Photo from source, Asylum
When I heard on the way to work the other day that David Carradine had died, I thought it was sad, but didn't give it much thought. Then, when I heard he'd committed suicide, I was a little stunned. I wondered, was he in bad health? It just didn't seem to make sense.
But the story took a strange turn, and it would seem--at least for now--that he died from "auto-erotic asphyxiation." The first time I heard the phrase, was in an episode of The X-Files, when a psychic character played by Peter Boyle predicted that David Duchovny's character Fox Mulder would meet his end that way. At the time, I thought it meant something slightly different, with me thinking that Mulder must be spectacularly endowed if he could choke himself with it. When I found out what it really meant, the scene was no less funny, but the mental image wasn't as impressive. And given Duchovny's much publicized sex addiction, it doesn't even seem unlikely.
Michael Hutchence, the lead singer of INXS is probably the most famous accident victim of the practice, but that one is somewhat in dispute. Some people think he really did try to kill himself, and that auto-erotic asphyxiation was a cover for it. Why that would seem better to anybody, I have no idea.
[Excerpt]
A Brief History of Erotic Asphyxiation
