cattle licking salt

My school used to take in boarders. When I was very junior, probably still in the nursery section, a girl jumped into one of the water tanks and committed suicide, and the school began to turn away boarders and became a day-school. The girl who died was reported to have been heart-broken over a love-affair with one of her classmates; we were and remain an all-girls’ school. When I had just started high school, a couple was suspended for kissing. When I was in eleventh grade, two of our number ran away and got married; the police chased them across hundreds of miles and brought them triumphantly back.

I was born in 1990. With the exception of a partial exemption from July 2009 to December 2013, I have never lived in a country that regards homosexuality as anything except a criminal offence. Lesbianism is not entirely recognized as existing at all, but the gay men I know—if “found out”—can be and are booked under the same laws in operation in England in the 40s; I detest a number of these men on grounds of their vast and ingrained misogyny, but I am also fairly lost in my admiration of their ability to say--in the face of all the legal repercussions--that they are gay. The man who is currently our Prime Minister ran partially on a platform of moral values which included prizing cows over gays. People have been murdered for being gay, have been thrown out of their homes, have been subjected to gang and corrective rape. Telling people that you’re gay is a vast ordeal: it is not that they will disapprove of you—though they will—it is that they can have you thrown out of your uni, your job, have you sent to prison, have you raped and killed and be regarded as saviours.

This is the world in which I read The Charioteer. Ralph’s behaviour with Hazell sends shivers down my spine, but oh Lord I understand him doing it. I understand him when he talks about vertical societies and dirty plates. I understand Laurie’s horror about queer circles and his reluctance to tell Andrew, because it isn’t news that he’s gay that would wreck Andrew’s soul, it’s the constant hiding and checking-over-every-word that gnaws away at it. I understand Bunny’s need to out Andrew to himself even beyond simple malice, because why the fuck should anyone escape self-knowledge when it is such a stone upon the heart. And I understand Laurie’s desperation to not be taken as “one of those queers”, “one of Sandy’s friends”, and Lord, I understand him telling Alec, as a sincere compliment, that he’s more a doctor than a queer. Amusing as I find the thought, I don't think Ralph very often forgets to pass, because dropping a pin can get you jailed or killed, and it's not like Lanyon doesn't know that.

Lord knows it ain't healthy, but if it helps you live--and it does, oh it does--you shut up and sit down and bend your body and subjugate your mind, and you champion people who tell you you never ought to have sex because at least they're telling you that the way in which you love is not a criminal, beastly, aberration.

ETA: I am not saying this isn't proof of internalised homophobia. I am saying that this sort of internalised homophobia is often the only sort of defence possible: Ralph saying the thing about the Ancient Athenians treating homosexuals like normal people has always struck me as the exact sort of bitter, cynical thing I would and do say.