Valentine Blues: High Holidays of Love in Low Times
Valentine’s Day is upon us, shopping sites flashing rosy red hearts, but I’ve got the Valentine blues… how about you?
It’s my first V-Day in over three decades without my beloved Captain Max (RIP Max 11/8/1943 – 5/13/2025), aka Pr. Maximillian R. Leblovic Lobkowicz di Filangieri, aka Mickey, my husband of 33 years, publisher, producer, butler, witness, Great Love and #1 lover, my Valentine.
I miss Max every day in so many big and little ways. V-Day is not for widows (Erika Kirk notwithstanding). It’s personal, but Valentine’s Day is a very personal holiday – as opposed toreligious or patriotic – whether you say it with hearts and flowers, whips and panties, tears and recriminations, or platinum and pre-nups.
Yet politics affects us personally, shaping us in ways we can’t escape. Currently, our so-called civilization is as broken as my heart, and with all the dystopian violence, lies from on high, political division, sexual suspicion, interpersonal alienation, creepy revelations, gross Epsteinizations, ICE fascism, über-militarism, blatant nepotism, snowballing censorship, mounting surveillance, hyper-monetization, environmental devastation, dizzying distractions and the utter emotional exhaustion of it all, who gives a candied heart about effing Valentine’s Day?
But V-Day is D-Day for Lovers; it’s the High Holiday of Love. High or lowbrow, it ought to be special, romantic, heartfelt, passionate, in the pink and perfect… and it hardly ever is.
V-Day Widow
What can you do for the Valentine blues? There is no cure. But putting together another “Max Collage” has helped to put me in the pink, with streaks of Valentine red, Lupercalian scarlet and bonobo rose.
Sailing through images of Captain Max from Valentines Past is a bittersweet journey on the high seas of memories. Snapshots from France trigger Valentine’s eve, 2002: Max waiting for me on a bustling French Riviera street corner as I fly like a fighter jet from the taxi into his warm strong arms, the boulevard crowd cheering, “C’est l’amour!” – as if we’re all in a French New Wave movie.
Not that Max and I were Jean-Luc Godard, though we were a bit Breathless, and we filmed many of our V-Days in Bonoboville, plus a few during Sex Week at Yale, a decade of great sex-educational Valentine Seasons… until a well-funded religious group forced a cowardly Yale to shut it down. Then there was V-Day 2017, canoodling on Venice Beach as the sun set into the shining sea, many wild Lupercalias in Bonoboville, a primal World Bonobo Day at the Zoo and a delicious V-Day 2024 of chocolate, storytelling, Absinthe and orgasms, swathed in our Palestine keffiyehs. That was our last Holiday of Hearts before Max was struck like lightning by a terrible stroke that paralyzed the entire right side of his body, and the left (rational) side of his brain.
So, there were no Valentine orgasms for us on V-Day 2025 under the bright lights of Hollywood-Kaiser’s stroke ward. Max couldn’t even eat the chocolates I brought him, though he did lick one chocolate and grin with pleasure – or just a remembrance of pleasures past – and we shared a few chocolate-flavored kisses, his favorite flowers, hand squeezes and a slurred “I love you” between medical procedures. Now even that’s gone.
Bella Ciao and bye-bye love. These are challenging times for love of all kinds.
Sexless Saint Valentine
To be sure, V-Day fatigue goes much farther back than “these times,” heartless as they may be. Ever since its brutal Medieval imposition on the Pan-loving peoples of early Christendom, the artificially sweetened festival of forced love called the Feast of Saint Valentine has fostered far more pain (St. Valentine’s Day Massacre anyone?) than pleasure.
Though Max and I ate up romance on the daily, we never felt hungry for V-Day. Like a strawberry glazed in sugary, chemical-laced icing; the real juicy fruit is in there somewhere, but the sickly-sweet frosting disguises, sanitizes and monetizes it beyond recognition… then leaves you with a toothache.
“Friends, Romans, Countrywomen, lend me your ears,” as Shakespeare’s (pre-Cleopatra) Marc Antony might say, “I’ve come to bury Valentine’s Day, not to praise it.”
Concocted by the early Catholic Church, shaped by the Victorian greeting card industry, sweetened by See’s, polished by DeBeers and abetted by Amazon, all this Hallmark Classic fakery was spawned by a cute and sexless Christian romance starring the celibate Saint Valentine.
As the story opens in 4th century pagan Rome (Max’s birthplace), mean old Emperor Claudius has outlawed marriage in a vain attempt to restore potency to the weakening imperial army of his collapsing empire. It’s true that when you make love, you’re less inclined to make war (sociopathic sadists notwithstanding), and Claudius wants fighters not lovers. Enter Valentine, a Christian priest arrested for marrying couples in secret who, while awaiting execution, converts his jailer’s blind daughter to Christianity, whereupon she falls madly (but chastely) in love with him. Then, just after the priest’s execution, the jailer’s blind daughter finds a card in his cell addressed to her and signed, “Your Valentine.” Not only is she deeply moved by this loving gesture, but the fact that she can now see the card means Valentine’s saintly ophthalmological skills have cured her of her blindness.
What a touching tale of pure ideals! But alas and alack (a big lack), the ideal is the enemy of the real, as Max used to say, and in reality, there were several Christian martyrs named “Valentine,” and no evidence that any of them healed a jailer’s blind daughter or left her a farewell card (with or without the Hallmark logo).
However, the ideal is more compelling than the real – as well as more marketable – according to Hallmark and Amazon, who have worked hard over the centuries to provide tools for a V-Day fraught with pressure (the enemy of pleasure) to purchase their products that simulate the real romance that money just can’t buy.
Lupercalia: The Original Valentine’s Day
How can anyone (besides those merry sociopathic sadists) find or share true love when such virulent hate, war, genocide, police brutality, ICE insanity and profound grief – for the innocent victims of the current madness, for our loved ones, for the world – bleeds out through our newsfeeds, onto our streets and into our lives?
That’s a trillion-dollar question that I, in my widow’s grief, am in no shape to answer. However, if your current need is just to have a good, stimulating, less commercial, more authentic V-Day, then, as the influencers say, do your research! You’ll discover what Max and I learned in the early, pre-AI 2000s: that deep inside the phony, chaste Valentine glaze is the original, primeval, whip-smacking, heartfelt feast for all the senses – including your sense of history – with nothing saintly or celibate about it.
Festeggiamo LUPERCALIA!
Performed with little goatskin strips called Februa – from which we derive our name for the month of February – the “whip-smacking” reminds us that the Lupercalian heart of the season always was and still is a bit kinky.
So… if the candy-coated stress of Valentine’s Day gives you a toothache, don’t beat yourself up over it – beat someone else! And no, you ammosexual incels, ICE thugs, puritanical perverts and Epstein apologists, that is NOT a call to violence, exploitation or abuse of any kind. On the contrary, I am merely offering a gentle, peaceful suggestion: that you give your special someone a light, consenting-adult flogging to celebrate the original, primeval, pre-Roman V-Day of Lupercalia…. Or, better yet, turn around and take one yourself. I’m sure you deserve it.
Best to restrict Lupercalian floggings to between you and your “special someone,” since consent can be tough to read in party settings, especially considering the ongoing atrocities at home and abroad. That said, not everyone has a “special someone” (nor should that be a requirement for deserving Valentine love). Whatever your relationship status, the most authentic way to reclaim V-Day’s Lupercalian roots is communally, and in that spirit, for almost two decades, Max and I whipped up many wild, wolf-howling Lupercals at the little Love Church of The Bonobo Way in the village of Bonoboville.
To dramatize our political points, we’d stage public Lupercalian floggings of submissive volunteers masked as authoritarian characters such as Trump, Putin, Bush, Cheney,Zuckerberg, Bezos and Kavanaugh, Commedia del’Arte-style, rather like the Portland Frogs and other stimulating street theater in our occupied cities. Yet the passion of Lupercalia is beyond the political and even the personal. It’s beyond human, welcoming spring for all of Mother Earth’s fauna and flora with erotic, ecosexual, communal ecstasy – reflecting Barbara Ehrenreich’s concept of “collective joy” – rather than the hopelessly unromantic monetization of St. Valentine and Amazon.
Maybe it’s my grief talking, but Lupercalia beats a broken heart any V-Day.
V-Day is World Bonobo Day
Broken-hearted or blissful, married, single, in a couple, throuple, commune or convent, you can honor love with the world’s greatest lovers and officially go bonobos on Valentine’s Day because Valentine’s Day, February 14th, thanks to U.S. House Resolution 738 (115th Congress, 2018) is also World Bonobo Day.
If any earthly creature embodies the spirit of true love, it’s the “make love not war” bonobo ape. You can seek Valentine inspiration to live in more loving ways from the source: the remarkable Love Apes of the rainforest. Our closest genetic cousins, bonobos are also the Peace Apes, having never been seen killing each other in the wild or captivity (thus far!).
Max and I were inspired by bonobos every day of our love lives together since we first *discovered* them on PBS in 1993. Interestingly, the bonobo’s Latin name is Pan paniscus, linking Lupercalia and World Bonobo Day through Pan, the Spirit of the Wild… at heart.
Gift Idea: Make a donation in your Valentine’s name to Lola ya Bonobo and/or Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI), both actively helping to save the wild bonobos from extinction, and give them the receipt inside a Valentine card.
Gift Idea 2: Give The Bonobo Way for Valentine’s Day to friends, lovers and your friends’ lovers. Spread the Bonobo Word of Love from the Love Apes. Give it to someone you love, even if that someone is you.
In these lovelorn times of escalating brutality under color of law flanked by greed, injustice, censorship, exploitation, degradation, misogyny and sorrow, just the existence of bonobosis a heartening reminder that peace through pleasure, female empowerment, male well-being, sharing and caregiving is possible for apes like us. It certainly heartens this V-Day Widow amid all the grief and reverberating madness.
Happy Lupercalian World Bonobo Day. Go Bonobos. Stop the killing. Free Palestine. Break the ICE. Get some therapy! Keep love alive.
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