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May you of a better future, love without a care and remember we loved too
A really nice thing that happened this afternoon: I am sitting outside the Kendall/MIT stop, reading Derek Jarman's At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament (1993).
For the first twenty-five years of my life I lived as a criminal, and the next twenty-five were spent as a second-class citizen, deprived of equality and human rights. No right to adopt children—and if I had children, I could be declared an unfit parent; illegal in the military; an age of consent of twenty-one; no right of inheritance; no right of access to a loved one; no right to public affection; no right to an unbiased education; no legal sanction of my relationships and no right to marry. These restrictions subtly deprived me of my freedom. It seemed unthinkable it could be any other way, so we all accepted this.
Somewhere in Thatcher's '80's, I look up. There's just me and two couples on the benches. They're both male. One couple came walking hand-in-hand across the courtyard and are now sitting a bench down from me, wrapped around each other in a comfortably talking, massively public display of affection; the other met up on the bench opposite me, where the last time I looked it was just the one guy reading, and are leaning with their shoulders together, looking at something on the other guy's phone. This is remarked on by absolutely no one except me and the disparity between the page and the plaza. I'm good with it.
For the first twenty-five years of my life I lived as a criminal, and the next twenty-five were spent as a second-class citizen, deprived of equality and human rights. No right to adopt children—and if I had children, I could be declared an unfit parent; illegal in the military; an age of consent of twenty-one; no right of inheritance; no right of access to a loved one; no right to public affection; no right to an unbiased education; no legal sanction of my relationships and no right to marry. These restrictions subtly deprived me of my freedom. It seemed unthinkable it could be any other way, so we all accepted this.
Somewhere in Thatcher's '80's, I look up. There's just me and two couples on the benches. They're both male. One couple came walking hand-in-hand across the courtyard and are now sitting a bench down from me, wrapped around each other in a comfortably talking, massively public display of affection; the other met up on the bench opposite me, where the last time I looked it was just the one guy reading, and are leaning with their shoulders together, looking at something on the other guy's phone. This is remarked on by absolutely no one except me and the disparity between the page and the plaza. I'm good with it.
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Nine
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I had even forgotten it was still Pride weekend.
It's not perfect, and it's still changing, and no one should settle. But it's better. And I like that.
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It's the next-to-last line of Jarman's book. I thought it was the last thing he had written; it turns out Chroma (1994) postdates it, but At Your Own Risk is certainly his last direct act of autobiography. Worth reading if you are interested by his films, his way of seeing the world, a passionate and political record of the experiences of a gay man born in Britain in 1942. I don't know if it's the best of his memoirs—Dancing Ledge (1984/1993) is just amazing—but it is the one he thought most important at the end of his life and he might have been right. He didn't live to see the future he wanted, but he was right that we'd be closer to it. Reading him in the better future is almost like letting him know.
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Well, I can be reminded of that almost constantly. It's an ancient fallacy that the present is a degenerate age—Livy complains about the headlong careen of the whole world into the toilet at the start of his Ab urbe condita and that was over two thousand years ago. I like the past, but I wouldn't live in most of it for any number of reasons. What it's rarer to be reminded of are ways in which the world has grown specifically better. This was a nice conjunction.
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I agree, most of the time, but I'd been getting a barrage of "the world is going away in a handbasket, etc" stuff yesterday through FB friends, media, etc, especially WRT impending environmental doom.
What it's rarer to be reminded of are ways in which the world has grown specifically better. This was a nice conjunction.
Indeed.
In other news, did you see yesterday's Google doodle, the Maurice Sendak one? I found it on youtube last night, but I can't seem to locate the link now. I'll do further digging if you've missed it.
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Yes.