Open letter to Steven Patrick Morrissey.
(I wrote this in my notebook in hospital on the advice of my therapist and doctors, and figured I’d post it here now I’m out. I look forward to all your horrible messages. Yes I’m fully aware he won’t ever read it, it was an exercise I did for myself and no one else).
Morrissey,
I say this as someone who adores you. As someone who has weathered vicious arguments where I refused to acknowledge that you could have said or done anything that was even kind of objectionable. As someone who sees your music as important beyond almost all importance. As someone who is saving money to get “It takes strength to be gentle and kind” tattooed on themselves. As someone who credits you and the Smiths with helping me rebuild myself after escaping severe child abuse. I say this as one of the Morrissey faithful, as a fan with a blog filled with quotes, songs and photos related to you and your work. I say it as someone who had a topless poster of you above his bed in my late teens and probably lost out on several romantic encounters because of it. In short, I say this as a Mozipedia owning, Wilde fluent, T-Shirt owning, pillow-case owning, obsessive fan who has spent countless hours obsessing over you and every little nuance of your work.
Explain to me, please, why you would even think of aligning yourself with UKIP? A party who have aggressively voted against almost all animal rights and welfare bills continuously? I know they responded to animal rights protests by promising to triple sentences for animal cruelty and install CCTV in every abattoir, but their actions speak louder than a manifesto they knew they’d never be in a position to carry out. They have spoken frequently about bringing back Fox Hunting, a barbaric and inhumane “sport” that the upper classes are still sore about losing. And why, Morrissey, of all the candidates you could endorse for UKIP leader, do you decide to endorse Anne Marie Waters and attribute her loss of the leadership election to a hitherto never considered conspiracy theory? Anne Marie Waters is a horrendous woman. A far right, “anti-Islam activist” with links to the National Front successors, the English Defence League, who supports Trump’s flight ban and who has called for all Mosques to be closed and mass deportations of all Muslims from the UK. The people she is attacking are the very people I thought you, of all people, would be the first to support. Outsiders in a country that misunderstands and hates them. The very people who I see you as a champion of, are the people you seem to want to remove most of all.
Is this all over some romanticised ideal of a perfect England? Because your perfect England seems awfully white and horribly out of touch. Do you not remember Shelagh Delaney’s work, a huge influence on you, which specifically deals with racism and minorities in England? An England that you were keen to endorse as a younger man? It feels like all those times I defended you as not racist but misunderstood, I was in the wrong. For years I have argued that your “sub-species” comment was based on your deep love of animals, something you care about more than anything - and yet, when it suits you, you can forget a parties terrible stance on a topic so dear to you, because you care more about subjugating and possibly removing minorities that you don’t feel fit in your nice, white England of the past. It disgusts me. I feel betrayed.
This isn’t even to start on your horrendous comments defending Kevin Spacey (made worse by the fact you were a victim of sexual abuse yourself), the bizarre politics of Low in High School, your comments defending Harvey Weinstein and accusing his victims of being angry they didn’t achieve more and a myriad of other recent examples. These things are just piling up into a stack of things I don’t know what to do with.
Morrissey you were so important to me. You are so important to me. You taught me healthy feminist ideals, the beauty of words, you introduced me to non-conforming gender and sexual norms, you gave me Wilde, James Dean and Shelagh Delaney and more than anything, you made me feel like I wasn’t alone. You understood my shyness, my loneliness, my pain and gave me that first block with which to rebuild myself on. I will never forget the feeling of being all alone and hearing Panic for the first time and how it said everything I wanted someone to say at that moment. I have spent years of my life defending you and my adoration of everything you’ve ever done and now it feels like those who criticised were right all along; maybe you are the smug, women hating, racist little Englander who wants everything white and “English”. I hope not, but it’s a conclusion that’s hard to ignore based on everything you’ve said.
Don’t get me wrong - I love your music. I love Low In High School, to me it feels like a long awaited successor to Strangeways Here We Come. I listen to you or the Smiths for at least an hour a day, every day. Please don’t make it so I feel like my adoration of you has an asterisk next to it. I truly don’t understand why you want to remove a large group of people who I think of as the very people you supposedly represent. I truly don’t get your flirtation with the alt-right. I have said before that I found your boxing period hard to get along with (as I find boxing barbaric) but that pales in comparison to this.
Morrissey, I truly adore you. I understand every person at a Morrissey concert who weeps openly at being in your presence and dives towards the stage to just touch you, as if the king’s touch will somehow cure them of their vulgar shyness. I have gigabytes of bootlegs and alternative versions. I have a specially printed book of nothing but your lyrics arranged like poetry. I love you in a way I don’t love anyone else - but for the first time, I don’t support you, and I can’t defend you, and that honestly saddens me. I know you’ll never see this, but god damn. I only hope that you stop alienating the very people who adore you more than almost anything. The people to whom your existence means the world. The people you saved with nothing more than words and pop songs.
