Monday 30 December 2013

The Faerie Iconoclasts Who Dared to Re-Imagine Queer

 
So what’s an Icon?
In a literal sense it is a painted image intended to induce a sense of the divine. Over the centuries Queer folk have suffered at the hands the Great Organised Religions' image-makers. Metaphorically, nothing divine has ever been invoked in the painting of our image. In fact quite the reverse!

However I have a personal gratitude to three great secular saints of The Church of Queer who each, in their own ways, have managed to repaint our tarnished image. They have helped us to dare to be our divine selves against all odds.

The great American writer Walt Whitman (1819- 1892), in the Calamus cycle of poems from his magnum opus ‘Leaves of Grass’, re-imagined the then unspeakable love of men-loving-men as the ‘Love of Comrades’; a love so powerful it would transform a warring world into a calm and peaceful global village.

These poems were largely considered to be obscene by Walt’s compatriots. Internationally, however, they excited a new generation of morally oppressed yet nascently radical queer folk. Among them was the Brighton born Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) who was dramatically transformed after reading them. So much so that he sailed to the US to meet, and then make love with, his heroic iconoclast.

He was encouraged in his own writing to re-paint the way in which queerness had been smeared. In his book ‘The Intermediate Sex’ he articulated, to a hostile and highly sexually oppressive Victorian society, the argument for a biological determinant for non-heterosexual sexuality. This was a society which criminalised as morally defective any physical expression of same-sex love. In 1895 Oscar Wilde was sentenced by our great British society to two years of hard labour in prison for daring to be himself!

When he was just a child the Worthing born Harry Hay (1912-2002) migrated with his parents to America. In the local library he managed to break his way into a locked cabinet containing a copy of ‘The Intermediate Sex’. Encouraged by the fact that there were at least some highly respected European writers who took a non-moralistic view of the expression of same-sex love, he developed his own ideas (via his involvement with the American communist party and a love affair with the actor who famously came to play the part of Grandpa Walton). In a post-Stonewall era when queers were increasingly clamouring for ‘we’re just the same as you are- but different’ social and legal acceptance, Harry was busy wondering what was the purpose of queers? Do we not have a unique window of perspective for the wider society and a special subject-subject love devoid of the materialistic and social status considerations implicit in most marriage contracts? Was our purpose not to be visionaries, healers and teachers? Did we not need spiritual sanctuary where our unarticulated sense of purpose and our innate sense of awe at the fabulousness of the natural world could be allowed to flourish unencumbered?

As Faeries we dare to be ourselves and we model the audacity of this radically spiritual act for our non-queer brethren.

Let us then give thanks to Saint Walt, Saint Edward and Saint Harry the Great Faerie Iconoclastic Icons!

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