Justice for R. Kelly: a Reflection on the State of Eros. (Dedicated to the Lady Jerri.)

 

I've been reading, recently, about the life of Robert Kelly, whom you'd recognize from *Space Jam*'s soundtrack, the "Ignition" remix, and his many other hits, such as "Trapped in the Closet". It just breaks my heart to see how he was treated, not just as a child who had to grow up much too fast, but also as an adult, even after having given us such heartfelt, soulful music. I could never reconcile those sweet and sentimental, loving, sometimes mystifying tones with the entire image of a sex offender; he was a Don Juan, but not Don Giovanni.

 

Clearly, that same mainstream media that made him famous had betrayed him, while the legal system, which was never there for him when he himself most needed and deserved it, in the tenderness of youth, went well beyond its obligations in defence of "children". The hypocrisy is not the part which angers me, as it is so ironic that it's laughable, and that alleviates some of the sadness of this great man's tragic, tortured life. It makes me realize that, if I've been too harsh with people, I can lighten up and, if they thought that I was much too harsh, I am a softie next to many of these pompous litigators, journalists, and entertainment industry "professionals".

 

R. Kelly was a sort of father figure to me, since I listened to his songs since I was very young. Yet as an adult I can understand or leastwise try to fathom all the pain behind his music, music which, mysteriously, never seems to come up in a single portion of his court case (though the pain does). Listening to it, (the music, not the case) I know now that this soulfulness could *not* be faked, and I'm afraid to listen to it for that very reason, to imagine what "we've" done to him "as a society", as well as to imagine all the wrath which I would feel towards those lawyers who could righteously deny his victimhood. Here was a man who, having every reason to resent the World, saw beauty in it, and, devoid of ordinary boundaries, (for he was robbed of them) he did not choose to hate but to ooze love from every pore, from the most base, "perverted" paraphilia to Reverence for God (for which he had been ridiculed by entertainers who could not see past his image as a "pimp", a shallow dogmatism still retained by the most dour and sophisticated prosecutors in his case).

 

*His* music was not all, however. I would listen to Aaliyah's "I Miss You" when I was still in middle school, and, to this day, I've hardly heard a sweeter and more tender love song. It's believed that she had written it for him, and I believe it. I believe they loved each other. I believe that they loved God; why else would they have gotten married, if it was illegal? Some say marriage is a legal institution. If a couple bothers to get married in defiance of the Law, then they are Romeo and Juliet. Their love *means* something, just like how the title of Aaliyah's *Age Ain't Nothing But a Number* album always had a meaning even adolescents fathom.

 

Here's what angers me and also makes me laugh: that, had Kellz grown up in Japan, had he done all the things he did *there* rather than here in the U.S.A., the vast majority of them would have been normal, not illegal. It was only this last June that the age of consent there was raised from thirteen to sixteen, to much overblown applause, which sounds ironic, given that the country has an underpopulation problem.

 

This is not to say that now I am a relativist. Not at all, but quite the opposite. It's simply that the relativity of laws, including in the U.S.A. itself, exposes the absurdity of using them to judge of someone's *Soul*. It puts the cart before the horse. The legal age of sexual consent is meant for the protection of a child who *has* no sexuality, for he or she has not reached puberty (though even an asexual, who's reached a given age, can nonetheless "consent"). Yet at what point does one become an adult, *truly*? Dave Chappelle, that constant hypocrite and self-appointed victim, asks us, "*How old is fifteen?*" as if that *number* were some sort of Absolute by which all things were measured.

 

It is not. A child who wakes up on his birthday would be very sad indeed to learn that, rather than a cake and presents with a bow, his gift is a hard boot and a restraining order from the house he's lived in eighteen years. Yes: *legally,* he is an adult, but at what point does that *happen*? When the clock strikes twelve? True maturation, if it ever happens in so short a space, is either carried out in *ritual* or through a *trauma*.

 

By the latter rubric, Kellz grew up when he was eight. Although we have no legal evidence, (unlike the sex tapes which we stole from him) we know that he had been abused, six years, by older women in his household. Yet we cannot say that he perpetuated such a cycle of abuse, for never did he have relations with a prepubescent *child*. The critical distinction in between ephebophilia and pedophilia was utterly dismissed in sentencing this "predator" by treating all his partners as mere "children". Well, I was not fifteen years of age yet when I listened to his and Aaliyah's music. Nor was he when he was forced to do things "of that nature" by his very family. For once, I do feel privileged and grateful, and, for once, I wish that someone would shout "privilege" at all the pious and self-righteous litigators trying to portray him as some sort of monster who should be ashamed. Most of us never had to go through that, and we enjoyed his music in the comforts of a far less broken home and life.

 

"*Yet that is no excuse*." I never claimed it was. Yet, much like the disparity in legal ages of consent, it proves a point. It is absurd to use this arbitrary number like a solid measurement of one's subjective, private life. It's an absurdity that, once I reach the age of puberty, I have to wait four years before I "get to" act upon it, by which point my life may very well have been derailed, while someone else, in Texas, only has to wait three years. Yet even more absurd is that *I* would not then be punished for my "crimes", just as you'd be the victim were you drunk and I was sober. Rather, I'd be like Gustavo Fring, whose punishment was watching someone that he loved be punished for *his* (that's to say, Gustavo's) choices: the most cruel torture which I can imagine.

 

In this day and age, *most* Western dogmas with regards to sexuality have been dismissed and vilified, since the criteria which justified those dogmas in the past no longer resonate with people's philosophical positions. Yet those same outdated notions drive the modern concept of a statutory rape: that no one can consent without the necessary "mental faculties", as if we all were Rationalists living in Victorian Society. Yet what strange deity comes to my house the year I turn eighteen and gives me license to bear arms, to smoke, to kill, to work, to love? Why does he visit Texans earlier? It is like asking, "*Why does Santa Claus not love my Jewish friends?*" It is completely superstitious and neurotic, and, if it is justified by saying, "*Letting up a little here will lead to the most blatant sex crimes you can think of*," I can laugh at how it was the *Music Industry* that was accused of "Slippery Slope" fallacy when they spoke out against the Cancel Culture.

 

Law is sacred, but the Gods themselves cannot tame human love. Marie-Louise von Franz said that this is the problem with contemporary Western culture: no one values Eros, which is personal, between two human beings, and which says that "*I do this, against the rules, because I love this person*."

 

I cannot deny that Kelly and Aaliyah loved each other to the full extent of Eros; I can hear it in their voices, just as when I was myself fourteen. The critical distinction in between ephebophilia and pedophilia is not an abstract legal loophole, but the very opposite: the recognition of a biological reality which only can be linked to "predators" since it *predates* all Law. That biological reality is that the child becomes erotic at the age of puberty, and, by that point, it only is the State, the Public, and the jealous or the broken heart which chooses, arbitrarily, to recognize that love as being or not being a "legitimate consent" based on the very opposite of Eros: Logos, also known as "Reason". Yet it goes too far, to an extreme which is unreasonable, when it puts the cart before the horse and overlooks the *feeling* of the *lovers* and asserts control from a parental posture. No one's rules can tear me from the ones I love, not even if I must go mad to demonstrate it.

 

Kelly's sentence is as tragic as Aaliyah's death, and it is an extension of it. I believe that Robert Kelly spent his adult life attempting to recover what he lost from his first wife, his Juliet, if not his girlfriend Lulu who, like Hugo's daughter, fell into a river and was drowned. His tragedy was that he never could succeed, and all his efforts to protect his private love affairs from public eyes made those eyes pry far harder where they never should have looked.

 

Yet he was not alone to blame. As usual, it truly is the World which is too cruel. No one can assert "responsibility" but overlook the fundamental facts of subjectivity and individuality which justify it. No one can preach conscience but so utterly condemn another's conscience in his own affairs. When we condemn him as a monster, is there not a drop of doubt, a flicker of a smile before the blatant irony? At what point does a man grow tired of condemning others for their lack of shame? At what point does he say, instead, "*Perhaps you feel no shame because you are not guilty, after all*"? How could he be, if he believed that he was right? What business is it of ours? Had Japan not changed its laws this year, what would we do? Why, then, have we not bombed them once again and forced them to adopt the Sacred Seventeen (or, in my State of California, the Everlasting Eighteen, Not Accounting Romeo and Juliet Laws with a Two-Year Gap)? Why bother to name loopholes after Shakespeare plays, when we have not the *love* to understand them? Who are we to calculate it, when we cannot hear it even in the Music which had brought these star-crossed souls together? How can we pathologize it?

 

He grew up when he was eight. She was an adult and a woman to his eyes, and so she was in her own eyes, although she died too young. Two people meet and love. Why should they care about the World? Why should they care about the people they'll become when they fall out of love? Nobody ever can be "rational" in one's consent, since love makes everyone irrational. If even an asexual can offer one's consent, though feeling nothing, how can someone in the very tenderness of puberty not do so?

 

By this I don't mean to change the Law, just as I have no hope in that I'll change this terrifying verdict. Yet I mean to step away from it and view the drama from the point of view of those involved *as they were* in their moment of involvement and, beyond that point, reserve all judgement. This was not a murderer, a "thug", a kingpin, or an executioner. He was and is an unencumbered lover, and that is his only crime. The greater crime is to forget that, for one lacks it in oneself.

 

All hatred must proceed from love. It’s truly noble to defend a child if it is out of love for children that one hates the predator. To use the name of children to attack those whom one simply *wants* to label as a “predator” is to abuse them. That alone perpetuates the “cycle” which R. Kelly tried to break through Music, God, and Sex. The only child who suffered in his lifetime was himself and, somewhere, underneath that man who has been forced to live within the body of a boy, the boy remains, in tears that, though he'd given so much to the World and in the praise of God and women, all would turn on him. Yet, just as most of us will never grow up overnight, so I cannot expect the World to grow up overnight. I only write to take small steps. My hope is that this will be a "Step in the Name of Love".

 

**[({R.G.)}]**

 

**Dedicated to Jerri.**