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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