And speaking of incest...

You know, it just occured to me that in the litany of incestuous acts in literature (going all the way back to the Old Testament and the plays of Ancient Greece) I can't think of a single one that involves two people of the same sex. Think about it. Father and daughter - check. Mother and son - check. Brother and sister - check. But brother and brother? Mother and daughter? Even Turgenev's promisingly titled Fathers and Sons turns out to be depressingly non-sexual.

Incest, it seems, is the last bastion of heterosexuality.

I could argue that this is a reflection of the superior moral fibre of gay people through time. They may play for the other side, but at least they follow the rules. But that's obviously ridiculous.

What we have here, I think, is a grave lacuna at the heart of the literature that deals in taboo sexual acts. Why should straight people have a monopoly on this stuff? What we need is an all male version of Mourning becomes Electra, or a version of Oedipus Rex where Oedipus, returning from a foreign land a stranger, accidentally kills his mother and takes her place in his father's bed. The day we give homosexuality its rightful place in the canon of lyric tragedy, is the day we move closer to a more egalitarian society.

Where's Sophocles when you need him?

P.S. If you're wondering what brought that on - it's probably a combination of all this talk about incestuous bloggers and this lovely piece in the New Yorker by David Sedaris.