Esoteric Brezhnevism

  In his 1977 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, Guy Strait recalled, “I wrote in 1953, I believe it was, I published a small book called The Right to Go to Hell , wherein I said that I believe a man has the right to go to hell or heaven, whichever he chooses, at whatever speed he wishes, so long as he does not take anybody with him by force.” [1] The ironically named Strait would go on to make his mark in the publishing world, albeit not in the field of theology. Strait, who was born in Texas in 1920 and died in San Francisco in 1987 – thereafter, presumably, departed for Hell – “was the tenth of 11 brothers and sisters and was about fifteen years old when he obtained his first camera,” relates Clifford Linedecker in his out-of-print and scarce 1981 true crime study Children in Chains : Almost immediately, the young man began shooting photographs of flowers, plant buds – and nudes. He was eighteen when he walke...