Wild Kinks and Perversions of 20 Influential Historical Figures

19. Mozart liked getting his “salad tossed”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791) started composing and performing before royalty at age five. By the time he died thirty years later, he had cemented his place in history as one of the classical era’s most prolific and influential composers, with a legacy still felt in Western music to this day. He created about 600 compositions, many of them considered to be the pinnacles of classical music, and impacted subsequent music heavyweights such as Hayden and Beethoven. For somebody whose star burned so bright before he died so young, it is perhaps not surprising that Mozart was a freak beneath the sheets.

He particularly had a thing for getting his “behind” licked. In 1782, he composed Leck mich im Arsch (“Lick Me in the A**”), a party piece for his friends, whose lyrics include “lick me in the a**, nice and clean“, and continues on in that vein. Mozart’s publisher was scandalized by the lyrics, but he liked the music. So he tinkered (or basically rewrote) the lyrics, and changed the song’s theme and refrain from the inappropriate sentiments to “let us be glad!” Mozart also composed Bona Nox, which included some other lyrics not suited for proper company.

18. Mahatma Gandhi allegedly had a thing for young girls

One of the most revered figures of the 20^th century, Mahatma Gandhi, famously led India’s struggle for independence. Along the way, he perfected the strategy and tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience and inspired other independence and civil rights movements around the world. Martin Luther King was a student of Gandhi’s methods and put them to use in America’s Civil Rights movement. However, in his personal life, Gandhi was… a complex man. Nowhere is that complexity more evident than in his sleeping habits.

In a nutshell, Gandhi liked to sleep naked with young girls. The story was that he did so in order to test his willpower and strengthen his resistance to the temptations of the flesh. In reality, it was probably less about spiritual experimentation, and more about Gandhi gratifying his desires. As one of the early acolytes who shared his bed put it after his death: “Later on, when people started asking questions about the physical contact with women … the idea of experiments was developed … in the early days, there was no question of calling it an experiment“.

17. The most libertine founding father

Thomas Jefferson usually gets most of the credit for being the Founding Fathers’ main Enlightenment figure, but Benjamin Franklin probably has him trumped. Franklin, an accomplished writer, publisher, printer, postmaster, politician, political theorist, diplomat, statesman, and scientist. He was also an inventor who came up with the lightening rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove. To top it all off, Franklin’s face ended up on a higher denomination bill than that of the Man From Monticello.

Less known about Franklin is that he was a babe magnet, who stormed French society and set its ladies’ heart aflutter. He took full advantage of that, and while his numerous affairs are tame by today’s standards, he was considered an all-out libertine by the staid standards of the Founding Fathers. Franklin was particularly fond of old(er) women, and in a letter to a young man, he advised him to opt for an old woman if he was inclined to engage in adultery. Included in his reason were: “when Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good“. They are more discrete, and: “Lastly They are so grateful!!”

16. Zhengde became emperor at age 14, and went nuts with the power

In 1505, a 14-year-old ascended China’s throne as the Zhengde Emperor. Unsurprisingly, the teenager had no interest in governing his realm. He entrusted running China to his palace eunuchs, then abandoned himself to living it up, diving headfirst into an orgy of lavish spending and bizarre behavior that set the stage for his Ming Dynasty’s downfall. The weirdness included plenty of perversions, that marked Zhengde as a monster.

Zhengde was into make believe, big time. He created an alter ego for himself, a general Zhu Zhu, upon whom he lavished praise and rewards. He also built a city block within the imperial palace so he could pretend to be a shopkeeper. Less innocent was his habit of taking his companions on thrill raids, bursting into the homes of wealthy citizens, violently seizing and kidnapping their daughters, and holding them for ransom while the girls were ravished. Officials who criticized the emperor’s conduct were arrested, tortured, and executed by the hundreds. Luckily for his subjects, Zhengde’s reign was cut short in 1521, when his pleasure barge capsized, and he drowned.

15. James Joyce could not get enough of farts

James Joyce, author of Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, combined complexity with explicit content that shocked contemporaries and led to landmark legal decisions on obscenity. He was also a total pervert, who had a thing for farts: he loved them to distraction, and could not get enough of them. Whether dishing them out, preferably on people’s faces, or receiving them, farts made Joyce’s day. Being a writer, he had to dive into farts, and there is an entire collection of Joyce letters in which he writes passionately about farts and farting.

In one such letter, he wrote: “It is wonderful to f*** a farting woman when every f*** drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also“.

14. The sultan who liked cow-like women

Before he became Ottoman sultan, Ibrahim I was locked up at age 8 by his older brother Murad IV in the palace’s Kafes, or “Cage”. It was a secluded part of the Harem, where potential successors to the throne were kept under house arrest, under surveillance and isolated from the outside world to prevent intrigues and plots. While in the Cage, Ibrahim’s brother, Murad, executed his other brothers, one by one, until only Ibrahim was left, constantly quaking in fear. It messed with his mind, and explains why Ibrahim became known as “Ibrahim the Mad” when he ascended the throne following his brother’s death in 1640.

In addition to nutty behavior such as feeding goldfish gold coins, Ibrahim went wild with the Harem. As a contemporary put it “In the palace gardens he frequently assembled all the virgins, made them strip themselves naked, and neighing like a stallion ran amongst them and as it were ravished one or the other“. Other oddness includes the time he got turned on by a cow’s genitals, had copies made of gold, and sent them around the empire, with orders to find a woman similarly endowed. A 350-pound woman with matching parts was eventually found, and she became one of his favorite concubines. More sinister was the time he was seized by a fit of madness, and had his entire Harem of 280 women tied in weighted sacks and drowned in the sea.

13. The Marquis de Sade spent most of his life locked up for perversion

Unsurprisingly, the Marquis de Sade was a sadist. The French aristocrat became so notorious for his deviant sexual practices, perversions, and erotic writings which combined pornography with philosophy and violent sexual fantasies, that his name gave rise to the terms sadist and sadism. His sexual fantasies’ emphasis on violence, criminality, and blasphemy – and his real-life partaking of criminally violent sexual practices – kept him behind bars in prisons and insane asylums for most of his adult life. He spent 32 years behind bars, including 10 in the Bastille. Most of his writings were penned while he was incarcerated.

In his early twenties, he did short stints behind bars for mistreating prostitutes. In 1768, he held a beggar hostage in his home, flogging and pouring hot wax on her. In 1772, de Sade and a servant were arrested for sodomizing prostitutes after knocking them out with roofies. They escaped to Italy, and were sentenced in absentia to death. Returning to France and laying low in a rural castle, he lured youngsters with offers of employment, then sexually and physically abused them. He eventually ended up locked in the Bastille, then in a mental asylum. Released in 1790 amidst the French Revolution’s turmoil, he promptly got himself elected as a National Convention representative. His final stint behind bars came in 1801 when Napoleon had him arrested for blasphemy and pornography, and kept him locked up for the rest of his life.

12. Pies turned on Charlie Chaplin

British actor Charlie Chaplin was the silent film era’s most famous star, and is one of the most readily recognizable actors of all time. In addition to being a pioneer who revolutionized acting and visual comedy, Chaplin was also a total perv. He is credited with inventing “the casting couch”, whereby powerful Hollywood men extracted explicit favors from aspiring actresses as a condition for getting them desirable roles. Chaplin also liked ‘em young, and that eventually derailed his career, and got him deported from America. He also had a pie fetish. After getting actresses to disrobe during auditions, Chaplin would grope them in exaggerated ways on the couch, then, having worked himself up thus, he would stand them naked against a wall and throw pies at them.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a pervert himself if ever there was one, disliked Chaplin’s political leanings. In 1944, he had Chaplin prosecuted for violating the Mann Act, which prohibits the transportation of women across state lines for sexual purposes. Chaplin was acquitted, but his reputation was severely damaged. Then in 1952, while Chaplin was out of the country, his American reentry visa was revoked. Rather than fight it, Chaplin settled in Switzerland for the remainder of his life.

11. The author of “The Ugly Duckling” was addicted to pleasuring himself and writing about it

Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (1805 – 1875) penned plays, poems, novels, travel books, and autobiographies, but his specialty was literary fairy tales. His works in that genre, which include The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling, are among the most widely translated writings in the world, and have been enjoyed by generations of children around the world. The pleasure he brought to millions of children is in stark contrast to Andersen’s own childhood, which was miserable, marred by dire poverty, and a homeliness that made him an object of bullying and teasing. Indeed, The Ugly Duckling was based on his Andersen’s childhood.

As an adult, Andersen was addicted to touching himself, and when not doing that, he liked to talk with prostitutes – and then rush back home to masturbate. A celibate, Andersen not only pleasured himself a lot, he also kept meticulous records of his “personal endeavors”, describing and listing them in his diary with a pair of plus signs (++), with sample descriptive entries reading: “When they left, I had a doubly sensuous ++“. In Paris, he liked to visit prostitutes and talk with them, then rush back to his hotel to put more ++ entries in his diary.

10. Lord Byron had a love child with his sister

Lord Byron, widely praised for his brilliant use of the English language, was one of the Romantic Movement’s greatest icons, and one of Britain’s greatest poets. He gained further fame, or infamy, for his flamboyance, the notoriety of his romances with members of both sexes, deviant practices, and allegations of incest. His most problematic affair was an incestuous one with his own sister, Augusta Leigh, whom Byron had seen little of during childhood. He made up for it by forming an extremely close relationship with her in adulthood. In 1814, the poet fathered a daughter upon his sister, making Byron the unfortunate child’s uncle, as well as father.

A sentimentalist, Byron liked to keep mementos of his lovers. In those days, the norm for mementos was a lock of hair from one’s object of affection, perhaps tied with a ribbon. But being Byron, Britain’s most flamboyant poet, eccentric aristocrat, and all-around pervert, a simple lock of hair would not do. Instead, Byron liked to snip clumps of pubic hair from his lovers’ crotches, and kept them, cataloged and labeled, in envelopes.

9. The Monstrous Prince of Korea

Crown Prince Sado (1735 – 1762) was the son and heir of Korean king Yeongjo. His father took little part in raising Sado, seldom seeing his son, and leaving his upbringing to courtiers who spoiled Sado rotten. On the few times the king visited his son, he demonstrated no affection, and berated him nonstop for his shortcomings. As a result, Sado grew up with serious Daddy issues, wildly swinging between desperation to please his father, and palpable terror of meeting him. Along the way, something broke inside the prince, and he turned into a world-class fiend.

Sado had extreme mood swings between dignity and probity one moment and turning serial murderer and rapist the next. When he got depressed, killing servants cheered him up, and on many a day, several dead bodies were carried out of the palace. He also enjoyed raping court ladies, and after murdering his favorite concubine in a fit of rage, he turned his sick attention to his own sister. Eventually, his father had enough, and decided he could not inflict his monstrous son upon his subjects. Executing a royal was taboo, so in 1762, the king had Sado locked up inside a heavy chest used for grain storage, and left him there to starve to death.

8. Aleister Crowley created a religion revolving around “Sexual Magic”

English writer and occultist Aleister Crowley (1875 – 1947) claimed to be a magician. Not a stage magician, but the warlock, spells and sorcery type. An L. Ron Hubbard type before there was an L. Ron Hubbard, Crowley also founded a religion, Thelema, whose prophet he claimed to be, entrusted with guiding mankind to the “Aeon of Horus”. Crowley summarized the Horus era’s ethics as: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law“. His magic religion included lots of sex with his followers, which he termed “Sexual Magic”, whereby orgasms and bodily secretions were used as components of magic spells.

A mainstay of Sexual Magic was that adherents should be completely open and uninhibited about sex, without limitations or restraints. Also, followers should expose their children to intercourse from infancy, and accustom them to witness all kinds of promiscuous activity. In 1920, Crowley and his followers established a religious commune in Sicily, but the perverse goings-on there led to controversy, scandals, and denunciations, that became regular fodder for the British and Italian press. Responding to the outcry, the Italian government finally shut down the commune and evicted everybody in 1923.

7. Edward VII had a private room in his favorite whorehouse

Albert Edward, who became King Edward VII, was a disappointment to his prim and proper parents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg. Nicknamed Bertie, he had his first sex scandal at age 16, with a prostitute. On the way back home from chastising Bertie, his father caught pneumonia, which did him in. For the next four decades, Queen Victoria blamed Bertie for killing her beloved husband and tried to keep him from succeeding her on the throne. She failed to get him removed from the line of succession but often remarked that her longevity and long reign were due to her determination to outlive Bertie.

While waiting, Bertie became a notorious libertine. Whether cheap hookers, aristocratic ladies, courtesans, discrete liaisons, notorious affairs, or wife-swapping orgies, Bertie was down. He liked prostitutes so much, that he had a private permanent room in his favorite Parisian whorehouse, decorated with his coat of arms, and housing a specially designed chair, named siege d’amour. By the 1890s, middle-aged Bertie was fat and out of shape, so he had the heavy-duty love chair custom made to let him have sex without crushing his partners. It also positioned them just right for access, with minimal exertion and contortions on his part.

6. The Biblical king who had relations with his wife’s corpse for years

Herod the Great (74 BC – circa 1 AD) is best known from the New Testament as the king who ordered the Massacre of the Innocents when Jesus was born. Herod also carried out massive building projects, including the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and the fortress of Masada, both of which featured prominently in the Great Jewish Revolt, decades after his death. Less commonly known about Herod is that he was also a pervert of the ickiest kind.

Herod did not inherit the throne, but ascended it by marrying Mariamne, one of the last surviving heirs of Judea’s Hasmonean Dynasty. One of the reasons that Hasmoneans were so few on the ground was that Herod and his relatives had murdered them. Understandably, Mariamne found it difficult to love a hubby who had murdered so many of her kin. By contrast, Herod was crazy about Mariamne, who was a great beauty. However, when Herod discovered that Mariamne had been plotting against him with two of their sons, love did not stop him from having her and their offspring executed. He then plunged into a deep depression and was unable to let her go. Literally. According to the Talmud, Herod had Mariamne’s corpse preserved in honey, and kept “fulfilling his animalistic desires” with the cadaver for the next seven years.

5. Thomas Jefferson raped his dead wife’s lookalike half sister when she was 14

Thomas Jefferson penned some of the most stirring words in advocating freedom, liberty, and equality. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” has moved and inspired idealists for centuries. On the other hand, Jefferson pursued his happiness in a hilltop plantation, Monticello, leading a life of luxury that was only made possible by the labor of hundreds of chattel slaves. Their numbers included a relative, whom he turned into a sexual concubine when she was 13 or 14.

Sally Hemmings (1773 – 1835) was the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, having been fathered by Martha’s father upon one of his slaves. Sally looked like the spitting image of her older half-sister, and when Martha died in 1782, Thomas Jefferson was struck by how much 9-year-old Sally Hemmings resembled his deceased wife. So soon as she hit puberty, at age 13 or 14 – too young to consent even if she had not been a slave and withholding consent was an option – Jefferson turned his dead wife’s lookalike half-sister into his concubine.

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.

3. Rasputin launched a cult revolving around carnal relations

Rasputin, the illiterate Siberian peasant, charlatan, mystic, holy wanderer, faith healer, blasphemer, and notorious lecher, led an extraordinary life. As a teen, he was such a notorious womanizer that he earned the nickname Rasputin, meaning “the depraved” in Russian. Later in life, his inexplicable ability to soothe the suffering of the child Alexei Nikolayevich, the hemophiliac heir to the Russian throne, won him the favor of his parents, the Tsar and Tsarina of the Russian Empire. The resulting proximity to the throne made him an incongruously powerful and influential figure in the Russian Empire’s final years.

In his youth, Rasputin fell in with a religious sect known as the Khlysts, who preached “holy passionless”, to be attained via exhaustion. So they wore themselves out with fervent prayer, dancing, and spinning. Rasputin built on that to invent a religious doctrine that he described as “driving out sin with sin“, to achieve holy passionless via total exhaustion: not just physical, but also via carnal relations. Rasputin led his cult into reaching exhaustion via orgies – prolonged bouts of debauchery by the entire congregation, to get all the base passions out of their system, then focus on God without distractions of the flesh.

2. Incase with his sisters was mild compared to Caligula’s other perversions

Caligula was Rome’s craziest emperor. The insanity included launching a war against Neptune, in which he ordered soldiers to gather seashells from a shore to show the sea god who was boss; ordering entire sections of spectators at an arena thrown to the wild beasts when he grew bored; breaking into sudden uproarious laughter at the thought that he could have anybody in his vicinity immediately executed with a gesture; and making his favorite horse consul – Republican Rome’s highest executive office. Unsurprisingly, Caligula’s personal life had no shortage of craziness.

Incest with his sisters was just the tip of the iceberg. At dinner parties, Caligula would often order a guest’s wife to accompany him to his bedroom, where he would have his way with her. Returning to the party, he would then rate her performance and berate the cuckolded husband for any shortcomings. He loathed Rome’s aristocrats, so to further humiliate them and shock their sensibilities, he turned part of the imperial palace into a whorehouse, in which the wives of leading senators and dignitaries were made to serve as prostitutes.

1. Tiberius’ perversions exceeded those of everybody on this list

Caligula had learned perversion from the best, having been raised by his uncle, the emperor Tiberius (reigned 14 – 37 AD). Unlike Rome’s most infamously perverted rulers, Caligula, Nero, and Heliogabalus, who became emperors in their teens and went crazy with the sudden power, Tiberius became emperor in his 50s. He exceeded all other emperors in perversion, but did his dirt in the privacy of a secluded palace compound in the island of Capri, far away from the public eye. There, Tiberius wallowed in perversions, most notably pedophilia with children of both genders. He reportedly had toddlers trained to dive underwater while he was in a pool to “nibble” at him as he swam, referring to them as his “minnows”.

Tiberius also had pleasure gardens stocked with teenaged and prepubescent youths, dressed as figures from Greco-Roman mythology, or frolicking about naked, displaying themselves for his pleasure, and engaging in intercourse on command with each other. As he grew older, Tiberius grew increasingly impotent, and so was often reduced to being a spectator. His residences had walls covered with pornographic paintings depicting all kinds of nefarious activity, from the routine to the shockingly depraved. The artwork was like a menu, enabling Tiberius to simply point at a painting, to communicate what he wanted done.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

All That Is Interesting – Read James Joyce‘s Absolutely Filthy Letters

Broadly, April 15^th, 2016 – Charlie Chaplin Was a Sadistic Tyrant Who F*cked Teenage Girls

Dejonge, Alex – The Life and Times of Grigorii Rasputin (1990)

Edwardian Promenade – The Amorous Life of Edward VII

Guardian, The, January 18^th, 2006 – The Perverse Side of Hans Christian Andersen

Guardian, The, April 9^th, 2017 – Eric Gill: Can We Separate the Artist From the Abuser?

History Things – History‘s Nutcases: The Zhengde Emperor

History Collection – Facts from the Captivating Life of Sigmund Freud

World History Project – Reign of Zhengde Emperor: The Tenth Emperor of the Ming Dynasty

India Today, November 30^th, 1999 – Mahatma & Manuben: Newly Discovered Diaries of Gandhi‘s Personal Attendant Reveal How His Experiments With Celibacy Changed Her Life

Mad Monarchs – Biography of the Ottoman Sultan Ibrahim I The Mad

Medium – 7 Disturbing Facts About Sigmund Freud

Mental Floss – 3 Dirty Songs by Mozart

Naked History – Prince Sado of Korea

Factinate – Unhinged Facts About Ibrahim, The Mad Sultan of The Ottoman Empire

HHH – The Scandal of Lord Byron

Korea Daily – Crown Prince Sado’s Difficult History

New York Times, April 1^st, 1989 – How Lord Byron Became Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know

New York Times, June 16^th, 2018 – Monticello is Done Avoiding Jefferson‘s Relationship With Sally Hemmings

Ranker – The Most Historically Important Perverts of All Time

Smithsonian Magazine, February 15^th, 2015 – Who Was the Marquis de Sade?

Swarthmore College, History 41 – Benjamin Franklin, Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress

Suetonius – The Lives of the Twelve Caesars

Time Magazine, July 7^th, 2003 – Why He Was a Babe Magnet

History Collection – Ten Crazy Facts You Do Not Know About Rasputin

History Collection – Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know: 5 Things You Should Know About Caligula

History Collection – The Scandalous Love Lives of 8 Roman Emperors