Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

They should have asked a fox instead. “Would you rather be hunted by hounds, gassed, trapped, poisoned or shot, old darling?” “Well, since you mention it, I’d rather be left alone.” “Ng … but given that that isn’t an option?”

We are living in a statistically rare and improbable period of British life. The last twenty years are the only twenty years of our history in which children have not been beaten for misbehaviour.

The Jews still manage, in some people’s eyes, that supremely clever trick of being to blame both for capitalism and its excesses through their control of banks and financial institutions and for socialism and the liberal consensus that threatens the very stability of capitalism and the free market.

Yet I could not agree with it, and said that I valued emotion as much as he did, but used it differently; if I poured it out on small occasions I was afraid of having none left for the great ones, and of being bankrupt at the crises of life. Note the word “bankrupt.” I spoke as a member of a prudent middle-class nation, always anxious to meet my liabilities.

It is worth remarking, I suppose, that the Indian “friend” Forster referred to in his Notes was, of course, a lover; also worth remarking that Forster never points out that his impression of the English character was not only middle-class and public-school, but also male

It was the size and condition of the stable-block that clinched the deal. This could be Father’s laboratory. There was room for as many lathes, oscilloscopes and things that go beep, tweet, whoop and boing as the maddest boffin could hope for.

I am not sure anyone really knew what queer really, really meant. The very idea of it made everyone so afraid that each created their own meaning, according to their own dread of their own impulses.

true of so many words about sex

the concept that really gets the goat of the gay-hater, the idea that really spins their melon and sickens their stomach is that most terrible and terrifying of all human notions, love. That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand. Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word’s full octave. Love as agape, Eros and philos; love as romance, friendship and adoration; love as infatuation, obsession and lust; love as torture, euphoria, ecstasy and oblivion (this is beginning to read like a Calvin Klein perfume catalogue); love as need, passion and desire.

If the physical act and its detail is so much more important to you than love, then see a doctor, but don’t spew out your sickness in column-inches; it isn’t nice, it isn’t kind, it isn’t Christian. And if the best you can do is quote the Bible in defence of your prejudice, then have the humility to be consistent. The same book that exhorts against the abomination of one man lying with another also contains exhortations against the eating of pork and shell-fish and against menstruating women daring to come near holy places. It’s no good functionalistically claiming that kosher diet had its local, meteorological purposes now defunct, or that the prejudice against ovulation can be dispensed with as superstition, the Bible that you bash us with tells you that much of what you do is unclean: don’t pick and choose with a Revealed Text—or if you do, pick and choose the good bits, the bits that say things like “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” or “Love thy neighbour as thyself.”

I will apologise for faithlessness, neglect, deceit, cruelty, unkindness, vanity and meanness, but I will not apologise for the urgings of my genitals nor, most certainly, will I ever apologise for the urgings of my heart. I may regret those urgings, rue them deeply and occasionally damn, blast and wish them to hell, but apologise—no: not where they do no harm.

I think it is certainly true that our circumstances made it very difficult for some of the boys around me to cope with girls, but then you see I believe that all boys find it very difficult to cope with girls, and none of my straight friends who went to mixed state schools has ever told me anything different. I operate a sympathetic and comprehensive listening service for many friends in relationship difficulties (as they do for me when I’m brave enough to let them) and from all I have ever heard (or read in the autobiographies of others) sex is every bit as difficult, awkward, embarrassing and heart-rending for the straight as for the bent.

My guess is that the instinct of Ronnie Rutter was that I was an “unhappy boy” and that he was too scrupulously well mannered or too trusting in the benevolence of time and fate as to enquire into the whys and wherefores.

Nowadays a lot of what was wrong with me would no doubt be ascribed to Attention Deficit Disorder, tartrazine food colouring, dairy produce and air pollution. A few hundred years earlier it would have been demons, still the best analogy I think, but not much help when it comes to a cure.

Algebra, I suddenly saw, is what Shakespeare did. It is metonym and metaphor, substitution, transferral, analogy, allegory: it is poetry. I had thought its a’s and b’s were nothing more than fruitless (if you’ll forgive me) apples and bananas.

I can’t claim my father made a mathematician out of me. I still speak only stumbling, schoolboy maths with an atrocious English accent.

I knew that the past was a foreign country, and knew too that it followed logically that the future must be abroad; in other words I knew that it was my destiny to become a foreigner, a stranger to myself.

I know that my early life was at one and the same time so common as to be unremarkable, and so strange as to be the human stuff of fiction. I know of course that this is how all human lives are,