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IN A novel, set in the 1960s, by John Kennedy Toole, "A Confederacy of Dunces", the hero, Ignatius Reilly, goes to a gay party to drum up political support.In the centre of another knot [of guests] stood a lout in a black leather jacket who was teaching judo holds, to the great delight of his epicene students.
His story makes for colourful copy but poses questions which, despite partisan conviction and tireless sleuthwork, remain unanswered and probably unanswerable five years after his death.Nureyev was the Russian defector whose "leap to freedom" thrust the epicene world of ballet into the forefront of the trendsetting 1960s.
But it's perhaps album opener "Best Friend" that best demonstrates their favoured tropes: the terse, mechanistic beat, as if programmed on some primitive drum-machine, underpins a jaunty African guitar twinkle in the fashionable Vampire Weekend manner, with Jonathan Pierce's somewhat epicene vocal style bringing suitably dramatic emotion to a lyric about a deceased friend.
Human detours include the monk Thomas Merton, who shared Hoare's obsessions with ravens and Moby-Dick, and TH White, "a more epicene , English Hemingway", who said that "swimming underwater everyday looking at fish" was part of his training as a writer.
The result is a familiar and densely populated book in which it's sometimes a bit of a hurdle to keep up with characters like "the hulking Horst Sklarz of the Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt, and the epicene Tristan Benzler of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt" (Pity the actor who has to read the Audiobook).
In a dystopian society in the future, a group of wealthy, epicene overlords — authoritarians with violet hair and the vicious manners of French courtiers — threaten and control an impoverished population.
You would think that veneration so exquisite, verging on the epicene , indicates an object of, well, recherché taste.
Those two appear in the show's catalogue, in a photograph taken in 1958, at a Rivers opening; Rauschenberg looks bored, and Johns like a proudly epicene , watchful dandy.
Its cover featured, in miniature, the haunting image that appeared on the hardback edition from the library: a Michelangelo drawing, in dusty-red chalk, of an epicene Oriental youth in three-quarter profile, wearing a headdress and earrings.
Their king, Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), an epicene seven-footer with a shaved head and what looks like a gold-lamé thong, lounges on cushions in his court, surrounded by aroused lesbians intertwined and writhing like snakes in a basket.
And even at university there was an epicene interlude.
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The primary grammatical function of "epicene" is as an adjective . It modifies nouns, describing qualities related to gender ambiguity, grammatical gender, or effeminacy. Ludwig provides examples showcasing its use in describing people, art, and language.
Expression frequency: Very common
