Nights Of Love In Lesbos
Side 1
Side 2
This is a stupid record and I own it because I’m a stupid person who buys stupid things stupidly.

Released in 1962 by Fax Records, Nights Of Love In Lesbos, promises “a frankly intimate description of a sensuous young girl’s lesbian desires.” In actuality, it is little more than a very abridged and slightly more ribald reading of Pierre Louÿs’ Songs of Bilitis, a rather well-known piece of lesbian erotica from the 1890s that Louÿs attempted to pass off as legit historical texts that he discovered and translated. He later was exposed as a fraud, but people still held the works in high regard because I guess French people of the late 1800s were really into reading about lesbians.

I have not read Songs of Bilitis in its entirety. My gay ass is not the target market I suppose. But in glancing over it, I found that this record took several extreme liberties with the source material. Male characters from the poem are excised entirely, with entire sections not related to lesbian lovemaking are torn out as well because, well, why bother with them I suppose. The erotic aspects are changed also. Whoever wrote this abridged version was very much a boob man. Boobs abound here. The narrator talks about her own breasts, the breasts of her lovers, how men are inferior because they don’t have breasts, and so on. It feels like it was written buy a guy who assumes lesbians just look in a mirror all day and get turned on by their own tits. However, while this record is all about the boobs, anything below the waist is strictly off limits. Even words like “loins” are removed. I guess they wanted to be better safe than sorry in case the law came after them.

When the time comes for the record to get down and dirty with tales of sapphic deeds, descriptions are so flowery and peppered with metaphor that a casual listener might pass over them without actually understanding what’s going on. The most explicit sexual act I could find on this album was this line: “sometimes she makes me kneel and place my hands on the bed…then she slips her little head underneath and imitates the trembling kid which sucks from the belly of its mother.” That has to be the most unerotic description of oral sex I’ve ever heard. There’s also a reference to lips opening but that might just be my pervy ass reading too much into things.

The only credit on this record is for the narrator, performing under the mononymous pseudonym “Ilona.” No one is credited with adapting the original text, and all production work is left uncredited as well. Obviously, the people who worked on the record were either too ashamed to be named, or too worried that they might face charges for obscenity.

As stupid as this record is, I think it’s an interesting historical document that showcases what passed for “scandalous” before the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and it’s a real shame that the stories behind it, and the countless records like it, are lost to time. If there is any information about the production of these records online, it’s very hard to find. Most searches for “fax records” turn up auction listings, blogs like this, or pages by dudes who collect pin-up art. If anyone out there does know any actual information about how records like this were produced and/or sold, hit me up in the comments!

I hope this softcore tale of lesbian lust helps you during these trying times. And a reminder, if you need further distractions from our virus-enduced hellscape, I have a new podcast where I talk about prog with Jeremy Parish and Elliot Long. You can check that out here.

Take care of yourselves and stay safe.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2020 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Complete Albums. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.