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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Was he gay? Bisexual? Or really just celibate, as he claimed? "I'm just simply inches away from a monastery," Morrissey once quipped.
Apr 30, 2004 | Of all the attention Steven Patrick Morrissey has garnered, he is perhaps best known for not doing the nasty. His abstinence is seen as symbol, proof and cause of his eccentricity. After all, in an age utterly obsessed with and possessed by SEX, such party-pooping is inconsiderate, anti-democratic, downright unhealthy, and, well, positively sinful. And in a pop star who hasn't been knighted and whose main audience isn't grandmums, it's actually heretical.
As Oscar Wilde put it, celibacy is the only real perversion; and in Morrissey's eyes, this was a good enough argument for practicing it. Like any form of Utopianism, reinventing sex requires you to renounce the thing you want to reinvent. Paradoxically, although celibacy is perhaps the least innocent sexual option -- renouncing sex makes everything sexual -- publicly it provided Morrissey with the innocence he needed to carry off his seductive-seditious project.
In order to be above sexuality, the prophet of the fourth sex had to be above sex. And in a world which can only, on a good day, conceive of two and a half sexes, the prophet of the fourth had to "take the vows" (and marry not Jesus but himself) to avoid being enmeshed in a dreary, mundane, mind-numbing parochialness. Whatever he did, whatever the mechanics and topography of his nakedness with another person, and the all-important, all-consuming details of whether their genitalia were internal or external, would be taken as the complete explanation of Morrissey himself -- what he was, how he wore his hair, how he tied his shoelaces and, of course, the rationale behind his whole oeuvre. He would, in other words, lose control of his own narrative, surrender his own authorship. He would cease to be his own special creation and become instead someone else's dirty joke.
"What do you like in your music?
I can't forgive anybody a bad lyric really. I like to think a singer is singing with a sense of immediate death. The Gallows Humour, lah de dah. That it's the last song I'll ever sing, quite literally. I like singers to sing with desperation.
Humour?
Well you know, desperation, humour, what's the difference?
Sex?
Well, yes, humour; we've mentioned sex."
-- NME, 1989
Celibacy massively enhanced Morrissey's stardom by turning him into a conundrum, a puzzle that had to be solved. As a highly sexual pop star who renounced sex, he made himself the Rosetta Stone of sex itself and found himself interrogated about his "sex life" like no other pop star had ever been before. (By way of contrast, Boy George's infamous "I prefer a cup of tea" remark was rather too eagerly believed.)
"Where does the anguish and the hate come from?
As with most things, I'm still trying to find out.
Why can you fall in love so easily with images, but not with people?
I'm still trying to find out."
-- Blitz, 1988
In an age fascinated with telling the secret of sex, over and over again, Morrissey had to be made to talk. In interview after interview the celibate star would be pushed up against the wall, bright lights shone into his eyes, and made to explain his alibi over and over again in the hope of catching him out. Tricks mixed with threats mixed with wheedling pleadings in an attempt to get this most uncooperative of witnesses to turn Queen's Evidence.
"You must get a few propositions these days ...
Not many! The shock of the whole thing to me is that not many situations do arise. I thought literally queues upon queues would form, but it's not the case. After the end of a sizzling performance, where people are simply eating each other to get close to the stage, I find myself back at the hotel with Scrabble and an orange. It's all very curious."
-- Jamming, 1984
