I am aware that there is a contingent of radical queers which range from highly suspicious to downright disapproving of the whole equal marriage hoopla. I find myself on the fringes of this group quite frequently.
Just as frequently, I find myself in the company of queers who are gung-ho about the fight for equal marriage.
And I often find myself in the company of straight people who are perplexed and confused by the fact that I’m legally married yet do not refer to M. as my wife, nor do I wear a ring.
So I thought I would write about it here, and try to explain myself.
For me, marriage felt inevitable. In the strange headspace where M. and I were as our relationship developed, the one where we were just like all the straight people around us except somehow we were both girls, it didn’t really occur to me that we wouldn’t get married.
Yes of course I knew that we couldn’t really get married. But to me the important thing seemed to be the big white dress and the massive party. Martha Stewart showed me that!
So when M. proposed to me with a diamond ring, on her knees, in the jardin du luxembourg (it was my senior year in college), I said yes. Well, I said ‘oh my god’ a couple of times, and then I said yes.
We planned to have a ceremony right after she graduated, a year after me. But it was delayed by our crazy move to the west coast, and 9/11, and all sorts of complicated stuff. We finally did it in March of 2002; she was 22 and I was 23. Just babies we were.
At that time I had no idea how emotional people can get around weddings. To me, it was a clear-cut case: my family had always been hands-off when it came to raising me, hands-off when it came to my relationship — surely they would be reliably hands-off when it came to my wedding?
No. My mom threw ten kinds of hissy fit over things as stupid as the guest list. [she wanted to invite every friend she'd ever had, plus the southern relatives whom I had never met and who didn't know I was gay] My dad threw his own kind of hissy fit over whether or not we had an open bar. Turns out he really wanted to impress his cousin, who (it turns out) didn’t care one whit that he couldn’t have a scotch and soda before dinner. In fact this same cousin complimented my choice of white wine, thank you very much.
My oldest sister was upset that I wasn’t wearing white.
My mom told me my sisters couldn’t be ushers, since they were women. Gender panic? For real? I mean, come on! Look who’s getting married in the first place! One sister accepted, pleased, and the other said no, citing her femaleness as the reason.
M.’s family was overall better behaved. Her mom was agreeable, and did what we asked her to do with much aplomb and good grace. Her dad attended, after we hadn’t seen him in over three years.
And it was a lovely wedding. Ours was the first-ever same sex wedding in our reception venue. We wrote the ceremony ourselves, I did all the flowers, the dinner was something we often served to guests who came over to visit us at home. The favour was a cd that we made with our favourite songs (at the time, somewhat embarrassing now). I made my veil and jewelry myself the night before, in a fit of creative inspiration.
But I have real feelings of ambivalence around our wedding and subsequent marriage. From the start of our relationship, I had always felt committed to M. I never looked around and said, maybe this won’t work out. I had the same feelings then that I have now regarding crushing on other people, but I never doubted that I loved her above all and that faced with the choice, I would choose her. Which I have, in every case.
That said, we were on a damaging path of assimilationism that the wedding, and being married, greatly accelerated. Our immediate circle of family and friends gave it a lot of legitimacy and approval — and why not? We were doing something that was extremely legible and comprehensible to them. They all had either done it, were in the process of doing it, or desperately wanted to do it. Looking back, only five people who have never had serious partners were there, and two of those are my sisters, both of whom say they want to get married.
After the wedding, this circle of people treated us differently. Our relationship was more serious, our status was higher. People pressured us about having children, buying a house.
All well and good. But we were doing this thing without understanding the whole story. We aren’t straight. There is nothing we can do to pass in the everyday world as mainstream and ordinary without denying some fundamental facts about who we are. Which is precisely what we did for a long time.
I don’t blame the marriage/wedding ceremony entirely. We were doing a good job of burying ourselves in the straight world before we got engaged. But I think it played a role in sealing the tomb, so to speak, of our radical queerness. I think it ended up showing us, here there is approval. We don’t have experience of anything else, and people say we’re doing a good job, so we’d better keep doing it this way or maybe they won’t like us anymore. But maybe it was even simpler than that: we don’t know what else to do.
So when I hear queers in vocal opposition of gay marriage, it strikes a sympathetic chord with me. Sometimes I feel embarrassed about our ceremony, like ‘god look at how we were aping this straight thing, and where did it get us?’ I took my ring off because it felt like enslavement to some dreary ideal of chastity, virtue, responsibility. It represented the push to buy a house, barbeques with straight guys who didn’t like M. and made inappropriate comments about my looks, long boring talks with straight women who wanted babies and said that female bosses are the ‘worst because they’re so emotional’. I felt always alienated and silenced; I don’t want to promote an institution that has the power to make me feel that way.
Okay, so why would I then argue that equal marriage is vitally important? Because of this: our marriage, in the beginning, was not legally sanctioned. We were not legally married until 2005, three years and three months after our wedding. And the legal protections are huge; it makes a big difference. It means we have hospital visitation rights. It means that the shared finances and property that we have built up together over 15 years are recognized as such in case one of us goes off the deep end and tries to take it. Which happens.
It means that if she dies, I don’t have to fight her sometimes less-than-sympathetic family over whose money is in our joint certificate of deposit. If I die, it means she gets the car without fighting my flaky parents. Not that I think these things would happen, but they do, with surprising frequency. It means she gets to decide where I’m buried. It means that we can travel to the UK and be on the same visa.
What legal marriage means is that the relationships that exist do not have to depend on a stranger’s goodwill for recognition. There are reams of horror stories about partners denied visitation, children snatched and parents denied custody. Legal marriage is really, really important.
And also this: I fully see that marriage can mean different things to different people. There are couples who I look at and see marriage fitting them beautifully. Just because marriage is problematic for me doesn’t mean that I want to deny it to other people.
And that’s sort of the crux of the matter, isn’t it? I agree that there are many, many pressing issues on our plate as a community. Trans rights are my issue right now, and reading stories of the discrimination trans people face makes me want to cry. But we need, as a community, to keep everyone’s needs in mind.
We don’t know how many horror stories have been averted by the marriages performed in MA since 2004, but surely more than a few. These needs are less pressing precisely because people who want to get married are allowed to.
I personally advocate for marriage to be completely abolished — let anyone contract with anyone else to create inheritance and tax status that fits their lives. Let churches tell people how to live their lives if they can get anyone to listen to them. Let government stay completely out of everyone’s bedrooms.
But until that day, marriage is the best tool we have to ensure that our relationships are not erased. It is imperfect, but it does make an impact. I sometimes regret the circumstances of our wedding ceremony, but I don’t regret our legal marriage certificate at all.
It’s the seventh anniversary of our commitment ceremony today, and we’re having a quiet dinner tonight with a new friend who doesn’t know it’s our anniversary. To me it’s the ideal way to celebrate — spending time with the community that we denied ourselves for so, so long. We are very good at being a couple. We need more practice at having friends.
And don’t worry, we won’t be drinking any green beer.
