This post samples from Volume Two, specifically its opening chapter, "Concerning Martyrs, from Demons to the Undead."
Update, 4/9/2024: I've decided to attach "Psychosexual Martyrdom" to the the sample chapter, "Brace for Impact" (2024), another book sample for my upcoming monster volume (rough ETA, mid-2024) and of which the opening section "Hugging the Alien" is already available on this blog.
"Brace for Impact" is actually a full chapter that divides into over thirteen pieces (clocking in at ~85,000 words, ~209 pages, ~139 images, and sixteen new exhibits). "Hugging the Alien" is the first piece; "Time," the second; "Teaching" (the opening), the third; "Medicine," the fourth; "Facing Death," the sixth. The others are actually too erotic to feature uncensored on Blogger, so I will be posting them on my (18+) website, instead. Click here to see the promo post for the entire sample chapter and links to all thirteen pieces.
Volume Two is the upcoming Humanities primer/monster volume for my book project, Sex Positivity (2023); "Psychosexual Martyrdom" asks the reader to humanize the oppressed through reclaimed monsters by learning from the monstrous past as something to recreate ourselves in our own artwork:
About my book: My name is Persephone van der Waard and I am currently writing and illustrating a non-profit book series on sex positivity and the Gothic. Made in collaboration with other sex workers, the project is a four-volume set called Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Liberating Sex Workers under Capitalism through Iconoclastic Art. As of 2/14/2024, my thesis volume and manifesto volume are available online (the other volumes shall release over the remainder of 2024). To access my live volumes, simply go to my website's 1-page promo and pick up your own copies for free. While you're there, you can also learn about the yet-unreleased volumes, project history and logo design/promo posters!
Concerning Martyrs, from Demons to the Undead: Learning from
the Monstrous Past; or, a Humanities Primer to Humanize Reclaimed Monsters with
Capitalism has no use for people who see each
other as human; it wants us dehumanizing ourselves so capital can function as
normal, moving money through nature at the cost of human life. Capitalism needs us
to die, so we need to remember and honor Nex' humanity. We must
if some of us are to survive and develop a better world, one that
Capitalism forbids us from imagining through Capitalist Realism (the canceled
future, one where vigilante violence against "mutants" is expected
and performed as a means of escapist fun). We need to stand together against
the ultimate foe: the state and its enforcers, but also their harmful illusions
(source).
—Persephone van der Waard, "Remember the Fallen:
An Ode to Nex Benedict," (2024)
Capitalism is unstable by design. When you have economic
crisis (which is engineered), you get moral panic (which is also engineered);
from moral panic, you get persecution using appropriated cultural signifiers:
black magic as something to woo and awestrike the in-group into a position of
fascinated apathy towards all manner of out-groups. Anyone who is different is
marked as such, driving an economy of witch hunts and police-state militarism
tied to settler colonialism and Cartesian thought. At home and abroad, this vicious
cycle is the creation of an enemy ad infinitum, often a supernatural,
queer/alien one tied to nature, to Hell, to the exotic and far-off but also the
close-by savage, sodomite and imaginary "barbaric." Presented as
weak/strong scapegoats, these personas are simultaneously ripe for the taking and
responsible for the degeneracy of the youth, rape of women, and fall of Civilization.
They are both infantilized and blamed for everything by those expected to bring
these cataclysms about: weird canonical nerds.
It's a con, then, one carried
out by the gullible, zealous and cynical. Thanks to the monomyth as didactic,
the colonizers envision themselves as "knights" fighting the good
fight. Yet, they are Quixotic, with "courtly love" being a cryptonym
for lust of the cis-het male sort: the open secret of rape as synonymous with "protection"
in their eyes. Put differently, Capitalism is heteronormative, exploiting
workers in sexually dimorphic ways that lead to state decay through Capitalist
Realism: the world as parasitized behind the illusion, killing host and
parasitoid alike. All the while, said nerds project their terrorism onto
others, calling their actions "counterterror" to disguise settler colonialism
(and its stochastic terrorism) while chasing their victims down. It's a monopoly whose process
must be humanized by learning from the monstrous past as psychosexually martyred,
stalling Capitalism and helping it develop into Gothic Communism; i.e., by
subverting its heteronormative, kill-on-sight illusions with genderqueer ludo-Gothic
BDSM iterations that thwart Capitalist Realism and achieve active
intersectional solidary from various marginalized groups working in concert.
Note: Such a concert obviously involves numerous parties of different
inclinations and preferences united against the elite. For here, we'll primarily
explore Numinous psychosexuality through queer monstrous martyrs (from
homosexual men to gender-non-conforming people at large) as something to not
only to behold in the present space and time, but evoke using iconoclastic
Gothic poetics in our own complicated artistic expression. —Perse
"Psychosexual" means "of sexuality and the mind," generally trauma; I further liken it to conflict—i.e., conflicting mind and sex, or "battle sex" through rape fantasy, theatre and play. So while Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything in service
to profit and all monsters are psychosexual to some degree, the chaos of iconoclastic monsters ultimately challenge the profit motive and its heteronormative, binarized theatrical language/performative roles (of sex and gender) as a delivery mechanism for orderly state abuse (canon vs camp); i.e., by
anisotropically reversing Gothic poetic's flow of power (often through deception,
concealment and revelation—cryptonymy) to humanize workers in spite of
Cartesian hegemony (and its grim harvests) and Capitalist Realism; e.g., terrorists and
counterterrorists, but also heroes and villains (from my thesis volume): "All heroes are monsters, thus liminal expressions
that are sexualized and gendered" (source). Challenging state monopolies by reversing
the dialectical-material function of said labels (and their oft-pornographic[1] poetics) is exactly
what we must do in order to succeed. Monsters as (often queer) code, a messy shadow zone full of darkness visible. It's where the magic (and the sex) happen.
All the while, surrender and segregation[2] are no defense because the state requires criminals to exist inside harmful, highly unequal distributions of power ("Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will" —Frederick Douglass). Instead, we must short-circuit the exchange of violence by humanizing ourselves as ordinarily being the givers and receivers of state harm made into something whose sex positivity—the giving and receiving of pleasure and pleasurable pain; i.e., sadists and masochists during sex-positive demon BDSM—of which the establishment cannot challenge: "The givers and receivers of a state-sanctioned conflict reveal both to be human, one losing its ability to receive punishment and the other to give it. Both must happen simultaneously and en masse for settler-colonialism to stop" ("Bushnell's
Requiem"). The state mustn't colonize us through fascism, thus
decaying into fractured forms of itself (and Capitalism) through medieval regressive
defenses of capital; it must be developed before then, from moment to
living moment, as gleaned from monstrous hauntology into something that stalls
genocide altogether. Though violence and force are required to challenge
the state, liberation comes not from sheer feat of arms, but rather from
subversive and transgressive reclamation of monstrous symbols: a pedagogy of
the oppressed that makes us human while presenting us as monsters abused
by the state. It's a tricky balance, mainly because violence as
something to perform and receive are not the same thing despite often appearing
identical; i.e., martyrs are generally raped by the state, which we have to convey mid-performance without actually getting raped if we can help it ("rape" meaning [for our purposes] "to disempower someone
or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them," generally
through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material
conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit): finding power while disempowered (the plight of the monstrous-feminine).
Again, it's tricky because mid-development, we will be criminalized regardless of what we do; but if
criminals become human, then the state's power crumbles, not ours.
The paradox stems from the manner in which those cast as monsters are designed to threaten
the state at all times—either by making demands that go outside their scope of
influence, but also because our mere existence must threaten the state and
its actors; i.e, because the state demands the arrangement as useful
to them. To survive this clear-and-obvious clusterfuck, we must become precious, saintly[3] and unkillable as monsters
are, but also loved. As something to perform, queer martyrdom is instrumental to our becoming loved without demanding our actual destruction. That sword is always hanging over our heads:
Military optimism, as I envisioned it ("The Promethean Quest and
James Cameron's Military Optimism in Metroid," 2021), is the
idea that you can kill your problems, somehow "slaying Medusa." But
you can't kill Medusa because her life-after-death persona represents things
that aren't people, alone; they're structures and the genocide
they cause seen in the final moments of the damned. Theirs isn't a question of
blind faith towards a self-righteous cause, but conscious conviction
towards a cause that is just (ibid.).
aren't. This requires terrifying those who would kill us for destroying the
dogma they hold dear at the cost of human life—our life—as normally the required
sacrifice for profit dressed up in American Liberalism (the give-and-take of
basic human rights, vis-à-vis Howard Zinn, but retreating as fascists do
towards a Zombie Caesar who eats workers at a greater and greater rate): a
persona attached to various uniforms. This can be literal military attire, vis-à-vis
Aaron Bushnell
The paradox for Bushnell is he made a choice to leave the
security of the Western mindset, his complete self-destruction an educational
act of siding indisputably with the oppressed by literally becoming one of
their number. He was not the Roman fool falling on his own
sword, but Medusa cutting off her own head to show it to the
West and freeze them solid. It took guts, conviction, and profound belief in a
better world. More to the point, it will endlessly haunt those people most used
to Western illusions ("Bushnell's
Requiem").
but
it easily extends to more overtly monstrous forms of martyred expression related
to state abuses of power on all registers. A state in decay will colonize, thus
cannibalize, its local population from the outside in. Like Joan of Arc, we must
transcend, becoming something the flames cannot burn, and for which rioting will
result if the flames touch us. The state relies on holy violence to sustain its
ranks, making the passion of our suffering and that of its regular or
tokenized soldiers (e.g., Glory, 1989) utterly necessary to maintain and continue itself through a fresh and ever-flowing supply. If we can't fully protect ourselves, then we must sicken them
to the bloodspill, our ashes carried by the wind to dispel the state's ravenous
celebration of our tragic deaths:
(exhibit 33b2:Artist, left: Reubens; bottom-left: Malcolm
Browne, of Thích Quảng Đức, 1963. Despite the seemingly quaint medievalism of sacrifice, there is an
awesome power and forcefulness in death [to say otherwise would be a tremendous
disservice to the slain]. Except while America is fed on martyrs, they expect the
sort that apologize for war abroad and at home. As demonstrated by Aaron
Bushnell, an American soldier, and Đức, a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk, martyrdom
can become a relevant means of protest that—despite a likeness to romanticized
forms in service to the state [e.g., Stranger Things, 2015, top left]— specifically
becomes a powerful form of non-violent resistance through self-sacrifice; i.e.,
as something the privileged inside the Imperial Core cannot deny or eat
happily. Instead, it will become poison to them, turning the sweet taste of
victory to ashes in their mouths. Time to slay, queens!
The idea is to "die" with irony insofar as death can be an effective mask whose terminal, holy guise likewise speaks to everyday non-fatal events: the orgasm. Except martyrdom, like sex, also involves a variety of performances that include our old
friend, ahegao aka "death face," as a sensuous, at-times undeniably erotic evocation of
exquisite psychosexual "torture" [the phallic, traumatic penetration of the arrows pushing deep into the sensitive flesh, but also fetishized[4] pressure points like the armpit: Saint Sebastian's second "pussy"]. To that, consider this exhibit a taste of things
to come when we examine the palliative Numinous and rapture in Stranger Things relative to my
own undead trauma [exhibit 39a2]: Vecna, per the ghost of the counterfeit, actually being a disastrous
projection of status-quo bigotries and systemic harm onto an imaginary other [the
predatory outsider] that targets vulnerable fringe parties routinely sacrificed
inside colonial projects by Capitalism and its usual in-group/token agents;
i.e., colonial benefactors attacking people of color and white women, etc, while
pinning it on a cartoon villain From Elsewhere; e.g., Max under Vecna's orgasmic,
vampiric spell [rolling
his eyes while he tortures and kills his victims, sucking them dry through rape and murder while gouging out the princess's eyes—skull fucking her]. The whole scenario is
an abject metaphor for Red Scare and Satanic panic we can turn on its head to
speak to our suffering in ways that don't peddle fatal nostalgia
to the next generation. By reversing the process of abjection, irony can be
injected into the torture, amounting to queer voices, for example, that speak
through death as something to perform in shockingly intense, boundary-pushing ways; e.g., Oscar Wilde's inspiration by Guido Reni's homoerotic painting
of Saint Sebastian[5], followed by the homicidal
pastiche of post-closet, early-'90s writers like Dennis Cooper having
twinks-in-peril expose themselves as theatrically "brutalized" but,
point in fact, remain unharmed:
He lies naked on a futon with his wrists tied
together, legs spread, feet jutting out of the frame. Twisted sheet, like a
skinny tornado. In the first shot his long, straight black hair's fallen into
his face, covering everything but the tip of his nose, chin, cheekbone, one
partly shut eye. He's seventeen. His body's too tensed to be dead or asleep.
That's supposedly a noose around his neck. […]
Third shot's a
close-up. His face, neck, 'noose,' shoulders, armpits. His tongue's flipped
over backward and pushed through his teeth. The underside's weird. His eyes are
alert, antsy. Each reflects a little camera and part of a hand. The 'noose' is
neither too tight nor particularly loose, like a necktie. His expression
suggests an inexperienced actor trying to communicate shock.
Four's a
medium shot. He's facedown, wrists untied, feet jutting out of the frame. His
arms are bent in a neo-Egyptian manner. His asscrack is covered with something
that vaguely resembles a wound when you squint. His back, ass, and legs are
generic pale teenager. His hair's studiedly askew like in photos of '60s
fashion models. His shoulders are pimply, narrow.
Five.
Close-up. The 'wound' is actually a glop of paint, ink, makeup, tape, cotton,
tissue, and papier-mache sculpted to suggest the inside of a human body. It
sits on the ass, crushed and deflated. In the central indentation there's a
smaller notch maybe one-half-inch deep. It's a bit out of focus. Still, you can
see the fingerprints of the person or persons who made it.
competing forces for or against the state[6]; including "death faces," "rape" porn without irony is simply rape canon as a form of state apologetics. Pleasure and pain, death and jouissance—such dichotomies
often blur during liminal expression, insofar as this varies per oppressed
group from moment to moment. So while it might be tempting to see martyrdom exclusively
as a kind of "snuff porn" within psychosexual expression, it also
exposes a practical utility to what's common and on hand. Ludo-Gothic
BDSM and its assorted contracts of negotiated play and exchange puts power back into the hands of those normally doomed to die from
exposure to state forces working with the devil they know to liberate themselves; e.g., the palliative Numinous; i.e., as something whose
memento mori evolves over time insofar as state control of a particular
group is relaxed or tightened, thus abjected or embraced in society at large. Historically,
the separation of these conditions is futile and generally beside the point.
Coil, for instance, was one of my ex Zeuhl's favorite bands,
and they loved Wilde and Cooper a great deal [in fact being friends with Cooper
in real life]. Yet they seemed to take great delight in "torturing"
me by exposing me to the perennial mystery of the beautiful sufferer as a morbid
joke. At times it was puzzling and gross, as Cooper showed in Frisk.
But, as he showed in his campy [and frankly terrible] movies, it could also be oddly funny[7]. In Like Cattle Towards Glow[8]
[2015] a young actor pretends to be dead for his partner while both are in bed.
The other asks him, lying face down and naked on the bed sheets, "Are you
still dead?" To that, Zeuhl looked at me and I them, we smirked, and then had
sex; sometimes while we fucked repeatedly in the days ahead, we'd even joke:
"Are you still dead?"
Martyrs are paradoxes in how the ideal of someone special
generally becomes a "ghost" that survives them after they die; i.e., the rise of a mode of queer-monstrous discourse [the Neo-Gothic] that, from Matthew Lewis onwards, helped GNC people camp canon through Walpole's ghosts [and later Marx'] as penned by them, but also of them. It can also apply
to those who fail to measure up. As I tell Bay in my fifth and final dedication
to them:
You taught me that when you make a
likeness of someone that you want to exist in place of the current version,
you're making a gravestone of something that never was, but could be in the
future with someone else. With you, babe, I don't have to. You're already
ideal. But it feels like a fairy tale—not a delusion to erect and lose
ourselves inside regarding a promised "better end," but a current
palace of play that helps us find joy and healing together.
For this entire volume, then, we'll investigate the
artistic history of oppositional praxis as a queer defense mechanism
that intersects with cis-exploitation by the state; i.e., past examples of the
Gothic imagination as a precursor to Gothic Communism, poetically expressing
the human condition through older monstrous language in relation to Capitalism,
labor and nature. As Gothic Communists, our revolutionary aim is to learn from
this expansive, pre-fascist past by humanizing monsters-as-martyrs through hauntological
xenophilia—an iconoclastic process and subject group that historically is
ostracized by the process of abjection, itself used to sexually devalue all
workers through canonical xenophobia and carceral hauntology inside the
infernal concentric pattern (the Gothic castle, home as foreign, inside of
itself as borrowed from past copies).
For instance, persons categorized as "monsters"
don't really want to be made into martyr-esque masks and called
"scary" by the in-group (e.g., Tom Noonan's Creature[9], below, set—as generally
is tradition—to immortal and touching music by Bruce Broughton: "Scary Mask & Phil's #1," 1987);
they want to be accepted and loved, shirking isolation as a social species
without feeling like impostors surrounded by a) people who want them dead, or b)
who they feel like they have to kill in order to survive. However, their
damned position within the out-group leaves them forever longing—desperately searching
for a lost sense of community and humanity from those excommunicating them. As
the pandemic showed, people don't want to be forced to wear a mask in order to
survive, nor be associated with the identity it puts forward as
"borrowed," but sometimes we have to, anyways. Capitalism gives us no
choice; either we adapt and put on the mask as a revolutionarily cryptonymic
device to reclaim from our enemies, or they use the same masks to get near
(face-to-face), then attack us at close range (exhibit 100a3) in a place we normally
feel safe: among friends/friendly monsters, out on the dance floor, at home,
etc.
The paradox during praxial synthesis is intuitive
familiarity and recognition of harmful and non-harmful variants; i.e., a monster
with a face that is mask-like, said mask worn by people who give the lifeless
material a symbolic heft, a human face that looks monstrous to globally
disempower the elite's ceaseless calls to violence. We must befriend monsters
who are friendly to our cause, and embody themselves from a young age into
adulthood. But this must also be provided and taught in ways that challenge
capital, which paradoxically operates through the same nostalgia as a constant dialectical-material
struggle, mid-opposition.
The fascist pitfall is to self-sacrifice out of
revenge and emotional stupidity as taught from an early age by canonical
monsters. For the oppressed, a far better option is to address and check for canonical
stigmas; i.e., while simultaneously self-fashioning a fresh, xenophilic
community for ourselves as we grow up (twice[10], for trans people): our
people as something to find, but also make amongst ourselves by
subverting the highly visible xenophobic strawmen shown to us as children. We
can empathize with our would-be conquers as "fallen" (e.g., horribly sexist,
Cartesian men like Victor Frankenstein), but really need to focus on ourselves
and the bigger picture: of internalizing Gothic Communism at a societal level.
Doing so doesn't make us "apathetic," nor preclude tears for the
wretched as hostile towards us; it's merely being practical while fighting for
a better world that will help everyone as we dodge state attacks through workers
triangulated against us through an equality of convenience—of "boundaries for me, not for
thee" claimed by standard/token state enforcers punching down (the paradox
of pacification
is that it happens against the state's defenders regarding the state as
something to not attack, versus the state's enemies for which it's
always open season).
For example, while many people weep for Darth Vader's fall
from grace, I once cried for Gwyn, Lord of Cinder from Dark Souls. It
was at MMU when I was dating Zeuhl. After listening to his maudlin piano theme, I started to
sob. Hearing my sadness, Zeuhl came into my room and said, trying to comfort
me, "Maybe you shouldn't listen to this song?" But I always
felt compelled to—if not to understand, then at lease empathize with the
suffering in others (which is probably why I decided to complete my masters in
the Gothic, a field of study predicated on intense emotional oscillation);
empathy is vital if we want to change the world for the better and generally
happens within castle-like spaces full of monsters and their complicated martyrdom
as something to humanize alongside various executioners—the Nazi as someone to
heal from their own toxic ideology by showing them (with Athena's Aegis) the
error of their ways.
To critique power, then, you must go where it is
according to how it tends to present itself; i.e., the chronotope (from Volume
One):
Such a castle's nightmarish presence denotes potential
mayhem tied to one's habitat; i.e., through the liminal hauntology of war
colonizing nature and those tied to nature. When such a castle appears, it is
time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the
state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological
expression, a demon or castle needn't spell our end; it can represent our sole means
of attack, reclaiming said poetics' endless inventiveness to turn
colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains with counterterror (source).
The same idea applies to monsters, myths and magic; i.e., the medieval
as something that commonly denotes trauma per capital's regular abuses. Under
Capitalist Realism, rape is everywhere because unironic monsters are
everywhere. This will undoubtedly be a shock to the system, which means that
addressing such things that mark trauma as monsters do will also, to some
extent, be shocking and unpleasant. Certainly they'll be paradoxically
sickening and delicious. Even so, I'll have to prep you first, which we'll do
next.
Footnotes
[1] Porn is very liminal, insofar as it can serve workers or the state during Gothic culture or counterculture; i.e., (from "What I Won't Exhibit"):
Porn under Capitalism is always a liminal proposition, one where canon conflates gore, rape, and general harm with supposed acts of love (e.g., Squid Game's gratuitous 2021 violence illustrating a generalized violation of human rights through misdirection and pornographic force presented as a "cute" game). As the title might suggest, then, Sex Positivity is largely about sex positivity as something to replace canonical forms of abuse with; i.e., liminal expressions of sex and trauma that lean towards, and help lead survivors away from, the status quo using cathartic monster poetics and sex-positive "demon BDSM."
This often involves a collective sense of humor that verges on the obscene and the bizarre; e.g., earlier I said "lactating furiously" apropos of nothing. And my mother, overhearing said, "It's like those pornos with women spraying milk on each other. People like that." To which I asked, "Why? Because you're waxing nostalgic on your state-sanctioned role of sexual labor?" To which my mother replied, "No, I'm reclaiming lactation for sex workers! Is that ok?" To which I responded, "As long as it's performed with some degree of irony then yes; i.e., porn is liminal, insofar as it can serve the state or workers." To which my mother said, "It's not for the state, it's for Communists! I'm going to get a t-shirt that says that." To which I replied, "Lactation for Communism! Lactate—with irony!" All very silly but iconoclastic nonetheless.
[2] E.g., Nex
Benedict (from "Remember the Fallen"):
Nex went to the "correct"
bathroom only to be killed anyways by those the rule was supposed to
"protect": teenage girls (in truth, the rules are coding behaviors
that condition cis-het people [and token agents] to attack "incorrect"
persons). The three attackers used the rule to isolate Nex, then entered the
bathroom in bad faith to execute them (the rule and the
person). In turn, the state's ipso facto sanctioning of
selective punishment has been demonstrated by their shielding of Nex' hangmen
(or rather, in this case, hangwomen) [source].
[3] In Dreyer's The Passion of
Joan of Arc (1927), a member of the public turns after Joan is killed, faces
her smug executioners, and declares, "You have burned a saint!"
before the whole town riots in mass protest. Indeed, its ruling class anticipated
riot, arming themselves beforehand to club the rioters and shower them with cannon
fire. "Riots are the voice of the unheard"—a phrase once used by MLK
but also channeled earlier still by Matthew Lewis, whose infamous novel The
Monk throws the town into bloody panic after they learn a terrible truth: the
Prioress has wrongfully imprisoned and indeed murdered Don Lorenzo's long-lost
sister, Anges! In truth, Anges isn't dead, but the mob is too angry to
care, burning the prison-like convent down. It's a jailbreak, directed furiously at a false, carceral institution calling itself "holy."
[4] The soft, sensitive skin, hair, sweat/scent glands (scent being a very animal, non-verbal way of communicating that's tied to sex). The weirdness of fetishes are generally arbitrary but often attached to a real-life component; e.g., when Bay makes me cum, my armpits smell like Lucky Charms breakfast cereal.
[5] As Katie
White writes in "How Did a Third-Century Catholic Saint Become a Gay Icon?
Here's the Homoerotic History of Saint Sebastian" (2022):
In the modern era,
the popularization of Saint Sebastian as an icon in the gay community often
leads back to Guido Reni's Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (c.
1615) arguably the most famous depiction of the saint (Reni painted six
versions). Oscar Wilde was known to have adored the work, which is in the
collection of the Palazzo Rosso, in Genoa. In fact, Wilde went so far as to
adopt the pen name Sebastian while exiled in Paris during the last years of his
life.
Reni's
painting was similarly influential to the famed 20th-century Japanese
author Yukio Mishima; in Mishima's 1949 novel Confessions of a
Mask, the book's adolescent protagonist experiences a homosexual
awakening while gazing at the very same painting. The references to the saint
didn't end there—Mishima, who was himself gay, went so far as to pose as Saint
Sebastian in a now-infamous photographic portrait, taken not long before the
writer's death by suicide in 1970. The photograph further cemented associations
between the ecstasy and torments of the saint's martyrdom with the homosexual
experience of persecution throughout the 20th century. Wilde, himself, it
should be noted, had been exiled in Paris, following a nearly two-year
imprisonment at Reading Gaol in England for the crime of practicing homosexuality
[…]
But
what about these depictions of Saint Sebastian so resonated with the likes of
Wilde and Mishima? Many observers, including Susan Sontag, have noted that
Sebastian doesn't yell out in anguish amid his wounding but endures the torment
with an expression caught between pain and pleasure. Sontag called him the "exemplary
sufferer." His head is often flung back or forward rapturously. He
conceals the depth of his emotions, experiencing both torments and pleasures
privately, a feeling similar to the experience of gay identity for many men in
the 20th century (and often to this day) [source].
The point isn't merely to suffer but speak through it
as a performance informed by historical pain. As such, the "suffering" of the sinner-as-queer (not just cis-queer men, but all GNC people) becomes a paradoxical means of expressing one's anguish in ways
that, uncorked, feels Numinously cathartic by virtue of releasing repressed tension, coping with nonstop abuse using playful forms, and speaking to one's forbidden, closeted self as frequently synonymized with abject
misery by the state.
[6] E.g., 1970s Judas Priest is Priest at their loudest and gayest. Comparatively in 2024, they have completely lost their critical bite, chasing profit through an unironic Zionist edge (from Persephone van der Waard's "Judas Priest: Invincible Shield and Zionism," 2024):
as time went on, Priest sold out. Their critical lyrics became deliberately dumb—starting with British Steel (1980) into Painkiller (1990), the latter being something to emulate with Invincible Shield as pastiche of something that, far from becoming a joke, has become canon to espouse whatever dogma the band wants to enrich themselves with. […] Likenesses haunt themselves as part of this hauntology. Whatever castles raised by Priest, then, these will be haunted by the very spectral and faceless, metallic things they refuse to sing about now but once did; i.e., using the language they've grown accustomed to abusing having the iconoclastic potential to push back against genocide. Priest, the people up close, don't care about that anymore. They care about their legacy as something to sell to Americanized fans worldwide; i.e., by singing about invincibility as a Zionist privilege they invoke time and time again while Palestine suffers for longer than Halford has been alive (source).
Dressed up as leather-clad, Viking-esque heavy metal torturers, they're assisting unironically in the torture (and forced martyrdom) of faraway lands by putting a Jewish police badge on their album cover:
They're not just posers, but posers of their former selves, arrogant enough to put a gold Jewish police badge (surrounded by the red-and-blue color scheme of police sirens) on their album cover […] the Priest logo, already Jewish-like, is woefully crass ("That is an... incredible album cover," a friend tells me. "Wondrously distasteful. Evokes the smell of freshly licked boot leather. Zionist in the most anti-Semitic ways"). Suspiciously embedded inside another Jewish simulacrum, [it] serves as an unironic police badge in defense of British imperial shores (ibid.).
[7] Insofar as the Neo-Gothic, like the actual medieval period before it, treats "comedies" as both gallows-type humor but also simply stories that end well, thus aren't "dramatic" in the ancient sense of the word; i.e., death is allowed, but so are sex and monsters that involve "happy endings" at the end; e.g., Dante's Divine Comedy (1321) being told in three parts: The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso.
[8] Described on
IMDb: "Several short films about troubled gay youngsters who attempt to
resolve their psychological issues through bizarre fetish play or sinister self-expression"
(source). Cooper's
films are exceptionally bad, but still offer a unique look into the
strange liminality of homoerotic expression carried forward into the present.
[9] The
final scene to Fred Dekker's The Monster Squad (1987) demonstrates Amazonomachia
well, insofar as Dracula is both a walking movie poster and someone who means
different things depending on who's looking at him. Young cis-het boys and men
in the audience will see him and relish in his indiscriminate killing of the
police (one commentator gushing, "Nothing is more terrifying than the way
he barely treats those cops as annoyances, not even bothering looking at them
as he kills them and never once breaking stride. Astounding work," source); Leonardo Cimino will see the
Nazis color code (and police-state malice) reflected on Dracula's black-and-red
affect/murdering of the American doppelgangers (a scene from earlier briefly showing
a camp-issued tattoo punched into his arm, specifically a concentration camp
tattoo: "You sure know a lot about monsters!" / "Yes, I guess
you could say that I do."); and Phoebe the little girl, when picked up
threateningly by her would-be destroyer, will gaze into the terrifying eyes of something
she doesn't understand (having little grasp of what the boys in their clubhouse
[whose floor entrance from the outside reads: "no girls allowed"] are
constantly excluding her from): "Give me the Amulet, you BITCH!"
(SYFY's "Monster Squad at 30" 2018).
Coming
to her rescue, Frankenstein's monster is also a walking poster, but through the
walking likenesses of the living and the made-living operating together in the
present space and time, becomes a genuine protector that channels Mary
Shelley's original monster as someone to vindicate. Featured as
regularly saving little girls from danger—i.e., the De Lacey family's, but also
a child rescued from a freak accident—stigma and bias are carried on the
monster's features, leading him to be punished and ultimately desire revenge
against Cartesian dualism inside a settler-colonial project:
"I continued to
wind among the paths of the wood, until I came to its boundary, which was
skirted by a deep and rapid river, into which many of the trees bent their
branches, now budding with the fresh spring. Here I paused, not exactly knowing
what path to pursue, when I heard the sound of voices, that induced me to
conceal myself under the shade of a cypress. I was scarcely hid when a young
girl came running towards the spot where I was concealed, laughing, as if she
ran from someone in sport. She continued her course along the precipitous sides
of the river, when suddenly her foot slipped, and she fell into the rapid
stream. I rushed from my hiding-place and with extreme labour, from the force
of the current, saved her and dragged her to shore. She was senseless, and I
endeavoured by every means in my power to restore animation, when I was
suddenly interrupted by the approach of a rustic, who was probably the person
from whom she had playfully fled. On seeing me, he darted towards me, and
tearing the girl from my arms, hastened towards the deeper parts of the wood. I
followed speedily, I hardly knew why; but when the man saw me draw near, he
aimed a gun, which he carried, at my body and fired. […]
"This
was then the reward of my benevolence! I had saved a human being from
destruction, and as a recompense I now writhed under the miserable pain of a
wound which shattered the flesh and bone. The feelings of kindness and
gentleness which I had entertained but a few moments before gave place to
hellish rage and gnashing of teeth. Inflamed by pain, I vowed eternal hatred
and vengeance to all mankind. […] My sufferings were augmented also by the
oppressive sense of the injustice and ingratitude of their infliction. My daily
vows rose for revenge—a deep and deadly revenge, such as would alone compensate
for the outrages and anguish I had endured (source).
[10] Gender-affirming
care—i.e., the taking of sexual hormones—during adulthood leads to what's
generally referred to as a "second puberty."
