Romeo and Julian

As a gay man I am blessed and cursed by the fact that beyond higher education, society doesn't really know what to do with me. What I mean by this is that in contrast to a straight person, their life has a set path that society expects them to follow; they're born, attend education, graduate, date, marry, have kids, and raise those kids to do the same. Every major life goal or milestone that society expects of straight people centres around this path, from renting and eventually buying a home big enough to house those kids, getting a job where you earn enough to support them, even marriage as a concept was tightly linked to having children.

As a gay man though, the expectation to get married isn't placed on us, even in the rare instances where it is, there's no time frame that we're pressured into. If you're straight you're expected to be married and have your first kid by 30, if you wait longer then you're going to end up in the position where you'll already be feeling the effects of ageing and find it difficult to keep up with those children. For gay men as neither can get pregnant this time pressure isn't present because the assumption is that you will adopt if you do have kids. That is if there is any expectation to get married and have kids at all, many cultures and communities actively push against the idea of gay parents - which is ridiculous, the idea that gay parents will make kids gay is just asinine, having straight parents didn't make me straight.

I've talked about the concept of propaganda in the past and whilst it's a strong word to use in this context there's no other word that really fits for what I and many others observe, namely that media in general has a heavy bias towards straight relationships, and those stories even when they are first and foremost romantic, end with living happily ever after, "settling down" and having a family. Meanwhile those stories that centre on gay relationships often end in tragedy.

I live in the UK so it should come as no surprise that Shakespeare was part of the national curriculum when I was in school; of the plays that we studied the two we focused on most were MacBeth and Romeo and Juliet. The former is very much focused on power struggles and the extremes a person will go to in order to attain power. The latter however is a love story, one that most people will be familiar with. The basic premise being two star crossed lovers from feuding Houses who fall in love despite the protest of all around them. The thing about Romeo and Juliet that always stood out to me was that it makes more sense if it's gay.

Queering Shakespeare isn't a controversial subject, in fact the Bard is widely regarded as Bisexual with many of his sonnets believed to have been written to a male lover. The subtext of characters seemingly female in text but male in reality isn't a stretch in this regard - in fact women at the time rarely appeared on stage, the roles of female characters were usually played by men in wigs, one of the many alleged origins of the term 'Drag' as an acronym for 'Dressed Realistically As a Girl' is owed by its progeny to Shakespeare.

Romeo and Julian, a love story of two men who fall for one another despite everyone around them at odds with the romance, a story that ultimately ends with tragedy fits with the prevailing narrative that gay people either die a hoe, die alone, or just die. That sounds facetious but it touches a nerve that has been aching for me as of late. There is a longing for a feel good love story that depicts a realistic romance between two men. Movies like Red, White, and Royal Blue don't really cut it despite their pretence as a comedy, the characters aren't relatable.

The search for gay romance ironically proves fruitless. I have written a number of books at this point with gay and LGBT characters some of which revolve around their romantic interests but there's something narcissistic about relying on your own content to fulfil a need, it's numbing almost, in a similar way to the fact you can't tickle yourself except with your tongue by lightly brushing it against the roof of your mouth [did you just try that?] nowhere else on your body can you actually tickle yourself because you're expecting it, the sensation has to come from an external stimulus. That's the way I feel about Romantic Fiction, no matter how epic the narrative I write may be, I will ultimately gain more enjoyment reading other peoples' works. The problem is finding those works to begin with.

The easiest place to find gay relationships in literature is with erotic fiction, and whilst that can be fun to read, the sex is usually the main focus and all narrative direction is an accessory to it, included only if it contributes to the sexual tension. There's rarely a story beyond the sexual desire and despite the impression the media and social media too like to give we don't spend every minute thinking about sex. In fact as a gay man to be honest straight people always seemed to spend more time thinking about my sex life than I did.

With the prospect of finding authentic queer voices in literature proving difficult to realise, myself and many other queer people often turn to queer coding instead - that is to say characters that are written as queer in attitude even if the text itself never confirms this. I think this is why certain TV shows and Movies end up proving popular with queer viewers in particular, and sometimes that attention gets validated by the shows themselves - the queer coding of shows like True Blood garnered enough of a queer following that the show was able to write queer story lines into the production. I love True Blood and I am happy this happened but it touches on a problem with media more widely, namely that queer stories are only included when it's profitable, they're an attempt to bait and hook, not to cater to an appetite - True Blood gets a pass because their story lines actually developed queer characters and followed through as opposed to baiting a story forever that never gets realised.

In some ways you could argue that greater acceptance of queer people has lead to the death of queer stories that focused on the story itself but happened to include queer characters; there don't seem to be shows now like True Blood, Oz, Queer As Folk, Will and Grace, and Six Feet Under, shows where almost all of the focus is on the storytelling. Queer characters feel like they have become more of an accessory now, not less, as their lives are no longer the focus of any narrative that includes them, they're not part of a queer story, they're just queer people in a story - much in the same way that gay bars, clubs, bookshops and other queer spaces have vanished because of greater integration into the mainstream, but ironically this has actually erased queer identity more than oppression ever did.

So where's my Romeo and Julian? There's no doubt a porno that exists by that name, I know there's a schlager track by Michelle with that title but I've yet to find an actual fully fleshed out story that explores this interpretation, other than a movie called Private Romeo by Alan Brown that was set in a military academy where the two love interests are students performing Romeo and Juliet, but the narrative is tinged by the meta which is a political criticism of Don't Ask Don't Tell which has since been repealed.