Joe Orton's defaced library books and the death of rebellious art | Jonathan Jones | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

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In May 1962 a pair of would-be writers were each sentenced to six months in prison for defacing library books. It was a truly surreal crime. Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton had met and fallen in love as students at Rada. They did not make it as actors, but instead wrote novels that did not get published. Their main escape from their literary efforts in their little Islington flat was to visit their local library, where they practised a highly individual art form. Orton and Halliwell delighted in cutting up and rearranging the covers of the jaded volumes on the library shelves, creating bizarre collages that turned dreary 1950s book jackets into hilarious, erotically charged works of art. The poet John Betjeman became a near-naked tattooed man. Giant cats invaded Venice on the front of an Agatha Christie novel. Collins' Guide to Roses had a monkey's face disturbingly inserted into the heart of the yellow rose that emblazoned it. Instead of laughing, fining them, and telling them not to do it again, the system came down hard. Orton had his own explanation for the harsh punishment their vandalism received: he said they were treated brutally "because we're queers". After leaving prison he became one of the most powerful and subversive writers of the 1960s. His contempt for authority became marketable as his plays dramatised the revolutionary impulse of the age. In Loot, the law is made a mockery, exposed as both violent and meaningless. A policeman tells a young criminal: "Under any other political system I'd have you on the floor in tears!" to which his sobbing victim replies: "You've got me on the floor in tears." Today it is easy to congratulate ourselves that we are so much more enlightened than the authorities who imprisoned Orton and Halliwell half a century ago. Their reinvented books have just gone on exhibition in Islington, but are they art? To 21st-century eyes there is no question. Of course these bookworks are art. They go in view in London during "Frieze week", when yachts are sold as art. If a boat, why not a book? After the Islington exhibition, Orton and Halliwell's books deserve to go on view at Tate Modern as masterpieces of the 1960s. So, as I say, we might congratulate ourselves that what caused consternation in 1962 simply looks like witty and imaginative art to us. But I don't feel self-congratulatory at all. When I look at these collage masterpieces I feel immense nostalgia for a time when art could be criminal. In 1962 authority was still clothed in Victorian garb. There was something to rebel against – and rebellion involved risk. In 21st-century Britain, on the other hand, the art of rebellion has been so thoroughly institutionalised that no real dissident art is possible. Instead we have a constellation of cultural stars who shock without shocking anyone, mock authority that gave up the ghost long ago, and delight a generation of avant-garde grandparents. We have gone from Joe Orton to Grayson Perry. The cultural change that started with the fame of Damien Hirst in the early 1990s has turned punk dissidence into mainstream culture. The transformation is so liberal, so encompassing, that it excludes no one and distresses no one. Like coalition politics, it squares every circle. But far from liberating us to enjoy defaced library books alongside the other wonders of our avant-garde age, this universal modernism is just sinking British culture into mediocrity. Britain was more exciting when it was more dull. Orton and Halliwell inhabited an early 1960s London still shadowed by the Blitz. Their attack on library books was a glorious rejection of the austerity and ordinariness that still set the British tone in 1962. In just the same way, the Sex Pistols in 1977 scandalised a Britain that reeked of stale food. Britain was flat and grey and provoked colourful resistance. Now the greyness has been glassed over, and modern British culture seems oddly pointless. Where is today's Joe Orton? He was a truly subversive writer. Invited to write a screenplay for the Beatles, he enthusiastically accepted – and penned a fantasy so orgiastic and disturbing the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein received it in stunned silence. Even in modern revivals Orton's plays have something icily hard and uneasy at the heart of their humour: a Bacchic power, a revolutionary awe. What writer in Britain today is genuinely controversial and provocative? To find a contemporary Orton you have to cross the channel. The French novelist Michel Houellebecq is truly disconcerting – and brilliant. His apparent enthusiasm for sex tourism and his depiction of Islam earned him a dubious reputation but in reality his novels create a gloriously free and dangerous play of ideas. Houellebecq's latest, The Map and the Territory, confirms his stature as a great modern writer and, incidentally, mocks the pretensions of the art world. In Britain we have a far more glamorous art world than Paris does nowadays. But we do not have a Houellebecq, or an Orton. Real artistic danger has departed these shores. The Lord Chamberlain's office prevented Orton from putting Winston Churchill's penis into a play. Nowadays you could probably put a 30-foot plastic replica of Churchill's willy on view at Frieze and sell it to an collector for a hilarious price, and the suburban folk who once walked out of Orton's plays would coo with delight.

Surely the point is more that this is what people in the Sixties wanted? The avant-garde has won, and now hasn't the faintest idea of what to do. Houellebecq is shocking because he openly rejects the new set of rules ("Thou shalt be nice to ethnics etc.") not the old one.

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I think another factor is that the status quo has been, and has felt, secure and unchallengeable. Everything was up for grabs because there were no real threats, everything was just quaint or cute or ironic.

Edit: and anyway, the idea of art as "rebellious" is not some sort of commonplace but a particular conjunction of causes and effects. Most art has,for most of history, been deployed to exalt and lionise the powers that be and social orthodoxies, not confront them.

Good point.

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The new gay conservatism | Suzanne Moore | Comment is free | The Guardian

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Some of my best friends are married. Some of them are gay. Some of them are gay and in "civil partnerships". And I don't even mind! Aren't I bloody marvellous? And so very modern! Yes, I am just so wonderfully tolerant. Approving of gay marriage or being "gay-friendly" is, after all, the key signifier of modernity. "Can we get a Gok?" asks my 10-year-old. "No darling," I have to say. "There is more to gay people than fashion. And Spanx." I know this as I was in Manchester a couple of weeks ago at the Tory party conference. Cameron was doing his gay shtick, which is considered rather daring. "So," he said. "I don't support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a Conservative." He is right, and this is exactly why I don't "support" gay marriage. Yes, of course there were the naysayers who can't even abide the word gay, but on the whole, the Tories are pretty gay. Maybe it's not them, it's me, but this is my experience of them. Every year at their conference I find myself either talking to openly gay Tories or talking about who is in the closet. Certainly, the political closet must be like the Tardis, otherwise how could they all possibly fit in? As we cannot assume real correlation between the left and gay politics any more, we ought to perhaps ask what a progressive line is. Yes, much has improved for gay people. But is it enough? Hardly. The whole Liam Fox affair has been most peculiar in that the implication that he is gay was everywhere and yet he has referred to this in the past as "smear territory". In 2005 he talked of these smears: "They'd say, 'Why are you not married? You must be a playboy or a wild man or gay'." I have no idea what he means by "wild man" but anyway, he got married/tamed. The same kinds of innuendo have been made about William Hague. All of it gets somewhat tedious. But it very much looks like Fox's downfall may be over a friendship that reveals nothing at all about his sexuality and way too much about his spectacular lack of judgment. We don't know all the details, nor do we need to. We know enough, surely, to be happy that he is no longer in charge of weapons of mass destruction. His "impression of wrongdoing" certainly blurred public and private boundaries. Indeed, the Tories' newfound "liberalism" depends on an absolute split between public and private. A set of attitudes are in play that are totally sexually prescriptive. The right does its best always to depoltiticise sexual politics. You can be gay as long as you are domesticated and committed to the idea of "normality". One cannot be curious about sexuality or even a dabbler. There isn't a lot of flexibility. But in real life people explore. Michael Portillo had gay affairs. Does that mean he could not be happily married? Do we think any less of Christopher Hitchens, who has revealed dalliances with two men who would become Tory ministers in Thatcher's cabinet? Now it seems homosexuality is as fixed as heterosexuality. It's not about what you do, but who you are. No longer a spectrum, instead people have to choose sides. A gay identity, amplified by consumer choice, has become something of a straitjacket. A narrative has been set in stone. The conventional discourse is that a young person may be unsure and experiment for a period. They then must face up to who they "really" are, as though sexual preference determines everything else, and then have the courage "to come out". Liberal society will tolerate them as long as they stay in the box they have ticked, and if they behave themselves, they can then have what straight people desire. A romantic partner for life. Who knows? Maybe even a white wedding. Zip-a-dee-doo–dah. I don't want anyone not to enjoy themselves, but isn't it all depressingly straight-edged? Gone are the days of transgression or even deviation from the norm. Marriage is an institution set up to protect property and patriarchal rights that we choose to overlay with our need for sex, romance, passion and companionship. Extending this right to gay people may seem generous, and may still be seen by the haters as destroying the sanctity of marriage, but something else is going on. This is not about conservatives accepting homosexuality, but about making homosexuality conservative. If two people want to publicly affirm their love and have a celebration, why is a civil partnership ceremony not good enough? What exactly is missing here? Surely one can only regard such partnerships as "marriage-lite" if one believes in marriage–heavy, which many of us don't, looking at the divorce rate. If one is religious I guess it makes more sense, but again we know it's the acceptance of homosexuality that within the church divides the modernisers from the traditionalists. Context is important, and that is shifting. The struggle to end discrimination and to give gay people the same rights as everyone else has been long. Equality before the law is part but not all of it. The politics of sexual liberation, be they gay or straight, challenge both law and culture. An equality predicated on sameness not difference is doomed. Women cannot achieve equality by acting as if we are the same as men. We have seen what that produces: total exhaustion. The same applies to gay politics that loses any radicalism if it has to spend all its time reassuring the heterosexual world we are all exactly the same. Out goes the fight just when confrontation is needed. The law is never a guarantor of equality. A culture of homophobia cannot be legislated against. As the Tory party is ramming marriage down all our throats at the moment, its own rightwing is openly hostile. Tory councillor James Malliff, a cabinet member of Tory-controlled Wycombe district council, Buckinghamshire, tweeted after Cameron's speech: "We may as well legalise marriage with animals, crude I concede, no apology." This is not very big society of him, is it, even though that is his brief? But then we have seen some particularly nasty homophobic attacks in public recently. Homosexuality is still punishable by death in seven countries. There are battles to be fought, so patting gays on the head and giving them big, fat gay weddings is somewhat insular. Equality surely means more than a lifetime of monotonous monogamy. Such conservatism is hardly new. I remember in the mid-90s debating with Andrew Sullivan, who had written Virtually Normal. Even then I could not understand why gay men in particular focused on being accepted into the most oppressive of institutions – the holy trinity of the military, marriage and men in frocks, the church. But then the title of that book tells you a lot. Gays are just like us. Nearly normal. Normal being so totally ideal. Sullivan reassured his readers that all the changes he wanted could happen without any change in behaviour or "sacrifice" from heterosexuals. This is not true and the point at which this all breaks down is over the issue of gay adoption, which many "normal" people will not countenance. Do not mistake begrudging acceptance for liberation. When arch-Conservatives started leading this charge in the 90s, something else was also going on: queer theory. For all its madness – and it was often fairly insane and prone to disappearing up its own barely metaphorical backside – it was preaching a new kind of politics. This, lest we forget, was born out of anger and loss. It was a response to many deaths from Aids-related illnesses. In the age of antiretrovirals it is necessary to remember what a politics of transformation might resemble. The HIV epidemic was not about how you identified yourself sexually but what you did. Queer politics challenged heterosexuality by saying there is no such thing. All of us are in flux, just performing different roles. Sexuality is messy, fluid. Difference, even freakery, was to be celebrated. The residues of queer theory still resonate in popular culture. Look at Lady Gaga and her embrace of drag. Look at the tattered remnants of the alliances between feminists and gays. What remains valuable is the understanding that homophobia and misogyny do not exist in a vacuum but are propped up by fearful mythology. The precise mythology that says love and parenting can exist only within certain kinds of families and those families can only be created via marriage. The limitations of queer theory, not least its denial of basic biology – women give birth, men don't – meant that much of its radicalism became purely academic. But what remains valuable was its assertion that one could argue for a set of rights that bypassed cultural assimilation. Now, in the time of this self-proclaimed "liberalism", we should ask who benefits in this arranged marriage. Yes, gay people can go far if they tolerate a system premised on denying their existence. Even to the altar. Note: I haven't even used the word lesbian. Why would I? No one mentions it. Women don't figure in this discussion much. Because the righteous new Victorians of traditional politics simply offer crumbs from their table to the deserving, not undeserving, homosexuals. State-endorsed coupling for all is as conservative as they come! The dulling of a gay dream. Again I do not resent anyone's "big day", but any progressive would not waste time arguing the case for gay marriage. Quite the opposite. Instead, the right to civil partnerships should be extended to everyone, whichever bits of our bodies we chose to stick in other people's bodies.

Same thing, different issue. The basic message is "Come on, you poofters! Buck yourselves up a bit! I really feel you're not flaming nearly enough these days. How on earth am I supposed to feel all smug about being enlightened enough to support your cause when even the Tory Prime Minister thinks that you're all excellent chaps?"

Of course, the problem is that most of the stuff that is genuinely transgressive these days is now illegal - racism, homophobia, fundamentalist religion, the more exotic forms of pr0n... Breaking the rules will still get you sent to jail, it's just that the rules have changed.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

Same thing, different issue. The basic message is "Come on, you poofters! Buck yourselves up a bit! I really feel you're not flaming nearly enough these days. How on earth am I supposed to feel all smug about being enlightened enough to support your cause when even the Tory Prime Minister thinks that you're all excellent chaps?"

Yes, I have to say I find her hatred of marriage almost comical. She might want to double-check stats on kids born/raised within marriages vs. those who aren't...

Flaming rebellion is all well and good but it can also be a bit tiring. Getting along may not make for exciting cinema but it allows you to get on with life...

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Of course, the problem is that most of the stuff that is genuinely transgressive these days is now illegal - racism, homophobia, fundamentalist religion, the more exotic forms of pr0n... Breaking the rules will still get you sent to jail, it's just that the rules have changed.

So I might draw the lines in subtly different place than society but, overall, if we limit the laws that send you to jail to things that really cause harm to our neighbours, is that not an improvement?

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Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais

So I might draw the lines in subtly different place than society but, overall, if we limit the laws that send you to jail to things that really cause harm to our neighbours, is that not an improvement?

It's the same old right not to be offended. In those days people didn't want to have to think about the existence of gays, now we'd like to believe that we can legislate racism out of existence. In both cases you're outlawing something that doesn't do much real harm, but which you'd just rather not think about.

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Racism does real harm, just as homophobia used to. There's a reason both of those are modern-days taboos.

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Homophobia's offensive if you're gay, but sexism is offensive if you're a woman and that's still okay - they're just expected to laugh and suck it up if they don't want to be seen as hairy-legged haridan killjoys. BITD gays used to be a public nuisance too, to a certain extent - at it in public toilets and parks (they still are, of course, but these days no one minds). You can generally find a reason to ban pretty much anything.

People say unpleasant things about me all the time. I don't think that's a reason to put them in jail.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

Homophobia's offensive if you're gay, but sexism is offensive if you're a woman and that's still okay - they're just expected to laugh and suck it up if they don't want to be seen as hairy-legged haridan killjoys.

I think that's a bit of an over generalisation. Sure, having a sense of humour is a virtue and knowing how to put down an offensive individual is a skill but there are limits to sexism. And laws against sexual discrimination...

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People say unpleasant things about me all the time.

About you being a woman?

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I think that's a bit of an over generalisation. Sure, having a sense of humour is a virtue and knowing how to put down an offensive individual is a skill but there are limits to sexism. And laws against sexual discrimination...

*shrugs* You're allowed to say stuff about women that'd make you a total pariah if you said it about blacks. That's just how things are. Dunno why.

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About you being a woman?

Does it matter what it was about? Apparently the key fact here is that it caused harm. I was dead offended last time I failed the ENA. I think I should be able to sue them for the trauma they caused me.

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