Young Was Already There

Before I apply Marguerite Young’s philosophy to queer media, I want to say something about where the philosophy came from.

Young spent decades of her life in Greenwich Village, at the center of a literary and artistic community that included queer writers, artists, and thinkers for whom the conditions she was describing were not abstract philosophical concerns. The plural self that cannot be singular, the grief that has no available cultural language, the witness hunger, the self constructed under pressure from materials survival makes available: these were the lived conditions of existence for people in Young’s immediate community, people she loved and worked alongside and witnessed across the decades she spent building the AND philosophy.

The five pillars did not emerge separately from that community. They emerged from inside it. Young was paying attention to what the people around her were actually carrying, and what they were carrying, with particular intensity and particular stakes, were the conditions her philosophy describes.

This matters for the posts that follow. When I apply Young’s lens to queer media, I am not reaching for an analogy or making a creative connection between unrelated things. I am returning the philosophy to one of its primary sources: the community whose experience of the plural self, the permanent weather, the witness hunger, and the self constructed under pressure most directly informed the thinking that produced it.

The queer experience of the plural self is specific. The self that is multiple in a world that demands singularity, that is required to perform a legible coherent identity for survival while carrying a genuine interior multiplicity that the performance cannot contain: this is Young’s first pillar lived rather than theorized. The grief that has no available cultural language, the loss that cannot be mourned because the mourning itself is denied legitimacy, the permanent weather generated by a world that refuses to witness you completely: this is Young’s third and fourth pillars as the conditions of daily life rather than as philosophical observations about consciousness.

The witness hunger in queer experience is also specific. To be seen in full multiplicity, without the requirement to be singular or safe or legible before the seeing is offered, is not a philosophical luxury for people whose multiplicity has been consistently punished. It is the most necessary thing. The chosen family, the community, the specific relationships that survive because they are built on genuine witnessing rather than on the performance of a legible self: these are Young’s fourth pillar as survival mechanism, not as aspiration.

Young knew this. She built the philosophy from inside a community that knew it. The posts that follow are an attempt to honor that knowledge by applying it to the media that has done Young’s work most seriously in the queer cultural space: the films and television shows that have witnessed queer experience with the precision and the patience and the refusal to flinch that Young’s philosophy requires.

The door that Young built was always open to this. It was built, in part, by people who needed it to be.

Come in.

Twenty Years of Weather

Brokeback Mountain takes place across twenty years. The film is not about a summer on a mountain. The summer on the mountain is the origin of the weather. The twenty years are what the weather does.

Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist spend one summer together on Brokeback Mountain herding sheep and become, in the specific quality of that summer’s proximity and isolation and shared difficulty, each other’s most complete witness. The witnessing produces a love that neither of them has the cultural language to hold: not because the love is ambiguous or confused but because the world they are required to live in has not made the language available. The love is precise. The language is absent. The grief generated by that gap is the permanent weather of everything that follows.

Ang Lee made a film about twenty years of permanent weather. Marguerite Young would have recognized it as one of the most precise renderings of her third pillar available in any medium.

Grief as Permanent Weather: The Structure

The film’s structure is Young’s structure: the recursive return to the same ground from expanded angles, each return revealing something the previous pass could not access, the accumulation producing the full weight of the permanent weather across twenty years. Ennis and Jack meet again, and again, and each meeting is the same love in a different configuration of loss: older, more defended, more shaped by the permanent weather of the intervening time.

Young’s third pillar: grief does not conclude because the source of the grief has not changed. The source of the grief in Brokeback Mountain is the gap between the love that is real and the world that will not hold it: and that gap does not close across twenty years. It widens. It generates more weather. Each meeting adds another layer to the accumulated weight that both men are carrying into every other aspect of their lives.

The film does not offer resolution. It offers accumulation: the full weight of twenty years of permanent weather, held without softening, without the consolation of a world that eventually changes or a love that eventually finds its available form. The world does not change within the film’s span. The love does not find its available form. The grief is permanent weather. Young would say: yes. That is the honest account. Hold it.

The Plural Self Under Pressure

Ennis is the plural self under the most sustained and most damaging pressure the series has documented. The self that loves Jack and the self that has internalized the specific violence of the world’s response to that love: these are not sequential selves, a before and after. They are simultaneous rooms, present from the beginning, in permanent conflict that generates the specific quality of Ennis’s silence and his stillness and the way he holds his body as someone who is always bracing against the weight of what he is carrying.

Young’s first pillar: the self constructed under pressure is real. Ennis’s defensive architecture, the performed straightness, the marriages and the children and the life organized around the suppression of the room that contains the love for Jack: these are genuine selves, genuinely inhabited, built from the materials that survival in his specific world made available. The love is also genuine. Both rooms are real. The film holds them simultaneously for twenty years and does not adjudicate between them.

Jack’s plural self is differently constructed: he has more access to the room that contains the love, more willingness to imagine a different configuration, more capacity to articulate what he wants. The tragedy of the gap between them is partly the tragedy of two plural selves with different relationships to their own multiplicity: one who can imagine the full house and one who cannot, across twenty years of meetings that are the closest either of them gets to being fully witnessed.

The Witness That Could Not Be Sustained

The summer on Brokeback Mountain is the witness relationship in its most complete form: the isolation that removed the world’s requirement for singularity, the proximity that made genuine seeing possible, the shared difficulty that produced the specific quality of trust that genuine witnessing requires. For one summer, Ennis and Jack saw each other completely. The witnessing was real.

The twenty years that follow are the witness relationship that cannot be sustained inside the world they are required to live in: meetings that are the recursive return to the witnessing, each one real, each one partial, each one adding to the permanent weather rather than resolving it. Young’s fourth pillar does not promise that the witness relationship is sustainable. It describes what consciousness needs. Brokeback Mountain is the most sustained and most precise account of what happens when consciousness has had the witnessing and cannot have it consistently: the permanent weather of a seeing that was real and cannot be made continuous.

The shirts, at the end, are the witness relationship preserved as object: the record of the witnessing, the evidence that the seeing was real, the permanent weather housed in a physical form that outlasts the person who generated it. Young would say: the shirts are the painting in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. The object that preserves the witnessing after the situation that made it possible has ended.

Ennis holds the shirts. The witnessing was real. The grief is permanent weather. Twenty years of it, and counting.

The Names That Were Said

It’s a Sin ends with a list of names. The names belong to real people who died of AIDS. They are read aloud. The reading takes time. The show insists on the time: on the specific, irreducible reality of each name as the name of a person who was fully present in the world and who is gone.

Young’s fourth pillar: the witness sees the full multiplicity of another and does not reduce it to a category or a verdict or a statistic. The ending of It’s a Sin is the witness pillar as the formal conclusion of a television series: the show has spent five episodes building the full multiplicity of a specific group of people, and it ends by insisting that the people who did not survive that building be witnessed in the only form now available to them: their names, said aloud, by someone who is paying attention.

Russell T Davies made one of the most Young-serious pieces of television about the AIDS crisis. Not because it is the most comprehensive or the most historically complete, but because it understands, with precision, that the grief of that crisis is permanent weather, that the losses were not statistics, and that the witness relationship is the only adequate response to a world that tried to make the dying invisible.

Grief as Permanent Weather: The Silence of the Culture

The specific grief of It’s a Sin is the grief that was denied cultural legitimacy: a government that refused to acknowledge the dying, a media that treated the crisis as the consequence of choices that deserved their consequences, a culture that was organized around the invisibility of the people who were dying. Young’s geological WE: the grief accumulated in the silence. The permanent weather was generated not only by the deaths but by the cultural refusal to witness them.

The show is set in 1980s Britain and it renders that cultural silence with extraordinary fidelity: the parents who cannot say what their children are dying of, the newspapers that find the language of judgment rather than the language of witness, the government whose silence is itself a form of violence. The grief that cannot be mourned publicly accumulates in the private spaces: the flats, the friendships, the chosen family that is doing the witnessing the culture refuses to do.

Richie’s arc is the permanent weather pillar in its most devastating personal form: the young man who is performing the life of freedom and joy that the post-Stonewall moment made imaginable, who is carrying the grief of the crisis alongside the joy, who cannot integrate the two until it is almost too late, whose mother’s response to his dying is the cultural silence made personal and intimate and devastating. The grief for Richie is permanent weather. The grief for what his mother’s silence cost him is permanent weather. Both are real. Both persist.

The Plural Self: Ritchie, Roscoe, Colin, Ash

The show’s ensemble is structured to witness the plural self of a generation: different configurations of queer identity in 1980s Britain, different relationships to the available cultural language, different ways of carrying the permanent weather of a world that is simultaneously more open than it was and more dangerous than it appeared.

Richie is the plural self organized around performance: the performer, the one who makes the others laugh, the one whose genuine interior is protected by the entertainment he provides. His performance is real. His interior is also real. The show holds both and does not require the entertainment to be stripped away to reveal the truer self underneath. They are both his rooms.

Roscoe is the plural self in its most fully inhabited form: the self that has decided to be entirely and unapologetically present in all its rooms, whose joy is genuine and whose survival instincts are sharp and whose capacity for love is present in the specific texture of his loyalty to the people he has chosen. He is not simplified by his exuberance. The show witnesses him completely.

Colin is the plural self in its most unformed and most vulnerable configuration: the young man from Wales who does not yet have the vocabulary for what he is, who is witnessed into the beginning of that vocabulary by the community he finds in London, who dies before the vocabulary is fully available to him. His death is the show’s first and most brutal statement of the permanent weather: the loss that comes before the self has had the opportunity to be fully constructed.

The Witness: Jill

Jill is the show’s witness and she is doing Young’s work in its most sustained and most costly form: the friend who stays, who witnesses every death, who carries the full weight of the community’s permanent weather across the show’s entire length and beyond it.

Young’s fourth pillar: the witness has a cost. Jill does not witness from a protected distance. She is inside the permanent weather, accumulating grief with every loss, and she stays anyway. She stays because the witnessing is necessary. Because someone has to be in the room. Because the people who are dying deserve to be seen completely, in full multiplicity, by someone who will carry the record of the seeing after they are gone.

The ending, where Jill reads the names, is Jill doing what she has been doing across the entire series: witnessing. The names are the community she witnessed. The reading is the record of the seeing. The permanent weather of the grief is present in the time it takes to say each name, the insistence that each name is a person, the refusal to reduce the loss to a number.

Young would say: Jill is the work. The witness who stays. The one who carries the names. The one who insists, against the cultural silence, that the seeing was real and the people were real and the grief is permanent weather that deserves to be witnessed rather than managed or resolved or made invisible.

The names are said. The witnessing continues. The permanent weather persists.

Young would say: yes. Say the names. That is the work. That is all of it.