Steve_Bamlett_blog

Invent a holiday! Explain how and why everyone should celebrate.

This is a question that seems asked over and over again so why not start responding by referring to an old blog on what holidays mean to the retired and ruminant.

A celebrant of the holy days of retirement. Some thoughts about the fate of ritual in a world defined by scheduled work.

But let’s suppose this question is about me imagining I had the power to force a celebration of an idea or concept on everyone, for that is indeed the true political nature of Bank holidays. Labour governments used to invent celebration of the values of the Labour Movement, before the Labour Party became the toy of a conservative middle-class element in favour of the benefits to them of capitalism. Tory Governments would in retaliation ban these holidays or change their name or affiliation to something frankly more backwards looking, the best example of which is May Day, wrested back and forth between its pagan origins, Christian repurposing and the Red Flag.

So maybe I might turn to make a day when the world changed for me personally because I finally could legalise my partnership of 35 years standing, though that was in January 2006, one month after the creation of Civil Partnership. The day was the 28th of January. That seems like a good day for a holiday. And let’s make it a celebration of a love you have chosen despite the lack of formal social support, of bonding not tied to the system of inducements to heteronormative lives that prevailed through my early infancy in the 1950s and the false dawn of the 1967 legalisation of sex between ‘consenting adults in private’.

That reduction of love to sex and choice to something that must be kept secret was a bad moment. Queer historians have pointed out that the years after 1967 were tougher for most queer people than those before, for the State tried to radically enforce the notion of privacy, raiding public places to eliminate frank choices to demonstrate love (by which I don’t mean to indicate sex) visible to others. Even in the 1990s a policeman tried to arrest me and a heterosexual male friend who hugged in the street on parting because, unknown to us, we did so near a notorious ‘cottage’, where it was reported men had sex with each other, in Muswell Hill. The reaction of the man I hugged lost me a friend forever but maybe that was no loss, for he insisted he should not be arrested because he was straight.

To make a partnership public was important and even then to convert it to marriage, for despite the traditional gay liberationist objection to marriage with its conservative connotations, marriage had to be a choice for us and more so for those people for whom religious affiliation remained important. I would call it Love Choice Day and it would celebrate people choosing how they loved themselves in a form of their choice, their choice of how to express love and who to love. It would not be a day specific for queer people but a day where choice predominated in the expression of our attachments including that to how we see ourselves and how we manifest the attachment, including what we name it. It would celebrate asexuality as well as all consensual sexualities, which hopefully some people self-defining as cis straight people will celebrate too.

It would even not be a day for venerating love for the compulsion to use that word leads to a lot of false attachments and misunderstanding, though it would definitely venerate mutual respect. When I bonded with my husband I did not know what that bonding meant, though I thought it did. Now I know no one word is adequate for our togetherness to express it’s meaning or effect on us. Nor are any of the formulas of how to live together from social convention or modern wisdom (or books that pretend to such status) for sustaining that togetherness has meant an openness to choice and a sense that mutual duty is not mutual bondage. It has involved mistakes made by a different version of love and it has involved working through that.

People have to find out how to choose from exercising choice. Only that way can they know that it is even possible to mistakenly call something love that was directed at someone incapable of it. The end result is a self-willed constraint on your own ongoing learning about choice and wisdom: that was not love but bondage to an idea without substance (an empty choice!). So let’s celebrate our day. Lets! Xxxx lol

With love

Steven