When It Comes to the Royals, Hope for Homosexuality
If the Ubiquitous Harry and Meghan Cannot Finally Wreck the Royals, perhaps a Gay Wedding Can.
Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex (whatever that means), certainly possess their share of detractors — and, in many cases, haters. One may find fault in their economic opportunism, their unwillingness to reject fame and fortune even as they simultaneously reject the British monarchy. But ultimately, the rupture in their relationship with the Crown speaks to the institutional failures of that monarchy, most pointedly in its inability or unwillingness to repudiate the bigoted bile and vile misogyny of the British tabloids. The latest example came when broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson penned a column for the Sun in which he yearned to see Ms. Markle running nude through the streets of every British town while mobs flung fecal matter at her. Whatever Mr. Clarkson’s intent, the comments proved disgusting and unfit for print, and in their visceral venom, they are not far removed from the idea of raping and then lynching a Black woman. The idea in both cases is to harrowingly humiliate, visually expose, and virtually extinguish a person’s very identity. And yet, as Rutgers University professor Roxane Gay wrote in a December 21, 2022, column in the New York Times, “The royal family has said nothing about his words. It still refuses to protect her.” At a minimum, the British monarchy is supposed to stand for some vague, haughty notion of decorum, yet clearly, in matters of intellectual importance, it does not.
In other words, the British monarchy could not handle the injection of a Black princess, however fair-skinned — so much for it being a well-oiled machine, adaptable with the times. Yet it toils onward through its embarrassing totters, inherently obsolete yet desperately cloaking its obsolescence and irrelevance, recoiling in false piety, the proverbial hog bathing in perfume. The world’s longest-running reality show continues, and continues to embarrass one of the world’s most prominent democracies.
As Gay correctly writes, “The monarchy doesn’t need to be changed. It needs to be dismantled.” After all, the Crown and its concepts of royalty and royal blood, the original form of unearned celebrity, is utterly at odds with democracy, modernity, and humanism. Some point out that the institution makes money for the United Kingdom, but that argument is intellectually insipid — after all, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism in Asia and Africa also enriched the British nation.
So if race — and the Royals’ botched response to racism — could not cause this insufferable institution to implode, what social factor might finally turn the trick? Perhaps it would be homosexuality and the prospect of a gay wedding. Imagine the spectacle of a king marrying a king, or a queen marrying a queen, or a prince marrying a prince, or a princess marrying a princess — cinematic camp rendered real. The whole scene — a princely royal staring lovingly into the eyes of a soon-to-be princely royal, their lips inching toward each other for a blissful kiss as some religious rite-of-passage is ritualistically read — would be so absurd, baffling, and revolting to the Crowns’ target audience as to alienate millions of viewers around the UK and the world. (Yes, a small gay wedding for an obscure junior member of the royal family occurred in 2018 and received the endorsement of the Crown, but instead envision a wedding with the prominence of Harry and Meghan in 2018, or Charles and Diana in 1981.)
Of course, homosexuality is not a foreign concept to the British — Freddie Mercury; Elton John; Martina Navratilova winning Wimbledon after Wimbledon. But it is utterly incongruous with the medieval, fairy-tale fantasies propagated by the Crown and sowed as the primary source of its commercialism. Thus the very notion of a gay king or lesbian queen, or gay prince or lesbian princess, or gay duke or lesbian duchess, would threaten the unearned mystique of the monarchy. And the staging and sight of a gay wedding could bring about such chaos and convulsion — both within the Crown and amid its aficionados — as to bring the decrepit institution to its knees. Royal-inspired tourism could dwindle, and more pointedly, the very idea of an such an event would crystallize how the monarchy is inherently inconsonant with modern life. It would be one of those “End of the World” situations, rather like Dustin Hoffman’s college graduate seeing his mother’s friend strip naked for him and offer herself to him at the start of The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967).
In other words, an openly homosexual British royal in direct line to the throne — and a resultant gay wedding of epic proportions — would make a mockery of the monarchy. Or, to prove more precise, it would expose the Crown for the intellectual laughingstock that it already happens to be, except to the multitudes blinded by mindless traditionalism. Perhaps British conservatives — those most inclined to defend the institution — would now be the ones most eager to dismantle it.
Of course, that is not to say that the author of this piece hopes that any of the tykes of William and Kate — or Harry and Meghan — prove to be individually gay. This writer does not even know the names of their children, nor does he want to. But at some point, somewhere along the line, some notable Royal will surely sire a gay child. And given the developments of recent decades — at least in the West — that child may rightfully and righteously seek to live his life openly, rather than repressing his or her sexual identity. And, in that case, the Crown will have a huge dilemma on its hands. For if it could not handle a light-skinned Black princess, just imagine its ineptitude when facing the incongruity of a royal gay wedding. Finally, just finally, the institution might end up dissolving in anguish like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz.
