Comments | ink_ling: A Queer Quote

ink_ling

A Queer Quote

Aug 23, 2005 20:24

I was reading Morris Berman's The Twilight of American Culture and ran across this quote from E. M. Forster:

I believe in aristocracy ... Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and all classes, and all through the ( Read more... )

queerness, literature, quotes

Comments 12

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ink_ling August 24 2005, 03:33:03 UTC

:) I think you're right. The language of aristocracy -- even though I know he is redefining the word -- makes me feel a little too powder-wiggy, though.

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ink_ling August 24 2005, 04:33:07 UTC

Have to staple it to my scalp!

Thread 6

jliv August 24 2005, 03:01:14 UTC

The plucky shall inherit the earth!

ink_ling August 24 2005, 03:33:57 UTC

Hahaha! I felt kind of like an outsider there, too! I just couldn't allow someone to describe me as plucky. It's one of those words I can barely bear the sound of ... .

creepy1966 August 24 2005, 03:49:02 UTC

Things in prison are kind of like that..
Actually,it gives more of an order than anything else.Then again,I'm a mental invalid,and likely could be missing the point entirely.

ink_ling August 24 2005, 04:34:37 UTC

You trying to make me think of aristocratic, queer prison stories!? Hahaha ... . OK: Well, maybe it's just me ... .

creepy1966 August 24 2005, 13:25:55 UTC

We could write a script...Set in France,about 1946.

ink_ling August 24 2005, 16:44:57 UTC

Can we do Turkey or Spain? I want to use my casting couch on darker-browed men. :)

nathangphd August 24 2005, 15:44:46 UTC

Wow, that's a really brave statement coming from him, especially in 1939. Given that he wrote Maurice, his one gay novel, in 1914 but immediately repudiated it and refused to let it be published in his lifetime, this quote is not only a remarkably open declaration of his own queerness, but also a sort of post-Edwardian "we're here, we're queer, get used to us" statement. Oooh, I feel all open and affirmed now!

ink_ling August 24 2005, 16:55:18 UTC

I know! And it's odd to me, but I get this sense -- because of the more repressive time period, the relatively new understandings of "homosexual" -- that his definition of queer would more closely match my cultural understanding I would argue for, rather than the generally standing "gay" that is taken for granted now.

If that makes a lick of sense!