mattbaume patreon

Bonus video! My So-Called Life's 90s Costume Inspiration, and PBS's Gay Past

🕑 Added 2024-10-06 16:00:15 +0000 UTC

Comments

Michelle K.B.

I knew I had heard of Oranges are the Only fruit in a book context. Before it was a 1990 BBC serial it was a 1985 UK semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel. Wikipedia describes it as being about a “sensitive teenage” lesbian rebelling against an Evangelical upbringing. The BBC did a newer version of it in 2016

claire bee

Oh, please talk about VIP, it is such glorious madness! Speaking of glorious madness (and also early, somewhat problematic queer stuff), have you ever come across The Farce of Sodom, or The Quintessence of Debauchery? It’s a little mini-play from the 17th century, and basically it goes like this: the King of Sodom announces that being gay is legal. Most of the men in the kingdom immediately decide that they’re going to bang guys now, leaving the women to get it on with a) each other, b) the few men left who are still clinging to straightness, and c) animals. Then a guy shows up to announce that everyone in the kingdom has venereal disease now, and also the judgement of God will descend unless everyone repents. The king refuses to repent, fire falls from Heaven, end of play. Well, clearly this is not exactly what you might call positive representation. However, it’s interesting that the final voice we hear is not that of the moralising guy, but the entirely unrepentant king, still insisting on living an openly queer life even as the heavens fall. And it kind of has the same sort of deliberately transgressive, let’s-freak-out-the-normies-as-much-as-possible feel to it as the early films of John Waters, so there’s that. Plus there’s the fact that, at the time, it would have almost certainly been impossible to get it published if it just ended with happy queer people living their best lives. Now this play was never, so far as I know, performed on a stage, and almost certainly was never even intended to be. There was a bit of a thing back in the day (and to some extent even now) where people wrote plays that were intended to be read, not performed. And because you would read things in your private room, and your private room was at that time called your closet, this was called “closet drama”. So one of the very earliest openly queer narratives is also an example of closet drama. I do like these little historical ironies! By the way, a lot of people attribute The Farce of Sodom to John Wilmot. Personally, I don’t believe it for a moment. It’s not that I can’t imagine him writing it: I just don’t think he would have been capable of first publishing it anonymously, and then spending the entire rest of his life not saying or doing anything that would have absolutely confirmed him as the author. That feels like a level of discretion and self-control that would have been extremely out of character for him. Anyway, here it is on Amazon if you want to buy it (the links seem to be a lot shorter on the .com version than they are on .co.uk): https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+farce+of+sodom&ref=nav_bb_sb