What’s a conspiracy theory you actually find believable?
Do we need ‘conspiracy theory’ because we find trust in short supply? August 20th Day Seven in Edinburgh Highlights: 1. Pleasance Dome 10, Moth and Dog Are Dying to Get Out, a play exploring the relationship of two boys, their coming out and the confrontation of distrust and ‘conspiracy’ (The Fringe Festival); 2. NW Room, Jem Calder & Derek Owusu (The Book Festival) & Courtyard Theatre Édouard Louis (The Book Festival).
Maybe I have a suspicious nature but the two young men in tne photograph above don’t look like the ones Geoff and I saw playing the roles of Moth and Dog, nor do they wear the indicators of the nicknames- white furry ears for Dog and fairy wings worn on the back of Moth. But maybe we cannot trust publicity advertisements for theze shows or maybe we can’t trust our memory for faces. I could insist that there was a conspiracy against truth here and make it plausible but it wouldn’t be.
Interestingly enough Moth and Dog Are both in this play high-school boys coming of age and, with some degree of certainty coming out as gay males. Each will lose their animal ears and wings respectively when they do, though Dog has to have his taken off by Moth, who by this time come out more fully but has taken another boyfriend, Christopher (we never see him) whom Dog tries to frame for a plot in which a picture of Moth’s spread rectum sourced from.his use on Grindr is spread a ross the school threatening, as Moth sees it, his chance of successfully coming of age as a man rather than boy.
Conspiracy theory is at the heart of the play as Dog feeds so called ‘evidence’, as Iago does Othello, of Christopher’s nasty nature. Of course, Christopher’s did not do the school oy crime and, indeed , Dog did. And he did it because he felt otherwise he would lose Moth to Christopher, but there are much deeper reasons for his conspiracy to blame a other gor conspiracy.
Do blossoming queer relationships between boys tequire more trust of each other than do heterosexual ones? Perhaps? Tje consequences of being outed are terrible to them but in this play mainly as a threat of not being a leader to be queer and still, if that is what you need to affirm, a ‘man’. Dog is tne more peturbed, even though he does not say he fears a threat to male reputation. But it transpires that this is largely because he refuses to a certain that he is gay,except in some teenage phase. Christopher may be gay, but he has never been one of the lads. Moth may be gay, Dog thinks, but even if he is, having teenage desires for him does not make Dog, gay – that’s for more febrile animals with wings.
As he polishes his conspiracy with himself to keep Moth it is also a conspiracy to keep Morh and his relationship secreted a d provisional. Yet there is another way in which conspiracy is facilitated. Boys relate to each other only by the Internet or behind the bike shed, openness is dangerous. Covid lock down exacerbates this but I don’t see this is a lockdown play per se. Lockdown rather seems a metaphor in the play for the isolation of boy’s in the world of non-normative sexual identity exploration. But in the end, it is not a out conspiracy really but the things that make the trust between needed in growing up male and in growing into openness to a queer life.
These themes, though with less stress on the non- heteronormative, may or not be those in novels by Derek Owusu and Jem Calder. I have blogged before on the novels addressed here: Borderline Fiction and I Want You to Be Happy respectively [the blogs are linked at the novel titles]. Owusu’s novel out in October was out too and, of course I bought one. However, the theme relevant to me now in this event for this blog alone was prompted by Owusu linking why we write novels, if we do. He said that it was not because we know other people, or think we do, but because we don’t know them and must construct them from fiction woven around stated fact, and that this may apply to auto-fiction too, and, as shall see much more so in writing much nearer the autobiographical in Édouard Louis. Yet fatigued after this week, I don’t feel able to really generate commentary on this much. Suffice to say that personality, and not only in Borderline Personality Disorder Syndrome (BPD) syndrome, is not something that is a matter of well established and clearly delineated facts (or symptoms come to that) but something greater where fictions of all kind play around the border of what a person is or can be. The discussion was intelligent and interesting but I wasn’t surprised that Geoff found it dull – it played too much in abstractions.
Édouard Louis
I have blogged before (use the links on the titles) Édouard Louis’s Collapse And Monique Escapes and the discussion on this engaged more perhaps than any other in the Festival this year but Louis also said many similar things to what I reported above of Derek Owusu, if more theoretically grounded as you might expect from a Frenchman fascinated by critical philosophy, and with reference to queer themes much more centrally to his main themes – though also about, of course, class and sex/gender. The interviewer (Adam Biles) kept him talking to the end but did so in a way that still fascinated. When I saw Louis in the signing tent I ask him the question I wanted to ask – about the violence of his disgust at his brother’s sexual body. What Louis said fascinated me even more because he too was repelled by how he appears in this scenario and for a long time considered dropping it, but did not – on the insistence of good and philosophical friends, for it implicated Louis himself in what could look like the socio-structural conspiracy bringing about his brother’s collapse, and, of course, Louis is a truth teller.
That’s the end of my Edinburgh week then
With love
Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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