Up Queer Street

Our friend Carol said we just had to read David Sedaris in the  September 9, 2024, New Yorker –  “The Hem of His Garment about his audience with the Pope. It was hilarious, she said, and so it was.

It’s an irreverent and self-deprecating account of the Pope’s invitation to comedians to visit the Vatican. And – because they are comedians – they share Catholic jokes – 

A cop stops a car two priests are riding in. “I’m looking for a couple of child molesters,” he tells them.

The priests look at each other. “We’ll do it!” they say.

– and God jokes and highlights the absurdities of it all including his own in buying a cassock purchased from the Pope’s own tailor. He notes that the thirty-three buttons symbolize the years of Jesus’s life but leave you “wishing he’d been crucified at twelve.”

The Pope and Homosexuals

Apparently the Pope has been making friendly overtures to homosexuals:

Pope Francis can’t preside over same-sex marriages, but he created a firestorm within his Church by blessing gay people about to be married. “If they accept the Lord and have good will, who am I to judge them?” he asked, in 2013.

This is obviously not full acceptance but Sedaris thinks of it this way:

My feeling is that if you want a church that is a hundred per cent gay-friendly, go join one—there are plenty to be had—or start your own. “Yes, but I want Our Lady of Sorrows to celebrate Pride Month,” I can hear someone whining.

It’s like going to Burger King and demanding a Big Mac. If you want a Big Mac, go across the street to McDonald’s. Jesus.

Gay not Queer

Sedaris also comments:

I wasn’t bothered by the Pope’s use of “faggotry” because I’m not queer; I’m gay. The difference is that queer people are offended by just about everything. Gay people just wonder what they’ll wear to the Vatican at the crack of dawn, and what the proper etiquette is.

Gay, not queer. And yes there is a difference. Decades ago – when “queer” was a slur hurled most often at gay men and too frequently accompanied by violence – we marched in the streets and sometimes chanted:

We’re here, we’re queer
Get used to it.

Meaning homosexuals are a part of the world and stop with the discrimination.

These days “queer” – the noun –  appears to mean people who think they are special in some way and who adhere to an ideology that encompasses every fetish, kink, and perversion imaginable. Seems queer to me. 

To be “queer” is to make a statement that you wish to be seen as different from what you perceive as society’s imposition of normality and conformity. It seems to involve railing against the immutable and binary nature of human sex while wearing mismatched outfits and sporting loud hair dye. (Reality: We are all male or female. No one chooses their sex and no one can change it. there are three sexual orientations. The variety of human personality is infinite.) 

No wonder that there is a growing movement to restore the meaning of #LGB and keep a distance from the antics of the rest of the alphabet. It makes sense as one group is about sexual orientation and the other a collection of chosen identities driven by the political ideology of gender theory.

On Xtwitter, @Serena_Partrick – who uses the name of the homophobic, misogynist musician Billy Bragg as her online handle – posted this:

Queer Theory, the reason so many people keep talking about “queering” everything, is a Trojan Horse for p*edophilia.

Never underestimate what highly motivated s*xual deviants can achieve.

All this is a long way from what i set out to write about – three classic mysteries all with a school or college setting and in all of which the word “queer” appears mostly in line with this definition from my copy of the wonderfully old-timey 1933 Westminster English Dictionary.

Murder in the Basement, Anthony Berkeley 1932

Death on the Cherwell, Mavis Doriel Hay 1935

The Horizontal Man, Helen Eustis, 1946

Murder, mischief, malice, and mayhem in schools. Such a rich topic.