Queer Times, Queer Becomings

Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come: Velvet Goldmine’s Queer Archive

Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come Velvet Goldmine’s Queer Archive Dana Luciano The curves of your lips rewrite history. —The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Velvet Goldmine (1998) Lipstick Traces They keep on kissing Oscar Wilde. He’s been dead for over a century, buried in Paris beneath a strangely demonic stone angel (inspired by Wilde’s poem “The Sphinx”)—best known, perhaps, for what it lacks: the exposed male genitals that were condemned as obscene, supposedly broken off and hidden by cemetery officials.1 The stone also contains the ashes of Wilde’s longtime lover, Robert Ross, who commissioned it when he had Wilde’s remains moved to Pére Lachaise from the suburban Cimetière de Bagneux. Here, on this monument that speaks, at once, of the affirmation and the repression of queer energies, is where the kisses gather, brought by admirers who press their painted lips against the stone to mark their presence and their complicity. This makes Wilde’s family—his biological descendants, that is—furious. The impressions can’t be removed; because they contain animal fats, they permanently stain the stone. They’ve been repeatedly scrubbed off and the tomb set behind a barrier to prevent their return; a plaque has been added, imploring visitors to show 121 122 DANA LUCIANO respect for Wilde’s memory; yet people keep bringing them back. Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland deplores this persistence, lamenting: “unthinking vulgar people may have defaced Wilde’s tomb for ever” (quoted in Jeffries). But those who leave the kisses see things otherwise; their marks are meant not to deface a memorial but to activate a memory. Their relation to the deceased is not, of course, usually granted the presumption of durability that “blood” family bonds enjoy; the kind of attachment they have to, and in common with, Wilde is still often dismissed as unreal, transient, ephemeral, certainly nothing to set in stone. Yet the lipstick traces keep their vigil on the monument; the scandalous kisses persist. The pink and purple marks made by pilgrims to Wilde’s gravesite manifest the “touch across time” that Carolyn Dinshaw locates at the heart Figure 1. Wilde’s tomb, wikimedia commons. 123 NOSTALGIA FOR AN AGE YET TO COME of a queer historiographic practice: a critical gesture that insists not simply on making queerness “visible” within the past but, more provocatively, on queering historical method. Queer historiographers ask what it means to think history as something other than a linear chronology, a public record of steady “progress” enabled and stabilized by the domestic-familial reproduction of successive generations.2 The pressure of lips on stone suggests a different form of contact with the past. The lipstick kisses don’t trace a timeline, a narrative of descent, between Wilde and those who made them; rather, they bend time through the location of partial affinities, pressing up against a presence from the past, the present-ness of this being-otherwise.3 They kiss into being an expansively queer now, one that is affectively distinct from the melancholy perpetuity predicted in the verse from Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol” which is etched on the back of the stone: And alien tears will fill for him Pity’s long broken urn For his mourners will be outcast men And outcasts always mourn. The disconsolate note struck by the verse fragment is well-suited to the circumstances of Wilde’s death, exiled and in disgrace, yet, as the grave’s audacious front implies, that is not the only story to be told in Wilde’s name. Queer “outcasts” may well mourn, but as the flaming bursts of color on the stone affirm, they also rejoice in their difference, and the two moods mark time differently. Mournfulness conveys the insufficiency of a present marked by loss and emptiness, maintaining the conviction that the present should have been otherwise, while the exultation of the outcast brings that otherwise-present into being, charging it with a mingled sense of consummation and expectation—just as a kiss can do. Queer artists have found other ways of leaving kisses at Wilde’s grave. Consider Neil Bartlett’s Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde, an experimental, transhistorical, collective memoir of gay male life in London. Bartlett’s practice, much like the lipstick marks, animates another form of time, as the dual resonance of the titular “present” indicates. Writing...