Over the weekend, I was lucky enough to see the ”After Edward” at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. It is a piece that hooks in the Christopher Marlowe classic krönikespel ”Edward II”, a renässansdrama about the king who has a relationship with her male minion and murdered by their enemies. For several hundred years played the almost never – the gay theme was too challenging in the times, who rather let themselves be dazzled by the nationalist heroismen of figures such as Henry V.

It is really only in recent decades that it gained new life on stage, not least in the 2000s, Edwards fate often been depicted as a homophobic hate crime. In the new ”After Edward”, we meet the actor and playwright Tom Stuart. He has recently played the title role of just Edward II in the Globe’s staging and mirrors, in this autobiographical piece, his homosexuality in the Edwards. Surrounded by and in dialogue with the iconic queerhjältar as Gertrude Stein, Quentin Crisp, and Harvey Milk, a ache he issues of our own time relation to sexual annorlundaskap – if the level of acceptance and political success now been so great, why am still feeling so many lgbtq people bad?

to these questions in these days is of course no coincidence. This year it is fifty years since Stonewall occurred, an event that is referred to as the lgbt movement’s actual starting point. Then got the clientele on a gaykrog in New York enough of the police’s constant raids and harassment, and fought back. In the decades that have passed, in principle, all happened: decriminalization in large parts of the world, the right to marry, adopt. Still lagging hälsotalen after.

Here in the west, lgbt people are still greatly overrepresented in suicidal and missbruksstatistiken. Only in Sweden are centuries for depression and anxiety and depression higher among people in same-sex marriage, compared with persons in heterosexual marriages, according to a report from the national Board of health in 2016. Lgbtq people often have suicidal thoughts and are at greater risk for abuse than heterosexual. A report from the Folkhälsomyndigheten 2015 indicates that as much as 40 percent of the country’s young transgender people at some time attempted to take their life, while 57 per cent at least considered it.

It is easy to forget in the wake of the lgbt movement’s political successes, that shame is not necessarily something that will disappear automatically with openness and Pride.

”After Edward” – which is not at all so programmatic that you can easily get for themselves, but a poetic and often funny return of the king – is derived the problem to a high degree to the interaction between society’s prejudices and it psychological and complex cluster of feelings of shame that still surround sexual annorlundaskap. Not least during the formative years of childhood and early adolescence – trauma which follows after like a shadow into adulthood. ”You asked me always if you smelled bad,” says Edwards, the former boyfriend to him in ”After Edward”. ”As if you thought that there was something rotten inside of you and was afraid that it had begun to seep out.”

the lingering shame draws the british author Matthew Todd in his book ”Straight jacket – Overcoming society’s legacy of gay shame” (2016). In one of the book’s most affecting parts are knocked Todd of how few clear memories he has of his childhood – they have been too painful to think about. Because he was always the one that others were ashamed of inympades also självföraktet in him. It later led to the constant risk behaviours: an explosive and self-destructive pleasures in a meeting with a gay scene where the other bar of similar wounds.

It is easy to forget in the wake of the lgbt movement’s political successes, that shame is not necessarily something that will disappear automatically with openness and Pride. Like most traumas are sitting to the left of the skull and cannot be magically removed. It must be treated. The only question is whether there is ground for such a discussion, in a time which increasingly sums up and dismisses the kind of rättighetsanspråk with the word ”identity politics”.

More texts by Johan Hilton, for example, if it is so strange if teaterkritiken be seen as a part of promotional activities.