“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.”
Oscar Wilde from The Picture of Dorian Gray - 1891
March 17th is the day many celebrate all things Irish and it has often been said that everyone is Irish on that day. It certainly has evolved for many into an excuse to get royally pissed, often on green beer. Though the exact year of St. Patrick’s death is somewhat a matter of conjecture there seems to be some historical agreement that the actual day was March 17th sometime in the 5th century.
Snakes and shamrocks are often closely associated with Patrick. He may have actually used the shamrock to teach the mystery of the Holy Trinity, i.e. three-in-one. The shamrock was certainly a pagan symbol and as with so much of Christianity was co-opted by the new religion probably to enhance recruitment.
The snakes are a bit more of a shaky matter. Post-glacial Ireland never had any snakes but Patrick gets credit for driving them all out of Ireland. One account relates that he may actually have hallucinated being attacked by snakes after completing a 40-day fast and then defeated them. That sounds about right to me. After a good night sleep and some real food and water the snakes were all magically gone.
One thing historians agree on was that a young Patrick, a Brit actually and not Irish himself, was captured by raiding Irish pagans and hauled off from Roman Britain to Ireland where he spent several years as a slave. Eventually he did return to Ireland as a missionary. I think we can give him at least some credit or blame for converting Ireland to Catholicism although even this is contested by some. He certainly has become the patron saint of Irish Catholics.
As a young Irish Catholic lad my coming out as queer was in retrospect heavily influenced and directed by that peculiarly intense version of guilt inducing religiosity, Irish Roman Catholicism. St. Patrick then for me represents in some ways a stifling religion that has done more than its share of oppressing Queer people.
Though certainly not unique to Ireland or the Irish the whole messy and very sad kettle of fish that is clergy sexual abuse has really come home to roost in recent years in Ireland. The far-reaching tentacles of this perversion are currently in the press in the form of Cardinal Keith O’Brien and his resignation for inappropriate sexual advances. Cardinal O’Brien is Irish and was born in Northern Ireland. He recently resigned as the religious head of the Catholic Church in Scotland because of “drunken fumblings” of a sexual nature towards several other much younger clergy and students.
This was apparently not a case of serial pedophilia and perhaps could even have elicited some sympathy for a man only able to address his gay sexual nature when drunk. An unfortunate but not infrequent manifestation of internalized homophobia still today. However, this guy’s self-hatred manifested itself only just a year ago in a public diatribe condemning the “madness of same sex unions and the tyranny of tolerance.” Sorry, no sympathy here, only pity.
So on this St. Patrick’s Day I prefer to celebrate a different Irishman. Not one of the O’Brien’s of the Church or an old and largely mythological saint of a religion that is rapidly imploding into irrelevance. Rather I prefer to honor the legacy of a much more honest and open queer Irish man, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), dramatist, novelist and poet.
I acknowledge that what got Oscar in so much trouble, ending in a severe two-year prison term at hard labor, was in part the result of “yielding to his temptations”. Oh yes and then taking very queenly umbrage at being implicated as a sodomite by the father of one his young lovers.
He decided to sue this man for libel. Obviously Oscar was not openly embracing his inner queer here, but it was the 1890’s in Victorian England. At trial things didn’t go so well. Wilde eventually ended up being charged and convicted of “gross indecency” and the charge of libel against the father of his lover dropped. Sodomy in those days in England was a felony. In the English penal system Wilde was Prisoner C.3.3.
I would like to end with a couple more delicious quotes from Prisoner C.3.3:
“ Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
“We are all in the gutter but some of us are
looking up at the stars.”
“Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”
Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone and don’t forget to lift a pint to Oscar! His life I think on balance was a positive way to yield to temptations in a manner that keeps one’s soul from growing sick.
For St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 2013
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| Oscar Wilde's grave in Paris, France Photo by Pat Gourley |
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