Is there any historical example of friendship between a eunuch and an intact man?
Well, part of the difficulty is that if there was such a friendship, almost certainly people would have thought that it was sexual. Eunuchs were always accused of sexual perversions, but we don’t know anything about these people’s sexual practices. There were certainly very close friendships between emperors and their chief eunuchs. Let’s talk about your relationships. You’ve been the castration guy since the book came out. Long before that actually. What has it done for your social life? What started happening long before the book came out was I would tell scholarly colleagues what I was working on and this would always produce lots of jokes. I suppose the result of this research on my social life is that I’ve become the center of a huge comedy network. I was on the Los Angeles comedy channel radio station doing a program called “Morning Sickness.” And I’m talking to a pair of women on a comedy talk show in England. This has been fun. I can make jokes about this subject better than an
