Reflections of a stormy petrel

Everything I find written about practicing homosexuals intimates that they were aware of their "difference" from an early age, and certainly from their teens. But in my own experience, the two homosexual men I knew best only turned to their own sex in their mid-twenties, after considerable experience with women. And I would like to be sure that this business of young teens being already gay is not a matter of retrojection and personal mythology. After all, there has hardly ever been a teen-ager who did not feel "different".

When I heard of the well-named Mrs.Robinson's lust-crazed behaviour and attempted suicide, I was disposed to sympathy. After all, I know better than most the situation of someone who warns against sins he knows - all too well. But when I heard one remark made by her husband - to which, one assumes, she fully submitted - then all sympathy flew away. I have no pity for someone who could so falsify Christian moral teaching as to say that "I did not say that homosexuality is an abomination, God did."

What shallow, ugly nonsense. Do not expect from me a defence of homosexual practice as such; the Church teaches against it. But the Church also teaches that the impulse as such is not a sin; only the practice is; and what is more, the Church teaches, and has always taught, that homosexual fornication is bad in no other way than any other form of fornication. That is what makes Mrs.Robinson's great sin so ironic: she fell into what, according to age-old Christian teaching, was the exact same sin - only a different specification - that she and her husband were busy pushing beyond the boundaries of the human (that is what "abomination" means). And to add to the irony, it was exactly in Ireland that the equivalence of all forms of fornication had been clearly formulated. The earliest Celtic penitentials (the systematic study of morality and guilt is one of the great contributions of the Celtic Churches to Christianity), though ascribed to two saints, Gildas and David, who were notoriously at the opposite end of doctrine and practice, nonetheless fully agree in this: the penances inflicted for homosexual practice (and for homosexual practice only) are exactly the same as those imposed for fornication with women.

If that is the case, where does the peculiar savagery with which the West has long since treated homosexual practice? The answer is simple enough; it is, in fact, present, black on white, in some of the best known and most widely studied documents in history. It came from Roman law, and specifically from the changes wrought in it by one of the worst tyrants in history. The murderous Justinian I, would-be restorer and effective destroyer of the Roman Empire, codified the whole of Roman law in an enormous Code called after him; but in codifying the law, he also put in some enactments of his own, one of which featured the death penalty for homosexuality. He needed it in order to get rid of undesired clergymen and aristocrats.

It must be understood that for most of our history, everything Roman has had a kind of glow placed on it. Ancient Rome was always taken to be a model, however it was perceived. And when Roman law was rediscovered in the twelfth century - after centuries in which Europe, including Italy, had developped a different customary law of Teutonic origin - its superiority was taken for granted. And so judicial murder for sodomy became part of the law of the land. That was not the only horror that resurrected Roman law brought to Christendom: its prestige also covered the codification of torture as a normal instrument of police investigation - which it remained until the eighteeenth century and Cesare Beccaria - and the codification of slavery. Slavery had disappeared from Europe during the Dark Ages; from the moment Roman law was resurrected, there were constant attempts to reintroduce it in various ways, or to alter serfdom into slavery, according to time and place. It was because of one such bright idea that the English peasant rebels fo 1381 had intended to "kill all the lawyers"; they knew, all too well, that legal ideas being pushed included their own enslavement.

I do not feel bound to any of this kind of heritage. It has nothing to do with Christianity. Let us remember one basic point: to a Christian, everyone is a sinner. Including, most certainly, himself, or herself. If I say that a practicing homosexual is a sinner, it is no more than I should and do say about myself, for the practice of a myriad sins none of which I am going to tell you about. I certainly do not mean that the practice should be called an abomination, any more than any other sin is an abomination. Some sins certainly are, beginning with murder and abortion; but I am myself guilty of so many things that I should be the last to condemn others. I walk as a sinner among sinners, and if I ever say that anything is an "abomination" - something from which human beings should flee as from the plague - it will certainly not be the insanitary and rather sad practices with which some people try to ease a desire that cannot be eased. Try murder, or abortion, or the oppression of distant peoples; those, not these, deserve to be called abominations.

There are sins, and there are sinners, whom one should reject; crimes that really are abnormal, that affect the sane human being with a sense not only of anger but of misery, enormous wrongs that cannot be altered. Abortion is an abomination; Nazism is an abomination; Communism is an abomination; Leopold II's conquest of the Congo was an abomination. These evils subvert the very order of society and involve an infinite number of attendant evils, themselves monstrous enough to damn a man's soul, as states and professions are perverted, rank by rank, office by office, person by person - till everyone is guilty of something monstrous. The railway clerks and signalmen who kept the trains running in Nazi Germany made sure that cattle trains loaded with prospective murder victims were efficiently driven to Auschwitz or Sobibor. This is what abomination looks like. To extend that to homosexual practice - let alone to "homosexuality" - is an insult; an insult to the dead who were its victims, and to the damned who let themselves be swept away with its flood, and damned their own souls in consequence.

Myself, I really am not interested in my neighbour's sins. My own are quite enough to be getting on with. And to condemn one man for one of his sins makes sure that all of us will be condemned, always. The experience of Mrs.Robinson ought to be instructive in this regard. If you condemn a man for this "abomination", you condemn some of the finest people who ever lived. You condemn Plato, Virgil, Michelangelo and Tchaikovsky - something that should occur to no civilized man.

Most of us know that ever since the bloke with the beard took over Cuba, homosexuality - associated with the island's supposed pre-revolutionary past as a haven of Yanqui degeneracy - has been suppressed, persecuted and punished by (what passes in Cuba for) law. Well, no more. Raul Castro seems to have noticed that his putative allies in the extreme left have changed their view on that little matter - and so, from one minute to the next, Cuba has turned from hell for homosexuals to San Francisco without the Diet Coke. In a few days, with the speed and efficiency of tyranny, the Cuban government has passed rules that allow the changing of one's identity, sex-change operations and the eventual legalization of homosexual unions.

Now understand me: I have absolutely no intention of making any direct comparison between the promotion of "gay marriage" and the like, and the horrors of the nineteen-thirties. However little I may like some features of this (and on sex-change operations I am agnostic), it is simply not on the same moral level as the promotion of mass murder. So I positively beg the looking-for-offence brigade not to distort what I am about to say. But this sudden and extreme change of tack by a hardened tyranny looking for support where they had previously had enemies reminds me of nothing so much as Mussolini's appalling race laws of 1938. Apart from their own native loathsomeness, which itself cries vengeance to Heaven, these vicious perversions of the concept of law were execrable because they represented a complete about-face on a matter on which Mussolini had been consistent since 1919, namely toleration and protection of Italy's Jewish population. He sold the Jews down the river, and broke his word given to them over and over again, in order to align himself to a man whom he had previously treated as an enemy and actually nearly gone to war with only four years earlier. Now countries change allies, and Italy's reasons to do so in 1938 were only too easy to see; but to change ally is one thing, and to change your whole ideology to suit your ally is another. Mussolini made himself, not the ally, but the slave of Hitler; in that one dreadful act there were the inevitable seeds of all the seven years that followed.

Of course the Cuban Communist about-face is not on the same level. It does not, for one thing, represent the State suddenly turning a hate-ridden and murderous face to a class of citizens it had always protected before. Where murderousness and inhumanity are concerned, el partido is pretty much where it has always been, not better, but not worse. What is clearly reminiscent of Mussolini is the way that a tyranny throws away decades of practice and implicit principle, however bad, not out of principle but out of transparent and undignified grovelling before an ally.

In her private life, JK Rowling is a fairly typical, though not slavish, member of the moderately educated left. Her honesty to her own imagination, though, has been leading her in all sorts of directions which seem increasingly incompatible with the ordinary sort of left-wing attitudes prevalent in Britain. In her private life, after a few traumatic years as a single mother, she lends her face to the group that represents single-parent families; in the novels, there are no single-parent families at all, and the most attractive family by far is the largest. In her private life, she is a feminist; in the novels, she delivers a strikingly attractive picture of not merely male, but patriarchal authority and wisdom. In her private life, she talks nonsense about Susan Pevensie “discovering sex” and C.S.Lewis “punishing her” for it; in Goblet of Fire, she delivers a delightful and truthful account of Harry and co. fumbling towards the other sex – and if she gets the details of male love totally wrong in Half-Blood Prince, she at least continues with a picture of teen-agers growing towards heterosexual love and marriage. One in which, by the way, and contrary to contemporary clichés, sex as such is of very minor importance indeed – so much for teen-agers’ supposedly rioting hormones. In her private life, she has clearly stated that she does not approve of boarding schools (in their peculiar British form, with its class and political overtones, as “public schools”); but the novels are based on a brilliant and magnetic vision of all the peculiar glamour and romance of this very peculiar British institution, to the point that they have actually contributed both to an increase in the number of boarding school students, and to a tendency in the British state school system towards a closer imitation of “public schools”. And then there are the Umbridge chapters of Order of the Phoenix, with Umbridge teaching “non-violent conflict resolution and negotiation”, and Harry leading an underground class in the use of weapons; one might practically be reading a tract by an American right-to-bear-arms supporter.

Now, I think there is evidence elsewhere that JKR does tend to react to her readers’ concerns and interests. The whole Tonks and Remus affair seems to me to have been put in to address fannish shipping concerns – or because, as I would argue, it was a most attractive and charming pairing. JKR found it, found it attractive, and used it – but less felicitously than kikei or pandoraculpa, possibly exactly because it was imitative. The revelation of Blaise Zabini’s identity and background is in my view less successful (here I tread on poisoned ground: some scumbag deliberately lied about my views in f_w, to make me sound like a racist, leading to the most unnecessary flamewar I ever fought) but reflects just as much a reaction to fannish concerns. The mere throwaway name of the Slytherin had roused more fan interest than any other minor character, not exluding Grindelwald; owing, as I argued long ago, to the fact that it suggests two of the “coolest” nationalities possible, French and/or Italian. (There was also a pathetically ignorant attempt to prove that someone called Blaise could possibly be female; of which, the least said, the better.) I think that the sudden revelation of a wholly different descent represents JKR’s irritation at all the froth generated by a mere name. So JKR does, in my view, react to reader concerns.

I think, however, that with the growth of her success and influence, a much more basic anxiety must have touched her mind. However little she may read of criticism, review and debate – and she could never keep up with the cataracts of argument that take place daily across six continents – she must have started to notice that most of those who dislike her world, treat her as ideologically unsound, or attack her writing, tend to come from the media and literary left; while many of her keenest and most outspoken defenders not only come from the right but have a decidedly conservative axe to grind. Most of all, she must be clear in her mind – for she is not stupid – that her own work does provide them with plenty of ammunition.

So, I think, she decided to do something to balance matters.

In one feature, she has done it with such artistic integrity and insight that it has gone unnoticed. The Dumbledore family, broken by tragedy that turns brother against brother and hag-ridden by secrets, makes a striking counterpart to the Weasleys, and heavily qualifies what had been so far an almost one-sided view of the family as a fortress. And at the same time, she manages to slip in, credibly and imaginatively, a classic left-wing topic – unhappiness and oppression come from outside, from “society”. The Dumbledores are ruined by the brutal and stupid assault on their daughter, and by the oppressive Ministry laws that force the father into Azkaban and the mother into taking the family into virtual concealment. As a result, circumstances deprive brilliant young Albus of the intellectual companionship that is his natural environment, forcing him back into the restricted world of his brother; and his brother, in turn, develops the surly and very negative attitude that will haunt them both. This leads in turn to Albus being seduced – whether sexually or not it does not matter – by Grindelwald, a breath of fresh air to the virtually exiled teen-ager. It is not, as in the most shallow and doctrinaire left attitudes, exclusively the fault of society; the arrogance of Mrs.Dumbledore, the resentment of Aberforth, make their own contribution to the picture of unhappiness and constriction; but the primary impulse is from an oppressive state of society. And as it is done with such a light touch, with such keen observation and truth to life, that we never even stop to think about the socio-political message it conveys. Also, to that extent, it shows that a left-wing viewpoint has something to say about society that is not merely escapist or doctrinaire, that it is grounded in real experience. Oppression does exist. People may be ruined and twisted from outside as well as from inside. Lives may be ruined by burdens they are not responsible for. All this is very true and very good.

However, the supposed revelation of Dumbledore’s homosexuality, though much more resonant, is far less felicitous. Of course, it has drawn a shower of praise from the usual suspects, from the detestable Peter Tatchell to, alas, my friend avus; and that is, in my view, just what JKR intended. She was not happy with the party tinge her work was acquiring – very much against her conscious will – and decided to reposition it in the most visible and blatant way. Whether she had always intended Dumbledore as an aged homosexual, or whether this is something she retconned into the previous six novels, is not relevant here; the point is that it is done so badly that it works against her conscious purpose. I have nothing against Potterverse characters being gay (though I do object to the perversity of switchknife and the like, who seem incapable of touching any male character without making him, not so much a homosexual, as an arse-bandit). My favourite candidates for the role, as I repeatedly said, are Harry himself, Dudley, and Moody, but I have no great objection to Dumbledore being one if you insist, ma’am. The point is however that there is nothing in Dumbledore that tends to suggest it.

As a homosexual correspondent pointed out on superversive’s LJ a while back, being homosexual does not just mean occasionally falling for pretty boys (or girls) or even having the occasional mad passion or great lifelong love. It means that your whole way of looking at the sexes, that is at the whole of society, is different. For ninety-seven per cent or so of mankind, the possibility of desire between (unrelated) man and woman is so natural that it is taken for granted, being factored in into professional, commercial, working, social relationships of every kind and quite across the board. Notice, for instance, how often married couples will consort with other married couples. It is at the heart of everything that is peculiar in the interplay of the sexes, from the conventions of chivalry to the cultural fear of rape.

For the remaining three per cent, however, this permanent potential for sexual desire is vested in their own sex. A homosexual man invests his own sex, especially the younger and more handsome of them, with what medieval English called daungier – the power and danger of possible attraction. Does anything that Dumbledore does tend to suggest it? It is possible, of course, to answer in the positive. He can be said to be virtually idolatrous towards handsome, green-eyed Harry Potter, and at the same to hide away from him – especially in Order of the Phoenix - with exaggerated caution, as a man would from a possible object of attraction. The problem is however that none of these things is ever presented as in any way strange or excessive or out of the norm. If Dumbledore admires Harry, then so do the rest of us. If Dumbledore keeps away from Harry, we know he has the best possible reason – with Voldemort in Harry’s mind, Harry is a possible spy at court. What is more, Dumbledore takes immediate measures to remove the problem, ordering Harry to study Occlumency.

But whether or not JKR actually meant it from the beginning, the fact is that the supposed revelation of Dumbledore’s sexual tendencies could not have been worse managed. First, as I pointed out last time, it rests on an odious fallacy, rooted mostly in female suspicion and jealousy – that passionate male friendships must have something sexual at the bottom of them. Second, its impact on Dumbledore is wholly negative. There is none even of the reparative function that, in my view, homosexual passion does afford to damaged spirits. It is quite literally a seduction into evil. It allows Grindelwald to suspend Dumbledore’ sense of morality and critical intellect, drives him to a fraudulent world of sick fantasy and the most debased kind of wish-fulfilment and ego tripping, connects him, in short, with everything that is vicious and depraved. And it leaves Dumbledore with a permanent suspicion of himself – worse, with a sick disgust of himself and his motives – that makes him permanently less effective as an opponent of evil. If an anti-gay campaigner had wanted to present a profoundly negative view of homosexual passion, he or she could not possibly have done a better job of it.

As I said, Peter Tatchell and the usual suspects are cock-a-hoop. What is it about a certain kind of fanatic, that always leads him to applaud everything that is most contrary both to his interests and to his beliefs?

A while ago, a person with whom I no longer correspond discussed with me the role of the Church in the history of Nazi Germany. Her views led me to write a whole essay, which I think contains some good things, and I have decided to publish it. The first paragraph contains my opponent's views; the rest, mine. Because of its size, I have been forced to cut it in two parts; bear in mind that the next post on this LJ contains the second part.

( Read more... )

I remain convinced of the utter necessity of reforming many branches of the Catholic Church, especially the American, Brazilian, German and Dutch ones, to clear them of the so-called Liberals. People who don't like the kind of thing that the Catholic Church has been for 1900 years have, these days, a supermarket's worth of alternative products to buy, including some which claim Apostolic Succession and allow them the fun, should they wish to, of taking part in beautifully conducted traditional rituals, rich with vestments and incense. There is no need for people who never believed any of the major Church dogmas to stay in a body whose views they oppose. The trouble is that, for forty years now, they have stayed and tried to subvert it from the inside. It was an absurd enterprise anyway, but it has succeeded just as much as it ever could - sowing scandal among the faithful, encouraging the Church's enemies, leading to sin and to schism.

However, I am more and more worried by the spirit that seems to be unleashing itself in North America now that the "liberals" are, at long last, on the defensive.( Read more... )