One of the great works of queer British cinema is likely 1945’s Brief Encounter, an adaptation of Noel Coward’s short play Still Life. It is Coward’s exploration of repressed sexuality through the medium of straight people: two married strangers meet by chance in a railway station and begin a simpering affair over refreshments. It is so British that, when screened in France, audiences couldn’t understand why two people would struggle so intensely against obligation. Even when Celia Johnson’s Laura tries to kill herself at the end of the film, when her final moments with Alec are interrupted by a busy body neighbor she’s too polite to ignore, we see how the rest of the cast thinks she just popped out for fresh air.
Celia Johnson is the epitome of a particular type of trope gay British men have long loved. Had I been alive in the 19th century, I’m sure one could find sodomites flocking to Hedda Gabler or Chekhov’s Masha just as much as Noel Coward was drawn to Laura. And just as Celia Johnson’s performance has become an iconic display of sexual repression, so too do I feel Princess Diana has become a symbol of the familial oppression many queer people know all too well. As the last of her sons gets married, it’s time to once again remember why Diana is such an enduring queer icon, and why so many queer people and gay men identify so strongly with her.
Princess Diana was a champion of queer equality, of course: her excellent record on HIV advocacy and the commitment to activism and social justice she instilled in her sons is testament to that much. But what has always compelled me about Diana is the sense that her doom was not a shock, but an inevitability — as all great art and icons seem to inevitably end up developing.
Just as we know Hedda’s guns will be her death, and that Laura will never run away with Alec, so now does it feel obvious that the wedding of Charles and Diana was never the fantasy fable that Royal weddings are always meant to be. Like all great icons, some have come to admire Diana for her beauty and her dignity. Others — especially queer people — admire her for how long she lasted in the face of a shitty situation.
Is there anything more queer than a fabulous woman trapped in a bleak household? It’s the story we all bear: Who among queer people, not unlike Diana, haven’t forced ourselves to try and find joy in the joyless?
Which of us haven't thrown ourselves at the foot of our own respective matriarchs, as Diana did Elizabeth after discovering her husband’s affair, and get nothing back? “I went to the top lady, sobbing and I said, ‘What do I do? I’m coming to you, what do I do?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know what you should do, Charles is hopeless.’ And that was it, that was help,” she said in video tapes broadcast for the first time in the UK last year.
(Ironically, this might be one of Diana’s greatest legacies: that both mothers and their gay sons see their own repression and compromise in her. It makes for a truly wonderful middle ground.)
Who among us has not, like Diana, developed a disorder due to feeling like an outsider even in the spaces we’re supposed to find safest? “I didn’t think I was good enough for this family so I took it out on myself,” she once said of her eating disorder. “I chose to hurt myself instead of hurting any of you.”
And in that famous BBC1 Panorama TV interview that always makes the rounds when Diana crops back up in the British tabloids, we are reminded that there was nobody more aware of her own tragic fate than Diana herself. “I don’t see myself being queen,” she says, with that look of laughing at her own tragedy we can all relate to. “Because I do things differently, because I don't go by a rule book, because I lead from the heart.” It’s as self-aware and bleak as any other iconic figure queer people hold dear. “Every strong woman in history has had to walk down a similar path,” she says in the interview. “But someone’s got to go out there and love people.”
Due to a severe lack of publicly queer men, women and people who identify as anything else, the queer community has become good at co-opting our martyrs of choice from the heterosexual world. Diana’s death was a tragedy, absolutely, but what is truly sad is that nobody thought her worth saving. She was astutely aware of her own lot, and continued to be beaten down by the only system more repressed and devoted to duty than Britain at large: the Royal family.
What is a more fitting tribute, truly, to the masses of AIDS victims to whom the world turned a blind eye, until it was suddenly decided they were martyrs? What more suitable symbol is there for all those stuck in families they feel they may never escape? Diana’s story lacks the survival, the recovery and the perspicacity of disco music or many of our other favorite icons; rather, we love her because her story is imbued with the gloom of all things queers hold dear.
Diana stands as a reminder that sometimes, people don’t just keep their stiff upper lip and compartmentalize. Sometimes, we are driven to a brink. Sometimes, people won’t let us be happy — but we can still be good, and decent, and pleasant. We can all, even in the face of great coldness, be the queen of people’s hearts.
David Levesley is a multimedia journalist focusing on the intersection of cultures and culture. He has written on everything from opera to orgies for GQ, Vice, Slate, the Daily Beast, the Guardian and many more. He is currently the Social Media Editor for the i Paper, where he writes and produces videos about queerness, politics and the arts, and is also a playwright and producer, having staged works across the UK and in America.
