SACRAMENT BY CLIVE BARKER [13 FOR HALLOWEEN]

22/12/2021

For LGBTQ readers, Sacrament is essential reading; a work that dares to not merely represent us, but celebrate us, to explore a metaphysics innate to our conditions. Barker perceives sanctity where so many see only filth, license and deviance. Barker even dares to proclaim that we might walk better ways, if we're able to haul ourselves out from the swamps and ghettos heteronormative culture would consign us to.

Thirteen For Halloween 2021: Sacrament

Whilst representation will always be significant (and, indeed, its own argument, whilst we operate in systems and traditional structures that consist of privileged and marginalised demographics), material that elevates the conversation is arguably even moreso. What does that mean, elevating the conversation? In the mosy refined terms, it refers to any subject that transgresses beyond the common or proscribed parameters of given discourse. All too , when it comes to matters of LGBTQ rights, we cede automatic power and territory to those who fancy themselves our opponents (and, indeed, our betters) by operating within enshrined assumptions and definitions. That dynamic will always, always place the onus upon us to defend our positions, often our very existence, whilst any effort to stray into more abstract or forbidden arenas of discussion must be denied for the sake of brevity and concision (not to mention base survival and the maintenance of human dignity).

This is as true of our fiction as our cultural and political discourses; our academic debates and philosophical roundtables. All too often, representation becomes the end in and of itself; the mere acknowledgement that LGBTQ people exist promoted as the Holy Grail of our peculiar crusades. Whilst absolutely necessary, this is also highly reductive and has a tendency to rely on fairly pat or cliché assumptions, stereotypes and tropes. Likewise, it has the effect of stunting any effort to use base representation as a stepping stone to wider, deeper and more profound discussion.

The likes of Clive Barker are exceptions in this regard; Barker is not interested in having discussions that others have already gnawed down to the marrow. Nor is he interested in debates that others might have under the same set of parameters. When he writes about the experience of being a gay man, he does so with the express intention of exploring what that means in abstract, existential and metaphysical terms rather than the brutely political. To him, politics itself is an unworthy arena for such debates; what he refers to as “. . .a playground of dead men.” To trammel matters of our identities, our humanity, our mere existence, within the systems and assumptions of politics is, in Barker's mind, to not only automatically lose the argument (politics being the very swamp in which our self-fancied enemies thrive and multiply), but to do an incredible disservice to our better selves, our potential tomorrows; the conditions we might come to inhabit, if we can only pry ourselves away from the banalities and proscriptions of culture.

In Barker's purview, acceptance is not enough. Tolerance is not enough. Even proscribed celebrations such as Pride etc are not enough. Hardly anything culture as it manifests in the 20th and 21st centuries is, has or can provide will ever be enough, and that is because Barker regards humanity collectively in a manner that transcends and disregards proscribed narrative. It is clear from his -notably rare- work on the matter that being gay (or trans or any other factor that pushes humanity to the margins) isn't the point or the end goal or the subject of celebration in and of itself. Rather, it is one of many factors and incidents that places humanity in a rarefied state:

Being denied the traditional narratives that are pre-made and vacuum-packed for our straight siblings (e.g. those of “husband,” of “wife,” of “parent,” of “child”), LGBTQ men and women have, traditionally, been thrust into a situation where we have to weave our sense of self from rarer materials (often the art we consume, the experiences we endure and the strange extended families, fraternities and “tribes of the tribeless” we make amongst one another). This phenomena Barker presents as both a blessing and a curse; not a double edged sword, but a fractal thing of many kaleidoscopic facets:

We are, as he explores in the seminal Sacrament, self-authored entities at our very best; creatures that do not accept or embrace the stereotypical roles heteronormative culture contrives and imposes upon us, but which find meaning, poetry and mythology in our status as the lost children of humanity; as exiles, outcasts and wanderers from hearth and home. In this, Barker acknowledges the pains and traumas that are part and parcel of the status; the existential despair that has, historically, consumed so many of us before our times. He acknowledges the collective, unhealthy coping mechanisms that have accrued amongst our many cultures as a result; the self-destructive and consumptive tendencies that are part and parcel.

But, he also celebrates our wantonness and deviance; our status as observers from outside the fishbowl, and our consequent capacity to not only question the status quo, but directly vandalise it.

In Sacrament, Barker paints the portrait of a young gay man of a particular era and generation; those born in the 1960s or '70s, who were amongst the last to operate in states of criminalisation in the UK and USA (not to mention most of Europe), amongst those who were outcast and midsunderstood by not only their parents, but society at large. The tale of Will Rabjohns would have been a very different one were he to have been, for example, a Millennial or a member of Generation Z (though those generations face their own particular set of challenges). He is amongst the most autobiographical of Barker's protagonists; a vessel for Barker's own experiences with regards to his family, the turmoils and traumas that led him to near-destitution in 1980s London and eventual success in Hollywood, Los Angeles and within arenas as diverse as cinema and literature. Will Rabjohns follows a broadly similar career arc to Barker himself (though Will's particular art is in photography of wildlife and the natural world). Specialising in commentaries on human-authored extinction, direct parallel is drawn between Rabjohns himself and the various species he captures in his work (the book makes explicit mention of gay men and women as -generally, whilst not universally- “genetic cul-de-sacs”). We, unlike our straight siblings, are not going to provide grandchildren for the sake of our parents or some notion of genetic legacy; we are where the story stops. In that, we are, each and every one, a species of humanity on the brink of extinction; in Barker's estimation, rare and strange birds of peculiar brilliance, that flicker briefly and powerfully before burning ourselves out.

Whilst acknowledging the necessary traumas and potential nihilistic, self-destructive tendencies that go hand in hand with such an assessment, Barker also presents this status as one worthy of celebration: rather than dying in ignorance, our “outsider” status lends us a certain perspective that our straight, cisgender counterparts are often denied, not to mention the aforementioned capacity for self-authorship which Barker extols as sacred within our conditions and experience.

For a story that deals with sex, death, violence, nihilism and so many other ostensibly bleak and morbid subjects, that thread of sanctity is pervasive and paramount throughout: as a wanderer without any sense of place or sincere home, Rabjohns is placed in the role of shaman, a wanderer beyond the borders of common human experience, whose business is to find and tell the stories that make humanity what it is. Only, in Rabjohn's case, those stories are not authoritarian proscriptions of tradition, cautionary folktales or meta-narratives promising punishment if strayed from. Rather, they are callings to his own people; that tribe of the tribeless that we as LGBTQ brothers and sisters all recognise.

That there is horror in the state of the outcast is beyond denial, and Barker doesn't shy away from that. If anything, the various traumas, despairs, denigrations, violence and self-destructive tendencies that are so often bred from the condition are presented here in often agonising verisimilitude; Will's existential pain of separation from his family, the hideous friction he experiences with a Father who will never be what he needs or desires, the incredible isolation, loneliness and separation from humanity that is part and parcel of the experience, all come to bear here, as do wider commentaries concerning the -often consumptive- coping mechanisms we have -historically- indulged in order to survive and operate in a world that not only promotes but celebrates our extinction.

Will is a lost child, as is every other LGBTQ character in the book. All seeking after some semblance of fraternity, of oneness and connection with other human beings, but also aching for the sense of identity that traditional meta-narrative so readily provides our straight siblings. Rather than engaging in any discussion or argument that sets out our rights to those conditions and how we might achieve them, Barker instead imagines a pilgrimage in which we discard them utterly, in favour of our own, self-authored conditions; mythologies that are not proscribed or handed down from a diseased history, that aren't even derived from any collective experience of being LGBTQ, but which we weave for ourselves from our pain, our loss; our love and lust and disgraces and exultations. This, he argues, is the shaman's journey, which we all must take if we wish to survive and flourish as abstract entities: a journey that is as much of the self as it is any physical trek, whose sacred sites are those born from formative associations and traumas, where revelation is an individual experience, never to be repeated or shared in quite the same way ever again.

Rather than slipping into the trap of accomodationism or contentment with marginalised “acceptance” that so many of our discourses promote as our ultimate aim, Barker dares to condemn those efforts as misguided, and ultimately moribund (what the same systems and traditions that have, historically, been responsible for our denigration and persecution feel inclined to gift, they can just as readily take away). A more difficult, treacherous, but ultimately transcendent road lies in denying the scraps culture and politics feel inclined to spare us and forging our own ways, celebrating the very “deviances” and transgressions that are so often the source of our demonisation. For Barker, the sacred and the profane can be intertwined, even overlapping magisteria; that which heternormative culture and tradition condemns as license can be, in LGBTQ communities, a source of connection, oneness and even transcendence. As in most of Barker's work, sex is essential; the means and medium by which Rabjohns understands his connection to others, even those that, ultimately come to wish him harm. It is a sacred act, always, and always one that precedes moments of metaphysical and spiritual transformation (however dark the resultant conditions might be). For many -certainly amongst the moral-minded- that set themselves against us, the notion that homosexual congress might be a sacred act, a source of spiritual growth as well as physical pleasure, is anathema; they lack the empathy, imagination and understanding to conceive that, the throes of passion with another, sensuality, pleasure and the untempered connection of the experience forcibly hurls us from our comfortable contexts, into conditions we rarely touch in a banal day to day. Sex here is painted as evidence of magic and miracles in the world; in humanity itself. That it occurs beyond the brute, animal necessity for procreation and in defiance of what many misapprehend as “natural law” makes it all the more profound; an act of self-will that dovetails with the theme of authoring our own identities regardless of what tradition or culture demand.

Counterposed to these moments of revelation, these acts of transcendence and transgression, are forces that inhabit and express the very worst aspects of human masculinity and femininity; entities that are, by their very natures, wounded, mutilated and traumatised, but which have come to learn lies of their natures in the same ways that so many of us do:

Jacob Steep and Rosa McGee are mysteries even to themselves; entities that clearly exhibit inhuman capacities, yet inhabit roles so powerfully and critically human, they are the synthesis and epitome of all they express. In this instance, they are Barker's less-than-flattering commentary on traditional and proscribed gender roles: having assimilated their personalities from observing humanity, they have become the most extreme expressions of proscribed masculinity and femininity; elemental avatars that are at once ascended, near-divine, yet also base, cruel and capricious. Whereas Rosa is elemental femininity; a seductive, fecund earth-mother of limitless sensuality and perversity, Steep is the elemental Father figure; a manifestation of masculinity at its most traditionally cruel, neurotic, confused and violent. Whereas Rosa is earthy, jolly and given to flights of fancy, Steep is brooding, melancholy, insular and obsessed with his own sense of purpose. Whereas Rosa indulges in sex, affection and strange plays of maternity, Jacob is indifferent, distant and infanticidal.

Here, we have Barker's commentary on what would later become known as “toxic masculinity” and proscribed gender roles in general: Jacob Steep and Rosa McGee are the essential manifestations of all that tradition would impose upon us based on incidences of our anatomies, and they are broken, neurotic, confused, often monstrous entities of mutual abuse and violence; creatures so alien to themselves and one another, they can't even see a means of healing. That Steep is also murderous to the point of genocide -making a hobby of inflicting extinctions on the species of the Earth- is perhaps the most damning and trenchant comment the book contains regarding what we call “masculinity” and the various traditional narratives that are part and parcel (Father figures are almost universally antagonistic here). Whilst a part of this is autobiographical -Barker using Steep and Will Rabjohn's own Father to explore the tensions that exist between him and his own-, the exploration broadens extensively beyond the personal, into a surgical and wholly damning analysis of the divisions that exist innately between Fathers and children, exaggerated to abyssal states when said children turn out to be LGBTQ. It is Barker's assault upon the traditions and soul-stunting roles that the forces of conservatism in our species would see imposed upon us all: in Barker's estimation, those impositions serve only to mutilate and divide us; to set not only Fathers against sons, but both against themselves.

A healthier dynamic, Barker argues, derives from a much more fraught and problematic quest: in acknowledging the dust and dirt of history for what it is, rather than attempting to enshrine or exalt it: to consign the corpses of old narratives to the cemeteries they belong in, and start cultivating more sincere gospels of who we are and dream of being.

For LGBTQ readers, Sacrament is essential reading; a work that dares to not merely represent us, but celebrate us, to explore a metaphysics innate to our conditions. Barker perceives sanctity where so many see only filth, license and deviance. Barker even dares to proclaim that we might walk better ways, if we're able to haul ourselves out from the swamps and ghettos heteronormative culture would consign us to.

A rare and beautiful parable, that operates beyond assumption or tradition, elevating the conversation in such powerful and profound ways, it becomes something other entirely.

Further Reading