A Royal Secret (En kunglig affär) - a film review

Imagine you're the King of Sweden. One of your subjects comes to see you to help him get a liquor license so he can keep his restaurant going.  He has been denied this license because he has a criminal record and even went to prison once for the killing of a police officer. Do you grant his wish? And do you then also get him to have sex with you? And do you then maintain a sexual liaison for years despite the advice of your closest advisors? Is that what you would do if you were King of Sweden?

According to the court testimony of Kurt Haijby, the restaurant owner in question, this is how his many-year relationship with Gustaf V began. Gustaf V is the grandfather of the present king, Carl XVI Gustaf. (If you're a Swedish king and have a Roman numeral in your name, you put it between the two first names you choose to go by.)

I can't speak for all LGBT people, of course, but in my experience, and with apologies to the heroic activists among us, most of the LGBT people in my circle of acquaintances are more interested in enjoying the victories of past liberation struggles than marching in parades with signs reminding us all that the struggle is not over, that there are still countries, like Russia, Uganda, and Saudi Arabia, to pick three at random out of a large pile, where the lives of LGBT people can be utterly miserable.

I happened upon a four-part TV mini-series, last night, from Sweden, which takes up a fascinating tale of royal goings-on and spins it in such a way that LGBT people will grit their teeth at SPOILER ALERT yet another story which fulfills the expectation, "I thought people like that killed themselves."

In this TV version, the (non-royal) gay guy comes off pretty well. He's definitely got the makings of a charlatan, but the real bad guys are the government officials doing their all to hide the king's homosexuality. In this version, Haijby gets sent to Hitler's Germany and the Swedish government rewards Göring with the title of Commander Grand Cross of the Royal Order of the Sword for taking him in, where he ends up for a time in a concentration camp. He returns to Sweden only to end up in an insane asylum, where the director of the asylum is blackmailed into keeping him locked up despite his conviction that Haijby is perfectly sane.  As the blurb on the episode guide sums it up:

Based on true events, the story follows restauranteur Kurt Haijby and his secret relationship with king Gustav V, which eventually got out and led to one of the worst miscarriages of justice that Sweden has ever witnessed.

If you check out the Wikipedia version, you get a surprisingly different slant. Here, Haijby is not only a self-serving manipulator, but a pederast, sentenced to hard labor six times for fraud and theft. Not such a cool guy at all.

In the movie version, Gustaf is quite sympathetic. Not without good historical reason: Gustaf walked a tightrope balancing pleasing the Nazis to keep them from invading his country but at the same time helping Jews escape, and even sending a telegram to the Hungarian regent asking him to stop the deportation of Jews from Hungary. But none of this background stuff is taken up by the series, where he's just a lonely old man.

He is clearly taken with Kurt and his gifts to him are freely given, not extorted at all. He does turn away from Kurt in the end, after Kurt writes a book and exposes the correspondence between him and Gustaf which makes plain the sexual relationship was mutual and freely entered into. At that point the liaison moves from gossip to outright scandal. Kurt is arrested and put on trial, but when he refuses to admit his homosexuality the prosecution is able to make him out as a blackmailer. He goes to jail for six years of an eight-year sentence. His defense is that he was only doing what the Swedish constitution asks of its citizens: to love their king. His only mistake was that he loved him too much. The most sinister character in all these machinations is Governor Nothing, who orchestrates it all and lies through his teeth at the trial. Nothing's wife even says to him in an especially telling scene, "You will have to answer for your lies at the gates of Heaven," or words to that effect.

Because of a bias for things that get published and fact-checked, I have to go with the Wikipedia version. But I can't deny that I'm glad the topic of homosexuality has reached such a level that the Swedes can make a movie in which the current monarch's grandfather is not portrayed as some kind of pervert even when he knowingly or unknowingly takes up with one. It's a marvelously entertaining story, even if it does end with a suicide. You are expected to blame the corrupt do-gooders whose homophobia leads them to do all manner of dastardly deeds to hide the homosexuality of their king, but not the king himself, and not his homosexuality, either. That is merely explained away as a prejudice of an earlier age. The suicide is not a just outcome; it's a tragedy that is expected to make us all feel good about the course of gay liberation.  The response to finding out your king is gay in the 1930s is to lie your head off. The response in 2023 is, "Who gives a damn?" Things do sometimes get better.

I'm not totally sure I want to call this a piece of LGBT history, since the cover-up of the scandal leads to some doubt about whether the king did have an affair or whether it's entirely an attempt on Haijby's part to extort a whole lot of kronor out of the royal treasury. More than history, in other words, it is yet another example of how one of our main challenges these days is to decide which narrative of events to take to heart and mind. We will likely never know for sure which of the conflicting narratives contains the greater truth - the Wikipedia/historical record one or the revisionist? film series one written by Bengt Braskered and directed by Lisa James Larsson, featuring the excellent Icelandic-Swedish actor Sverrir Gudnason as Haijby, and Swedish actors Staffan Göthe as Gustaf and Reine Brynolfsson as Nothing.

Ask me in a year or two. I imagine I'll remember the fictionalized film version and will have forgotten the other one.

Question is what am I to make of my previous remark, that things sometimes do get better. Do I take the spruced-up fictionalization of a historical gay? character as a sign of things getting better?  Are they actually better because we can now retell historical events in a better light?  Where do we put our focus - on our ability to tell historical events with gay characters in a positive light? That the Swedes are unafraid to make a movie about an allegedly gay king of theirs? Or that - if he was gay - that this is still a scandal and we suspect the family is likely to wish this fiction would just go away?

To see the film you need a subscription to Viaplay on the Roku Channel - at least that's how I accessed it. There may be other ways, but I couldn't find any.

photo credit

Good Friday Service in the National Cathedral

I clicked on the link to the YouTube video just now of the Good Friday evening service in the National Cathedral. I thought I'd poke my nose in and see what they were up to. I stayed, profoundly moved, through the whole thing.

Nothing shakes up your priorities like death, probably. Twice in the past couple of weeks I've participated in two "death and dying" seminars, with people who, like myself, are now ready to think and talk aloud about the end of their days. And nothing focuses your attention more acutely and effectively.

I've shared the fact that I have a terminal disease. I have not shared my frustration with how difficult it is to talk about this in a meaningful way. Death - and dying - remain a taboo topic in our culture and most people who do not feel it breathing down their neck much prefer to keep it that way. It's especially difficult, I think, in America, where being bright and optimistic is among our most ardently pursued national goals, and where we are inclined to think all problems have solutions. This one doesn't, and that makes it a real no-no.

When I say "seminars" I am referring to an organization called Death Cafe which has been going on for eleven years now and has chapters in many countries. If you're interested in more information, I suggest you check out their FaceBook page. I just want to mention it in passing here. And I say "seminars" - plural - because I just got together with friends to take up the same topic privately, as well. The word "seminar" is my choice of a way to describe it - an intimate group of folk gathering around a table - or in a zoom call - to get below the surface of an issue.

I mention these two death-and-dying seminars to explain why I stuck with the Good Friday service at National Cathedral. There is an additional reason: one of my two beloved dogs has gone blind and is suffering from Cushing's Disease. She doesn't have a lot of time, and we are now milking every hour of every day with her while we still can.

I didn't set out here to talk about my personal situation. I wanted to reflect on the fact that the Christian narrative centers on death and resurrection. I don't share, as I've made plain elsewhere numerous times, a belief in resurrection, or in reincarnation. I'm too grounded in non-theistic rational thinking for such a hope or dream or wish to find purchase in any notion of life after death. And for years I lived in a state of rage against organized religion because I saw it as the birthplace and prime mover of homophobia. I had no interest in the doctrine and I had positively hateful feelings toward the practices. Those negative feelings only increased as I grew more sympathetic to the goals of the feminist project, and as the stories of child abuse grew to expose ever more weakness and hypocrisy among the clerical set. There was a time when, if I could have pushed a button which would make all organized religion go away, I would have pushed it.

Time cured me of that. I now see that rage, that loathing, as wrong-headed. It lacks nuance, and brings forth my favorite metaphor of life - the blind men and the elephant - our propensity to miss the woods for the trees, to dwell on the part instead of the whole, to miss the complexity of the big picture. I now find it quite natural to distinguish between the bullies who want to beat up on anybody they perceive as not of their tribe, on the one hand, and people with a much to be admired sense of humility probing for meaning in life and hoping there is a creator-mentor father-figure who will help them through the rapids.

I was a very religious youth. And I had a thing for the dramatic. I climbed the twenty-eight steps of the Scala Santa in Rome on my knees back in 1961 before attending Easter Mass in St. Peter's Basilica where I got to sit right up close to Pope John XXIII as he officiated. I used to attend mass during lent with my catholic friends every morning before school. And I found my way - can't remember how or why - to the Episcopal Church on Good Friday, where I discovered that Anglicans/Episcopalians gave the catholics a good run for their money going into the dark places of religion. In my protestant church I was told the reason we don't have crucifixes is that the papists dwell on the misery and suffering and death of Christ, while we protestants accentuate the resurrection. Another example of American culture being defined as protestant, catholics being still foreign in the America I grew up in. Problem is, for other reasons I can't explain, I was drawn to this covering of the cross in black and extinguishing the candles in the Good Friday in the darker churches.  More real somehow.

All this came back to me just now as I sat through the powerful and wonderful service at National Cathedral - an Episcopal service. The dwelling on the dark side of life - death as the dark side of life. The religious people do it because they want to honor their Savior. I do it because I want to get a better grip on death and dying as a stage of life I have now entered.

I still cannot imagine becoming a religious person. I suspect I'll be a non-theist for the duration. But I see no contradiction in sharing with religious people the common ground of shared culture. I am not religiously Christian, but I am culturally Christian. It's all around me and I'm ashamed it took me so long to recognize it. The stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral, Brahms' German Requiem, Negro Spirituals, the desire to contribute to the building of Notre Dame de Paris, it's all part of the rich and exciting world of beautiful things that help make life worth living. 

For years now I've enjoyed celebrating Shabbat with Jewish friends on Friday nights, and seders on Passover. I love being invited by these people and am happy to share in their embrace of their traditions. And if you take the time to listen to this Good Friday service at National Cathedral - and I hope you will - reflect on the fact that America would be culturally much poorer without the beauty of this musical tradition the slaves gave the rest of us.

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Oh, were you there when they crucified my Lord?
(Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble) tremble

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they nailed him to the cross?
Were you there when they nailed him to the cross?
(Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble) tremble
Were you there when they nailed him to the cross?

(Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?
Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble) tremble

Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?
Well, were you there when the stone was rolled away?
Were you there when the stone was rolled away?
(Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble) tremble
Were you there when the stone was rolled away?

Put away once and for all, I urge you, the notion that the contemplation of death is a downer.

In my view, it is an important missing piece of what a good meditation on life should include.