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We know the intimate, depressing details of this ill-fated union thanks, in part, to a short essay by a Lovecraft scholar titled "Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex: or The Sex Life of a Gentleman." Before the wedding, Lovecraft reportedly "purchased and read thoroughly all subject matter he could obtain regarding the marriage, sex, and the duties of a husband in the connubial bed." Nevertheless, Sonia later reported that, though the marriage wasn't entirely sexless, her husband was "squeamish and prudish about perfectly natural functions," and "the very mention of the word sex seemed to upset him." He also "never mention[ed] the word love," she later said, in a memoir. "He would say instead, 'My dear, you don't know how much I appreciate you.'" The marriage lasted less than three years.The interest in Lovecraft and sex may also be stoked by the ever-intensifying conversation about his racism.
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The interest in Lovecraft and sex may also have been stoked by the ever-intensifying conversation about his racism. Lovecraft, in case you haven't heard, was a devout white supremacist who sprinkled his letters with impassioned diatribes about Jews, Asians, African Americans, French-Canadians, various European immigrants, and basically anyone else who didn't look like him. And Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos author Bobby Derie tells us, "It's difficult to really separate out Lovecraft's views on race from sex… because of how tightly they were intertwined with his understanding of evolution, biology, civilization, and sense of self." In one letter from 1930, Lovecraft called interracial sex a "melancholy and disgusting phenomenon" and encourages "placing the heaviest possible penalties on miscegenation."His biographer, S. T. Joshi, classifies him 'among the most asexual individuals in human history.'
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