Site Presented By
Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
After 25 years together -- including children, mortgages, intimacy and boredom --- Kay and I stood for six hours in the San Francisco rain to become mundane and unspecial. To be married.
Feb 24, 2004 | The morning after the wedding, I lay in bed for those pre-alarm minutes and beamed at the ceiling. I am, at least for now, truly and legally married to my dear Kay. After 25 years, after sharing everything that married people share -- children, failures, disappointments, illnesses, successes, adventures, mortgages, intimacy, boredom, in-laws -- after sharing a lifetime, we are mundane and unspecial. We are married.
Kay and I got to San Francisco City Hall on Feb. 16 at 5 a.m. It was drizzling, cold and dark. A dim line of shivering, paired lumps led from the entrance on Polk Street, around the corner, along a whole block of Grove Street and onto Van Ness Avenue. I let Kay off at Van Ness and went to park the car. By the time I got back to her, I knew that our umbrellas, rain jackets and three-legged camp chairs were going to be inadequate. We had packed our wedding finery (Kay's tux jacket, my heels and my new, blue Ralph Lauren angora sweater) in backpacks that became damp in minutes as the drizzle turned to earnest rain. We had dressed warmly but I still had to walk back to the car and pull a down vest and some plastic bags from the trunk. We covered what we could. It was going to be a long wait.
In a red, plastic envelope I carried all the domestic partnership documents Kay and I have collected over the decades -- from Marin County, from the state of California, from the college, each document signed and sealed and notarized in the most proper way, each document treasured, but none a real marriage certificate. I tucked the papers deep into the pack, twice wrapped in plastic, precious records from a long-fought civil war.
The sun came up at 7. The sky went from gray-black to gray-white and the streetlights went off. A wind snaked its way around the corner and whipped at the umbrellas and blue camping tarps. Every now and then Kay or I would try to bring our toes alive by walking around the block. I tried to count the people ahead of us. Rumor was that 500 would make the cut. Were there 250 couples ahead of us? It was so hard to tell how many people there were under the plastic sheets and makeshift tents. Even when I asked, I found it impossible to tell how many were waiting to be married and how many were guests. I had no way of knowing how many people ahead of us were, like us, saving a place for others.
Our dear friends Greg and Ben had tried the City Hall line on Saturday and on Sunday, two days in a row. They had gathered family as witnesses. They had gone without sleep. And both days, they had been turned away. By Sunday night, they were exhausted and disappointed, but we convinced them to try once more. We sent them home to sleep promising to call and wake them in time.
The line behind grew by twos every few minutes. By dawn, the queue had lengthened around the corner of McAllister Street and was starting back toward Polk. A McDonald's opened two blocks up Van Ness. I got coffee, hash potato sticks and a chance to dry my knees under the hand dryer in the bathroom. Kay left her coffee with me to use the McDonald's bathroom too. And in the light we could finally see the people with whom we had been trading life stories. Asa, who on Friday had married his partner of 28 years, had returned to witness the marriage of his nephew, who had driven down from the Sierras. Sherry and Sharon, together for 11 years, had made the trip from Oregon. At dawn, the stories gained faces.
And the dawn brought something else: the support of people all around us. Suddenly we had more than the fellowship of those soggy people in line, but from commuters and passersby too. Cars and buses honked and the people inside them waved at us happily. A teenage girl on a bicycle rode by saying, "This is so great! This is so great!" People started coming by with Styrofoam cups and big cartons of Peet's coffee. Not just gay people, but straight people with children came by with bagels and doughnuts and biscotti. A beautiful little boy walked along the sidewalk with his mother giving out yellow roses. An SUV was parked at one corner dispensing juice and hot drinks. Breakfast and smiles and cheers. These people, who left their warm beds to support us, were genuinely happy. "Congratulations! A wedding breakfast! Good for you!" They beamed like proud family. It was still raining, but it wasn't cold.
I am a proud and reserved person. I constantly protect myself from the danger of condescending sentimentality. I carefully filter out the world's opinions and judgments. But these kindnesses broke my heart. I was frequently in tears.
