A return to the shadows
Forbidden love is hot SAYS CRYSTAL JEANS
Last year I started up a conversation about queer progress with a 65 year-old luvvie in a pub. “Well, I can’t deny it’s better now,” he said. “And of course I’m glad not to be burying my friends to Aids. But one thing I miss, if I’m being honest, is that thrill… you know? That transgressive frisson of sneaking around in the woods, of doing things behind locked doors. The naughtiness, darling, the forbidden!”
It wasn’t the first time I’d encountered this (often) guiltily expressed sentiment from older queer people. I’d rather things as they are now, obviously, and yet…
As a child, I was too busy playing with my Action Man to notice the introduction of Section 28, though I did not escape its stink. Obviously things are better now, although far from utopian. And yet, when I’m enjoying some “transgressive frisson” with my girlfriend, I have wondered, would this be even hotter if it could get us arrested? Or sent to the gallows?