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TAKE THESE MEN by Brent Hartinger
A couple of years ago, when my partner Michael and I decided to hold a ceremony to celebrate our commitment to each other, most of our friends told us they didn't know what to expect. We told them it would basically be a wedding between two men, but the truth was, we didn't know what to expect either. Straight people talk about "the gay agenda" like there's some kind of newsletter. It might be easier if there was. We did know we wanted to "publicly affirm our relationship," even if we weren't exactly sure what that meant. In some vague kind of way, it just seemed hypocritical of us to insist that our friends and family to treat our relationship with the importance we feel it deserves when we'd never told them--formally and in so many words--just how important it is. But almost immediately, we found ourselves floundering. Once a heterosexual couple decides to get married, they're suddenly whisked off into a whole Pirates of the Caribbean full of traditions, with underwater tracks guiding them from one event to the next. Look over there--it's Wedding-Shower Cave ! Now here we go, down Invitation-Selection-Process Waterfall! And now we come to Burning-Village Rehearsal Dinner! Our boat, on the other hand, had no track whatsoever. For a long time, we drifted aimlessly. We weren't even sure what to call the damn thing. A wedding? A commitment ceremony? We briefly considered just calling the whole thing off. Then the unexpected happened. Our friends, some gay and some straight, started taking our wedding...seriously. In fact, they took it far more seriously than we were taking it ourselves. It was the first thing they'd ask about when we went over for dinner. Had we set a date yet? Had we picked out a place? Two heterosexual couples threw us a shower-of-sorts--lots of wine and Thai food, great gifts like panniers for our bikes, and not a blender in sight. And a couple of my straight male friends began planning an "alternative" bachelor party--a whole weekend of intellectual debauchery that would include plenty of chemically-assisted musings around a raging bonfire on the beach at midnight . In other words, now that we'd foolishly said the words "commitment ceremony" out loud to our friends, we were suddenly obligated to go through with it. When we finally sent out invitations, people warned us to expect some shrinkage in our guest list. Sure enough, two or three people had unalterable conflicts on the date we were proposing: a Nobel Peace Prize being bestowed, an audience with the Pope, or something along those lines. But everyone else we invited desperately wanted to come. By now, of course, we had found a place, and were starting to plan the ceremony itself. Traditions? There was nothing from stopping us from using them if we wanted (well, except for our lack of garters). At the same time, we didn't feel confined by them either--the way every single heterosexual couple we've ever met seems to have felt before their weddings. We now saw that we had the best of both worlds; we were the bisexual hermaphrodites of the wedding set. Where we had felt aimless before, we now had a direction; best of all, it was a self-chosen one. With each new idea, our ceremony felt less generic, less interchangeable with other weddings, and more like a ceremonial representation of us. Why couldn't we have our pagan friend lead us and our friends around a garden giving us the Blessing of the Four Winds? We held the actual event on the deck of a huge house on an island in Puget Sound . In a nod to potentially confounded parents, we chose a (wildly liberal) minister as our officiate. We started by singing some songs, including a couple embarrassing ones that I wrote for the occasion. Then a few close friends spoke movingly, the minister said some words of his own, and we all walked down to the beach where everyone made a wish for us, then threw a single flower out into the ocean. We both admit to tearing up a little as we watched the floating blossoms streaming out into the setting sun. Then the ceremony was over, but the best was yet to come. During dinner and around the bonfire afterwards, we had friend after friend come up and tell us how honored they were to have been invited. Several people told us how glad they were they had been able to bring their kids--that they had desperately wanted their children to see that there are different kinds of relationships in the world. And couple after couple, gay and straight, also told us they considered our relationship to be a role model for their own. A role model? That's when it finally occurred to us. We hadn't needed to tell our friends and family how important we are to each other. They already knew. That's also when we learned a profound truth about weddings. They aren't about the couple saying anything to friends and family. They're about friends and family saying something to the couple: that they are valued and appreciated, an important part of the community. We had it exactly backwards. Stupid us. It's tempting to think that our experience says something about the state of anti-gay prejudice in post-Will and Grace America--that on this issue, America is getting better after all. But I'm not so sure our experience says anything of the sort. Frankly, our exceptional straight friends probably would have reacted exactly the same way even if our ceremony had taken place in the sixteenth century in a room just down the hall from a meeting of the Spanish Inquisition. And despite our ceremony, we're not married--not in any legal sense. All over the rest of the world, countries like Norway, France, Spain, and Canada have listened to the concerns of their lesbian and gay citizens and granted them marriage or marriage-like rights. But in the United States , only the state of Vermont offers lesbians and gays a limited form of marriage, which the federal government and all other states have refused to recognize. On the contrary, conservatives--those great champions of "states' rights"--are now starting a drive to amend the U.S. Constitution to specifically forbid any state from ever offering any same-sex marriage rights, even the limited ones in Vermont . Many Republicans--and they are all Republicans--even have the audacity to accuse us of wanting "special rights." Why do marriage rights matter? Anyone in a long-term gay relationship knows the answer. It's the petty little concerns, like the possibility of being denied access to a hospital room when your partner is about to die. Or the chance that, should one of you die, anti-gay family members will suddenly demand to inherit half the property of the surviving partner. If same-sex marriage isn't legal by the time Michael and I retire, we'll miss out on some fifteen thousand dollars a year in Social Security benefits, which is enough to make even the most patient gay person grind his or her teeth in frustration. But for the time being, we live in an age of "don't ask, don't tell," where many heterosexuals insist, as if magnanimously, that they're willing to tolerate us, just as long as they're never confronted with any evidence that we exist. Big of them, huh? Still, I suppose I should be thankful, because plenty of other Americans aren't even willing to do this. George W. Bush, the "new," more tolerant Republican, supports sodomy laws: laws that make consensual sex between people of the same gender--what we call "making love"--a crime. In George W. Bush's America , all sexually active gay people are literally sex offenders. Why would our famously compassionate president take such a bigoted, uncompassionate stand? And why would he and his broom-butted conservative colleagues bring out their big guns against even the slightest trifle of a domestic partnership law? Well, they usually argue that the mere existence of our relationship is somehow a threat to their families and their community. It makes me wonder what they're families are made of anyway. Styrofoam? Tissue paper? Snow? The Republicans can think whatever they want. Funny thing though. When my partner and I got married, it made our family, and our community, that much stronger. |
