Actually, Paris is the capital of heterosexuality

You might not have guessed from the drag-heavy Paris Olympics opening ceremony, but Paris has traditionally been pretty awesome.

In Charles Murray's 2003 book Human Accomplishment, 12% of the 4002 eminent individuals in the arts and sciences who achieved prominence between 800 BC and AD 1950 made their careers in Paris, making it far and away the highest achieving city in history.

During the Paris Olympics’ Opening Ceremony, I only turned on the TV at the very end when the balloon bearing the Olympic Torch lifted off: “OK. The Montgolfier brothers in 1783. Flight! Humanity finally gets off the ground. Awesome!”

The next year, French architect Etienne-Louis Boullée proposed one of the most famous unbuilt buildings in history, the 500 foot tall balloon-shaped cenotaph for Enlightenment hero Sir Isaac Newton:

But …

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen writes:

I’ve only seen excerpts, but many people are upset.  I can vouch “this is not what I would have done,” but perhaps the over the top, deviance-drenched modes of presentation are reflecting some longer-running strands in French culture.  La Cage aux Folles?  Le Bal des Folles?  The whole Moulin Rouge direction?  How about Gustave Moreau, not to mention his lower-quality followers?  Jean Paul Gaultier? (NYT, “Fashion Freak Show”)  Pierre et Gilles?

Why is drag considered suddenly cool? I mean, other than for outdated épater les bourgeois reasons. Artistically, it ranks up there with driving around in a coal-burning pick-up truck.

In reality, French culture is traditionally famously heterosexual: e.g., “Vive la difference!” Paris has long been the world capital of male-female romance.

Two highly similar stories from the late 1840s established Paris as the coolest place in the world for jealous aspiring artists and consumption-ridden demimondaines, Alexandre Dumas fils’ The Lady of the Camelias, and Henri Murger’s La Vie de Bohème. These led to Verdi’s opera La Traviata and Puccini’s opera La Boheme, respectively, and were eventually merged in Baz Lurhmann’s movie Moulin Rouge.

There’s nothing much gayer than American musicals, but still:

The ancient Greeks were pretty pederastic, the Romans less so. According to an observant old lady in Brideshead Revisited, the English and the Germans, who worshipped the Greeks, developed a tradition of "romantic friendship," but the Latins did not.

Still, a lot of the Italian legends were not straight. For example, all four of the Italian Ninja Turtle artists never married, but Raphael was straight. Donatello, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, probably not so much.

French artists, in contrast, were notorious for l’amour with their models.