Since you dealt so thoroughly with gerbil stuffing a few years back, I know you are the man to answer this question. There is a rumor going around about that frozen Stone Age man they found in the glacier between Austria and Italy in September 1991. What I have heard is that scientists found traces of semen in the man’s anus. I know this is sticky territory, but is this rumor true? I haven’t seen this mentioned in any AP news bulletins. –Wayne L. Wilson, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
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“Otztal Valley, Italy–The mainstream media reported widely on “Otzi,” the 5,477-year-old Stone Age man found mummified in a melting glacier high in the Italian Tyrolean Alps. The U.S. media did not, however, share a gripping detail that was reported in Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and elsewhere: there was sperm in Otzi’s anal canal. ‘The Tyrolean scholars have not given this little detail any special significance,’ according to Lambda Nachrichten, the magazine of Homosexual Initiative Vienna, Austria’s leading gay organization, ‘but there can only be one explanation: Otzi had sex with another man in the Alps!
“‘The tight-assed Tyrolean scholars were uncomfortable even having to acknowledge it,’ Lambda said, ‘but Otzi is the first known homosexual man that enjoyed being [made a receptacle of lust] . . . . Otzi was the passive partner–of this there is absolutely no doubt. . . . The sperm was carbon-dated.’ . . . According to the Zurich, Switzerland, newspaper Blick: “Since the homosexual innuendo has made the rounds, politicians in the North and South Tyrol regions suddenly have less interest in poor Otzi. And in Otztal they’re afraid they’re going to end up being called ‘Homo Valley.’”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.
