The (Gay!) Wedding Blog

Thankful, Thoughtful

2011-11-29T07:47:00.000-08:00

I complain a lot – by which I mean, of course, “express perfectly reasonable positions about issues which you should be concerned about, too!” It’s a good thing, really. Almost noble.

But sometimes, it’s also good to see the other side. And in the spirit of Thanksgiving, that’s what I did last week. I took a few minutes to write about all the things I’m grateful for, as a married gay man, in our current world.

I pounded out a first draft and then went off to stuff my face, of course, making the strategic choice to spend time with my husband, parents, niece, and friends rather than to hunch over my laptop polishing the blog and posting it. So I’m a little late on this one, but for good reasons. I think that’s about thanks-giving, too. I was enjoying the life I’m grateful for, and, I hope, helping some of my nearest and dearest enjoy it more, too.

But the important fact to get back to is that, for all the issues which still face us as gay people and as same sex couples, the world has changed mightily in our favor recently. When I was a teenager and just figuring out who I was sexually, same sex couples could not express themselves publicly. Holding hands was a serious political statement. Talking about your relationship, or even about your sexual identity, could get you fired and thrown out of your home – or even physically abused with little legal recourse.

The very idea of a committed gay relationship, public or private, used to be inconceivable, and the suggestion that gay commitments not only existed but deserved the same legal recognition and protections as heterosexual ones was so far out of the discussion no one even suggested it.

So the world has changed – and mightily. The iPhone was introduced in 2007 and now hundreds of millions of us surf the Internet and communicate with each other as we walk down the street (I went Christmas shopping for Phil on BART last night as I rode home.) And Lawrence vs Texas, the Supreme Court decision decriminalizing sodomy, came down in 2003, and same sex couples now have marriage rights in multiple states, adoption rights in even more places, and the freedom to serve openly in the armed forces. And majority public opinion has gone from ignoring or reviling us less than a generation ago to supporting us as full equal partners. It’s amazing what’s happened.

So I’m thankful, and I hope you are, too, whether or not you’re gay and whether or not you’re married. It’s good to have rights. It’s good to have a public discourse where we can share our ideas, argue for our convictions, and air our complaints. This is all good.

In spite of whatever turmoil you may see on TV this week, we live in an improving world. There is good cause for thankfulness.

The Skank-tity of Marriage

2011-11-06T22:50:00.000-08:00

So, it turns out Kim Kardashian's wedding was either a completely fabricated-for-TV event or, at best, perhaps the most ill-considered, frivolous set of nuptials since Britney Spears' drunken two-day first marriage. And yet not one right wing pundit I've seen has decried this distasteful travesty for cheapening, demeaning, or in any other way damaging the institution of marriage as a whole (my serious commitment to Phil, on the other hand, remains, in the minds of these same people, a terrible threat to tradition and societal stability everywhere. Sigh.)

My dear friend, Grace, pounded out an outraged message to me about this when the Kardashian news broke. I didn't think, I admit, that there was much to write about there. Surely, nobody in America expects the Kardashians to be anything but shallow, self-consumed, and utterly disrespectful of anything that doesn't profit them? And anyway, who cares? The irony of Kim, Britney, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, and tons of other trashings of the sanctity of marriage getting respect while same sex commitments get, well, trashed, is old news.

But then I read another story, and my blood did begin to simmer some. This one was about a new announcement from my favorite hate group, the Family Research Council. They slobbered all over a select group of congressmen who have done things like fight to defund Planned Parenthood, supported DOMA, denied LGBT rights, and worked in various other ways to turn back the clock on equality and good sense. FRC president Tony Perkins said he applauded these congressmen’s “commitment to uphold the institutions of marriage and family.”

The problems here are legion. First, without medical care or education from Planned Parenthood, even more young women are likely to become teenage mothers — especially in the Bible Belt, which perennially has the highest rates of unwed pregnancy, teenage marriage, and divorce of anywhere in the U.S. And without other family planning services, those unprepared mothers’ offspring are going to have even less chance of growing up in a whole or financially solvent family.

In other words, this “upholding the institutions of marriage and family” really means working to destroy marriage and family by encouraging ignorance and trapping more and more people in poverty and desperation — not to mention the resulting higher odds of single parenthood. Nice work, congressmen. And thank you so much for noticing them, Tony.

But none of that is the best part of this story. Oh no. The congressman Tony Perkins really, really loves is Joe Walsh (R-IL), who shows his dedication to marriage and family not only by fighting to destroy other people’s chances for success, but by abandoning his own children and stiffing his ex-wife for more than $100,000 of child support. Joe Walsh is one of the most famous deadbeat dads in the country at the moment, but in the eyes of the FRC he’s showing “unwavering support of the family.” That's "support of family" in the extreme abstract, theoretical, completely divorced-from-reality sense, apparently. Not actual support of any actual family, especially his own.

Walsh claims the debt should really be reduced because during some of the years he was racking it up he was having a really tough time and not making much. No word on why he hasn't paid that lower amount, either, or what his excuse is for this year.

Don’t get me wrong – I do not mean to compare Kim Kardashian to Joe Walsh or his good buddy Tony Perkins. Although I’ve called her shallow and I seriously question her intentions, sincerity, and comprehension regarding her own wedding, she’s certainly never displayed the kind of callousness or cruelty of these guys. The only reason she's in the same blog as them is because these are parallel examples of how terms like “sanctity of marriage,” and “support for marriage and family,” really turn out to mean the exact opposite of what they’re saying. Kim Kardashian’s marriage was not sanctified or, in any way I can discern, a blessing upon the world. Joe Walsh and Tony Perkins’ efforts to destroy family, equality, and young people’s future lives is not supportive of family, marriage, or any tradition anyone in their right mind would want to defend. Yet, because of right wing propaganda and big money, these are the evils that get paraded on TV and in politics as good things, while Phil’s and my endlessly loving, committed, hardworking, happy and healthy marriage gets marginalized and Federally negated even here in San Francisco.

This stuff is so glaring and offensive, you’d think there’d be no need to point it out.

What Fundamentalists Get Wrong — Even When They Almost Get It Right

2011-11-06T22:48:00.000-08:00

Love In Action is the world’s oldest and largest organization dedicated to converting gays to heterosexuality. Recently, John Smid, the longtime leader of Love In Action, following in the footsteps of countless of his own graduates (and lots of grads and leaders of other, similar programs) came out as gay. In fact, he announced not only that he, personally, is gay, but that he never saw a single gay man changed into a heterosexual in all the years he ran the program.

Hallelujah. Smid’s personal story is striking evidence that this kind of “therapy” is utter nonsense, but his statements are more than that. As a former perpetrator of these practices, he can speak definitively about the entire system and call out the mistaken ideas it’s based on. After years of shouting that sexuality was only a behavior, Smid now says he’s learned it is an identity, something fundamental to the very core of who we are and how we relate to the world.

Again, hallelujah. I encourage everyone to read Smid’s words and commit his remarkably clear arguments to memory. Believe me, next time you find yourself debating with someone who thinks being gay is a choice, this will be the best ammunition you can have.

But at the same time that I’m excited about Smid’s statements, I find something about his approach incredibly off-putting. See what you think.

First of all, Smid remains married to his straight wife, although he’s perfectly open about the fact that they have no sexual interests in common. He doesn’t describe the nature of their current relationship or say why it still has value to them, or even whether what she thinks. He’s gotten some flack for that. He’s also annoyingly vague about his new stand on sin and how he now thinks God feels about gays. As someone who spent so much time declaring that God hated homosexuality and that gay relationships were worse than hellish, these are issues you’d think he ought to address.

But even more than these problems, I sense an underlying self-centeredness and lack of compassion about his whole approach. This is what drives me crazy about fundamentalism in general, and if I’m right it’s both sacrilegious and the very thing that makes reasoning with these people impossible.

Here’s what I’m talking about. Smid now runs a personal blog designed to minister to other gay men and women who identify as Christians. The question about whether anyone who’s so radically changed his own worldview and politics has any business ministering to anyone is a big one. But the more specific problem is Smid’s attitude toward the people whom Love In Action (and he, personally, as its leader) mistreated over the years. Some of their stories are horrific, but while Smid has expressed a general sort of remorse, he doesn’t really address the seriousness of the damage he has caused, or even own up to just how inappropriate and outrageous his own personal actions were in some cases.

Worse, he wants all of Love In Action’s survivors to contact him so that he can apologize personally.

Does this strike anyone else as grossly intrusive and selfish? I don’t care how sorry John Smid is, he has no right to suggest that anyone should get in touch with him at all, let alone anyone he victimized in the past. In other words, it’s not about you, John. Get out of the way, accept your own guilt, and leave Love In Action’s former victims find their own healing. Make public statements, by all means, and please tell the world that you and your organization were wrong, wrong, wrong and never had any “change” to offer anybody. But do not dare suggest that those you and your organization once abused have any responsibility, or even anything to gain, by getting in touch with you now.

To my mind, John Smid’s callous call for his former victims to help him out with his own repentance reveals a stunning lack of humility. His statements have tremendous value, and I think they’ll be a powerful tool for bringing down programs like Love In Action and the misguided beliefs that support them. But the man himself needs to learn when to shut up and listen. Listening is the very core of repentance. And John Smid, like all too many Christian Fundamentalists, seems much more interested in making sure everybody else is listening to him.

2011-09-08T08:16:00.000-07:00

My husband runs a regional theatre that develops a lot of new plays and musicals. This summer, one of those was a show called Little Rock, about the Little Rock Nine, the first African American kids to be integrated into a white high school there in 1958. It’s a terrible story: the students were abused, beaten, spat on, and treated like dirt both by many their fellow students and some teachers. President Eisenhower sent in troops to escort them to classes. One was expelled when she made the tiniest move toward retaliation, and when the other eight prevailed, the entire school district shut down for a year rather than allow them in again.

Watching this show made me think of our ongoing debate about whether or not it’s proper to compare the Civil Rights Movement with the LGBT community’s struggle for equality. I can understand why African Americans, who have been so cruelly mistreated for generations, and who continue to be looked at with suspicion and dislike in our “enlightened” society, would resent our co-opting their struggle. We haven’t, as a class, been abused so violently. We have not been kept out of schools at gunpoint or attacked on sight by mobs. We can “pass,” most of us, and get by in the straight world, even if it destroys our souls to do so. Most African Americans can’t even imagine having that choice.

On the other hand, the Little Rock Nine had each other for support. And when they went home, they re-entered a world of families and friends who looked just like them. We LGBT types do not have that. Our families are too often the first to reject us, and even if they’re supportive, they’re not like us. The Little Rock Nine suffered along with their community; we all suffer alone.

But even more than that, what struck me as I watched the play and learned about the horrors these children had to endure was that the hate was the same. They were called lazy and stupid, in spite of their academic achievements and exemplary behavior; we’re judged as sinful and promiscuous, even when we want to commit for life, raise children, and live the American Dream. They were told they’d be happier if they just “accepted their rightful place in the world”; we’re told we can be “cured.”

In the generations before Little Rock, similar pronouncements were made about women when they fought for the vote, Jews when they fought for their lives, and every other underclass that’s fought for its freedom throughout human history.

See the hatred on stage made it clear how all this is really just a terror of change. Evolution has taught us to fear change. We need to know the rules, know who’s friend and foe, who’s above us and who’s below. Otherwise, how can we survive in the hard, ruthless, competitive world? How can we know who to rely on and who to fight?

Social upheavals like the Civil Rights Movement and LGBT equality upset that apple cart. The rules are in flux and the world is uncertain. The good news is that these things pass. The Little Rock Nine all completed their educations and went on to lives of great accomplishment. In our case, growing majorities of our fellow Americans are supporting our struggle and saying we deserve our rights.

But the bad news is that hate takes victims, and it’s not over yet. So the rallying cry is an old one, but still needed: fight fear. Recognize the weakness of those who hate, but do not allow them to spew their bile at you even for one second. Stand up for yourself and for others lovingly, peacefully, and ruthlessly. And let the whole world know that hate has no place here, even if it is an (unfortunate) outgrowth of a perfectly reasonable evolutionary mechanism.

Why Gays Are Better At Life, Love, & Marriage

2011-09-05T20:38:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest advantages of being gay, I’ve always said, is that you get to make your own rules. After generations of being denied marriage, family, the right to live and work openly, now we get to decide for ourselves — each of us individually — how to exercise them.

Monogamy? Maybe it’s really not the be-all and end-all of marriage. Wedding ceremonies? They can include any rituals we like, or none at all. Domestic life? Who cooks and who cleans? Well… who’s best at it?

But there’s a flip side to this coin. If we’re going to make our own rules, then we have to really know who we are, and take responsibility for all our own needs, desires, fears, strengths and weaknesses.

In marriage, it all begins with honesty. And that’s not nearly as simple as it sounds. It’s easy enough — and true — to assert that honesty is far more important to marriage than strict sexual monogamy, as Dan Savage recently reminded us via Mark Oppenheimer in the New York Times Magazine. But being consistently, lovingly honest, especially in the emotional balancing act that is romantic commitment, is a skill that takes years to learn.

The response to Savage’s article has been hilarious, full of all kinds of sturm und drang and incomprehensible objections: Ross Douthat wrings his hands over the idea of nonmonogamy on the basis of what he claims is the debacle of heterosexual swingers of the 1970s, as if a few bored suburbanites from 40 years ago had anything to say about, well, much of anything; blogger Sady Doyle thinks Savage’s outlook is too male-centric — apparently, in her view, women are so handicapped by their sex that they can’t be expected to stand up for themselves, or understand their own needs; Eve Tushnet doesn’t understand how eros can be such a wild force within us and yet also susceptible to reason. Savage’s point is that it is wild and inherently untamed but our behavior, if we’re responsible adults, shouldn’t be. Controlled nonmonogamy, then, is one reasonable tool — for some people, in some situations — he’s suggesting for achieving that.

What comes through loud and clear in all this hysteria is the same terror we hear from the foolish conservatives who somehow still believe that the American family should be some sort of Ozzie and Harriet fantasy straight out of 1950s TV. Authoritarianism, hidebound tradition for its own sake, and not thinking for yourself are the principles these people believe in, because having to figure things out for themselves and take responsibility are simply too terrifying.

Well, they are terrifying if you’ve never had to look inward, figure out who you really are, and determine for yourself what you need and what you have to offer. But knowing those things and honoring them is the only way to be truly honest and really loving — in a relationship or just walking down the street each day.

We gay people have a huge advantage here. Living through the hardships and hatred of a homophobic society tends to strip us of our illusions early. Even now that's true — otherwise, there'd be no need for It Gets Better. But for those of us who do stick it out, there's an enormous payoff. And even with the hardships, I wouldn't give it up for the world.

Gay people are smart, tough, and wise. Far from being the pariahs of marriage and family — not to mention spirituality and Godliness! — I think we’re the models everybody else should be following.

New Home

2010-03-05T07:20:00.001-08:00

A marriage is not made at the altar, or even in the bedroom. No, it’s made on long, miserable road trips, and at the dinner table with each other’s parents, and at the vet’s office when your cat is sick. A marriage is really made in adversity, in other words, which is why Phil and I are buying a house.

No, not really. Well, yes, I mean, we really are buying the house. It’s the ugliest house in San Francisco, and we’re quickly learning to love it. It features seafoam blue carpeting, and knotty pine-paneled walls — all of them — and a hideous dropped ceiling with a silvery pattern of leaves on it. In the master bedroom, which used to be a porch and therefore slopes precipitously toward the back yard, the walls are covered with the weirdest sort of paneling-cum-wallpaper you’ve ever seen, and there’s one of those bulbous popcorn ceilings overhead. It’s sparkly.

Needless to say, we will be performing lots of demo and renovation before we move in and subject the cats to all this. We already have some testosterone-for-hire lined up to help us, and next week we’ll be auditioning contractors.

Oh, the fun of it all!

The bad part is going to be leaving this place that’s been our home for two years. We have loved this rental, made good use of it, welcomed our friends here, thrown parties here, planned and prepped and stored all the pieces of our wedding here, gotten to know San Francisco here. Two of my beloved cats, who had lived all over the United States with me and seen me through careers, boyfriends, crises, and finally marriage and happiness, died while we lived here, so this was their last home. We’ll be taking their ashes with us, but that part will be very hard.

But the new neighborhood is wonderful. The new street is beautiful. The new house is also both those things, albeit mostly only in potential so far. But it’s going to be fun. At least partly. And the eventual payoff will be worth it. We hope.

We’re off to a new, exciting adventure. Tallyho!

Keeping the World Safe for Straight Marriage

2009-12-09T08:07:00.000-08:00

I'm honestly not going to be snarky about this.

Last week, Rachel Maddow interviewed Richard Cohen, an author and self-proclaimed therapist who says he can "lead people out of homosexual attraction." In other words, he's one of those nut jobs who claims to make gays straight. If, of course, the gays really want to, and if they are willing to spend plenty of money buying his books, videos, and CDs.

(For the record, the Catholic Church has recently revved up its own efforts in this area. Heavy sigh.)

I'm not going to be snarky, in spite of how completely ludicrous Cohen's theories, therapies, and general presentation are. I'm exercising restraint because, first, the jokes are just all too easy, and second, because I have a personal history with this issue.

Here’s the story: when I was 22 years old, I became a born again Christian and embarked on a seven year odyssey to change my sexuality. I was living in South Africa at the time, and all my best friends had started attending a really wild and terrific Bible study. Yes, wild and terrific. I’d been searching all my life for some sort of religious connection, and in this group we sang loud, discussed Scripture seriously, and were exceedingly filled with joy. The requirement to stop sleeping around did not, honestly, seem all that intrusive as a price for belonging and feeling I'd found some meaning, and a chance for happiness in my life.

Upon returning to the States six months later, things went downhill. And as the years went on, they really got bad. I attended a succession of much less joyful, helpful churches. In those place, the Bible was treated as a weapon to beat down anyone who disagreed with the pastor. It was also used to beat us down, and remind us how sinful, miserable, and generally repugnant we were. Nice, huh?

Meanwhile, in my quest to "heal my sexuality" I did all the things I was told: I read books on the subject, I attended Christian support groups and Bible studies. I underwent counseling with pastors. And I prayed. I prayed and prayed and prayed, often for two or three or four hours a day. I learned a lot, through all that. I learned how my own mind worked, and I learned where a lot of my lifelong depression had come from. I learned all the things the books and pastors and other people told me I'd learn.

Except I didn't learn how to like girls. In fact, the one unexpected thing I learned was just how fundamental to my identity being gay way. Liking girls, even if such a change were possible, would have required me to become a completely different person, like in a cheesy sci-fi movie where they lock somebody into a big scary chair, slap a helmet on their head, and electronically impress a new personality into their body. That wasn't what I wanted, and I couldn't believe it was what God wanted, either. And anyway, the technology hasn't been invented — thank God.

I also met another gay man who was a Christian, and he opened my eyes because he was so much more joyful, caring, generous, and patient than any of the Christians I knew. Gifts of the Holy Spirit abounded with him, which I'd been taught was impossible, since he was a big sinner. So the house of cards that had been constructed all around me collapsed. I'd already stopped going to church regularly, because I couldn't find anything like the joy and love I'd had at the start.

The funny thing about that Evangelical world is that, like brainwashing, it requires constant re-applications. Once I was out in the world on my own, the essential illogic and meanness of the worldview became apparent. I stepped away, and in the years since, as I've gone through all manner of spiritual struggles and confusions, and even as I've mourned lost friends from those years, I've never for one second been tempted to return there.

But there is one other piece to this story. I had a friend who went on this odyssey with me, and he did change his lifestyle, and he's still living happily with his wife and three children, a quarter of a century later. I do not say, you'll notice, that he changed his sexuality. He didn't. What he did do was make a conscious decision to live a different way, and build a very mainstream, traditional life which he'd always wanted very much, even while he was living as an out gay man. He'd mourned then that he'd never have it. And the various Christian communities he's found in the years since have served the purpose of supporting him and reaffirming his choice.

It works because he's honest. His wife knows all about his past, and knows that some things haven't changed. But she also knows he adores her, and is honest with her, and doesn't go out catting around because he's got what he wants, what's most important to him. In his case, the most important thing isn't about sex.

I couldn't do that. My life with Phil is my most important thing. It's what I've always wanted, even when I didn't know that.

So that’s it. Anyone can live any way they wish, and there are, indeed, ways to make almost anything work, if you're honest. But there is no “healing”, no reprogramming, no essential change. Anyone who says different is lying.

There is also no “healing” necessary. Gay is good, and moral, and valuable to society. It offers distinct advantages over heterosexuality. So take that, Richard Cohen, and all your abusive, selfish, mean-spirited ilk.

In fact, go to hell, Cohen. And please take all your terrible lies, which are killing people and leading to terrible abuses in other countries, with you.

In the Midst of the Unkindness...

2009-12-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

This is a follow-up to last week's post about the actions of the New York State Senate regarding their gay marriage bill. In the midst of that sadly unkind outcome, there was a ray of light so bright, it actually made me cry when I finally watched it this morning, even though I already knew most of the things which were said.

Senator Diane Saviano gave one of the most cogent and also beautiful speeches about the issue of legalizing same sex marriage which I have ever heard. She swept away all the cobwebs of confusion which generally surround these debates, and clarified exactly why discriminating between relationships is not the State's function, but is—and will always remain—the church's. She also pointed out, ruthlessly but not without compassion, where the real threat to marriage and moral standards lies.

I'll reiterate the gist of her arguments, because I think we should all be repeating them as often as possible. The government, as Senator Saviano amusingly pointed out, would issue her a marriage license if she applied for one with a cab driver she'd met five minutes ago. She might not know his background, his family, or his last name, but by the government's standards, they would be a perfectly acceptable couple. This is because it is not the government's job to judge the fitness of a relationship, only its legitimacy in legal terms. In other words, the government's only job is to assure that both people applying for a license are, in fact, authorized to do so—that they're old enough, of sound mind, and not already married to someone else. As far as the government is concerned, a marriage license is just a legal contract. Therefore, the government's only interest in it is its enforceability.

The church, on the other hand, considers the fitness of a marriage, both in terms of the individuals involved and the relationship itself. The Roman Catholic Church (and many others) refuses to bless a variety of different kinds of unions based on its own internal set of standards. A church may not marry two people if one of them has been divorced, or if one of them hasn't been baptized, or for countless other reasons. This, too, is right and good, because to a religious organization, marriage is a sacrament. Therefore, the church's interest is in whether the relationship is appropriate, in line with church teachings, and likely to continue and strengthen the religious community.

See how different these are? The government will marry anyone who's old enough and available. The churches get to pick and choose. No gay marriage law will ever change this, just as no other marriage law has ever impacted religious behavior or rites (as long as those weren't in direct contradiction of other laws which would render the contract void, e.g. marrying minors or family members or multiple partners.)

On the issue of defending the sanctity and traditional scope of marriage, Senator Saviano also spoke eloquently. "We have a Wedding Channel," she said, where we can watch people "spend billions of dollars and behave in the most appalling way, all in an effort to be princess for a day." We have game shows, she points out, where we give away brides and grooms as prizes. Our culture trains little girls from an early age to hunger after their shot at the altar, to imagine their wedding dress, their ceremony, etc., etc., but "they don't spend five minutes thinking about what it means to be a wife," the Senator concludes. And she is right.

Most of this has been said and discussed before, but that doesn't make it less affecting, and it certainly doesn't make it less true. Senator Diane Saviano has stated the situation of marriage succinctly and compellingly. I encourage everyone to watch the video of her speech on YouTube and to send it along to everyone you know who might be struggling with these issues.

This debate has become so freighted with fear and confusion over the past months that seeing the issues clearly is difficult. The argument itself has become so contentious that even having the discussions without anger is supremely challenging. Senator Saviano's speech is a lovely antidote to these problems, and can be used as a tool and also an encouragement.

And, to answer my own charge of last week, her speech is proof that, even in the middle of terrible selfishness and unkindness, human beings do display wonderful wisdom sometimes.

Unkindness and the NY State Senate

2009-12-03T07:47:00.000-08:00

This should be a rant about the New York State Senate, but it isn’t.

Oh, don't get me wrong — there are lots and lots of reasons to make fun of the New York Senate. These are, after all, the people who, earlier this year, took to locking each other out of the Statehouse and kept changing parties to prevent anyone from having a majority. Their constituents say the whole system is broken, and no one who's any good will run, so they're stuck with these same yahoos year after year. Not a stellar recommendation, really.

As of this week, of course, this is also the latest legislative body to stomp all over equality by voting down same sex marriage. According to everyone who watched this latest battle, the final vote was an outplay of political fear and posturing and bore almost no relationship to what anyone in the room really believed. That, if true, is shameful.

Thanks, New York State Senators. We really, really appreciate your heartfelt willingness to throw us under the bus in order to protect your own sorry asses, which we understand you feared might be in danger because of the anti-marriage rantings of Sarah Palin and her professionally ignorant far right cronies.

But I digress. This post really isn’t a rant about the pathetic senators up in Albany. Their behavior was depressingly craven, but not really surprising. Because we've seen it all before, again and again. Regardless of the particular arguments, regardless of the debates or the sound bites or the statements to the press, the bottom line is this was just another instance of the remarkable unkindness that’s been showered upon us LGBT folks lately.

That’s right: simple unkindness. It's been everywhere you look recently. Rick Warren refused to disavow the heinous anti-gay policies of his good friends in Uganda, who want to execute people who are gay and imprison those who fail to turn them in. The Catholic Church in DC threatens to throw that city’s poor and needy to the wolves rather than acknowledge that gays and lesbians are actually members of society. A bishop in South America has announced that no LGBT folks can get in to heaven — this one's not an issue I’m particularly worried about, especially if we're talking about the Catholic version of heaven, where I wouldn't be welcome, anyway, but the statement was calculated to distress people, and certainly qualifies as a massive act of unkindness.

And the list of unkindnesses goes on and on. America is a great, smart, trendsetting nation, but we have never been a kind place. We were born in anger and have made our greatest advances — socially, technologically, and economically — through competition.

We are rightly known for our great freedoms and opportunity, but we guard those benefits jealously; we do not like to share them. We shut our borders to the needy who ask would come to us, we turn our backs on the starving and the sick in faraway parts of the world, we ignore those in our own cities who are so poor and downtrodden that they can no longer even dream of the better life which the rest of us believe is our birthright.

Really, is it any wonder that, when handed the opportunity to shut down someone else’s dream at no cost to themselves, our lawmakers jump at the chance? Is it any wonder that, offered the chance to make themselves feel better by pushing down another group and curtailing its rights, the majority of voters across the country do not behave according to their best impulses, but immediately fall back into their most shallow, fearful, selfish selves and vote against us?

For the record, no group has ever been awarded rights by popular vote. That’s right: the majority of us, no matter what we say in polls or after the fact, has never once, in 234 years, willingly shared our freedoms with any minority group. If Emancipation had been put to the popular vote, do you think we would have given up buying and selling human beings? Of course not — we love to have power over one another, and besides, slavery was a great economic engine.

If mixed-race marriage had needed the approval of the staid white masses, do you think they'd have given it? Don’t be ridiculous. The same arguments which are levied against gay marriage now were used for interracial couples in just a few decades ago: against God's law, a redefinition that betrays tradition, and — our ultimate bugaboo — bad for the children. Sorry folks! Stick to your own color or stay single!

So when it comes right down to it, getting upset over the New York Senate vote against gay marriage this week just seems pointless. They behaved callously, selfishly, and foolishly. But the truth is that all too often such bad behavior is — no matter how many glowing, hopeful patriotic speeches we make — the American Way.

Who's Really Doing Damage to the LGBT Cause?

2009-11-30T07:21:00.000-08:00

Phil often complains that being a gay pioneer sucks. But judging from Newsweek and Good Morning America, the real hell is being a gay role model.

Our first generation of role models was exemplified by characters like the clean-as-a-whistle, utterly non-threatening Will Truman on Will & Grace and those perfectly charming, also sex-free boys on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Now we have a new flavor of LGBT TV stalwarts. They’re on Prime Time and they’re flaunting their sexuality in a variety of ways. And people in the press are lining up to tell them they’re doing it all wrong.

Newsweek struck the first blow, in an article by Ramin Setoodeh, who claimed that flamboyant men like American Idol’s Adam Lambert and the gay character on Fox’s new musical series, Glee, who is named Kurt Hummel, may be alienating Middle America and undoing all the good results Will and Queer Eye achieved. Then, Good Morning America also registered disapproval by canceling Lambert’s appearance on the morning after his no-holds-barred, sexualized performance at the American Music Awards. ABC claimed that their viewers would be offended if he behaved that way at 8 am, and that in any case he was a loose cannon and they couldn’t risk it.

That's utter nonsense, and offensive, but far be it from me to waste time explaining all the reasons why. That’s been done quite well already (see Michael Jensen's response and Dennis Ayers' follow-up, both at AfterElton.com.) On the other hand, this debate has raised some interesting and, I think, important issues beyond the question of whether Setoodeh and/or GMM are completely off their rockers.

First, let's look at just what, exactly, these LGBT role models are actually modeling. In the early days of Will and Queer Eye, the message was “We’re here!” and that's pretty much all it was. Oh well, it might also have been, "And we're cute and smart and useful!" Fine. This was all the message that was needed then, because much of America didn't know anything about gay people, including what they looked like or that they lived perfectly normal lives.

But now we've moved beyond that. Adam Lambert and Kurt Hummel are living out a message of self-acceptance and even celebration by virtue of actually going through what real LGBT people suffer.

The moment you admit you're gay is the moment you give up all your dreams for the future. You're never going to be just one of the guys (or girls), you're never going to advance to that Prince Charming white picket fence vision of domestic bliss you've been told is your birthright. You're not going to have an easy road, no matter how smart and good looking and creative you are. Instead, you're going to be a minority, with all the challenges that implies.

You learn to build other, better dreams, but the process of giving up what you've been promised by fairy tales and TV shows and your mother at bedtime is wrenching. But here's the good news: it's makes you grow up. Self-reflection leads to self-acceptance, and it leads you to an understanding of just who you are, what you believe, and what (or who) you can rely on. It makes you stop taking the world as given and start examining it to see what's really there. Valuable lessons, and anyone who doesn't experience this kind of challenge in life has no reason to learn them. So LGBT folks have a serious advantage.

Shallow, non-threatening, sitcom-ready Will Truman demonstrated none of this. But Adam Lambert and Kurt Hummel are living it out before our eyes. Our latest collection of LGBT role models may be less warm and fuzzy, but they represent an important advance on the old brand.

And our high profile LGBT role models have advanced in other ways, too. Not only are they more varied than in the old days, but they’re also much more integrated into the TV mainstream. The days of Queer Eye For the Straight Guy may be are over, but Ted Allen, its gourmet maven, shows up nearly daily on the Food Network, and no one so much as mentions the fact that he has a boyfriend back at home, sharing his own kitchen. Ellen Degeneres may be chatting with celebs rather than exploring lesbian issues on a sitcom, but People Magazine published six pages of photos of her and Portia DeRossi's wedding last year. Over on MSNBC Rachel Maddow talks casually about being gay and mentions her long-time girlfriend, Susan, without any ramifications. Neil Patrick Harris came out publicly several years ago but plays what may be the most heterosexual character on TV on How I Met Your Mother and wins Emmys for doing it.

Gay is no big deal, and isn’t that the goal we’ve been fighting for?

The bottom line is, no one seems to be worried about flamboyant gays except Newsweek and Good Morning America (and a few other media outlets who are desperately looking for attention.) Just like when Cokie Roberts appointed herself keeper of the nation’s morals and kept hammering on about President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky when poll after poll showed that, across America, no one wanted to hear it anymore, this current tempest in a teapot is really a great big story about the press trying to create a big story.

Gays on TV are not a big deal these days, even if they’re kissing each other or bumping and grinding in stilettos. America has, to an increasing degree, gotten over it. The American press only hurts our cause by refusing to get over it, too.

God, people! Grow up a little!

What I Learned At the Revolution

2009-10-27T07:45:00.001-07:00

Here’s what I learned at the March on Washington on October 11: Representative Barney Frank and lots of other older, more experienced gay and lesbian activists got it wrong.

Barney Frank said this March was "a waste of time," and I've also heard it decried as "a terrible idea" and "horribly organized." Not having been to earlier marches, I can’t compare and so can’t really judge that last one. But I can tell you why it was definitively not a terrible idea, and certainly not a waste of time.

This March drew a whole new crowd which had never done this sort of thing before. The streets in Washington that Sunday were full of people in the twenties who’d never felt moved to take to the streets. They'd never felt personally connected to the demonstrations or the causes of the past, much as they may have watched those with interest.

But in the wake of Proposition 8's passage here in California, and as a response to the ridiculous and stupefying rhetoric of the anti-LGBT forces buying up airtime, they felt connected this time. The March also included lots of people like Phil and me, who are in our mid-40s, and also lots of thirty-somethings and fifty-somethings and every other age, the day really belonged to the younger crowd. And that was a great thing for a number of reasons beyond the simple excitement of seeing a whole new generation get energized.

The mood at the March was ebullient. The day was gorgeous, but I suspect that even if we’d all had rain pelting down on our heads, it wouldn’t have mattered. The fact that, just before the March kicked off, an honest-to-god rainbow appeared in the sky directly over our heads was a grand gesture on the part of the heavens which the crowd celebrated and cheered, but which it also, really, took as no more than due. The world was obviously watching, this group knew. The world was tuned in to the crowd’s own tweets and Facebook postings, already commenting on its blogs. The power of people, and especially of people talking, speaking out as they stepped forth, and speaking out again and again, continually as they travelled to Washington, and walked the two-mile route, and oohed and ahhed over Lady Gaga, and clapped and sang along at the rally, was manifest all around us. The world was more than watching. It was walking alongside us.

So that’s two reasons Barney Frank and all those other older, more experienced protest organizers got it wrong. First, the mere fact of mobilization: it is never wrong to allow people to participate, and the fact taht this demonstration was energized by and centered around a new group gave those people a brilliant affirmation that their actions do matter and their voices will be heard. Second, for purposes of making an effective global statement, this generation doesn't didn’t need the same kind of organization earlier groups did. Because of the technology which is so beautifully integrated into their lives and activities, they could protest on the fly, and pull in an audience of millions with their iPhones. Individually. But speaking as one. Isn’t that what grass roots protest is all about, anyway?

The final reason I think Barney et al got it wrong is a little subtler, and a little uglier, too, sadly. As the LGBT fight has become more mainstream, as the organizations and individuals who lead our struggle for equality, for legal protection, and for full investment as first class citizens grow more sophisticated and more powerful, they feel a natural urge to control the whole movement. There is an instinct to herd together all those who feel as we do, to sign them up not only as supporters but as foot soldiers, and to make sure they are toeing the party line and fighting as the organizers want them to fight. That’s the most efficient way to achieve something, isn’t it? That’s the way to run a revolution: carefully, strategically, and always taking the long view.

Well… maybe, and maybe not. I am grateful for those who have dedicated their lives and careers to LGBT rights in my generation. But I resented it in the 90s when they said the time to fight for marriage equality had not come yet, and I don't like it when they try to shoot down a natural uprising like this one just because its form does not match their administratively-minded understanding of how to protest. They're out of date and, much worse than that, they're pushing away the most powerful population out to achieve our most audacious goals.

And that gets to my other belief: I think my generation has grown afraid to be too audacious. We have a lot to protect now, and we've learned to play the game from the inside, and to fight our battles inch by inch rather than in great, sweeping gestures. The people at the March that Sunday believed in grand moves. They believed in miracles and they believed in the power of a great mass of people, and they believed in themselves. And honestly, anyone who doesn't believe along with them had better just get out of their way, because they have a mission now and they are going to achieve it.

The revolution was televised. More important, it was Twittered and Facebooked and blogged and YouTubed. It is still all those things, and it continues to be discussed (and reblogged, and reTweated) and will be for who knows how long? All those who were there are participating—still. They will continue to participate, and pull in many others of their fellows who couldn't make the physical trip on the 11th. The fight continues without any input from any organizers at all.

The revolution is all new again. We're going to win it. Hallelujah!

Cris & Phil's Wild, Fun, Super-cool Adventure

2009-10-15T10:01:00.000-07:00

We went to see Hair last night. Great show (won the Tony for Best Revivial last year and is still the buzz among Bway queens everywhere), one of my favorite theatres (the Hirschfeld), and the very top item on my list when we first started talking about this trip to NY. But things changed, as the time got closer. Or perhaps what I should say is that things... intensified.

First of all, rather than a simple trip to NYC, this jaunt became a multi-stage, completely complicated, dueling-business-trips adventure between Phil and me, with a few days carved out in the middle for vacation. Okay, fair enough. At the same time, the March on Washington was announced, so we extended and altered our plans to include a few days in DC before we came up here. That was complicated, in turn, by my sudden need to be in Atlanta for work just before then, which extended my DC time and suddenly added a visit to my cousin there, rather than a hotel, but never mind that. More details later in another post. For this moment, I just want to give you some context for Hair.

We saw Finian's Rainbow on our first night in town, mostly to check in with my fabulous, brilliant adopted NY mama, Terri White. She was fabulous, brilliant, etc., and we had a great time over drinks after the show catching up on gossip and comparing wedding notes (hers, to the gorgeous Donna Barnett, is in three weeks.) Then, last night, dinner with one of Phil's old Yale buds and Hair.

Got that? All up to date now? James walked us to the theatre after we'd eaten and we said goodbye, but in the middle of that we were interrupted. And this is where the fun begins. There was a small documentary crew filming and interviewing people outside the theatre, and they'd targeted us because we were wearing our HRC tshirts under our blazers. Somehow, the tshirts became a beacon, and the woman interviewing zeroed in on us. She introduced herself as Ibby Carothers, from Marriage Equality New York, and explained she was filming something for In the Life, a PBS show profiling LGBT newsmakers and issues, and had been backstage interviewing Gavin Creel and some of the other Hair-ites (Follicles? Strands? Locks?) about their experience busing down to DC for the March a few days earlier. We talked on camera about the crowd there, the crowd at the theatre, the fact that they seemed younger and more energized than at previous events, and the general excitement that seems to be growing about LGBT issues and the national/federal equality fight in particular. And at the end, almost as an aside, Phil mentioned that we were one of the 18,000 same sex couples who'd gotten legally married during California's 5 month window of opportunity last year, and all hell broke loose.

Well, what really happened was that the interviewer got very excited and started filming again, wanting to hear more about our feelings as a married couple and the fact that Hair more or less marked the end of our first anniversary celebration, which had begun, officially, at the HRC gala in DC a few days earlier (where Gavin Creel had also appeared and, in fact, sung one of the songs from the show onstage.) Then they shot us kissing and walking in to the theatre, we found our seats, and the show started.

Without going in to a whole, complete review, let me just tell you that Hair is fantastic. Inspiring, emotionally satisfying, beautiful to behold but also covering a grand range of emotions and bringing up some serious issues, brilliantly done throughout, and one of the most uplifting, energizing theatre experiences I've had in a long time. That great score doesn't hurt, and neither does the fact that the cast is, without exception, excellent and at the top of their games. Whew.

But aside from all the raving, what you need to know about Hair is that at the very end of the show, the cast comes out into the house to invite audience members up onstage to dance with them. And we went. And, since I had our camera in my pocket, I took a couple pictures, and then we got a picture together, kissing, taken by the lady dancing next to us. And then, when the cast and ushers began herding us all offstage again, one of the cast members was suddenly standing in front of us saying, "Are you the two guys celebrating your anniversary?"

Huh? I mean, yeah, but... huh? How did this happen? We said something helpful like, "Uh, yes. How did you know about that?" And she said, "Oh, Gavin made an announcement. Will you come backstage and say hi after the show? I'll give them your names at the door." So, a few minutes later, we were threading our way through the throng to the doorman who, indeed, looked on his list, found Cristian and Phil listed there, and directed us inside and up onstage again, where about a dozen other friends and supporters of company members were hanging around waiting to meet them.

This was so surreal. How did we become Known to these people? What just happened? We spoke to a couple of cast members, as they began to come out, each one walking up to us with big grins and saying, "are you the guys?" and "thank you for coming!" as if we were doing them a favor. And then Gavin Creel walked up, and we played the whole scene again with him. The PBS interviewer, it turned out, had sent a message backstage after talking to us. Apparently she liked our story.

Gavin Creel is a terrific actor. He wholly deserves the praise he's been getting for his performance as Claude, but even more than that, I think he's a terrific example. He came out publicly some time ago, in spite of the fact that, as a rising Broadway leading man, he had more than a little cause to worry for his career. And he's made it his mission to fight for LGBT equality, establishing Broadway Impact and convincing the producers of his show to go dark on a Sunday so that the entire cast could travel to Washington to lead and appear at the March. Creel himself appeared at the HRC gala the night before, as mentioned, and he's worked tirelessly to pulicize this issue, to speak out about marriage and Don't Ask Don't Tell and hate crimes and the many other very real problems facing our community. He is someone who has absolutely put his money where his mouth is, walked the walk as he's talked the talk, and moreover, he's led his entire cast in doing the same. That's pretty fabulous, and I only hope he's reserving some time in the midst of all of this to find himself an amazing boyfriend. If I meet anyone who seems up to the task, Gavin, I'll send him your way.

So anyway, there we stood onstage at the Hirschfeld, chatting it up with some of the current hottest names on Broadway, accepting their congratulations to us, for god's sake, and, really, just having a great time. We told them all, repeatedly, how great we thought they were, but really, that bears repeating. I remember being 20-something or even 30-something and being a dancer. I was occasionally lucky enough to work in casts that were composed of great, supremely talented people, and we were even more rarely lucky enough to work together doing shows that demanded our best, and gave us something to really dig our teeth into and show off with. So I know what that experience is like, and anytime I see a New York cast obviously living out that fantasy—recently, I think of In the Heights, Spring Awakening, and now Hair—I feel so happy for them, because this is really a unique and uniquely blessed time in their lives which they will always remember. In this case, the fact that this cast has taken all that joy and energy and directed it toward such important political and social work is simply mind-boggling. I can only salute them, thank them, and send our and all our brothers' and sisters' love at them. They are great, great champions.

The way this whole thing fell together seemed surreal and enchanted. Our vacation-cum-anniversary trip, HRC, the March, our tickets to Hair which just happened to fall on the same night that a documentary crew was there... very bizarre and unpredictable. But wholly fabulous. Theatre magic, of the best kind.

Vive la revolution, kids!

Our First Anniversary

2009-10-12T21:49:00.000-07:00

Phil and I have been married for one year now. One year and one week, as of this moment. In fact, it occurs to me that our vows and the newly-reverend Kelley’s pronouncement on us must even have happened at about this time, so… there you go. One year and one week ago.

This has been a great year. Also as very challenging one, but that’s just about our circumstances. The economy collapsed, our jobs had various dramas, and our lower level was infested by raccoons. All that made for weird and busy times. But our marriage, on its own and without regard to wildlife, has been wonderful.

Hopefully, all one-year-married couples feel this way. For us, being a same sex couple in this age of religiosity and fear, I suspect our feelings might be a bit more mixed and complex than average.

We had to spend this first year fighting for the legality of our marriage, which is not normally part of the post-wedding agenda. It wasn’t until Memorial Day that we got confirmation our marriage would stand, and at the same time we learned that none of our gay California brothers and sisters would be able to have legal weddings for themselves, which made the whole thing bittersweet, to say the least, and inspired most of our friends to send us emails of sorrow and mourning, in spite of the fact that, for us, the news was good. Surely, no straight person would ever stand for this sort of treatment by the government.

Over the course of the preparations last year, I learned why marriage is important to me: it’s not just about our commitment, it’s about our acceptance into our community and the world’s recognition of our status as a couple, separate and different from its recognition of us as individuals. There are other reasons, too, why marriage—both the word and the institution—are important. This status carries rights and responsibilities which simply cannot be assured with any jerry-rigged combo of other legal labels or accommodations. The very word carries meaning and impact completely unlike the effect of “domestic partnership” et al. So this is important.
But more personally, I went through another change in this. In the beginning, I felt weird calling Phil my husband. The word made me feel weird and self-conscious. Isn’t that weird? Even embarrassing. Partly, perhaps, this was a leftover reaction to some of the earliest same sex couples I heard using these labels. Remember Bob and Rod Jackson-Paris? They were two competitive bodybuilders who held a grandiose marriage ceremony in the 80s and toured the country, appearing frequently on Donahue and Oprah to talk about gay rights, commitments, etc. They were trailblazers, but as such people are, they were also a bit… off-putting. Very showy. Very loud. The fact that their relationship didn’t last that long, and that they were not the most articulate or most interesting spokesmen for our cause probably also made me, intellectual snob that I am, less likely to embrace them. I’m sure they are very nice men, but… they were body builders. Models. Pretty boys. And political activists, getting in people’s faces to make a point of referring to each other as their husband. So that word felt too loaded to me. I told myself I was the one with the problem, not society, and certainly not the friends and associates who’d come to our wedding and even, occasionally, introduced me to others as “Phil’s husband.” But I usually chose to say “partner” instead. And then felt that I was betraying, in a small way, the very thing we’d fought for and done.

But I started saying it, first to Phil and then to my friends, and then to others, and in print. And—no surprise here—the word “husband” is important, too.

I get to have a husband. We are one thing now, as well as two people. We are committed, and we are also accepted and reaffirmed—now by the California Supreme Court, no less!—in that commitment. We are married. He is certainly still my partner, in that we share a house, we shop together, we do all the coordinated things “partners” of any sort do. But we are more than that. We are husbands.

Here’s to the next year. And the next after that. And the next 50, or 100, or however many. And here’s to the day when all our brothers and sisters can be husbands and wives, and when everybody acknowledges them as such, everywhere, at every level. Here’s to us.

1 of the 18,000

2009-09-05T10:29:00.000-07:00

Phil and I, together, are one of the roughly 18,000 same sex couples who got legally married in California last year during the five months we could. I feel the other 17,999 out there, somewhere, going about their lives and, I'd imagine, feeling just as confused, hurt, and angry as I do when faced with vitriolic attacks from extreme right wingers on our commitments, our lifestyles, and ourselves as members of this society.

I wonder, often, why no political cause or organization has identified us or spoken of us as the powerful, symbolic group we are. We are 18,000 couples, a significant number emotionally if not statistically in this huge state. And we are now a special class of people, separated from both the mainstream and our gay and lesbian sisters and brothers by virtue of our weird, historically unique legal status. Surely we are a symbol of something? Useful as an example of how God does not rain down fire and brimstone at the drop of a marriage license? Representatives to point to as we live out our mainstream ambitions of settling down, providing stability for our families, buying homes and rooting ourselves into our communities?

That is, after all, what this is all about: stability and rooting. Think about it: if we really wanted to destroy the institution of marriage, why would we be so eager to join it? This is such a simplistic question that I'm almost embarrassed to write it. But think about it: if we wanted to destroy the institution of marriage, wouldn't we be working to undermine it legally? To, perhaps, take away married couples' rights rather than sharing in them? Wouldn't we be waging campaigns to convince the world that this commitment thing really isn't the positive force for society which all those loudmouthed preachers insist it is? Wouldn't we be out in the streets shouting, "No! Marriage is not the answer!" But we don't say or do any of those things. We say, "Yes! All you crazy fundamentalists crying out that marriage is the linchpin that holds the family, society, our country, all countries, and the entire universe together-- we agree with you! And we want to help out with that!"

In spite of its embarrassing obviousness, this is a notion which seems to have escaped James Dobson entirely, or he would never have said, "[Homosexuals] want to destroy the institution of marriage." It seems to have eluded Maggie Gallagher (quoted in the same article), or she couldn't have seriously asserted that same sex marriage, "will destroy American civilization."

Why in the world -- and I am asking this in all seriousness -- would we gays and lesbians want to destroy our own society? We grew up in the U.S. We enjoy the benefits of U.S. policies and opportunities. The great majority of us plan to stay in the U.S. and many of us are bringing up children in the U.S. We are not some alien visitors descending on the country like locusts, trying to exploit it for all it's worth and then leave it. We are its citizens, its residents. Our fates are tied to this country. We have a vested interest in strengthening it and this society. And we are trying to do that in exactly the same ways our more conservative neighbors have historically done so: by marrying, raising children here, buying homes and taking part in our local economies. By rooting ourselves into our communities to help uphold and strengthen them.

Really, this is all so simple. The logic here is worthy of a second grader. I am 46, and the super-conservative voices quoted above are older and much more accomplished than I. None of us should need to have such an elementary argument. This is all self-evident.

But it's not. Phil and I are, together, one of the 18,000 same sex couples who married in California while it was legal last year. We are a special class, because we are part of two minority groups at the same time. We are gay men, and we are a married couple. That means we are members of a sexual minority which still experiences terrible prejudice and discrimination, to say nothing of violence, in many parts of this country. But it also means we are working, by our very existence, to change that. Being a couple makes us part of the underground of believers who want the next generation to live in a better, stronger, happier country than we do.

In other words, we really believe in the power of marriage. Can James Dobson and Maggie Gallagher and all their ilk say the same thing?

I Don't Know How To Do It Better, But...

2009-07-20T22:29:00.000-07:00

Over the last year and a half, we gays have been thrilled to be told that we are equal, then crushed to be slapped down and told that no, we're not, then both buoyed and dispirited to hear that we are, but we're not, and in any case our committed, society-supporting relationships are second class. Whew. As my husband says, it sucks being a pioneer.

But what should we do now? In the immediate wake of Prop 8's passing last year, as we marched and gathered and voiced our outrage, our shared goal seemed clear: change things. Now. When all this happened a second time this summer in response to the California Supreme Court's confirmation of the proposition, we again reacted clearly and in unity, with calls for a repeal on the 2010 ballot and a restoration of our marriage rights as soon as possible.

Now, a few months later, as multiple grass roots groups and national chapters of political organization descend on every gay event, knock on doors to canvas strangers, and send out mass emails asking for support, an opposing viewpoint is growing stronger among the moneyed movers and shakers of our community. Their belief is, increasingly, that this current movement will fail, that 2010 is too soon for a ballot initiative, and that we should all step back, retrench, and develop a better strategy rather than risk going down in flames again.

So the argument is defined, and those of us who care about this issue but not aligned with either group are pulled both ways. Personally, I'd like to bitch slap 'em all.

On the one hand, although I’m a big believer in strategizing and fighting smart, as opposed to going off half-cocked, I am also a believer in passion, in anger, in inspiration and determination. The “not yet” camp is too cool and too cautious to win my love for this most personal, most intimately insulting issue. How can equality ever be a matter of timing? What reasonable argument is there for just rolling over and letting our abusers continue to mistreat us? By what skewed set of standards is it acceptable to allow bigotry to be a matter of convenience?

On the other hand, I’ve had a little contact with Equality California, and I’ve been receiving and reading Courage Campaign’s missives for more than a year now. They all drive me crazy, too. Their pleas for monetary support come across as desperate, and their organizing and canvassing seems amateurish. It's all enthusiastic as hell, but demonstrates little wisdom and none of the political shrewdness needed to effectively respond to our detractors and win over the fearful hearts and minds that slapped us down last November.

There is no center to this movement. Not only is there no central organizer, or even central organization, there is no central message. No hook, no clear rallying cry, no simple, transparent organization standing up for us or leading this charge.

There is, instead, a disorganized mob of activist organizations whose goals seem to overlap and whose methods seem to undercut each other. Go out in San Francisco any weekend and you will find representatives from all these groups tripping over each other on the sidewalks, bright grins and clipboards deployed in force. They and their endless pleas for support, for signatures, for money and time and heaven only knows what else exhaust and drive away even those of us who agree, who desperately want to help in this cause but can't discern a useful way to do so.

The fact that EQCA et al seem to be spending most of their time importuning people in gay neighborhoods only accentuates the problem. There may, indeed, be work to be done there -- gathering more supporters, alerting people to the most current needs -- but the inadvertent message is that these groups are playing it safe, that they remain disorganized, and that they are expending the main part of their energies competing with each other. How can they have any resources left to try to make a difference among our detractors?

Meanwhile, plans for a unified March on Washington this fall are also inspiring cries of "Too soon!" and "Wrongheaded!" But on that score, at least, I know what I, for one, will do. I am going to Washington. I will take part in whatever demonstrations or marches or other events are available. I will stand up and be counted as a gay man, as a representative of the 18,000 same sex married couples in California, as someone who believes the time has come to stop being patient and understanding and to say, simply, to all the bigots who would deny our basic rights, "Get over yourselves! It's not about you!"

I hope the groups in California find their way, somehow. I am eager to help in their cause, and to support their work. But so far, I can't find evidence that they're actually doing any work that might prove valuable.

The Last Five Years

2009-07-06T15:56:00.001-07:00

This months marks the fifth anniversary of Phil's and my meeting. And what you'd expect to read next would be me waxing rhapsodic, right? "Oh, how time flies! It seems like just yesterday that our eyes met across the room!" But no. It doesn't seem like just yesterday at all. It seems like 20 years, not five, and when I think of all we've been through, all the things we've done, I feel exhausted to the point of stupefaction.

Consider this: In the past five years, Phil and I have moved three times, with two of those moves being cross-country relocations. Between us, we have changed jobs five times. One of those was his and the other four were mine, including multiple career shifts as well as new employers (I've gone from Operations Manager to freelance marketeer to retail coffeehouse zombie to Executive Assistant to... marketing once again -- full circle, sort of.) We've weathered long-term houseguests and family illnesses and financial crises and the illness, treatment, and awful death of my beloved cat, which broke my heart and nearly killed Phil to watch. And we got married, in a full-blown ceremony with more than a hundred people in attendance and a three course dinner, all planned and prepared by, well, us. We threw the wedding in record time and amid world-caliber drama because we live in a state that both acknowledges us and treats us with contempt, that stands up for our rights yet simultaneously reduces us to the status of political football. It's been way fun, let me tell you.

And just to put this all in even better perspective, allow me to point out that Phil and I spent the first two years of our relationship living in different cities. We traveled to see each other. We traveled all over, meeting up not just in our home towns of Chicago and Manhattan, but in Atlanta and San Francisco and Stowe, Vermont, and Paris, France. We had a great time. Really, it was fabulous. Expensive, exhausting, frustrating and stressful, but also fabulous, as our pictures and stories attest. And then, after reaching the end of our patience for all that coming and going, and not being able to just spend a quiet night together, and after discussing our plans at great length and deciding that nothing much was likely to change, so we were safe taking the plunge, I left New York and moved to Chicago. And then Phil got an offer from TheatreWorks just six months later, and thus the whirlwind described above began. Yes, kids, that whole list of things I gave you above has happened not in the past five years, but really in the past three. Is it any wonder I look haggard?

Well, no, to be fair, even I, with all my jokes about aging, wouldn't (most days) describe myself as haggard. I do feel amazed though, that so much, well, life can get crammed into such a short time. Who knew? Whodda thunk? Oy!

Of course, the most important thing is, aside from my cat dying, I wouldn't change a bit of it. Really. Not even the horrible parts, like getting snowed into Salt Lake City or the miserable day we left Chicago. Phil is the love of my life, and if this is our journey, then so be it.

And even more than "so be it"-- I celebrate this silliness. This ridiculous, exhausting whirlwind. I love him, he loves me, this is our life together. It makes for a crazy story, but it's us, it's ours, and it's certainly not boring.

Most of all, it's what we've done together. As we've often said, if we didn't kill each other when we got stuck in North Platte, or had to drive down to San Diego for a theatre event three weeks before our wedding (diagramming the waiters' tracks for the reception all the way, because there simply was no other opportunity) then we must be meant to be together. In fact, each trial and challenge just brings us closer. We are meant for each other, and meant for this life.

Oh ye gods, though, I must say... what the hell has the next five years got in store for us?

Have Fun, People! Sheesh!

2009-07-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

As my old boss, Alycea, used to say, here's the thing: gay people and Gay Pride are in a weird place these days.

I have always said that there really is no such thing as a gay community, at least not a permanent one. Being gay is just not enough of a commonality to draw a group together. National heritage, religious practice, professional connections and all kinds of other things are way more important. All theatre and shopping jokes aside, being gay doesn't indicate much at all about your other interests, likes or dislikes, and so it doesn't, by itself, give you much to talk about at cocktail parties. Cocktail party chatter is a pretty good indication of group cohesion, so... the "gay community" is not, in most situations, a very solid group.

But we gay people do get together sometimes, notably for Gay Pride and political struggles. In the last few weeks in the U.S. and particularly in California, we've been having both. Pride was ten days ago, and the whole gay marriage drama slogs along, with states lining up pro and con and even politicians in DC beginning to figure out this is an issue worth discussing intelligently and even supporting.

But here's the thing (Alycea again) about both these issues here in San Francisco: nobody outside the 415 area code cares what we think. This fact comes as a shock to most of the citizens here, gay and straight. At least, it would come as a shock if they would ever consider it. But they don't. SF was a big deal in the gay rights movement in the 70s and 80s, just as it was a big deal in the counterculture in the 60s. But Haight Ashbury is no longer the center of the pot-smoking universe, and Castro Street is certainly no longer the place to go for political action or energizing rhetoric. It's just one more gay neighorhood, like similar areas in almost every major city in the U.S. In fact, it's less exciting than gay neighborhoods in some cities, mostly because it's convinced it's still so important and has refused to move on from its glory days.

The San Francisco gay community, such as it is, is convinced that the world is watching it. The overwhelming reaction to the passage of Prop 8 last November seems to be embarrassment. San Francisco is assumed to be Ground Zero for gay political power, and therefore should have been able to stem the tide of fear and conservatism from the Central Valley and elsewhere in this state, in spite of the fact that the vast majority of Californians outside the coastal urban areas are conservative, reactionary, and in some cases, wildly right-wing. This is the state that is home to more white supremicist groups than anywhere else in the nation, after all. But here in the Bay Area, we conveniently ignore that, and take ourselves to be the center of thought and the leaders of the nation. In the aftermath of the election and Prop 8's triumph last year, the overwhelming emotion here seemed to be embarrassment. Oh, sure, the fact that no new gay and lesbian couples could get married was bad, too. But mostly, we seemed to be concerned with our image.

I don't mean to condemn my co-homos here too harshly. But I do wish they'd all get over themselves. The world is not watching. It doesn't care that much. We Californians are not, in fact, central to anybody else's worldview (the one thing I've ever agreed with Dr. Phil on is hiw statement, "You'd be amazed how little time other people spend thinking about you.")

Meanwhile, the cause of same sex marriage continues in the Midwest and New England. And a new initiative is happening here to get a Prop 8 repeal onto the ballot in 2010. This time, we'll be a bit better organized, one hopes, and will be able to address our neighbors across the state, rather than wasting time and money fighting against undue out-of-state religious interference (one prays.)

And for the moment, what if we all just had fun at Pride, instead of being so self-important and earnest? The Pride Parade here is a model of family friendliness, and in this case, I have to say, that's not much of a recommendation. It goes on for hours, includes lots of music and floats and smiling, waving people. But if a five-year-old asked his parents what these people were parading about, I wonder what they'd tell him? I certainly don't know.

Gay Pride was born when a bunch of drag queens refused to be arrested and mistreated by abusive New York City policemen. The first "parade" was a demonstration outside the jailhouse to express solidarity with those who had gotten hauled off and locked up. The press, as Frank Rich has eloquently noted, shut its eyes. But the queens were determined, and having broken through the stifling silence that had been imposed on them for generations, they refused to shut up and go home quietly.

Forty years later, we're still loud, and we have achieved more and progressed further than those first protesters can possibly have imagined. But where does that leave us? We, nationally, debate the fine points of law. We argue amongst ourselves over subtleties of strategy and whether we dare offend some proportion of voters in order to publicize our cause to others. We tiptoe, we make nice. And in this city, we strait-jacket ourselves by our self-importance, our obsessive desire to be loved, and our maddeningly Clinton-esque worry over our legacy. And I, for one, am f*#%ing tired of it.

We've won the fights those first angry queens faced. But there are still others. There's the right to get married, the right to adopt children, both as couples and, in some states, individually. There's the need for mentoring, because our young people are still getting kicked out of their homes and left to fend for themselves on the streets. And there's the need for education, because the world is so very different from what our most conservative neighbors wish it were, and we are one of the best living examples of the fact that difference can be wonderful, not only scary.

I am here, as Harvey Milk was, to convert people. We all should be. In small ways and large, through whatever peaceful means we can create. Our forefather/mothers stood up for themselves and changed the world. Surely we, in this infinitely more supportive age, can do no less.

Last Year At This Time...

2009-06-16T13:27:00.000-07:00

The first anniversaries are beginning. One year ago last week, same sex marriages began to be performed in California, and Phil and I attended our first ceremony.

Our first legal ceremony. I don't think I even realized the import of that at the time. With all the arguments, all the drama surrounding the issue, and with all the commitment ceremonies, gay couples who called themselves "married", etc., over the years leading up to that day, did I even stop to realized, this was the first time I'd seen two people of the same sex legally bound together? I don't know. I don't remember.

What I do remember is that the day was nothing like I'd expected. I didn't know what to expect, to be honest. There had been so many protests, so much noise in the op-ed pages and raised voices on the news that I more or less expected throngs of infuriated conservatives storming the doors of City Hall, us homosexuals having to sneak in and out like patients at an abortion clinic, dodging molotav cocktails and threats. What I found was no protesters at all, a few dozen supporters gathered in the Civic Center with signs celebrating this new era, and a group of Christian Scientists passing out cupcakes. Red, white, and blue cupcakes. There were also a couple tents inhabited by ministers offering to perform ceremonies for those couples who hadn't been organized enough to plan ahead with the City.

And inside, although the Rotunda and the huge hall where marriage licenses were being issued and all the hallways and balconies were full of people, the atmosphere was quiet. It was calm. It was joy-filled. Sunlight poured in and lit up the gorgeous building, and all the staff were smiling.

I know this sounds too Hallmark-card and smarmy to be consciounced. But it's true. I've never seen so much simple happiness, so much generosity in one place, so universally shared.

I got there on time, which turned out to be early. Our friends, Keren and Jill were waiting with their baby and a couple other friends. As an official witness, I was marginally part of the license process, stepping up with Keren to sign the document after the two brides. The City of San Francisco had wisely set aside one of their largest meeting rooms on the ground floor for licenses, with lots of seating and tables full of staff ringing the space. Each couple took a number, or signed in somewhere, and got called up to fill out their paperwork. They were then, if they'd signed up for a ceremony, assigned a Justice of the Peace, a couple hundred of whom had been sworn in specially for these first days.

The City knew there were going to be lots of us. They had special systems all ready. But on that first day, they'd limited the number of reservations so they could test those systems, give themselves a kind of dry run. Everything went smoothly. There were plenty of seats available. And when the charming, sweet woman who was to perform Keren and Jill's ceremony was introduced to them, she said, "I'm supposed to take you to a room here on the first floor. That's where I've been assigned. But it's not very impressive and there are no windows. Would you like to find another space? I think we can do that today." So she and Keren went out scouting, and decided on the mini-rotunda at the top of the grand staircase under the dome of the building. The bust of Harvey Milk stands there in honor.

A word: the San Francisco City Hall is one of the most spectacularly beautiful civic buildings in the world. Its Rotunda and grand staircase form the kind of space that requires stopping and staring, mouth open, when first encountered. The dome above is breathtaking. On this day, small groups moved this way and that across the space, finding their marriage locations or collecting their supporters or leaving to go celebrate. Everybody smiled at everybody else. Everyone said, "Congratulations!"

Phil ran late. And on his way downtown, he called me to ask if anyone had gotten any flowers. The answer was no, so he detoured, running into the downtown mall where he knew of a flowerseller and rushing the woman there through prepping two bridal bouquets -- she doesn't quite seem to have understood what she was doing, let alone the historic nature of the day -- before dashing back to meet us. He got on a bus for the few blocks down Market St. "Does this bus stop at the Civic Center?" he asked the driver. "I'm late for a wedding!" She promised him it did and pulled away as soon as he was on. "Sorry, sorry, gotta make a wedding!" she called to the people whose face she slammed the door in.

And then he ran down the length of Civic Center Plaza, a couple blocks of gardens and walkways, vaulting over people's picnics and dodging pedestrians. "Oooh, you late!" one homeless man woke up to call after him.

I swear I am not making any of this up.

At the security check, the metal detector buzzed at Phil. He stopped, handed the bouquets to the security guard and reached for his pockets. But they waved him through. And he arrived as we arrived at the ceremony location, out of breath but with the flowers, ready for the ladies to make their commitment.

It's so movie-friendly. How can this have really happened?

And now a year has passed, and meanwhile Phil and I have married, Prop 8 has passed, the Supreme Court has ruled both in our favor and its, and there's a Federal lawsuit over the whole mess. We are living in interesting times, as I've said before. But sometimes the interest is not revolutionary, or argumentative, or even loud. Sometimes, it's just lovely.

This all began in love and joy. Remarkably so. Seemingly universally so for those involved. I never heard about any ugliness at City Hall through all the months when gay marriage was legal. The couples I saw on that day, and on the day, some time later, when we applied for our license, and then again when we went back to pick up our official copy, cried and smiled. They were a little blown away at what they were doing. At what was suddenly possible.

I remember the very first time I felt this, although it was cheesy and silly and nothing at all like my actual wedding, or even the moment we actually got our license. It was several years ago and happened while I was watching a Canadian TV series.

I know. A TV moment. Worse than that, a reality show TV moment. How cheesy can you get? But occasionally, even reality TV achieves memorable moments.

When Canada first legalized same sex marriage (newsflash: the sky has still not fallen in Canada) someone produced a show about throwing weddings for same sex couples. Scott Thompson, the gay Kid in the Hall, hosted, and I believe they'd throw a wedding each episode in a week or less, always with lots of drama, near-miss disasters, and other hoopla. We gays are good at drama. But also at happy endings. One particularly twinky groom marveled, as the credits rolled, "I have a husband. No one can take that away now." And I thought, "Wow. A husband. Wow. That's real. That's really different."

I thought at the time that it was something I'd never be allowed to share. I didn't know Phil then, and there was absolutely no indication that any state in the U.S. would ever legalize gay marriage. But... who knew? I have a husband. And, according to the California Supreme Court, Prop 8 notwithstanding, no one can take that away from me.

I have a husband. First anniversaries are happening. This fall, there's a March on Washington. More and more states recognize our marriage and are allowing our brothers and sisters to marry, too. Glory!

Real Tragedy

2009-06-10T21:01:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, it's not all about us.

Shocking, I know. You all believed Phil and I were at the very center of the gay marriage universe, didn't you? Well, I admit, I sometimes think so, but this morning I ran into a video op-ed piece on the New York Times site that put that into perspective.

God, I hate that phrase. "Put things into perspective." So mealy-mouthed and presumptuous all at the same time. But I digress...

Here's what the Times taught us: there are gay soldiers, and at least some of them have partners. Who are being fucked over big time by Don't Ask Don't Tell.

Not surprising. We all know there are gay people in the military. Even the military knows this, and spends a ridiculous amount of time, money, and energy kicking them out and thereby debilitating itself. It doesn't take a genius to imagine that where there are gay servicemen and women, there will be their husbands and wives, supporting but staying hidden, agreeing to live in secret so that their partners can continue to do the thing they believe in.

Let me just say right off the bat that I am in awe of the people, gay or straight, who give their lives to this sort of service, regardless of whether or not I think the particular war they're fighting at the moment is reasonable one. I am also in awe of their partners, who are living a life I don't think I could ever consent to. How to go back into the closet, when you have finally achieved the terrible task of getting out of it? How to knuckle under to a policy that is so clearly wrongheaded, counterproductive, and downright evil in order to support your loved one in their life of service. These people, both the soldiers and the partners, believe in the importance of service so strongly that they're willing to give in to the hatefulness of this policy. They are willing to serve the U.S. even against its will, because it insanely has dedicated itself to rejecting them regardless of their value to its cause.

There are 65,000 gay men and women serving in the U.S. military, by best estimates. No one knows how many gay Armed Forces husbands and wives there are. This is for obvious reasons, but stop a minute and think about what that means. Nobody knows how many there are. Nobody knows who they are. Nobody knows where they live, how they survive, or that they exist at all.

No one will call them, if their military spouse is injured or killed. No one will tell them. They do not appear on any military call list. One must hope they have good relationships with their spouse's family, so that when an "official" family member is called with news, they will think to relay it.

If a gay serviceman or woman is in a military hospital, their spouses may or may not get to visit them. If they are allowed in, they certainly will not be able to kiss their beloved, express physical affection, or behave in any way like a wife or husband. That would end their spouse's career, get them ejected from the organization they've dedicated their life to.

If a gay serviceman or woman is killed, who will be at their funeral? Who will receive the flag folded over their coffin? Whose hand will be shaken by the ranking officer at the service? Not the gay spouse. Not the most important person in that serviceman or woman's life.

Gay husbands and wives stick with their partners for better or worse, in sickness and in health, through good times and bad, just like straight spouses. Gay men and women support their loved ones in the military. They keep the home fires burning. They give their military spouses a reason to get up in the morning, a reason to fight through to the next day, and a reason to stay alive to come home. They are, in a very real sense, the thing worth fighting for.

But they are the thing which the military has decreed cannot even be mentioned.

The op-ed piece is a statement by a gay military husband, a man whose partner of 15 years serves in Iraq. Of course the speaker's face is never shown in the video, and he doesn't state his name or that of his partner. The two of them are out, he tells us, and their relationship is publicly known. If his face were shown in this context, his partner's identity would be known.

I wonder, now that I think of it, about the lies they must have to tell in their personal lives, as well as to the military. Can they let other people in on their secret? Does the military man have to make up stories about where he goes and what he does for a living, when he disappears for months at a time? How do they keep this secret?

If this man's husband is wounded -- he cannot bring himself to say "killed", as what spouse could? -- he thinks he should be told first. "I want to be the first person who knows, if anything happens. I think I've earned that," he says. Yes. Surely, and without doubt, he has earned that. To suggest otherwise, to even consider that this might not be the case, flies in the face of all understanding. If love is love, if commitment is commitment, if family is family, then surely he has earned this right. He earns it every single day, agreeing to live this hellish half-life to continue his partner's career.

They can be most open with each other in writing, he says. But still, they must be careful. Letters are sometimes intercepted. And his military husband has little privacy. A letter left sitting on his bed might be seen. A too-clear expression of love would betray him.

This is his life partner, the person with whom he has yoked himself for better or worse for life, the person whom he, not an "official family member" will care for if tragedy happens and his husband returns home wounded. And he cannot tell him that he loves him.

This is the very essence of discrimination. This is the very opposite of everything we are promised as citizens. This is, beyond question, the most abject abandonment of the military's stated responsibility for its members.

This is shocking. This is shameful.

This is also something that need not happen. When President Obama was campaigning, he stated multiple times that he opposed Don't Ask Don't Tell. He promised he would work to repeal it when he got to the White House. I know he's been busy. He's certainly had pressing needs to focus on since his inauguration, and he's set all kinds of records for achievement and effectiveness since that date. But this is one of the issues that has fallen by the wayside, that's been ignored, and that is being allowed to continue to destroy people's lives, because taking it on has been inconvenient. I acknowledge the inconvenience. But this is a problem about which the President can take swift action and have an immediate effect. He can suspend Don't Ask Don't Tell unilaterally, as Harry Truman did with the rule about segregation in the military when he was in office. Or, the President can simply direct the military to stop enforcing Don't Ask Don't Tell and render it toothless even though it remains on the books. That won't fix all the damage it causes, but it will be a start, if he doesn't have time or energy to take on the entire problem right now.

This situation demeans all of us. People deserve to be acknowledged, whether or not we agree with their politics or beliefs or even lifestyles. The supporters of our military servicemen and women deserve better. Committed couples deserve better. If conservatives really cared about any of the things they espouse, like stable, loving homes, and families, and lifelong commitment, they'd be yelling from the rooftops for this discrimination to end. But they spit on all those things, instead, and those of us who try to live them get spit on, too.

I've had enough of this shit. We've all had enough of this shit. This is shameful. Make it change.

NYC Op-Ed: A Gay Soldier's Husband

Tell the President to end Don't Ask Don't Tell

My Gay Agenda

2009-06-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

The current round of arguments about same sex marriage is more tiresome than ever. The opposition seems to have nothing new to say, yet our side just keeps engaging them. My own opinion is that we should just GET ON WITH IT. The arguments have been made, and now it's time for us to demand change, and the other side to get over themselves and get out of the way.

Just in case someone else out there doesn't feel quite so settled about this as I do, however, I thought I'd do a round up of all those tiresome standard arguments once and for all. Anyone who needs a primer on how to respond to a crazed right-wing marriage-hater, here you go. Anyone who's been living in a case for the past few years and hasn't heard all this, what follows is my semi-educated boiling down of all the stuff that's been rehashed and rehashed again at every step of this process.

And what it is most of all is my own personal manifesto, and call to action. My own Gay Agenda, if you will. You always wondered what that really was, didn't you?

Here goes:

ARGUMENT 1: The Bible says it's a no-no.
SHORT ANSWER: Who cares?
LONGER ANSWER: The Bible says a lot of things. It says significantly less about homosexuality than it does about divorce, diet, or whether men have to be circumcised to be saved, but that's beside the point. In fact, the fact that it's beside the point IS the point. It's all beside the point. The Bible is not and never will be a basis for law in the U.S. This is fundamental to our national identity, to our Constitution, and to why we're an independent country in the first place. If you cannot or will not wrap your mind around this simple fact -- the Bible is not the basis for law in the U.S. -- then perhaps you'd be happier living in a more fundamentalist nation with other people who share your political outlook. Consider Iraq, or Afghanistan. Bon voyage.
BOTTOM LINE: The Bible is not an acceptable source for U.S. policy. Period.

ARGUMENT 2: Gay marriage will ineradicably alter the meaning of marriage.
SHORT ANSWER: Duh!
LONGER ANSWER: Actually, you've got it backward. Marriage has been changing since long before anybody suggested legalizing same sex unions. Same sex unions are now a possibility because marriage has changed. They are not the cause of that change.
Here's the thing: marriage changes all the time. It's been evolving ever since we started doing it, way back before recorded history (and way before Christianity, just for the record.) In early societies, when tribes and extended family groups were competing for land, marriage was a way of strengthening bonds and defining who belonged to whom. In feudal times, it was all about inheritance. For the Victorians, it was a way to control the growth of society, and in the U.S., it has variously been a method for perpetuating beliefs, an excuse for increasingly esoteric cultural rituals, and a confusing, complicated word for which we have no good definition and little common understanding.
Think about your parents' marriage, or your grandparents' or great-grandparents'. Think about the marriages of your ancestors a century or so ago, in whatever country they lived in then. Their marriages were nothing like yours, and you wouldn't want them to be. The wives in those unions couldn't vote, didn't work outside the home, and were statistically likely to die young. The men didn't have it much better. Marriages were arranged, they were a business transaction with the two participants no more than pawns to be traded. Yes, marriage has changed a lot since those days. We're at a point now where we've moved far enough toward individual choice and marriage-for-love that we can recognize a great truth: for some couples, love and choice will lead them to a same sex pairing. But my marriage to my husband isn't the cause of this change. It's the joyful result. Marriage is a symptom of how we live and what kind of society we have. It is not a root cause.
ARGUMENT 3: Gay marriage is A) unnatural; B) non-traditional; C) icky
SHORT ANSWER: Oh, grow up.
LONGER ANSWER: Let's take these in order.
A) It's unnatural: This usually means "animals don't do it", although no one seems to be advocating the things some animals do do, like eating their own poop and masturbating in front of staring crowds at the zoo. But I digress. The thing is, animals actually do do this. Scientists have documented plenty of cases of lesbian seagulls, faggot penguins, and all manner of other birds and beasts living in long term, stable, monogamous, child-raising same sex couples. And this doesn't even touch on the fish who have sex changes. So there.
B) It's non-traditional: This one is harder, since "traditional" is one of those words everyone uses, but no one can define. The way most people use it, it seems to mean "whatever I, personally, am comfortable with." But if you take a stricter definition, something like, "what's been practiced most often during the history of our country," then you're right, same sex marriage is not traditional. On the other hand, the list of things which are traditions by that definition would include slavery, women not being allowed to vote, women and children being the legal property of their husbands and fathers, and interracial marriage being illegal. Anybody care to stand up for those traditions? Anybody want to object to the fact that we overcame all of them through legislation and enlightened Supreme Court decisions? Any voices raised now for overturning those? I didn't think so.
C) It's icky: I think your sexual practices are icky, too.

So that's religion, society, and ickiness -- the Big Three in the opposition's song and dance about why same sex marriage is horrible and will bring about Armageddon. Their only other argument, as far as I understand it, is that somehow my commitment to Phil is going to damage the similar commitments made by all the straight people around me, or somehow so cheapen the whole institution that it will render their marriages meaningless. This one really just escapes my understanding. I can't even come up with a good response to it, because I can't grasp the logic of it at all.

On sober reflection, though, I don't believe there is any logic here. I think all these objections, no matter how intelligently they're expressed, are really just cries of panic. I think they come directly from that shrill inner voice which is screaming, "Oh no! Things are changing! Scary, scary! The world is not what I expected! If gay people can get married, what else might change, or turn out to be different from what I thought? I'm being forced to re-examine all my preconceptions! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Well, yes. It is very scary to find things are different from what you thought they were. It is terrifying to learn that the world is changing, or never was what you were promised as a child. It's horrifying, demanding, and not fun at all to have to throw away preconceptions and start over and build a whole new worldview. But guess what? This is what every single gay person in the history of the world has had to do at some point in his or her life. This is what is demanded of us if we're going to survive and thrive. This is how we have to relearn who we are and what we believe from the ground up, starting from zero and rebuilding without any help, most times, from our families, or our churches, or many of our friends. This is when we discover who really cares, what really matters, and what's really real. This is our experience.

Welcome to our family.

Not Dull

2009-05-30T20:07:00.000-07:00

We are living in interesting times, Phil and me.

That's a curse, for those who missed the allusion. "May you live in interesting times," means may you exist in turmoil, without peace, divorced from the fulfillment that uninteresting things like commitment and family and a steady few decades of working and getting ahead provide.

Phil and I are living through extremely interesting times at this moment.

I've known of this curse for a number of years (I believe it's Chinese, but don't quote me.) But I've always half laughed at it, even while I recognized its pearl of wisdom. I've considered myself an adventurer, in some sense. Interested in interesting things, bored with a life that's too calm and quiet. That's still an apt description of me, but on the other hand, some aspects of dullness have become attractive. I love living a committed life, and I'd like to enlarge my stable, loving, family of choice.

Phil and I seek adventures together, these days. And even when we don't, we seem to find it. Believe me, given the thrills and chills life has handed us in the past couple years, we'd both be more than happy for some time off. But the world, not to mention our fellow Californians, conspires against that.

On Tuesday the 26th, when the California Supreme Court ruled once and for all on the validity of Proposition 8 and our marriage, Phil and I were in Chicago. We'd gotten the announcement of the announcement last week, and knew to stop what we were doing at noon (10 am Pacific Time) to go online and read the decision. As all the best legal minds had predicted, the Court upheld the proposition but also confirmed the 18,000 same sex marriages that took place last summer, when they were legal.

We immediately started getting messages of condolence from friends and relatives. This was a strange, unexpected, and rather mixed experience. For one thing, the news for us, to be very blunt, was good. Our marriage stands. The bad news is for all the other same sex couples who might want to get married now. They can't, at least not in California. So they're the devastated ones. Our lives can go on just as they have been. On the other hand, regardless of the practicalities, how could it not be reaffirming to have people thinking of us at this time, especially some who hadn't been to our wedding or otherwise involved in this particular aspect of our lives, but who recognized nonetheless how important this was to us?

The thing is, as I said above, no one seriously expected that the Court would throw out the hateful proposition. They couldn't do that, because this case was not about the merits of the amendment itself, it was only about the merits of how it got onto the ballot. This was a question about process, exclusively. Unless the process the marriage-haters had followed to get Prop 8 onto the ballot turned out to be so flawed that it obviously and clearly flew in the face of all precedent and constitutional intent, the Court had no business taking the enormous step of actually throwing out the amendment, itself. They had to consider this, but the realities of the situation pretty much precluded any hope of such an action.

What were those realities? Well, the central argument that could have gotten Prop 8 tossed out on its ass was that its effect was so sweeping and unprecedented that it should have been considered a revision to the Constitution, not an amendment. This is a reasonable argument, but an unwinnable one. Revisions and amendments are not defined in the California Constitution. Neither item is defined, and the dividing line between them isn't either. There are no guidelines, and there has never previously been any legal discussion, about what makes a revision and what makes an amendment. There is some sort of very vague "common wisdom", which is what was being argued re: Prop 8. But the Court has never previously considered any of these issues, and to suddenly do so now, and set such a huge, sweeping set of precedents merely as a convenience in order to provide an excuse to get rid of this noxious piece of legislation, would fly in the face of what we expect and depend upon about the Court's behavior. It would not have been proper legal process, and it would not have upheld the rule of law. If ever there were a case where "two wrongs don't make a right" applied, it's this one. Proposition 8 is a huge, unforgivable wrong. But to strike it down through an abrogation of law would be worse.

On the other hand, if the Court had agreed with the pro-Prop 8 forces (in court by the absolutely execrable Kenneth Starr) that the amendment should apply retroactively, that would have been an even bigger, more disastrous precedent, not to mention morally unspeakable. There was absolutely no good excuse for doing this, and the Court wisely followed reason and didn't.

In fact, when I read both the decision and a couple commentaries on it a few days later, the Court went farther than they needed to in the direction of protecting the rights of same sex couples -- not just those of us who were married during the legal days last summer, but even those who wish to be recognized legally in the future. Proposition 8, the Court ruled, applies only to the word "marriage", not to the fact or status or legal standing which that word describes. They actually said, quite clearly, on the last page of their decision (and it should be noted that although the confirmation of Prop 8 was 6-1, this part was unanimous) that same sex couples are entitled to all the same protections for their committed relationships as heterosexual couples, and that the State of California is required to keep recognizing this, regardless of terminology. It's not clear to me what this means in practical terms. What would the State be recognizing? Does this mean that registered domestic partnerships must be upgraded to include all the same rights as marriage? Does it even indicate, as one commentator stated, that if a same sex couple went down to the courthouse and applied for a marriage license, they could cross out the word "marriage" and replace it with something like "legal union" and the State would have to issue the document? This is strange and complicated situation, and the only sure thing is that it will lead to more court cases and more legal arguments.

I suspect, in fact, that this is exactly what the Court intended. There was no good answer to this case. Proposition 8 stinks. I don't just mean that it's unpleasant and a slap in the face to me and many of my friends, personally. I mean that it's bad law, and it runs counter to everything our country is supposed to stand for: equality, progress, reason, and freedom from religious tyranny (just because the tyranny in this case covered up its own church roots doesn't make it any less religious, or bigoted, or disgusting.) I believe our Supreme Court recognizes this, and knows, as do all thinking people, that the will of the masses is a fine thing, but sometimes wrong. That is why we have a representative government and a complicated series of checks and balances within our system, so that the best thing has a chance to happen, not just the most popular. I think they did both the only thing they could do, but also the thing which would necessarily continue the argument, and which would give the side of freedom and equality ammunition with which to fight.

But all of this is beside the point, as far as I'm concerned. Once we'd read the decision, we talked about it, and speculated as to what would happen next. We knew there were already moves to get a Prop 8 repeal on the 2010 ballot. We suspected there might be class-action suits even before that. We wanted to be involved however we could. Phil planned to go to a rally in Chicago that night, while I flew home. I planned to write this blog entry, and others, and get our story told.

But our own personal responses were different. Phil felt relieved, and confident that, whatever fights the future might hold, our status was at least no longer in question. This is true, but I felt no relief at that moment, and very little going forward. The thing is, ladies and gentlemen, that our status may be confirmed, but it's still a very mixed bag. We are married in half a dozen states, not married in the others. We file our taxes as a couple in California, but as single people Federally. Not "married filing single", mind you, but "single." Not married. No possibility of being married. Our country, regardless of what our state says, has specifically taken measures to allow it to ignore us. DOMA, Bill Clinton's second big abandonment of the gay community that helped elect him (Don't Ask Don't Tell being the first), relegates us to second citizenhood, once and for all. And until that changes, and we're actually, undeniably, universally married, all these arguments seem small and temporary.

We're people, people! We're a married couple! We jumped through all the hoops, filled out all the paperwork, played all the games, obeyed all the traditions. Our community welcomed us and blessed us. Our families love us. We are married, and we are as much upholders of tradition, and of the strength of our city, as any straight couple. Perhaps more, because we're fighting so hard for our "traditional lifestyle" whereas they get to take theirs for granted.

It sucks, as Phil has opined, to be a pioneer. In a generation, this whole fight will no doubt seem not only unbelievable, but shameful and embarrassing. We should be embarrassed. I'm embarrassed by our country at this moment, because I'm part of it, even though I'm also part of the class that's being wronged. This whole political era, Obama notwithstanding, is pretty embarrassing.

And yes, kids, it's f*#@ing interesting.

How We Began and Why You Should Read This

2009-04-11T15:19:00.000-07:00

Phil and I met at a bar in New York City one night. There, I've said it. We met in a bar, we hit it off, and if you, like Phil, ever find yourself in possession of an unexpected suite at the W Hotel Times Square, I hope you will make as good use of it as he did. We got married four years later.

In spite of our bar beginnings, Phil and I are pretty damn respectable. At our wedding last September, 120 of our friends and families -- including theatre people, architects and designers, Silicon Valley venture capitalists, academics, and assorted others -- grinned and clapped when we exchanged vows. They raised toasts to us, laughed and ate huge amounts of great Italian food, and cried when we waltzed together. I'm still not clear on why that last part was such a big deal, but apparently it was. The waltzing brought down the house, especially when we switched leads.

And now we're in limbo. The Supreme Court is currently deciding what to do about our marriage, along with about 18,000 others. Last year it was legal for us to get married. This year, not. Last year, we were at the forefront of a new era of equal rights and acceptance. This year, we're in retro-land, beaten back and slapped in the face by a weird conservative coalition both frightened and frightening.

This is an odd time in gay and lesbian history. We've made huge, unexpected strides. But we've also run headlong into prejudices and unreasoning fears which we thought were long dead, even among our friends and neighbors.

A few years ago, same sex marriage was a radical idea which even a lot of gays and lesbians thought was weird and unappealing. Our gay leaders and press told us not to push this issue, and that marriage was an outdated symbol of oppression anyway and we shouldn't want it.

But we did want it. We wanted it in spite of our well-thought-out political positions. Even if we agreed marriage needed to be redefined, even if we felt that it carried connotations of traditionalism, religion, and complacency which have done nothing but hurt us, we still wanted it.

The only way I can explain it is to bring up another hot-button topic, children. A few years ago, I was asked by lesbian friends of mine if I'd like to consider being their sperm donor. I was flattered, obviously, and also nonplussed because I had absolutely no idea how to approach such a monumental decision. I'd never wanted kids -- I like them okay, but for brief periods and mostly when they're old enough to debate with, not when they're dependent and a 24-hour a day responsibility. So did I really want a little part-me running around in someone else's household? And what would that mean for my relationship with my friends? Hm...

In the end, two things happened: my sperm turned out to be non-viable (too many years wearing g-strings in Vegas, perhaps) and my friends decided that an anonymous donor was probably a better option overall, anyway. But the reason I even got my sperm tested was because I'd said yes. Yes, I did want to engender another little person. Yes, I did think my family's DNA deserved a shot at another generation, at least. I was surprised, once I thought of this, with how important it seemed.

And in a similar way, marriage, which had always seemed remote, a little mysterious, not terribly interesting, and like a lot more trouble than it was worth, when it suddenly became a real possibility, turned out to be something I wanted very much, indeed. I didn't understand why, exactly, until very close to the time of our wedding. We planned the whole thing in detail, as you can read in the earlier blog entries here. But we planned and outlined the actual ceremony, the words we'd say and what we wanted our officiant to do, very late in the process. We didn't even talk about that question until the gift registries were settled, the catering order was confirmed, the venue and guest list and menu and staff were finalized, and even our wedding clothes were hanging in our closets. "What do you want to say?" I asked Phil one evening, pen and paper in hand. And we realized we didn't have a clear idea of exactly how a wedding ceremony was supposed to go, what its important component parts were, where the traditions came from and why they mattered, what meant anything to anyone and which of those things meant something to us. Without a shared church tradition, our ceremony was a blank page, literally.

But weddings, given the billions of dollars they generate each year, are a subject you can find lots of help with. Online and out on the street, nearly everyone is eager to help you. Again, read down for some of our adventures slogging through that jungle. And ceremonies, while they don't inspire quite the avalanche of aide that catering, clothing, cakes, and bouquets do, still have their own legion of web pages to give hints, offer outlines, and generally take all the thinking away from you and give it to people who are better equipped to do it. So a few days later we had some research to work with.

The Processional. The Vows. Various readings, teachings, visitations by transubstantiated deities, exchanges of rings, yadda yadda yadda. The Recessional. More yadda yadda.

I, personally, was in favor of a chupa and all our friends standing around us in a big circle, but that clearly wasn't going to work. Anyway, we talked about a few ideas, and how to shift those traditional elements to fit us, and I started writing outlines. This is not quite as obsessive and businesslike as it sounds. Writing is how I think best. I've called it "thinking with my fingers" sometimes, because if I start with the germ of an idea, lay my fingers on a keyboard, and give them free rein, they often develop that germ into something I can work with. Just so in this case. I found myself writing an outline for a ceremony which was all about community and shared commitment, about us committing to each other and the community witnessing this in order to welcome us into their fold. Marriage, it turns out, is a three-person relationship. There's the two people of the couple, and there's a third one of the community of married people. That third person is large and ageless, and it's hardly an active member of the relationship on a day-to-day basis. But that doesn't mean it isn't important, or real. Anyone can live together, but by going through the ritual of a wedding you make your commitment official, you enter it into the historical record. You put yourselves out there for the community to either approve or deny, and with any luck they welcome you and make you part of them.

That is why marriage was important to me. I wanted us to have a union, rather than just a relationship. I wanted the two of us to be bigger than just the two of us, to be a whole rather than just a sum of two parts. All of that is what marriage offers.

So now, when some factions of the electorate of California have been tricked, pushed, or otherwise manipulated into taking marriage rights away from gay and lesbian couples, and when other, less respectable factions, are dancing on the grave of our rights and hopes, we have this weird conundrum. We are married -- the State Attorney General has confirmed that, and required us to say so on our taxes -- but we may not be married tomorrow, or next week, or whenever the Supreme Court announces their decision. Even if, as everyone expects, they confirm the legality of our marriage while still upholding Proposition 8 and therefore denying any new gay or lesbian couples the right to share in this, we will not be a legal couple in Nevada or Florida or New Jersey, where our parents live, or in most of the other states of this country, or in many countries, or on our Federal taxes. Our marriage, even if the Supreme Court should go hog-wild and strike down Prop 8, will be conditional and limited in ways no legal marriage before ever has been. Ever. We will be second class married citizens for the foreseeable future, regardless.

This sucks. And this is not what I set out to write about today. But, as I said above, my fingers often have different ideas than I do. So... there you go. Why We Want Marriage, by Cristian Asher. It's why, to my mind, this stuff matters to all of us. I don't imagine that my story is universal, or that uber-conservative readers, if they should stumble on this blog and read through it for some reason, would experience an epiphany and change their politics or social views. This is not meant as a lesson or even a political wake up call. But it is meant as the opening of a discussion which I hope everyone will take up on their own, with their own friends and families and partners. The thing is, in this country, we don't know why marriage matters. We generally agree that it does, but we have vast differences of opinion about why and where the meaning comes from. All these conflicting opinions must give in to some sort of shared, agreed-upon bottom line if we're ever going to move forward. It's not a question of what marriage might mean in some particular religion, or why it's important for a particular political party or in any other non-universal belief system. It's a question of why, in the U.S. in the 21st Century, the ritual and practice of marriage makes any difference. What the institution brings to our society, what the word means to us, and why it is different from its imitators, civil unions and non-formalized domestic relationships. What is going on here?

That's the question that matters. All my other ideas will have to wait for the next blog.

An Election Day Post-Mortem

2008-11-09T14:47:00.000-08:00

On May 15^th of this year, the California Supreme Court legalized same sex marriage. My partner, Phil, and I sat down together, as I’m sure most other long-time gay couples in California did, and asked each other, “So, are we going to do it?”

Our answer was easy. We’d been planning a commitment ceremony for the last four years, but it had been repeatedly postponed because of job changes and relocations. The chance to get hitched “for real” was one we jumped at.

If we could have, we might have waited until spring 2009 to do it. Planning a big wedding in only eight weeks is not a task anyone should volunteer for. But we saw a deadline looming at Election Day. The chances of an anti-marriage amendment passing, back in those rosy days, seemed unlikely. But as we told our friends, “We’d feel awfully stupid if we woke up on November 5^th and it turned out we’d missed our chance.” So we set a date and started planning.

On this page, I've blogged the whole process, and the story has gotten immensely positive feedback from countless readers. Our wedding, itself, described in great detail over three posts below, could not have been lovelier. But now Election Day has passed, and it turns out our fears were well-founded. Same sex marriage is over, at least for the moment. The fallout, anger, and arguments from that decision will no doubt fill our news for months – if not years – to come. Certainly the court cases will continue, and cost this state millions of unnecessary dollars.

But I’d like to try to clarify at least two points that I’ve been facing repeatedly in the last few days. One is a mistaken encouragement, the other a mystery about the nature of our opposition. Here goes:

1) Are we married or aren’t we? Well-meaning friends have said things to me along the lines of “no matter what happens, you’ll always be married in my eyes.” This is, of course, very nice, but completely beside the point.

My husband and I are still married so far. It would take another court decision to invalidate the 18,000 existing same sex marriages performed during the past six months. But if the Court should so decide, then Phil and I won’t be married any more, no matter how many supportive friends say different.

Marriage is a legal status, uniquely respected and positioned, as the Court recognized in its original decision last May. My relationship will still be just as committed no matter what happens. But if the state stops recognizing it, then we will no longer have the legal advantages of marriage, and we will no longer receive the automatic respect from strangers or businesses that the term “married” inspires. We will not be married, regardless of the fact that we will be a committed couple till death do us part.

2) What are those pro-8 people thinking? Of the many inscrutable aspects of this sad debacle, the various weird attitudes demonstrated by those who would destroy my marriage are among the most striking. Since the election, many Prop 8 supporters have expressed confusion over the passionate responses and outcries from the gay community. One suburban lady was extremely upset because a man had yelled at her for the “Vote Yes on 8” sign that still stood in her yard on November 5^th. Why was he so angry? she wondered. In her neighborhood, people stuck all kinds of political signs in their yards, but nobody let differing opinions get in the way of cordial behavior.

Is it possible that this lady, and all the others who have expressed similar confusion, honestly do not understand how intimate and destructive this amendment is? That it strikes at the very heart of gay people’s lives and chops away at the most important, most foundational elements of our freedom and societal status? If we don’t have all the same freedoms as straight people do, then we are second-class citizens. If we can’t get married, then our relationships – not to mention our families, children, and futures – are deprived of status and respect in the community.

Even more alarming, we are formerly-first-class citizens who have now been demoted, by a popular vote, to second-class status. The arguments about whether or not homosexuality is “chosen” or not, about whether or not marriage is a mutable enough term to cover same-sex relationships, may be unwinnable. These questions speak to basic worldview and are rarely decided by rational evidence. But to have our status taken away, to be told out of the blue by a slim majority of our neighbors and peers that they have decided to push us down, to stop recognizing us, to elevate themselves above us – this is offensive and un-American in the extreme.

One of the most striking aspects about same sex marriage bans in elections is the rate at which people lie about their own positions on them. Consistently over the years that such laws and amendments have appeared on ballots, polls have shown them either losing or else winning by very slim margins. But when the final votes are tallied, these statistics are upended, and the initiatives pass by huge margins. This pattern does not happen so reliably with any other form of legislation. Uniquely, people claim to support same sex marriage when they actually are working to destroy it.

Why? The forces of the religious right often point to the one-sided results of these contests as evidence for their own position, claiming that the People Have Spoken, and they have stated loud and clear that they don’t approve of same sex marriage. But I wonder, if the People really believe in this position so strongly, why are they so afraid to say so in public? Why are they, in fact, so ashamed of their own vote that they lie about it on the phone or on their way out of their polling places?

Can it be that they actually know that to pass such hate-based laws is wrong? That to deny same sex couples the right to marry is no more defensible than denying interracial couples that right was a couple generations ago? Are we really such a craven bunch that we give in in such numbers to our basest emotions, our most fear-based, small-minded impulses?

That is shame, indeed. Stick with us, spread the word, and don't stop fighting. Phil's and my marriage is not only legitimate, meaningful, and important to us, it's worth fighting for. By everyone.

Wedding Weekend 2: The Wedding Day! (evening)

2008-11-04T07:20:00.000-08:00

Phil and I were married at 5:30 in Palo Alto, in the patio of the Lucie Stern Center, under the clearest of clear skies and in front of 120 of our friends and supporters, after eight weeks of insanely intense preparations and more samples of entrees, white wine, and cupcakes than I can remember.

As I stood in the prep room off to one side of the patio, having just watched my three closest friends walk out through the door to join Kelley, our officiant, and Phil's two brothers and best friend, Brian, I was thinking all the things you'd expect: I thought this is it! and I can't believe this is happening, and also wow, don't let it slip away! I want to experience and remember every second of this! I'd had that last thought a number of times over the weekend, beginning as our guests began to arrive at the barbeque. This is it! Don't miss a second! The time we had prepped for, and anticipated, and shopped and cleaned and rearranged for, was happening. As we'd opened each yes RSVP, and as we'd gone through the emails saying out of towners would be there on Saturday night, we'd marveled again and again at how it was actually happening. We were actually having a wedding. Our friends were actually coming. I know I've been hitting that point a lot in these blog postings, but I still can't get over it. Phil and I have been committed to each other for some time, sure. But, as I've written elsewhere, getting married is different, and a wedding is even different from that. To learn that our loved ones didn't just support us in theory, but that they were actually eager to plunk down the hundreds of dollars necessary to fly out to San Francisco, and pay for a hotel, and take part in this ritual with us was staggering. It was especially staggering because it was all so undeniably sincere and heartfelt. We had none of the family presumption or traditional guilt to rely on to make anyone do this. Everybody who came to our wedding came solely and entirely because they wanted to -- because they really wanted to, because they had made the conscious and joyful choice to join us.

And when I stood in the prep room for that one last moment, by myself, waiting to go out, I felt that and wanted to capture it, and knew I couldn't, and knew that this was one of those moments that is so wonderful and so rare you wish you could just stop time and live in it for, oh, say a year or two to fully experience it, to explore every nook and crevice of it, before moving on. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here. It was a brief moment, and less than a minute later I heard Kelley say, "let's bring out the grooms," and I saw Phil stepping out across the patio, and I walked out and headed across to meet him, hoping to god my knees weren't shaking.

I had written a lot of references to community into our ceremony, because that is the core of a wedding in my understanding. It's not just an excuse for the couple to exchange vows and for everybody else to get dressed up and swill free Champagne. It's a social contract: the marrying couple is declaring their intention to live as a family in the community, and the community is accepting them into itself, putting its stamp of approval on their union, welcoming them into a new, more advanced stage of existence. That may sound overblown to some readers, but I'll bet not to those who are married. It really is different from just living together, no matter for how long and how committed. The old saying is that marriage is a two-way street, meaning that it requires work and change from both its participants to succeed. But it's more than that, because the larger community has a role, too, and although that role is less active (on a daily basis) than the coming and going of the two-way street, it is no less important. Maybe society (and its stamp of approval) is the pavement on which the two-way street is laid, or something like that. This image is growing strained, it's not up to the task of supporting my point, but I hope you get the idea. In any case, the role of the community, of human society, was a very big deal at our wedding, and Kelley talked about it repeatedly in the ceremony.

Kelley. When Phil suggested asking Kelley to officiate at our wedding, I laughed at first, but then quickly became committed to the idea. Kelley is the founder of TheatreWorks, as I'm sure I've mentioned about 5000 times in these posts. He is the man who originally had the vision for a socially responsible, community-serving theatre company here, at a time when the Peninsula offered no theatre and very little community of any form. There's lots more of both now, in no small part due to Kelley's efforts and the evolution of TheatreWorks. At this point, to those who know him or the company, he is a little larger-than-life, while at the same time he is perhaps the most approachable, soft-spoken, emotionally quiet artistic director on the regional theatre circuit. He is deeply passionate about the importance of things like community, diversity, and the role of art in furthering those things. But when Phil first mentioned him as our officiant, I don't think either of us really thought of it as a viable option -- at that moment, we felt a little uncertain of how our wedding would be perceived, and asking Kelley to officiate over it seemed like the ultimate vote of confidence, like asking the Pope to say grace over dinner so your guests would get the idea that the meal was to be taken seriously.

But the image of Kelley officiating became the most central part of that community blessing idea we were evolving. Many weeks later, after he'd agreed, and after I'd signed him up with the Universal Life Church and had his credentials shipped off, he and Phil and I met down in Palo Alto to talk through the ceremony. I'd sent him a draft of what I'd written, complete with ideas for what he would say, but as I told him, I intended it to be only an outline, not a cast-in-stone script for him to follow. Over coffee, as we talked through each part of what I'd written, Kelley kept asking if we were comfortable with him adding certain elements: could he make mention of the political situation? Could he make jokes? Could he make references to musical theatre, and quote Stephen Sondheim? Well... of course. Or, as Phil said, "if you think you can make it through a Sondheim lyric without losing it, go right ahead." For the record, the lyric Kelley had in mind was from Passion, one of Sondheim's less-beloved works, and from a song called "Loving You", which, ironically enough I once performed in a cabaret show. It goes, "Loving you is not a choice, it's who I am." And he did, in fact, get through it without crying.

So that was our preparation with Kelley. I think I'm rambling as I tell this story, and I'm not sure how to give you a clear picture of what actually happened. But my experience was this: I entered from my side room, passing through the sort of collonade that lines the Stern patio courtyard, and I walked across the grass past my three closest friends in the world while Phil walked toward me from the opposite direction. When we got to our places in front of Kelley, I realized the crowd was clapping, and I looked out at them, fastening on a few individual faces but mostly just feeling everything wash over me. I felt utterly there, not at all rushed or overwhelmed as I've heard other marrying couples complain. But I was also very aware of being there, of trying to get the most out of it, of a certain level of self-consciousness as each moment happened. Kelley spoke some of the words I'd written, and some of his own, speaking about marriage and the great contract we were entering into with each other and with our community. He introduced the first set of readings, and I listened to each witness read the words we'd chosen for them. Some got laughs and some sighs, and each one held its own meaning and created a distinct kind of blessing on us and for that moment. I glanced out at our guests once or twice, always the stage manager and wanting to make sure the audience was enjoying the show. And they were.

Kelley invited Phil, and then me, to say our vows to each other, and the crowd laughed as we pulled out our notes to remember what we wanted to say. I'm still not sure exactly why that's funny. Did they really think that in that moment, with all the other things we'd had to think about, we'd be able to just blithely say these things without any help at all? Did we seem over-practiced or overly administrative because we had notes? I don't know, but I do know that our actual vows, when we said them, were received with wonder and celebration. We were both told how beautiful our words had been, and we certainly felt that about each other's. After each of us spoke, Kelley jumped in again to lead us through a version of the traditional "richer or poorer, better or worse" litany. And then we had the second reading, which was the passage from Velveteen Rabbit that seemed to amaze so many people. Honestly, folks, it's off a website! We didn't even come up with the idea on our own!

And then the rings, and then C Kelly singing. She was standing behind me as I faced Phil, which meant that during the song I ended up sort of half-turning and watching her over my shoulder. I also looked out at the crowd to see what they were thinking, but what I really wanted to do was swing around and stare at Kelley -- we'd had bets, Phil and I, over whether he'd make it through that song without crying, or whether we would. Actually, I didn't think I'd cry. As I've said before, this wasn't the intimate moment for us, it was the heartfelt performance, sort of. No less real, but definitely public and less vulnerable then the moments we'd spent alone in preparation for it. I'd cried a little bit -- we both had -- when we'd first read our vows to each other the night before. But to get back to that musical moment in our ceremony, as it turned out, the person who cried most during C Kelly's singing was C Kelly, herself. She barely made it through the big notes, which is not to say she didn't still sound wonderful. We don't have a recording of her on the CD we created, because we didn't know until too late that she was actually going to be able to do it. But we did include a different recording of the song she sang, since it's not only extremely beautiful (and by one of my personal favorite composing teams), but it's also a perfect statement of how we feel about love and our marriage.

After the song came Kelley's benediction, another short passage of his own devising. I think this was where he talked more about politics, about the historical nature of the event and the day. This may also have been where Sondheim crept in, but I can't swear that I remember for sure. Maybe I'll just post the ceremony, so you can look it up for yourself.

And then, "By the power vested in my by the state of California, I now pronounce that you are married!" And to our guests, something like, "May I present the newly married couple!" And he invited us to kiss each other, and we did, and the crowd cheered. For a couple minutes. There were grins and clapping, and we stood and received it, and grinned ourselves, and it was a weird and wonderful moment. In the pictures from that part, I look like a total goon, laughing and not sure how to take it in, while Phil seems to be gloating over the fact that I'd teared up and he hadn't.

Just as we didn't have a processional, we didn't recess, either. Instead, Kelley invited all our guests up to the front to gather around for a big group picture. They did this, while the minions whisked their chairs away, and we now have a fabulous group portrait of everyone who was there with us. As Phil said when we first discussed this idea, there is something both reassuring and powerful about having such an undeniable record of all our supporters. When the forces of evil break into our home to try to rip our wedding rings off our fingers and destroy our marriage license, we can point to this framed photo and say, "See?! All of them were there! All of them approved this!"

But enough political posturing! Our wedding day did have those overtones, in an entirely quiet, calm, joyful manner. But the political was never our focus. It was an added extra, a free side-benefit of the ways we and our guests were joined in celebration and joy. For that day, no overt thoughts of revolution or political struggle were given any time at all.

The next item on the agenda after the group photo was cocktail hour out in the patio. But the wedding party and families snuck off to the main courtyard of the Lucie Stern to take photos. We did all the usual poses, and a few others, as well, with the backdrop of the gorgeous theatre building behind us and the brick walk and green bushes all around. There are shots of Phil and me dancing and laughing that I absolutely love now, and others of us with our witni and families, and the whole wedding party all together that are simply brilliant. Our photographer, Gina, did a fabulous job of it.

After the photos, everybody else headed back to join in the drinking, but Phil and I stayed to get a couple final shots with Gina, and then showed her the ballroom. And here's the next thing that I really desperately want to get across here but don't know if I can. The ballroom was so beautiful, with all the tables draped in burgundy or khaki, and all the white and glass plates laid out on them, and the centerpiece/antipasto spreads spilling down in their centers. I can't really describe it at all adequately. It all looked so rich and also welcoming. I will admit that, while I'd loved all the choices we'd made about how to structure our reception and dinner, and I knew it was going to be a great party, I hadn't felt as much confidence about it simply looking beautiful. We didn't have the budget to do some of the aesthetic things we'd hoped for: there was no special lighting in the ballroom, and we hadn't done anything to decorate the room, itself, beyond placing a couple arrangements of dried flowers around the fireplaces and bar. The cupcake stand anchored one end with its attendant smaller tables, but then there was a great big open space between it and the dinner tables, and I had been afraid that the whole room would seem echoey and unfilled. But I was wrong. It was astoundingly impressive and homey and comfortable all at the same time. It was bounteous. The deeply-infused colors of all the linens, the stacked tiles and the food that spilled out on them; the scents of parmesan and cured meats and briny olives and garlicky bruschetta topping; the sounds of the final pieces of silverware clinking as they were set down by the table minions, and the sounds from outdoor of conversation and laughter at cocktail hour... rich is the only word. Rich for each sense, and in all senses simultaneously. It was beautiful.

Gina took pictures of us, and of the ballroom, and especially of the cupcake stand Phil had built. That item, let me tell you, looked particularly spectacular, and lorded it over its end of the room. Have I ever described the cupcake stand? You'll remember, from oh-so-many weeks ago, how we learned that all the cupcake bakeries in town wanted to rent us very cheesy, inadequate stands (along with cupcakes wrapped in metallic paper, with ribbons and bows all over) and that we hated them. Phil chopped up a bunch of foam core (the leftovers of old lobby posters from his past two theatres), and we'd sat downstairs together over a couple evenings gluing things together, and then had spent half a day at the fabulous Flax Art Supply choosing rare and beautiful papers to cover it. What we ended up with was a tiered, round stand with three lower levels and three upper ones, the two halves separated by a big glass hurricane lamp we got on clearance at Z Gallery. We filled that glass column with cuttings from the Killer Ivy which is trying to mummify our back deck, and we got a big bunch of purple flowers for the very top, where the central column around which it was all constructed allowed room for a glass or vase. The flowers sprayed out from the top of the stand like a fountain, and finished off the whole thing beautifully. Overall, it was amazing and gorgeous, and a wholly worthy replacement for the traditional wedding cake. Oh yeah-- and it was also covered with more than a hundred mini-cupcakes from Delessio Market (go there!) here in SF, which is one of the truly great sort of gourmet buffet/bakeries in town. We'd chosen a deep dark chocolate cupcake with white chocolate icing, and also a pumpkin cupcake with some kind of icing I can't remember -- buttercream? Something spicy? Anyway, it was incredible. Toward the end of the night, Phil and I did our version of that annoying feed-each-other-the-first-slice tradition, which went much better with mini-cupcakes than it often does with huge pieces of cake. And no, this did not turn into a food fight, because we are not twenty-year olds playing around at all this.

I'm skipping ahead. Eating the cupcakes didn't come until hours later, after we'd rejoined our guests and our families and witni out in the patio for cocktails, and then helped herd them into the ballroom and sorted them out to their assigned tables for dinner, and eaten, ourselves, and gotten up and visited all the tables like the good hosts we are, and had toasts, and drunk Champagne... but what can I tell you about all that? It all went perfectly. Everybody had a great time. Our apparently unique take on antipasta and dinner went over brilliantly, with each table figuring out on their own how to navigate the overwhelming amount of food they found themselves facing as they sat down. Some picked up the tiles and passed them around, some designated one person to stand and hand things out. Some just took what was closest to them. But they all talked, they all figured out what worked best for them. Our biggest challenge, and our top priority, had been to create an atmosphere where our guests would all break down their own walls of unfamiliarity and get to know each other. And that worked. They were forced to cooperate in a way they really liked. And the food gave them something to talk about, too.

In fact, as I've said a number of times, the entire event was both exactly what we'd hoped for, and yet also much better than we'd expected. All our plans and intentions bore fruit, and they also bloomed and grew beyond what we'd foreseen. We wanted everyone to have a good time, but we hadn't expected that an appreciable number of them, both on the night itself and in the weeks after, would come to us and say that it was the very nicest wedding they'd ever attended. We'd tasted food options for weeks, and made the best choices we could, because we wanted our guests to enjoy a great spread-- but we hadn't expected to be stopped again and again as we talked to them to be asked where this was from and where that was from, where they could get some of those, and if we could demand the recipe from whoever had made the green beans. We'd carefully outlined everything that needed to happen that night, and made sure to hire enough minions to get it all done-- but we hadn't imagined that we would also get workers who were excited to be there, and happy and enthusiastic, and who'd keep congratulating us and just be thrilled for being a part of our wedding.

Who knew? Who could have imagined?

One last thing I'll tell you about, because it seems to have loomed so large in so many people's minds, is our first dance. Phil had insisted that we must dance -- that not only must there be dancing to round out our reception, but that the two of us must do a "first dance" together as a couple. Oh, dear god. Now, those of you who know me also know that I spent 15 years dancing in public, that I made my living that way through my twenties and thirties. But that was in full-fledged production shows, on stage, with a cast of other dancers and singers around me. It was not on a ballroom floor at my own wedding reception, out of context and at a moment when performing was completely beside the point, not to say inappropriate.

But eventually I gave in, and we'd created a very nice collection of five non-threatening waltzes which we thought everyone would enjoy and be able to dance to. We stuck with waltzes because we figured everyone can count to three, and there's an absolute minimum of technique required for this, as opposed to a two-step or a swing or anything else that's less instinctive and common. We'd also talked to a handful of friends whom we knew could dance, and given them strict instructions that they were to grab partners and join in with us after the first verse or so. We did not want to be out there on the dance floor all by ourselves for the entire first number. This was not supposed to be about showing off in front of our guests or making them gawk at us, it was supposed to be about checking off yet another tradition and giving people another way to enjoy themselves. Well, they did, apparently, have a good time, but not by joining in on the dance floor during that first song.

To be absolutely fair, one of our dancing friends, Brian (who was also one of Phil's witni), did grab someone he knew and whirl her out there to keep us company. But for the most part, we were on our own while Leanne Rimes warbled away at This Love, which is a terrific waltz and a very pretty song. Evidently, Phil and I are just too riveting when we dance together for people to take their eyes off us. I'm saying that facetiously, just in case you think I'm getting insufferably conceited, but there's also, I am forced to admit, some sort of grain of truth to it. We've been told a number of times that there is lots of chemistry when we dance together, and that whether or not we're doing the most complicated or impressive steps together, we are wonderful to watch as we relate to each other. Mostly, I think the point is that we have a good time, and let ourselves go when we dance. Lesbians, in particular, have always seemed to find us wonderful to watch, which we've never understood, but it's always nice to receive their compliments. And our wedding guests seemed to share this fascination, so we were stuck giving a performance after all, which wasn't what I'd signed on for, but oh well -- at least it went over well. We've been promised videos of this dance by a couple people who happened to have video-capable cameras handy, but so far we haven't seen these.

If we could have done anything differently, I would have hired a huge clean-up crew, because as it was, we and our wedding party and our minions had to work very hard to get everything cleaned up and loaded out in the time allotted. This was the part of the evening we had not organized to within an inch of its life beforehand, and that made things more difficult, too, as we didn't ever know precisely what needed to be done at any moment, what anyone else had decided to do about the leftover food or the folding tables or the stack of menus, and at several moments we all seemed to be working at cross-purposes. Still and all, after the van had been reloaded four times, and the cars had all been stuffed full, and we'd said goodbye to all our guests and loved ones, Phil and I drove slowly and carefully off toward Highway 101 feeling utterly exhausted but completely satisfied and amazed that we'd really and truly entered into this new stage in our life.

We got married! We really did it! And it was legal and real and official and a huge joy!

There are a few pictures here. And there'll be more to talk about, including our honeymoon and the terrible results of this recent election. But for the moment, revel with me in the joy of September 28th, with all our friends around us, joined by our family and community and all our loved ones, sharing in the joy and harmony of a perfect evening, blessed by blue skies and a total dearth of disasters. We had an amazing wedding. Join us in our celebration by remembering and sharing in it with us.

Wedding Weekend 2: The Wedding Day! (afternoon)

2008-11-02T22:35:00.001-08:00

I was chatting just a couple nights ago with the Marvelous Mariel, who stage managed and ran our wedding day in Palo Alto from the moment we all arrived at the venue until the moment Phil and I pulled away from the Lucie Stern in our seriously-overloaded van and headed home. She had just finished dealing with an event twice the size of ours, which included not only a formal, sit-down dinner for a daunting crowd of VIPS, but also dancing and cocktails and a charity auction along the way. But when I asked, what did she say? "Oh, yours was way harder. Waaaaayyyy harder," with a lot of vigorous nodding.

Hm. We didn't intend it to be hard. In fact, it wasn't hard at all, for us. I mean, it had nearly killed us for the 8 weeks beforehand, but the actual day was... well, okay, it was hard, too.

But, as Mariel rushed to point out, it was also fun. And rewarding. She'd begun the conversation, in fact, by telling Phil and me how much she'd enjoyed being part of our wedding.

Here's how it went: after brunch and all the running around up in San Francisco on Sunday morning, we, our witni, and a handful of other friends all convened in the parking lot of Willow, the rehearsal building belonging to TheatreWorks, where Phil had been piling up wedding stuff for more than a week already. There were two rooms of things to plunder: TW's own events supply room, where Phil had stuffed cases of wine, beer, and soda, and where we'd also be helping ourselves to the theatre's supplies of things like corkscrews, wineglasses, and baskets; and a conference room where the stage managers of the show then in rehearsals (Radio Golf) were working, and where Phil had left piles of wedding decorations, serving platters, and other non-edible supplies.

Here's the measure of how good and loving our friends are: they were actually excited to be hauling and carrying all this stuff. We had not just willing bodies but actual smiling faces and enthusiastic people. Who would dare hope for that?

Without giving you a complete list of every item we were packing, let me just say it was a LOT of stuff, and there are pictures of the prop van sagging so low that it's amazing we made it over the speed bumps in the parking lot. Our Honda and Phil's brother's cars and another rental one of the witni was driving were packed full, too. And there was a fair amount of last minute shuffling when it looked like we might not get everything in on a single trip. I utterly refused to waste time sending someone back to Willow for a second go-round, so we played 3-D Tetris with all the cargo spaces, and I ended up riding to the Lucie Stern with a gigantic box in my lap, twisted around it in the van's passenger seat like a demented Cirque du Soleil acrobat. But it all fit and we got there.

Just for the record, on the way out of the city, Michael, Ang, and the other Michael had stopped for a traffic light only to find themselves faced with an aging, completely exposed leatherman wearing nothing but a dog collar. "Wow, that seems kind of chilly," Michael #2 commented. And so our group officially left the Folsom Street Fair behind and headed down to Silicon Valley.

At the Lucie Stern, we were met by Mariel and our minions. Minions, just to make our terms clear, were what we were calling our hired staff, the eight young men and women whom Mariel had browbeaten into working for us all day and night long to set things up, serve our guests, clean up afterward, and generally smile and get everything and everyone where they needed to go in between times. They were GREAT, which was both gratifying and a little surprising given that we weren't exactly paying stellar wages. Thank you, minions, wherever you are now.

Anyway, we met the minions when we got to the venue, and split them all up, along with the witni and other volunteers. There were three teams, and all of us, in one way or another, started loading things in, building tables, arranging the ballroom, unpacking tablecloths and dinner plates and goblets and champagne flutes and silverware, setting up Phil's brilliant centerpieces, dispensing olives and cheese and cured meats and mushrooms and all the rest of the antipasto to its various dishes, arranging flowers, retrieving and setting up chairs... there were a lot of logistics.

This all started at 3:00 pm, after meeting at Willow at about 2:45. At 4:00, half of us moved on to the patio and kitchen to set things up there, and then an hour later those of us who were actually in the wedding, or attending it, quit working and rushed off to get dressed. And that's when we discovered the one and only disaster of the whole day.

Back at home in SF, when Phil and Michael and Michael and Ang and I were loading and checking and reloading and rechecking the car and the van with everything we needed, Phil had turned to me and said, "In the movie of this day, when we close the door for the last time, just as you hear the lock turn, the camera would pan down and zero in on the one absolutely indispensable item we've forgotten. What is it?" And neither one of us could figure that out. We went through the litany of essential items we could think of half a dozen times, both together and with the other guys, too. Marriage license. Rings. Artichoke hearts. Wedding clothes. Shoes, flowers, and coffee. Wedding guest book. Vases. Last-minute serving platters. Really, we couldn't think of anything. But as we left all the last, tiny, remaining items of set-up in Mariel's hands and switched focus to actually living out the ceremony, and as we got dressed, and tied Keren's tie for her, and found our socks and shoes (and I realized I'd forgotten a belt, and borrowed Michael #2's, which I still can't find to return to him now – sorry, Michael!), what we'd forgotten became suddenly, vibrantly, unforgivingly clear: our vows, which we'd written and rehearsed the night before, and then left neatly on our bedside tables.

But before I get to the story of how we dealt with this, let me just say a word or two about rehearsing our vows, because our friend Sandra was horrified that we were doing any such thing, and tried at length to convince us not to, but to keep them secret from each other so that the ceremony would be the first time either of us had heard the other's.

Oh good grief. We love you, Sandra, but really, this is the most over-romanticized piece of sentimental ridiculouslessness I've ever heard. I guess the idea is that if we each knew what the other one was going to say, then the moment where we actually said it in our ceremony would somehow lose poignancy and emotional heft. Oh please. First of all, for generations, all anyone vowed to do was love, honor, etc. They certainly knew what those words were going to be, and yet they found them, couple after couple, remarkably stirring and meaningful and, yes, full of emotion. Second, I've heard lots of stories of couples not remember one damn thing from their own weddings because they were so overwrought and caught up in the emotions and the moment. I wanted to know what my new husband was saying, and be able to take it in and remember it. I didn't want to risk missing things. Third... oh hell. It's just silly. Our wedding was for us, and we wanted to get the most out of it. But also, I think we knew that, meaningful as the ceremony was going to be, it was not going to be the intimate, private moment that would lend itself to the revealing of secret love-truths. That worked much better the night before, when we sat cross-legged on our bed and read our words to each other. I thought Phil's were beautiful, and touching, and exactly perfect. And he liked mine just as much. At our ceremony, hearing those words again was thrilling because I knew that all our friends and family were also hearing them with me, and that they'd be hearing the words I spoke about my love for Phil a moment later. Our vows were declarations in that moment; we spoke of what marriage meant to us, of why we had each chosen the other, of what we expected for our lives together. The intimate moment had come 18 hours earlier, but that public moment was just as meaningful, if different, and although I didn't cry on either occasion, at home I felt a new flood of devotion and wonder over this man I'm going to spend my life with, and at the ceremony I felt a huge wash of pride in him and in our commitment.

But all of that might not have happened when we realized we'd left the vows at home. It was a big time oh shit moment. We stared at each other in stress and panic for a moment, and then Phil said something about pulling out his laptop (which he'd thankfully brought) and copying down the words he'd written, and I tried like hell to remember all of my vows, and to find mneumonic tricks to help me feel confident I'd get through them without forgetting anything dire. I mean, you don't want to be Hilary Swank at the Oscars, forgetting to thank her own husband, do you? And yes, I admit I am embarrassed that I thought of that at the time. How gay can you get? But on the other hand, Hilary and Chad Lowe got divorced a couple years later, so maybe it's a serious question, gay as it is.

I did not have my laptop with me, so I didn't have access to the full text I had written. I remembered it pretty well though, and after dithering about for a few minutes, it occurred to me that I could just jot down some of the most important words I wanted – the adjectives, essentially – and use that to guide me through. I knew I'd remember the general sweep of the statement.

And yes, this means I got through my wedding vows by relying on bullet points. I'm sorry, but that's just the way it worked out.

And after that, once the boutonnieres were pinned on and we'd checked through the windows to see that all the guests were seated and Kelley was getting ready to start, Phil was whisked away by his witni to go wait on the opposite side of the patio out of sight, while my witni pulled me off into the prep room and huddled with me to say good luck and some other stuff. We saw Phil's witni enter from the other side, and then I stood and watched my witni walk out –Angelo, Michael, Keren – and then I was alone in the prep room, knowing Phil was alone over on the other side, and I stood at the door and listened as Kelley introduced our supporters and welcomed everybody and then introduced us.

And then... and then... he called us, and we walked out, and the crowd clapped, and people grinned and cried and Phil and I met in front of Kelley, who would pronouce us married. And... but that's the end of the story, and it's probably best to leave it for another post. It deserves its own time.

Wedding Weekend 2: The Wedding Day! (morning)

2008-11-02T13:58:00.000-08:00

I'd like to be funny about this, but I'm not sure how. The easy way to be funny is to talk about bad things, or problems you've faced, or wild, unlikely inconveniences. None of that happened on our wedding day. We did not have eight hours of trial and tribulation, and finally make it to the Lucie Stern in the nick of time to exchange vows. We did not have rain, traffic jams on the way down the Peninsula, misprinted invitations that directed everyone to arrive an hour late, a misunderstanding with the caterer resulting in 500 dinners of gefilte fish, or any of the other disasters you've ever heard about on one of those TV shows about Wildest Weddings, or Weirdest Weddings, or Wedding That Almost Didn't Happen. Our wedding did happen, and it happened smoothly, and although there was a lot of work and some stress along the way, it happened exactly as planned and turned out even better than we'd dared hope.

I guess all I can do is tell you what happened.

First of all, Sunday, September 28, 2008 was possibly the most beautiful, weather-perfect day on record in the history of the human race. Really. The temperature was perfectly in the 70s, the air was light and fresh but never chilly, the sun was shining, and the sky was so blue it looked like it had been designed for a Flintstones cartoon.

We started the day with a brunch for our wedding party and their various consorts, partners, and other hangers-on. I'd made the reservation at a restaurant called Home near our place, which, as you'll remember if you're a faithful reader, has played a continuing role in our relationship, our life in San Francisco, and our marriage. When I called to make the reservation, I'd had very specific things I wanted, like a table in their covered courtyard, and space for a dozen people set up in such a way that we'd all be able to hear each other. This is not normally a problem, but the manager I had spoken to a couple weeks prior to our wedding morning did pause for a moment when we discussed dates and times for the reservation. "Do you know what weekend that is?" he asked hesitantly. "Oh yes, I'm well aware," I answered. But in case you're not, I'll now tell you the story.

The last weekend of September is, among other things, generally when San Francisco hosts the Folsom Street Fair, one of the largest events of the year for the international leather community. This means that thousands upon thousands of fairly outrageous individuals descend on the city, all decked out in leather pants, kilts, chaps, bras, vests, skirts, hats, boots, stilettos, etc. And also, frequently, in studs, collars, chains, masks, gags, handcuffs, leashes, blindfolds, and all sorts of other items that A) turn them on, B) indicate the minutiae of their fetishes to others who share them, and B) generally seem like a lot more work than can possibly be worth it.

Now, don't get me wrong. I understand the desire for kink, and I certainly have no problem with other people pursuing theirs. I just question whether it's possible to go so far down that road that you lose sight of your original intention, and the lifestyle overtakes the impetus. But that's a question for each individual to address; what I really question is the predilection the leather folks (and older San Franciscan kink-ites in general) seem to have for total nudity. I do not understand how walking around in public stark naked falls into the category of "leather", but believe me, it seems to be one very common manifestation of this particular subculture. Perhaps the naked people have delved so far into leather that they've come out the other side, and now no longer need the vulgar reminders of actual leather to turn them on or manifest their orientation. I have no idea. I do think it's more than slightly inappropriate to go schwinging down Market Street in nothing but a pair of sneakers, regardless of what events are happening elsewhere in the city. But this is not meant to be a manifesto on taste and fetishism. This is the story of our wedding day, and the point is that when the manager of Home asked me if I were aware of what other sorts of clients might be surrounding us for brunch on our wedding morning, I told him yes, I knew exactly what we were in for. He and I agreed that, given their business demands on such a morning, and given the fact that at least half our wedding party was from out of town and of heterosexual, non-kinky leanings (at least as far as we know), we'd opt for an early-ish time, and plan to have brunch by no later than 11:00 am. So we were off and running.

The actual day, as I said, was bright and happy and perfect. Our friends Keren and Jill had only arrived back in town late on Saturday, so we weren't sure when or whether they'd both be able to join us, but everybody else was on their way with lots of time to spare, and Michael, Angelo, Phil and I all headed down the hill around 10:45.

Again, there are no really funny stories about brunch. Sorry! We met up with Phil's brothers and their partners, Brian, and eventually with Keren and the baby Bean, too. And we all ate and swilled our addictive beverages of choice, and somewhere along the line Phil and I handed out gifts to our respective witni and also printouts of their individual readings. A word about the readings: we'd talked a lot over the last couple weeks about exactly how the ceremony might go. We wanted to write vows to say to each other, and we also wanted Kelley to lead us, as officiant, through some version of the traditional "better or worse, richer or poorer" litany. Beyond that, we'd come up with ways to adjust for the fact that we were not going to be doing a big processional past all the gathered guests, and various other substitutes for some of the more hidebound wedding traditions. Phil had wanted music, and we'd asked C Kelly Wright, a TW regular and spectacular singer, to perform "Part of the Human Heart", from Once On This Island. And we'd discussed readings for the witni to chime in with.

Here's a confession: we found all our wedding readings off web pages offering compilations of them. In fact, the first couple we found – a selection from Madeleine L'Engle's book The Irrational Season and another passage from the children's book The Velveteen Rabbit – were off a page very specifically touting readings for weddings (these were among the "literary" choices, I do believe.) Although I loved the readings, themselves, and certainly couldn't come up with anything better, I felt really cheesy and unoriginal about just lifting them from a web page rather than creating something more personal and heartfelt, ourselves. I spent a couple days agonizing about this, then a couple more skimming through my favorite novels, and doing other searches online to find inspiration. But in the end I couldn't top the L'Engle and Rabbit passages, so I assuaged my own discomfort by adding a whole collection of other, shorter quotes. I figured we'd at least make the whole idea of readings a bigger deal in our ceremony, and involve all the witni rather than just a couple. This actually did seem very appropriate and important to me, because words, books, and writing in all forms are such a big part of Phil's and my life (as anyone who's visited our two-room library, or been dragooned into packing or unpacking books when we've moved, can attest.) Anyway, I turned up a large collection of short quotes about love and marriage in general, from a very wide range of sources. There were lines from Mark Twain and St. Augustine, Rita Rudner and Joanne Woodward. Some were sweet and some were funny, and there seemed to be at least one that was suitable to each of our very-varied witni, so I was happy.

So... brunch was fun. Afterward, we all split up to collect different items needed for the wedding, and with a plan to meet up again down in Menlo Park at the TheatreWorks rehearsal studio, where we'd load up with all the dishes, drinks, decorations, and various other detritus bound for Stern. Phil's brothers left with maps to pick up our side dishes and cupcakes, Phil and Michael rushed home to meet up with another friend (another Michael, who'd foolishly volunteered to help out) and start loading up the car and van, and Ang and I detoured around to pick up the flowers and coffee down on 18th Street.

The race was on!

Wedding Weekend 1: Saturday

2008-11-01T10:52:00.001-07:00

September 27th was a Saturday, and the day before our wedding. Phil and I left Michael home with all the dishes and food to be packed and hit the highway for Silicon Valley.

We had a number of friends flying into town that day, and the time had come to start the long, complex process of translating all the preparation work we'd been doing since July into the actual, full-fledged, once-in-a-lifetime event, with all its participants and guests and logistics. The first challenge was to get everything and everyone to wherever they needed to go.

Even this was more complicated than it might sound. We had an enormous amount of stuff to transport from our house in San Francisco down to our wedding site in Palo Alto. Phil had been working on this for awhile, taking carloads of serving stuff, decorations, and cases of soda, wine, and beer down to TheatreWorks' rehearsal studio, where he'd staked out a couple storage rooms and handy corners and stacked up our supplies into towering piles of wedding-ness. But that still left a lot of food, clothing, last-minute items, and people to get down Highway 101, not to mention a fair number of other logistics to arrange for the visitors' barbeque on Saturday night and the wedding party brunch on Sunday morning. So Phil and I began the day by driving down to TheatreWorks to pick up the prop department's minivan. On the way back, I also picked up my friend Angelo, who was flying in from Vegas that morning, and together Ang and I picked up some jumper cables, because the car had started having battery problems and Phil and I were trying to prevent disaster by being prepared.

Just for the record, this was a wholly superstitious approach. We knew we needed a new battery, but until we had time to get one we figured if the car knew there were jumper cables, it wouldn't bother to give us trouble. Murphy's Law precluded – in our minds, at least.

Then we all met back at our house, where Michael was busy washing and prepping, and we quickly put Ang to work on something or other, too, because not only were there last minute wedding things to finish, but the barbeque required lots of work, itself. We'd planned the barbeque so that we’d actually get a chance to see our out of town friends while they were visiting. It seemed rude to ask people to fly several thousand miles and then barely say hello before they had to fly back. And while we hoped we’d get lots of time to talk and hang out during the reception on Sunday, it was a wedding, folks, so we knew our time would be limited. I mean, there was a lot planned for that few hours at the Lucie Stern! In any case, when Ang and I got home from the airport, the house was already abuzz with activity, as Phil and Michael cleaned and vacuumed and generally worked like Cinderella on steroids. And Ang and I jumped right in.

”Abuzz with activity” sounds so hackneyed, doesn't it? But it's a fair description, and it's an important point. One of the ways to understand our whole Wedding Weekend – one of its defining aspects, which crystalizes the experience in my mind – is as a community undertaking. Our friends gathered. We all worked together, and then we talked and ate and drank and had fun together. There were big groups and small, new connections and old ones. If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ll remember my thoughts upon watching Mama Mia, and how, between the awful songs and Meryl Streep embarrassing herself, the whole village in that movie entered into the wedding preparations and celebrated along with the couple. That’s what happened here, really. We’d had all the drama of family members not coming, etc., etc. And we’d struggled through the difficulties of doing everything ourselves until the final stage. But starting with Michael’s arrival on Monday a week before the wedding, and then increasingly over the weekend, itself, the crowds gathered and helped and dived in and participated. And that whole thing, taken altogether, was a celebration, and exactly the kind of communal, joyful experience we’d been hoping to have.

So: back to our buzzing home on Saturday afternoon. I’m certain no one wants to read a blow-by-blow of who cleaned what, and even if someone does, I can’t remember. I do recall spending quite a bit of time, myself, sitting on the floor of our downstairs unit printing out placecards, because Phil and I had only finalized the table assignments late the night before, sitting on the floor of our living room pushing RSVP cards around on the carpet. We were quite proud of our tables, when we finished – and that’s partly a tribute to the quality of our friends and partly a self-serving shout-out to our own instincts for putting people together. We mixed and matched, insisting that no table could have only TheatreWorks people, or only relatives, or only any other single group. Beyond that, we just wanted tables that would have a good time, and find something to talk about. Like I said, we were pretty proud of our final choices. Printing the damn cards to tell people where they were supposed to sit, though, remained to be finished, and so I had to skulk downstairs for more than an hour of trial and error and more trial, partly because printing things out is one of those modern-day trials like slaying dragons or finding Shangri-La was in the old days, and it never goes exactly as it's meant to, and you always have to trick the printer into actually spitting out what you designed. In my case, I make things harder because I insist on using a layout program rather than the stupid Microsoft templates (which are easy so long as you don’t want to do anything creative or, to put it another way, anything that some dweeb up in Redmond, WA hasn’t already thought of.) Upstairs, while I toiled in cyber-land, there was lots of clearing away of wedding detritus, and final packing for the next day, and chopping of flowers and sticking them in vases, and dressing of salads and cooking of pasta, and setting up the bar in our handy laundry area, and then after all that, sometime in the early evening, our guests started arriving.

The other thing to understand about our wedding is that our guest list – and even our wedding party – included lots of people who had never met each other before. Phil and I between us have close connections that literally span the globe. We hadn’t succeeded in dragging our favorite British supporter across the ocean to join us (although she insisted on regular phone updates), but we had guests from all over the U.S., and they represented both all the stages of our own pasts and all the various aspects of our lives – personal, professional, and social, individual and shared. There were some of Phil’s old board members from the theatre he ran in, as well as Chicago friends who’d never been to the theatre. There were all our TheatreWorks buddies, both staff and board and general friends, and also my work friends, and other SF connections, and our upstairs neighbors, and our visiting relatives. Ang came from Vegas and Grace came from Redbank, and… the list goes on. No one knew each other, everybody plunged in to prep and eat and talk together. It was glorious. And it began on Saturday, when we held the out-of-towners’ barbeque at our house.

The first folks in were Greg and Anne, from Chicago. And then more people, who arrived together and needed fifteen minutes of directions because they’d gotten lost driving three miles in San Francisco. And then Phil’s brothers showed up, and the neighbors, who had to leave early, and more friends, and more and more. We ended up with twenty-some that evening, and food for about three times that (welcome to my life. Parties are inevitably followed by several days-worth of leftovers, and because this weekend was all on an especially large scale, it generated especially plenteous leftovers. We still have leftover olives, cheese, and artichoke hearts in the refrigerator. Well… we’d promised Michael that if he’d stay and cat-sit during our honeymoon, he wouldn’t have to go shopping. Oh boy, did we make good on that promise.)

I'm not sure what else to say about the barbeque. It was a great night. And were there final thoughts at the end? Things we learned before we went to bed and slept our last night as single men before our wedding? Hm… Well, there were three things:

We have a great, great party house. We’d always suspected this. But the combo of large spaces and small ones, and the flow from room to room, and the options for inside or outside or upstairs or downstairs all gelled magnificently, and we are already planning what to do with the place for Christmas.
We have great friends. We knew this, too, of course. But seeing them all together, some for the first time in a couple years, and more, seeing them all fall in love with each other and then come tell us how much they liked so-and-so, was still more than we’d dared to hope for. We have really, really great friends.
This was going to work. All the preparation and planning had been an enormous drama. It had exhausted us time and time again, and we’d had to collapse, rest up, take a deep breath, and then go shopping for more bowls again. But in the end, with Michael’s help and Ang’s work, and the aid and support of all our other friends throughout the entire weekend, not to mention the good and great energy of everyone around us, it was all going to be worth it. The payoff for the last three months was going to happen. It started that night. And things were only going to get better.

Inlaws and Outlaws

2008-10-22T23:52:00.000-07:00

I have a good friend in New York who refers to his partner’s family as his “outlaws”. I’ve always thought that hit just the right note of irony, descriptiveness, and understated politics. To be honest, I thought it was something to aspire to, because my friend’s partner’s family shares the label and the joke, and love him dearly. They are an outlaw family, in all the best senses.

But guess what? I don’t have outlaws like my friend does. I have in-laws, legal and official. On our wedding night, after the wedding and all the clean-up were finished, we hugged Phil's brother and his wife goodbye before pulling away from the Lucie Stern Center in our overladen van. They were heading south in their own overpacked vehicle. And I turned to Phil just as we all rolled out of the parking lot and headed in opposite directions and said, “Oh my god. I’m actually related to these people.” Yes. I have an official brother-in-law and sister-in-law now through Phil. And when their baby is born after the first of the year, I’ll share a niece with my husband.

Husband. Niece. Brother and sister. Family. This is all quite clear in California, and since this particular in-law family lives in LA, there’s no question of our relationship. I’m less certain what the legal status is between me and Phil’s other brother, who lives in New Jersey, or with his parents, who are based in Florida. And then there’s the looming question of what my relationship to these people will be if, in a few weeks, Proposition 8 passes, and marriages between two people of the same sex are outlawed, hatred and panic written into the California Constitution.

I’ve been saying that if Prop 8 passed we’d leave the state, never to return, but I’m sure that sounds like hyperbole. I don’t know what will actually happen. Leaving is certainly something we’d discuss, in spite of all the connections we’ve made here, in spite of all the love that embraced us on our wedding day, in spite of all the investments we’ve made in our life here. We’d do this because, in spite of all that goodness, the state itself would have chosen to spit on us and reject us, and what sort of masochists would we be to stick around for more of that sort of treatment?

I’d like to think that our departure might shock or hurt some of the supporters of this hateful amendment, but I’m sure they’d consider it a good riddance. They have blinded themselves to the very nature of our commitment and thus the value of our presence—just as their very own parents or grandparents fifty or sixty years ago might have refused to see a marriage between a black man and a white woman in any real terms, but would have called names and averted their eyes and breathed a sigh of relief when that mixed-race couple disappeared, never asking too closely where they went or how the communities they left were diminished by the departure.

It is shocking to both Phil and me not just that Proposition 8 is such a hate-filled, fear-filled piece of tripe, but that we have to fight it in the first place, that this very discussion is considered normal, legitimate, and worth debating even in liberal circles. The very idea that we can’t marry the people we love? Just for a moment, if you’re straight, imagine that situation. Imagine that society gets to vote on—or, more to the point, veto—the most intimate personal part of your life, the central factor around which all other aspects revolve, and which, depending on your situation, can determine your financial status, your lifestyle, your circle of friends, your future prospects, and the inheritance you will leave. All these will be decided not by you and not by those who know or love you, but by an unfeeling, alien electorate who are often whipped into a frenzy by the most backward and fearful specimens humanity has to offer. Imagine having to beg and plead for permission to have your marriage. Imagine well-respected members of the community standing up and being taken seriously as they declare that your marriage is not a marriage at all, that it never was, that it has no value. And that it—and you—never will.

That is what we’re facing. How can we stay here if our very marriage is ripped out from under us?

I meant to write about the beauty of our wedding. It was a perfect day. It was a pristine, joyful, love-filled, celebratory, reaffirming, fun, wise, communal blessing of an afternoon and evening. It was everything a wedding should be, and so often isn’t. It was everything we’d hoped and planned for, and more besides, because not only did everything go right, but all our friends and loved ones got it, they saw what we’d intended and they reveled in it and loved us right back and added wave upon wave of goodness and happiness to every stage of the proceedings. The whole was indubitably greater than the sum of its parts, and let me tell you, those parts were pretty damn good to start with, and their sum would have been pretty fine in itself.

There are a few pictures up at http://crisandphil.blogspot.com. There are more coming—I’ve learned that Blogger is a terrible place to post a lot of pictures, so I’m starting over somewhere more suited to that. Stay tuned, and keep checking back.

I can’t communicate the great wonder and joy that was our wedding day, at least not yet. At the moment, all I can think about when I sit down to write is Proposition 8, and the threat it holds over all our heads. So I've given in, and decided to write about that instead. And I’m asking all of you not only to vote against it, if you live in California, but to write to all your friends and tell them to vote against it as well.

Meanwhile, with the pictures posted so far, I can at least offer some image evidence of the great time we had, and the great example our wedding day was for all who believe in love and commitment. And the great argument it was against all those who would question its validity, and defame the value it brings simply because we’re not one-man-and-one-woman.

We cannot thank all our wedding guests adequately for their love and support. But we're asking one more thing of them now, which is that they help defend us and the day we spent together in love and community.

Tell friends. Enjoy the pictures. Go to www.NoOnProp8.com. Do whatever feels right to you. But please continue to act in love and strength, and help fight against this tide of hate and fear.

St Michael of Hollywood (and his heavenly host)

2008-10-17T07:57:00.001-07:00

I’m going to embarrass and outrage one my best friends, but I don’t care. He deserves it.

Six days before our wedding, one of my groomsmen, Michael, flew in from LA and took up residence in our basement, otherwise known as Wedding Central.

A little background. Michael is the very first person I met when I moved from Las Vegas to New York, because he was a friend of my friend Rob, whom I was moving in with, and so he met me at the apartment and helped unload the truck. This was even more daunting than it might sound, because I’d left a 3 bedroom, 2000 square foot house in Las Vegas, and was moving into a decrepit studio apartment on the Upper West Side. I’d gotten rid of a lot of furniture, but still… it was a big damn truck and that studio got very crowded. If I remember correctly, there were actual shoehorns deployed before we were finished.

The next week, Rob left on tour with a show and I knew no one in New York City except Michael. He bore with me and showed me around town, and gave me the most comforting, specific directions I’d ever heard in my life when telling me how to get places or navigate the subway. He’d tell me which car to ride in on the train so that I’d get off facing the correct exit in a station, or tell me all the shops along one block so I would know for sure I was on the right side of the street, or describe what movies were playing in a particular movie theatre on the way. I’ve learned since that Michael does this because his own sense of direction is so nearly hopeless, but at the time I thought he was just being thoughtful.

And he was. I did learn my way around New York, and I discovered lots of tricks for navigating the city that stood me in good stead during all my years there – and which have served me ever since in other cities. But the point is, Michael was my first NY tour guide and contact, and he was a godsend.

He also became my theatre buddy, and we teamed up to get cheap tickets to nearly every show on Broadway for a couple seasons. Those were the years of Chicago and Ragtime, the premier of the stunning revival of Cabaret that made Alan Cumming a star, the start of The Lion King’s apparently endless reign. Michael and I sat in front rows staring straight upward, or back balconies straining to see anything, or off on the side aisles or right next to columns, in all kinds of weird seats we’d lined up at 7am to get for $20, or come early and put our names into a lottery for, or showed up for at the last minute because he knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who was on staff somewhere at the theatre who could get us last-minute cheap seats. Those were great nights. The shows weren’t always great – aside from the stunners above, that was also well into the run of Jekyll and Hyde, which we watched from crash position in our front-row-center seats, terrified equally by the ten ton scenery swinging wildly right over our heads and the completely insane jekkies all around us. It was also the last days of Titanic, a show so dismal that even my usual bad show game of “how could I fix this” yielded not a single good idea.

All that happened in the 90s. After 2000, Michael tended bar at a historic West Village place and a loose social crowd gathered him on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. I was running RealPilates at that point, an upscale fitness studio in Tribeca, and I loved stopping off at West 4th for a beer or two on my way home. The people on the barstools around me ranged from out of work actors, to businesspeople, to one of the chief editors for Newsweek. Eventually, the happy hour group also included Karen Jacobsen, who sang and tried out new songs on us and let us share her trials and tribulations as she recorded her first full-production CD.

Do I sound like I’m waxing nostalgic here? I’m not, but I want to give you some context. When Phil and I first talked about making a commitment to each other, and holding some kind of ceremony, I had three friends I told immediately, and whom I asked to stand up with me. Michael was one of those, of course. And when we began planning our actual wedding a couple months ago, of course I contacted those same three friends to make sure of their schedules before we locked in the wedding date. Michael had moved to Southern California a few years ago, and aside from acting gigs didn’t have many commitments, so he rather recklessly mentioned in one email that he’d be available to come up early and help out if we wanted.

Oh boy, did we want. I told him that sounded great, and furthermore, asked if he’d like to stick around for the whole week after our wedding and take care of my sick cat while we went on our honeymoon. The cat treatment at that point included nightly IVs and multiple pills stuffed down a very unhappy, furry throat, and I was getting really anxious about how this was going to happen if I couldn’t be there. Michael signed on, and even after we lost the cat battle, and my beloved pet died only a couple weeks later, he remained happy to stay for the week, happy to come up for the week before the big day, and happy to be our indentured servant throughout.

I’m not kidding about the indentured servant part. I mean, I guess I am, because we didn’t actually own him and he could have left if he’d wanted. But he didn’t, and I can’t begin to tell you how much he accomplished. For anyone who was at our wedding, you can thank Michael for the structure of the centerpieces, for the fact that all the bowls and serving dishes were clean, for finishing the cupcake stand, and for all that tomato bruschetta topping – he didn’t actually make that, Phil did. But Michael prepped all the ingredients while we were away at work so we could just chop and mix in the evening. Without his work ahead of time, it never would have happened.

Really, none of it would ever have happened. Or at least, much less of it would have, and what did would have exhausted us and made it impossible for us to enjoy our own wedding. And the event itself would have been much, much less successful.

In the day before the wedding, Michael began to be joined by our other friends and witni. My dear friend Angelo arrived on Saturday morning (I keep referring to Ang as “my oldest friend”, but that means the friendship is the oldest one I have, not that he’s the oldest, okay? Ang has known me since I was 17, and yes, that’s just as terrifying to me as it would be to you.) He and Michael, together, finished final preparations for the entire wedding, not to mention helping us get the house into shape for the barbeque we held that night for all our out-of-town friends. And the two of them took part in what was absolutely the most ludicrous pre-wedding event of all, The Opening of the Recalcitrant Artichoke Heart Jars. That one had all three of us braced against the kitchen counters, struggling and sweating to twist the damn tops off. A few hours later, besides standing up alongside us, reading the selections we’d given them (that morning), making toasts, and generally providing some of the brightest moments of the whole evening, our six witnesses – along with their partners and friends, and a few other friends who volunteered – loaded and unloaded cars and vans, set up the tables and chairs in the ballroom, prepared the food, decorated, arranged flowers and placecards, handed out programs, herded the guests to and fro, and generally made everything happen.

The point here is that, in yet another way, this was a community event. We did lots of preparation. We worked hard, for eight weeks. But when it came right down to it, we couldn’t have done it by ourselves, and we didn’t. Once again, our friends came to the rescue, led by the inimitable St. Michael.

Hunting the Elusive Purple Witni Shirt

2008-10-10T07:30:00.000-07:00

O hear the tale of our merry chase for the purple shirts for the witni!

That sounds like a bad pseudo-medieval quest epic, doesn’t it? And it could be – the purple witness shirt is apparently a beast as rare and difficult to capture as Bugs Bunny, and not half as entertaining.

Or maybe that’s not quite true. As I think of it, we captured dozens of the damn things, but then had to trade them back in, find others, compare and search and dig through piles of sale shirts… oh, it was an epic, all right. And perhaps I should have said that the correct purple witness shirt was a rare and difficult-to-find thing, or the wearable purple witness shirt was hard to find, let alone purchase and disseminate in all its proper sizes. That was what proved well nigh impossible.

In any case, our shirt quest, which appeared to be one of the easier things on our wedding to-do list when we started, turned out to be long, hard, and annoying. And now I’m going to tell you about it.

As you've already learned, we went through Round 1 of wardrobe drama with our own outfits. That was hard enough. We thought, at the time, that deciding on coordinating outfits for our witni would be quite easy. Indeed, we did decide what they should wear on that very same day, and even purchased ties for all of them. My witni were going to wear dark purple shirts with green-accented ties, while Phil’s were going to wear lavender shirts with deeper purple-accented matching ties. We went home and emailed all the information our witni could ever need to help them find the shirts we’d chosen in their own nearest Macys. We got make, name, color, SKU and barcodes... everything but the license plate number, officer. We even included the sale prices for which they’d be available that weekend, if our witni could go shopping right away.

And then all hell broke loose. First of all, the shirt I’d picked for my witni – a lovely, deep purple solid oxford from DKNY Men, on sale for about $25 that weekend – turned out not to exist. At least, it didn’t exist anywhere besides the Union Square store of Macys. And I mean anywhere. It wasn’t even mentioned on the DKNY website where they listed all their other products. Other Macys had never heard of it. And it goes without saying that any other stores my witni went into just looked at them like they had five heads.

Sigh. All right. So I figured I’d just buy the shirts at Union Square, and the witni could reimburse me. Except by the time I got back there, first of all, the damn things weren’t on sale anymore, so they cost almost $50 each, and second, of course, even Macy Union Square didn’t have the right sizes. Surprise! And there was no time to order. So… back to the drawing board, which in this case meant Cincinnati. You remember Cincinnati, right? Phil and I had to go there on a theatre trip just a couple weeks before our wedding. And yes, there was a great big Macys store right across the street from our downtown hotel. So off we went, on our first morning in town, to find that, no, they didn’t have the DKNY line, but yes, they did have other purple shirts – on sale again! – which I proceeded to buy instead. This choice was by Geoffrey Beene, and after a long, involved conversation with the head salesmen in the department, wherein he assured me (actually screaming and waving his arms around) that my female witness could never wear these, there was no way, no way anywhere on the globe or in history to convert a man's shirt into a woman's size, I just grabbed the closest things I could find and ran.

I was really hoping that we’d still track down the original, DKNY choice. But meanwhile, I figured a backup in hand was worth two in the mysterious Macys aether, so I crammed those three new shirts into my luggage and flew home.

Meanwhile, Phil’s witni had developed their own problems. Mostly, the problems belonged to one of Phil's brothers, who wears a very specific size with unusually long arms. It doesn’t exist in any but one or two lines we found. Those lines, you should already have figured out, do not include anything like the solid lavendar shade we'd picked originally.

Oh, holy crap. Back to the drawing board again. With the Cincinnati shirts now sitting in our bedroom, we skulked back to Union Square to search through their stores for anything in the right size. Palate was entirely secondary at this point. And… nothing. Until, miracle of miracles, Phil found a dark purple shirt that actually had all the requisite sizes available, right there in the store. And it was… can you see this coming? My original DKNY choice, the one that didn’t exist anywhere else, and which did not have, just for the record, any of my witni’s sizes available.

Okay. So Phil’s witni would now wear the dark purple, while mine would have to go lighter. This also eliminated the Cincinnati shirts from consideration, since they were only half a shade different from the DKNY and would blend together from a distance. Okay, no problem. Phil's original lavendar choice didn't come in the right sizes, so we searched for something different, one for which all three necessary sizes were right there in the store, and we took every single shirt we found up to the register. Only one small, possible glitch still remained: the DKNY shirts were fitted, rather than traditional cut, and we didn’t know if that would work for Phil’s brother. So we went ahead and made the purchase, but then immediately shipped one off to LA so he could try it on and say yay or nay.

You know it was nay, right? I mean, come on. Of course it was nay. There’s no way this could work, could it? Back to the drawing board once again. This would be what, the fourth or fifth time? Except that this time we threw up our hands and told the problem child himself, “You find something. Let us know what it is and we’ll work around it.” And so the search shifted from San Francisco to Southern California, and we waited to see what else we’d have to adjust, return, exchange, or just start over with this time.

Meanwhile, we now had at least six shirts we’d have to return. Which I did only to find that Macys couldn’t figure out how to credit Phil’s credit card, so the ones he’d purchased were only good for an in-store credit. Mine from Cincinnati were just fine, and could be credited back to my account, no problem. All that smashing and hauling the damn things through security had been for nothing, but at least I didn’t have to pay for them.

And then, shortly after that point, we heard the word from LA. Yes, there were new shirts. They fit, there were others available, all was well, and one was being overnighted to us to hand over to Phil's one non-brother witness. In the same package was the master version of our wedding favor CD, which Phil's tech-brilliant brother had been equalizing for us between shopping trips. This magical package was sent Thursday, and Phil waited with bated breath all day Friday for it. Not only were we eager to see what shirt we’d ended up with, and whether we’d have to adjust my choice yet again, but we also wanted to get a start on copying those CDs! We were one week out from the actual Wedding Day at this point, so Time Was Running Short in a big way.

The package did not come on Friday. It came on Tuesday, after we'd already made other arrangements for downloading the equalized CD songs, which involved installing new software I'd never heard of and learning all new ways to outsmart iTunes, which was so determined to be helpful it almost destroyed the whole process.

But back to the shirts. When Phil opened the package, what do you think he found? Just guess. You can guess this, can't you? Yes, that’s right, kids: he found my Cincinnati choice, the Geoffrey Beene pretender to the DKNY throne, the shirts I'd repacked my suitcase for, and dragged through two airports, and then brought to work and schlepped over to Macys to return one day during my lunch break.

Oh dear god. It turned out we could have kept one of those stupid shirts after all.

I tell you, just reliving this whole saga exhausts me. It was all so silly. But hey, we had shirts, our witni would be dressed, and the colors even all looked good together. So... all’s well that ends well, right?

Yeah, right. All’s well that ends well, indeed. Shakespeare should try shopping at Macys before he spouts off next time.

Where We Are

2008-10-09T14:22:00.000-07:00

I can’t be funny anymore, I’m exhausted.

A few nights ago, at about 2, Phil woke up with a start and demanded, “Where are we?” I hastened to reassure him we were home, in bed, and, until three seconds before, peacefully sleeping. But now that I think back on it, he may have had a point. Where are we, indeed? And how did we get here?

They’re loaded questions. Loaded with meaning and emotion and importance, of course, but loaded mostly, it must be said, with shopping.

Of all the things we’ve dealt with in these preparations, the question of what we were going to wear, and what our witnesses were going to wear, has turned out to be one of the most difficult. This is ridiculous, right? I mean, I know that wedding attire is traditionally a Big Huge Hairy Deal, but that's usually because there's a bride involved, and she needs The Perfect Dress, while her bridesmaids all need The Most Hideous Dress, and those things take time to discover, and require multiple fittings and various weighings-in from mothers, mothers-in-law, fathers, and friends. And they also often cost about as much as the down payment on a nice house in the city, and the only thing you can really count is that the one the bride finally decides on is going to be unavailable in her size, already sold to someone else, and 10% more expensive than the absolute top price her adoring dad has budgeted.

We didn't have to deal with any of that. So our wardrobe should have been easy, shouldn't it?

Well, no. One of us – and all right, I admit it, it was me – had very definite ideas about what he wanted to wear. Or at least what he didn’t want to wear. Mostly, as I said to Phil, I didn't want to wear a suit. That was fine, as Phil didn't particularly want to wear a suit, either. I then redefined (and broadened) my requirements to be "nothing I would wear for a theatre opening." And thus the circus began.

Let me give you just a little background here. Clothes are important to me. I know that's shallow, and I'm sure you're all thinking I'm a horrible person now, but I can't help it. Good clothes make me feel attractive, confident, and happy. Wearing something I love empowers my day, and I believe I'm actually better at whatever I'm doing if I feel I look good.

Bad clothes do the opposite, and wearing them is depressing. The problem is, there's no clear rule book to tell what is "good" and what is "bad". If I understood more about design, maybe I'd be able to break this down into things like cut, line, weight, and fabric. As it is, all I can tell you is that I was desperate to avoid the same old kind of clothes I put on every day to go to the office, and the slightly more formal ones I wear for theatre events. Don't get me wrong – I like most of my wardrobe individually. But the remoseless round of khakis-and-a-shirt, khakis-and-a-shirt wears on me till I want to scream. I ache for something even slightly funkier: cargo pants, hiking boots, layered t-shirts instead of oxfords. I am so tired of "business casual" that I can't see straight. But with all that, I couldn't tell Phil what I did want to wear. And this brings us to the real problem that underlies this whole issue: I love good clothes, but have absolutely no fashion sense and no idea what I'm going to love or hate before I put it on. I'm serious about this. Throughout my adult life, whenever someone has told me I look good, I've rushed out immediately and bought five more of whatever I was wearing that day and adopted it as my "new look". And then I've kept it until something else happened to fall together on me.

In an effort to be practical and helpful, I headed out to Macys one Sunday, determined to try everything in the store on if necessary until I found some inspiration. All I had to go on was some suggestions Phil had made about wearing a vest instead of a jacket, and a vague liking for pinstripes.

I know, I know. This must sound stupid. But off I went to Union Square with the highest of hopes.

Does anyone out there have any idea how big the men's store at Macys Union Square is? It's huge. Five or six floors of clothes, clothes, clothes. They used to have home electronics in there somewhere, but those have apparently gone the way of the dodo and now it's all just racks of fabric. More pants and shirts and jackets and ties than you can shake a stick at. Which, if you're me, might be almost as productive as trying several dozen of them on proved. Men's clothing is just damned boring, when it comes down to it. And there simply is no way to dress up that doesn't involve some kind of jacket or suit. AAAAHHHHHHH!

I found… exactly nothing. I hauled several thousand dollars worth of pants and shirts and jackets into a dressing room, in several waves. The sales people started out helping me, and ended up just rolling their eyes and getting out of my way. I dutifully tried on dozens of different combinations, and I even stepped out of the dressing room and looked at myself on the main floor, just like you’re supposed to. Yuck. Dead end after dead end.

I went home again. And then the next weekend, Phil and I tried again. We went together that time. And he acted as personal stylist to me and hung out while I tried things on, and gave me reactions to them, and brought me accessories.

I highly recommend this style of shopping. But let me add one little caveat. I'd actually asked a friend of mine, who used to do this for a living, if she could make any suggestions. What did she recommend? "You can never discount the effect of a great suit." Thank god this was by email, because my screams of betrayal and horror might have done serious damage to our friendship. A little later, Phil asked if I'd like to ask someone he knows, who's also a style consultant. I immediately said no, because I feared the same thing all over again, except with his friendship at stake instead of mine. But with him out there in the corridor, already knowing all my weird non-negotiables and loving me anyway, I felt comfortable and energized. If you've never done it, do.

We started at Express, because their shirts are bright and bold, and I'd seen nothing else that didn't put me to sleep. And things went well there. In our initial foray we also found a couple of cool vests, and a lot of different colors, and we went into the dressing room with a good pile of things to consider.

I'll spare you all the endless details of black pants versus charcoal, lapel width, etc. It's scintillating, but I'm running out of time here. Suffice it to say that we ended up with a very nice, though not absolutely certain, combo of pinstriped charcoal pants, black courderoy vest, and purple striped shirt, with a contrasting purple striped tie. I liked it, and even thought it would prove comfortable for an entire evening. It wasn't precisely what I'd envisioned in the beginning, but it did give me that feeling of specialness I was hoping for. At least, barring anything unimagined and groundbreaking from Vera Wang or someone.

And then we went to look for Phil's clothes.

He'd gotten the same pants and vest that I'd chosen, because he wanted us to be dressed very similarly. I hadn't pictured that, but didn't care either way, as long as we weren't completely identical. But he needed a great shirt, and Express held nothing brilliant for him. So off we went, checking out Macys and Neiman’s and Banana Republic and lots of other places, both ones whose names I knew and ones I’d never heard of before. And I have to admit we saw lots of great clothes, but not the perfect shirt, not for our wedding, not for this perfect moment.

Until we wandered into Pink on a lark, without my realizing at all what a big deal that was.

As soon as we walked into Pink, we began seeing stunning shirts, but shirts that cost lots of money. Phil was moved by these – not just by their colors and patterns, but also by their quality, by the care that had gone into their creation. And here's the thing about that: we took great pains to be economical about our wedding. We wanted to do everything right, and we certainly didn't want anything to appear cheap, but we weren't spending any extra money. Tight reins ruled in all areas. So to spend an extravagant amount of money on a wedding shirt said something about the event itself. I'm sure Phil could have found any number of serviceable shirts elsewhere. But what he found at Pink was the right shirt, the one he adored, the one that made him light up when he put it on and came out of the fitting room. Its cost was not immaterial. Instead, it was a rather profound reflection of the fact that our wedding was, in fact, a wedding: a once-in-our-lifetime celebration that merited our absolute best and must not be compromised. And Phil, feeling all that, got choked up as we left the shop.

Crying over a shirt? Well, no. Not exactly. Crying over the reality that we've found each other – and that, quite unexpectedly, for at least this few months before Election Day, we have the freedom to express our love and our wonder, and enter into the highest, most uncompromising relationship our species knows. That's what Phil's tears were about.

Just for the record, those of you who live in California, vote NO on Proposition 8 on November 4th. And for those of you who don't, tell anyone you know who does to do so, too. For Phil and me.

My Fancy Fantasies

2008-09-04T16:41:00.000-07:00

I remember it all very well, looking back –
It was the summer I turned eighteen…

Those deathless words are the opening of one of my all-time favorite country tunes, but we’ll get to that later. Today I’d like to tell you about one of our weirder wedding projects, yet another thing which took me completely by surprise in the planning process.

You know about wedding favors, right? Those odd little gifts the couple gives their guests as a sort of last-ditch bribe to say nice things about them when it’s over? I have no idea how this tradition got started. It must be Middle Class guilt over getting a whole load of brand new kitchen gadgets, or else an evil plot by Martha Stewart. But in any case, we have learned that yes, we are apparently expected to come up with some sort of memento for our guests to take home and cherish for the rest of their lives.

Um… yeah, right. But here goes.

Phil thought of our solution, as he has with so many of the others. We have a number of friends who are singers or composers, so we’ve asked each of them to donate one or two songs that have some meaning to us, or them, or weddings in general, and we’re collecting those into a specialized CD to share with our guests.

That’s right, folks. We’re giving a mix tape. Insert your favorite high school or unrequited romance joke here.

Actually, that’s unfair. When Phil first suggested this scheme to me, I wasn’t thrilled with it. But then we asked around, and everybody else thought it was a fantastic idea. So, okay, I am happy to admit I have no clue and go with it. And as it’s turned out, I do think it’s going to be a pretty great gift. Weird, but great. And definitely unique.

We’ll be including everything from country to opera, with a liberal selection of theatre music in between. You won’t have heard many of these songs or singers before, probably, but you should. If you’re not one of our favored few who will actually be receiving the CD in a few weeks, go to http://www.karenjacobsen.com/, http://www.groovelily.com/, http://www.jillgrove.com/, http://www.terriwhite.com/, web.mac.com/pauleeg/Paul_Gordon/Welcome.html, and www.facebook.com/people/Michael_Edwin_Stuart/613924499 and find out what you’re missing. And then buy their recordings. Several of these folks have individual songs you can download on iTunes, and I highly recommend everything you can find.

Okay, enough of the commercial. Time for some full disclosure, and then for the fun part.

Full Disclosure #1: Actually, there is no opera on the CD. But there are two standards performed by an opera singer, and they have that whiff of formal legitimacy which is utterly lacking from most of our music. Just for the record, Jill, the singer in question, is an absolutely breathtaking mezzo soprano whom you can also hear from time to time at most of the top opera houses in the world. Check her schedule, or just buy tickets for the next Wagnerian extravaganza at the Met, or the Lyric, or the Paris Opera, or wherever. She will most likely be there, literally blowing away the competition.

Full Disclosure #2: I love country music. Now, there are lots of kinds of country music, and I tend toward the more modern, slicker styles – Leann Rimes’ Nothing Better to Do is one of the greatest tunes in the last couple years, especially if you’re dancing to it. But I also love some of the really twangy, hackneyed, old-style songs, and at the top of this particular embarrassing heap is that song I started this post with, recorded a few years ago with utter sincerity by the incomparable Reba McIntire. It is perhaps the greatest paean to sin and shamelessness ever produced: Fancy.

In the history of both story songs and shameless lyrics, Fancy surely stands alone. It’s sung by the title character – yes, I promise, I’m not making this up – who tells us all about how she was turned out of her home by her ailing mother when she was eighteen. Not only turned out, but gussied up in a red satin dancing dress and sent out to, well, make her fortune, as it were. The confused Fancy begs, “Mama, what will I do?” Comes the answer, “Just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy, and they’ll be nice to you.”

Yes, folks, that’s right. It’s a primer on prostitution. Handed down lovingly from mother to daughter.

But that’s hardly the source of its greatness. Fancy is only one of innumerable whore songs out of Nashville. On the other hand, it does claim one of the all-time great over-the-top lyrics ever recorded. I offer, for your consideration, the deathless line wherein Mrs. Fancy explains to her daughter why she's booting her, dancing dress and all, out of the house: “Your pa’s runned off," she sayd, "and I’m real sick, and the baby’s gonna starve to death.” Yup. I challenge you to top that one for drama and sheer bald crassness (and yes, since I know you’re asking, the word is, indeed, runned. I looked it up.)

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m really not making fun of this song. It was the very first thing I downloaded off iTunes when Phil gave me my iPod last Christmas. It’s got a great beat, and a better hook, and the story is triumphant and exhilarating, in spite of how staringly aghast it will leave you if you actually listen to the words. Fancy, you see, comes out on top. “I might have been born just plain white trash," she declares, "but Fancy was my name.” That just about says it all, to my mind.

And what, you may ask – if you haven't given up in disgust and moved on to reading today's New York Times or some other worthier writing – what does any of this ridiculousness have to do with our wedding, or opera singers, or mix CD favors?

Well, my friend Jill loves country songs, too, high falutin’ mezzo diva though she may be. And she loves Fancy. She once mediated a serious argument between me and a guy I was dating over whether it was fair to conclude that Fancy’s mother had once turned tricks, herself (oh come on! Why else would she instantly shove her daughter out under a lamppost at the first sign of a cough? My then-date refused to see logic. But Jill agreed it was at least likely, thank you very much.) My sister once decided that romantic compatibility could be judged solely by what books people loved as children. She was coming off a very bad breakup at the time, with a guy who had laughed at her for adoring Gone-Away Lake, so perhaps her outlook was tainted. But I think the Fancy Test may be just as important. Just try it with your next date. Ask them if Fancy’s mother was a hooker, and see how that colors the rest of your evening.

Anyway, the final point here, after all this yammering, is that my not-so-secret fantasy for this wedding CD, and for my wedding in general, has, for some time now, been that Jill Grove, opera diva, would sing Fancy at my wedding. This has nothing to do with how wildly inappropriate the song is for a nuptial event and everything to do with how funny I think it is that such a serious singer would stoop to such a silly song. I know, I know – nobody else would care, or get the joke, or have any clue why I thought it was so funny. It's the stupidest of in-jokes. But this wedding is for our enjoyment, isn’t it? I mean, along with showing our guests a good time, we’re supposed to be creating some sort of meaning for ourselves, and get this new stage in our relationship started off with a bang. And private jokes, like the bamboo whisk on our gift registry, are a part of that.

It’s not going to happen, incidentally. Jill’s in rehearsal at the moment, and has no time or opportunity to learn, let alone record, a song she’s never sung before, and certainly won’t sing in the future. So this particular in-joke will stay "in". So "in", in fact, that it won’t even happen. But now you all know about it and, if you ever hear this song, you can share it with me.

And as one final note of interest on the whole Fancy subject, I’ve just heard that that ever-classy paragon, Jessica Simpson, will shortly be introducing her first perfume to the world. And it's name will be... Fancy.

You can’t make this stuff up, folks.

Thoughts From the Road; orAn Unfocused Riff From the Central Valley

2008-09-01T18:17:00.000-07:00

So, having successfully booked a venue, mailed invitations, decided on a menu, and determined where we’ll be buying cupcakes, we’ve decided to take a few days off and explore Southern California.

This is not quite as insane as it probably sounds. Or rather, it is, but it’s not our fault. This is a work trip. We’re heading south for two out of town TheatreWorks events, and this seems like as good an opportunity as any to talk about the other marriage issue that’s become a part of our lives, which is the role of Professional Spouses.

Oh, all right, in the interests of full disclosure and honesty and journalistic integrity (yeah, right), I will admit that this Professional Spouse thing has come up before, has next-to-nothing to do with our marriage, and in fact is an issue whether or not we legally tie any knots (as opposed to illegally tying the knot, which I suppose is what we’ve been doing so far.) But this trip down to La Jolla and Pasadena, and next week's even more distant one to Cincinnati, is falling right in the middle of our wedding preparations, not to mention this oh-so-confessional, terribly intimate blog, so I’m taking this chance to vent a little.

Not vent. I actually enjoy my Pro-Spousal duties, mostly. I may make jokes, and tell old friends that I’ve become Samantha Stevens in my old age, but I actually love representing TheatreWorks in this way, not to mention getting to be involved with my almost-husband’s work and share his passion.

You remember Samantha Stevens, right? Bewitched? Darren was an ad exec in the old days of two martini lunches and calling your secretary “honey”, and Sam played the good wife and mixed drinks for her husband’s clients, and smiled and laughed on cue, and usually got him the contract in spite of everything that had gone wrong in the past half hour episode.

I am not a witch and I’ve never shaken a martini in my life, but I also smile and laugh, glad-hand and charm, listen intently at cocktail parties, and practice what my fabulous friend Diane used to describe as “facial aerobics.” She was talking about those moments onstage when a dancer or actor doesn't have much to do but must silently ooh and ahh over whatever they're supposed to be focused on. I, of course, perform this routine at cocktail parties, but it's the same thing. It’s a great workout. My cheekbones can now benchpress their own weight.

This spousal stuff was not a surprise, incidentally. Full credit to Phil: when we were newly dating and beginning to get serious, he sat me down and explained that part of the package was standing at his side and shaking hands, etc., and getting to know all his board members and staff. I found out later that no other man he'd ever dated had so much as been allowed to know the address of his office, or go see any of his shows, so actually this was a huge compliment. But on the other hand, in spite of his best efforts, how could I possibly have known what I was getting into?

Well, now I've learned Professional Partying and Advanced Sociability, and I've gotten past a lot of my own insecurities so that I can really enjoy some of the things I always wished I could enjoy, like talking to people I don't know well, which used to terrify me.

It helps that I love the company. TheatreWorks is a rare gem among regional theatres. The regional theatre world itself is pretty damn illustrious, something I never recognized in the days when my life was all about making a living on stage, and then all about Broadway and New York. But as it turns out, there are performers making a living in all kinds of ways I never knew about. And New York is a terrible place to see anything new, unless you want the Fringe Festival and really avant garde theatre – and that's pretty chance, let's be honest. The costs in New York are simply too high to allow for unproven work, and that is increasingly just as true off-Broadway as on. For ordinary new shows year-round, the regional circuit, spread all over the country, is the place to go.

So back to TheatreWorks. Not only is it a particularly large regional company and particularly dedicated to developing, nurturing, and supporting new voices and new pieces, but it even extends this outlook to musicals, which almost no one else does. And I love that. And the fact that I'm connected to it means I get to see and hear some of the most collossally talented writers, singers, and musicians in the world, whom you may never have heard of. Or whom you have, but whose shoulder you would never get to stand behind while they noodle on the piano and tell you about how and why they wrote that showstopping song at the end of the first act of their latest musical. So, when you add it all up, having to spend the odd evening, or even the odd weekend, rubbing shoulders with various luminaries and talking about the great work this company is doing isn’t a bad gig, truly.

But to keep things in perspective... it’s still Wedding Season, even as we're dedicating two days to a trip to Southern California, and performances of two big shows Phil and I haven't seen before, and networking, and exploring other companies. In other words, No Moment Shall Go Unexploited.

Here are our plans for this weekend, around and between the theatre commitments we have. On our drive down we’re planning to outline our wedding schedule, figuring out and noting down exactly what needs to happen when on the Big Day, from setting up the bars to making sure our clothes aren’t wrinkled. We’re planning on a staff of seven or eight, plus a variety of volunteers and our witnesses pressed into service to help with all this. But it’s complicated, and we won’t get any rehearsal. Everybody will be learning on the fly, and some of what we’re asking from them is pretty complex. So… coordination, preplanning, and stacks of printed instructions and schedules for each individual who’s helping us, and all that starts in the car on the way to Bakersfield (where we’re sleeping overnight.)

And this brings me to another thought, which I guess I’ll just throw in here since I don’t want to turn it into a whole diatribe and give it its own post.

People have suggested to us a few times that we’re making too much of this whole thing. That we’re overthinking, making too big a deal of it, that a gay wedding could be carried off much more easily and probably more happily with a couple casual phone calls and a last-minute potluck in our back yard. Well, here are my answers to that. There are two of them, starting with the practical and moving on to the emotional.

The first, practical answer to “this could all be so much easier” is that no, it couldn’t. We have a guest list of one hundred twenty, and the reason we have that many is that that’s the number of people who have expressed to us, on their own and before we asked, that they wanted to be there to celebrate with us. Now, even a potluck on the back lawn, if it’s for one hundred twenty, is going to require some damn fine planning, and we don't have a big enough lawn, anyway. Even if we did, we’d probably end up catering, because how do you organize a hundred different dishes, or monitor the whole thing to make sure there actually are enough entrees and not just salads? Honestly, that sounds much more chaotic and wearing to me.

Second, still on the practical note, parties go well and feel casual only when they’re planned and well-organized – and the larger the group, the more meticulous the planning needs to be. You just try asking 120 people over and doing nothing more than buying a few bags of chips and some beer, and you see how successful an evening you have. Planning in advance allows you to relax and enjoy the actual experience (especially if you have a brilliant person to stage manage it on the day, as we do.) We do not want to have to worry about anything on our wedding day, so we’re doing all the worrying and figuring out now, thank you.

And then there’s the non-practical, emotional/spiritual/legacy-minded answer. This is our wedding. It is not a brunch, it is not a party. It is not a housewarming, like we’d planned to throw this summer (and which still takes quite a lot of planning, for the record.) This is going to be an evening, and a weekend, which we will remember, and all our friends will remember, which will hold meaning for us for the rest of our lives. We do not want to underplay it, rob it of any of its importance, or pass it off like it doesn’t matter. Certainly, we don’t need a piece of paper to tell us we’re committed to each other, and certainly, our marriage will depend a lot more on the time we’ve spent and the energy we’ve put into each other than it will on anything that happens Sunday, September 28th. But on the other hand, those few hours that Sunday are the time we’ve set aside to publicize our commitment, to exercise our commitment, and to celebrate it with our loved ones. Those hours are different from any other period of time in our lives, because they are the period when everything and everyone will be focused on our relationship. Our relationship deserves that focus.

Moreover, that is the time when society, in a global sense, also focuses on the relationship we are holding up and showing it, and gives it its blessing. That, especially given that we are a gay couple and this is the first time ever that we’ve had this opportunity, is tremendously important.
So let’s not hear any more about doing this smaller or making it simpler or in any other way making it less. It’s quite simple, actually, considering the number of people involved and all that needs to happen. And it’s how we want it to be. Don't worry – we are not getting carried away, we are not fulfilling anybody else’s fantasy of our weddings. This evening will be ours, through and through, and I have no doubt that when our guests leave that is what they’ll take with them – along with the gift CD and, hopefully, some leftover antipasto. They will walk out saying that the ceremony and reception were perfect for Cris and Phil, and that they had a really lovely time, and wasn’t that person they’d never met before, who sat next to them at dinner, interesting?

And besides, it’s all kind of fun. Now that we’ve got most of the big mysteries solved, and lots of the details in place, it’s all falling together. And this weekend, with its stopovers at the outlet stores to look for clothes and spoons, not to mention its evenings spent in dress-up clothes in theatres not our own, watching shows that we hope will be entertaining, but which won't really matter to us if they're not, and its dinners and parties swirling wine and laughing and talking, and even its hours in the car creating spreadsheets and arguing about whether Bartender 1 or Bartender 2 should pour the Champagne, will be kind of fun, too.

Hey, we’re driving down Highway 5, the official most boring highway in the universe. What the hell else will we have to fill the time?

Halfway There

2008-08-26T07:09:00.001-07:00

Well, I guess we're really doing this.

Yesteday, we sent out the invitations. The night before, as Michelle Obama spoke on the TV, we stuffed them, carefully arranging response cards and envelopes, maps and information sheets, and -- oh yes -- the invitations themselves. Cristian Asher and Phil Santora invite you to celebrate their wedding... Yow.

I've found myself suddenly thinking of old friends I haven't seen for a long time, as we've made up our final invitation list and gotten these things printed. There are people in Vegas and Reno who were mainstays of my work and life year after year, for all of my 20s and much of my 30s. I haven't seen them now for, in some cases, more than a decade. But your wedding is one of those life experiences, milestones, what have you, when you renew old ties, reaffirm your own community. Isn't it?

It's about family. Which brings me back to Michelle Obama and the TV last night, and also to a post I've been trying to write for the last few weeks which hasn't ever gelled, and which I'd almost given up on.

It's that phrase: "It's about family." Family is something that gets talked about a lot in election seasons. It was certainly the cause celebre of the first night of this year's Democratic National Convention. And this particular phrase, "it's about family," is something some conservatives, particularly the religious variety, often cry out as their last-ditch, bottom-line argument against same-sex marriage.

I think they're right. But not the way they think they are. Let's consider this carefully: "Family" when used as a war cry like this, really means "children". And since we gay folks can't have those the same way your standard heterosexual couple does -- we have to rely on adoption, rented wombs, or at least a turkey baster and a sale on sperm -- we aren't families and we have no part in marriage.

That's how the Religious Right would see it. Of course, their logic is ridiculous. There are lots of heterosexual couples who rely on adoption and turkey basters, not to mention rent-o-wombs, to have children. And children are not the defining aspect of marriage, anyway, at least not in this day and age. In the last generation or so, the whole subject of children and the whole subject of marriage have become almost completely divorced from each other.

And an important fact to keep in mind is that "marriage" is a legal term. This political argument we're having is about the law, not religion or morals, no matter how many preachers pound their fists on pulpits. The United States was created as a profoundly legal nation, so any individual church or group can sanctify or refuse to sanctify whatever kinds of couples they like. But the law of the land is based on fairness and logic, not religion.

The other deep, dark secret about marriage that religious fundamentalists and political conservatives don't want you to know is that it's a social convention, not a immutable universal mainstay or even a human imperative. We don't need marriage to survive, either as a species or as individuals. It's something we've done in innumerable different ways through history, and something some societies haven't done at all. It's not a biological requirement, like eating or sleeping. It doesn't help propagate the species, as every politician with an out-of-wedlock child proves over and over. It doesn't do anything, really, except help draw us together. It cements spouses to each other, and draws all their friends and associates closer. Marriage knits us. It's a social exercise.

So in legal terms, "marriage" has nothing to do with family. In social terms, it has everything to do with it. But the family that's important is not just the potential children of a couple. To limit the vast, beautifully complex, joyful idea of "family" to just a handful of sperms and eggs would be offensive if it weren't so silly. Marriage is about family, in all its permutations.

It's about biological family, whose members generally gather to celebrate at the weddings. And it's about extended family, who likewise gather and toast and meet each other and eat cake and laugh and applaud. It's about church families and communal families, and whatever other groups have common traditions to share, or who are willing to trade traditions and enrich each other by the sharing.

Those old friends I've been reaching out to, talking to for the first time in years, in some cases, or at least trading emails with -- they're family. And the coworkers, and theatre people, and new friends here in the Bay Area whom we've met -- they're a newer family. Our childhood friends who are flying in from distant places, witnessing this joining, sending congratulations to us, getting to know us -- they're absolutely family. We are being married by the Artistic Director at Phil's theatre, Robert Kelley. Kelley is utterly dedicated to this mini-community he's founded and fostered through the last forty years, as much a patriarch as any nutsy old clan head (and a lot more loving.) Our wedding will be all about family in a great big way.

And now that we've done the political soapbox speech, let me tell you one last way in which our wedding, and marriage, is all about family. See, here's the fun part.

Phil and I now get to share siblings. I have one sister, whom I adore, but Phil has two brothers. I have no idea what it'll be like for him to suddenly have an older sister, not to mention the brother-in-law and fabulous, beautiful neice she brings along with her. But I'm beginning to get an inkling of what I'll experience, having two younger brothers.

See, they're fun. And funny. Very, very different from me, but in the grand tradition of families, that's never mattered. And on the occasion of our actual wedding, Phil and I get to torment them. Consider, if you will, the question of bachelor parties. Phil and I get to have ours together, being two men. And his brothers, as his witnesses and, well, brothers, are very concerned that this should go well. They want a proper bachelor party for us. They'd rent a hotel room in Vegas, if we had the time, and lay in mass quantities of booze and strippers for us and all our friends.

Uh... that'd be cosmos, in this case. Or maybe frozen daiquaries. And muscle boys with names like Arturo and Beef dancing and dropping trou on the coffee table.

I think this is a hysterical idea. Not the strippers or the cosmos, particularly, because I've generally found that both are overrated. But the idea of these two resoundingly straight, all-American men, one of them an actual ex-frat boy, for heaven's sake, organizing all this. I can't think of it without laughing. I do believe it's a tradition that the organizers of a bachelor party get a lap dance in front of all the other attendees. And if it hasn't been a tradition before, it will be now. One of the great advantages of being a pioneer is that you get to make up your own rules, and I say the straight brothers get a gay lapdance!

Phil has also been tormenting his brothers about the ceremony, swearing that he's making them wear peach taffeta up the aisle. I'm sure they know he's kidding, but...

So it's all about family, and it's all about fun. That's something else those super-conservative, fundamentalist folks know precious little about.

We gay folks are never going to make perfect little nuclear families of the Father Knows Best variety. But who does? The people who tried it, historically -- all the people of my parents' generation who twisted themselves into pretzels trying to live out that particularly artificial, picket-fence version of the "American Dream"-- gave rise to the biggest social revolutions in centuries. What do you think the 60s and 70s were about, if not a rejection from the strangling strictures of that picture-perfect lifestyle?

Family, and weddings, are about fun, and love, and lots of laughs, and making new friends over good food.

And some muscleboy named Arturo sitting in my brother-in-laws' laps.

Cupcakes & Wedding Costs

2008-08-19T07:47:00.001-07:00

People keep asking me how the wedding plans are going. Foolish mortals! They think they're just being nice. They have no idea the beast they're unleashing.

But seriously, how are the wedding plans going? I have a hard time answering this question. On the one hand, the wedding plans are going well, in that our basement is now stuffed to the gills with dried eucalyptus, serving bowls, and terra cotta tiles, and we're still speaking to each other.

But the wedding plans are also perfectly horrifying in that we're just now dealing with rental orders, venue contracts, and how many forks we need, and the big shebang is less than six weeks away.

Good god. Less than six weeks. Mary, Joseph, and Martha Stewart. This is usually the moment when I stop and stare off into space for a moment, my pupils slowly spinning in opposite directions.

This would all be much easier, of course, if we'd just signed up a wedding coordinator and given them a great big check and some casual instructions and let them take care of everything. "Not too formal or traditional," we'd say. "Something nice. And fun. But not too laid back, either. Warm. Sophisticated. Something all the guests will remember as a great night." And with that, they'd go off into wedding-land, and we'd go back to our lives, and on the 28th we'd all reconvene and something fabulous would happen. Right?

It's a lovely fantasy. Probably completely demented, but at the moment it’s the answer to every dream I have, so just let me have it.

But that fantasy is not at all like our particular reality, needless to say. We investigated some full-service venues and caterers. But see, there's this funny thing about weddings. They're really expensive. And the more you have people do for you, the more expensive they get.

And I mean weddings are really, really expensive, even if you try to keep things basic. They're much costlier than plain old parties of the same size.

First of all, there are all the extra logistics, like having to book two rooms instead of just one at your venue (one for the ceremony, silly!) and getting that ridiculous cake baked. And then you have officiants, and special clothing, and wedding favors so everyone can have some swag to take home. All these things add up, both in money and time (which is money, as we all know — and those of us in service industries, like wedding coordinators who charge by the hour, know it better than the rest of us.)

But more important, as we've discovered, weddings are also extra-expensive because they're weddings — not parties, not galas, not business meetings. Weddings. Which, apparently, carry more emotional baggage than birth and death and taxes combined. In fact, every possible therapy-worthy issue I’ve ever heard of seems to get tangled up in weddings. There's our parents' expectations, our own insecurities and competitiveness, our friends' jealousies, everybody's hopes for the future, and the fact that no one really knows what that third little fork above the plate is for.

Many, many issues. But don't be discouraged! Because, according to the wedding industry, they can all be solved if you just spend enough.

Consider: if you buy a gourmet cupcake at one particular, rather famous and fabulous bakery here in San Francisco, it will cost you $3.75. But if you buy a "Wedding Cupcake" in the same place, the cost zooms up to $5.00.

That's a 33% increase. And why, you ask? Why should you pay an extra $1.25 for the self-same cupcake just because it's got a wedding label on it?

You just answered your own question. Because it's got a wedding label on it. Oh yeah, it also has a shiny gold or silver wrapper, and it arrives with its fellows on a cheap tiered tray. But it's still the same cupcake. Same flavor, same icing. Except it's a Wedding Cupcake now.

All the other, ordinary cupcakes must be so jealous.

Or, consider the in-house catering options at one particularly lovely local historical mansion. That venue offered half a dozen sample menus for weddings. But the first one, the cheapest one, the starting point upon which all the others were built (and the only one I read) consists of a simple Caesar salad, some kind of chicken entree, and a dessert. No choices, no cake. Needless to say, no Champagne. Salad, chicken, dessert. For $115 per head.

I am not making this up. If anybody out there doubts me, just email and I'll send you the link. Meanwhile, all I can say is, at $115 per person, that must be some f*#%ing awesome chicken.

The bottom line is, if you want to throw any kind of large reception — “large” being anything over about 70 people — you can very easily find yourself spending more than I make in a year.

This reminds me of the days back in Vegas when I used to deal blackjack. I was good at it, regrettably, so I got stuck in the high limit room, where the bets come in five and six figures, and the tables routinely have several million dollars-worth of chips in their racks. You don’t actually deal very many games on a table like that (there are only so many stupid multi-millionaires in the world), so I used to amuse myself by counting down the money sitting before me in my chip tray. “This stack would pay off my house almost exactly,” I’d mutter. “That one is what I’ll make in a year. That other one is what I’ll gross in a year, and the center tube is how much the cast of Friends made in their final season.” It was a little depressing.

This wedding game is not depressing, but it does get scary. How can it possibly seem acceptable, let alone normal, to outspend the gross national product of Zimbabwe on a few hours of fun and food? How can it be right to go into debt and mortgage your future for this?

But enough serious thoughts. Phil and I will not be spending like Paris Hilton on a binge. We will, instead, be doing all the work ourselves, all the designing, prepping, arranging, and even printing, because we are uniquely positioned to make this happen.

If you’re going to pull off a huge event on a reasonable budget, it turns out that a theatre administrator is a very good thing to be. It also doesn’t hurt if you’re marrying a professional organizer with a design background who happens to work in a firm with an in-house print shop. Phil and I, between us, have a remarkable number of useful contacts to help us get this done. TheatreWorks' graphic designer is creating our invitations in her off hours. We've hired their events coordinator to run the whole thing on the day of. The food is coming from a dozen sources, and we or our minions will run all over the Bay Area picking it up the day before the wedding. The point is, we’ve spend the last number of years solving many of these same problems over and over at our jobs. So when we added up what we wanted in a wedding, and then did the research and found that the final cost was some appreciable percentage of a moon launch, we got creative.

Phil, being not only an administrator but also a scenic designer, has more ideas than I do. Our hor d’oevres will also be our centerpieces, and our ceremony will be performed in front of our new garden trellis. This may sound funny, but believe me, in the moment, no one will question either, or think anything other than, "What a fantastic idea! I want this!"

And that's the important part. Although I haven't slept a full night in two weeks and our weekends are now marathons of shopping and pricing and comparing stoneware bowls to fabric swatches, I’m very glad we’re doing things this way. We’re going to have a party that is about us, reflective of us, and where we’re going to have a really good time. And so, we are confident, will our friends. Every single individual element, it’s true, may not be the perfect choice or the thing we’ve dreamed of. But the whole will be much, oh-so-much greater than the sum of its somewhat weird and admittedly eclectic parts. We are having our wedding, exactly as we want it, and unlike many of the couples I’ve known who have handed this work over to planners and relatives, we’ll remember and revel in every bit of it.

And when it’s all over, we’ll have 14 new serving platters, uncounted bowls, and enough tiles to pave the backyard. If you’d like to borrow anything at all, just ask. Please.

And if anyone knows where I can get a discount cupcake — tasty, beautiful, and without a wedding tier or ribbon in sight — please send word.

What We'd Know If We Were Girls

2008-08-05T07:07:00.000-07:00

Last week, Phil and I met with our friend, Ev, who's designing our invitations for us. This was a love-fest, because Ev is brilliant, and she loves us, too. And, because she's actually done quite a few wedding invitations before, she knows what she's doing.

We don't, as became abundantly clear very quickly. But let me set the scene a little. I left work early and took Caltrain down to Menlo Park, where Phil and Ev met me at a cafe. On the train, I called Phil and said, "Hey, we should probably talk about this. What do you think the invitations should looks like?"

Yes, that's right, folks. We did our planning fully fifteen minutes before we met with our designer. Emily Post, I believe, recommends you have these conversations 8-10 months out, and finalize a design 6 months early at the very least. We are a little behind that schedule, having only set our wedding date a week and a half ago. It's in 7 weeks now, 7 weeks from today, for the record. 7 weeks and 5 hours. Yikes.

Anyway, we talked during the train ride, and I had the great advantage of having actually looked online the night before to see what other invitations looked like. I'd found something I liked: a very bold, simple rectangular card with the invitation printed on it and a ribbon tied around the top. The card was deep purple and the lettering was white. Ta-da.

Well, not quite. There's not just the invitation, you see, but response cards, and response envelopes, and other enclosures if you want to really do it up and spend the extra postage. You can include maps and schedules and menus for the reception, extra sheets of vellum and reminders and internet addresses for your website. About the only thing you cannot include, although it seems like something people might want, is any mention whatsoever about where you're registered. That, according to Emily Post and lots of other people, is Tacky.

Now, having sprung from a Southern family, I know all about the importance of not doing anything tacky. Believe me, this was a very big topic of conversation in my formative years, and as a budding queen, it was one I took to immediately. I was always happy to discuss who was tacky and whom we admired. To separate the crass from the class and make jokes about it endlessly. But really, these rules about the registry are byzantine even by wedding standards. You're supposed to register, because that's helpful to your guests, who reportedly want to give you things but, unless they've actually been your houseguest and done an inventory of your kitchen cabinets, don't know what you need. Even if they have snuck through your storage, how are they to know whether that godawful punchbowl on the top shelf is your greatest embarrassment or your greatest treasure? Do you want a second one, or are you just waiting for a good excuse to lose the first one?

Hence the registry. In this day and age, for people coming in from out of town, it's an even bigger help, because it allows them to just sign onto crateandbarrel.com or wherever whenever they want and ship you something off your list without ever having to so much as put the key in the ignition. So everybody agrees that gifts are part of weddings, and we all rely on registries, right?

But we can't admit that. In our fantasy world, apparently, everybody just knows what the perfect gift is, and it magically arrives along with all the others. In order to protect this illusion, the couple is supposed to slip the registry information to their witnesses, who then make it available to the rest of the world-- not, as you might imagine, efficiently, by getting the email addresses of the guests from the couple and sending the data around the world. No, no, they have to hang onto it and not volunteer it to anyone, either, until said guests come knocking on their doors asking. Of course, depending on lifestyle, location, and a host of other details, the guests may or may not ever have heard who the witnesses are, or know how to reach them, but that is the approved method, and Emily would be scandalized if we let concerns about efficiency interfere.

Good grief. I will be following Plan B, which I have seen described as "acceptable, barely" on the wedding sites. Plan B involves creating an online wedding page and posting the sites where we're registered on it. All our invitees will be given its address on the invitations -- or rather, on the informational inclusion that we'll send along with the invitations, which will also include a specific schedule (yes, the ceremony will take place before the reception), locations (patio, ballroom), and a map to the venue (oh, you don't know Palo Alto?) The spirit of Emily Post will be assuaged somewhat, I hope, and if we end up with twenty-seven blenders it's not my fault.

But anyway, back to those invitations. Our conversation with Ev was all going perfectly well until she started asking us difficult questions. Like, "what are your colors?"

Colors? Well, I'm white, with slightly graying hair and green eyes. Phil, ditto, with slightly more gray and hazel eyes. Gosh, I'm more used to being asked my age, weight, and location! What? Not those colors?

Ah yes. The Colors. The Wedding Colors, those chromatic labels by which all the world will know just who we are and what sort of ceremony we're having. Are we Formal people in black and white, or a Funky couple in brown and orange? Perhaps Retro in acqua and red? Trendy weddings this year use chocolate brown (I Googled it), and you can always be virginal -- and unspeakably gay -- with blush and bashful (if you know that reference, give up all pretense of heterosexuality right now.)

Well, as I said, I'd seen a purple I liked. And our house is full of moss greens and earthtones. And this is, after all, an autumn wedding, so we're going with that.

But oh boy-- are there going to be more of these questions? Colors and wording and the perfect songs and whatnot? Who thinks of this stuff?

Well, I'll tell you who thinks of it. Twelve year old girls think of it, that's who. Girls who have just developed their first crush on the boy next door think of it. Cheerleaders whose shelves are lined with Barbies and who dream in three hundred shades of pink think of it. Girls who hate Barbie and want to grow up to be Hilary Clinton think of it. Even girls who play sports and love power tools and develop crushes on other girls, I'm told, think of it. Colors and flowers and centerpieces and dresses and walking down the aisle and... god only knows what else.

We, as good, red-blooded American boys, were told that we didn't need to think of this stuff, because the women we married would do it for us. It turns out there's a little problem with that, though...

So here we are, gay and unprepared. For anyone who's ever wondered what the real difference is between fags and girls, you can sleep easy now. Fags don't dream of weddings.

Or at least, we didn't. In the future, when this is all commonplace, will we? Will little boys, when they first begin to think they might be "different", when they first look at their mother's new hairstyle and think "I would have done it in more of an upsweep," or as they sneak into their sisters' rooms to put all her dolls in better dresses, also lie in bed at night imagining the tux they'll wear when their man meets them at the altar? Will they build great, spun-sugar fantasies of churches gussied up in roses, and witnesses in putrid bridesmaid dresses?

I don't think so, somehow. I was pretty gay, as a kid, and this stuff never occurred to me. Oh, I imagined being married, but never the details, the design elements, the colors. As it is, since Phil and I both have design backgrounds, we're approaching this as a graphic challenge. He's thrown galas, so surely he can do a reception. I've built websites and designed ads and postcards, so figuring out an invitation should be possible, right? And we already have a plan for the centerpieces.

I guess it will all work out, even if it's going to be nothing like the fairy tale dreams of a fourteen year old. Those are probably pretty scary, anyway. And no one wants to wear the bridesmaid dresses.

The Mama Mia Manifesto

2008-07-28T18:05:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, after managing to avoid the stageshow all those years in New York, I went to see the movie version of Mama Mia! Come to think of it, I didn't just go, I even bought the tickets for Phil and me. It must be love, right?

This post is not going to be a review of the movie-- I'm still too shellshocked by how many Abba lyrics I turned out to know. But I have to admit that I was inspired by the movie, because, aside from “What the hell was Meryl Streep thinking?", I actually perceived something important as I sat in that theatre.

For those of you who have escaped the Abba Vortex, Mama Mia! is the story of Sophie, a charming young lass, and the struggles she and her family encounter on the last day before she's married. For our purposes, the story is unimportant, except for the wedding, and the wedding preparations which are the backdrop to its first hour and forty minutes. Sophie and her mother live on a Greek island, and everywhere you look, everybody in the village, from the hot Greek beach boy hanging off a ladder to the toothless crone stirring soup, is pitching in and getting ready, singing and dancing for all they're worth, ready and eager to celebrate Sophie and her marriage regardless of their mixed feelings about her fiancee or the fact that she’s the illegitimate daughter of an ex-pat disco singer with no talent.

That’s what a wedding should be. Not the disco part, you understand, but the social love-fest. It’s a community experience, a celebration enjoyed by family and friends and everyone who knows you. It’s a public announcement of commitment, sure, but it’s also one of those festivals/rituals/traditions made to strengthen bonds and reaffirm the importance of community. So why do we gay people have to fight so hard to get our families involved?

Phil’s and my families have been variously excited, nonplussed, and stressed about our relationship from the beginning. Now that we're getting married, those reactions are all heightened, and we’re often put in the position of having to defend, or at least explain what we’re doing. Yes, we’ve thought it through. Yes, we’ve discussed the consequences, be they emotional or professional or financial. We are adults and we’re not doing anything unnatural or ungodly or even non-traditional. We are getting married, for all the reasons everybody else gets married. We are entering into the very center of human life as we experience it in this century, in our society. We have even discussed the possibility of having children, although I don’t think that’s going to happen.

We deserve the same excitement and consideration as any heterosexual couple, and more than that we deserve not to have to assert that we deserve it. Whether you think we, as gay people, are the same as you or not is irrelevant. We are doing the same thing, for the same reasons.

And there’s one additional thing I’d like to add, a lesson that’s come to me with increasing urgency as we’ve moved through this process, and which I’d like to put out there for all parents, siblings, and other assorted loved ones of marrying homosexuals. The lesson is this: all the PC phrases and reactions you've learned from Oprah are not the same as really being thrilled for us. Saying, “I support you,” in other words, is not the same as actually being supportive. If you find yourself saying anything like, “I support you, but... I don't agree with what you're doing," or "... I don't believe in gay marriage," or "... I just can't accept this," or whatever, you can stop right there and not even bother. If you say “but” at all, you’re not being supportive.

To support is to uphold, to fight for, to champion. You cannot champion, but… If you fight for and uphold your loved ones, you must stand behind their decisions. You must believe they are doing the right thing, whether or not it is the same thing you would do in those circumstances. Otherwise, what are you offering them? What does it mean, in practical terms, if you “support, but”? What are you upholding? I have a friend whose parents said they "supported" her, but they hated her politics, her lifestyle, her choice of residence, and everything about the fact that she was a lesbian. She finally concluded that what they were supporting was her decision to own dogs. That was all that was left. And if she'd given the dogs black leather collars and taken them down to the Folsom Street Fair one year, that might have gone, too.

If your support is so conditional that it can't survive any difference of opinion, what makes you think it has any value? Why should we want that?

To say you “support, but…” is really just a PC way of expressing disapproval, and then letting yourself off the hook for it. That way you get to feel better while you abandon and betray your child or friend or loved one. To “support, but” is a way of breaking someone’s heart but then denying them the right to feel bad.

As I said, many of our family members have been very positive. We will have a lot of family at our wedding. This diatribe is not really aimed at them, not even at the ones who aren't coming, except in a larger, more political sense. It's certainly not meant as an attack. It is meant, if anything, to share with them how sad they make us, sometimes.

I have seen too many of my gay friends crushed again and again by their supposed support systems, by the people who renege on their responsibility to love and care, and who seem perfectly happy to use their power to wound, instead.

Don’t assure us you support us and then refuse to celebrate with us. Just come to our weddings. And have a good time. Let go of your own preconceptions, your own assumptions, your fantasy visions which were formed before you even knew us. Let go of your ideas of who you thought we would be, and enter into the wonder of who we really are. Learn what our lives are really about, as opposed to what you fear they might be. It’s a wonderful world.

Even with Abba tunes.

Engagement 2, II

2008-07-25T15:44:00.001-07:00

Ah, the good part! The rings! The plans! The date!

If only it were all that simple. Engagement 2: The Rings started out very romantically. But it went downhill quickly, into a very complicated and messy thicket of miscommunication and misunderstanding before getting to the happy ending.

Here's how things started: we go out dancing occasionally, and I don’t mean shirtless and sweating with a bunch of twinks at a rave. I mean we go two-stepping, partnering up and moving around the floor with lots of fake cowboys and lesbians, tight Levis and ten gallon hats everywhere you look. You can do it nice and genteel, if you’re dancing with someone you’ve just met, or much more, shall we say intimately if you know your partner better, or would like to. The country dance club here in SF is called the Sundance Saloon, and of course they have extra dances and events for Gay Pride, and we went, and at the end of the night, as we were circling the floor to a slow romantic tune for the last time, Phil said something that sounded to me exactly like, “I think we should look for rings tomorrow.” He swears he said, “engagement rings.” But I absolutely did not hear "engagement". Maybe Trace Atkins was singing too loud. In any case, this would be Major Miscommunication #1.

We looked at rings a couple times back in Chicago. Saw some things we liked (thank you, Christopher Duquet, for coloring in your bands with different color Sharpies for us: http://www.christopherduquet.com/), saw lots of things we hated, and got really pissed off at Movado when they refused to so much as walk their lazy asses over to say hello when we were craning to see something inside their cases (no link for them!)

But we hadn’t purchased anything, hadn’t found THE rings, hadn’t felt any urgency, honestly. Now here we were, fourteen weeks out and with nothing to wear, so to speak. So off we skipped at the world’s biggest, gayest street fair in front of City Hall in San Francisco on the last Sunday in June to find our lifetime jewelry. Except that one of us was not looking for lifetime jewelry, but only “training” rings, to symbolize our engagement, not our marriage (and, not incidentally, get him used to actually wearing something on his finger 24/7.) So off we skipped with completely different ideas in our heads.

Bad start. But this one actually got cleared up pretty quickly. It led inevitably, however, to Major Miscommunication #2, which was much, much more of a problem, and which shouldn’t even really count as a miscommunication, come to think of it, since "communication" was nowhere to be found, and that was the problem. One of us, you see, was kept completely in the dark about what was really going on that day.

That in-the-dark person would be me. As it turned out, Phil had much more up his sleeve than merely finding something nice to wear on our fingers. He wanted a Moment, and a Romantic Memory. He wanted a Proposal. Much more important, he wanted to make a proposal. I’d made the first one, as recounted in an earlier post here, and it left a little to be desired, whatever the result. I’d also pushed the conversation about getting married once the law against us was struck down, and pretty much every other aspect of this process.

I hope I don’t come across as some sort of desperate harridan here. Phil tends to be hesitant about these things – not about doing them, as he assures me again and again, but about initiating them. He inevitably gets bogged down in worries about how to pay for things, and what his family will think, and when to schedule events around his insanely-overscheduled theatre calendar. So he wanted to initiate this, and show once and for all, publicly, that he was just as motivated and active about getting married as I was. That he wasn’t just along for the ride.

It was a lovely thought. And he had lovely ideas about how to do it, ranging from a proposal on the steps of City Hall, where the first marriages had taken place, to dropping to one knee at the Saloon’s outdoor dance floor and putting my new ring on my finger while all the fake cowboys and cowgirls applauded.

Lovely, huh? But, um… there were those misunderstandings, miscommunications, what have you. So, after we’d looked at every booth in the fair and narrowed our ring choices to two, and after we’d discussed and discussed them, and I’d tried each one on one hundred times, and after I’d said that I loved one of them, and he’d said he loved the other, and after this conversation and this putting on and taking off had continued for nearly twenty minutes, I made a practical decision, and turned to Phil and said something like, “Okay, let’s just go with your choice. I like it well enough, and you love it, and I care much more about wearing the ring than about what ring it is, and it’s not forever anyway, right? It’s just until September.”

Oh, what a bad choice. See, I thought I was being loving, compromising for my darling, because I really did like both rings, which he didn’t, and also because the whole idea of an engagement ring seemed far more important to him than to me. I’d never even thought of it, remember?

But Phil didn’t want me to settle. He hated the idea that these rings weren’t going to be equally near and dear to our hearts. This was not his romantic moment, and how could people clap when he put a ring on my finger if I didn’t love the ring itself?

And the weather had changed, too, which, may I say, just disproves everything my English teachers ever told me about how the natural elements do not reflect the inner turmoil of real people. The sky had turned dark, and a wind had come up, and although the PrideFest didn’t officially close for another two hours, people were beginning to stream away and some booths were already closing. We stepped away, sat on a curb, and talked about things. Which meant I asked what I’d done wrong and Phil looked sad and didn’t answer, and I kept asking and kept asking until finally the whole story came out.

The Moment. The Proposal. Clapping gays and lesbians, and a memory forever.

Oh god. It was so touching. So then I was sad, too, and we both sat there on the curb all bereft while the wind blew and the freaks headed off past us to get warm and get drunk somewhere.

And where does one go from there? The moment for the Moment was lost. We hadn't even found rings we could agree on. Once we got through the whole conversation we decided to take one more shot, and went back to the booth where we'd been debating our two choices.

And found a third. I wish I could say the sun came out and the wind stopped, but the natural elements were not up for a second act. So it was still cold, and getting nasty, but we somehow stumbled on a ring design we both liked, and which looked good on both our hands (a serious challenge which straight people get to skip altogether, may I point out) and which we were happy with. We bought them, and followed the freaks out.

So, we had the rings, we'd cleared the air, we'd missed getting re-engaged at Gay Pride but there would be other times and places, right?

I'd suggested one Friday afternoon when I was coming down to Palo Alto for an appointment, anyway. We could take the afternoon off together, go spend it doing something unusual, have a little half-day vacation. Phil did not seem thrilled at the idea when I'd mentioned it, but when the day came we headed off to Half Moon Bay, planning to spend a few hours wandering around and up the coast, seeing the Pacific (which he'd never been to) and discovering what else there was to find up that part of Highway 1.

Half Moon Bay, for those of you who haven't been there, is a small community west and south of San Francisco, and more or less directly west of where Phil's office and theatre are on the Peninsula. The highway over there from the east is gridlocked almost every warm weekend, and along it are farms and wine tasting rooms and some really wild garden supply places (picture huge yards filled with welded, ten-foot dinosaurs and palm trees and other less likely items.) The town itself is your standard California beach community, which is to say that it's a like every other suburb or town but with older buildings and better weather. Like most of these places, Half Moon Bay has discovered tourism in the past couple decades, so its main street is very spiffed up, and full of several blocks of restaurants and boutiques that aim for that kind of kitschy-funky cool appeal that places like Carmel or Santa Monica invented. In Half Moon Bay, this is only about half successful, but it still makes for a nice afternoon, and you can get some good meals there.

We'd been one time before, but on that occasion we'd never found access to the beach, and we also didn't really know what we were looking for or doing. This time around, Phil had done some research and asked all the long-time residents at work about good restaurants, etc. But though the place he'd been directed to looked great, we found it a little before 4:00, and we weren't hungry and weren't really interested in staying around in town long enough to get hungry, at that point. So Phil's first idea for a romantic ring exchange failed to pan out, and we headed north in search of the beach.

For the record, although doing the big ring exchange on that Friday had originally been my suggestion, I didn't know if it was on the agenda or not. It seemed very important to Phil to plan this out and initiate it, and so I stopped asking early on in the process and just waited. Which you can take as a sign of true love, because I hate waiting, have no patience whatsoever, and would much rather be organizing and directing things myself, thank you very much.
Practical. And I'm pretty good at it. But in this case, I stayed in the background and waited.

Argh.

Anyway, to get back to our story, it turns out they hide the beaches well, along that stretch of the Pacific. But after missing a couple turnoffs we managed to nail one down, and parked, and changed clothes, and gave up on the pay-parking device, and slid on down the embankment to the sand and the ocean. Where we found a big inner city school group in one direction, and a bunch of frat boys and their girlfriends in the other, and a big dead seal in the middle.
I swear, I am not making this up. If I'd known then I was going to be writing this blog, I'd have taken a picture.

Aside from kids and rotting carcases, the beach was full of washed up jellyfish and some particularly disturbing seaweed. It looked like big, bulbous tentacles ready to reach out and ensnare any unwary walkers. So we picked our way along the sand for awhile, but it really wasn't the most wonderful setting, in spite of the endless horizon and the calming rhythm of the surf washing in and out, in and out forever. I really do love the ocean, even with dead things and frat boys cluttering it up. But this was not really a romantic moment.

And then Pacifica, a little farther north, turned out to be the world's most boring suburb whose greatest claim to fame and beauty was a Taco Bell that seemed to be built out of driftwood. And then once we'd given up and come back to San Francisco, we couldn't find a restaurant that felt right-- although, once again, only one of us knew what was "right" or what they were looking for, while the other of us was kept busy wracking his brain trying to think up more alternatives. Good grief.

We finally ended up at Home-- not our home, but the restaurant Home, which is a short walk from our home, although in this case we parked a couple blocks away and drove home afterward. Got that? Anyway, Home does have some resonance for us, because we went there for our last evening of our first trip here, when we came for Thanksgiving a couple years ago so Phil could meet my family. And we've been there since, every now and again, and it's a sort of reliable, welcoming source of comfort food when we want that (even though our best lesbian friends say they've ruined their mac 'n cheese recipe -- horrors!)

As a sort of omen, there was a big table in the corner that night where a group of men were sitting, including two in matching formal cowboy attire-- black Western suits, silver bolo ties, the whole drag. They were obviously celebrating their wedding, and so there was a very festive, celebratory air -- a gay air, perhaps? -- emanating from that direction.

So we had a very nice meal, and afterward, finally... Phil proposed to me, pulling out our rings from his pocket and telling me how he'd been carrying them around all day, even secretly switching them from his jeans to his shorts when we changed to go down to the ocean. And I have to admit to you that I honestly don't remember exactly how he phrased things -- if he literally said, "Will you marry me?" or not, but I did accept, one way or the other, and we shoved the rings onto each other's fingers and now we're engaged.

Now we're engaged! Did you get that? Read it out loud, call the New York Times, shout it from the rooftops! We've survived the moves and the job changes and the sick cats and the dead seals and all the other stuff, and we're engaged! And in the next eight weeks we'll survive family and planning and whatever else this ridiculous process throws at us and finally, legally, once and for all get married. We think we even have a venue picked.

So... on with the wedding!

Engagement #2

2008-07-24T15:53:00.001-07:00

So why, you may ask, more than three years after we got engaged, has there been no ceremony, no exchange of vows, no outward sign at all of any further commitment?

Well, we’ve been busy.

There was my move to Chicago, first off. That went on for awhile. Hauling my ass, my antiques, and my disgusted cats the 800 miles was only the first part. And after unpacking, applying for jobs, discovering that between us we owned two full dining room sets, four dozen plates and eleven whisks (who needs eleven whisks? Where did they come from?), applying for more jobs, learning to be a useful professional spouse, learning to two-step, and learning Chicago's public transit system, and then finally getting a job I hated, Phil was suddenly offered this great job in California, and it was time to do the whole thing over again.

And then came the worst move in recent history, a relocation akin to Noah's little jaunt on the ark, Adam and Eve's decision to leave the Garden of Eden for better digs, or Darth Vader's exit from the original Death Star. It was bad. And you can read all about it at http://theworstmoveinhistoryblog.blogspot.com/, but you're on your own there, because I try not to go back to that dark place these days. I'm happy! Happy, I tell you!

Anyway, once we got here, we of course had all our time and energy taken up by looking for an apartment, looking (again!) for a job for me, meeting people, finding our way around, Phil getting settled at TheatreWorks, looking for a better apartment… you get the picture. And then, without warning, out of the blue and beyond our wildest expectations, the Governator announced that gay people could get married in California.

All right, it wasn’t really the Governator, it was the State Supreme Court. But the Governator is funnier, and I've actually met him, sort of, while I wouldn't know a California Justice if I elbowed him aside at a bar.

When I met Ah-nuld, incidentally, he was not elected to anything, he was still just a multi-millionaire movie star, while I was a lowly chorus boy laboring under thirty pounds of makeup and yak hair dancing for Siegfried and Roy (yes, yes, I have plenty of salacious stories -- ask me about sharing a very small box with Roy, or Siegfried’s Robby the Robot imitation. But I digress…) Ah-nuld was much hotter in person than I’d ever expected, and Maria was much drunker, but maybe I was just jealous and judged her harshly.

Anyway, back to current events. The Court said we could marry, and the wingdings on the extreme right immediately said they’d get an initiative on the November ballot to rewrite the state constitution and fuck us over. If I’m feeling particularly angry and resentful sometime in the next weeks, perhaps I’ll treat you to my soapbox diatribe on the subject of wingdings, the Far Right, and what the Bible may or may not say, but for the moment you’re spared, so breathe a deep sigh of relief and keep reading.

People started asking us whether we were getting married or not. I'm sure every gay person in California, especially every one in any kind of stable relationship, got this question, but given our history of engagement and commitment, it did seem to strike a special chord. We said yes, or said we were discussing that, and we did, in fact, talk about it the night of the decision, just before we went down to celebrate with all our brethren at an impromptu street party on Castro (so much more fun than Pride!) And the verdict was that while we'd really prefer a few more months to prep and do the thing up right, the election in November was giving us a deadline we'd be monumentally stupid to miss. I mean, what if the wingdings really do manage to hoodwink the electorate in this state into snatching away our equal rights this time? Then we'd be outta luck once and for all, and quite possibly starting paperwork to emigrate to Canada or some less hate-ruled place. So we'd better grab the brass ring while it shone bright.

And in the midst of this have been some really unexpected and lovely moments. People at Phil's theatre started asking us if we were going to get married. I mean they'd ask out of the blue, apropos of nothing, and with big, eager grins on their faces. And not just the staff, whom you'd expect to have gay friends and to care about these things. The regular ticket holders asked us, and the donors asked us, and the board members, and they were all really excited and couldn't wait to be there with us on the big day. And my bosses and coworkers were thrilled, and our friends back East, and all our siblings. We've had people from all over the country, and from other countries, say they want to come to our wedding.

Who knew? Who knew all these people-- straight, gay, Democratic, Republican, ten years old and seventy-five years old and everything in between, every category and description you can think of-- loved us and would get excited over the two of us reciting some words and having a party?

Who knew?

So here we go. We're writing the vows, hiring the caterers, ordering the Champagne, etc., etc. And that is not the real second engagement, just its prelude, but I guess we'll break this up and give you the real second engagement story in a separate post. Stay tuned! And mark your calendars: September 29th is the day, or maybe the 28th or the 30th. We'll see.

And so it begins

2008-07-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

So, Phil and I are engaged now. But that’s so far from the end of the story, or the beginning, that it’s practically beside the point. It’s the middle, the deepest, darkest, most confusing part of the story.

Let’s back up. First of all, this is either the second or the third or the fourth time we’ve become engaged, depending on how you think of it. Let’s call it the second, in the interests of brevity.

The first time was way back in our prehistory, when I was still living in New York and Phil was happily ensconced in Chicago. And I have to tell you, at the risk of being branded an unromantic jerk for the rest of my days, that I actually didn’t mean to make a proposal when I brought it up.
Well, I did. But I was thinking practically, not romantically. I certainly did not think of what I was doing as any sort of bended-knee, strewn rose petals, cherubs harmonizing in the background sort of thing. I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page before I ripped up roots and moved halfway across the country. Doing that was in itself a commitment, and I wanted to make it. But I wanted to make sure he wanted to make it too, that he was thinking in the same terms I was, before I showed up at his door with the UHaul and the cats.

So what I did was, I gave Phil a card. Expressing love and devotion, as I remember, and ending with, “Would you like to discuss a lifetime commitment?” And a discussion was exactly what I wanted. What I got was no response at all.

See, I'd miscalculated, and failed to notice that we were already on two different pages. But that requires a little more backing up.

When Phil and I were first dating, as mentioned, I was on the East Coast and he was in the Midwest. We traveled back and forth once or twice a month, and little by little we began to meet each other’s friends and family. I’d met a couple of his work associates early on, because they were all in New York for a theatre weekend. But I hadn’t met the wife of his Artistic Director, who was very much the First Lady of Northlight, his company there. So when I was planning my third or fourth trip to Chicago, Phil let me know that Candy (the wife in question) was planning a dinner for us. And not just for us – she was planning a party including the two of us and a good chunk of his board of directors. In my honor. Oh – and did I mention this was for my birthday?

Now, here’s the thing. Candy is a lovely, warm, generous, and wonderful woman. She knows everybody, and is universally and rightly adored. But much more important, she and BJ (her husband, Northlight's Artistic Director) were surrogate heads-of-family to the entire company. Certainly not any kind of parental figures to Phil, but the heads of that professional, familial tribe. And she was throwing me a party.

My family is from the South. We have all kinds of leftover, twisted, half-forgotten rules and assumptions about human behavior and social obligations and the Secret Meanings of Everything. When the Family throws a party for the New Boyfriend, it means one thing and one thing only: it's an engagement party. If I was going to show up and smile and meet people at Candy’s lovely dinner, I was saying publicly that I intended to marry Phil.

Yikes! I wish I could say that I waited until hanging up with Phil to start screaming when he told me about it. But no, he got the full force of my freakout. I make no excuses, and he was spectacularly patient and supportive, in spite of the fact that he had no idea what was going on. I didn’t either, at that point. Those Southern demons are buried deep, and it took many hours of unofficial analysis with my closest non-Phil friends to dig ‘em up and put a name to them. But I worked my way through, and by the time the dinner happened, I was ready, if still stressed out of my mind. And I was comfortable and confident about being engaged to Phil.

So, fast forward a little more time, to when we’d begun to talk more seriously about my leaving my job and apartment and moving to Chicago, and you'll realize why I was no longer focusing on the big, scary parts of the lifetime commitment question. I was just checking in, having a conversation, confirming what I felt I knew already. I’d dealt with the demons.

Phil had not. Oh, he'd been thinking along the same lines, don't get me wrong. But he was enjoying dating, he was reveling in things as they stood at that moment. He wasn't ready yet to look ahead and make plans and anchor our relationship down with such a big, fat, heavy label as "life partner-to-be" yet. I understand that now. At the time, it felt a little weird and unsafe.

So, the greeting card. And so the lack of response. The other element here, aside from his need to ask himself whether he really was ready to tie himself to me officially or not, was his desire for romance and excitement. Again, I'd bypassed that, and had moved on to questions like, "how am I going to afford this and how am I going to support myself without work in Chicago?" But Phil not only wanted to make sure his answer was yes, he wanted to find a perfect way of telling me that answer so that we'd have something wonderful to look back on in later years.

He told me in a hotel room in Atlanta, by way of another greeting card (every element has meaning, where my partner is concerned!) I'd flown down to meet him after a three day conference so he could show me around his old hometown and, not incidentally, let a couple old friends check me out. Phil had grand plans on our first full day there for a picnic in the lovely Grant Park, a block from where we were staying. He was going to hand me this card with his “Yes” inside amid balmy southern breezes, chirping bluebirds, and the afterglow of fried chicken and cheesecake. But it rained, so we did the whole thing in our hotel room (overlooking the park, at least), and I’m glad we did so that I could cry, and we could hold each other, and, well, things could move along in other ways without having to worry about onlookers. I mean, I’m as out and public as the next gay, but extended displays of man-to-man affection in a public park in the middle of Georgia just seem unwise.

So that was Engagement #1, and all our friends were thrilled, and we began talking about a grand commitment ceremony somewhere in Chicago, perhaps a year or so after I’d moved, when we’d had a chance to settle in together, and I’d found a new job, and we’d both managed to recover financially from the relocation. Little did we know…