The quintessential and most austere of modernist poets T.S. Elliott wrote in his 1922 work The Wasteland that ‘April is the cruellest month’ and in many ways the man was right. If we turn on any news channel or open any newspaper we see somewhere this implicit sense of gloom and the emphasis on the credit crunch and all of its depressing implications. But using a queer pair of eyes, the thing that I seem to have noticed is that this sense of austerity and cutting back on the pleasures we all indulge in has manifested itself as a very straight and family bound thing. Queer is hard to locate and define and whilst some of us have children, more of us do not. We do not live with the social ties and responsibilities that other strands of society do and as a result lots of queer identities are still articulating and realising their pleasures and desires in this so called economic down-turn. Get yourself to any gay bar on any night of the week and they are still packed to the rafters with people who want to spend their wages or loan on forgetting the sometimes quite bleak reality of life in 2009. The stereotypical image of gay hedonistic pleasure still in some ways rings true and recently it seems to be getting more and more obvious; queers just seem to be very good at having more fun in times of recession and cutting back. I must be feeling literary this month because two other quotes by icons of queer culture come to mind when we think about this sort of take on things; Oscar Wilde’s assertion that ‘we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars’ and Joe Orton’s claim that ‘Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination’. Add to that the notion that if we’re all skint, we all really are in the gutter, then living beyond your means is perhaps the best and of course the queerest thing to do.  

< Back | View Archive