In this provocative and fascinating book, Dominic Janes tackles the thorny issue of same-sex desire and countercultural sexuality, with a particular focus on Anglo-Catholicism from the time of the Oxford Movement. He does not set out to scandalize, but simply to discuss how the church offered an environment in which alternative relationships could be expressed and where a ‘queer’ lifestyle could be lived out in a safe space. Perhaps most fascinating is Janes’s attempt to rehabilitate the idea of the closet which made sense in the hostile and homophobic environment of the past, but which makes less sense in the liberated Western world of today. He has little interest in what modern Anglicans like to call ‘homosexual practice’ and does not speculate on the sexual activity of soon-to-be saints, but rather seeks to trace the development of a safe space for same-sex love which, even if wholly ‘spiritual’, is no less love (p. 3). Such a lifestyle involved a form of suffering in a world in which there was no outlet for sexual desires apart from marriage: this led to a form of ‘queer martyrdom’ which ‘could encompass both attempts to accommodate sexual deviance within the realm of Christian moral witness and the attempted manipulation of Christian imagery of martyrdom in the cause of sexual liberation’ (p. 9). Often queer martyrdom involved finding liberation from sexual shame in abasement and obedience and in exemplary service and suffering which was modelled on the suffering of the ultimate object of desire, the Body of Christ himself.
Through a series of case studies both of Christian and post-Christian thinkers and writers (and in one case a film-maker), Janes discusses the construction of a queer sensibility both within the ecclesiastical closet, and, later, as this influenced the broader culture of same-sex desire (as with Jarman’s Sebastiane). He begins with brief discussion of Newman (where he is critical of those who seek to sexualize his relationship with Ambrose St John) before moving to a detailed account of the ritualist priest William Bennett who offered a powerful visual account of the Eucharist as well as a unique set of stations of the cross outside his Somerset church. What emerges is a theology in which sacramental theology offers a pathway to regeneration in which ‘even the fallen body of the sodomite might find (in spiritual terms) salvation’ (p. 33). Religious devotions could thus offer a safe space for same-sex desire through a sublime material encounter with Christ’s flesh and blood. Artistic expression of same-sex desire is also explored in relation to Simeon Solomon, whose work expresses powerful images of male beauty in ritualized and religious contexts. In Chapter 3 Janes moves on to outline the ‘queer family’ of the monastic revival with a lengthy study of Father Ignatius: although to the modern sensibility the accounts or pre-pubescent androgyny can be shocking, it is clear that the monastic life of self-abnegation was at once an expression of coded same-sex desire (p. 81). Janes concludes: ‘The communal life of certain British monasteries and confraternities had considerable potential to produce lives that combined same-sex desire with forms of intense self-discipline’. Consequently, shared love for ‘the material devotion to Jesus could … lead to eroticized fetishism of images that allowed men who desired sex with men to join in a community of those with similar longings without, necessarily, implicating them in the commission of sin’ (p. 96).
Gradually, however, the containment of such practices became increasingly difficult. The study of Frederick Rolfe’s scrapbook which at times is extremely amusing (Chapter 4) presents a kind of dilettantism and love of camp where the objects of devotion were shaped into something quite different. Rolfe came to ‘break out from the quasi-ecclesiastical closet by finally abandoning the attempt to pose as a priest and by looking beyond the priestly style of same-sex desire’ (p. 129). The discussion of ‘St Oscar’ in Chapter 5 moves further into the complexity of sexual identity and of the relationship of inside and outside: Janes explores the relationship between the modern sexual identity with its promotion of ‘coming out’ with the sorts of sexual constructions that relied on repression, secrecy and shame. The implication is that such a binary form might conceal the complexity of sexual identity. Wilde suffered a form of martyrdom for refusing to suffer in silence with only God and friends as witnesses. At the same time, he remained fascinated by religion and regarded Jesus as the precursor of the Romantic Movement in his life. Later, however, such figures as Edward Carpenter no longer required the memory of the ecclesiastical closet as the place for pursuit of perfection. After a fascinating account of the story of David and Jonathan with its mixture of innocence and eroticism as portrayed in a variety of sources including Lucy Laing’s 1936 novel, Janes discusses Derek Jarman. Archival material from his correspondence with Dom Sylvester Houéard reveals Jarman’s fascination with religion and the sado-masochistic aspects of hagiography in Sebastiane. Jarman reveals that Christianity consequently remained a ‘vital constitutive element in the queer culture of Britain at the end of the twentieth century’ (p. 199). By tracing the trajectory through a range of cultural resources Janes consequently shows how the different forms of queer martyrdom reveal powerful insights into the human condition.
Janes concludes with a brief reflection on contemporary Anglican debates which have almost universally failed to engage with the ways in which ‘deviant’ sexuality (which includes celibacy) and the Anglican tradition have been so closely intertwined. The Anglo-Catholic tradition in which a counter-cultural exoticism was often so prevalent fostered a kind of ‘queer self-expression’: queer adoration of Christ might even bear comparison with gay adoration of certain divas. For Janes, rather than something to be simply dismissed, the history of religious visual culture provides a way of ‘engaging with a Christian past that is composed of fellowship as well as exclusion and of acknowledgement as well as denial’ (p. 206). Queer theologians can excavate the past as they begin to exalt what was for so long an object of shame and ugliness but which at the same time was an object of beauty and creativity. All in all, this is a book which invites engagement with a complex tradition: Anglicans fixated on sexual identity might learn much from it although many of them will not like what it has to say.
