Justice & Law Quote by Derek Jarman

Jarman writes like a man backed into a corner by polite tyranny. The anaphora of "Understand" is a command masquerading as a lesson, a drumbeat that refuses debate because debate was so often the trap: justify your desires, submit your body to public scrutiny, translate intimacy into something the state can approve. "Sexuality is as wide as the sea" isn’t decorative; it’s tactical. Oceans can’t be fenced, and they don’t care about your categories. He’s smuggling in scale to make regulation look small.

The second line is the blade: "your morality is not law". In the AIDS-era Britain Jarman lived through, morality routinely tried to become policy - via stigma, censorship, and a public-health discourse that slid into punishment. The quote insists on a boundary: ethical beliefs may be personal, but they don’t earn jurisdiction over other people’s bodies.

Then he turns the mirror: "we are you". That’s not kumbaya. It’s an accusation aimed at the comforting fiction that queerness is an exotic minority problem, safely quarantined from "normal" life. He collapses the distance that makes discrimination feel abstract.

The last sentence is deliberately incendiary. By naming "safe, safer, or unsafe", he refuses the era’s pressure to let gay men exist only as model patients. Autonomy includes the right to risk, the right to desire imperfectly - a claim that’s uncomfortable on purpose. Jarman isn’t arguing against care; he’s arguing against ownership. The subtext is simple and furious: your fear doesn’t grant you title to our pleasure.