Leave Your Spandex At the Door turns 50: the Mirror of Love

MIRROR OF LOVE is the most personal book I’ve read this year. It looks back through the history of same-sex love, hinging on the stories of men who have loved men and women who had loved women, and how this same sex love has been welcomed by society: accepted or outlawed, punished or celebrated, hidden or immortalised through literature and art.. It isn’t a history crash-course on homosexuality. As it is revealed inside, that term didn’t even come into play until the 19th century. And it isn’t a sterile recollection of events; it is written in the form of a rhyme-less poem, narrated from one lover to another, binding history with intimate memories from inside the events, taking us near those men and women who loved throughout the course of human history.

When Mirror of Love was first released, it was in traditional comic form, illustrated by Steve Bissette, featuring two hermaphrodite angels. When Jose Villarubia approached the project, he chose to perform it as a stage play. The original idea of staging it as the last slides presentation of a retiring professor was wisely canned in favour of a more intimate setting, with a naked Villarubia performing the monologue to his lover, lying in bed, still wrapped in the bed sheets, dreaming. In this edition of the poem the word is separated from the image, with the image in this case being 40 photographs by Jose Villarubia. These photographs touch on the emotion which the original poem stirred. The images mate flawlessly with the words to bear a child of love that can’t be suppressed by etiquettes and boundaries. I wouldn’t need to know Villarubia’s history with the project (detailed through the introduction by David Drake) to realise how deeply immersed he’s become in this project: after first coming in contact with it as a reader, falling in love with it, adapting it to the stage and performing it himself, and now mating the original words with his imagery.

Going through these verses now, I envisioned the narrator in the setting of Villarubia’s play, as a man talking to his dreaming lover; the language is very intimate and personal, addressed not to an unknown person, but to “thee, my lover”; the palette of emotions covers the whole spectrum, from sadness and bitter irony, to tenderness and hope, anger and despair, trepidation for the future, and of course, love.

The Mirror of Love is a means of finding out more about us. We can only ever understand who we are by looking back at where we’ve been: what we once had and lost, what we have suffered and what we have gained again to bring us to where we are now. Certain liberties that are taken for granted by gay and bisexual men and women today, have been won through the fights for emancipation of older generations, and this work also serves to pay tribute to them: the women who had their teeth crushed for defying the patriarchs of their society, the artists who were imprisoned for simply expressing their emotions, the men and women who were called sinners, or declared ill, and the thousands who were lead into Pink Triangle concentration camps.

It is important to note that Alan Moore, through the medium of comics, was the first to give an account of same sex love (and in extension homosexuality) through history. As noted on the back pages of this tome, when Moore searched the libraries to find the “Big Book on homosexuality”, he discovered there wasn’t any such book, it hadn’t been published yet.

Despite its strong message, Mirror of Love doesn’t preach (as your humble reviewer has a tendency to), but simply remembers, and dreams. Especially in our day, when great freedoms have been won, but a great amount of the public and the world’s governments still frown upon same-sex love, this book should be in every library and every home, to remind people that all forms of love should be accepted, as they used to be.

Mirror of Love is a book that resonates deep inside the reader, makes us more aware of our self and our place in the world and ultimately changes us for the better, by using words and pictures to teach us a thing or two about love. And when the next person comes along who wants to write his or her own account of this history, Moore and Villarubia’s work here will have earned its place in it.