When I was young, I thought I was on the left—but I never really felt that in my heart; then, for a time, I was nothing (well, I was something, not truly nothing, but nothing specific); and then I admitted that what I say is on the right—de facto, not like I have a positive belief. But, in truth, I am a crossbencher.
There was one boy at my school whose father sat in the Lords as a crossbencher, and people used to say to him, “Is that his sexual orientation?”. In a sense, it is a sexual orientation—after all, I did put on my mother’s dress and sunhat a year or two ago and walk around in them (to do so confers certain shamanic powers). It’s not the same as transsexualism—I don’t want to cut my genitalia off, it’s more to do with the theatre (with the mystery, with the mask—with “the Christ”). The crossdresser, the crossbencher, the hermaphrodite—the person who lives in two worlds, dark and light.
I did kiss a man, too—but I didn’t like it. I kissed him on the lips because I wanted to kill him—but today I would just spit in his face, punch him. So it was not a kiss that I enjoyed, but it is what a crossbencher would do. It’s androgynous—like David Bowie. I checked, of course—I looked at gay pornography, transsexual pornography (no erection); so it wasn’t the real thing—I just wanted to kill him (murder is sex, of course—so you could say I just wanted to have sex with him, not murder him). I like to be empirical about these things.
I am quite prepared to transgress, for the masses the transgression is all that matters—but the envelope is not the message, for people who are interested in experience (that is life, that is—growth). The way we carry on, we crossbenchers, causes a scandal—just as Jesus caused a scandal, and Buddha caused a scandal, and Mohammad caused a scandal. We must always cause a scandal—to wake people up.
The crossbencher is not a centrist—he doesn’t take a little from side “a” and a little from side “b”, he’s not a moderate who wants to keep everything under control. He’s just a man who is completely loyal to his particular viewpoint and experiences (aristocrat); and perhaps a consensus, an emergent order, builds around that (perhaps he’s more real than most)—but it’s not an abstract idea about how the world is or should be, nor is it the final word on it. That’s why I’m a crossbencher.