CAR Hills
Prison is a profoundly heterosexual world. Homosexuals don’t seem much attracted to crime, which, among other things, is a sort of heterosexual male club. It is an essential part of the club that women and children are waiting at home.
I find talking to these family men difficult in here. I find random attempts to make contact sticky enough at the best of times. But when they mention their partners or children, and I am forced to admit that I am alone, the conversation often comes to an abrupt and chilly end.
Most prisoners are not deeply prejudiced. It is more that they see me as slightly less than a human being. They see their families as serving sentences as hard as their own. Although they have caused pain, they are living for their loved ones. Someone who cannot make even this claim to selflessness is not worth spending time with.
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Alex Renton
We were gathered in a cold upstairs room, 20 of us, making a respectful circle around the corpse as it lay on a steel table. The Italian butchers were sharpening their knives—cleavers, choppers, long thin blades with upward curves for separating fat from skin, flesh from bone. What we were about to watch was an ancient winter rite, once universal, now half-forgotten and barely legal. As the knife was raised over the hairless flesh, I found myself looking over my shoulder, half-expecting some breathless enforcers of decency to burst through the door—the inquisition, the police, the Edinburgh health and safety inspectorate.
Europeans have always slaughtered pigs in early winter. Saints days, from St Andrew’s to St Stephen’s, are marked for the job; the tradition of combining religion, the winter solstice and a feast of freshly killed pork goes back to the Roman Saturnalia, and probably beyond. Pigs have been domesticated for 9,000 years. It’s a wholly practical ritual: by December, forage has run out, but the nine or ten-month-old pigs of the year’s farrowing are fat on the nuts, berries, mushrooms and other debris of autumn. As the temperatures drop, the best time to preserve their meat arrives. The new wine pressing should be ready for sampling—in any case, it’s a good moment for a party.
The Europeans who do still slaughter their own pigs are mainly in the east, where subsistence agriculture is still alive. But the embrace of the EU brings with it the cold hand of regulation. In Romania, some 1.5m pigs are usually slaughtered in backyards in the week before Christmas. They are drained of their blood and then rolled into a bonfire, to singe and clean the skin. But Brussels rules don’t permit amateurs to slaughter pigs: a vet must be present and a stunning device used. According to the Economist, the Romanians asked for a derogation to kill animals according to their traditions, just as Muslims and Jews can. It is Christmas, after all. The commission said no, but, as I write, the Romanian smallholders’s pig slaughter will go ahead as planned.
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Mark Cousins
Hollywood releases on average three films a week in Britain, more than 150 a year. Since the product in question is a film, which is labour-intensive and unpredictable in its income generation, it comes as no surprise that Hollywood tries to standardise as much of the production process as it can. Thus genre, stardom, story structure, themes and marketing methods are all made formulaic—frustratingly so for those of us who like surprises.
But occasionally a film comes off the conveyer belt that seems to have escaped the cookie-cutter. One such movie is 300, which is well on its way to taking $0.5bn at the box office. Since its release, it has been written about extensively. I intended not to add to the coverage—but then I saw it, and my jaw dropped.
Unless you gave up media for Lent, you’ll know that 300 depicts the famous battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, in which Spartan King Leonidas and 300 of his elite guard routed Persian King Xerxes’s force of 10,000, 100,000 or 170,000 (Herodotus didn’t have a police helicopter, so had to guess). Not since Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ has Hollywood produced anything so rabidly, ferally frenzied. 300 feels as if Adolf Hitler has come back from the dead, got hooked on gay fisting websites, done the best digital film course in the world, then stalked into liberal-Jewish Hollywood and convinced them to give him $60m to make a movie.
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Ronald Dworkin
The British government’s refusal to exempt Catholic adoption agencies from its ban on discrimination against gay parents misunderstands the complex principles at stake. A liberal society faces a difficult decision when some of its members claim that their religious conviction will not allow them to obey a law that the majority deems necessary to prevent injustice. In such cases there is an apparent conflict between the demands of justice and respect for the freedom of citizens to follow their own convictions on matters of faith, and care is needed to discover the best way to reconcile the two liberal principles at stake. Liberal societies have exempted conscientious pacifists from frontline fighting in war, for example, in spite of the important principle that danger ought to be shared equally among citizens able to fight.
Discrimination against gays is indeed unjust; it is wrong for an adoption agency to refuse to help a gay couple adopt a child when they meet all other tests for qualified parents. But the leaders of the Catholic church not only disagree, as a great many private citizens no doubt disagree. They also believe that it would be unconscionable for them, a sin against cardinal tenets of their faith, to hand a child in their care to gay parents. True, Catholics are not forced to run adoption agencies. But requiring them to choose between abandoning a historical mission of charity, in which they have contributed much benefit, and acting as they believe their faith forbids, does place them in a position in which they think their duty is compromised however they choose. It also diminishes the chances of abandoned children finding a stable home: the Catholic agencies, by all reports, have been among the most conscientious and successful.
Is this harm necessary? Of course qualified gay couples have as much right to adopt as any other couple, and any policy that seriously compromised their opportunities would be unacceptable. But Catholic agencies arrange only some 6 per cent of adoptions in Britain, and they could be required, if they were exempted, to inform gay applicants that other agencies are fully subject to the anti-discrimination rules and even to supply a list of convenient other agencies. It is said that exempting Catholic agencies would mean that the government endorses their discrimination. But that is silly: no one thinks that when government exempts conscientious objectors it endorses their view that it is wrong to fight. It is also said that since the church has charitable status, exempting Catholic agencies would mean that the government subsidises discrimination. But that is wrong as well: it is more accurate to say that government subsidy makes possible the benefits that those who are exempted are nevertheless able and willing to provide. The NHS does not require Catholic doctors themselves to perform abortions.
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Duncan Fallowell
Grayson Perry lives in a charming Georgian house in a leafy square in central London. “Would you like tea or something stronger?” he asks in a rich, deep Cockney voice. “And toast? I always have toast around now.”
I ask him if he dresses up only for performance. [He is dressed normally in white shirt and jeans.]
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Stella Tillyard
Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, begins on the Central line and ends in the subterranean showers of an underground swimming pool.
His latest, The Line of Beauty, last year’s Booker prize-winner, starts on a hot summer day and ends with its protagonist and London bathed in “the light of the moment.” From the underground to the bright lights; Hollinghurst’s career has followed the same path. Although the main protagonists of all his novels have been young gay men, he has moved from a debut widely regarded as the best book about gay life written by an English writer to a novel which, strictly speaking, is not a “gay novel” at all, just a novel about the unravelling of a family that happens to have a gay man at its centre. The four novels, published over 16 years, make a brilliantly economical body of work, full of dreamily beautiful writing, teasing literary allusion, and a self-confidence encapsulated in the title of his Booker winner. The Line of Beauty is an obvious reference to the cocaine which spreads a beguiling charm over the story’s moral and financial subterfuges. It gestures knowingly to Hogarth’s treatise on the rococo, and introduces a series of parallels between the attractive surfaces of 18th-century England and Thatcher’s Britain. But as much as these it is a writer’s promise: every line in this book will be a beautiful one.
Hollinghurst started his published life as a poet (a good one, says a poet friend of mine), and is master of the gorgeous phrase, lightly, sometimes camply balanced, alive to language and rippling with humour. These phrases pile up almost to excess, like petals drifting off a cherry tree in spring. In sex scenes and scenes of humour, they add a gorgeous sheen to the explicit and the absurd that is both one of Hollinghurst’s hallmarks and one of the most enjoyable elements of his work.
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Grey Gowrie
California, where our westering instincts come to an end, has always been an imaginary place as well as a real one. In the second half of the last century the state became the home, and to some degree the subject, of three remarkable English artists: the novelist Christopher Isherwood, the painter David Hockney, and the poet Thom Gunn. Now that Thom Gunn has died, David Hockney, who spends more and more time here in England these days, is the survivor. He painted a great double portrait of Isherwood and his companion, Don Bachardy; Thom Gunn wrote a poem, “To Isherwood Dying.”
It is no coincidence that the three men were homosexual and left England while gay sex between consenting adults was still illegal. So it was in California, but statutes were ambiguously worded and local politicians, Governor Ronald Reagan included, were sensitive to public pressure as well as changing public views. The issue for these artists was not forbidden behaviour but the centrality of sex to their work. This is less true of Hockney whose technical and investigative range is immense. Nevertheless, his best known paintings, the swimming pools with or without bare bottoms, may also be his best. Thom Gunn is likewise fine for being able to make universal what is also specifically gay. His poem “My Sad Captains,” just 18 lines of seven syllables apiece, is one of the great sad songs about love in our language. The title is drawn from Antony and Cleopatra and the poem lives up to it.
Gunn published his first work, Fighting Terms, in 1954, not long after leaving Cambridge. He was 25 and a little older than another Cambridge poet, Ted Hughes. They became linked journalistically, though Hughes’s debut came three years later. Both seemed confident and tough young writers, not angry young men. If you describe Gunn’s early volumes to someone who has not seen them (poetry must look as well as sound), you might seem to be indicating correspondences with the nascent pop art movement. There were poems about bikers, Teddy boys, Elvis, voyeurs, a fallen rake and the leader of the attempted assassination of Hitler, Claus von Stauffenberg. But in formal terms the poems were restrained, neither loud nor attention-grabbing. They were counter-modernist too. This was the age of Philip Larkin and “the movement,” of resistance to TS Eliot and Ezra Pound as well as neoromantic poets like George Barker or Dylan Thomas. You had to say what you meant and justify your meaning. No golden age seemed unalloyed:
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Philip Hensher
What literary critics and academics normally mean when they talk about “gay literature” is a work written by a gay or lesbian writer, which discusses gay subjects and is primarily directed towards a gay audience. If a work is written by a gay writer but does not discuss gay themes, and is not directed towards a gay audience, does that count? Probably not, or Hamlet might be regarded as gay literature (at least by the “Shakespeare was gay” school). On the other hand, mysteriously, that sometimes does seem to be a sufficient criterion. The Importance of Being Earnest may plausibly be included in the category. Secondly, if a heterosexual writer addresses homosexual themes, but not primarily for a gay audience, does that suffice? Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat takes on a gay subject, but does not seem to me to count; nor does the lesbian sub-plot in Little Dorrit (in which Tattycoram elopes with Miss Wade). Thirdly, there is a large body of work produced by heterosexuals, without homosexual references, which is nevertheless predominantly appreciated by homosexuals. For this category, we have the term “camp,” a term so problematic I will avoid it altogether. All the same, the films of Douglas Sirk, the novels of Ouida or an opera like Rosenkavalier can plausibly be included within a discussion of the homosexual aesthetic.
We can carry on, inconclusively, with permutations of these elements-creator, subject, audience. The musicals of Stephen Sondheim are written by a homosexual and appreciated by a largely homosexual audience, but do not address homosexuality. Gay art? The paintings of Caravaggio are homosexual in subject and their creator was homosexual, but they do not have a predominantly homosexual audience. The novels of Mary Renault are mostly about male homosexuality, were written by a lesbian and read originally by a mass audience. Now they are read predominantly by homosexuals. Gay art? You begin to see the problem. Yet, if we took only the writing which fulfils all three criteria, the bulk of it would be pornography.
So this is what the standard definition of gay literature is: something without pornographic ambitions, written for and by homosexuals about homosexuality. EM Forster’s Maurice, written before the first world war but only published after his death, falls into this category. Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, subject of an obscenity trial in 1929, must be considered, and perhaps also the novels of Ronald Firbank. WH Auden, in the 1930s, sometimes addressed this coterie audience exclusively. There is a line in one of his sonnets, “to lie flat on the back with the knees flexed,” which only a homosexual would recognise as being a reference to passive sodomy.
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CAR Hills
It was only a month or two ago that I told my mother I was gay, although I am 45. She now lives in Portugal, her native country, but she was staying with me in London. She had just revealed to me that although her huge seaside villa would remain mine after her death, as it must under Portuguese law, she had given a lifelong tenancy of the upstairs flat to her much younger live-in lover. When I heard this, I went berserk for two days.
She didn’t react much when I broke my unwelcome news about being gay, but returned to the subject several times in a way which seemed clever to her (she’s going slightly funny). She said once, “What would you think if I told you I was a fressureira?”
“If I knew what that meant, I might be able to answer.”
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Evan Davis
Gay marriage
Dear Melanie,
Before I say anything, let me come out of the closet as an admirer of your newspaper columns. It is my respect for your cautious attitude towards social permissiveness which makes me determined to persuade you that gay and lesbian couples should be offered some kind of marriage arrangement to solidify their relationships. I hope you will find my case convincing, because it is based on an outlook rather close to your own.
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