Theology & Sexuality

ISSN: 1355-8358 (Print) 1745-5170 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yths20

A Queer Death: The Funeral of Diana, Princess of

Wales

Elizabeth Stuart

To cite this article: Elizabeth Stuart (2000) A Queer Death: The Funeral of Diana, Princess of
Wales, Theology & Sexuality, 2000:13, 77-91, DOI: 10.1177/135583580000701307

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/135583580000701307

Published online: 21 Apr 2015.

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 77-

A Queer Death: The Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales

Elizabeth Stuart
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Abstract
Elizabeth Stuart opens her paper by commenting that she feels that the
most significant part of Michael Vasey’s book, Stranger and Friends, is
the final chapter on death. Vasey, she notes is one of the very few people
to address the question of sexuality and death and his call for the queer-
ing of death has to be taken seriously. Stuart goes on to explore what a
queer death might actually look like by reference to the funeral of Diana,
Princess of Wales. Through a close reading of the event, combined with
personal experiences of having been in Hyde Park, Stuart shows
how the many different mixed and ambiguous messages were brought
together in the one event. The overall effect of this ambiguity was to sub-
vert what should have been a national establishment ritual to make it
accessible to many different people, especially to those who are gay,
lesbian or bisexual. Stuart sees this as a possible pattern for the future and
calls for far more work on this neglected area of sexuality and worship.

For methe most stimulating and exciting section of Michael Vasey’s

Strangers and Friends was the chapter ’Over the Rainbow’ which
reflected upon the effect of AIDS upon the gay community and wider
society. Vasey noted the way in which Western modernity had
almost completely succeeded in reducing death to a natural event
unworthy of much serious reflection or ritual accompaniment. He
accused even his fellow Evangelicals of abandoning the scriptural
understanding of death as natural, certainly, but also as a terrible
power, which opposes life and locks humanity in bondage and fear.
With the waning of the tragedy of death went a diminishing hope in
the reality of the resurrection and heaven and belief in judgment.
Vasey hoped that AIDS, disrupting as it did (at least for a crucial
period of time) the modern confidence in human reason as it was
manifest in science and medicine, thereby becoming a powerful
symbol of the postmodern rejection of the Enlightenment project,
1. Michael Vasey, Strangers and Friends: A New Exploration of Homosexuality and
the Bible (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), pp. 238-50.
 78
2
might ’play some part in articulating a new cultural voice for death’ 2
More specifically he hoped that the gay community which had borne
the brunt of the disease in Europe and North America might, through
its own reflection upon death and dying, rediscover the ancient
Christian connection between desire and immortality which seemed
to have been so decisively severed by modemity.1 Vasey’s implicit
suggestion that AIDS might have led to the queering of death finds
precious little support in the body of work known as lesbian, gay or
queer theology which, while often claiming to reflect upon a commu-
nity or subcommunity’s experience, in fact like most classical Western
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liberal theology has largely side-stepped theological reflection on

death. Whether, in the practice of dying and the rituals of death and
mourning, those with AIDS and those who loved and ministered to
them, engaged in or are engaging in the kind of queering of death that
4
Vasey hinted at awaits empirical investigation.4
Vasey’s reflections upon death and desire did encourage me to take
much more notice of death and the rituals and rhetoric that surround
it. The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997 was a death that no
one could ignore. Her death and funeral became a media spectacle of

unprecedented proportions. The search for the ’meaning’ of the event

goes on and remains a site of contention among academics (though so
far few theologians have regarded the event as having sufficient
significance to merit theological reflection). My concern in this article
is to suggest that one way of understanding the funeral of Diana,
Princess of Wales, is to understand it as in many respects a ’queer’
funeral and therefore as an event in which death was ’queered’. The
article is structured into three parts: a definition of queer and its
application to Diana as a person; an analysis of the funeral, both the
liturgy and surrounding ritual and rhetoric, as a queer event; and
some theological reflections upon the queering of the death of Diana.

Queer Theory
Queer theory is chiefly associated with Michel Foucault and the
development of his ideas by Judith Butler 5 Foucault questioned the

2. Vasey, Strangers and Friends, p. 240.

3. Vasey, Strangers and Friends, p. 243. Jonathan Dollimore brilliantly explores
this connection, which dominated western culture for so long, in Death, Desire and
Loss in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998).
4. Indeed, this is the subject of a research project under my direction at King
Alfred’s College, Winchester.
5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. I. An Introduction (New York:
 79

two central notions upon which post-Enlightenment theory and

theology sexuality have been based. The first is the notion of a
of
fixed, essential identity, sexual or otherwise. Foucault argued for the
social construction of sexual identity through discourse and constant
redefinition. The second is the idea that power is something held by
dominant groups and used against others with less power, for exam-
ple women, gay people, the poor and so on. Foucault argued that
power was fluid and present in all parts of society and could be
deployed by any group. Where power was exercised there was
always resistance to it, which itself was a kind of power. These ideas
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were developed by Judith Butler. She argued that feminism has made
a fundamental error in continuing to assume that there is an identity
of ’woman’ somehow bound up with the female body which is stable
enough to make some (though perhaps not many) generalizations
about. This is a paradoxical position for most feminists to take, con-
sidering their antipathy to the ’biology is destiny’ approach to gender.
Butler seeks to question the ’natural’ connection between sex, gender
and desire, arguing that gender and desire are unstable. Indeed, she
famously asserts that gender is not expressive of some inner nature
but performative. We learn to become a woman or a man by follow-
ing the gender scripts that our culture hands out to us and each per-
formance reinscribes that gender upon our bodies. It is only when
some people throw away the scripts or perform them badly or sub-

versively that the non-natural nature of gender is revealed. Butler

argued that the parodic performance of gender by drag queens or
butch and femme lesbians most clearly demonstrated and disrupted
the connection between sex, gender and performance. She called for a
resistance to the gender scripts that are handed out to us and a
proliferation of subversive performances of gender but noted the
difficulty of resisting such scripts because no one stands completely
outside of them. This is then the ’essence’ of queer theory, that there is
no essential sexuality or gender. ’Queer’ then is not actually another

identity alongside lesbian and gay (although it is sometimes rather

confusingly used to convey a radical coalition of lesbian, gay, bisexual
and transgendered persons’) but a radical destabilizing of identities

Random House, 1978); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (London: Routledge, 1990).
6. This is certainly how Goss uses it in his work and how it is used in Eliza-
beth Stuart with Andy Braunston, Malcolm Edwards, John McMahon, Tim
Morrison, Religion is a Queer Thing: A Guide to the Christian Faith for Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual and Transgendered People (London and Herndon, VA: Cassell, 1997).
 80

and resistance to the naturalizing of any identity. To be queer is to

play with that which signifies the normal in a particular culture and
in the process to suggest alternative ways of being. As J.F. Buckley has
noted,
Queer performance is the constant illumination of the overarching
society’s normative shadows into which no audience member would
willingly look. The queer forces that look by calling attention to itself as
the representation of the contradistinctions inherent in identity. In fact,
because society writes the antisocial as a distinct otherness, there is
already a perspective for the queer to illuminate. To create ’deviance’ is
to create potential queer performances.
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Queer is always unstable and on the edge of existence because if the

’audience’ responds to the queer performance and changes its under-
standing of what is deviant that particular queer performance is
redundant.
Diana, Princess of Wales, is capable of being read through a queer
lens. More than that, it is possible to read the progress of her public
life as a gradual queering process. Diana began her public life largely
buying into the patriarchal fairytale, performing the roles of wife,
mother and fairytale princess with aplomb. Yet when that fairytale
began to turn sour for her, Diana chose to perform the scripts of
royalty, heterosexuality and family very differently from the way
expected of her by the establishment of which she was a part. As
Richard Coles has noted, Diana ’came out’ and the key performance
of that process was her Panorama interview with the then largely
unknown interviewer, Martin Bashir. As Coles notes,
In the place of duty,reserve, mystery she claimed honesty, openness,
transparency. The narrative of her life radically departed from the
traditionally royal example of sombre frumpy virtue and keyed into the
full-blooded celebrity exemplar of believe-in-yourself, dream-come-true
fulfilment.8
In that interview Diana subverted the boundaries between her private
and public life and in the process rendered her performance of her
desire, her motherhood and her royalty public and therefore political.
She flaunted her subversion. Coles argues that part of the way in
which Diana most effectively parodied and subverted her perform-

7. J.F. Buckley, Desire, the Self, the Social Critic: The Rise of Queer Performance
within the Demise of Transcendentalism (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press,
1997), p. 125.
8. Richard Coles, ’Feelin’s’, in Mandy Merck (ed.), After Diana: Irreverent
Elegies (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 169-82 (173-74).
 81

ance of royal heterosexual woman was by taking on much that

characterizes a contemporary gay male British identity.
In a nutshell, that amounts to a cross between ’Somewhere Over the
Rainbow’ and ’We Shall Overcome’. Some of the key ingredients are a
sense of a blessed life lying just over the horizon, for which we long; a

lovely and imaginative sense of the magical; a sense of internal and

external oppression; the elevation of heart over head and its subsequent
deployment as a9 rhetorical and political battering-ram. It is also an
aestheticproject
Diana’s rapport with (some) gay men was based upon a reciprocal
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exchange. She could be seen to have adopted a gay redemption narra-

tive as part of her parodic performance of her scripts and they
adopted her as an icon, seeing in her, William J. Spurlin suggests, a
determination to resist ’inhabiting subject positions that inhibited the
expression of her desires, and, in so doing, found new ways to create
alternative affectional and familiar bonds while keeping the tradi-
tional family ones that meant most to her (her sons)’.1° Diana did not
ever transcend her scripts-aristocrat; heterosexual woman; mother-
but she did perform those scripts subversively in such a way as to
question their construction and expose their absurdities. But Diana
also retained something of the old-fashioned gay diva about her. She
knew how to fight without fists, to destabilize the representatives of
heteropatriarchal normativity by upstaging them and outsmarting
them (in every sense) and to combine ruthlessness and vulnerability
in one persona.11 And, of course, Diana associated herself with AIDS.
At a time of rampant homophobia in British society which partly
manifested itself in an equation between gayness, disease and death,
Diana subverted the dominant heterosexist discourse of ’gay =

untouchable’ by publicly touching a person who was HIV positive. Of

course there was no reason why she should not have done so but the

extraordinary response of the media to that act and her subsequent

public association with those living with HIV and gay men indicated
that she was subverting something powerful in British society. The
Mail on Sunday, for example, wondered whether the Princess really

9. Coles, ’Feelin’s’, p. 177.

10. Williams J. Spurlin, ’I’d Rather Be the Princess than the Queen! Mourning
Diana as a Gay Icon’, in Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg (eds.), Mourning
Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief (London: Routledge, 1999), pp.
155-68 at p.166.
11. Daniel Harris, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (New York: Hyperion, 1997),
pp. 8-39.
 82

wanted to be remembered for being ’the patron saint of sodomy’.12

Jenny Kitzinger has noted that Diana’s public association with HIV/
AIDS signalled a marked change in her public image. 13 She became,
as Coles has put it, ’caringly counter cultural’.14 Alexander Cockburn
more archly described her as ’gliding through the AIDS wards as a
Madonna of the Damned’,15 a queer appellation if ever there was one.
Even in the manner of her death Diana subverted what was expected
of a contemporary royal, dying young, in a car crash caused by drunk
driving, with her Muslim lover. Diana’s death was on a purely human
level a tragedy and death, as Vasey noted, is not meant to be a
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tragedy in modernity. To suggest that Diana’s life and death can be

read through queer lenses is not necessarily to make any value
judgment of them. It is simply to point out that the parodic, sub-
versive performance is one possible grid with which to make sense of
her life. And it may also help make some sense of her death rituals.

The Funeral
I took part in the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. I was one of the
crowd that lined the processional route and gathered in Hyde Park to
watch the liturgy on giant screens, drawn there by a mixture of intel-
lectual curiosity, emotion linked with a strong sense of solidarity and
a desire to be part of a historic event that promised-from the
moment on the day she died a man from the BBC reported that gay
men were among the first group of people to lay floral tributes at the

royal palaces-to be something quite extraordinary. As my partner

and I walked from the tube station towards Hyde Park she remarked,
’It’s like Pride without the whistles’, and indeed it was in some
respects very like a curiously silent gay pride event. Same-sex couples
and groups of gay and lesbian people occupied the streets of London
in unusual numbers and visibility. And representatives from
HIV/AIDS charities wandered through the crowds handing out red
ribbons. The red ribbon has become a complex signifier. One of the
things it has come to signify is ’gay’ or ’friend of gay’, to wear it is a
sign of anti-homophobia, and so for a few hours on the morning of
12. Mail on Sunday,1 September 1991.
13. Jenny Kitzinger, ’The Moving Power of Moving Images: Television Con-
structions of Princess Diana’, in Tony Walter (ed.), The Mourning for Diana (Oxford:
Berg, 1999), pp. 65-76 (68).
14. Coles, ’Feelin’s’, p. 179.
15. Alexander Cockburn, ’The Plumage and the Dying Bird’ in Merck (ed.),
After Diana, pp. 29-32 (29).
 83

Saturday 6 September 1998 London took on the appearance of being

queer and I, as a lesbian, had that curious sense of safety usually
associated in my mind with one day of the year-Gay Pride day-
which reminds me of how unsafe I feel the rest of the time. I mention
this before analysing the funeral liturgy to draw attention to the fact
that the context in which the funeral took place was already queered.
Not only were a disproportionate number of gay men and lesbians
evident on that day but also large numbers of black people and
’youngish female adults of social classes III and IV’,16 those marginal
to the British establishment, who that day and in the days preceding it
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came paradoxically to represent the British people. Queerness was

also manifest in the remarkable manner in which British subjects
started to make demands on their Queen and demand that she too
became ’caringly counter cultural’, sacrificing royal protocol and
culture of mourning for something much more overtly emotional.
The funeral service at Westminster Abbey was ’the most watched
television presentation of all time’. 17 But what were people watching?
The Established Church of England was doing what it arguably does
best at times of national and personal crisis, doing ’for us what we
cannot do ourselves’; that is, affirming certainties in the face of crisis
and brokenness. If Walter is right that ’death typically shatters the
social fabric-through ritual, through conversation, through nego-
tiating new roles’,19 then the Church of England has always played an
important part in providing a religious rhetoric and ritual that begins
to repair the social fabric. In many respects the funeral service
constituted an attempt to restore some of the misrule that had broken
out in the aftermath of Diana’s death. Westminster Abbey, the stage
of so many royal and national liturgical events, became once again a
guardian to the establishment, the royal family took their traditional
precedence and places in the Abbey, which resounded to the National
Anthem at the beginning of the service. As the procession moved
through the building the choir sang the traditional sentences and
prayers taken from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer which have
been used at every royal funeral since Charles IL2° Familiar traditional
hymns such as ’I Vow to Thee, My Country’, ’The King of Love My
16. Tony Walter, ’The Questions People Asked’ in Walter (ed.), The Mourning
for Diana, pp.19-48 (30).
17. Grace Davie and David Martin, ’Liturgy and Music’ in Walter (ed.), The
Mourning for Diana, pp.187-98 (190).
18. Davie and Martin, ’Liturgy and Music’, p. 188.
19. Walter, The Mourning for Diana, p. xiii.
20. Notes on the Order of Service.
 84

Shepherd Is’ and ’Guide Me, 0 Thou Great Redeemer’ punctuated the
service. Titled men and women read and spoke, the Prime Minister
read from Scripture, the Dean of the Abbey presided and the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury was present and led the prayers (which included
a prayer for members of the royal family).
The performance of the funeral was therefore conducted at least at
one level according to a familiar establishment script. But if the ser-
vice was in some sense a repair job then it was a job that some
realized could only be done by incorporating some new cloth. As the
notes incorporated into the Order of Service state, the sentences con-
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stituted ’the only strictly traditional element in the service’. The script
may have been familiar but it was also subverted in many respects.
First there was an obviously queer element to the service in the
person of Elton John who arrived (as commentators noted) with his
male partner and whose performance of his rewritten hit ’Candle in
the Wind’ was the joint centrepiece of the service together with the
Tribute by the Earl Spencer. This piece of popular music, containing
only the vaguest references to Christian imagery or belief,21 provided
a sort of cultural bridge between the popular mourning of the
previous week and the mourning crowd beyond the Abbey and the
establishment represented in the Abbey. It was also the part of the
service that induced the most open displays of emotion from the
crowd in Hyde Park who sprang to their feet at the end of it, as if to
acknowledge that Elton John was in some sense their representative
in there and had done them proud. The participation of an openly gay
man at the heart of the funeral service queered it. What is more, his

presence marked a suspension of the ’reality’ of the Church of

England’s ham-fisted treatment of lesbians and gay men. It appeared
to be perfectly natural and appropriate for John to be there. His pres-
ence therefore could be interpreted as a peek at life beyond the rain-
bow-at a reality thicker than that in which the Church generally
moves-a breaking-in of the resurrection. Elton John’s presence

vividly re-membered Diana’s friendship with gay people and her

association with HIV/AIDS (John himself has been a forthright cam-
paigner on issues surrounding HIV/AIDS). Here was a gay man at
the heart of the establishment in some real sense representing those
outside of it and in the process subverting the script of the establish-
ment to include gay people. Neil Bartlett declared in Gay Times that

21. There is a reference to grace (’you were the grace that placed itself, where
lives were torn apart’) and one reference to heaven, (’now you belong to heaven’).
The whole song did, however, have echoes of Blake’s hymn ’Jerusalem’.
 85

’we were being included in Diana’s funeral not as spokesmen for a

cause, but as honoured guests’. 22
The central presence of a gay man was not the only queer element
of the funeral. Elton John’s performance was followed by the Tribute
by Diana’s brother. In the place where the sermon might have been,
Charles Spencer delivered an extraordinary powerful address which,
as well as providing a moving and honest tribute to his sister, also
contained a stinging attack on the royal family’s treatment of her and
the press’s constant harassment. The platitudes of death were blown
out of the water and the fact that the Tribute was followed by Sebas-
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tian Temple’s adaptation of St Francis of Assisi’s ’Make Me a Channel

of Your Peace’ served to challenge the easy identification of peace
with the status quo. Once again the crowd in Hyde Park rose to its
feet and the sustained applause carried itself into the Abbey itself
where the congregation joined in. The sound of applause in the Abbey
driven by those outside its walls, demonstrating appreciation for an
address which refused to keep to the script expected, was a powerful
symbol of subversion.
The two central performances followed the readings: two of these
were non-scriptural poems, ’family favourites’, the third, read by

Tony Blair, was 1 Corinthians 13, Paul’s great exposition of love. But
this reading was docked. The Authorized Version of the Bible was
used but as the Order of Service notes state ’Mr Blair, however, will
be substituting the word &dquo;love&dquo; for &dquo;charity&dquo;, as the New English
Bible did, when it first came out in the early 1960s’. One wonders why
Blair just did not use the New English Bible but the fact that the word
’love’ was preferred over ’charity’ is interesting, considering that
Diana’s service to charities was emphasized throughout the service.
Charity in contemporary culture suggests an unequal relationship
between giver and recipient, love suggests greater equality and soli-
darity. Love suggests both giving and receiving. The changing of the
words of Scripture in this way drew attention again to Diana’s sub-
version of the royal script, giving not out of bounty but out of
vulnerability and the need to be loved.
The readings were interspersed with hymns and an excerpt from
Verdi’s Requiem. The ’Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna’ from the
conclusion of the Requiem Mass, sung by the BBC singers with the
soprano Lynne Dawson, introduced a piece of high camp into the
proceedings. The tragic prayer of supplication conveyed through the

22. ’Signs of the Times: The Revolution of the Flowers: Diana, A Tribute’, Gay
Times (October 1997), pp. 50-54.
 86

sacred language of Latin taken from a Roman Catholic Requiem and

rendered dramatic by the music again subverted the constrained and
constraining script of the Protestant establishment. Again it picked up
something of the popular expressions of mourning, because the media
had designated the vigils, lighting of candles and laying of flowers as
’Catholic’ in character and also reminded the congregation of Diana’s
flirtation with Catholicism which was part of her subversion of her
own scripts. Davie and Martin suggest that, in this piece, ’the fully
sexualised female voice of Lynne Dawson literally &dquo;impersonated&dquo;
Diana’ and, interestingly, that piece of music enabled ’ambivalent and
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chaotic emotions’ to be discharged in order that ’order might be re-

established and closure begun’ 23 I will return to the significance of
this piece of music later.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the funeral was the very
marginalization of the Church that scripted it, housed it and choreo-
graphed it. The Dean spoke only at the Bidding and the Commen-
dation, to begin and close the service; the Archbishop of Canterbury
appeared only in the second half of the service to lead the prayers and
give the final blessing. Other figures took centre stage. The unique
service which deviated so profoundly from traditional Christian rites
suggested that the Church of England knew that what it had was
inadequate to this particular task. This was further reinforced by the
use of John Taverner’s ’Alleluia’ in the final procession. Here was a

piece of music obviously rooted in the Orthodox musical tradition,

which drew on the words of the Orthodox funeral liturgy. It had a
foreign, strange character about it.
So there was something definitely queer about the funeral service:
various elements came together to subvert the complex matrix of
establishment, Church of England and heterosexuality. The script of
the Anglican funeral service was performed in a manner that drew
attention to and then exposed the inadequacies of its own content. It
reminded me of nothing more than some of the funerals I had
attended of those who had died with AIDS, recognizable in structure
and in some elements but stamped too with a personal defiance of a
society and a Church which were felt to have rejected and demonized
those who are gay. Interestingly, Walter, in seeking to argue that none
of the rituals of mourning witnessed during the time of Diana’s death
are entirely new, notes ’a British funeral that concluded with clapping
had been screened a decade earlier as part of a BBC television docu-

23. Davie and Martin, ’Liturgy and Music’, p. 197.

 87

mentary (Remember Terry) about the death of a man from AIDS’ 24

Rosemary Bailey in her biography of her priest brother Simon who
died with AIDS in 1995, describes how shocked some were to dis-
cover that Simon had asked for black vestments rather than the now
usual white which suggest resurrection, ’more traditional, more
sombre, more humble, less presumptuous of eternal glory and for
Simon, the theatre director, perhaps more dramatic too’.25 Within the
framework of the Requiem Mass Simon had chosen a number of
readings ’from Shakespeare to Derek Jarman’, his own poem ’If I Go’
was read, his sermon preached by a lay woman and, as well as
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hymns, a Bach cello solo was played 26 Derek Jarman, whose own
death in 1994 had prompted mini shrines to appear across Soho, had
what to many was a puzzlingly traditional funeral interspersed with
four addresses from friends, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
accompanied his body to its grave, a body that he insisted was exposed
until the funeral. Here Jarman, the archetypal queer, queered his own
funeral refusing to play the atheistic radical or rather playing it very
differently. Lying in his coffin over which traditional rites were being
conducted, he wore a cap proclaiming himself a ’Controversialist’. 27
In death Diana had the sort of funeral that a gay British man with
AIDS might have had if he had also happened to be Princess of Wales!

Queering Death .

The service may have been queer but was it any good? From a
Christian point of view queer can only be judged to be a morally
acceptable strategy if in parodying certain scripts it propels the
observer back to the values of the gospel and Christian tradition. The
two central performances of Elton John and Charles Spencer both
gave expression to the tragic nature of Diana’s death and therefore
challenged modernity’s construct of death as natural, but neither for-
mulated that response in specifically Christian terms. And Spencer
concluded with an extraordinary statement thanking God ’For taking
Diana at her most beautiful and radiant and when she had joy in her
private life’, as if getting old was a worse fate than death. Much of the

24. Walter, The Mourning for Diana, pp. 271-72.

25. Rosemary Bailey, Scarlet Ribbons: A Priest with AIDS (London: Serpent’s
Tail, 1997), p. 201.
26. Bailey, Scarlet Ribbons, p. 201.
27. Tony Peake, Derek Jarman (London: Little, Brown & Co, 1999), pp. 1-6, 532-
33.
 88

service continued to convey the facile hope of a natural understand-

ing of death, leading to some vague notion of eternal life. There were
references to resurrection in the prayers but none to judgment. It was
only in the Verdi piece that the anguish of eternal death and judgment
was faced and the need to rely on God to deliver the person from that
’awful day’ acknowledged. The personification of Diana in Dawson’s
voice placed her life and death firmly within the Christian tradition of
the tragedy of death, fear of judgment and need of deliverance. That
such a prayer (paradoxically sung by secular singers) could be
described as articulating chaotic and ambivalent emotions by Davie
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and Martin, rather than clear and appropriate fear, indicates just how
queer such a piece is in the context of the modern funeral. The resur-
rection upon which hope of delivery is based was articulated in
Taverner’s piece: life is described as ’a shadow and a dream’ com-
pared to the resurrected life, the ’Alleluia’ of the resurrection is
intoned and the final words of the piece are the words of God ’Come,
enjoy rewards and crowns I have prepared for you.’ So two of the
pieces that queered the event, interrupting the dominant discourse
and exposing its inadequacies were ’foreign’ to the Anglican tradition,
one Roman Catholic, the other Orthodox.
The tragic dimension of death then could be said to have been
articulated at least to some extent in the queer dimensions of death
and the notion of fear and judgment faced in one queer element and
the hope of the resurrection in another. The reconnection between
desire and immortality which Vasey also hoped would occur in a
queering of death is harder to locate. The first hymn sung was ’I Vow
to Thee, My Country’, which is both a statement of loyalty and service
to one’s country and a looking forward to ’another country’, that is,
heaven. Diana chose this hymn for her wedding service. At that event
it became her personal manifesto for ’the fairytale’, a promise of sub-
missiveness and self-sacrifice for the good of her country. Its presence
at the beginning of the funeral service was a stark reminder of how
fairytales are never true and that the price that Diana paid was a very
different one to that expected in July 1981. This glorification of patrio-
tism which identifies love with unquestioning acceptance of and ser-
vice to ’my country’ stood as a powerful reminder of Diana’s subver-
sion of the scripts given to her in 1981 and the price she paid for it.
The second half of the hymn, looking towards ’another country’, does,
however, suggest the existence of another world to which our desires
are ultimately orientated. In the context of Diana’s funeral the empha-
sis fell on the second half of the hymn, on the other country which
might provide Diana with the happiness that eluded her in her own.
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Earl Spencer’s conclusion to his address quoted above may also hint
at the realization that ultimately Diana’s desires would never have
been satisfied in this life. Taverner’s piece, with its designation of life
as ’a shadow and a dream’, also locates the fulfilment of human desire
in ’another country’. The reading from 1 Corinthians 13 reminded us
that ’we know in part’ and, when the perfect comes, ’that which is in
part shall be done away’ and ’now I know in part; but then shall I
know even as also I am known’. But as with the theme of judgment
and deliverance this theme is never articulated by the representatives
of the Established Church, the prayers contain no reference to such
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things.
Sara Maitland described the funeral service at Westminster Abbey
as a ’weird post-Christian semi-pagan’ carrying-on 28 She does not
define her terms but if she is referring to the absence of a dominant
narrative of tragedy, judgment, fear and resurrection hope as the
fulfilment of desire, then such a charge could be levelled at many con-
temporary Christian funerals. Diana’s funeral, it could be argued, had
more of these elements than most, even though they were subversive
elements in a performance the overarching narrative of which
appeared still to present death as natural. Indeed one possible expla-
nation of the extraordinary reaction to Diana’s death was that it pro-
vided a space and a protocol to mourn not only her death as a tragedy
but also all other deaths only commemorated by twenty minutes at
the crematorium or articulated purely in natural terms. The flowers,
candles, queueing, messages and vigils constituted what Douglas J.
Davies has designated ’words against death’, performative actions
against the horrors of death which nevertheless acknowledge its
tragic element .2’ The most memorable aspects of her funeral service,
Elton John’s performance, and her brother’s address, the music from
Vivaldi and Taverner, also articulated the tragedy of the event. One
could argue that, in spite of the fact that the Commendation read by
the Dean made the first and only reference to Diana’s baptism, in her
designation as ’our sister’ and ’companion in faith’, and to the com-
munion that all the baptized living and dead enjoy, Diana had a more
overtly traditional Christian funeral service than many.
The funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, suggests that Vasey’s
instincts may well have been right-that a sense of the recovery of the

28. Sara Maitland, ’The Secular Saint’, in Merck (ed.), After Diana, pp. 63-74
(71).
29. Douglas J. Davies, Death, Ritual and Belief (London and Hendon, VA:
Cassell, 1997), pp.1-7.
 90

tragic dimension of death, and therefore of a more ’solid’ hope in

resurrection and a reconnection between desire and immortality,
might be possible and indeed be inspired by reflection upon
HIV/AIDS and forms of identity. What does become obvious through
the analysis of her funeral liturgy is that the process of queering, of
parodying to subvert, of repetition with significant difference, in itself
does not necessarily propel the performer back to the riches of the
Christian tradition. Elton John and Earl Spencer powerfully articu-
lated the pain and unnaturalness of death but provided no narrative
context with which to make any sense of it, nor any clearly defined
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sense of hope that corresponds to the nature of the tragedy. The other
elements that I have identified as queer because they deviated from
the form of an Anglican funeral liturgy derived their power not only
from their strangeness in an Anglican context but also from their
rootedness in ancient Christian liturgies which articulated a different
understanding of death to modernity. There are lessons here for the
queer theologian, one who seeks to reflect upon the Christian faith
through the lens of queer theory, believing that queer theory itself
helps to highlight a clear ’queer’ dimension in the Christian tradi-
tion.3° Subversive performances are only of ultimate value if they
propel us deeper into the gospel and one cannot rely on the performer
to make the necessary connections. The theologian’s task is to take
responsibility for assessing the value of the performance in its ability
to reconnect us with a part of the Christian tradition marginalized or
forgotten. From this perspective we might say that the performance of
Diana’s funeral left a lot to be desired. It was subversive but it was not
subversive enough. Themes of forgiveness and repentance were
absent, the identity of the baptized which subverts and relativizes all
other identities was only alluded to.
Michael Vasey was almost unique in producing a book about
homosexuality that addressed issues of death and beyond. The
extraordinary absence of deep theological reflection on these issues
from gay and lesbian theologians who have lived through the age of
AIDS is almost incredible and places those theologies firmly within
the paradigm of modern liberal theology. The funeral of Diana,
Princess of Wales, reminded the millions of people watching it that
the Christian performance of death can be its most subversive, most
queer performance of all and thereby indicts all the modern liturgies
and funeral services and the theologies that inform them that have

30. See my ’Sexuality: The View from the Font (The Body and the Ecclesial
Self)’, Theology and Sexuality 11 (1999), pp. 9-20.
 91

failed to act out that performance. It had the typically queer effect of
illuminating an area which society would prefer to remain dark-the
area of death. This is also what AIDS has done. If theologians fail to
follow Michael Vasey in being prepared to walk into that spotlight
then they will have missed the opportunity, as Vasey noted, to
deconstruct some of the idols of our age through rigorous engage-
ment with culture from the perspective of the Christian tradition. In
other words, we will have failed in our vocation.
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