In today’s On the Square , David Mills explains the way in which we are all like James Slattery (aka “Candy Darling”), a transvestite star of Andy Warhol’s famous Factory:
According to the New York Press reviewer, Beautiful Darling ends with a quote from his diaries: “You must always be yourself no matter what the price. It is the highest form of morality.” Many of us will find it easy to scoff at a man in a dress proclaiming the need to live honestly as a moral imperative. “Of course he’d say that,” we think. “He’s wearing lipstick.”
It’s the great credo of the libertine life, “Be yourself.” But the young James Slattery was right. Aristotle and St. Thomas would have understood him. You must be who you are and suffer for it if you have to. That is, after all, one of the lessons of Good Friday. A lot of people hanging around Jerusalem that day hated the one man in history who was perfectly who he was, hated him for precisely that reason, and few of us would have liked him any better.
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