Parallelism between Jes Grew and the LGBTQ community

The dynamic between the Jes Grew community and the Wallflower order in Mumbo Jumbo offers a narrative through which we can understand contemporary cultural issues. The battle for power between marginalized groups and the traditionalist authority is echoed across various social issues, among them the fight for LGBT rights. In many ways, the LGBTQ community and history share deep similarities with Jes Grew.

Like Jes Grew, the legacy of LGBTQ people traces all the way back to ancient history, in various parts of the globe. In ancient Mesopotamia, same-sex relationships were very common, so much so that they were considered equal to any other relationships. Similarly, in ancient Greece and Egypt, there was little to no stigma around same-sex couples, except in specific cases in which the social status of the lovers differed or a man was deemed to "play the part of the woman" during sex. Back then, queer relationships were so normalized in mainstream society that no words meaning “homosexual” or “heterosexual” existed until it was coined in the Christian bible (source).

The rise of Christianity transformed the status of LGBTQ people in society. LGBT identities were drawn out as a form of sin and immorality by Christians, and ever since then a stigma around queerness has become entrenched in previously neutral/supportive societies, its influence continuing onto today in the form of LGBTQ discrimination and oppression. Much like the marginalization and demonization of Jes Grew by Atonists, the Judeo-Christian narrative of morality had led to the defamation and persecution of queer people. 

The way LGBTQ people are treated in modern society is comparable to how the Wallflower Order depicts Jes Grew. For the last few centuries, queerness has been viewed as a form of mental illness and a public threat. Even just a few decades ago, people “diagnosed” with being gay were legally forced into electrical shock treatments or, like Alan Turing, given experimental hormones/drugs to purportedly cure the "gay disease"--as if being gay were hazardous contamination needing to be washed away from society. Likewise, in Mumbo Jumbo, Jes Grew is termed by the Wallflower Order as a mental outbreak and a horrific threat to human civilization. This view leads those in power, the Hierophants, to do whatever it takes to stop its spread in broader American society and thereby prevent the "inferior" culture from "contaminating" the "superior" Western civilization. While, in reality, both LGBTQ identities and Jes Grew are rooted in thousands of years of human history, their opponents seek to undermine their validity by framing them as a fundamental threat to functioning society.

Especially in recent years, we have seen a strong parallel between the Jes Grew/Wallflower Order dynamic in Mumbo Jumbo and the contemporary fight for LGBTQ rights. The plot of Mumbo Jumbo is set on a new Jes Grew outbreak affecting various parts of America, which in turn stimulates a series of behind-the-scenes schemes by the Atonists to try to stall its growth. In present-day society, recent progress in LGBTQ acceptance and visibility has added momentum to the trend toward LGBT empowerment in mainstream culture, allowing more people to feel comfortable coming out as queer and inspiring public celebrations of LGBT culture all over the nation. These changes, though inherently positive, have triggered a surge in conservative actions to crack down on LGBTQ rights. We are now seeing anti-LGBT organizations (the modern-day Wallflower Order) like Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation mobilizing their political power and resources to influence medical establishments offering gender-affirming healthcare and promote bills that curtail the rights of LGBT people through local and federal governments. The intensity and prevalence of these attacks have steeply risen in the last few years. Just in the first few weeks of January 2024, 400 anti-LGBTQ bills were being considered in legislatures all over the country, a pace surpassing the 510 such bills that were introduced in 2023 (source). 

We can also find a similar progress-backlash dynamic repeating itself in previous history--there was the Gay Liberation Movement in the late 1960s and 70s that led to some legal changes expanding the rights of LGBT people but was immediately followed by pushbacks from anti-LGBT campaigns like Save Our Children. We also had the LGBTQ activism during the 1980s AIDS crisis and the “God’s punishment for sexual immorality” narrative that the cultural conservatives pushed to dump all the blame for the outbreak onto the LGBTQ community, who were effectively victims of a system that forced them into squalid conditions that made them more likely to contract AIDS. In all these ways, the battle to restore the power and dignity of LGBTQ people has been ongoing throughout modern history, in the same way that Jes Grew had manifested in American society in the form of various cultural movements including Ragtime, blues, and jazz.

With the above-mentioned recent legal attacks on the LGBTQ community and the increasingly polarized politicization of LGBTQ issues, the fight for LGBTQ rights is unlikely to be won anytime soon. As the rise and fall of Jes Grew in Mumbo Jumbo has taught us, the more deeply we seek to infiltrate and challenge the oppressive nature of dominant cultural norms, we are bound to face more fierce resistance by our present-day Wallflower Order. Reaching our ultimate goal, which is complete, widespread normalization and celebration of LGBTQ identities and cultures, would likely entail many more sacrifices and defeats in the future. The battle will be tough, but as PaPa LaBas suggests, hope is on our side as long as we keep trying:

    Jes Grew has no end and no beginning...We will miss it for a while but it will come back, and              when it returns we will see that it never left. You see, life will never end; there is really no end to life,     if anything goes it will be death. Jews Grew is life...They will try to depress Jes Grew but it will only       spring back and prosper. We will make our own future Text. (Reed 204)