THE NECCESITY OF DEVIANCE
                   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
                       By Jack Stevenson

   In the ideal utopia, individual freedom flourishes.  In such a
state of existence there would be no deviants since there would be nothing
to deviate from.  Everyone would bloom like a beautiful flower according to
their own precaurioyus individual natures.  There would be no stifling
society codes, no predjudice, no repression, no crime.
   Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, Utopia is unobtainable.
Deviation is the only thing that's kept the human race from dying off from
bad ideas, lack of style, or just plain boredom, not to mention tyranny,
incompetence or stupidity.
   As it is, within every religion, within every country, within every
city and small town, deviance springs up unwanted like some evil mushroom,
much to the horror of the civil and moral 'authorities.'  It is the one
irrepressible, ineludeable constant of human nature.  Thank God.
   It is the deviant, at first presecuted, then maryred and
worshipped, who changes society, starts all the new religions and
philosophies.  It is this deviant virus buzzing around in the rotted
innards of exstablished countrys and belief systems that keeps the decaying
carcass on it's feet until something paramutes off, and it crashes to the
ground a stinking corpse... although sometimes it actually takes a few
centuries to fall over.
   On a less grandoise scale, deviation worms it's way into fashon,
art, and every other form of human conduct, often while the guise of
perfect respectability is maintained.  Deviance is a neccesity of life, on
a par with food, shelter, and clothing.  And like any other activity, it
can be persued in a cowardly, or a courageous fashion.
   Society seeks to maintain the status quo out of pure bloated
inertia.  Industrialization gave rise to the middle class in all developed
countries and soon the middle class had it's own culture: a culture of
cowardice conformity and sterility whose holy ground became the suburbs.
Conformity was required, the status-quo worshipped.
   Yet the stricter the status-quo is enforced by social codes, the
more widespread the deviant urge becomes:  today the suburbs are hot-beds
of deviance and depravity, while inner cities - admittedly more violent -
are staid in comparision.
   Look though any window in suburbia to see men dressed in leotards or
neo-nazis in full regelia drowning kittens in bath tubs while through
ghetto windows, you see earnest young dope dealers and pimps chasing the
standard capitalist dream.  Sexual and other deviations are shunned in the
ghettos while the suburbs provide the privacy, leisure time and money to
engage in such activities.
   It is the pointlessness and boredom of middle class life more than
anything that spurs and motivates people into chasing deviance.  Poor
people are too busy trying to 'make it', chasing commercial images of
success, and rich people hide all their glorious deviance behind the
impenetrable wall of discretion propriety.  It is out of the belly of
the middle class that pulls a virtual army of 'deviance' as they are quick
to be called.  Punk rockers are drop-outs from suburbia, with their
anti-beauty esthetics.  Before them the hippies were the drop-outs with
their drugs and anti-materialism.  Many gays in New York, San Fransisco and
other big cities are escapees from middle class conformity.  A thousand
bizarre cults worldwide are gourged on the children of the middle class. It
is the greatest contribution of the middle class to culture.
   Deviance in it's most spectacular, sensational and violent forms
has become a religion, merging Punk rock with Satanism, Nazism and modern
death technology.  Mark Pauline, a San Fransisco artist, builds engine
powered contraptions, that animate the corpses of chickens and rabbits in
grotesque fandango.  Autopsy vidoes are all the latest rage, and a small
movement of Xeroxed fanzines that idolize mass murderers is cropping up,
reflecting wider interest in this new industrial death culture that has in
fact been well recieved in the art world.
    Mass murderers are replacing football players as focal points of
youthful fascination.  Gilles de Rais emerges from the muck of his history
as the John The Baptist of this new order.  The richest noble and bravest
knight of early 15th century France, de Rais won a prominent place in
French history books for his battlefield hroism in the cause of Joan of
Arc, personally rescuing her from the English at least twice.  His later
career as a lunatic, devil worshipper and sex murderer of hundreds of
peasant children won him a place in the wax museums.
   Ed Gein, killer and cannibal of the American 1950s, exploded as a
blinding supernova in the holy firmament of sexual deviance.  In habiting
an unworked farm in rural Wisconsin, Gein impressed neighbors as a mildly
retarded simpleton who hung out with kids and was good for handyman chores
and helping road crews chop weeds along the highway.  Yet Gein's peaceable
manner concealed the soul of a freinzied deviant:  by night he engaged in
murder, graverobbing and necrophilia, as well as the manufacture of human
lampshades, chair seats, nipple belts and skull caps.  All of Gein's crimes
were traced back to a desire to revive his dead mother from her grave and
driven out of control by a twisted sexual urge.  Perhaps the ongoing
celebration of Ed Gein is a reaction to the sterile sexual teases of Pop
icons such as Doris Day and Annete Funicello who purveyed a dehumanized aur
of sex that Gein actually came to practice.
   Charles Manson is certainly well enough known, both by the myth and
reality (if in fact they can be seperated).  Yet while Manson dabbled in
Satanism and admired the Nazis, he was a different phenomenon than either
medieval castle-dwelling de Rais or farmboy idiot/introvert Gein.  Manson
became the great hollywood killer and his ledgend has been enshrined by
media cirucs parole hearings and annual televising of Helter Skelter that
are as eagerly awaited as The Wizard of Oz.  'I live in my world,' said
Manson in prison in 1970, 'and I am the king of my world, wether it be in a
garbage dump or if it be in the desert or wherever it be, I am my own human
being.  You may restrain my body and you may tear my guts out, do anything
you wish, but I am still me and you can't take that.'  Is it any wonder
Manson strikes a chord with teenagers, deviants and outcasts constantly
bucking the norm?
   Finally there is John Gacy.  If mass-murderers are considered the
ultimate deviants then John Gacy is an ironic contradiction.  While Gracy
was a killer, a more average, normal, successful member of the community
you could not find.  He was the quintessential suburban 'well respected
man.'  His taste in everything from houses to cars to backyard barbeques
was middle class suburban.  None of this cult-worship commune jazz for him,
his world revolved around the gravity core of middle class respectable.
Because of this, he could never admit, and in fact to this day denies, that
he is gay.  He has been called by some 'The Ultimate Closet Queen' and the
results of his reppresion and self-loathing became national headlines in
1979.
   While Gacy is a pretty poor role model for any self-respecting
deviant, he is the current mass-murder record holder and hence earns the
respect of the pure-mided death cultists who despises any hint of insanity
or cultism.  Manson and Gein on the other hand were more flamboyant and
colourful characters and have enjoyed popularity on a wider scale,
inspiring movies and songs and even bleeding a little into pop culture.
Gilles de Rais, though, remains almost unknown to the population, with
their fast-food slaughters and shopping centre massacres while in
history-conscious France, he is known to every schoolboy.
   Other mass killers have made the jump from police reports into pop
legend.  Jim Jones was the ultimate cult leader and fake Mohammed.  Charles
Starkweather was the 1950's own white-trash James Dean/Rebel without a
cause, and Lizzi Borden slaughtered her parents - What red-blooded Teenager
hasn't thought about it?  Today there are endless Hillside Stranglers,
Highway killers, Nightstalkers, mad Slashers, beserk snipers holed up in
schoolhouses, and walking time bombs exploding in post offices and
fast-food restarants.
   And so, much to the horror of their parents, our young people find
heroes aplenty in today's 'world'.  Or perhaps I should say anti-heroes.
To today's youth, getting stabbed to death or getting blown apart in an
explosion doesn't seem much worse than dying of boredom, and certainly it's
quicker, you might even get on TV.
   Modern society seems a faceless, homenized, sterile place...
predictable, circumcised, pre-conditioned.  The impulsive, the violent, the
anti-social is admired and at times emulated.  The deviant is our new hero.