A love that dare not speak its name
Searching for a trump card in the trials of the wild
Image: actor Christopher Reeve, in 1985. CC BY-SA 3.0
“The love that dare not speak its name” is a line, the last in fact, of a poem written by Lord Alfred Douglas in 1892. Lord Douglas was a lover of the dramatist Oscar Wilde, and this poem was cited at Wilde’s trial in which he was accused of being a somdomite, which was how the Marquis of Queensbury, Lord Douglas’s father, spelled sodomite.
Here’s the (long) poem:
It is that last line that made this poem famous, for without it, it would like as not never have been cited at Wilde’s trial and, but for that, few outside the University of Oxford, in whose magazine it was published, might ever have read the poem at all. However, history had a different fate in petto for this work of art, because, as has been well rehearsed, the love that dare not speak its name, as referred to in the work, was supposedly homosexuality.
Nowadays, there are still parts of the world in which the love that dare not speak its name still dare not speak its name. In other parts, it has acquired cohorts and become LGBTQI+. In yet others, it calls itself by its name: homo, gay. And what allowed it to speak its name was not the fact it is love, but the fact that, not daring to speak its name made homosexuality an object of extortion and blackmail. And, if ever anything made that plain to a potential blackmailer, it was precisely the trial of Oscar O’Flaherty Wills Wilde.
Nowadays, in the liberal, western world at least, a man or woman can stand for parliament and be elected and do great service to his or her community whilst proclaiming themselves homosexual because the fear of blackmail is a thing of the past. At last, the love that dare not speak its name is able to proclaim its name.
And in its place has trodden another love that dare not speak its name. It formed the core offence in a scandal that shocked Belgium and the world in 1996 involving the murderer Marc Dutroux. Dutroux procured youngsters for the sexual pleasure of grown men who have gone unidentified by justice, since they have never stood trial for their crimes. What became apparent during Dutroux’s trial was that prominent persons were seduced into committing criminal acts with underage persons in return for large sums of money, which were then filmed, with the film being used as a means of blackmail in order to extort even larger sums of money from them.
Whether they identify themselves as such or not, such criminal circles operate on a fundamentally satanist agenda: satanism is worship of the devil, whose central tenet is to love oneself, to the exclusion of all others (contrary to the central tenet of deific religions, which is to love the lord and to love others as you would love yourself).
Under satanism, one is under no obligation to extend help or assistance to another. There is no Good Samaritan, and no suicide for having betrayed another, no feeding of 5,000; but there are fishers of men.
The fishers of men in the Bible were Saints Andrew and Peter (then known as Simon). Jesus called them in from the Sea of Galilee and announced to them that, if they followed Him, he would make them fishers of men, instead of fish.
Matthew, chapter 4, verses 18-20:
And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. And they straightway left their nets, and followed him.
Matthew and the other Gospel writers make no mention of any incentive to follow Jesus, but follow him Andrew and Simon did. That they did so, may be regarded as wondrous; or perhaps the Gospels omit the bribe, if there was one.
What I think – and I have no evidence for it per se – happens in Heaven when we all get there is that the injunction laid upon us on Earth — love as you would be loved — continues, but the roles are reversed. This time, God loves us as He would be loved, and that is why Heaven is dubbed Paradise.
Extending this idea to Hell, what I think happens there is that, having enjoined his followers to love none but themselves on Earth, the devil, just like God, practises what he preaches, and loves himself exclusively, and what becomes of the spirits and souls he has won through men’s and women’s selfishness on Earth is a fate that concerns the devil not.
But there is a belief among satanists, whose veracity I cannot test, nor can they (although, nota bene, that inability does nothing to shake them from their convictions), that will have it that those who on Earth win more souls for the devil will be accorded special treatment in Hell. They see their task on Earth as being not only to love only themselves but to turn the minds of others who might wish to love others towards loving only themselves, and thereby adoring the devil. You might have thought that the greatest value in terms of won souls lay in converting – we can now call it for what it is: corrupting – the elderly, for they have lived life to the full and perhaps imbued themselves in the die of deific adoration. But, I think that that poses too much of a challenge to the lazy satanist, and so it is at the other end of the age scale that they practise their corruption works, on those with more malleable minds, and even the new-born.
This is love that dare not speak its name, for it is the most despicable form of human interaction, surpassing, in some eyes even cold-blooded murder. By recruiting the young for the devil, satanists believe they will be rewarded when their final lot comes true in Hell, and not be left to boil in a vat of oil.
These considerations may fail to convince the reader: spiritualistic poppycock, and nonsense. And, indeed, there is a greater tendency to see the finality of blackmail, extorting money from the weak of will and strong of bank balance, as a far more persuasive argument. However, whichever reasoning one follows, one arrives at a conclusion that, whether the corruption of youth stems from a carnal desire or devotion to the devil, it remains, for the most part, a love that dare not speak its name (other than behind closed, and closely guarded, doors).
A number of human names have been sprawled across the newspaper headlines in recent times, whereby the above considerations played some sort of a role, although, out of discretion and respect for victims, the details of the crimes allegedly committed were not delved into.
Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide, it seems, in jail whilst awaiting trial on charges related to such heinous acts. There is a strong suspicion that such acts were indulged in by Prince Andrew of the United Kingdom. And Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s procurer, has for a year now languished in an American penitentiary.
In some quarters, ever since the riots of January 6 in Washington D.C., ever-mounting surprise has been expressed at the fact that, the more accusations and criminal charges that are levelled against Donald Trump, the more popular he seems to become. A deemed rapist, proved to have fingered the sexual organs of a writer in a department store changing room; fraud on a vast scale in a bid to cheat lenders and investors; retention of secret documents that are property of the state, for no reason whatsoever, and their likely disclosure to unauthorised persons. One is left wondering what criminal charge would break the faith of those whom he has made his own fishers of men, his own unshakable following.
Several years ago, when I was more active in amateur theatrical circles, I was invited one Saturday afternoon to a “play reading”. The play was by an American playwright, Iain Boisvert, and was called simply Un-. Iain was keen to hear the play read so as to gain a feel of its live performance as opposed to having written and studied it on the printed page. It involved some controversial subjects, such as transsexualism, sawn-off shotguns and, as I recall, around six dead bodies on stage as the final curtain fell.
With the reading cast left somewhat reeling from this dénouement, the play ended and Iain asked for reactions. I raised a finger. “Yes, Graham?” “Iain, don’t you feel you took the easy way out?” “How so?” “Fun with Dick and Jane is a comedy about bank robbers. You can make a comedy about robbing banks. You can make a comedy about murder, one in which you actually root for the murderer; you can even sympathise as audience with someone who wants to blow himself and a nuclear power station sky high. But, I challenge you to write a play in which the antagonist is sympathised with by the audience and is nonetheless a paedophile. People will always hate a paedophile. Make your antagonist a paedophile, and you have a ready-cast, black-hatted, incontrovertible, incorrigible baddie. Easy.”
The A-list actor Christopher Reeve, who famously played Superman, once very bravely made a film in which he played a paedophile. He was warned against it, that it would affect his career, but he persevered because he saw the impossibility of portraying a paedophile as an ultimate challenge to his acting skill. His acting career was ended somewhat differently when he fell from a horse, but somewhere I cherish an admiration for Reeve for having broached that unbroachable career boundary. And yet, if he succeeded in persuading the audience to sympathise with his portrayal as a paedophile, what confusion of thoughts must have tumbled through the audience’s minds as they made their way home after the show? It can have been no easy role choice for Mr Reeve. And no easy role to choose to go and see.
In sum, I think it is still fair to assert that the crime of paedophilia will turn even the most ardent follower from the path trodden by a leader guilty of the crime, unless, of course, he be a leader of satanists.
So, Ghislaine Maxwell. When it was reported in 2022 to Donald Trump that Miss Maxwell had finally spoken up when questioned about her involvement in matters Epstein, Mr Trump was overheard to respond with the most curious of phrases:
“She say anything about me?”
Just on the offhand
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Thank you, Graham, for sharing this with me. In general, I do not approve of someone making money by "selling" other humans for any purpose. But selling children is as low as a person could go. Homosexuality is as normal for animals as eating and emptying our body wastes, and is no ones damned business.