In those days, the State would not allow gay people to
marry, nor did it recognize “Domestic Partnerships.” We did not care about those facts. Most young people who were straight did not
want to marry either. We all regarded
marriage as a patriarchal institution in which a father sold his daughter to
another man who thereby became her husband.
“Husband,” after all, means “manager,” as in “animal husbandry” or in “to
husband nature’s riches from expense.”
Why would anyone want to enter into that kind of relationship? We wanted to be neither “husband” nor “wife.”
We called each other “Lover” or, while still beginning and
not yet ready for that commitment, “Boyfriend.”
Later we shied away from such the more emotional terminology, finding “Lover”
perhaps too dramatic, and we chose “Partner” instead. This latter term implied something more
objective, more durable, and more socially – even legally – recognizable. Besides, “Lover” still had some associations
with the world of marriage – a Lover or a Mistress was an extra-marital consort
with whom one committed adultery.
My first lover (for it was that long ago) studied Medieval
Latin poetry. He discovered a body of
love poems written by monks to other men and to boys. For centuries these works had lain hidden
among manuscripts kept in monasteries and university libraries in England,
France, and North America. He translated
and published them, and his work was important in the development of a new
field of gay studies. John Boswell, in his book Same-Sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe cited my first lover’s work
and acknowledged its importance.
But the thing that my lover taught me about Medieval Latin
poetry that struck me most powerfully was the fact that poetry of that period
was almost always (these love poems being some of the very few exceptions)
written in the first person plural. We
can hardly imagine such a thing: the
first person singular, “I” being probably the single most reliable hallmark of modern
poetry, that is, of poetry since at least Dickinson and Whitman, and probably
before that. Yet for the thousand years
between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, poetry spoke in the voice of
“we.”
What would a discourse or a poetics that speaks in the first
person plural look like today? Over the
past few decades a form of political discourse called “Identity Politics” has
emerged. Identity Politics suggests that
people vote for (and otherwise ally themselves with) politicians and movements
which they feel reinforce themselves personally and their ways of living, so
that the political landscape has come to be seen as consisting of racial
politics, feminist or gender politics, gay politics, Hispanic politics, etc.
Similarly, politicians, pundits, and organizers talk all the
time about “the community” of one kind or another. Even businesses, especially internet
businesses, speak of their clientele as this or that “community” – Apple
customers, Facebook members, and Uber riders are all “communities.”
But Identity Politics and Consumer Communities are only
awkward attempts to characterize a position on issues that might obtain for a
group. Because those who use this
terminology have not consciously embraced the validity of speaking as “we,”
they remain mired in the individualist world-view and attempt to mediate the
limitations of that view with complex verbal and conceptual frameworks. Like Ptolemaic astronomers, they are stuck
explaining that various planets stop in their orbits around the earth and then
go backward (or “retrograde) for a while before stopping again and then proceeding
in their usual direction. Where is the new
Copernicus who can show that viewing things from the point of view that all the
planets, even the Earth, revolve around the sun makes everything in the Heavens
easy to understand? When will the
collective view, rather than the view of atomized individuals, begin to address
the nation’s problems – and the world’s – and to find solutions?
*
Historical note:
The Declaration of Independence justified the rebellion
against the British throne by asserting certain “truths” as axiomatic. The ability to make these fundamental and
undeniable claims came not by referring to Biblical or to any other
authority. Jefferson simply wrote that
“We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
And this “we” was not merely a “we the undersigned” – it was not shorthand
for the individuals who signed the document.
It was with the voice of “the People” that Jefferson wrote, specifically
“in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies.”
When will we hear the voice of the People speak for itself
again?
