Happy Jubilee!
Media Round-up:
In line with the occasion here’s some art you can use to really appreciate the
GDP [2022] - Bob Vylan - The more I listen to this album the more it grows on me - I still think it has some weird stuff about food and bodies, but I can’t make the music not bop!
Growth [2020] - Screaming Toenail - Very cool punk tunes that are full of love and solidarity while embracing being an other and using that to fuck shit up.
The Last of England [1987] - A series of stunning and blazing visuals
Albion
I watched Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels again a few days ago. An east-end Black queer giallo set around a murder at a cruising spot leading up to the Queen’s Silver Jubilee - now seems as good a time as any to watch it!
There are lots of things I could pick on in this film but I think there’s one particular thing about it that hit me more this time - and that’s the way that the death of TJ (a Black gay man) at the start of the film is received in the community.
London’s a big city - but when you have the right set of marginalisations it’s awfully small. I often joke about being 2 degrees of separation from basically every Black queer person here and as much as that may not be strictly true, it’s not far off. For better or for worse we are all so deeply interconnected in complicated webs. We never get an exact idea of the nature of Caz (Mo Sesay)’s relationship to TJ. Maybe they went to school together. Maybe they used to be lovers. Maybe they’d just caught each other's eyes on the way out from the same park where TJ was killed. In life, you barely felt the thread of silk on your shoulder and now in death, you keep thinking about its absence.
This struck me in the film when he talks about having spoken a few times but not being that close. It’s a weird kind of grief because you’re grieving for the person who died but also kind of for yourself? Or for the version of you where things were just a little different and you’re the one everyone’s posting an in memoriam for. And I don’t know if that’s selfish or self-centred? Maybe this is all just an exercise in narcissism.
In any case, while you are deep in feeling the world still turns - especially for the people who never had to give a fuck about Black queer life or death. So of course most white queer people go about their days blissfully unaware - you see this in Jason Durr's Billibub, where even with all his talk of revolution he had no clue who died in the park that night. And because the world still spins, you keep spinning too, no-one wants to hear that you're grieving for someone who wasn't in your nuclear unit or your best friend from school, they do not want to know about the spectre of death that constantly looms heavier and heavier. And it almost works.
Almost. But then in the minute of quiet time, you feel it once again. You see this in Sesay's determined face as Caz tries to stay strong and keep moving and keep pushing the music and keep connection - after all nobody is interested in seeing dark-skinned Black tears. But it can't hold. Every now and then he folds and breaks down, there is no grand trigger or big moment it just happens. And then his best friend Chris (Valentina Nonyela) holds him, Julien's camera holds the moment, and we move on.
Ultimately, what’s another grave to this necropolis? What is the difference between a murder in the park or a death by suicide or a bleeding out at the end of a coloniser’s bayonet? Each could’ve been stopped by a nation with any compassion that it was willing to turn into action. Each adds another tooth to the trophy cabinet of Albion. Each gives the blood-red rubies on the pillager’s crown their signature shine.
To me, this is clearest in the police investigation of the murder. They are looking to close their file as soon as possible by finding the quickest Black person to pin it on, forcing the narratives they construct about Black violence to be true through an extremely compliant criminal justice system. Crucially the issue here isn’t that a Black gay man died. The British state and its lapdogs are more than willing to let that happen through a lack of support for addiction, through a lack of support for mental health or gender-affirming care, through prisons, through underlying health conditions long untreated. The only issue here is that he died too publicly, his blood soiled one of Her Majesty’s Lawns that she deigned so kindly to open to the public.
And much like our protagonists, all you can do is remember the times you did have then dance and shout and hold and love and fuck and cry and agitate till together you bring the whole thing down. Hopefully, we’ll live to see the weight of their crowns crush them.