The Angelic Conversation

Public Culture
sexualities, ethics, politics
Fourteen Sonnets for an Epidemic:

Derek Jarman’s
The Angelic Conversation
Candace Vogler
Prelude: Ethics
In the mid-1980s, in the first rush of the urban homosexual

AIDS crises in North America and England, Derek Jarman made The Angelic
Conversation, a film involving Shakespeare’s sonnets. The film opens with the
first two lines of sonnet 151 in white letters on a black ground:
Love is too young to know what conscience is:
Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?
Now, as contemporary scholarly editions of the Sonnets will note,1 the whole
of sonnet 151, one of the bawdiest of Shakespeare’s sonnets, is likely a play on
a proverb: Penis erectus non habet conscientiam (“an erect penis has no con-
I am grateful to Tom Vogler and Dan Morgan for comments on the first draft of this essay. Jaime
Hovey and Patchen Markell stepped in to help me with a subsequent draft. Michael Sinnetiker gave
me tremendously helpful critical comments in symposium at Johns Hopkins. I want to thank Jona-
than Goldberg and Michael Moon for organizing that symposium and for their comments on that
version of my project, which allowed me to redirect and refocus the work substantially. Audience
questions and comments at Johns Hopkins and the University of Texas at Austin, together with a very
helpful session at the University of Chicago’s Mass Culture Workshop, have allowed me to under-
stand Jarman better and to make better use of the film. Jay Schleusener has been a tireless conversa-
tion partner about the erotic. Bradin Cormack has been a tireless interlocutor about Shakespeare and
the untimely character of queer visuality. Claudio Lomnitz urged me to bring out the ethical more
explicitly, and Dilip P. Gaonkar gave me excellent editorial advice about how to do it. Damon Young
raised a final set of objections. Finally, throughout the four years that I have been picking up and
putting down this essay, Neville Hoad has provided steady support, criticism, and encouragement.
1. See, e.g., Stephen Booth’s masterful edition: Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1977).
Public Culture 18:1

© 2006 by Duke University Press 23
Published by Duke University Press

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Public Culture science”). The first two lines open that play in two senses of “conscience” — con-
science as ethical sensibility (Cupid is too young for this) and conscience as joint,
shared knowledge (in this context, carnal knowledge, knowledge “born of love”).
Sonnet 151’s subject, then, is variously the prick of conscience.2 And these lines
set the problem for Jarman’s film.
“Conscience” traditionally names whatever it is that equips properly atten-
tive people to do their part in the daily production and reproduction of excellent
modes of social life. When “conscience” likewise names homosexually inflected
carnal knowledge (as, Jarman’s film insists, it will for his audience), we have
to alter our understanding of the reproduction of sound social life accordingly.
The collectives that form at sites of erotically charged homosexual congress are
not, in any ordinary sense, communities. The cast — the particular groupings of
participants — changes, for one thing. For another, there is no reason to expect
in advance that a group forming itself erotically on one occasion will share in
feeding, clothing, and sheltering its members over time. Instead, various partici-
pants might wander in and out of domestic life with other members indifferently;
stable duos might host temporary guests; solitary youth might move from place to
place never intending to enter into durable domestic arrangements. Worse, there
is no reason to expect in advance that the regular participants — those who can
be found, reliably, at this or that place, from one week to the next — will have
anything much in common beyond their interest in erotic exchange, either at the
outset or afterward. In short, the kinds of institutional affiliations that are crucial
to normal, North Atlantic heterosexual coupling (and its characteristic modes of
intimacy) are not the substance of temporary, urban sexual collectives. The need
to secure this form of social life, then, has to be theorized without the usual props
of joint economic venture, shared domestic circumstances, or even shared “cul-
ture” (in many traditional senses of that term).
Some homosexual erotic scenes in Jarman’s day had almost no anchor in
everydayness, actually. Although names may have been exchanged, there was no
2. It is sonnet 151 in which “I do betray / My nobler part to my gross body’s treason; / My soul
doth tell my body that he may / Triumph in love; flesh stays no further reason, / But rising at thy name
doth point out thee,” and so on. The “rise and fall” of the erection plays out across the verse.
Bradin Cormack pointed out to me that there is a further play on “conscience” in the sonnet — con
feminizes “conscience” by way of Latin (where conscientia, as joint knowledge, is feminine). Jar-
man, like Shakespeare, was fascinated by the specters of Latin in English literature. In The Angelic
Conversation, Jarman plays with feminizing elements, which is why he had a woman read the poetry
in voiceover and why one of our two lovers figures the dark lady in the final sequences. Jarman
locates something of the woman in masculine alterity to itself.
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reason to assume that the names you were told were the names that appeared on Fourteen Sonnets
leases, passports, or driver’s licenses — even if the exchanged names were “real,”
they needn’t have been real in those senses. By a similar token, it was bad form
to ask what someone did for a living, where he came from, or where he lived.
While this aspect of the “little ethics” (etiquette) of participation owed a lot to the
danger of exposure, it also made possible modes of intercourse that were intensely
intimate and utterly focused, uncluttered by the stuff of heterosexual private life.
The notorious “anonymity” of the sex, that is, was neither faceless nor inatten-
tive to the particular qualities of participants. The first problem for an ethics of
these intimacies is precisely the problem of coping with depersonalized, vibrantly
particular, erotically charged interaction.3 It is a hard problem. It is so hard that
the question of whether sexual arousal contains the seeds of conscience has to be
treated as ethical bedrock here.4 Sexual arousal — in fact or in prospect — brings
together Jarman’s constituency and holds them in place here or there. It is the one
known thing that participants have in common.
The queer ethical at stake in The Angelic Conversation hangs out at the sites of
collective erotic intimacies, which may only seem like one sort of place because
participants face heteronormative hostility at the defensive perimeters (both as
hostilities take shape in law and custom and as such forces interpellate partici-
pants). The work of developing ethics under the circumstances is apt to go miss-
ing from view under conditions of political urgency. Ethical matters are those
transpersonal and (in some sense) impersonal aspects of interaction, activity,
and attachment that tend to the reliable production and reproduction of nonac-
3. The second problem is coping with the ethical challenges peculiar to this form of social life. I
will not discuss the second problem at any length here. I am grateful to Damon Young for discussing
some of its aspects with me. What follows turns on Jarman’s film, which celebrates masculine beauty
in the figures of race-marked white, Anglo men. The pursuit of beauty in the relevant social milieu
had an undeniable ruthlessness. Moreover, as Young put it in personal correspondence, other modes
of racial marking tended to read as “exotic” from the dominant modes of visual attachment. I think it
reasonable to set these matters to one side here, partly because there has been almost no patient work
on the first problem — namely, the problem of articulating the sense in which a temporary erotic col-
lective counts as an ethical subject internally, rather than how such a collective becomes a target for
violence and normative criticism, erasure, disapprobation, or demonization.
4. Leo Bersani took up this problem in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/
Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988),
197 – 222. For Bersani, homosexual congress could serve as an ethically hygienic counterpoint to
some forms of sexualized violence by putting the phallic ego at risk and in play. Bersani works in a
Freudian phenomenology of man-to-man sexual intercourse. I will be less concerned with individual
subjects than with unstable collective subjects and will rely upon Lacan more than Freud, but I hope
to be working in the same vein.
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Public Culture cidentally sound modes of social life. By nonaccidental I mean that some part
of what’s good about the mode of society in question can itself be explained with
reference to the very forms of interaction, activity, and attachment that make such
society possible.5 For example, it is no accident when friends enjoy each other’s
company and risk things with each other that they will not risk with strangers. It is
hard to see how friendship would be possible without this, and to whatever extent
friendship is a good thing, it is good in part because of the pleasures and risks
made possible by friendship. Moreover, friends know this about each other and
about friendship, and, while it is possible to discover that some mode of attach-
ment has become a friendship without having noticed the change, it isn’t possible
to be friends without sharing the pleasures and risks of friendship. This point is
impersonal — it holds for friends generally, not just for me and mine. It is also
transpersonal — friends are, as such, in thought or in company, collectives.
Modern friendship turns on hyperpersonalized intimacy. Accordingly, work
on the ethics of friendship turns on locating its impersonal, general aspects. By
contrast, the challenge of working toward an ethics of homosexual erotic collec-
tives turns on understanding the particularity of depersonalizing intimacy (inti-
macy that operates at some remove from autobiographical detail),6 the peculiar
lineaments that articulate the collective body, and how these produce and repro-
duce sound society steadily, reliably, but en passant.
The lines of attachment that draw together erotically charged homosexual col-
lectives were — and often still are — visual rather than narrative. Queers notice
each other. The ways in which they notice each other are titillating. Visuality is,
in this sense, central to modern urban homosexual congress. As Lee Edelman
puts it, “homosexuality, as constructed in the modern West, occupies a distinctive
relation to questions of the gaze and of visual perception.”7 Edelman is inter-
ested in tracking the centrality of visual semiotics (both inside homosexual urban
exchanges and at the orientation-defining, anxious, unstable perimeter of hetero-
5. Any aspect of sociality can be good in some respects, bad in others, of course. Sex/gender sys-
tems, for instance, might be good insofar as they manage procreative human activity and bad in the
personal costs of managing the production of future generations in the ways required by the specific
codes. Moreover, the varieties of practical goodness at issue here are several. The bulk of my work
in Reasonably Vicious (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002) involves explaining
practical good.
6. I began work on depersonalizing intimacies in an essay on the strangeness of troubled mar-
riages as these take shape in U.S. popular culture. See “Sex and Talk,” in Intimacy, ed. Lauren
Berlant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 48 – 85.
7. Lee Edelman, “Imagining the Homosexual,” in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and
Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 199.
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normative surveillance) in terms of the obscure and the obvious, of the tropes that Fourteen Sonnets
turn on the representation of man-woman sexual difference as apparent, and of
the male homosexual as a troubling, potentially undetectable difference within
what reads as sameness at the masculine pole of that very man-woman axis. I am
interested in taking his suggestion that homosexuality operates through distinc-
tive and distinctively vexed modes of visual attachment in a different direction.
I will use three queer icons — Oscar Wilde, Derek Jarman, and that Shake-
speare spun of reading his sonnets as confessional love poetry — together with
Jarman’s film (belatedly married to the queer iconic style of Shakespeare sonnet
reading begun by Wilde) in order to explore the relevant modes of visuality, to
explain how these work to erase any line that there might have been between
the aesthetic and erotic dimensions of homosexual visual intercourse, and, ulti-
mately, to begin to develop a language adequate to tracking one ethical dimen-
sion of homosexual visual intimacies. Throughout, I will eschew the usual props
of character set against a backdrop of stable relationships.8 I go to my exem-
plars in order to come up with a better articulation of the ethical as it emerges in
depersonalizing homosexual intercourse, rather than in search of concrete advice
about how to solve the ethical problems that emerge from that kind of social life.
Everything will hinge upon a reading of The Angelic Conversation. The place of
Shakespeare’s poetry, both in defensive homosociality and in anglophone homo-
sexual social life, marks my point of entry.
Poetry Has Its Privileges
Oscar Wilde’s literary critical foray into Shakespeare’s sonnets, “The Portrait of
Mr. W. H.,” contains an aside about memory:
The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of con-
sciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. . . . But the
little things, the things of no moment, remain with us. In some tiny ivory
cell the brain stores the most delicate, the most fleeting impressions.9
8. The usual way of thinking about ethics in connection with literary, dramatic, or cinemato-
graphic material rests upon treating individual figures as separate loci of subjectivity or agency,
treating plot as the interactive field of their relations and actions, and treating character as the well-
spring of their imaginary interactions and as the underlying subjective steadiness that colors their
attachments. This technique of thematic reading, aimed at extracting something like the moral of a
story, is useless for trying to articulate the ethics of late-twentieth-century male urban homosexual
intercourse.
9. Oscar Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” in Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Cente
nary Edition (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1999), 313.
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Public Culture But memory does two sorts of work in Wilde’s “Portrait,” and the storage and
retrieval of small things is not the primary sort. The main work of memory hap-
pens in laying siege to poetry under the flag of masculine beauty, in the name of
“Mr. W. H.” — the “onlie begetter” of the sonnets, according to the 1609 Quarto’s
dedication. The three main characters, Cyril, Erskine, and the narrator, make
of this stuff, seriatim, narratives and subjects for narrative through the move-
ment of a forged legacy, following a trail of half-thoughts. Their readings produce
a literary coterie among the living, the dying, and the dead, focused on Willie
Hughes — imaginary boy-actor addressee of the sonnets — whose vitality and sig-
nificance increase in direct proportion with the improbability that any such person
ever existed.10 In this artifice, the line between internal and external evidence for
a reading is at once crucial and irrelevant. The outside of the sonnets is whatever
can be caught up and knit into their fabric by means of Willie’s imagined life sto-
ries. Willie’s life stories, in turn, are made of close, increasingly creative readings
paired with historically proximate contextual details. Throughout, Wilde depicts
literary criticism as an act of impassioned, erudite, and interminable aggregate
fantasy that is oriented to widespread publication.
Wilde’s readings, rereadings, and repeated insertions of the sonnets into rela-
tions among men exemplify the movement of this verse inside and outside aca-
demic quarters. He gave the sonnets to Lord Alfred Douglas in the early stages of
their acquaintance and claimed under oath to have taken from them a Shakespear-
ean literary manner that suggested masculine physical intimacy without giving
evidence of it.11 Later, from prison, he credited the sonnets both with inspiring
the famous, injudicious letter — which, he assures us, he “would have written to
any graceful young man of either University” — and with figuring the tragedy of
a particular love.12 He thereby helped to make the sonnets scandalous.13
10. The erotic dimension of the production of this coterie marks the distinction between Wilde’s
proper “Portrait” and the lesser lights of the (mere) picture of Dorian Gray. For an excellent reading
on this distinction, see Jaime Hovey’s A Thousand Words: Portraiture, Style, and Queer Modernism
(Athens: University of Ohio Press, forthcoming).
11. Montgomery Hyde, ed., The Trials of Oscar Wilde (London: William Hodge, 1948), 129.
12. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, in Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 995, 1026 – 1031.
13. For example, some scholars suspect that learned doubt about the authenticity of the 1609
Quarto owes more to the Labouchère amendment of 1885, and to Wilde’s trials and conviction in
1895, than to anything else. See, e.g., Katherine Duncan-Jones’s introduction to the Arden Shake-
speare Third Series edition, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Oxford: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997),
32 – 33. For a fascinating reading of the place of Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” in the studied
indeterminacy and clearly delimited scandal of his trial, see Lawrence Danson, “Oscar Wilde, W. H.,
and the Unspoken Name of Love,” ELH 58 (1991): 979 – 1000.
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Like Wilde’s imaginary men, most contemporary critics divide the sonnets Fourteen Sonnets
into an initial 126-sonnet subsequence that turns on the figure of an aristocratic
young man followed by a 28-sonnet subsequence that turns on the figure of a dark
woman.14 The sequencing produces a possible plot involving the transmutation of
complex man-to-youth homosexual attachment into heterosexual forms no less
troubled.15 In the young man sonnets, the poet’s object becomes the poet’s mirror
by showing off poetic skill in seeing and praising, but, as Joel Fineman — Wildean
critic par excellence — puts it, “From the beginning of the sequence . . . where
visual circles become vicious cycles, where visual reflections become exhaust
ingly reflexive — even the most traditionally vivifying images of vision in the
young man sub-sequence . . . somehow manage to project a mirror image of their
own funereality: a kind of ‘autopsy.’ ”16
Both the subject matter and the visual complexity of these sonnets may have
drawn Wilde to set them in a circle of men. Their visuality matches the force
of attachments formed through glancing, looking, and watching, which have
been crucial to the relevant circuits of homosexual intercourse at least as long
as Shakespeare’s sonnets have been readily available in their current form — that
is, since the nineteenth century.17 Wilde’s utter determination to track the look of
14. Some scholars read in the number of dark-lady sonnets a possible numerical allusion to the
days of a menstrual cycle. Katherine Duncan-Jones uses this correspondence in her discussion of the
misogyny of the dark-lady sonnets. See Duncan-Jones’s introduction to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 49.
15. Heather Dubrow strongly questions the entire tendency to read the sonnets as falling into two
groups. See “ ‘Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d’: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare’s
Sonnets,” reprinted in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York: Gar-
land, 1999), 113 – 33.
16. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Son
nets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 158. Fineman reads the whole text as a pro-
gression “from an uncertainly ascetic poetry of picture to a definitively erotic poetry of word, from
a vestigially ideal poetics of ut pictura poesis to, as it were, a sexy and unhappy poetics of ut poesis
poesis,” which “represents in very obvious ways a rewriting of the assumptions of the poetry of
praise, not the least of those assumptions that such poetry makes about itself” (161). I am grateful to
David Lloyd for suggesting that I spend time with Fineman’s essay in this connection.
17. The first full editions of the Quarto were printed in 1780 and 1790 under Edmund Malone’s stew-
ardship. The late publication marks the sonnets as, in a peculiar sense, Shakespeare’s great nineteenth-
century volume of verse. As Margreta de Grazia reminds us, this “belated history of the sonnets can
be considered their only history.” See “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” reprinted in Schiffer,
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 96. (Compare Eve Sedgwick’s remark: “The tradition of the sonnets is the
tradition of reading them plucked from history and, indeed, from factual grounding,” from her book
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire [New York: Columbia University
Press, 1985], 29.) Accordingly, some modern critics anxious over the initial stain of sodomy, then
the deeper taint of homosexuality, that spread across the sonnets from their first widespread pub-
licity insist that the sonnets are about Shakespeare, but not as a younger man’s lover; some insist
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Public Culture things can make it as easy to think his wife and children a biographical accident
as it is to find the sonnets’ dark lady a disorderly interloper. For many modern
readers, the sonnets have a homosexual bias.
The Angelic Conversation realized Jarman’s ambition to film, precisely, the
homosexual bias of Shakespeare’s sonnets as a crucial source of modern fascina-
tion with the verse.18 The film, like the sonnets, invites a quasi-narrative reading
without any obvious plot and without dialogue. In it, we accustom ourselves to
watching two young men who are, in turn, closely watched by members of the
film’s embedded male audience (call these figures “fairy onlookers”), and the
men and the onlookers occasionally turn to the camera. The fairy onlookers come
armed with mirrors, torches, and other attention-getting devices, and, as they
keep watch, our two men, initially followed through solitary sequences, gradually
drift toward each other, unite with a marked man, wrestle, kiss, and part again
while Judi Dench reads sonnets in occasional voiceover.19 The whole is under the
uncertain surveillance of a radar tower.
Jim Ellis treats The Angelic Conversation as a powerfully counterhegemonic
film produced among the waves of period pictures that made Britain’s film indus-
try bankable in the 1980s.20 Ellis is, I think, dead right about this.21 He offers a
that the sonnets are not about Shakespeare, hence not about Shakespeare as a younger man’s lover;
and, more recently, some insist that the sonnets map Shakespeare’s loves. Of the many registers of
distinction in the sonnets (de Grazia lists social rank, age, gender, education, experience, race, and
ethical worth among them), sexual difference dominates modern readings.
18. This is not the same as setting out to film all of the sonnets, of course, and Jarman edits them
for the purposes of the film.
19. The decision to ask Dench to read was apt — she is, of course, a famous Shakespearean
actress, and the familiar sound of her voice (low, and faintly androgynous) lends a note of camp to
the piece.
20. Jim Ellis writes: “When we remember that the ‘obsessive catalogue(s) of detail’ [as Jarman
put it] that are the hallmark and the chief appeal of the [1980s British] period film are most often the
fetishes of a faded imperial glory, the inescapably conservative nature of the genre becomes clearer.
Jarman’s refusal to provide the visual pleasures of period, whether through an aggressively antirealist
mise-en-scène, or the pointed use of anachronistic props and language, both circumvents and implic-
itly critiques the trap that is almost constitutive of the genre. If there were such a category as the queer
period film, Jarman would have to be recognized as its foremost practitioner. . . . Jarman’s films of the
Renaissance constitute a series of . . . counter-memories, which function as challenges to the nostalgic,
Thatcherite construction of England’s glorious past in the cinema of the 1980s. Colin MacCabe notes
that, ‘For Jarman the investigation of what it is to be English is inseparable from a reworking of the
controlling myths of the English Renaissance,’ since these myths form the core of English national-
ist sentiment” (Ellis, “Queer Period: Derek Jarman’s Renaissance,” in Out Takes: Essays on Queer
Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999], 290).
21. The Britishness of it all, moreover, was pretty suspect in Jarman’s book. He wrote, “You
would make American product here, and convince them it was British” (The Last of England, ed.
David Hirst [London: Constable and Company, 1987], 112).
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subtle treatment of such things as Jarman’s use of the fairy onlookers’ props and Fourteen Sonnets
animation of bits of John Dee’s writings in the service of giving us a reading of
The Angelic Conversation as queer period film. I will begin from Ellis’s claim
that Jarman’s film is meant to aid our transmogrification by “changing perception
through the correct combination of images”22 and take the reading in a different
direction, treating the film as a response to the early 1980s urban homosexual
AIDS crisis, a response that manages crisis through the storage and retrieval of
small things (the underdeveloped path of Wildean memory). It is not so much
the struggle against heteronormativity as the struggle for a positive account of
the terms that must be met in articulating an urban homosexual ethics that is the
primary work of the film.23
Penis Erectus Non Habet Conscientiam
Ellis writes, “In The Angelic Conversation a selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets

provides oblique commentary on a series of hallucinatory images,” and he notes,
“If, according to [Eve] Sedgwick and [Joel] Fineman, the sonnets record a hetero-
sexualization of the male subject and, for Fineman, one of the first historical emer-
gences of that subject, this is precisely the narrative that Jarman resists.”24 But it
22. Ellis, “Queer Period,” 296.

23. For Jarman, queers, aesthetically charged erotic ambition, alchemy, and collaborative mate-
rial resourcefulness (of the kind involved in taking hold of emblematic Renaissance texts or the
figure of Oscar Wilde, and more generally in low-budget filmmaking) belong together with queer
sexual congress, which in turn falls under the rubric of “sodomy” in Jarman’s reading of Renaissance
texts. The interested path of association in Jarman’s animation of Renaissance texts, and the decision
to start from a bawdy dark-lady sonnet in The Angelic Conversation, accidentally converges with
one strand of Shakespearean scholarship. Jonathan Goldberg writes, “Nowhere [in the sonnets] are
the suggestions of sexual relations between men taken to constitute the antisocial behavior of the
sodomite. If anything like sodomy does appear in the sonnets, it is in relation to the so-called dark
lady of the final poems; a woman with whom promiscuous, nonmarital sex occurs; this is seen as
debauched and transgressive sex, not least because it threatens to destroy the relation between the
sonneteer and his beloved young man” (“Hal’s Desire, Shakespeare’s Idaho,” reprinted in Shake
speare’s Hand [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003], 226).
By starting from sonnet 151, we start as far away from the praise of marriage and family life as
possible, in modes of sexual congress that are disrespectful and disruptive of the sonnets’ images
of social and natural order. Aesthetically infused carnality, rather than detached soul-searching, is
the field where we encounter the question of queer conscience. By beginning at the transgressive,
nonmarital end of the sonnets, Jarman infuses his choice in young-man poetry with the counternor-
mative force of the later sonnets. Nothing in the early sonnets suggests that the young man’s relations
with the poet are other than socially sanctioned. Such is not the case for man-to-man sexual congress
in the social context of The Angelic Conversation.
24. Ellis, “Queer Period,” 299, 302.
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Public Culture is hard to single out one narrative that filmmaker Derek Jarman “resists” since,
Ellis continues, the film lacks characters and so may resist narrative entirely:
Although Jarman has called the film a love story, it is not a love story in
the usual sense. He gives a more descriptive account elsewhere, saying
it is “A series of slow-moving sequences through a landscape seen from
the windows of an Elizabethan house. Two young men find and lose each
other. The film ends in a garden.” In terms of information about charac-
ters, this is pretty much all we get. They never speak and are not given
names. Their actions are not explained, no motivations or thoughts are
ever given, except perhaps in a removed way in the soundtrack. If any-
thing, they resist any attempts of the audience to know them in any but the
most banal sense or to construct for them an interiority.25
This is necessary, according to Ellis, because it allows our two young men “to
avoid getting caught in the information systems of the masses, the hostile surveil-
lance by the combined forces of the state and dominant culture that is represented
by the radar towers,” and one must “avoid the confining definitions of queer self-
hood, if one is ever to end up in the garden.”26
This may be all that Jarman intended. Or it may have been what he intended
before he decided that his footage inadvertently realized his ambition to film the
sonnets (that is, before our film came into being). Whatever the case, it is too tame
a reading of The Angelic Conversation.
Although the film acknowledges the defensive perimeter of queer life with a
radar tower, a burning car, and occasional discordant noises, it doesn’t dwell in or
on this zone. Instead, it is reflective, slow, and lavish in its attention to beauty —
closer kin to the sonnets than to whatever circumstances of social upheaval may
have attended their composition.27 Moreover, the sonnets at issue in the film give
every indication of comprising an alternative edition of the text. They are not just
taken up from Shakespeare here or there.28 They are radically reordered.29
25. Ellis, “Queer Period,” 302 – 3.

26. Ellis, “Queer Period,” 303.
27. The circumstances of composition may have included the arrival of the plague in London.
28. Jarman takes nothing from the first seventeen sonnets (the sonnets urging the young man
to marry and breed). If there is a particular quasi-narrative that Jarman leaves aside, it is the strand
that begins with a focus on procreation as aesthetic reproductive technology (it is the young man’s
loveliness that is meant to be carried on by his progeny) and goes into abeyance when the seeds of the
youth’s beauty sown in verse promise an alternate route to future generations. Jarman resists neither
the claim that beauty ought to be preserved, nor the suggestion that artifice provides an alternative,
multiply realized and refracted, survival strategy for beauty. Nor does he leave aside the dark-lady
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The first movement of Jarman’s atmospheric edition of the literary text begins Fourteen Sonnets
in print before accompanying each young man going about his solitary business
in voiceover. After meeting the first two lines of sonnet 151, our print frontispiece,
we move into the first twelve lines of sonnet 57 in voiceover.30 Poetic render-
ings of love-induced isolation, envy, and twists of vision and judgment, and love-
linked misfortune mark the field of conscience as a discursive field taken up and
put to use by a contemporary homosexual reader asking, in effect, in what sense
an erection (a figure of carnal interest and tacit carnal knowledge) can have any-
thing like ethical compunction.
What the film editor lets fall to the cutting-room floor tends to remain there,
left out of account in the final film, more or less.31 What is left behind when cut-
ting Shakespeare, on the other hand — especially when cutting the Shakespeare
most often in anglophone queer circulation since Oscar Wilde’s day — continues
to haunt Jarman’s edition. The omitted final couplet of sonnet 57 — “So true a
sonnets. And he may have ignored the first seventeen sonnets simply because these mark (in the
sonnets as we know them) a road not taken. It is unclear, for example, that sonnet 10 would have
been out of place in the film: “For shame deny that thou bear’st love to any, / Who for thyself art
so improvident; / Grant, if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many, / But that thou none lov’st is most
evident: / For thou art so possessed with murd’rous hate / That ’gainst thyself thou stick’st not to
conspire, / Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate / Which to repair should be thy chief desire: / O
change thy thought, that I may change my mind; / Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love? / Be
as thy presence is, gracious and kind; / Or to thyself at least kind-hearted prove, / Make thee another
self for love of me, / That beauty may still live in thine or thee.”
In context, “Make thee another self for love of me,” urges marriage and progeny for love of the
poet. This context is shattered in the film, of course, while the poetry of self-loathing made acute (but
potentially relieved) in love finds its way into the film at many points.
29. Jarman’s sequence is as follows: written first two lines of sonnet 151, followed by (all spoken)
the first twelve lines of sonnet 57, then, in their entirety, sonnets 90, 43, 53, 148, 126, 29, 94, 30, 55,
27, 61, 56, and 104. As usual, sonnet 126 marks a turning point — in standard readings of Shake-
speare’s sonnets, 126 is the last of the young-man poetry; for Jarman, 126 (the sonnet that begins “O
thou my lovely Boy,” the one readdressed by Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas) marks the point in the
film where our two young men have begun watching each other.
30. As Ellis points out, Jarman had no patience with the suggestion that the job of the late-
twentieth-century filmmaker working from Renaissance English texts was to produce a historically
accurate spectacle, capturing the dead hand of the past in all of its manifest deadness. The aim was
mercenary: to retrieve what was useful from history. Nevertheless, Jarman preserved the arithmetical
proportions of the sonnets, drawing one-sixth of his poems from the dark-lady sonnets, five-sixths
from the young-man sonnets, and producing the needed balance by omitting the final couplet of son-
net 57. The resulting edit has a slightly different status than the conjoint editing of the film.
31. Some snippets may return as “deleted scene” additions on DVD, might be restored in special,
recut versions of the film, or might be retrieved by scholars. For all that, most of what falls to the
cutting-room floor is at best supplementary to the finished film.
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Public Culture fool is love, that in your will, / Though you do anything, he thinks no ill” — raises
the specter of the author (“Will” is capitalized in the Quarto text, rendering “in
your Will” ambiguous between a statement about the addressee’s character and a
statement about the poet, Will Shakespeare), reanimates the jealousy foresworn
in the body of that sonnet, and personifies love. The frontispiece also personifies
love, suggesting that what is left out of account in Jarman’s cutting of sonnet 57
(jealousy? the relation of the artist to his subject?) is better captured by what he
lifts from sonnet 151:
Love is too young to know what conscience is:
Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?
The film, then, thinks nothing of cutting Shakespeare to fit (queer attachment
to the sonnets is too raw for scholarly compunction). Raising the question of con-
science turns on the peculiar force of vision found in an older man — a filmmaker,
enamored of two younger men, several landscapes, and some poetry — who is
capable of capturing these love objects in art (Jarman’s will, and his Will, are
at issue here). This articulation of the question makes modernized Shakespeare
a vehicle for addressing the ethical and political crises born of the 1980s urban
homosexual AIDS epidemic.
“ ’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity . . . You live in this,

and dwell in lovers’ eyes”
The most obvious fact about The Angelic Conversation is technical. Jarman
explained:
On the Nizo [Super 8] camera there is a dial which allows one to take
speeded-up film; you take single frames, if this is projected at normal
speed, it goes fast. But I have projectors which go at slow speeds, so the
film is restored to a near normal pace, like a series of moving slides. . . .
The single frame makes for extreme attention, a concentration that is
voyeuristic. Time seems suspended. The slightest movement is amplified.
This is the reason I call it “a cinema of small gestures.”32
The stop-frame technique accounts for the graininess of the picture. Jarman got
the tone by transferring from projection to video through color filters, sometimes
while fiddling with contrasts. The sequences that play out at regular speed some-
times begin as regular speed Super 8 and undergo the same transformations.
32. Jarman, The Last of England, 145 – 46.
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Sometimes, the real-time sequences begin in video. What Jarman pulls off with Fourteen Sonnets
this bit of movie magic is, I think, extraordinary: perhaps without meaning to,
he manages to catch how one begins to look at one’s lovers, friends, and fellows
when one realizes that any of them might show up blighted soon.
In the early days of the urban homosexual AIDS epidemic, the mounting fear
that anyone might go at any time began to influence how one looked at one’s crowd
and at those strangers who appeared because they were slumming or while they
were coming out. A man would look stunning some night, or pensive, or other
wise striking, and there began to be a little voice in one’s head, insistent as the
mutterings of duty, saying, “Pay attention! Remember this! Hold this moment!”
(“Because,” it seemed to add sotto voce, “this could be the last time.”)
The Angelic Conversation was made shortly before Jarman found out that he
was HIV positive. It was televised when images of plagues and divine retribution
already congealed around young men struck down by strange ailments, some-
times in what felt like the blink of an eye. Apparently inexplicable lesions or
infections were often the symptoms that led to seropositive diagnosis in the mid-
1980s, and the underlying blood condition, in turn, was represented as a species
of contagion for which one could be tested at STD clinics. The film partly reg-
isters the fact that not only are your friends dropping like flies, not only does no
one understand why, not only is it possible that you will be next, but all of you
are becoming the focus of a newly intensified public homophobia with its state-
and socially sanctioned violence, and, moreover, some of you are responding by
scuttling back to the closets or deciding all you ever wanted was to be more like
all those straight people securely tucked away in their homes with their prurient
hostility to marginal sexual intercourse, to you, and to all that you represent. As
Simon Watney puts it, writing about Britain in 1986, “whilst individuals are vul-
nerable to HIV infection, the entire reproductive machinery of gay subjectivity is
also vulnerable to the ideological fall-out of the representational crisis triggered
by the virus.”33 The film’s texture registers both the internal threat of loss and the
external representation of voluntary entry into homosexual congress as suicidal
and of homosexual seduction as murderous.
In attempting to make memory to order, under those circumstances, what one
got was a rickety moving picture made of still images, each lovingly recorded
with the possible weight of premonition attached.34 Jarman’s technique captures
33. Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1996), 18.
34. At least, that’s what one got if one wasn’t sick and didn’t expect to get sick any time soon.
When Jarman made The Angelic Conversation he did not know that he was HIV positive.
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Public Culture the phenomenology of the deliberate archiving of the present man, under threat of
losing him. It is a self-insulating process. You distance yourself from what’s going
on in order to make memories in the present, thereby manufacturing self-protective
alienation from your own scene. This is, I take it, partly why we viewers have to
supply the context for what the young men are doing, why masculine beauty is
sometimes the only context, and why, even when we see what a lover sees, we can
never see it as he does (the use of mirrors that can’t image us underscores this
distance). The processing of the film mimics us in regarding men whose context
is not obvious in the mood of precise, tender retentiveness. We have begun to hold
images under pressure from inside out and outside in.
But, then, holding images was nothing new for urban homosexuals. Writing to,
with, and for Oscar Wilde in the 1980s, Neil Bartlett described the odd cobbling
together of visual materials that was then a mode of homosexual urban interior
design:
Somewhere in the house, flat or room of each of my lovers and friends
there is . . . a drawer of photographs, a wall of pictures, a mantelpiece of
postcards, a bookshelf, a wardrobe of clothes. If you or he can “read” this
collection of words and images, with all its attendant justifications, juxta-
positions and cross references, you will have a gay story, a history. . . .
There will be some passages of narrative: a photo of a child next to the
photo of the man, or a sequence of ex-lovers indicating moves from place
to place. Other things will not indicate narrative at all. Next time you see
him or talk to him, his collection will have changed.35
Notice that the telltale accumulation of items in a gay room might be invisible as
such to heteronormal guests. Such accretion of indeterminate souvenirs is itself
at home in an urban life whose modes of publicity and privacy are best tracked
visually.
Editorial creativity of this sort was second nature to urban queers. In a way,
Jarman invites us to view such skill as a virtue — the cultivated strength of an
individual person acquired and nurtured by social interaction, crucial to the daily
production and reproduction of sound social life, and flexible enough in its points
of application to express itself in many, many different ways (in decorating a
room, for instance, or watching a film, or editing Shakespeare). Although nor-
mally treated as an individual character trait, an ethical virtue is always socially
35. Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde (London: Serpent’s Tale,
1988), 25 – 26.
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productive. My virtues, if I have some, are mine, but there is no such thing as an Fourteen Sonnets
idiosyncratic, antisocial virtue. In a sense, then, the proper subject of a virtue isn’t
its individual bearer. Rather, it is the collective beneficiary of the virtue’s exercise.
What virtue equips its bearer for, what having such strength enables, is participa-
tion in nonaccidentally sound social life. The modes of seeing and selecting at
issue in The Angelic Conversation carry exactly this sort of social charge.
The fact that the mode of looking made acute during the early days of the
urban homosexual AIDS epidemic was already ours, and remained ours quite
apart from heteronormative hostility, is established from the very first sequence
of our film by the insertion of a fairy onlooker. This fairy onlooker’s dress is
somehow at once reminiscent of Renaissance finery and evocative of the foppish
sartorial splendor that belonged to post-Stonewall,36 pre-AIDS London homo-
sexual scenes. The fancy-dress fairy onlooker watches, but his flashing mirror
(which cannot image us) is juxtaposed with shots of an instrument of alien sur-
veillance: the radar tower.
Describing the place of surveillance apparatuses in homosexual city life in
the mid-1980s, Henning Bech writes: “[This] surveillance . . . does not know
everything about a person, only what it can see on the spot; and it is not always
present. . . . There is thus the possibility of eluding it; [but] one has to reckon on
its being present any time. One cannot be homosexual . . . without feeling poten-
tially monitored.”37 Let the radar tower figure the whole apparatus of sporadic
monitoring. Let the haunting pace show the shift in vision made irresistible by the
internal threat of loss. The film’s stakes become portentous. And Jarman won’t
let you rush anything.
Questions crowd in at this point. In what sense do the habits of vision mim-
36. The Stonewall uprising, named for a Greenwich Village bar, the Stonewall Inn, began in the
early morning hours of June 28, 1969. Police intent on conducting a fairly standard raid on the bar
in order to harass and arrest the gay and lesbian clientele met with unprecedented violent resistance.
The bar crowd was joined by sympathizers, and several nights of confrontation with police followed.
The events of those nights are generally (if problematically) taken to signal the beginning of the
gay and lesbian liberation movement in the United States and are loosely commemorated in Pride
festivals and parades to this day.
Jarman commented: “Stonewall was a RIOT which occurred in the summer of 1969 in Christo-
pher Street, New York, outside a bar of the same name. For the first time Queers fought back with
bricks and bottles and empty beer glasses and burnt cars. The best fighters were the trannies — a
dress was a badge of courage. This riot sparked a revolution in our consciousness. A community of
interest was established and a debate was entered. The harder it was fought the more our case was
furthered” (At Your Own Risk: A Saint’s Testament [Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1993], 66).
37. Henning Bech, When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity, trans. Theresa Mesquit and
Tim Davies (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 99.
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Public Culture icked, exposed, and reflected upon in The Angelic Conversation give us a starting
place for thought about the queer ethical by giving us queer virtue? How does this
very strange little film return our viewing habits to us as enabling the emergence
of sound collectivity under extraordinary pressure? And what has any of this got
to do with engineering a point of collapse for traditional distinctions between
ethics, aesthetics, and erotics? I will turn to Jacques Lacan for help with these
matters.
Working around the Elided Gaze
There is an important twist in the circuit of the Lacanian scopic drive at work
in The Angelic Conversation.38 In Seminar XI, Jacques Lacan introduces the
gaze — the nonexistent partial object avoided by the scopic drive — by way of
considering how there might be an image of absence, given that the very pleni-
tude of the visual domain (natural home to the imaginary) would seem to ren-
der impossible a visual representation of lack.39 Lack opens onto the field of the
Other — instigator of entry into the symbolic, in whose regard the thereby con-
stituted subject is found wanting.40 The field of the Other, in turn, immediately
opens the field of desire as always already the Other’s desire. It is the Other’s lack
of regard and insistent demand, after all, that marks the subject as at once inad-
equate and overwritten (but underdescribed) by the symbolic order. The Other’s
demand enters the subject as desire, and sets up the desire to be what the Other
desires — that is, the nonexistent objet a, in Lacan’s schema.
38. For Lacan’s schematic of the circuit of any partial drive (hence, of the scopic drive), see Le
séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de lappsychanalyse, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973), 200.
39. The possibility of representing lack marked an earlier boundary between the symbolic order
(which, as such, could represent lack) and the imaginary (which, as paradigmatically visual, could
not).
40. Although nothing is more common than personifying Lacan’s capital-O Other by treating
“it” as something capable of demand, desire, and regard, this move already represents something on
the order of a category mistake. The Other is a site of disparate normative pressures in the (uncon-
scious) subject. Its “substance” is as various as rules of grammatical construction, norms of polite
conversational distance, moral codes, and so on. It can only exert apparently singular pressure
through the conflation of conflicting registers of impersonal normative authority. “It” — this pres-
sure point — cannot want, demand, or desire anything. “It” isn’t a subject. That “it” is personified as
an individual capable of want/desire/demand for the modern liberal subject is part of what fascinated
Lacan about the nagging presence of normative pressure deprived of any singularly compelling
account of normative authority. Accordingly, I adopt the conventional way of writing about “it” with
caution and caveats. The convention takes hold of an ungrounded point of Lacanian phenomenology
as though the phenomenology had a solid basis. Lacan, of course, knew that it didn’t.
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In his discussion of the gaze, Lacan is precisely concerned with locating the Fourteen Sonnets
gaze in the field of lack-desire-Other. In order to do this, it is crucial to bring the
(always elided) gaze into view as marking “l’apparition du fantôme phallique,”
the appearance of a phallic phantom.41 In addition to producing genuine rapport
between the domain of vision, traditionally allied with the imaginary, and the
symbolic, Lacan’s account of the gaze as the inevitable failure of coincidence
between seeing and being seen — an analog, if you like, for the failure of coin
cidence between signifier and subject in the symbolic register — also makes pos-
sible his account of the scopic drive.
Like all partial drives, the scopic drive eludes the field of the Other by tracing
a subject-consolidating, passive-to-active movement along a trajectory of jouis-
sance that never allows itself to be given over to the nullifying, castration-inflected
business of desire. Like all partial drives, the scopic drive travels a circuit con-
structed around avoidance of the nonexistent object of the Other’s desire — in this
instance, the objet a as gaze. Since what is avoided by the circuit of the drive does
not exist in the first place, the circuit takes its character from the negative space
of a specific absence.
Returning to The Angelic Conversation, we might say: so far, so good. In Jar-
man’s film, if you like, the gaze of the Other that would push the film into the
register of desire seems at first to be figured as the radar tower. This figure both
demands to be seen and threatens a kind of seeing that is not consonant with the
film’s peculiar texture.42 Jarman stages almost perfect filmic indifference to that
gaze — the only place where it comes close to sharing a scene with our figures, it
takes the form of fiery real-time clouds, assailing one of our would-be lovers who
has just been battling with his own shadow, and rendering the Other’s gaze deter-
minate only in prefigured, shadowy remainder (“When in disgrace with fortune
and men’s eyes / I all alone beweep my outcast state, / And trouble deaf heav’n
with my bootless cries, / And look upon myself, and curse my fate” comes in
voiceover in the vicinity of this sequence). More than this, there is an outright
erasure of the apparatus of hostile surveillance in the film’s final moments. As
Jarman puts it, “There is that hovering, external violence, but at the end of the
41. Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, 101.

42. The sense in which the radar tower is knit into the film is rhythmic. Its pulsing and the hum-
ming throb of it echo the pacing of the rest of the film. In general, except for one brief, lyrical musical
passage, Jarman uses sound in the film in ways that isolate and enhance auditory impressions in the
way that a cinema of small gestures isolates and enhances visual details. I discuss the pulse of the
radar tower below.
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Public Culture film it’s cauterised by the blossom,”43 that is, in the concluding scenes of the film,
the radar tower is gradually obliterated from view by a wisteria panicle. So, it
looks like we get: gaze = radar tower (internalized as projected assault by fiery
clouds); subject = us; and we take over the field by allowing wisteria blossoms,
initially seen when a lover buries his face in them, remembering a kiss, to over-
whelm the tower, the hovering blot on our horizon. We seem primed for the scopic
drive, and the film can be read as an exercise in seizing that pleasure that belongs
to staying in the field of the subject while luxuriating in visuality.
But there is a strange resonance between the pulsing rhythm of the tower’s
oscillation and the halting texture of the film, and any attempt to use Lacan to
read Jarman must account for that resonance. Potential threat in the film is not
confined to that “hovering” violence never directly in the scene with any of our fig-
ures. This is not the sole point of failure of seeing and being seen to coincide, and
it shouldn’t be, if we take Lacan seriously. Lacan took it that the distance required
for the run of the scopic drive — the movement from being seen, to assuming the
position of one who lets oneself be seen, to seeing that one lets oneself be seen
and seizing upon this (as if one could see oneself seeing oneself by assuming the
position of one who allows oneself to be seen) — could be effected only in a split
subject, a subject that could not, actually, see itself seeing itself but was open to
the elision of the gaze made possible by presuming some such coincidence of seer
and seen. We find this noncoincidence glaringly indicated in flashing reflective
surfaces that cannot catch the audience and more subtly registered in the film’s
haunting texture and pacing.
There are two things to note about using the scopic drive to come to grips with
the peculiarities of the film’s pacing and texture. First, built into the never coinci-
dent networks of watching, looking, showing, seeing, and being seen is something
on the order of an illusion of homosexual consciousness as se voir se voir — see-
ing itself seeing itself — that very illusion by which, on Lacan’s account, the gaze
is elided.44 Second, therefore, to whatever extent The Angelic Conversation gives
us a picture-perfect mapping of the scopic drive, it is a version of the scopic drive
that stays in the field of the subject without staying in the field of the individual.45
The relevant subject is not one or the other of our lovers, nor any subset of fairy
43. Jarman, The Last of England, 134.

44. See Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, 96 – 98.
45. The possibility of staying in the field of the subject without staying in the field of the indi-
vidual was suggested to me by Jaime Hovey’s reading of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
See A Thousand Words (Athens: University of Ohio Press, forthcoming).
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onlookers, nor the viewer. The Lacanian subject, scopically driven through this Fourteen Sonnets
film, is rather the inherently unstable collective made of enduring filmed figures
and changing audience. Each locus of visual acuity — each filmed figure and any
audience member — is split qua individual subject, of course, but the whole collec-
tive, as unstable aggregate, is likewise rendered a single split subject by the opera-
tion of scopically driven attention. And, of course, this subject — the accidentally
aggregated collective subject — cannot form unless the audience is drawn into
the circuit of the scopic drive, that is, unless the aesthetic power of the film is at
once both erotically charged (hence, primed for jouissance-induced and -inducing
oscillation) and capable of giving birth to a collective subject (hence, ethically
pregnant).
As near as I can tell, you could not have got through a single viewing of The
Angelic Conversation by concentrating on the urgent need for political action,
still less by sinking into your own private ledger of losses. If there is an audience
for this film — an “us” not all made of scholars interested in the cinematographic
turn on the sonnets — we must come prepared to be fascinated by male figures.
That is, unless the viewers supply surges of vital erotic engagement, the spec-
tacle is impossible to watch. If The Angelic Conversation can stay in the field of
the collective subject (screening by screening) without staying in the field of the
individual, it can only do so by seducing its viewers to slide onto the circuit of the
scopic drive. Jarman likened the film’s pacing to bad pornography and hoped that
some unknown young man might be moved to masturbate while viewing it one
day.46 And, happily, attending to the slow majority of The Angelic Conversation
is rather like “cruising” it.
Cruising
But, then, the visual dynamics of cruising permeate the film from the first
sequence onward. We watch the man at the window until he turns to us. The cos-
tumed man interrupts us with his flashing mirror. We watch our young men from
behind, from the side. We draw closer and hear breathing and water lapping.47
Everything is suspended, slowed, vulnerable, tense, and possible. Here is Bech
46. Derek Jarman, Modern Nature (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1994), 123 – 24.
47. I am grateful to the members of the University of Chicago’s Mass Culture Workshop for
stressing that the use of sound in the film is disrupted as thoughtfully as the use of imagery. The
sounds in the cruising sequence, especially, are isolated and amplified to stress the extreme attention
to detail that belongs to erotic attraction. That is, the sonic work of the film underscores the haunting
visuality.
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Public Culture on the peculiar interpersonal tendrils of homosexual urban visual intercourse in
cruising:
You must never start letting your gaze rest on the man you’re after. You
look away almost as soon as his eyes hit yours; and after a moment, you
look back to see if he’s looking at you. Now it’s his turn to shift his
eyes . . . a couple of chance eye contacts en passant, while the eyes are
scanning the place anyway, may be enough to set off a magnetic spi-
ral — as is known from the train, when one sometimes has to resort to
the window, both to escape the other person’s gaze and to see if it’s still
there. . . . Not that the gaze need always be used as a means to achieve fur
ther contact. It becomes enough in itself; from being a means of contact, it
becomes the end. The reciprocal glancing turns into the contact. . . . What
is called cruising is this combination of gazes and movements, which at
gay bars takes place in an enclosure and finds its proper territory out in
the city.48
The Angelic Conversation began as a cruise gambit in a bar, actually. Slightly
drunk, Jarman got up the nerve to approach Paul Reynolds at a club called Heaven
one night and follow up a trail of glances and rumors by actually speaking to
him.49 Jarman asked if Paul was willing to appear on film. Paul agreed, and
shortly thereafter, the two hit upon the idea of asking a still younger man who had
caught Paul’s eye, Phillip Williamson, if he’d be filmed too. Jarman imagined that
Paul and Phillip might begin an affair, and so had a chance to marry his voyeur-
ism to his fascination with Super 8 in the filming. All of the footage was in the
can before funding or the sonnets entered the picture. Tony Peake writes that Jar-
man had begun editing when he “had the belated idea of having Judi Dench read
fourteen of Shakespeare’s sonnets as an oblique commentary. This was a fusion
of a quite separate notion — to film the sonnets — with the material to hand. It was
also, as far as Jarman was concerned, a perfect way to proclaim the homosexual
bias of Shakespeare’s verse.”50 I do not know why Jarman thought that his method
was homosexual perfection, but it should have had something to do with the gen-
esis of the picture. The project moves in and out of the semipublic bar scene, gath-
48. Bech, When Men Meet, 105 – 6. Bech uses “gaze” to mean something like look, glance, or
stare. The impossibility of a self-consolidating, self-productive, self-initiated, and self-returning
look, glance, or stare is what Lacan means by gaze.
49. Reynolds was an archaeology student at the time who, rumor had it, admired Jarman’s use of
Latin in the film Sebastiane.
50. Tony Peake, Derek Jarman: A Biography (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 2000), 339.
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ering its erotic charge from the whole operation of homosexual urban sociality, Fourteen Sonnets
which is offscreen in the scenes that it enables, or indirectly represented through
the alchemical fairy onlookers. Jarman shoots his young men at his own sites of
optimism and memory (at Dancing Ledge on the Dorset Coast where Elizabeth
and John Dee wandered, for example).51 In short, he picks up youths and takes
them to places that count as his home turf, seeking the thrill of recording what
they’d do, more or less on their own. And he decides, at the last minute, that he
has thereby filmed the homosexual bias in the sonnets.
That bias is, in part, a reflexive slowing of vision that requires that pleasure in
seeing or scanning turns back on itself in a loop that obliterates whatever distinc-
tion there might have been between the aesthetics and the erotics of vision. In this
loop, erotic vision wraps itself around as yet unblemished men in a way not unre-
lated to what Lee Edelman describes as “rediscovering the luxury of narcissism
from within an experience constructed on every side as a rupture in narcissism
itself.”52 However, partly because this narcissism stays in the field of the subject
without staying in the field of the individual person, it produces the subject as col-
lective emerging from interactive scenes. Transpersonal particularity, rather than
identity-laden individuality, emerges as ephemeral product in the exchange.53 If
it is partly the threat of AIDS casualties that forces the distillation of a familiar
mode of visual sexual congress into a mode of increasingly untimely viewing, it
is also the case that the specter of possibly death-dealing, symptomatic blemish
is given to us only as enigmatic stain — ornamental marking of a sort — in the
first (and the only sustained) real-time sequence of the film, a stain that is taken
up into the more usual stop-frame sequencing subsequently. The stain sequence
marks a turning point in the film.
51. Jarman’s fascination with English Renaissance texts turned upon associations between
alchemy and marginal sexuality. Jarman made a study of the work of John Dee, alchemist and advi-
sor to Queen Elizabeth I. See Jarman, Dancing Ledge (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1993), 188.
52. “The Mirror and the Tank: ‘AIDS,’ Subjectivity, and the Rhetoric of Activism,” in Homo
graphesis, 116.
53. Bradin Cormack argues that attention to Shakespeare’s use of Ovid already produces this
kind of reflective positioning. He writes, “Ovidian desire is diffuse in such a way as never really to
cohere except as a potentiality between possible subjects and possible objects. The narrative ten-
sion between Echo and Narcissus that identically constitutes their desire as, impossibly, an expect-
ant looking for sound, subordinates the individual actors to the scene in which they play out the
imperfections of their fate and so imperfectly produce desire” (“Rescuing Narcissus: The Politics of
Reflection in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” unpublished manuscript, 5).
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Public Culture Nonaccidentally Sound Social Reproduction
Significantly, the scattered real-time sequences in The Angelic Conversation feel

like they pass by too quickly, produce particular figures as real-time ephemera,
depict either intimacy or struggle when they depict our lovers, and are framed by
brief shots of the more-often-real-time fairy onlookers. Phillip and Paul are first
drawn together in real time washing a marked man and draping him in jewels. The
gravitas of the sequence is marked visually by the fact that it hits us in real time,
by the fact that our two would-be lovers are finally sharing a frame, and by the
stunning central figure of a singular man (whom we will not see again) seated on
a kind of throne. His bared chest is marred and decorated by the fantastic image
of a horned beast that runs down the front of his abdomen, and enigmatic figures
spring from the head of the beast, crawling up toward his shoulders, where their
ornamental and faintly alarming progression is obscured by some kind of robe.
He wears a jeweled crown reminiscent of a crown of olive leaves. Our would-be
lovers wear plain dark suits. Phillip holds a torch. Paul dips a cloth in a small
basin, bathes our marked man (who is at once disfigured and made splendid by
the markings on his vulnerable body), and then begins to kiss the marked man’s
knee.
The ritual bathing of a marked man will be familiar to any of us who have
attended at AIDS sickbeds. The marked-man sequence is the only indoor sequence
involving touch. It is the first unmediated physical intercourse recorded in the
film, which has, up until now, tracked the separate movements of our two atten-
dants and the aggregation of fairy onlookers. Everything conspires to make this
scene unusual, suggesting that normal interaction, in this film, begins in semi-
secluded public spaces where observation is the medium of attachment, perhaps
later recalled, like the sonneteer’s visions of loveliness, alone. What mattered
most to Jarman about the sequence was that the marked man is neither threaten-
ing nor dangerous to his attendants or observers. Sonnet 94, a kind of study in the
dynamics of constancy and alteration, is part of the soundtrack for the sequence:
“They that have pow’r to hurt, and will do none,” might be any of our figures—
Paul, Phillip, the fairy onlookers, or the still, marked man who is a magnet for
our soon-to-be-lovers.54 I do not know if Jarman used sonnet 94 deliberately
as a soundtrack allusion to safe sex, if our marked man is meant to be among
those
54. Jarman noted in retrospect, “the ritual washing of the tattooed man who looks like a king
or prince . . . At the time I was thinking of . . . service willingly given, not exacted” (The Last of
England, 133).
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That do not do the thing they most do show, Fourteen Sonnets

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow —
Clearly, the collective subject (marked man – Paul-Phillip – fairy onlookers) is
one that can “husband nature’s riches from expense,” as can the subject of the
sonnet. Clearly, spectators are drawn to the marked man (as to a lodestone) and
find themselves at his service (the whole economy of erotic servitude sketched in
our first sequence by sonnet 57 is brought to a head and redirected as we attend to
the marked man — he appears as the new addressee of that sonnet for us). He is
among “the lords and owners of their faces,” making it possible for others to serve
as “stewards of [his] excellence.” But all three figures in the scene — Paul, Phillip,
and the marked man — together with the fairy onlookers who have been gather-
ing in shots leading up to this sequence (husbanding and stewarding by watching)
“inherit heaven’s graces” through their affective conspiracy in rendering services
owed to the marked man. Moreover, the fact that this sequence is filmed in real
time marks it as especially sensitive to its epidemiological circumstance, making
sonnet 94 available to the then-new discursive field of safe-sex publicity, whether
or not Jarman noticed this. That throughout the film we are far more likely to
meet the fairy onlookers in real time than we are to meet Paul or Phillip in real
time suggests, I think, that we had special need of them during the first rushes
of homosexual urban AIDS crises. They operate as a kind of defensive veil, pro-
tecting sites of visual and tactile erotic congress as they both draw attention to
themselves and position themselves for voyeurism.
The film underscores the AIDS reading of the marked-man sequence retro-
spectively. In the next sequence Phillip (not Paul, who kissed the marked man,
but Phillip) bathes himself, dipping water from a tidal pool in a shell. We have
returned safely to slide-show slowness again, and the spider tattooed on Phillip’s
arm, recalling our marked man, slips past.
We stay with Phillip while Dench reads sonnet 30:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night.
And so on, until when “I think on thee, dear friend, / All losses are restored, and
sorrows end.” If we read the tattoo as communicable and the shell as simultane-
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Public Culture ously taking the place of the marked man, becoming a vehicle for memory and
a prop for an imitation of care, then we may just as well read attractiveness as a
transitive relation among our male figures, condensed and intensified by the min-
istration ritual and focused through the marked man’s body that draws Phillip and
Paul together in attendance.
The film’s first kisses are given to a small golden globe held by a circle of
fairy onlookers. The marked man draws the film’s next kiss from Paul. Phillip
will draw Paul’s final kiss. Intimacy travels in circuits laid down by look and
touch, circuits at once sensitive to the fragility of a moment of physical contact
and enabled by the moment’s paradoxically heavy-handed ethereality. The com-
munication of bodily marking from marked man to the attendant who did not
kiss him, for instance, and the heavy, clanging throb of musical soundtrack at the
beginning of the marked-man sequence, before Dench’s voice relieves us with
poetry, give us the marked-man sequence as real-time, pre-posthumous elegy and
birth certificate simultaneously. What comes to life is an overseen and overheard
collective that sends Phillip to the seaside and makes possible the subsequent real-
time kisses between Phillip and Paul.
The reproductive machinery of Shakespeare’s sonnets begins in vision and in
attachment to dead things and absent figures. It is carried by, transmitted through,
and transmuted in successive, troubled images. Jarman’s film is shot through with
analogous visual complexity, variously heightened and redirected to carriers of
other cultural charges. Even the magic that makes each slowed filmic sequence
possible veils our figures in the technique that fixes attention on their smallest
movements. In essence, the kinds of watching that knit together and enabled vari-
ous homosexual exchanges — the voyeuristic and appetitive circuits of seeing that
energize scenes, the impact of AIDS anxiety on seeing, the production of a col-
lective with a shifting cast of characters as singular subject on the circuit of the
scopic drive — are deployed as representations of the sonnets’ visuality in The
Angelic Conversation. At the same time, the so-called evacuation of corporeal
congress in the name of the aesthetic that made the sonnets useful to Wilde is
refigured and undone under Jarman’s direction, where vision itself becomes a
medium of erotic intercourse, where the corporeal element gone missing is famil-
iar streets, familiar watering holes, familiar modes of dress and address.
The erotic leading edge of urban homosexual exchange — the centrality of
networks of passing glances to cruising, for instance — shows itself as crucial to
the substance of homosexual intercourse in this film. As the film progresses, the
closer our two lovers come to their kiss, the more often we cut to the onlookers,
armed with instruments of illumination and with mirrors. Jarman can count on
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us to animate his film because we are already accustomed to spotting each other, Fourteen Sonnets
watching each other, marking each other’s presence, and keeping watch on and
for each other. These habits are themselves erotic and hence lend themselves to
the subject-consolidating, passive-to-active run of the scopic drive’s circuit. But,
in this context, the normally destructive circuit of the scopic drive becomes the
field that makes possible a conscience born of love. Giving the two impromptu
stars some of Shakespeare’s sonnets as part of a fantasy about enabling their
affair allows the poetry to fill the role in this film that it might play in an offscreen
romance. And working with Super 8 footage underscores the cross-generational
reproductive force of the film. I take it that Jarman is (at least implicitly) sensing
aesthetic production as a site of social fertility in this film and elsewhere. The
extreme intimacy of the mode of aesthetic production at issue, moreover, lodges
the fertility directly in the visual circuits that so saturated urban homosexual con-
gress in the 1980s as to have rendered life without them unimaginable.55
Jarman uses Super 8 “to develop a parallel cinema based on the home movie.”56
“The home movie,” Jarman says, “is bedrock, it records the landscape of lei-
sure: the beach, the garden, the swimming pool. In all home movies is a longing
for paradise.”57 He adds that his later films “are extensions of [his] father’s and
grandfather’s work.”58 Paradise in The Angelic Conversation is an effect of train-
ing a slowed eye on lovely men in slightly secluded places. The extreme attention
is produced through a deliberate, technical act of omission (recall that we get the
slide-show effect by running speeded-up film slowly, forcing attention on individ-
ual frames by isolating them and thereby infusing what we see with the kinds of
visual editorial skill that surrounds such competences as those exercised in queer
cinephilia).59 We find, here, technologies for recording family life and aspiration
55. In conversation with Neville Hoad on this and other AIDS crises, it became clear to me that
managing an AIDS crisis without rushing to monogamous, respectable sexual comportment as fan-
tasy antidote required relocating cross-generational social reproduction from the field of procreation
to some other site of fertility. Aesthetic production is such a site.
59. For discussion of queer cinephilia, see Roger Hallas, “AIDS and Gay Cinephilia,” Camera
Obscura 18, no. 1 (2003): 85 – 126. Paul Willeman describes cinephilia, an unusual form of attach-
ment to film, this way: “What is being looked for is a moment or, given that a moment is too uni-
tary, a dimension of a moment which triggers for the viewer either the realisation or the illusion of
realisation that what is being seen is in excess of what is being shown” (“Through the Glass Darkly:
Cinephilia Reconsidered,” in Looks and Frictions [London: British Film Institute, 1994], 227). For
a slightly different way of making a similar point, see the discussion of this form of looking as akin
to touch in Roger Cardinal’s “Pausing over Peripheral Detail,” Framework 30/31 (1986): 124.
A decade before Willeman, Al La Valley described ordinary gay male attachments to classic
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Public Culture appropriated in order to map the stuff of cross-generational homosexual attach-
ment as the stuff of lateral collective subject formation. The resulting film — first
shown out of competition at the Berlin Film Festival in February of 1985, then as
part of London’s Gay Pride celebration in a late-night screening at Camden Plaza,
then at Edinburgh — finally made its way publicly into private homes (the more
cinema, especially melodramatic Hollywood cinema, in terms very like those familiar from discus-
sions of cinephilia. The glamour of Hollywood films — almost never yielding their supple narrative
power directly to gay plotting — was recast in gay male eyes as a fragmentary, kaleidoscopic field
of queer-possible moments: “[Gay men] treasured film not so much for its narrative fulfillments as
for its great moments, those interstices that were often, ironically, the source of a film’s real power”
(“The Great Escape,” American Film 10.6 [1985]: 29).
Hallas takes it that experimental gay filmmaking has been haunted by characteristic traumas
since the 1980s, such as “the self-estrangement caused in childhood by . . . failure to assimilate to
codes of gender and sexual conformity,” “the alienation rooted in illness, . . . survivor guilt, and
emotional burnout related to AIDS” and the “loss — not only of numerous lives, but also of the
sexual culture developed in the post-liberation era” (“AIDS and Gay Cinephilia,” 99, 112). Hallas
thereby sketches a specifically gay male inflection of the task Paul Arthur finds informing contempo-
rary avant-garde filmmaking as such: “Recovering history, enmeshing the prerogatives of personal
experience — memory, autobiography, direct observation of everyday life — with the constraints of
a socially-shared past, recasting radical subjectivity as the interpenetration of public and private
spaces” (quoted in “AIDS and Gay Cinephilia,” 118). Constitutive homosexual habits of seeing,
showing, being seen, and passing unnoticed are, I think, what make it easy for critics like La Valley
and Hallas to assimilate ordinary homosexual takes on classic cinema to cinephilia — that mode of
viewer attachment which otherwise counts as a special achievement, at once enmeshed in the telling
detail and indifferent to the background plot. On Hallas’s and La Valley’s account, whatever was
captivating on screen became homosexually inflected in the interstices, slips, and excesses — only
apparent as such when measured against the plotted whole — condensed and appropriated as at once
seen, shown, and secret. Queer cinephilia attaches viewer to images by equipping queers to ignore
whatever does not fit — heterosexual romantic plotting, for example. Ordinary habits of queer spec-
tatorship display all the markings of what otherwise counts as a special skill: cinephilia as a viewing
strategy. On Hallas’s account, gay film spectatorship has always been (from the point of view of
narrative progression) untimely; contemporary avant-garde gay filmmaking exaggerates this, turn-
ing the habit of attending to enthralling indeterminate marginalia into a production technique that
recasts indifference to plot as at once sensuous and posttraumatic. The troubles that explain both
recent queer experimental filmmaking and longstanding queer spectator competence are, basically,
ethical.
Hallas uses readings of recent films to argue that the familiar catalogue of AIDS-exacerbated
and, sometimes, AIDS-specific losses is still responsible for peculiarities in avant-garde homosexual
film. For an account of the losses drawn up before some of the drug protocols that now make living
with AIDS seem more likely for middle-class urban homosexuals, see Douglas Crimp, “Mourning
and Melancholia,” reprinted in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 128 – 48. Hallas takes it that the issues traced by Crimp and
others in the earlier days have not been addressed adequately. They have simply been subjected to
palliative amnesias.
The catalog of traumatic sites marks so many ethical pressure points internal to queer social-
ity. These are transpersonal (since the pressures are exerted at exactly those points where queers
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usual venue for Super 8 work) when film critic David Robinson used it to kick off Fourteen Sonnets
television broadcasts of three of Jarman’s features.
Coda: Love and Moving Pictures
North Atlantic AIDS crises engendered many responses in the 1980s. By forc-
ing us to slow down and notice the particularizing but impersonal moments that
make up the ordinary circuits of homosexual appetite, an appetite at once respon-
sive to and productive of ephemeral and collective erotic scenes, The Angelic
Conversation makes a distinctive intervention in the ordinarily overwrought and
rapid-fire business of ethically urgent activism. Jarman patiently builds a picture
of our sociality as inherently productive and reproductive, having already left
behind the business of the first seventeen sonnets — that is, injunctions to natural-
ize questions about social reproduction by making a normalized procreative leap
that relays the need to cope with questions about the future by producing other
humans who can, in turn, refer all questions about social reproduction as cross-
generational continuity to their progeny. This mode of deferment is not at issue
directly in the prick of homosexual conscience.
Jarman gives us a representation of both the fragility of urban homosexual
congress and its reliable reproduction through ruptured repetition by returning
to us our familiar modes of mutuality made strange by reflexive scrutiny. In
doing so, on my reading, he brings the problem of urban male queer ethics to the
foreground.
I take it that, for Jarman, one crucial aspect of queer politics turned on explor-
form collectives, however temporary the associations). They are also, in the relevant sense, imper-
sonal. There is nothing idiosyncratic about finding the items on Hallas’s list challenging. Quite the
reverse — if someone sailed through the sudden illnesses and deaths of his twenty closest associates
unscathed, if the loss of the forms of erotic interaction that he had enjoyed with these men didn’t mat-
ter to him, if he thought, “C’est la vie . . . guess it’s time to find a wife and settle down, maybe have
a few kids . . . ” — that would be personal. It would be about him, not about the circumstances that
prompted his change of heart. It is not only predictable that the items on Hallas’s list will be chal-
lenging for individuals and groups, it is hard to imagine a mode of sociality that would be untouched
by such matters.
For Hallas, queer cinephilia is primarily defensive — in the face of many recent challenges to
queer sociality, queers redeploy the (posttraumatic) spectatorship strategies that made romance with
classic Hollywood cinema possible in a way sensitive to recent pressures. I have argued that the visu-
ality at issue in queer cinephilia is not just a response to ethical pressure but a site for the production
and reproduction of nonaccidentally sound queer social life. What Hallas struggles to describe in
the terms of liberal private life is, I take it, what Jarman accomplished more directly and powerfully
in the mid-1980s.
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Public Culture ing the possibilities of queer conscience. After all, it was the operations of queer
conscience that could do the work of articulating the relevant body politic from
within (rather than simply in reaction to external threat) and so could provide some
sense of what we needed to protect in order to do queer politics effectively.60
In The Angelic Conversation, the contours of a properly queer body politic
take shape as homosexual visual and tactile attachment mark turf without the
specificity of normal cartography. Queer conscience works by holding time out
of joint. Jarman uses private significance as the framework for the work of queer
conscience by shooting at sites of great personal significance, rather than at well-
known watering holes, or at Hampstead Heath, or along streets where men met in
his day. Perhaps this, more than any other cinematographic inclusion or omission,
gives the film both its extreme and its excruciatingly contingent intimacy and that
element of something timeless and impersonal that is required for any sense of
ethical grounding as more than a flash of local color happily enmeshed in the rou-
tines of custom. By insisting on cutting Shakespeare to suit the moment without
letting the cinematographic occasion be tainted by Renaissance period detail (on
the one side), by resisting the seductions of documentary vérité about the con-
temporary AIDS crisis, or even the current London scene (on the other), Jarman
produces a cinematographic meditation on modern homosexual conscience (as,
at once, carnal knowledge, joint knowledge, and ethical compunction) that allows
the erotically charged, repeated formation of temporary collectives to provide
both the concrete transpersonal social subject of the queer ethical and appropri-
ately impersonal touchstones for personal conduct.
60. The challenge to produce a politicized ethical body from within takes different forms in
the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s. In the United States, civil rights struggles
provide a precedent for politics. Stalwart refusal to think the social in terms of class helps make
possible a sense of subjective group identity with a kind of blindness to systematic inequality within
the ranks. Finally, in the United States, free-speech provisions allow us to gather and disseminate
such knowledge as there is about HIV. In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, there is insistent
recognition of the materially class- and race-fractured character of any imaginable constituency for
AIDS activism and a tendency to find suspect collectives that emerge from systematic, widespread
sources of shared interiority. In the United Kingdom, there is a long history of collectivist, coopera-
tive nonprofit institutions, and a related tradition of gay theater, pop music, film, and literature. There
are, however, no free-speech protections against police raids on bookshops and the like conducted
under legislative provisions to halt the spread of obscenity or indecency. Almost any foreign print
media containing explicit discussion of HIV transmission was deemed indecent in the early to mid-
1980s in the United Kingdom. For this reason, the chief medical officer in the British Department
of Health had to have copies of the Advocate and the New York Native smuggled into England in
diplomatic pouches in order to protect information needed for formulating the first AIDS public
information campaign from seizure by customs officers. The anecdote about smuggling is reported
in Simon Watney, Policing Desire, 13.
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I do not think that it is possible to transform what is magnificent about Jar- Fourteen Sonnets
man’s gesture into anything like a sustained, argued narrative about how urban
male queer ethics operates, and why, and for whom. You cannot translate the
marked-man sequence into an explicit code of conduct, for example. Instead, the
film marks out a distinctively fertile starting place for ethics, one that renders
explicit and ethically significant the very modes of visual attachment that make
film inspiring and useful for queers. In so doing, it allows us to begin to develop a
much clearer sense of what kind of ethical subject we meet in an emergent, eroti-
cally charged, temporary, and frankly beautiful homosexual collective. Whatever
else one wants to say about queer ethics for such collectives, it cannot so much
as begin without patient attention to the character of this sort of collective ethical
subject.
Jarman has placed two men who do not even aspire to indoor coupling at the
heart of our love story. Their ministrations to a blighted third man become a core
component of their intimacy. The fairy onlookers, with their fires and reflective
surfaces, produce a friendly public for kissing in an otherwise deserted place, and
this form of surveillance is already ours. The film is, to this extent, representative,
but not in a standard way. Standard representative films wind incommensurate
strands of event and character, meaning and randomness, plot and chance into a
complex, narrative, tonal and visual knot, held suspended until it gives way in a
satisfying or appropriately disappointing denouement. Refusing to conjure this
sort of screen magic is a little like refusing to do movie. Some of Jarman’s films
don’t do movie from his conviction that the trick itself is sinister. Their point is
instead to produce a film that could help to consolidate its own audience, like a
love letter that begins “To whom it may concern” and welcomes all respondents.
The Angelic Conversation is like that.
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Public Culture

sexualities, ethics, politics

Fourteen Sonnets for an Epidemic:

In the mid-1980s, in the first rush of the urban homosexual

Public Culture 18:1

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Poetry Has Its Privileges

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Penis Erectus Non Habet Conscientiam

Ellis writes, “In The Angelic Conversation a selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets

22. Ellis, “Queer Period,” 296.

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25. Ellis, “Queer Period,” 302 – 3.

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“ ’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity . . . You live in this,

32. Jarman, The Last of England, 145 – 46.

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Working around the Elided Gaze

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41. Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, 101.

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43. Jarman, The Last of England, 134.

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Significantly, the scattered real-time sequences in The Angelic Conversation feel

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That do not do the thing they most do show, Fourteen Sonnets

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Coda: Love and Moving Pictures

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