Getting to the heart of Valentine’s Day
Whether you think of Valentine’s Day as a sweet light-hearted tradition, a destined arrow through the heart, or a nauseating bombardment of red and pink tack, it’s impossible to avoid the hearts, flowers, chocolates and cards that start flying around well before February 14th.
The Valentine’s media in the UK tends to fall into three main camps. First up are the promotional tips – on where to get the best last minute romantic hotel break or restaurant booking, which supermarket dine-in deal offers the best night-in (pudding and Prosecco!), and how women particularly can learn some new tricks for dressing and acting the perfect coquette. Next we have the anti-Valentine articles – the commercial backlash, the singles angle, the couples who balk against Hallmark articulating their love for them and will be shunning any acknowledgement on the day. And lastly, the ‘quirky’ double page spreads that attempt to put a new, tongue-in-cheek spin on the well-worn clichés – satirical cards, ‘novelty’ gifts or alternative events. All of which are marking Valentine’s Day in their own way, by giving it head (and publishing) space.
So when asked to write a blog post on Valentine’s Day, I initially drew a blank as to what I could say that hasn’t been said a thousand times before. I decided instead to look into the history of Valentine’s Day, to see how differently it has been viewed in different times and places. And what I found out links rather seamlessly (ok, at least tenuously) with an LGBT perspective on Valentine’s Day.
Let’s start with the man himself. There are quite a few myths about St Valentine, but the general Google consensus appears to be that he was a priest who lived in Rome, under the reign of the Emperor Claudius, some time around the first century AD (stay with me – the history lesson won’t last long…). Valentine was reportedly imprisoned for marrying Christians who were being persecuted by the Emperor, including secretly marrying couples so that the husbands wouldn’t have to go to war. As Valentine’s Day is overwhelmingly marketed with heterosexual representations of ‘love’ (or lust), I found it really striking that St Valentine himself was actually a champion of the minority and the persecuted. Ok, his minority group was straight, but the principle still both challenges and resonates with the fact that LGBT people are largely overlooked in the public consciousness on Valentine’s Day. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a gay person having a limited selection of non-heterosexual cards is persecuted, but it would be more equal if there were a wider range of cards depicting same sex relationships - whether cartoons, teddies or fine art are your bag. I’m sure may of us would still rather avoid Clinton Cards, but the point is that it should be a viable choice.
The association of Valentine’s Day with romantic love is actually attributed to the poems of Chaucer in the Middle Ages, when it was apparently believed that birds paired into couples in mid-February. ‘Lovers’ poetry’ sprang from this (although it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that Valentine’s cards came onto the scene. This was due to the advent of mass printing, and the idea was that cards with rhyming verses inside could cater for people who couldn’t write their own poetry). The medieval idea of ‘courtly love’ was inherently heterosexual – knights and maidens and all that, and so paved the way for the concepts of Valentine’s Day that we have in the UK and US today.
But in some European countries, Valentine’s Day isn’t about romantic love at all. In Finland and Estonia, it is called ‘Friends Day’, and in Lithuania, it was traditionally about celebrating the start of Spring. In commemorating change, renewal and blossoming, I think this links quite nicely to the concept of coming out – both in terms of the closet and also with declarations of love. It seems appropriate then, that LGBT History Month is also marked in February.
In some Middle Eastern countries, women prevail on Valentine’s Day, and it is a festival celebrating wives and mothers. In Japan, women also take precedence, as it is traditional for only women to give men chocolates (as an aside, I wonder what lesbians do in this situation?).
In other places, however, Valentine’s Day is oppressive – in regimes where public displays of affection are considered vulgar (let alone being LGBT), or where there is a political argument that Valentine's Day is an infiltration of a commercial Western tradition, which creates economic inequalities with its merchandise.
Obviously there isn't room to say much about centuries of Valentine's history and culture in a single blog post; yet alone to validate the accuracy of these beliefs and traditions. But I think we can deduce something true from these 800 odd words... That as much as Valentine’s Day can be seen to be about love, desire, declaration and new beginnings, it actually has the concepts of equality and diversity at its heart.