He ruled figuratively, sadly not literally.

I would like to kick off Jubilee Week, a week celebrating our significantly successful Queen Elizabeth II's 60 year reign, by talking about who would have been better at the job.

Ah, the monarchy. No other institution has so much influence yet so little official power. They're like the hot, popular girl in your class; they carry a lot of weight when it comes to swaying public opinion, but they're unlikely to get any real legislation through.

Unless they liaise more closely with the faculty, if you catch my drift.

However, one group in society that they're not particularly influencing is, well, us. Despite a line of succession 20 long, not one single member has graced the British public with even a hint of homo-scandal. Granted, 8 of these people are under 16 (I'm not expecting Isla Phillips to be bi-curious before her 1st birthday), but still, that's 12 people, many of whom have lived very, very long lives, and the closest thing we've had to a gay royal is the rumour about Prince William.

But that's the present day monarchy: boring. 70~ish years ago, one royal was having much more fun.

Would you say no?

Prince George, Duke of Kent was the archetypal black sheep of a royal. Devilishly handsome and charming, he had little trouble wooing whomever he happened to have his eye on (apart from one particularly particular princess), and his sex, drugs and Charleston music lifestyle kept the PR department of the monarchy scurrying around like crabs on crack after him. He had a string of lovers male and female, including but not limited to Kiki Preston ("The Girl with the Silver Syringe" - the Paris Hilton of her day), his own distant cousin, Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, and flamboyant playwright  Noël Coward, with whom the Prince purportedly shared a 19 year relationship (a claim repudiated by Coward's long term boyfriend, but then again that's understandable, isn't it?).

The Prince wasn't a public relations nightmare in the 20's and 30's just because of who he slept with, either. At one point, a male prostitute attempted to blackmail the Prince with excerpts from some... romantic letters that the Prince had written, and on another the Prince was very nearly arrested for prostitution - while dressed in drag, an event that many of us would likely pay to have re-enacted. 

Now this would be our taxes at work.

It really is a shame that he was only 5th in line to the throne. If we could've somehow made the other 4 disappear (for various legal reasons I won't say how), we could've had an LGBTQ King. Just imagine how far ahead we'd be now in terms of sexuality equality if we'd had 20 or 30 or even 40 years of a flamboyant bisexual King reigning over us. We wouldn't even need this blog, because not being straight wouldn't be anywhere near as much of an issue. It'd be like having a blog written by 5 people with green eyes and their brown eyed mascot.

...on second thoughts, maybe old Liz isn't so bad after all.

I rather like writing for this blog.

As always, feel free to harangue us at homojournal@gmail.com, we're masochists like that.

Yours self-centredly,

James.

...I'm going to the Tower for calling our Queen "old Liz", aren't I?