Kirkup trial 25th anniversary
The Guardian has three articles on the 25th anniversary of the Gay Times blasphemy trial, when a jury found editor Denis Lemon guilty of "blasphemous libel" for publishing James Kirkup's poem "The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name." Kirkup's truly awful poem combines mawkish, messagy proclamations of gay pride with explicit descriptions of a Roman centurion ravishing Jesus's corpse. Margaret Drabble recalls the trial, in which she served as an expert witness for the defense. "The fact of the trial seemed far more shocking to me than the poem." Blake Morrison does a retrospective close reading of the poem, concluding that it's daring but not very good, a "propagandist intervention, not a work of art." And Kirkup himself tells a Guardian interviewer that he's angry at free speech advocates using his poem as a protest symbol. "They are using it for political ends and I disapprove of all politics and all politicians."
The poem has repeatedly been the subject of censorship struggles in England. In 1996-97, the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement came under investigation for merely linking to a non-British web page containing the poem. Earlier this year, TV presenter Joan Bakewell came under investigation for reading the poem on her program Taboo. Read the whole poem and earlier Daze items here.
