“There are only three possible endings to a story—if you put aside And They All Lived Happily Ever After, which isn’t an ending, but a coda. The three possible endings are: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness.”
Oh what an amazing, thrilling, enchanting and yes, humbling feeling it is, to be fully present in such a way as to know the right key and the right time! Then, effortlessly, the unique music that is YOU will flow.
Saint John Bosco, a progressive thinker, abhorred all punishment, believing that by removing youth from temptation, treating them with dignity and kindness, and enriching them with skills, they could be led to more productive lives. His simple rule was: “Not with blows, but with charity and gentleness must you draw these friends to the path of virtue.”
Art: Detail of a painting, held at Savio College Dingli painted by Austin Camilleri.
“Have patience to walk with short steps till you have legs to run with, or rather wings to fly. Be content yet a while to be a little nympha*, soon you will become a full-formed bee.”–Saint Francis de Sales to a Religious of the Visitation in Letters to Persons in Religion (Aeterna Press, 2015) page 133.
* The newly hatched and undeveloped bees are called Nymphs: when they have their wings, Francis de Sales calls them Avettes, from the Latin word Apicula.
In the original French:
“Ayez patience d'aller le petit pas jusqu'à ce que vous ayez des jambes à courir, ou plutôt des ailes à voler. Soyez volontiers pour encore une petite nymphe, bientôt vous deviendrez une brave avette.” –Francois de Sales
[“If we want to know why many queer people prefer their own company to the company of straights, certainly one answer to this question is about protection and mutual care—we hold each other up in a world that pushes us down. But there is also another, far less discussed facet to this story about queer people keeping their distance from straight people—an element that has less to do with queer vulnerability or oppression in the face of straight privilege and more to do with queer power, freedom, abundance or relief in the face of heterosexual misery and myopia. It is a story about queer people sometimes finding straight culture and relationships too sad or enraging to witness, too boring or traumatic to endure. It is about queers often wishing to look away from the train wreck, by which I mean the seemingly inextricable place of sexual coercion and gender injustice within straight culture, or what the feminist writer JoAnn Wypijewski described in 2013—as she reflected on the ubiquity of sexual assault among teenagers—as heterosexuality’s relentlessly “primitive” attachment to lies, manipulation, and violence as the formative route to sex. It is about queer recoil, or something like the nausea that the French scholar Paul Preciado has felt in response to both the aesthetics and the misery (the miserable aesthetics?) of heterosexuality, described in an essay titled “Letter from a Transman to the Old Sexual Regime”: “I am as far removed from your aesthetics of heterosexuality as a Buddhist monk levitating in Lhassa is from a Carrefour supermarket… . It doesn’t excite me to ‘harass’ anyone. It doesn’t interest me to get out of my sexual misery by touching a woman’s ass on public transport… . The grotesque and murderous aesthetics of necro-political heterosexuality turns my stomach.” Sometimes straight culture is quite literally repulsive; we feel it in the gut.
We have insufficient language to describe queer people’s experience of finding straight culture repellent and pitiable, given that heterosexuality has been presented to us as love’s gold standard. But even without a suitable name for this contradiction—the fact that the world’s most glorified relationship is often a miserable one—many queers have still spoken this truth. In 1984, a few years before his death, James Baldwin explained to an interviewer from the Village Voice that queers could see the precarity of heterosexuality, even as straights kept it hidden from themselves: “The so-called straight person is no safer than I am really… . The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if society itself did not go through so many terrors it doesn’t want to admit.” As Baldwin saw it, it is not simply that straight people are suffering and in denial about it but that heterosexual misery expresses itself through the projection of terror onto the homosexual.”]
