Shakespeare knew how to end a tragedy. He knew you don’t just send the audience home without some closure, without some lesson learned, without some sense that “this must never happen again.”
At the end of his play Romeo and Juliet, where the two lovers commit double suicide as a result of their families’ disapproval, Shakespeare brings on the Prince of Verona as well as Juliet’s parents and Romeo’s father. In front of the citizens of Verona, in the early morning light, the Prince publicly unravels the details of the entire tragedy. He does not blame the friar who hatched the dangerous plot, the druggist who sold the poison, or the messenger who came too late. Notably, he does not blame the lovers.
No, Shakespeare’s figure of civic and moral authority lays the blame squarely on the shoulders of the feuding families: “Capulet, Montague,/ See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,/ That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love!”
And then, we have the catharsis: Juliet’s father offers his hand to Romeo’s father. Romeo’s father declares that he will erect a statue of Juliet in pure gold. Juliet’s father is quick to add that Romeo’s body will be buried with that of Juliet. And the Prince sums up poetically: “ A glooming peace this morning with it brings.”
There is no “glooming peace” in Washington today. The two teenaged lovers who took their lives will have no statues erected in their honor. And even though one of them wrote a last request in her diary to be buried next to her “true love,” it is doubtful whether that request will be honored.
There is no Prince of Georgetown who will step forward and demand a full and public accounting from all parties of what they know. In fact, the authorities have declared their intention to suppress the details of the two deaths, consistent with their “policy” surrounding suicides.
And the families? They are requesting respect for their privacy. There are no gestures of reconciliation. The blame is being laid on the victims: One of the girls was, according to her father, depressed.
I daresay that Romeo and Juliet were depressed also. Romeo was facing exile and Juliet was looking at an arranged marriage with its attendant marital rape. But the wise Prince of Verona knew that his people deserved better than a facile blaming of the children. He knew the root of the tragedy lay in the families’ refusal to accept the love between these two young people, their determination to place obstacles in their path and to accuse them of betraying their families’ values, of dishonoring the family, with their passionate liaison. He knew that the only possible closure to the story would be the healing of this bigotry.
In the tragedy this week, there were two warring factions. One family was Catholic and the other Jewish. Traditionally Catholicism and Judaism are not religions that accept intermarriage between members. More than that, these are religions that have traditionally rejected homosexuality as morally wrong – a perversion or a sin.
No doubt the girls were depressed. They may have even felt as if they were carrying the weight of the world, because they were. These children were shouldering the disapproval and censure of two major world religions, backed by centuries of history and culture. These children were defying the moral precepts of millennia. Possibly, they were also dealing with the disapproval of their families. These burdens would be crushing to an adult with a fully-developed support system. For an eighteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old, it was more than they could bear.
As a witness to the playing out of this tragedy in the media, I am restless. I lack the kind of closure that Shakespeare offered to the citizens of his imagined world and the audiences of his real one. I am missing the respect for my investment in the story, in the culture that produced the tragedy. I need for the families to come together with mutual acknowledgement of the prejudices that drove their daughters to desperation. I want them to clasp hands publicly, to own and repudiate the historic “feud” between their faiths as well as the traditional homophobia of both religions.
I want them to bury these girls together, as the girls had wished, and I want them to establish a living memorial to honor their courage and their pain, a memorial that will bear witness to the fact that the homophobia taught and practiced by the major religions of the world is criminal, that the victims of this homophobia die every day in every country, and that young people are among those who suffer the most. I want a pledge from the media and from the police that there will never again be a conspiracy of silence, of suppressing suicide notes and details of deaths, of disappearing or downplaying the evidence of sexual orientation in the name of “respect for the families.” I want every death counted, noted, commemorated, remembered annually, until we all live in a world where homophobia is no longer tolerated or protected as a religious, ethnic, cultural, or personal prerogative.
Carolyn Gage (
http://www.carolyngage.com/) is a lesbian playwright and activist. She is involved in the Ugly Ducklings Campaign, a national campaign to prevent GBLT youth suicides.
http://www.uglyducklings.org/
