Larry Benjamin's Blog: Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life - Posts Tagged "marriage-equality"

What can I say at this moment? I love you? Thank you?
―those are but pauper words forming an impoverished language,
making it impossible to tell you what is in my heart.

Because of you, I am better than I was, more than I am.
Because of you, who I am now, is who I wanted to be.
Because of you, I am stronger than I used to be.

If I could, I would pull the moon from the sky and lay it at your feet.
If I could, I would give you a lifetime of sunny days and dreams that come true.
None of these are mine to give.

Instead I ask you to accept this ring―this endless circle of gold―which, like my love for you, knows neither beginning nor end.

With this ring, I promise to be your lover, your best friend, your life’s companion.

With this ring, I promise to walk by your side all the days of my life, bound and freed by our love.

Accept this ring, then kiss me and free me.

Last week the Mister and I celebrated our 15th anniversary. For fifteen years without fail, the Mister’s mother has sent us an anniversary card; she is only person who does so. As I read her card, I thought about how much this simple gesture of support means to us. That got me thinking about marriage.

We’ve been together fifteen years. Already we have outlasted 50% of all first heterosexual marriages and 25% of all second marriages. Yet our marriage isn’t recognized, is in Pennsylvania, where we live, and most states, not legal, is perceived by some as a threat to the sacred union between one woman and one man. I don’t intend to argue that point here but instead want to focus on what marriage—any marriage—is.

Mrs. Moon, Daphne’s mother on Frasier, once said famously, “You young modern people think marriage is some sort of promenade through paradise, when it's more like a march through Hell with a man strapped to your back and a litter of nasty babies swinging from your teats!” I love that particular rant of hers, though I think marriage is neither. So what is it? It’s his cold feet pressed against your warm ones on a winter’s night and you not pulling away even though you want to. It’s gently telling him, “No honey, you’re not dying; you’re hung over. Remember last night?” It’s having sex in the morning when you’d rather do it at night so you can fall asleep afterwards. In short, it’s gentleness, it’s compromise. It’s a willingness to commit to each other even though no societal pressure comes to bare. It’s a willingness to commit even though no law in the land supports or recognizes that commitment. It’s a promise between two people and only those two people.

As with Matthew and Thomas, the main characters in my novel, What Binds Us, the idea to get married sprang up organically. Though I’d written What Binds Us before the Mister and I started dating, it hadn’t occurred to me that we would get married. One night over dinner, he mentioned he thought we should get rings. I asked how he imagined us exchanging rings as I didn’t see us simply handing them to each other across the counter of Tiffany. He raised an eyebrow at the mention of “Tiffany.” “Okay so I only intend to do this once; I want a ‘good’ ring,” I told him. As a result I would only consider purchasing a ring from Caldwell’s, Bailey Banks & Biddle or Tiffany.

Ours was a simple ceremony—at home before less than two dozen friends and family—a far cry from the fairy tale wedding of Thomas and Matthew:
“Dondi had had the interior of the ruined church whitewashed and as the building filled with dusk, two hundred beeswax candles were lit, giving off a delicate peach glow. Two dozen delicate gilt chairs with red velvet cushions were lined up in neat rows. A neat, highly polished parquet floor had been laid over the dirt. A woman in frothy lace sat holding an oboe. Behind her were four tuxedoed men with violins. Ten thousand pale pink roses—an entire crop from Holland flown in that morning—gave the stark whitewashed space an air of magnificent opulence.”

In an example of art imitating life, the vows they exchange are the vows I wrote for my own commitment. One real couple, one fictional couple, one couple with great wealth, one couple saving to buy a house. Life and fiction were vastly different save for one detail common to both: “He slipped the narrow gold band on my finger as I looked at his beloved face, the contours and textures of which I knew as well as those of my own. I looked into his shining silver eyes and knew absolutely that I was loved.”

Yet to say that marriage is about commitment tells only half the story. Traditional marriage also carries with it certain rights and protections, which as gay men, we do not have access to no matter how committed we are, no matter how long we’ve been together. My mother does not speak to my brother’s wife. Yet my brother’s wife does not have to worry that if something happens to Michael, she will be denied her place at his bedside; she will not have to battle our parents for his remains, for the house they own together. My mother does not speak to the Mister. Why does he not deserve the same peace of mind my sister-in-law does?

The Mister and I are getting married in June. We’d like to get married in Pennsylvania but of course marriage equality is not to be found here in our great state! So we will probably get married in one of our neighboring states, like New Jersey (gasp) or Delaware. We wanted to get married in the state in which we’ve chosen to make our home and build a life together but we don’t want to wait any longer. After 17 years we feel we’ve more than earned the right to get married, whether Pennsylvania law agrees or not. But that’s not really the point of this post.

Like I said, we’ve been together 17 years. My older brother, Michael, and Susie, his girlfriend visited us for New Year’s. Susie told us they’d met a couple who’s been married 34 years. She asked the wife what the secret to a long marriage was. The woman responded, “Yes Dear.”

Susie then asked us what we thought the secret to staying married was. We’ve been together so long, we each have our roles; I’m the designated family spokesman, our joint voice. I don’t remember exactly how I responded but later in the day, I said something teasingly mean to Stanley and Susie laughed. Stanley didn’t hear me but knew I was making fun of him. When he asked me what I’d said, I responded “Nothing, honey.”

I turned to Susie in triumph. “There ” I said, “The two secrets to a long marriage: ‘yes, dear’ and ‘nothing, honey’.”

Read the rest.

It was Tuesday, May 20. We were about to get out of the car to explore a new thrift store in Rehoboth Beach when my Twitter stream went crazy. U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones 3d had found Pennsylvania’s ban on same sex marriage unconstitutional.

My brother called, then texted the news when I didn’t answer.

In the middle of that thrift store, using my phone, I scrolled through the posts on Twitter in elation...and disbelief.

“We are a better people than what these laws represent, and it is time to discard them into the trash heap of history,” Judge Jones wrote in his elegant opinion.

No Stay.

Then, on Wednesday, Governor Corbett announced, “I have decided not to appeal Judge Jones’ decision.”

On Thursday, May 29, we went to Philadelphia City Hall and applied for a marriage license. There were two straight couples and us. No one looked twice at us.

Read the rest.

“You can’t marry another boy,” they told me.
“Why not?” I asked, confused. “You said I could do anything. You said I could grow up to be President.”
“You can’t marry another boy!”
“But you said I’d grow up, and fall in love, and get married.”
“You can’t fall in love with another boy!”
― Excerpt, Unbroken

My father followed me into the kitchen. “I like Stanley,” he said. “He is the kind of person I imagined for you. Do me a favor. Keep this one.”
I was startled for two reasons. One, my father doesn’t talk much, certainly not about anything of a personal nature. At least not to me. Second, he’d always hated all my boyfriends. Until that moment, until that conversation, I’d always assumed that he’d hated my boyfriends for their sex. Now I understood he’d hated them because he thought they weren’t good enough for me, that I deserved better. In all honestly, I had dated quite a collection of losers and lunatics.

“I will, Space,” I promised. “I will.”

Yesterday, more than 18 years after that conversation with my father, 25 years after we first met, on our 17th anniversary, on the 45th anniversary of Stonewall , and 38 days after Judge John Jones III’s historic decision, I kept that promise; I married Stanley, the best man I know, the one man my father approved of.

I’ve written on this blog about being the sissy triumphant (December 2013) about turning “nos” into “yeses,”(May 2014) but yesterday I said the biggest yes of all: “Yes, I do.”

It was a small, intimate affair—just us and six of our closest friends. But it was everything I dreamed my wedding would be. Stacey Thomas of Philadelphia Wedding Chapel not only got us married on the date we wanted, she made the service personal. We felt protected, cared for.

As we walked the short distance to the front where Stacey waited for us, a distance which, short as it was, had taken 45 years to get to, I thought of those long ago drag queens, mostly black and Hispanic, who tired, had started a riot that changed the course of history. As I walked forward tightly gripping Stanley’s hand. I knew I could never stand in their high heels but I could walk in their footsteps.

In one surprisingly hilarious moment, Stacey asked our friends if they would support us and stand with us. They answered in unison, “We will.” Their words settled on my skin. I realized that these six friends had our backs and always would. We, as individuals, as a people, and as a nation, have come so far. I know we have so far to go but I wanted to stop in that moment to rest, to live in that moment for just a moment longer.

Earlier in the day, my friend Shirley, who has never married, questioned the importance of marriage, saying it was just a piece of paper. She said, “After, you won’t be any different, or look any different.” I joked that I would look different, I would glow. She informed me one only glows when pregnant.

Now, officially married, Stanley’s kiss still lingering on my lips, I felt different. Maybe because we were now protected—no one could ever deny me access to his bedside; if anything happened to me, the taxes on my estate wouldn’t force him to sell our home. Maybe because, by getting married, we’d told each other: “I know you and I love you anyway.” And maybe this was just what equality felt like.

Unbroken

I read about a year ago that the marriage equality movement had reached critical mass which meant it was essentially unstoppable; it could be resisted, it could be delayed but change was gonna come. And come it did, last week when SCOTUS, in a 5-4 decision, made marriage equality the law of the land.

Like most successfully married couples, Stanley and I know each other better than anyone else knows us: he knows I miss seeing my father, that I hate the idea of being buried, knows I wish to be cremated; I know Stanley is loving, and generous and so is an organ donor.

To those wishing to deny me my fundamental rights based on their “religious beliefs,” I have this to say: I do not want to get married in your church before your God for I believe in neither. I don’t believe in your religion, a sanctified lean-to built on a foundation of fables, hearsay and superstition. And I don’t believe that a God, who would allow His son to be nailed to a cross, who would allow generations of innocents to be enslaved and slaughtered, who would allow children to die and animals to be abused, gives a damn what I choose to do or not do with my dick.

Our commitment ceremony 18 years ago was about love, and a promise made to each other. Our marriage last year was about protection. It guaranteed that as I lay dying no one could deny Stanley the right to sit at my bedside and hold my hand. It guaranteed that should one of us die before the other, no member of either of our families could remove the remaining widower from the house we’d sacrificed to buy, the home we’d made together; no one could take the books off the shelves on which I’d placed them, or remove the art we’d hung together. I always maintained that not being able to get married had not kept us apart and being married wouldn’t keep us together but it could protect us from others who would try to separate us, who would deny what we had and what we meant to each other.

I was taken aback at the hostility with which some people greeted the Supreme Court decision in favor of marriage equality. My own Twitter stream was populated with comments from people who seemed to despise me for…being different, for being me, for claiming my right to equal treatment. I finally silenced them for, just as my marriage has no effect on their own marriages, their small-minded meanness has no effect on mine thanks to SCOTUS.

But even as I was filled with dismay for the enmity of total strangers, I was filled me with joy and hope at the idea that our nephew, Max, born June 12, 2015, will never know a time when his uncles were not married, may, indeed, never be able to conceive of a time when they could not have been married. (Note: That is Max we are holding in the photo.)

Keep reading.