Born Today: Kinky French Philosopher Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was born today, October 15, in 1926. He was a philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic. He was also a gay man into S&M, who enjoyed visiting sado-masochistic bathhouses in San Francisco in the early 1980s.

Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels, preferring to present his thought as a critical history of modernity.

Foucault published Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods which emphasized the role that power plays in society. 

In October 1980, Foucault became a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His growing popularity in American intellectual circles was noted by Time magazine.   His lectures drew huge crowds. 

Foucault spent many evenings in the San Francisco gay scene, frequenting sado-masochistic bathhouses, engaging in unprotected sex. He would praise sado-masochistic activity in interviews with the gay press, describing it as "the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously."

Foucault died in Paris of neurological problems compounded by HIV/AIDS on June 25, 1984; he became the first public figure in France to die from the disease. His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory.