Steve Ross performs Noël Coward’s songs, including the exquisite and little-known “Most of Every Day.” Coward himself sings his song “Green Carnation” (1929), which first made an explicit connection between Oscar Wilde’s invention, the green carnation, and homosexuality. (It is possible that Wilde, who was Irish, was making an ethnic commentary.) Note that Coward insists that homosexuality is not a PROBLEM for these people (“The world our eccentricity condones”). For him, homosexuality is “womankind’s / Gift to a bulldog nation.”
A chorus from the 1890s sings:
Blasé boys are we
Exquisitely free
From the dreary and quite absurd
Moral views of the common herd
We like porphyry bowls
Chandeliers and stoles
We’re most spirited, carefully filleted souls:
Pretty boys, witty boys, too too too
Lazy to fight stagnation
Haughty boys, naughty boys, all we do
Is to pursue sensation
The portals of society are always open’d wide
The world our eccentricity condones
A lot of quaint variety we’re certain to provide
We dress in very decorative tones
Faded boys, jaded boys, womankind’s
Gift to a bulldog nation
In order to distinguish us from less enlightened minds
We all wear a green carnation
Pretty boys, witty boys, you may sneer
At our disintegration
Haughty boys, naughty boys, dear dear dear
Swooning with affectation
Our figures sleek and willowy
Our lips incarnadine
May worry the majority a bit
But matrons rich and billowy
Invite us out to dine
And revel in our phosphorescent wit
Faded boys, jaded boys, come what may
Art is our inspiration
And as we are the reason for the nineties being gay
We all wear a green carnation