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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
While my friends lined up in the rain to get married in San Francisco, I wondered: If this is what we've been fighting for, why do I feel so ambivalent?
Apr 19, 2004 | In early February I left home in Oakland, Calif., for a one-month writing fellowship in upstate New York. A few days later I got a frantic call from Katrine, my girlfriend of seven years. "Honey! Come home quick!" she said. "They're doing gay weddings in San Francisco! Let's get married!"
"Again?" I asked. Katrine and I were already the most-married couple we knew. We'd exchanged vows and rings for the first time two years ago in February, alone in bed a la John and Yoko (but without the press coverage); again the next year at a celebration our friends and family threw for us, officiated by my Baptist minister son; and once more when we registered as California domestic partners a few months later. We registered for our fourth -- and, we thought, final -- marriage when we visited Katrine's family in France last summer, where we applied without fanfare for le Pacte Civil de Solidariti, which offers more legal rights than concubinage (domestic partnership) but fewer than mariage.
"For real this time!" Katrine said. "This might be our only chance!"
There was no TV where I was, and the nearest newspaper was a 10-minute walk away, but I hardly needed the news feed to be aware of this turn of events. Every time I plugged the phone cord into my laptop I found new wedding announcements bouncing around my in-box. I hadn't seen that much excitement -- or that many exclamation points -- on my computer screen since Ellen came out on national TV.
"It's official!!" wrote the gay dads across the street, whose unofficial commitment ceremony I'd attended many years ago.
"We did it!!" wrote a friend in her 20s, enclosing a photo of herself and her blushing, butch bride toasting each other with donated champagne on the bouquet-strewn steps of San Francisco City Hall.
"All day long I hand people their rings and cry, cry and hand people their rings. So much joy ... it's restoring my faith in the human race," wrote a straight, normally self-contained friend who'd served as a volunteer witness at 24 ceremonies and counting.
"Great news! Louise and I got married!" bubbled my agent, who'd waited in the rain for six hours to marry her girlfriend of 17 years, with whom she was now co-editing a photo book chronicling the wedding blitz. Amy had delivered plenty of "great news" to me over the years, but no book deal had ever made her sound this happy. "It felt so right -- so much bigger than the two of us. You should come home, Mer, even if it's just for one day," she urged me. "This could be the best thing you ever get a chance to do."
I cited the price of last-minute plane tickets. I maintained that the fellowship was the chance of a lifetime, too. I reminded Katrine and everyone else that she and I were already as married as two people could be. When the mayor of New Paltz, N.Y., started performing same-sex weddings I extended a perfunctory tit-for-tat invitation of my own ("Honey! Come here quick! They're marrying gay people in New York!") and was uncharacteristically acquiescent when Katrine proved no more willing than I to cross the continent for a quickie queer wedding. Marriage is all about compromise, I proclaimed loftily, when San Francisco started offering same-sex marriage appointments and Katrine got us one for the next available date, seven weeks later.
"It's not like you to be so unromantic," wrote a friend who knows that "uncompromising" is my not-so-secret middle name. "Or so un-activist," she added. "What's up?"
My friend had a point. Why wasn't I hopping aboard the lesbo love train?
