Every Monday on Global Comment, we share the slow, thoughtful, considerate words that our brains – and souls – need but that it’s easy to miss in our busy world. We distil the best of the web and recommend just three links every week that you absolutely must see.
No fluff, no fuss, just three exceptional reads.
Here are this week’s recommendations:
‘The crowd were saying, “Kill him, kick him to death”’: what happened to the people who protested against King Charles? (Simon Hattenstone / The Guardian)
Hill is a Christian, historian, pacifist, teacher, writer, activist and republican. At the start of the ceremony, which focused on the queen’s death, he was silent: “I wouldn’t interrupt somebody’s grief.” But when “they declared Charles rightful liege lord, and acknowledged our obedience to him as our only king”, Hill had heard enough. “I find this language very demeaning, and I called out ‘Who elected him?’” To his astonishment, he found himself surrounded by security, arrested and eventually charged under the Public Order Act 1986.
Perhaps the most alarming story to emerge was that of a barrister threatened with arrest after holding up a blank piece of paper outside parliament. It felt like something we might read about in China or Russia. (Indeed, a couple of months later Chinese protesters used blank pieces of paper to protest against the country’s zero-tolerance Covid policy in what people referred to as the A4 revolution.) What was happening to Britain and its much vaunted democracy? In the days after the queen’s death, as TV stations cancelled regular programming and sombre music was played on the radio, only supine monarchism seemed acceptable.
How One Mother’s Love for Her Gay Son Started a Revolution (Kathryn Schulz / New Yorker)
There was no mystery about what that kind of traditional, law-abiding woman was supposed to think about gay people in 1968. At the time, homosexual acts were criminal in forty-nine states, with punishments ranging from fines to prison time, including life sentences. Same-sex attraction was classified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association and routinely mocked and condemned by everyone from elementary-school kids to elected officials. Those who lost their jobs, homes, or children owing to their sexual orientation had no legal recourse. Political organizing was virtually impossible—one early gay-rights group that attempted to officially incorporate in New York was told that its mere existence would violate state sodomy laws—and positive cultural representation was all but nonexistent; there were no openly gay or lesbian politicians, pundits, religious leaders, actors, athletes, or musicians in the mainstream. Newspapers used the words “homosexual” and “pervert” interchangeably, and the handful of gay people who appeared on television to discuss their “life style” almost always had their faces hidden in shadows or otherwise obscured. In 1974, when “The Pat Collins Show” aired a segment on parents of gay children, the host introduced it by saying, “Even if he committed murder, I guess you’d say, ‘Well, he’s still my child, no matter what.’ But suppose your child came to you and said, ‘Mother, Dad, I am homosexual.’ What would you do then?”
You think I’m a man? Then I’ll be a man! (Annie Lennox)
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Image: Daniel Zacatenco