Queen James & Dr. John: ShakesQueer pt. 2 (a VENUS VALLEY chapter)

Info-dump chapter!

I had a lot I wanted to say in the last chapter and a few different places I wanted to take it; but for those who want to know more, there’s plenty more to know - and like a good little philosophy blogger, telling you all about it can raise plenty more questions!

If you’ve just got here, welcome to my chapter-by-chapter release of my book-in-progress: LGBTQIA+ centric philosophical musings which you my queerly beloveds are invited to debate, discuss, question, contribute, as your inputs become my edits until all our voices are represented in the finished published product: Venus Valley, Queer Philosophers’ Forum.

If you want to read more about Dr. George Weinberg, the psychologist who coined the term Homophobia; his Shakespeare-centred self-help writing; and how it helped me come out, when I was appearing in Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedy Twelfth Night; you can catch up on Part 1 by clicking HERE.

If you want to know more about the queer theory and conspiracy theory where I left off - the Queen James Bible and the School of Night - read on!

If you’ve read more of what I’ve written, you’ll know a big part of my exploring philosophy is Deconstruction - unpicking the threads that my Christian upbringing wove into my thinking, to see what does or doesn’t stand up to question. On that journey I came across Dr. Dan Mclellan, a PhD scholar of theology, religion and the Bible who spends his time combatting misinformation and disinformation about his specialist subjects on social media; I recommend you check him out if you want to hear someone use the Bible to speak for queer theory and against conspiracy theory for a change, instead of the other way round! (He’s also a Mormon, so of course I don’t agree with him on everything). He had a few things to say to a conservative Christian content creator complaining about The Queen James Bible, a new “woke” version of the classic tome, meant to fully acknowledge King James’ bisexuality and his political motives for his Bible, and to clear up mistranslations in the original that have led to so much of the disinformation that scholars like Mclellan have to take time ironing out. Especially the verses that are used as homophobic and transphobic weapons, so often that they’ve even come to be called “the clobber passages”. Let’s take a look.

I'm paraphrasing and generalising here, because yesteryear's world was as multicultural as today's in its own way. In the cultures around the times and places at the heart of the Bible, like Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian - instead of how we today give gendered names to relationship roles like BOYfriend/GIRLfriend or Bride/Groom - they pretty commonly used terms of status, more like today's Dom/Sub or Top/Bottom. The Dom role was masculine, so the male's place was the Top; the Sub role was feminine, so the female's place was the Bottom. If you put a dominant woman on top - even with a man - you took away her femininity and made her a "masculine woman"; you were treating her like a man; acting as if she was a man. And if you put a submissive man on the bottom - even with a woman - you took away his masculinity and made him a "feminine man"; you were treating him like a woman; acting as if he was a woman. That's what's being condemned, forbidden and prohibited in the “clobber passages". If you want to see them for yourself to compare the King with the Queen James, you'll find them in the books of Leviticus and Romans. It was an abuse and an assault that only Pagans, pimps, prostitutes and P-3-D-O's did to each other or to anyone else, according to the writers of the Bible. Today, we know sex work can be a consensual and colourful career at its best, though still dangerous when at its worst; and that children raised by gay and lesbian parents grow up happy and healthy. Not a sentence, not a syllable, of the Bible - King or Queen - calls that kind of family a sin to be in.

If anyone says anything with the words “biblical marriage” in it, in answer to that, ask them if that includes all the kinds of relationships in the Bible that we’re blessed by God - which includes incestuous marriage, polygamous marriage, celibate marriage, slave marriage; and whatever was going on between future-King David and Prince Jonathan, who “loved him more than his own soul”, and pledged allegiance to him by stripping off his robe when they were alone together in his war tent. The same David and Jonathan who Oscar Wilde named in his trial for “gross indecency”, as “the love that dare not speak its name”.

Later Greek and Greek-influenced culture after then, by contrast - even though they had just as problematic levels of sexism and slavery as the Biblical or Biblical-influenced ones - in fact recognised masculine & feminine males, and masculine and feminine females, to be stages along a "grey scale" of sex, with an androgynous midpoint. And in accord with that, the Talmud - the later collection of Jewish history, philosophy and tradition, based on the study of earlier scriptures - released people who were beyond or between male and female, from the strict masculine and feminine social roles. Those who used to be called hermaphrodites - apparently-female except for the apparently-male equipment between their legs - and eunuchs - apparently-male except for the apparently-female equipment between their legs - had special rules applied to their rights and responsibilities in Jewish society, depending on whether they were made that way by God or by man; and had their own pronouns in Hebrew, distinct from He or She. And not one sentence or one syllable of the Bible, King or Queen, calls that a sin, either. The closest it comes is decrying men in women's clothes and hairstyles, and vice versa; but what are "men's" or "women's" clothes or hairstyles, in a book where the Samson loses God's blessing and power by letting his long hair be cut from his shoulders, and Jesus heals a bleeding woman by her touching the tassels of his robe as they sweep along the floor?

The other big famous "clobber passage" is the story of Sodom & Gomorrah in the book of Genesis - so much so, that the names have become figures of speech for crime and sin, with "sodomy" even being the specific name of both a sin and a crime , once upon a time. The story goes that the men of the city came out in force to rape a pair of angels, not even deterred from their urges by the offer of human virgin girls as victims instead. There are callbacks to the story in the later books of Ezekiel and Jude, which make pretty clear that the two reasons the rape of angels was a perverted abomination, are because, first, it was rape; and second, they were angels - not because the men were turned off, instead of turned on, by the offer of virgin girls. In fact the word "sodomite" didn't become the word "homosexual" in English translations of the Bible until 1946.

Jude is a mini letter at the back end of the New Testament just before the big bad book of Revelation, little read and even less understood, because we don't have the source in our Bibles that Jude's talking about - unless we're in the traditional Ethiopian church - the book of Enoch. Which brings us to the Dr. John I brought up in this chapter's title; which, in turn, if you stay with me a minute, will bring us back to Shakespeare, via a quick detour around Aleister Crowley.

Spending his inherited family fortune travelling the world experimenting with the spiritual and ceremonial use of sex and drugs - possibly working for British Intelligence, if you believe some of his defenders - Crowley's ENOCHIAN MAGICK came from his claim to be the reincarnation of the Elizabethan occultist who gave his name as both Edward Kelley and Edward Talbot depending on who was asking. Eddie was the sidekick - and possibly the partner in polyamory with both of their wives - of the alchemist, astrologer, apothecary and antiquarian, Dr. John Dee. Dear Johnny left England, with the blessing of Queen Elizabeth, to travel Europe for the same kinds of research reasons as Aleister Crowley a couple of centuries later, with Eddie and their wives in tow - with notes in his journal suggesting the two men shared the two women. The book of Enoch, his fascination, is what's known as an eclectic text - a whole scroll pieced together from fragments of copies of an original that no longer exists - whose importance to Bible-based belief is debated in Judaism and accepted, as I said, in the traditional Ethiopian church (a church, by the way, whose very first convert, according to the books Acts Of The Apostles in the Bible, was a eunuch). It retells stories from the book of Genesis from the angels' points of view, ending with the angels put in their places, and their places marked by the Sun, Moon & stars. The fascination of it in both John Dee's and Aleister Crowley's day was, first, that the Sun, Moon & stars cycle back to their places in the sky over time, meaning it might work as a prophecy for when the angels will return or be released. Second, if it's the angelic account of those events, could its root language be the language of Heaven? And if words from Heaven make Creation - "God said, 'let there be...' and there was..." - then could we become Creators if we speak it? Unfortunately, by the time Johnny got back to England - leaving Eddie dying in prison for fraud, before apparently becoming Aleister Crowley's past life - King James, with his phobia of witchcraft and demonology, had taken over from the good Doctor’s beloved patron Good Queen Bess, and he died as penniless as Eddie.

But regardless if you believe any of the above is true or false, Dr. Dee influenced more than just Aleister Crowley. If the School of Night, the secret heretic philosophy meetup from the last chapter, was what its critics claimed it to be, then Dr. Dee was right at the heart of it. Spy catchers got hold of letters between Sir Walter Raleigh the politician & explorer; Anthony Munday & Kit Marlowe the playwrights; Thomas Heriot the mathematician ally of infamous astronomer Galileo; Matthew Roydon the atheist poet; George Chapman the English translator of Homer’s Odyssey; and our two friends Dr. John & slippery Eddie; to gather together in the house of the publisher of Shakespeare’s poetry, whose family also happened to be neighbours of the Shakespeares in Stratford. Which makes the claim more likely to be true, that Dr. Dee inspired the doomed Kit Marlowe's Dr. Faustus - the original tale of "selling your soul to Satan/doing a deal with the devil" - and Shakespeare's final fictional character creation, Prospero the enchanter, in my favourite play The Tempest. German writer Goethe's modern rewrite, Faust, in turn influenced and inspired C. G. Jung. And the classic sci fi movie Forbidden Planet, based on The Tempest, in turn influenced and inspired the pilot episode of Star Trek. The theatrical comedy musical remake, Return to the Forbidden Planet, starred James Doohan - Star Trek’s “Scotty” - as The Newsreader in the 1990s; in 2012 the role was taken by Richard O’Brien, co-creator of the infamous Rocky Horror Show: the rock musical about a mad scientist drag queen who creates himself the perfect gay lover in his Transylvanian lab. I’d feel a lot happier about that, if O’Brien hadn’t recently come out in favour of transphobic “gender critical” prejudice. You are the sex your genetics and genitals say you are, they say, and that should be the one and only basis for laws around gay rights, education, healthcare, or women’s safety; “gender” is a dangerous delusion to them. To paraphrase and generalise again, O’Brien’s message, as I take it, used to be for sexually-repressed men: no matter how flamboyantly effeminate you are, you’re still a man. Now, unfortunately, it seems he’s turned that message towards trans women: no matter how fabulously feminine you are, you’re not female. All I have to say back to him and the rest of the gender critics if that’s his position (it’s certainly theirs) is that if I want to know the truth about trans and nonbinary people, I’ll ask trans and nonbinary people, who know themselves and their own identity better than you ever will. I’ll ask the doctors and lawyers whose objective fact gathering overwhelmingly supports the value and validity of gender identity. And if I wasn’t interested in your movement before, I’m even more turned off by the neo-Nasties and extreme evangelical anti-abortionists who’ve taken your side.

(A Neil Gaiman reference was going to go here, for how he’s talking back to homophobes and transphobes who misread his books, but I think I’ll save that for the next chapter!)

While I put this chapter in because I thought it was a fascinating info-dump for the themes I raised in the one before, I also think it's a fun thought experiment for a philosophical question: Even if something written is not valid as a literal fact, can it still have literary value in how it moves or motivates its reader? And is that its “real meaning”, more so than any strict historical reconstruction?

So while Aleister Crowley, Dr. John Dee, and the other figures who came up in this chapter, could all fill several chapters or even several books each, that's already been done and done again. I want to take it a different way. Most of the things I've talked about in these two chapters were inspirations and influences of Shakespeare's, who himself inspired and influenced countless works of fact and fiction, which in turn gave their creators the chance to express, explain, explore, and invite their viewers to experience, fact THROUGH fiction - from Shakespeare to Star Trek. The technical terms I can teach you for this, to make this chapter philosophically educational, are ALLEGORY and CREATIVE NON-FICTION. For a deconstructing ex-Christian like me, it helps to know that some stories can still teach me lessons without being taken literally. And for the queer community, fiction gives us ways to say things we either can't say, or can't get anyone to listen to, any other way.

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