for a lot of Lawrence scholars to avoid a difficult subject.

We don't know that Lawrence made up the rape. We have his account and some historians unable to pin point his whereabouts said he wasn't in Derra All we know is the pages from his diary for that time period are missing. We know Lawrence paid men to whip him. That's really about it. He was a polarizing figure and secretive about his personal life. He was sincere in helping the Arabs gain independence or a British spy. He was gay or he was asexual or straight. We have pages and pages of historians reading into "the seven pillars' all sorts of explanations. I know nothing, but seems to me , he hated himself for being gay and he suffered PTSD from killing ppl and being raped.

He was a dirty bastard!

[quote] Lawrence dedicated it to “S.A.” - presumably Selim Ahmed, his beloved Dahoum.

It appears Selim had to sit kind of funny.

No, nobody thinks he was straight. NOBODY.

If family lore is to be believed, my grandfather diddled him at a country house weekend party at Cliveden sometime in the 1920s.

[quote]That's a whole lot of words for: "The women were ugly, so we fucked each other instead."

Like we don't see that shit said on here all of the time about women? How many friggin threads have we had about some hot guy with a "frau."

He didn't do sex.

He was celibate.

Dream on R44. The myth of the asexuals.

I don't believe that text is from the book.

R46 Which text?

The text in the OP is from the first page of the book—

Well, R46, shiver me timbers, it IS in the book. How did that get published back then?

In the movie, Jose' Ferrer is the diddler.

R49 Lawrence got it past the censors — 1. because the wording is ambiguous. 2. because he was a national hero. 3. and the text was scrutinised by George Bernard Shaw who know all about public taste and sensibilities.

He was a tragic and heroic figure, brilliant, sensitive and conflicted. He saw the primitive and brutal Arab way of life as purer than English civilization. After his exotic Arabian adventure, he was never content with his ordinary life.

If Lawrence was alive he certainly would've posted here.

The book got past the censors because it was privately printed.