The Stained Glass Closet
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Visions of Queer Martyrdom from
John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman
by Dominic Janes
of Chicago Press. 257 pages, $50.

DOMINIC JANES’ book about Victorian Englishmen attracted to their own sex—“sodomites” was the term at the time—in the Anglo-Catholic branch of the Anglican Church is not about the usual suspects. We do have Oscar Wilde and Cardinal Newman (founder of the Oxford Movement that began it all), but there are also chapters on people you may have never heard of: William Bennett, a provincial priest who had a Stations of the Cross built outside his church in Somerset; Father Ignatius, who founded monasteries based on the Benedictines; Frederick Rolfe (aka Baron Corvo), the author of Hadrian the Seventh (1904), the famous novel about an alternative pope. There are also the authors of children’s books based on the story of David and Jonathan; and, finally, the gay film maker Derek Jarman, who made a movie about Saint Sebastian and was himself canonized by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence on a beach in Dungeness not long before he died of AIDS.

Visions of Queer Martyrdom is essentially the story of the clash between the “muscular Christianity” of the Protestant Church of England and the Anglo-Catho-lics who, while remaining in the Anglican fold, formed a counterculture of their own by turning to Catholic ritual, sacraments, and imagery. Newman ultimately converted to Roman Catholicism, as did another figure who is curiously absent from this book, though he would seem to epitomize its subject, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who suppressed not only his sexuality but his literary gifts in order to be a Jesuit priest. Flirtation with, much less conversion to, Catholicism was a radical act in Protestant Britain. When Hopkins told his parents what he planned to do, it was like a death in the family; but when they asked Dr. Pusey, a leading light of the Oxford Movement, to counsel him, Pusey wrote back that it would do no good—when “perverts” were determined to go over to Rome, a meeting with him was simply an opportunity for them to say Pusey had failed. Here, of course, “pervert” means someone who wished to become a Roman Catholic.

It was perverse in the eyes of English Protestants to convert to Roman Catholicism, or even to introduce into the Church of England a sensibility and ritualism associated with the Middle Ages. But something was obviously going on in the culture at large; the Pre-Raphaelites were also returning to medieval subject matter. Reading Janes, we are shown the connections between Anglo-Catholicism and the pre-Raphaelites, including the homosexual artist Simeon Solomon, between Simeon Solomon and Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde and Father Bennett, Father Bennett and Father Ignatius, Father Ignatius and the Victorian emphasis on the innocence of children, the innocence of children and the suspicion the English media had that there was something rotten going on in the monasteries. There is a lot of evidence for Janes to examine, not only sermons and literature, sculpture and painting, but even the poofty preachers on ice skates who illustrated the Christmas cards that began to be circulated among the upper classes in Victorian times, not to mention the cartoons in Punch that relentlessly made fun of what was seen as the effeminacy, æstheticism, and mumbo-jumbo of the Anglo-Catholics. The “muscular Christianity” of Charles Kingsley—whose attacks on Cardinal Newman brought the latter to tears—saw the Oxford Movement as nothing less than a threat to British manhood.

But for men attracted to their own sex, becoming an Anglo-Catholic had several advantages, as Janes points out. In identifying themselves with Christ, the “original Catholic martyr,” they could express their own sense of suffering and ostracism. They could also appreciate Jesus as an æsthetic object. Here, for instance, is how Hopkins described Christ in a sermon: “moderately tall, well built, and tender in frame, his features straight and beautiful, his hair inclining to auburn, parted in the midst, curling and clustering about the ears and neck as the leaves of a filbert, so to speak, upon the nut.” And here is what a chaplain named Gerald Moultrie wanted you to imagine as you meditated on Jesus: “Lo, thy Beloved offers himself in his nakedness to thy gaze. With fixed feet he stands. He claims thy approach. He desires thy free access. He opens wide the arms of his all-embracing love. He shows his open wounds. His head he bends to thy kiss… Touch the Cross with love. Embrace it with the ardor of devotion. Clasp it and kiss it in the tenderness of thy sorrow.”

Roman Catholic ritual in England at the time was actually much plainer and poorer, Janes writes, than the ceremonies of the Anglo-Catholics (which leads one to wonder: Is “smells and bells” still the gay slang for High Church pageantry? And is there still a church in Manhattan called Smoky Mary’s? And does anyone still tell the joke about the naïve parishioner who, seeing the priest swinging the censor in a procession, runs up to him and says, “Excuse me, but your purse is on fire”?). Anglo-Catholics were extremely good at ritual. They were also able to find comfort in the company of men like themselves—though it’s not clear from reading Janes how much of the latter was expressed physically. Protestants, who considered marriage a way for their clergy to satisfy their sexual needs, found celibacy suspect. But by observing the rule of celibacy, Anglo-Catholics escaped the Victorian pressure to marry. Of course, Janes repeats, they paid a price for this: no sex.

How strictly the ethic of restraint was followed is not investigated here, besides references to a comely young monk taken under the wing of the famously androgynous Father Ignatius. Whether it was as flamboyant as the opening scene of Ronald Firbank’s Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926), in which the eponymous prelate dies of a heart attack while chasing a choirboy around the cathedral, is not gone into. These days everything’s changed: priests and monks are virtually assumed to be gay unless proven otherwise. Gene Robinson, the retired gay bishop of New Hampshire whose election nearly caused a schism in the Anglican Church (between European and African bishops) is quoted here as saying that the Church would be shut down if gay people were no longer allowed to staff it. And Ireland just voted to legalize gay marriage after a series of sex scandals seems to have broken the hold the Catholic Church had on that country.

In this book, Janes has a rich, rich subject, a gold mine, really—especially for anyone who’s read Firbank, or Hopkins, or Brideshead Revisited—though the cool, dry quality of the writing keeps it from being the absorbing narrative one might wish for. Words like “constitutive,” “reinscribe,” and “problematize”—and phrases like “systems of meaning,” “hegemonic cultural practice,” and “subversive subject position”—act as a sort of formaldehyde. How can Ann Cvetkovich’s observation, quoted here, that “the manipulation of images becomes a form of ownership facilitating the process by which they are collected and installed within personal systems of meaning” do anything but crush the prosaic fact that Frederick Rolfe (aka Baron Corvo) had a private altar in his home composed of the sort of pictures and ephemera with which many of us made collages, or scrapbooks, or even, yes, private altars, when we were growing up? A private altar is a private altar; does it have to be a system of meaning? The language of queer theory is so deadly that one really has to wonder if, in using it, and thereby restricting their audience, not to mention desiccating their own material, professors are not performing a martyrdom of their own.

That said, the details of this story are delicious: the cartoons in Punch, the children’s literature, the Christmas cards, the private altars, the photographs of tonsured monks. It’s worth the occasional patches of jargon to learn that Cardinal Newman was buried with a close friend—though this was not necessarily evidence of homosexuality; there was a tradition of English clerics being buried side by side. Or that “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” was written eight years after the loss of Thomas Grey’s friend and probable lover, Richard West. Or that the idea of the “Real Presence” (that the body of Christ is being consumed at Communion) so appalled Anglican parishioners that Father Bennett was brought to trial by one of his parishioners for espousing it.

In the end, however, the stained glass closet was busted open by Oscar Wilde, a Protestant who’d always been fascinated by the Catholic Church but saw it as Protestants did, as a sort of “femme fatale”: gothic, sensual, masochistic. Wilde was more Hellenistic than Christian, but he became a real martyr after being sent to prison—though De Profundis, the long letter he wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas after his release, is not, Janes argues, the Christian weeper critics take it for, but rather the construction of a new homosexual identity using Christian tropes. And after Wilde came yet another Protestant to shatter further the Anglo-Catholic hideaway: Edward Carpenter, the gay activist who despised the artificiality and snobbery of the English elite, took a working-class man as his lover and lived happily ever after in a cottage in the country. And then, many decades later, the final break: gay liberation, whose proponents disdained the Anglo-Catholics as a bunch of closeted fairies.

Janes does not share this disdain. In his view the stained glass closet was not antithetical to gay liberation but a forerunner of it—if only because it was members of the Anglican Church who lobbied for the decriminalization of homosexuality during the deliberations that led to the Wolfenden Report (in part because they wanted to protect their own priests from blackmail). As for the present day: “In my opinion,” Janes writes, “the Churches and the gay community have a great deal to offer each other in terms of the mingling of ethical and æsthetic stances.” But just what these stances are is not made clear. Like so many similar observations in the book, they remain frustratingly abstract. Just how did gay liberation grow out of the church closet, unless it was in reaction against it? As for the current struggle between Christian congregations and openly gay clergy, Janes writes: “It seems ironic … that it is at this very time that strong elements in the Church of England, alongside others in the Church of Rome and in many other Christian denominations, have stood against the liberalization of rules concerning gay clergy. By clinging on to the old model of private queer martyrdom in the closet, these churches are preventing their priests from engaging with a changed society.”

Do gay men still see themselves as martyrs? It’s quite possible—even with political success and assimilation. What we read in Hopkins’ last great poems, the so-called Terrible Sonnets—terrible because of his despair and sense of abandonment—are surely emotions that people still feel today. But in a secular age, identification with Christ seems less of an option. Prompted to name a gay martyr now, one’s first thought, at least in the U.S., would probably be Matthew Shepard, or the AIDS dead, or the countless people fag-bashed on the street who were not Matthew Shepard. Abroad, it would be the gay men executed in Iran, the demonstrators beaten by thugs at gay marches in Moscow, the men jailed and murdered in Uganda and other African countries. But how many gay people see themselves, in the privacy of their own hearts, as ostracized and suffering like Christ, one cannot say. Is the gay Anglican group Dignity all that’s left of the Anglo-Catholics? Bishop Robinson writes a column for The Daily Beast and rode past me in a convertible in the Gay Pride Parade in Washington this summer. The Catholic Church allegedly screens applicants to the religious life to eliminate homosexuals and is still paying out to the victims of abuse. Yet the current pope seems to be welcoming in a way that his predecessor was not. The story goes on.