“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”
- W.H. Auden, Funeral Blues
#LoveWins — This was the global trending topic on Twitter the day same-sex marriage became legal on all fifty states in the United States last June 2015.
At that time I remembered that the most beautiful and loving lines ever said in a film (in my opinion) was the one recited during the funeral scene in the 1994 film "Four Weddings and a Funeral" which catapulted Hugh Grant to stardom and dare I say, Rowan Atkinson (yep, Mr. Bean himself) where he played in this film a bumbling priest officiating his first wedding. In this film, the lives and romantic relationships (and mis-adventures) of Hugh Grant and his other proud-to-be single friends are chronicled from Charle's (Hugh Grant's character) point of view.
What was surprising to me at that time was how the concept of same-sex partnership is just casually inserted in the movie without any great fanfare. On the first half of the movie, most of Charles's friends are just getting drunk (or pissed according to the Brits) and the men are just some happy-go-lucky mates. It was only during the funeral that certain relationships are revealed to be far deeper than what they seem. In that scene Matthew's character broke down in tears while eulogising his partner Gareth. That kind of heartbreak can only come from a place of love, sadness, pain and regret. It dawned on everyone at that funeral, that though most of them are proud-to-be-single and not that lucky in love; Matthew and Gareth had always been a "married" couple.
This was in 1994, two years before Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google and ten years before it had an IPO and exploded into the world's consciousness. Why is this relevant? Well, Google had to be invented (and Wikipedia, of course) before I was able to find out the entire poem from which Matthew's eulogy came from. I would not know in 1994 from which book or library I would be able to go and do my research. Works of fiction and literature only came to my attention just by chance. Like when I discovered e.e.cummings' "98 Poems" lying open in one of the tables in the University's Main Library.
Looking back we've really come a long way since 1994.
