Back to the front page
American History

Wild Kinks and Perversions of 20 Influential Historical Figures

Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky - 1706
Benjamin Franklin. New York Post

Eric Gill. The Times

4. Eric Gill had incestuous relations with his sister and molested his maids and daughters

Eric Gill (1882 – 1940) was an English sculptor, printmaker, and typeface designer, whose fonts are still used today. He was named Royal Designer for Industry – Britain’s highest award for designers. Gill was also prominent in the Arts and Crafts Movement that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and which popularized the use of folk styles of decoration. In the negative column, Gill was a Class A pervert, who would probably do decades behind bars if he was alive today.

Gill was a sex maniac, and worked it into just about everything. His obsession did not revolve around normal intimacy: he was into incest, bestiality, and pedophilia, was addicted to prostitutes and liked to abuse his maids. One of his most famous sculptures, Ecstasy, depicts a couple passionately entwined. The model was his sister, with whom he had a lifelong incestuous relationship, and her husband. Some of his most celebrated artwork used his own prepubescent daughters as models, whom he liked to draw nude in semi-erotic poses.

Written by

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.

Keep reading

Advertisement