spectacular way ( seppuku , the traditional samurai suicide of self-disembowelment), after taking over an army base with hisown private army and addressing the soldiers about the decay of Japan, having finished that very morning his last etc.
(9) Sacco and Vanzetti, who, despite world-wide appeals for clemency, were etc.
(10) Miguel Hidalgo, whose impassioned call in 1810 for Mexican independence is considered the starting-point of his country’s struggle to break away from Spain. This call has become known at El Grito —The Shout — and Hidalgo is always portrayed in paintings and sculptures with a clenched fist, fiery eyes and his mouth wide open. It is this vision that struck me — that strikes me still — that of a man at the centre of his country, far away from any sea, who has had enough, more than enough, and who tosses his head back and lets out a shout so long and so loud that it rolls across every plain and down every valley of his country, and in all the towns and villages people hear this strange cry and turn their heads to listen to it. Miguel Hidalgo was arrested by the authorities and summarily etc.
There is another strand, intertwining with the physical change strand, the acne strand, the prime minister strand. Perhaps it started earlier, but I wasn’t aware of it. For me, it started on my first day of school in North America.
I’m not sure whether it was more the fashion of the time, the mid-seventies, or my parents’ personal liking, but at that age I had rather long hair, nearly down to my shoulders. Had I been a trailblazer I could have flaunted a ponytail. I didn’t think anything of my long hair; nor did my classmates in France. I recall no more than occasionally being mistaken from behind for a girl by Parisian shopkeepers.
But in North America, I discovered quickly and brutally, girls could have their hair short or long, though most had itlong, but boys, boys I say, could only have it short. The first day of school, within the first minutes, just as I sat down, the class clown came up to me and asked me if I was a boy or a girl. I said flatly that I was a boy, but my response didn’t register, or even matter, since he was not really asking a question so much as making a comment which elicited the desired chuckles and snickers from the class. The teacher called us to order. As the boy turned away, he spat out a word. “Faggot!” At recess I heard it again, and another, “Fag.” When I learned the North American meaning of the epithets, I was dumbfounded by the hostility behind them.
If a friend of mine in Paris had confessed that he was in love with a Simon or a Peter, I would have compared notes with him on my love for Mary Ann. Gender in matters of love struck me as of no greater consequence than flavours in ice-cream. I imagine the absence of religion in my upbringing was one factor that had allowed this belief to survive. Perhaps, too, I had a natural openness in the matter. At any rate, it was completely unwittingly that I had disregarded this fundamental polarity of North American society.
In the years that followed I began to get my hair cut shorter and shorter. I didn’t do it in one dramatic operation, which might have instantly salvaged my emerging manhood in the eyes of others, because I was too young and self-conscious to be so daring and — isn’t life a series of difficult choices? — because my unmanly long hair helped hide my acne. Despite the social cost, without hesitation, I chose homosexuality over acne.
From that first day of school onwards, fear and misery were a routine part of my existence. With them came a feeling of confusion. It was not over this bigoted division of desire;that was easy enough to deal with. With a monstrous coldness I could have thought, “The Nazis didn’t like Jews, the KKK don’t like blacks, North Americans don’t like homosexuals,” and that would have been the end of it. A socio-political observation and a consequent