Articulations of Desire, Vol. 2

C. DELPHINIUM DAYS

“...como se hace siempre. ¿Siempre.... Creo que sí... ¿O fuimos nosotros los primeros a quienes ocurría aquello?” Agustín GÓMEZ ARCOS, El cordero carnívoro, 1975

We know that language shapes thought, and therefore the way we perceive “reality.” Perhaps that’s why we’ve been so concerned with concealing its meanings, with building codes that allow us to create other realities or to preserve territories that would otherwise be destroyed.

One of the methods used during the Victorian era to encrypt communication was floriography. Flowers allowed for the sending of seemingly coded messages that all speakers of that language could decipher. All the communities mentioned earlier have been forced to “speak the language of the enemy,” while constructing codes that allowed them to exist within a reality parallel to the hostile environment surrounding them. Words that enabled the formation of communities.

“The term anti-language refers to forms of language that are used by people who are somehow apart from mainstream society, either residing on the edges of it, perhaps frowned on in some way, or hidden away or even criminalized, with attempts from the mainstream to expel or contain them.” Paul BAKER, FABULOSA! The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language, 2019

Perhaps this connection to the language of flowers led Vita Sackville-West to create a garden of white flowers. A whole text only her initiates could read, yet one that served Derek Jarman in articulating his chapter on white in Chroma, 1993. In it, as in the rest of his artistic work, references draw from both pop culture and classical tradition, crafting a mythology that continually traced a genealogy, opening up the possibility of stories on the margins of historiography. The map as an act of love.

“Te escribo solo para expresarte mi amor.” Virginia WOOLF, Carta a Vita, 1928

Affection develops its own language—terms and expressions that attempt to verbalize the unspeakable in a feeling. Often we create this language from what we've learned, replicating love as an exercise—seen and repeated in people and lives that bear no resemblance to the ones we must live. The absence of dissident affectivities and narratives initially leads us to replicate heteronormative ones. But like an actor who hasn’t internalized their script, there is always a crack in the performance... we glimpse the flicker of something that seems to speak to us through a character or an image. We sense there's something more there, but how to decipher the message it’s sending, how to decode in order to speak and inscribe ourselves in history?

“Six or eight thousand years ago They laid down the law” B-52s, Mesopotamia, 1982

“Political correctness has unfortunately relegated ’gay history‘ to the recent and contemporary account of the gay emancipation movement. But to place this movement in its proper historical perspective we must revert to some of the principles of ’queer history’” Rictor NORTON, Myth of the Modern Homosexual. Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity, 1997

To historiograph while fleeing the mechanisms of power and control imposed by history itself is already a challenge. But how do we make visible the diversity and dissent that a non-normative historiography should include? In recent years, such discourses have entered academia, starting with a critique of its own founders—Michel Foucault and David Halperin—for identifying people by their sexual behavior, which theorists like Leo Bersani have called “brutally reductionist.” In his essay collection Is the rectum a grave?, 2010, Bersani points to the misogyny and homophobia in many of those approaches, arguing that true radicalism lies more in modes of relation than in the acts themselves.