this morning's sermon
"On Shakespeare's Sonnets, and Why Gay Marriage Is Good For Business."
Peg Duthie
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville, 23 April 2006
Since their publication in 1609 -- almost four hundred years ago -- there have been millions of words devoted to William Shakespeare’s sonnets. The choicest of these 154 verses have been read aloud in all sorts of venues for all sorts of occasions, including weddings and fundraisers and Unitarian Universalist worship services. They have also been mined over and over again for clues to the real William Shakespeare, so much that one prominent critic complained that "more folly has been written about the sonnets than about any other Shakespearean topic."
The identity of Shakespeare remains very much in the headlines of our day. Just this past week, the UK Independent ran an article on whether Shakespeare was the love child of Queen Elizabeth and her stepfather. There are groups passionately devoted to proving that the author we refer to as "William Shakespeare" was actually someone else, such as Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford; the main Oxfordian society has over 500 members and a board of trustees, and it hosts annual conferences. There is a website called Shake-n-Bacon that favors Francis Bacon as the true author, and a documentary titled Much Ado About Something that argues in favor of Christopher Marlowe, and other candidates have ranged from various other courtiers to Queen Elizabeth herself. In their eagerness - and some might say, desperation - to identify what they can of Shakespeare, enthusiasts have sifted not only through the plays and poems attributed to him, but also signatures and portraits and masks and even anagrams. There has been a whole lot of mud flung over what’s admissible as evidence, whose scholarship is up to par, who’s being selective or snobbish about what they want to believe, and there’s no sign it’ll ever come to an end: there are too many people who have invested too much time and money and self-identity in their beliefs about the Bard. I can guarantee you that any new, remotely credible specimen of evidence with be greeted with the delight, doubt, and derision similar to what we’ve seen in recent weeks with the purported Gospel of Judas: the love of Shakespeare is tantamount to a religion for a number of people, so much that George Barnard Shaw was driven to coin the term “Bardolatry.”
One of the most contentious issues in literary criticism is how much can you extrapolate the truth of an author’s life from what they write. The question becomes more urgent when it’s an author like Shakespeare: his identity matters so very much to people because it can be pointed to in arguments over what’s possible in our lives and what ought to be permitted. Is it possible for someone to come from a small town and write sophisticated plays? How much formal training is essential for someone to produce Shakespearean-quality art? Was this icon of Western civilization a homosexual or bisexual man, and if so, does that add or confer some sort of legitimacy to modern-day gay and lesbian individuals? When the United Kingdom held its first gay history month last year - with government funding, and coordinated in part by Schools Out!, a British education and anti-bullying organization -- Shakespeare was on the list of famous people to be discussed, along with Florence Nightingale, Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, and other superstars of traditional classroom lessons. One British official derided the campaign as “achingly politically correct,” but the head of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and other authorities felt that the Bard’s sexual orientation was in fact fair game for debate. Even Harold Bloom, who is notoriously anti-political correctness, is willing to consider that Shakespeare “evidently lusted after both genders.”
Now. I don’t actually have a dog in the authorship debate. The historical evidence in favor of any one candidate is scant and mostly circumstantial, and while so-called textual evidence can be fun for speculation, it’s hardly trustworthy as a source for historical fact. I had dinner with a new friend a couple of weeks ago who confessed that the mental impression she’d initially formed of me from my writing was that I was tall, curly-haired, and Jewish. She’s not the first person to tell me that I “write taller” than I look, and my fictional narrators can afford better Scotch than I ever will. I’m not involved enough in Renaissance studies to have to care who Shakespeare actually was, but I do find it compelling that whoever he was, he did in fact write ardent sonnets addressed to another man and to a woman, and that this makes readers averse to the notion of a gay Shakespeare utterly uncomfortable. Way back in 1640, a publisher named John Benson rearranged the sonnets so that they all seemed to be addressed to a woman, and since then, various critics have argued that the sonnets were merely and purely a literary exercise, and that they couldn’t possibly be based on an actual situation or the poet’s actual feelings.
In my opinion, to insist that Shakespeare had to be gay, or that he couldn’t possibly have been gay, are both failures of imagination. Which is, essentially, what homophobic behavior is at its core. It is a failure of imagination when an individual fails to comprehend that gay and lesbian people are real people, and that real people deserve courtesy and respect regardless of whether their relationships resemble our own or not. My favorite “Dear Abby” column ever appeared a couple of months ago, where a woman wrote about her neighbors - two very nice young men who had been ideal neighbors, very friendly and helpful, until she saw them kissing and basically delivered them a letter from the neighborhood telling them that wasn’t acceptable. She wrote to Abby because she was very hurt that they were no longer speaking to her, and wondered why they were being so unreasonable about this one thing and making everybody uncomfortable. Abby wrote back,
You're lucky that these gentlemen merely choose to ignore you.
Your neighbors could respond to your hospitality by hosting weekly outdoor "gay pride" barbecues and inviting all of their friends to enjoy life on your quiet suburban street. I can hold out hope that they will choose to do this, but I'm spiteful in that way. Your neighbors sound much more kind.
In your original petition to these men, you basically stated that while you value them when they are raising the standard on your street and shoveling your driveway, you loathe them for being who they are.
I about dropped the newspaper when I read this. My mom used to mail me Dear Abby clippings, and this was when the “new” Dear Abby was already writing the column; I am not used to thinking of “Miss Van Buren” as a member of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy to Destroy Marriage As We Know It. I don’t know what her stance on gay marriage happens to be, but at least she gets that gay people have feelings, and that it is not unreasonable to not like someone who thinks your life is somehow disgusting or a mistake.
It shouldn’t be a hard concept to grasp, but I cannot tell you how many conversations I have had with people -- including fellow Unitarian Universalists -- who don’t understand why gay people can’t “wait” until society is ready for marriage equality, or why the word or concept “marriage” has to be involved at all. I cannot do justice to everyone’s arguments in the time we have here, but I do want to stress two key points: the first is that failures of justice are failures of imagination. It is the failure to grasp that there are real people with real feelings involved: the people who say “I don’t want gay people teaching Sunday school” are failing to imagine how they would feel if someone said “I don’t want you teaching Sunday school.” The people who say, “Gay people should settle for civil unions” wouldn’t dream of telling a straight couple, “You should make do with a civil union.” The upcoming Tennessee referendum against same-sex marriage this November is a colossal, collective failure of imagination, on the part of too many people who haven’t yet realized that gay relationships are just as real and deep and long-lasting as heterosexual ones.
[My second point is that] I do use the word “yet” because I’m hopeful: it often takes first-hand acquaintance with gay neighbors and gay colleagues and seeing them in stable same-sex relationships to make empathetic imagination even possible. It’s easy for me to understand why marriage discrimination is unfair: I have actual friends to whom I cannot imagine saying, “No - for the good of society, you cannot get married.” This isn’t the case for some of my more conservative friends - some of them from my parents’ generation, where there weren’t enough couples “out” for them to know, and some of them from my own generation, where their communities are small enough that being “out” - never mind outspoken -- is still too dangerous for the gay people they probably do know but just don’t actively think of as gay.
Another tricky aspect of enabling justice is that, when it comes to legislatures and corporate boards, it’s so often not about doing what’s right as doing what’s expedient. There’s a bill in the state legislature right now that would “limit the differences in pay between men and women” for doing the same job. It’s called the “Pay Equity in the Workplace Act of 2006,” and you would think it would be a no-brainer. However, it’s seen by a number of legislators as a “job-killer,” and the governor was originally against it. The governor was also originally against a proposed raise to the state minimum wage, and there are 31 business groups on record as seeing such bills hurting “job opportunities and economic growth for most Tennesseans.”
As someone with very close ties to several corporate executives, and who works for corporations herself, I think it’s instructive to consider what’s going on here: in this day and age, very few people are arguing that women ought to be paid less than men -- at least, no one who isn’t trolling for a fight on purpose. The problem is that, human nature being what it is, people don’t like to vote for things where they have something to lose. Businesses don’t want to spend more money on payroll and benefits, whether it’s for gender equity or domestic partnerships or what-have-you -- for many businesses, it’s the one part of their expenses that they can legitimately manipulate, unlike cost of supplies and rent.
Part of the challenge of convincing businesses to do the right thing is to show them that doing the right thing will increase their profits - or at least not cost them significantly more than not doing the right thing. A big fear among business owners when it comes to gay unions is how much more they might have to fork out in additional benefits; so far, the trend seems to be only 1 to 2 percent increases in enrollment rates, be it for same-sex or opposite-sex partners. When Vanderbilt University researched offering domestic partner benefits, the issue of increased costs was naturally a major concern; Vanderbilt’s head of human resources established that same-sex benefits wouldn’t really affect their bottom line when it came to expenses, and their policy has been in effect since 2000.
Another component to persuading business owners to support same-sex marriage - or at least, not to oppose it - is to emphasize what’s been called “the war for talent.” Attracting and keeping good employees is a huge issue in today’s corporate world, and gay-friendly companies have an edge over ones who aren’t. Earlier this month, Lambda Legal released the results of their “workplace fairness survey,” in which 54 percent of their 1200 respondents said “that gay friendly nondiscrimination and antiharassment policies were ‘critical’ to their decision about where they decide to work,” and “an additional 38 percent…reported that gay friendly policies were appreciated and contributed to their happiness.” Put another way, gay-friendly policies explicitly mattered to 92% of the people taking the survey in deciding where to work and whether to stay where they're working.
The Human Rights Campaign issues an annual list of “top companies that support equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) employees,” and mainstream companies such as Hyatt Hotels, Hewlett Packard, and Intel make a point of mentioning their presence on the HRC list on their websites. Companies are recognizing that diversity and tolerance are good recruiting and marketing tools, not only to gay and lesbian prospects but also to straight individuals who, given the choice, would rather work for employers who treat all of their staff fairly. Progressive companies are recognizing that, in the twenty-first century, employee loyalty is not simply a matter of pay but also of morale: that an employer has to make it feasible for the employee to devote their time to both career and family in order to retain them, whether it’s through offering flex time and telecommuting or other accommodations that would have seemed outrageously generous twenty or thirty years ago.
It’s important to remember that, in the overall arc of history, things do change for the better. You couldn’t pay me to go back to Shakespeare’s time - not given how it treated women or heretics in general. It’s important to accept that changing the world can take more than a lifetime, but that what we do helps clear the path for those who inherit our values. To steal a phrase from the chief rabbi of Great Britain, “You save the world one act at a time." To quote the president of our own movement, Dr. Bill Sinkford, “despite the backlash we see every time the circle is widened, it never really shrinks back to where it was before."
Here in Tennessee, my home church is working to develop a statewide coalition of UU congregations and individuals to defeat the proposed ban on same-sex marriages. Components of the plan include training potential advocates among our churches on effective lobbying and canvassing for votes, as well as helping the Tennessee Equality Project with commercials featuring gay and lesbian families. The ultimate hope is that the campaign will make more people aware that gays and lesbians are real people among them, and also that more people will become aware of Unitarian Universalism - that there is a “religious left” as well as a “religious right,” and that it’s our Constitution too -- and our Shakespeare, whoever he was.
There’s one especially popular sonnet by the Bard that I love to pieces even though I completely disagree with its message: it’s the one that starts, "Let me not to marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds." To which I say, horsefeathers. Love is the doctrine of this church, and it isn’t "an ever-fixed mark" that "is never shaken." It isn’t a search for truth and meaning if you already have all the answers. Love is love when it has room to admit to fear and inexperience and to then change its mind. As Unitarian Universalists, it is upon us and our faith to bring this understanding to the wider world. Amen and alleluia.