wouldn't you rather read something else?

It was, of course, inspired by this post:

But I was little too.

Still collecting the full alphabet of the “live, laugh, love” variants if anyone has some good examples.

Incidentally, after the first few times of saying “no, I’m straight but it’s important,” he started saying “you can think that if you want.” ALSO not a popular position at the time. Adam Lambert’s entire career had been derailed only four years before because he dared to be openly gay and sexual about it.

It’s worth noting that “Take Me to Church” was popularized in a viral video of ballet dancer Sergei Polunin interpreting the lyrics (as directed by David LaChapelle). That routine is–“gay and sexual about it” is a really good phrase, especially since Polunin is performing in a pair of tights the same color of his skin, a dance belt, and absolutely nothing else. The choreography emphasized the vulnerability of the lyrics, the importance of sex and love, the pain inflicted by marginalization and homophobia, and the transcendence of queer affirmation among ourselves. I remember it being almost impossible to avoid that video, although I never did–I watched it over and over, transfixed, for weeks. And the thing about that routine is that it draws a lot of its strength from using the dancer to highlight the emotional punches in the lyrics, so you can hardly avoid listening to the lyrics and processing what they mean.

Those lyrics were also unapologetically unflinching in dissecting the pain and ambivalence inflicted by chronic, pervasive homophobia–especially through the Catholic Church. The man is Irish. The Catholic Church is his local religious and moral authority, and it carries a weight there that it does not have in the US. Even writing 20 years after Sinead O’ Connor (may her memory be a blessing) famously tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live in 1992 to protest Church abuses, the Catholic church casts a long shadow over Ireland. It’s all bound up in nationalism and resistance and culture and centuries of English occupation and poverty and the Church providing many social services in times when no one else would, and then using that position to commit atrocities it then immediately tried to deny. (It has taken as much as 20 years to even get an apology.) And of course Ireland was on the front of the wave uncovering abuse within the Church; the Magdalene Laundries had been Found Out starting in 1993, and that particular vein of anger smoldered for a long time on top of the sexual abuse. (There’s a Joni Mitchell song about that one, even, the world was watching Ireland so closely in those days.) I don’t think there’s a nation in the world that is as keenly critical of the Catholic Church as Ireland; it and the US are still the only nations that have dedicated formal governmental inquests into priestly abuses, and quite a few of the dioceses involved in the US were parts of the Irish-American diaspora.

Besides the Catholic Church at the time was directly opposing LGBTQ rights everywhere. Just five years earlier in 2008 the Church and the Knights of Columbus had donated a massive amount to the campaign for California’s Prop 8, which banned gay marriage in California–an outcome that felt, at the time, like a blow. If you couldn’t keep gay marriage from being explicitly banned in California, what hope was there for anywhere? So Hozier is really staring down that legacy when he’s writing these lyrics–and, importantly, he’s not focusing on the powderkeg image of the closeted gay priest who molests little boys to express his sexuality. That was pretty much the only context in which gay Catholicism was getting discussed anywhere I could see in 2013. Sure and away that shit wrought so much harm but no one was talking about the chronic damage that comes from being told that you’re inherently unclean and sordid.

My lover’s the giggle at a funeral. We were born sick–you heard them say it.

I mean, I met a dude in 2012, when we were all freshmen in college, who told me that because of his strong Catholic faith and his gayness, he had chosen to reconcile that by simply remaining celibate forever. And in some religiously Catholic circles that was progressive at the time. The best I was seeing from mainstream Catholic theology was that gays could frame themselves as a lay person called to celibacy while also being openly gay, just as long as they never engaged in any kind of sexual activity with anyone. After all, sex was only acceptable within the bounds of marriage, and that sacrament wasn’t open to the gays, so your options were real limited if you wanted to obey the rules. In a very real sense, you were formally treated as if you were an unfortunate perversion of healthy sexuality which you could only make the best of by inventing a celibate calling.

So it is intensely, intensely meaningful that Hozier takes this whole framework of context and association and marginalization and transcends it into a viciously, sickly joyful piece of art that frames queer expression as holiness and the Church as an agent of sickness, of hunger, of pain. He is unsparing in the text as he equates his lover with holiness and ecstasy and life (only then I am human / only then I am clean; I was born sick / but I love it) and the church’s teachings with slow poison (a little poison each week), rejection (my church offers me no absolution), and the dull pain of internalized shame.

Offer me that deathless death, o good god! Let me give you my life! Command me to be well!

Again, of course we queers love you, man. We were introduced to you by the lyrics of a piece of art directed towards our very souls, affirming the life-giving connections offered by queer community (through the heavily implied metaphor of sex with the narrator’s lover) as wholly human. You started out by emphasizing how much that background radiation can hurt. Your first masterpiece sensation, which brought us to know you, was a delicately crafted powerhouse of validation and joy in a shared, bitter history. It is pain twisted into defiance, loneliness turned into a bond.

No fucking shit that was not a popular sentiment at the time. I was completely stunned and astonished when DOMA went down in 2013 with Windsor–it felt wholly surreal, especially as I’d been in Georgia and Texas where you were lucky if legislation didn’t go out of its way to kick you in the nuts on its way by. Kids, “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” fic was almost a subgenre in the enormous Stargate: Atlantis fandom at that time; when DADT went down in 2011 as it was winding down, people wrote whole fests specifically considering the characters processing the transition and coming to terms with what it meant.

DADT meant that almost all serving military members who were queer* had to remain at least publicly in the closet, and that if they were found to have been too publicly out–well, they could and often were drummed out of the service for it and lost their careers over it. Again, DADT came down in 2011. You’d get discharged and not honorably, which means you lose all your benefits and employers can see that and wonder why for the rest of your life. It was not fucking great, especially for women–there is an enormous lesbian/bi culture among women in service–but it was still slightly better than before, inasmuch as they were no longer allowed to trigger investigations to drum you out on suspicion of homosexuality just for being inconvenient or too suspiciously gender nonconforming for whatever piece of shit decided they didn’t like the look of your face. And that was seen as like, a little outdated, but not the perversion against human rights it feels like today.

Two years before. I think this came down right after Windsor hit the pike. What a year that was. Remember the brief period of heady joy after Obergefell, before Pulse, when we felt for a moment that we were marching along a path to queer acceptance across even and clear ground, and the world was on an uncomplicatedly positive trajectory? Remember optimism? But of course we all had the scars. No one casts off that much explicit shame from our communities that quickly.

In this, one of the great flowerings of transphobia as a moral panic, rising out of previous moral panics centered on homosexuality and gender conformation, it’s easy to lose hope and worry that there is no way out. Remembering the visceral context as recently as ten years ago, and considering how much of the landscape has changed, is a useful reality check. We made huge strides back last time, and we’ll do it again.