Recently I watched the Oliver Parker film based on Oscar Wilde's only published novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. It brought home to me again the tripod beauty of Wilde's perceptions of debauchery, morality and spirituality. I am no Wildean, but I like to think that perhaps he explored a painful divide in his own life between beloved wife and family on one side, and Bosey and the rent-boys on the other.
I've become aware of a public divide in the social world which could do with similar perception and divination. I'll state it simply: in public perceptions of sexuality, on the one side there appears to be a moral repugnance for behaviour which transgresses the current popular notion of Christian ideals; on the other, a knee-jerk reaction to the very idea of moral restraint.
The "Christian" side, shared in modified form by most of society, thinks a woman a slut if she displays a sexually open and positive nature. The other side is sometimes uncomfortable with the idea of sexual morality because it sounds Christian and we really hate that!
I grew up in a vaguely liberal, vaguely agnostic household. I converted to Christianity at the age of 14 (wait, it gets better) then deconverted at the age of 33. Eventually I recognised that I was polyamorous. A lot of my old friends had dropped away. Just as many I let go. Now a lot of my new friends were various flavours of queer.
The Church had become hoarse-voiced declaiming the orientations, choices and lifestyles of my new friends, so it wasn't surprising that below their cool and beautiful exteriors lay a festering resentment towards anything religious. Religion was strongly identified with sexual and gender-role repression. Fair enough too.
On the other side, I hear the other people in my life - the straights, the mainstreamers who are part of my mundane community - putting every kind of interesting sexual behaviour in the same rubbish bin. Of course gay is now mostly cute and cool even in the mainstream, and more than a few of these mainstreamers are even happy for gays to marry (though they're not sure they want gays teaching their kids). But the covert and unavowed behaviours of mainstreamers are, when revealed, deviant (to say the least) from the declared norm.
The Wilde story must be treated with respect because it straddles these two worlds, as did Wilde himself.
The deterioration of Dorian Gray shows not simply conventional sexual license and "deviance" in the terms of the day, but the moral disaster that blights a person's soul when they define the world entirely in terms of their own aesthetic sensation and pleasure. Wilde's story also shows the fearful and tortured remnant that crouches within the cruelest moral narcissist, a silent witness its own gradual demolition. As Mephistopheles cryptically warns Faust, "This is indeed Hell, nor am I out of it."
Contrast that with what I call "moral debauchery" a term which I use in a positive sense. Sex-positive, playful, adventurous, this first recognises the simple rights of oneself and others (safe, sane, consensual). Then it recognises that the playmate or playmates are always no less than a person, and always acknowledges at leat covertly the person within whatever game is being played. Terry Pratchett's character, the witch Granny Weatherwax, nails a preacher with a neat definition: "...sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself..."
Just like mountain-climbing, car-racing and sailing, sexual involvement is always dangerous. When it moves outside the unconscious constraints of mainstream society, it becomes more dangerous still, and needs correspondingly more conscious negotiation. Interestingly, I find my queer friends to be often more morally intelligent than my mainstream friends, simply because they have had to think, talk through and negotiate things more. The mainstream people who do get it are often people who have made a habit of understanding the essence rather than the appearance, the spirit rather than the law.
My queer friends who violently reject Christianity as an institution often have little trouble with the character of Jesus, beause he seems to be reported as someone who followed the essence into places the law wouldn't fit.
As do we.
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