That's me (on the right) and my husband on our wedding day. September 4, 2011, Nantucket MA.
I came out in 2004, but I didn't begin my life as an out gay man with much political passion about marriage equality. The whole issue seemed distant from my own life: I was 22, newly out, and enjoying dating for the first time in my life. Hospital visitation, partner benefits, property transfer rights--all these issues didn't matter to a kid just starting his sexual life. Besides, the whole concept of "marriage" seemed so...heteronormative. Even if I did find a boyfriend I wanted to spend my life with, what would a marriage do to define it?
I was an active participant in the 2004 elections, canvassing in Pennsylvania for John Kerry. I remember being aware of all the gay marriage bans on state ballots being used to drive up conservative turnout that year, but I didn't feel connected to the outcome of those initiatives. The whole issue wasn't about me. It was about some theoretical old gay couple who wanted a piece of paper to codify a union that I neither envisioned nor desired for myself.
Then, on election night that year, George W. Bush won. Those gay marriage initiatives passed across the nation. The sadness, the agony washed over me that night as I realized what The Nephew came to understand this week: a vote against marriage equality is a vote against every single member of the LGBT community, regardless of their relationship status. Those anti-equality voters weren't voting for an institution, they were voting against me--who I am--the clear, hard fact of my homosexuality which was decided for me by God, or genetics, or hormones in the womb many years before.
I felt the same way in 2009, when Maine voted to repeal marriage equality. By then, however, I'd met my husband. My great love.
Isn't he a handsome devil?
We weren't married then; though we lived in a state (Massachusetts) that recognized marriage equality, we were just starting to think about the long term, about knitting our lives together in the myriad ways lifelong partners do. I remember watching the Maine vote come in at the bar I worked at back then, a divey bar of mixed gay and straight clientele in Boston's South End, the kind of place where the Sox game would be on one bar TV and RuPaul's Drag Race would be on another. When it became clear that once again, a state had voted against me, I remember the same feelings of sadness and confusion drape me once again. I talked about it with a couple at the bar, two men who'd been together for many years. Their faces were serene as they described how, two decades prior, none of the victories for equality--not even the idea that people would be seriously debating whether to provide equal recognition under the law--were imaginable. They carried a quiet confidence about the future that resonated with me.
My relationship was neither validated nor invalidated by the respective decisions of states regarding marriage equality. But when it became clear that there was nobody on Earth who could be my husband but the man I was with, I knew that I wanted to marry him. Our marriage was about legal recognition, of course, and the rights and responsibilities that come with that codification. But there is no civil union, no domestic partnership, no commitment ceremony that, for us, could replace marriage. No one person, religion or belief system owns "marriage". Marriage is a legal construct and a spiritual commitment, a process of joining tangible possessions and intangible promises to care and love in perpetuity. Marriage is between two people, and also between that couple and the community at large. Marriage is the basis from which we will teach our own children about relationships, and how we will relate to our friends and neighbors, and the lens through which we will view our future. It is also, ultimately, a rubric for how others will view us. We are not boyfriends. We are not sharers of health care benefits or property. We are husbands.
Now, President Obama sees that too. Oh, happy day!