This quarter in Humanities Core, I had the opportunity to read Giovanni Boccaccioâs The Decameron. Written in the 14th Century, it deals with human sexuality and builds a world in which sexuality takes a step out of its taboo. The work instills compassion in the reader in order to shape a better world based on human happiness rather than social stigmas. With The Decameron as a basis, I want to expand on the idea of text as a communicative device, specifically in furthering the acceptance of queer people.
The work embodies the Christian ideal of loving oneâs neighbor, which Boccaccio implores the reader to adopt with respect to queer neighbors. Boccaccio pushes this idea even knowing that he is fighting an uphill battle because the phrase was used dissonantly with the actual social norms of the Church in his time. Videographer Natalie Wynn satirizes how empty the phrase sometimes feels in her film The Hunger: âI’m the most compassionate person that [anyone knows], but âlove your neighborâ doesn’t mean anything goesâ. In her view, people who âquestion the worthiness of other peopleâs livesâ run from the dissonance between loving and hating their neighbors. The Hunger is a retelling of Wynnâs struggle with addictionâa real consequence of queer rejection modeled by a character for presentation to the viewer.
Whereas Wynn works from the inside, speaking to a mainly queer audience, Boccaccio attempts to communicate queerness to an outside audience. In the tenth story of day five of The Decameron, he humanizes the homosexual character Pietroâhe builds up the worth of Pietroâs life in the eyes of a reader who may condemn Pietro for being gayâeven while describing him in othering, even derogatory terms. Simultaneously, Pietro can be sinful for his homosexuality and loved for contributing to the storyâs happy ending.
Boccaccio, by virtue of his derivative ideas, is queer. He wants to live in a world where queerness is accepted. Both works address the hunger created by the unquenched desire to be a beloved neighbor. While Wynnâs queer character falls through this void into addiction, Boccaccio urges the reader to save the characters of The Decameron from the same fate. He shows how to fill the emptiness of a socially rejected life with acceptance to elevate the quality of life for the rejected and the rejector.
Like Wynn in âThe Hungerâ, Boccaccio realizes that the message of loving queerness is arresting and that its direct treatment is unlikely to convince anyone new to adopt it. Thus, they welcome the reader into their space under the guise of celebrating sensuality. The Decameronâs main theme is the acceptance of sexuality, and many of the stories are designed to make the reader laugh about sex rather than condemn it. Wynn includes Lucy, her dealer, who provides sex jokes as well as substances, endearing the viewer to her and temporarily knocking away the stigma of her business. Both Boccaccio and Wynn create a sexy space in which to place their queer narratives, appealing to a broader audience than just seekers of queer angst, and then present a problem specific to queer people.
The confluence of these two works despite their seven-hundred-year displacement shows the vitality of the genre, fueled by the continued rejection of queerness. Effective across modes, this style of story that creates a progressively more estranged spaceâthe queertopiaâlends itself brilliantly to text action, invoking through evocation the application of the morals that it teaches. Indeed, its appeal to the reader to actually accept real queer people contributes to keeping it alive; the effects of its works are less tied to contemporary aesthetics and more to a universal struggle in favor of strangeness and novelty for the sake of progress.