"With my tears go into your loneliness, my brother. I love him who wants to create over and beyond himself, and thus perishes.” Thus spoke Zarathustra.
I’ve observed lots of queer happenings from various parts of the planet over the last two years. After I was drugged and shipped to New Zealand by my academic peers, I worked my way steadily towards the West Coast of North Americashire with the wildly changing queer landscape trailblazing behind me. I crossed oceans of rednecks and mountains of sliding prejudice and tried to document what I saw along the way. Even when I was in physical danger I never stopped once to think about the miracle that is supposedly my ‘life’.
I can see the middle-age mountain ahead. The one that queers of my age were not really supposed to - we weren’t actually supposed to survive. And it wasn’t just the AIDS crisis that flawed our confidence, it happened way before that. We never partied like it was never gonna end, we knew more than anyone that it was. In return it gave us a feeling of invincibility – at nineteen, with a head full of drugs, I danced on the slutbox at Heaven because I knew that I was going to die.
I never wanted a career and a pension back then and still don’t now. And I’ve no issues about my big exit because I’m a God-hater. However, I do think it’s sensible to make living wills and arrangements for our own deaths and here is why. I, we, have managed to push though so much crap and get to the point we are now by stealth, and we have remained in control of our own keeling boats for so long against the unnecessary tsunamis of heteroland that, if I snuff it tomorrow, I still need to have some element of control at the back-end.
“As a queer, I’ve been a coffin dodger since the age of seventeen, so death holds no power for me”
The other day, I thought back to when AIDS funerals were as popular as cable re-runs of Strictly. I remembered those final send offs hijacked by christian families reclaiming, so they thought, the darkened soul of the one lead astray by evil forces of homosexuality. That was, just before God absolved them of the sins we always called ‘virtues’. Those families who could never grasp why we saddos preferred to live in dumps like Hackney, Streatham, The Castro or Silver Lake rather than on the industrial outskirts of the towns where we were born and took it daily on the chin. Maybe, we were too busy running for the Nietzschean edge of the abyss quoted above, by creating ‘above ourselves’ and perishing, joyously, as a result.
At the AIDS funerals, I remember all those mohawks flattened by discreet hats, pierce holes freshly visible in noses, ears and cheeks - so as not to offend the family who took up the first two rows. The people who had little interest in the body before them but now, in a collective grief, could claim him as their own and sanitise away anything other than a perceived identity or history. This would be the first time those angry, now bereft, brothers would be shamed into crying. Later, as a result of their uncontrollable emotion they’d waltz in and take the houses, let the dogs free in a local park, sell the collateral and demonise the living partner for passing on such a heinous disease to their dear brother. All permissible by law.
There are still no words for the expressions on those families’ faces
when in excess of a thousand mourning queers turned up and spilled
out into the streets. There’s nothing as powerful as the emotional
corrective of an extended family of queers to bring the matter home.
“Who knew he was so... popular...”
There’s nothing quite like a full on Catholic burial, replete with liturgies about what ‘clean decent people’ the deceased were when the audience is comprised mainly of leather and piss club collectives and circuit party-ers. I’d want my own liturgy to mention those 15 gorgeous men I spent one single night with in a sauna, who meant more to me and my memory than every school friend I ever had. I want the parts of my life and the stuff I felt as ‘normal’ to be valued. And if you don’t want to hear it, then don’t bother going...
As a queer, I’ve been a coffin dodger since the age of seventeen, so death holds no power for me. There have been no days in my adult life when I have not been confronted with death, even if I haven’t recognised it. And for the people out there who may patronise us about how wonderful life is and how we must cherish all of it at all times, that if we don’t we must be somehow ‘depressed’ - here, take this pill...
I’m not depressed. I’m a realist and I’ve lived long enough to see both sides of the dying crap and it has zilch power. God forbid in a Christian way, our death is hijacked by the very people who caused it. But that doesn’t really matter - because we’ll be dead. However, and this isn’t narcissism, I don’t want that last image of myself to be one surrounded by sacred hearts and flowers or Virgin Marys in a chapel of rust. Throw me at the side of the road, chuck me in the Manchester ship canal. This isn’t me being disrespectful to my loved ones, it’s just me not sanctioning some weird process designed for the arrogance of the living. And I will not be packaged up in normativity when I am too incapacitated (okay - dead) to do anything about it.
Click here for published version of this article
“Who knew he was so... popular...”
There’s nothing quite like a full on Catholic burial, replete with liturgies about what ‘clean decent people’ the deceased were when the audience is comprised mainly of leather and piss club collectives and circuit party-ers. I’d want my own liturgy to mention those 15 gorgeous men I spent one single night with in a sauna, who meant more to me and my memory than every school friend I ever had. I want the parts of my life and the stuff I felt as ‘normal’ to be valued. And if you don’t want to hear it, then don’t bother going...
As a queer, I’ve been a coffin dodger since the age of seventeen, so death holds no power for me. There have been no days in my adult life when I have not been confronted with death, even if I haven’t recognised it. And for the people out there who may patronise us about how wonderful life is and how we must cherish all of it at all times, that if we don’t we must be somehow ‘depressed’ - here, take this pill...
I’m not depressed. I’m a realist and I’ve lived long enough to see both sides of the dying crap and it has zilch power. God forbid in a Christian way, our death is hijacked by the very people who caused it. But that doesn’t really matter - because we’ll be dead. However, and this isn’t narcissism, I don’t want that last image of myself to be one surrounded by sacred hearts and flowers or Virgin Marys in a chapel of rust. Throw me at the side of the road, chuck me in the Manchester ship canal. This isn’t me being disrespectful to my loved ones, it’s just me not sanctioning some weird process designed for the arrogance of the living. And I will not be packaged up in normativity when I am too incapacitated (okay - dead) to do anything about it.
Click here for published version of this article