“She seemed to go to extremes in order to make the play as obscene and immoral as possible.” This first appeared in Lit Hub’s  Literary History  newsletter— sign up here . On February 9, 1927, Mae West was arrested after a performance of her play Sex , which she had written and in which she starred. In fact, the New York Police Department’s Municipal Vice Squad arrested the whole cast, and carried them off in black vans . “I was the first one ever to say ‘sex’ on stage,” Mae West told Anjelica Huston and Peter Lester in 1974 . The play in question, which West wrote, was “a dramatic play with a jazz band in it,” originally called Follow the Fleet , she told them, but when she brought it to the director, Edward Elsner, he couldn’t stop saying how sexy it was. “I was hearing the word sex so much I was beginning to like it,” she said. “‘Gee,’ I thought, ‘this might be good for the title, Sex .’ So I tell my manager I want to change the title to Sex . He says, if only we dare… so we do!…