Queer as Punk

A punk bromance: Sid 💘 Johnny

 

'Punk is a challenge to reconsider everything you do, think or feel; 

including the ways that you love.' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

In the second volume of his memoirs - Anger is an Energy  (2014) - Johnny Rotten flatly denies the persistent rumour that he and Vicious, unlike Cook and Jones, were more than just good friends ... 

 

Perhaps one reason why this romantic myth continues to resonate is because before becoming a term used by the media to identify a form of rock music that emerged in the 1970s, the word punk had a long subcultural history rooted in illicit and deviant sexual activity.   

 

In the 16th century, for example, it was used by writers including Shakespeare as a synonym for a female prostitute and spelt rather charmingly as puncke [2]. By the late 17th century, however, it had taken on a different meaning and described a youth who is provided for by an older man in exchange for certain favours. 

 

This queer [3] etymology takes on renewed significance when one recalls the story of the Sex Pistols; an anarchic collective held together with safety pins and bondage straps which included a far wider and more diverse group of people than the actual members of the band [4]. 

 

The teens who spent their time hanging around 430 King's Road challenged heteronormative values with their behaviour, attitude, and appearance; cheerfully wearing T-shirts designed by McLaren and Westwood which included images drawn from gay porn, including homosexual cowboys, nude adolescents, and well-endowed American footballers [5].     

And so, whilst both Rotten and Vicious were for the most part straight in terms of their sexual orientation, their emphasis on non-conformity, free expression, and open acceptance of gay culture - the band and their followers would often socialise in the early days at a lesbian member's club in Soho called Louise's - was positively received within the queer community at that time.    

 

 

II. 

 

Notwithstanding what I say above, I think we should be wary of retrospectively romanticising the story of the Sex Pistols, or imposing contemporary theoretical interpretations concerning queer sexual politics and identities on to the reality of the UK punk scene in the 1970s. I don't want to be the person who says let's stick to the facts at every opportunity, but I would agree that any analysis showing a flagrant disregard for historical accuracy seems of little real value or interest.   

 

Further, as David Wilkinson points out, "once punk is separated from rooted judgement through failure to locate it within a particular conjuncture, its politics can be celebrated as uniformly positive" [6] and that's a problem: the Sex Pistols did not promise to make things better and punk wasn't entirely gay friendly; there remained elements of homophobia within it (just as there did of racism, sexism, and reactionary stupidity).   

Ultimately, for McLaren and Westwood, same-sex passion was seen as something with which to confront and discomfort the English; they wished to weaponise it, not promote gay liberation or simply camp things up for the fun of it: 

"Given [their] positioning of same-sex passion as alienated, perverse and violent, it is unsurprising that McLaren and Westwood not only seemed to have little interest in the radically transformative aims of gay liberation, but were also prone to homophobic gestures that were calculated to shock in their contempt of even reformist demands for respect, understanding and openness." [7]

 

Ultimately, as Wilkinson says, McLaren and Westwood's "was an idiosyncratic, peculiarly hybrid kind of politics, especially in relation to sexuality" [8]; one based on the radical understanding of desire as "an instinctive, irrational force capable of disrupting social norms once unanchored from the private sphere" [9], but they weren't interested in how to further loving relationships, same-sex or otherwise.   

 

And as for Johnny and Sid, for better or worse, they were more romantically fixated on Nora and Nancy than one another.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm paraphrasing Pete Shelley writing in the second issue of his self-produced punk fanzine Plaything (1978): click here. 

 

[2] Shakespeare used the word, for example, in Measure for Measure (1603-04), where Lucio suggests that since Mariana is 'neither maid, widow, nor wife', she may 'be a Puncke’ (Act 5, scene 1).

[3] I am using this term here as one that includes same-sex desire, but which is not synonymous with such. If it were up to me, as someone who finds the empty secret of non-identity philosophically more interesting than the open secret of same-sex desire, I would restrict use of the word queer to refer to forms of practice and behaviour that have nothing to do with sexuality or gender. 

      See the post of 16 March 2025, in which I discuss the term: click here. 

[4] When I think of the Sex Pistols, I certainly don't just think of Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock, and Johnny Rotten, but also of Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, Jamie Reid, Jordan, Soo Catwoman, Helen of Troy, and various members of the so-called Bromley Contingent. 

 

[5] David Wilkinson makes the important point that these designs "deliberately inhabited dominant understandings of unsanctioned sexuality as perverse, sordid and violent in order to provoke a reaction" and that McLaren and Westwood were not consciously offering a set of alternative values. 

      See Wilkinson's excellent essay 'Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have?): Punk, Politics and Same-Sex Passion', in Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, No. 13 (2015), pp. 57-76. The line quoted from is on p. 64. 

 

[6] David Wilkinson, ibid., p. 59.

[7] Ibid., p. 65. 

 

[8] Ibid., p. 62.

 

[9] Ibid., p. 63.  

Musical bonus: Tom Robinson Band, 'Glad to be Gay', from the EP Rising Free (EMI Records, 1978): click here. 

 

 

Two Novels by Yukio Mishima 2: Forbidden Colours (Reviewed by Tim Pendry)

Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into 

a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.

Yukio Mishima: Forbidden Colours - Reviewed by Tim Pendry 

An early Mishima novel that shows him at his most paradoxical. The style is mannered at times, realist at others. It is highly referential to a specific post-war Japanese culture, half-way between defeat and economic miracle, and yet looks back to European decadent and classical literature.

There are two barriers to understanding here. First, we wonder whether the translator (Alfred Marks) has always been able to communicate the subtle behaviourial codes of an upper class that hovers between traditionalism and business.

Second, Mishima's partly satirical posturing on art and beauty through the cynical, bored and rather unpleasant novelist Shinsuke, will result in some small moments of dreariness. Few of us in the twenty-first century can get truly excited by debates on lost aesthetics.

But these are relatively minor concerns because Mishima brilliantly portrays the homosexual underworld of post-war Tokyo in a culture that disapproves of it but more as a social weakness than as a moral failing. It is unnatural but not evil.

The mood is thus turn of the century Europe, rather than offering us the visceral horror of the deviant to be found in the then-contemporary West and still to be found amongst many religious troglodytes in the Americas and Africa.

A sub-culture is here denied entry into the wider culture on equal terms but it is allowed its dark space. In that space, homosexuals seem to live a vacant and sad but tolerated life, albeit with more than a hint of desperation.

Mishima (when he is not posturing as the superior Japanese traditionalist able to be more modern than the moderns) writes as brilliantly here as elsewhere. He also has the ability to dissect formal heterosexual relationships as he does homosexual within a culture of shame rather than guilt.

The character of Yuichi (Yuchan to his homosexual associates), often taken to be Mishima himself, remains a cypher throughout - a cool and self-regarding person with a limited emotional range.

What is more interesting is the way he impacts on others, giving us the paradox of the cool Mishima being able to define quite precisely the emotional responses of a range of figures: his wife, his mother, a high-born female, a shallow female and all grades of male lover.

As a non-procreative male, the extent of Mishima's imaginative genius can be found not only in his portrayal of women but in his unsentimental portrayal of a new-born baby while giving a good account of the way that Yuichi (as a man) can love both wife and baby as a father.

The book is about the complexity, lack of fixedness, of love. Yuichi is detached but no psychopath. He can feel but his position as the object of projected desires means that he is often not allowed to by circumstances. If he weakens, he may be denied access to his true nature for ever.

This is the fascination of the book - to see how a pure beauty without apparent moral content creates a range of desires and needs in others within a society that is layered with codes on what is acceptable or is not acceptable, wholly unlike our own in the West.

It is no accident that the sophisticated novelist with a broad education brings cruelties and small evils into the world of Yuichi, whereas Yuichi merely acts, like an animal, according to his rather limited range of needs.

Shunsuke's desire for a vicious revenge on women shows a person who has ceased to function as a human being and has no place on the planet as a vindictive, desiccated old man who has lost his creative spark.

His agent (Yuichi) is so detached that it becomes clear that the novelist is only half directing events. The women he wants to humiliate are all humiliated through Yuichi but they retain their power and dignity and Shunsuke is left with nothing.

Yuichi blithely sails through the events of the novel, somehow always landing on his feet like a cat, never feeling the pain he inflicts. The book is an essay both in the injustice of life and on the Nietzschean position of a general object of desire in the world.

As a result, although the actual sexual content is limited, the book gives off an aura of eroticism even when the reader (like myself) is very dominantly heterosexual.

What Mishima does, which is remarkable, is suggest to the male heterosexual reader what parts of himself as a male would re-emerge intact within a homosexual male - in other words, what it is about being a male that exists as essential whether one is gay or not.

To make a heterosexual male empathetic to the world of the homosexual would be no mean feat today - in the early 1950s, it would have been startling.

But the book is not so much about homosexuality as about desire itself and the way that desire has a life that is far more significant than any actual meaning to be placed in the desired object - because, in the end, Yuichi is always simply an object who finds it reasonable to be an object.

There are few occasions when Yuichi/Yuchan expresses genuine unhappiness so long as he is following his true nature. His cruelty is casual, the flow of the river through the easiest channel. Shunsuke is malicious, as are others, but Yuchan is as disinterested in malice as in kindness.

This a-morality (not immorality) is perhaps what will shock most readers - especially in one particularly nasty incident where a somewhat shallow bimbo who had hurt the novelist is seduced by the two conspirators' trickery into being, in effect, raped by the novelist in the dark.

The women are treated like objects in a very different sense but there is a sense that the novelist has seduced Yuichi into treating women as things through being directed into the realisation that everyone treats him as a thing (even if he does not care overly).

And, disturbingly, we have none of the hysterical self-traumatizing of Western women but only a determined dignity where the impression is left that these women have come to terms with their position with far more dignity than the ultimate loser in the game - the manipulative novelist.

The book brings us, the Westerner (from a culture with a serious problem in managing desire), into a medium (Japanese traditional culture) that is alienating to the degree that desire is clearly given form and that this form is then articulated in almost ritualistic ways.

By the end of the book, we are left wondering whether it would be better or worse to give desire its outlet through rigid codes and appropriate forms than (as our culture did at that time) deny it any role in formal society at all.

Homosexuality was illegal in the UK at the time the book appeared but, being Japanese, nothing is illegal here, merely shameful.

Any English homosexual reading the translation at the time must have had mixed feelings about its message - an acceptance and management of shame through combinations of secrecy, hypocrisy and denial but the vice being permitted nevertheless. He might have lived with that.

Note: this review by Tim Pendry originally appeared on Goodreads (Dec 28, 2011): click here.  It is reproduced with the author's kind permission. To visit Tim Pendry's user page on Goodreads, click here.

See: Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colours, trans. Alfred H. Marks, (Penguin Books, 2008).

For the first part of this post, featuring Tim Pendry's review of Mishima's Confessions of a Mask, click here. 

Three Brief Extracts from a Study of Eric Gill

Photo of Eric Gill by Howard Coster (1927)

National Portrait Gallery

I: Two Men With Red Beards

Eric Gill was a great admirer of D. H. Lawrence. Not only did they share many ideas and obsessions, they even looked alike. When the latter died, in 1930, Gill performed a special mass for Lawrence in the self-built chapel of his home in the Chilterns. He also produced two wood-engravings inspired by Lady Chatterley's Lover (unabashedly using himself as the model for Mellors).

This despite the fact that Lawrence in his review of Art Nonsense and Other Essays had been less than flattering, describing Gill as crude and crass; "like a tiresome uneducated workman arguing in the pub" who likes to repeatedly bang his fist on the table.

To his credit, Gill accepted this criticism in good spirit, telling Frieda in a letter that her husband was probably right and admitting that he was indeed an "inept and amateurish preacher". Gill was also extremely pleased to know that at least Lawrence had agreed with his main proposition concerning the sacred nature of workmanship.


II: It All Goes Together

A key idea for Gill was integration. One of the reasons he despised modern society was that, in his view, it seemed to perpetuate discord and division. His solution was to create perfect domestic harmony; home, sweet home providing a model of the good life amidst the chaos of the world and demonstrating how everything could be made to fit like the pieces of a jigsaw: It All Goes Together was one of Gill's favourite slogans.

Unfortunately, as Gill's biographer Fiona MacCarthy writes, when you consider his quest for integration and his extraordinary home life, you soon discover aspects "which do not go together in the least, a number of very basic contradictions between precept and practice, ambition and reality"; anomalies which, for one reason or another, are often ignored or glossed over by his admirers.

As MacCarthy also notes, however, to ignore Gill's complexity and contradictions - both as an artist and as a man - is ultimately to do him (and ourselves) a huge disservice.


III: Always Ready and Willing

Gill was a phallically-fixated, incestuous paedophile with a string of mistresses, happy to experiment with bestiality and cock sucking. We know this from diaries in which he recorded in explicit, quasi-scientific detail what he did with whom, when, where and how often (one of the telltale signs of a true pervert is this need to document).*

Gill preached morality and the importance of a well-regulated household that was devout and disciplined. But this didn't stop him from engaging in an anarchic succession of adulterous affairs, sleeping with his sisters, abusing his daughters, and fucking his dog. Always ready and willing, was another of the seemingly priapic Gill's favourite sayings.

The interesting thing is how, in Gill's mind, his aberrant sexual activities, his creative work and his Catholicism were, somehow, complementary; that is to say, equally important, equally holy. Which makes it extremely awkward, of course, for those who wish to separate these things in order that they might continue to enjoy the spiritual-aesthetic aspects, whilst condemning the former:

He was disgusting - but his lettering is so elegant and his designs so beautiful, as a friend recently wrote to me.        


* Afterword on Gill's Diaries

Gill cheerfully records, for example, the following incidents in his diary: (i) 25 September 1916: 'Compared specimens of semen from self and spaniel under a microscope'; (ii) 12 January 1920: Went into daughter's bedroom 'stayed half-an-hour - put p. in her a/hole'; (iii) 22 June 1927: 'The shape of the head of a man's erect penis is very excellent in the mouth. There is no doubt about this. I have often wondered - now I know'; and, finally, (iv) 13 December 1929: 'Discovered that a dog will join with a man'.

MacCarthy puts his bestial fascination and, indeed, his experiments with paedophilia, incest and fellatio, down to an urge "to try things out, to push experience to the limits ..." and suggests they should be seen as an "imaginative overriding of taboos" on the part of a highly creative and curious individual with an unusually avid appetite for sex. As such, says MacCarthy, these acts are not so very unusual, not so absolutely shocking, nor even especially horrifying - which is certainly a very liberal and generous reading, to say the least.       

See: Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, (Faber and Faber, 1989). All the biographical information, including the lines from Gill's diaries, are taken from this work. The diaries themselves are located in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA. Copies can be found in the Archive of the Tate Gallery, London.  

Readers who are interested, might also like to see D. H. Lawrence's 'Review of Eric Gill's Art Nonsense and Other Essays' in Introductions and Reviews, ed. Neil Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). This is believed to be the last work written by Lawrence before his death on March 2nd, 1930. Frieda sent the MS to Gill in 1933.  

On Queerness, Cynicism, and the Question of True Love

The notion of true love is central within Western culture. It's a concept founded upon the four values identified by Foucault as belonging to aletheia:

“True love is first, love which does not conceal ... because it has nothing to hide ... it is always willing to show itself in front of witnesses ... Second, true love is an unalloyed love ... in which sensual pleasure and the friendship of souls do not intermingle. Third, true love is love in line with what is right, with what is correct ... It has nothing contrary to the rule or custom. And finally, true love is love which is never subject to change or becoming. It is an incorruptible love which remains always the same.” [220-21]

You can find this ideal model of love developed in both Plato and what Nietzsche derided as Platonism for the people (Christianity). It’s a straight and straightforward form of love without subterfuge, disguise, or even curiosity; love that prides itself on its sincerity and its naturalness, rather than a sense of playfulness or sophistication. There’s simply nothing queer about it. It’s what normal, healthy, men and women share and upon which the sanctity of marriage is based.

Homosexuality, on the other hand, is, at its best - that is to say, at its most defiantly queer - the love that refuses to speak its name; the love that likes to stick to the shadows and hide in closets; the love that finds pride in its perverse, plural, and promiscuous character; an ironic, gender-bending, form of love that delights in artifice and in camp; a love that doesn’t conform to the heteronormative rule, or give a fig either about the judgement of God or what Nature dictates.

One might describe this queer radical style of homosexuality, as separatist. It certainly doesn’t want to fit into straight society and doesn’t keep banging on about equal rights; doesn’t long for a lifestyle involving monogamous marriage and the prospect of breeding. It isn't even particularly gay ...

In fact, we might best characterize it as Cynical in the ancient philosophical sense. That is to say, a type of practice which has a very militant idea of what constitutes the truth (of love and of life) and which has been “stamped by a scandal which has constantly accompanied it, a disapproval which surrounds it, a mixture of mockery, repulsion, and apprehension in reaction to its presence and manifestations” [231].

If Cynicism was the disgrace of ancient philosophy, then queer-cynical homosexuality is the travesty of true love; holding up a funfair mirror before Eros so that the latter can recognise himself, whilst, crucially, at the same time see himself outrageously distorted and made multiple.

See: Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Page numbers given refer to this paperback edition.