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| Apparently, Ed Wood could find dirty material anywhere, even the newspapers. |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "Sex Oddities and the Newspapers." Originally published in Belly Button vol. 2, no. 1, January/February 1971. No author credited.
Excerpt: "The case never got to court, but it did make headlines in that particular town. The citizens read and savored every word of the copy. However the most interesting part about the entire story is the fact that they, the citizens, formed a group to look into the asinine laws governing sex acts which should have been struck from the books years ago."
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| A vintage steam cabinet. |
Reflections: To be honest, I don't know whether the article "Sex Oddities and the Newspapers" represents Ed Wood at his most or least creative. I'll be optimistic and say most. On the surface, this article is a sampler platter of various crazy and salacious stories that Ed supposedly found in the tabloids. Ed's been known to write that kind of thing. "Those Hidden Happenings" is an example. If "Sex Oddities" was written in the same manner as "Happenings," then the only original Wood content in the piece appears at the beginning and end of it. The rest is filched from other writers.
But when Eddie quotes from other articles, he tends to name the titles and the authors. He's an honest thief, in that sense. But he makes no such citations in "Sex Oddities and the Newspapers," so my supposition—more accurately, my hope—is that he just fabricated the contents of it from thin air, based on nothing at all except his imagination and the pressure of a looming deadline. One point in this article's favor is that I cannot corroborate even one of its wild tales. Had such events actually occurred or such people actually existed, surely there would be some record of them.
And there are some real lulus in "Sex Oddities and the Newspapers." Some of these anecdotes feature the kind of gruesome, macabre humor you might expect from an episode of Tales from the Crypt. A jealous Parisian man cooks his unfaithful lover alive in a steam cabinet. ("My God, she was roasted like a pig on a poke," Eddie writes, mixing his metaphors just a little.) Another unlucky fellow is crushed by peat moss in a warehouse after passing out from too much drinking and lovemaking. Two Memphis neighbors get into a shooting war because one refuses to stay quiet during the other's afternoon sex romps. Ed treats all of these stories with an attitude of wry detachment.
On the other hand, Ed Wood presents certain stories that are supposed to be amusing (I think that's how they're intended, anyhow) but are actually disturbing or sad. For instance, Eddie heartily congratulates three male welfare workers who force female recipients to have sex with them in exchange for their monthly relief checks. "They're really under gainful employment," he enthuses. Then there's the story of the pimp and the prostitute who get into a violent argument when the former expects the latter to have anal sex with an entire convention's worth of tile salesmen. Eventually, after mutually inflicting injuries on each other, the two reconcile. "A whore generally loves her pimp," Eddie explains.
At its best, "Sex Oddities and the Newspapers" reads like a miniature collection of Ed Wood's short stories. These are little bite-sized tales of sex and sadism. (Hey, Tales of Sex and Sadism might make a decent title for a fourth collection of Eddie's magazine work, should such a thing ever come out.) Maybe Ed did just steal all these stories from various tabloids. If so, I'd rather not know about it. Let me enjoy this one for what I imagine are its merits.
Next: "More Oddities in the News" (1973)