Happy Pride Day!

Now that possibly a little over half of Americans don't react like a bunch of insane Medieval idiots to the concept that there might actually be people in the world with a homosexual orientation, there are a lot of stories to tell. We're not just telling the stories to ourselves any more.

(Last year, during a recital at a musical theater program, a straight friend asked why so many of the guys chose to sing songs with gay themes, or more generally why there were so many songs now in musical theater with gay themes, and the answer to me was so self-evident that I was a little appalled to be asked. But I guess if you didn't grow up gay you wouldn't see how starkly different things are now compared to even 5 or 10 years ago. It's so much more satisfying now to tell a story with a gay character or subject because the gayness isn't automatically the whole story any more. A general audience might sit and listen and be relaxed (and informed!) enough to see and hear a story about a specific person in a specific situation, doing and feeling unique and interesting and human things, instead of most of the audience just immediately having the reaction, "Oh my god! He's gay!" and not taking in anything else.)

This weekend, as we celebrate the anniversary of the Stonewall riots (if you're not gay and over 40, maybe you need a little history lesson), I want to remind myself that Stonewall was important but it was the 80s when things REALLY started to change. (Okay, yes, I know that's debatable and maybe even not so important, it's not a contest after all, but those years certainly marked a watershed in Americans' ability to ignore an uncomfortable truth hoping it'll go away. People were dying and they were screaming about it and wouldn't stop.)

Once again I credit Andrew Sullivan with some of the smartest, most affecting blogging out there. Where I disagree with him is in his apology for ACT UP's disruption of religious services. He's referring to the notorious demonstration at St. Patrick's cathedral when an ACT UP member threw a communion wafer to the ground. Admittedly it's easier for me, not believing that the cracker actually turns into the flesh of the son of "God," to accept such an act as political protest, but for me the demonstration in St. Patrick's was a galvanizing moment of brilliant disobedience. I think it was brave.

Anyway, I can't wait to see this film. And happy Pride Day -- a little early: this year I'm celebrating our national homosexual holiday by going to North Carolina for a wedding shower for C's brother (who is marrying a woman in September), which is 1) ironic, and 2) nice, because C's family welcomed me so lovingly into their family this spring and now I can in turn help welcome my soon-to-be sister-in-law.

Obama Moved By Our Wedding, Evolves.

We so wanted our marriage not to be a political event -- impossible to avoid, we know, but we aspired none the less -- so it was almost comical on our honeymoon cruise in the Mediterranean to read in the “USA Times” (the 4-page news digest they tucked in our cabin door on the ship every morning) that C’s home state of North Carolina voted by a large margin to extra-double-duty outlaw and ban gay marriage (I don’t know which is the bigger sin: bigotry or redundancy) and then a day or two later that President Obama came out in favor of same-sex marriage. Big week for gay marriage.

I had been so disgusted and to be honest bored with Obama’s gay marriage dilemma that I expected to just roll my eyes when, at of course politically the perfect moment, he finally completed his evolution. But instead I was quite moved. I mean, seriously, the fucking president. I know, it's marriage, and I have all kinds of trepidation about marriage as the flagship issue of our movement. But I came of age politically in the Reagan 80s and lived through Clinton and god-help-us Bush, and now the president of the United States says that he thinks gay people should be able to marry each other.

That’s massive.

And then there’s North Carolina. Of course at our wedding there was a big contingent of North Carolinians, many of them politically conservative but most of whom expressed their dismay about Amendment One and did what they could to persuade their friends to vote against it. And they came with open hearts to celebrate our marriage, to welcome me into their family, to join mine with theirs. Being from a traditional background, they know what marriage means.

One of the most touching things all weekend was watching C’s mother and mine chatting, smiling, enjoying the happy occasion and each other’s company. It was not a political occasion for them. I’m sure they have very divergent views on current issues, but their sons were getting married and they came together, with their families, to share the joy of that.

So all these state governments (mostly Southern, but it’s dangerous to relax with the notion that bigots all live in the same place and have the same accent) and their nasty little amendments. Of course it’s disheartening when it happens, but I come near to dismissing it. I try to focus on history.

All these religious bigots talking about homosexuality as a moral issue, a Christian issue, are identical to Calhoun, etc. in the 19th century defending slavery on Christian grounds. We read that stuff in history class and thought, “Jesus, these people are lunatics, how did anyone take this seriously?” And now we have Maggie Gallagher. It’s the same bullshit. It’s the same punch in the gut when you read it. And if Gallagher is remembered at all, it will be as a horrible person who distorted Christian ideas to justify her irrational hatred of a group of people.

We’ve always had ugly, backward, hateful people among us, but we have at key moments in our history found powerful ways to put them down. The Civil War amendments and Reconstruction. The civil rights legislation of the 1960s. I don’t think it will be too long before some branch of the federal government steps in and says, “It doesn’t matter what you think. People can marry who they want. Grow up.”

I must seem crazy optimistic in light of how conservative Congress and the Supreme Court have become, but the tide has turned. Remember, I still think gay marriage is ultimately a conservative issue and “marriage equality” will be a conservative victory. The normalizing of same-sex marriage is a conservative response to the fact of homosexuality, so I don’t think it’s too much to expect in these conservative times.

Perhaps what’s changed in my view is that I think possibly a conservative response is what’s needed now, at least at first.

Keeping Us Tight and True.

Last night C was snoring so loud not even my earplugs worked, so I got up at 1 a.m. and moved to the couch which is about 1 inch too short to be truly comfortable for sleeping. I feel asleep quickly, but woke up at 5 (the alarm was set for 6), tried for half an hour to get back to sleep, failed, got up and made coffee.

We usually get up at 7, but this morning, on my “day off,” we got up extra early to get to the City Clerk’s office by 8 to be first in line at the Marriage Bureau, which opens at 8:30. Just inside the front door, we saw a line to the right and a closed door marked “Marriage Bureau” to the left. A woman in a security guard uniform with her feet planted shoulder-width barked, “What are you here for?”

I said, “Marriage license?”

She pointed to the line and said, it seemed to me gruffly, “There.”

I’d been drinking coffee since 5:30, so, after standing for a minute, I got out of line and asked the security guard if there was a bathroom I could use. She said, “8:30.”

I thought she didn't hear me, so I said, “I asked where there’s a bathroom.”

She exhaled and said, “8:30!”

I said, “Um. Do you mean the bathroom opens at 8:30?”

She looked at me like she couldn’t fathom why she had been chosen of all the people in the world to endure such unmitigated torture, pointed to the glass office doors, still locked, and said, “Eight. Thirty.”

I said, “Well, aren’t you in a good mood this morning.”

We were not first in line, but we were fourth, and by the time the doors opened there were dozens behind us. The doors opened promptly at 8:30, and we were out of there with a marriage license in our hot little hands by 8:50. To be fair, I should mention that the clerk who issued the license was sweet and polite and gave us a warm congratulations as we were leaving. On the way out, I had in my head that I was going to say to Miss Security Grouch, “Why do you have to be such a horrid witch to everyone?” but she wasn’t there any more, and I’m glad. It’s hard, but I think it’s better to leave people like that to their own nastiness. Contain it. Fire just spreads when you blow on it.

All day yesterday and still this afternoon -- I couldn’t help it -- I have the Joni Mitchell song, My Old Man, in my head: “We don’t need no piece of paper from the City Hall keeping us tight and true, no, my old man, keepin’ away my blues.” Now that I am in the thick of this, it’s clear to me how badly I have misunderstood marriage ever since I was a teenager, believing that it was somehow about a relationship between 2 people. Of course we don’t need a piece of paper to keep us faithful or committed or even just together. That’s a commitment we make to each other in our hearts. The piece of paper is about, duh, the community around us that supports our commitment in various ways.

I just finished reading a beautiful, tender novel called “Arcadia” by Lauren Groff. It’s about a hippie commune in New York State. Don’t read it on the train or in a coffee shop if you’re trying to avoid sudden, involuntary weeping in public places. It’s about many things but most directly I think it’s about freedom versus community.

I say “versus” like it’s one or the other. Maybe in some important way it is. When we gain some of one, we lose some of the other. I have all my life seen the fight for gay rights as a fight for more freedom. It’s my body and you do not have the right to tell me what to do with it, etc.

Another book I read recently is “Flagrant Conduct,” Dale Carpenter’s story of Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court case which abolished sodomy laws in 2003. He lays out the contrast between the argument made in Bowers v. Hardwick (the Supreme Court case in which sodomy laws were upheld in 1986) and the argument made in Lawrence, a contrast which reflects the general shift in the gay rights movement.

In Hardwick, the argument against sodomy laws was that people should be free to have sex with whom they choose. But the lawyers for Lawrence barely mentioned “sex,” arguing that “intimacy” is an important component of stable relationships which are necessary in order to create families and communities -- so homosexuals’ intimate lives should not be criminalized. We used to argue for sexual freedom. Now we argue for civil rights. We used to want the right to be different. Now we're asking for the right to be the same. It’s not just a rhetorical difference. It’s a fundamentally different idea: freedom or community?

Is the fact that the latter argument is so much more resonant for me now than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago, is this change of heart due to something so mundane as a fear of growing old alone?

From time to time, C and I talk, as people who are about to promise to spend the rest of their lives together might, about the future. I returned to New York feeling like this was my last move, I would grow old and die here. I’d left for a while, tried a few other places, and had come back to the city I love, my home. C on the other hand wants to, eventually, move to Vermont or Upstate, or Maine. I love those places, but I imagine being 85 or 90, stuck in a house somewhere miles from amenities, unable to drive, starving to death some snowy winter. New York City is perfect for the old and frail. You see old people hobbling around the city all the time. It might take all afternoon to get to the corner for a quart of milk, but the trip is possible. It’s not 3 miles in the snow.

I’ve lived in remote, bucolic places and I love them, but I always end up missing the city. I miss that feeling, anonymous in a crowd, that anything can happen. That feeling of possibility is transformed now, though. It used to be not only about sex, but sex was the most compelling, the most urgent of the realms of what could happen if one stayed on one’s toes. Sex was behind the frantic hyper-vigilance, gears constantly turning, trying to turn every situation into an illicit encounter. Now that that part of it is gone, I don’t crave time alone as much or anonymity.

So, maybe Vermont. But not for a long time, and I want neighbors who drop by for pie and coffee, whose kids we’ll babysit, who’ll drive us to the hospital when one of us falls on the icy sidewalk.

Chance of Showers.

Yesterday C and I had a surprise long-distance shower, which his mother and sister had organized. (Now that I think about, they called it a surprise shower but it wasn’t much of a surprise since we hung all the decorations and put out the snacks ourselves. The actual concept was somewhat of a surprise to me, since I never imagined such a thing in my life, but there’s a lot of stuff around weddings besides the wedding itself that I never imagined, like Jack and Jill parties and bow hats, for instance.)

Anyway, C’s mom and sister contacted everyone we’d sent wedding invitations to and asked them to send shower presents. Meanwhile they sent us a big box of decorations, a bottle of wine called “Menage a trios” (which I have to say is a funny choice for a wedding shower), lemon biscotti, cookies, cheese straws.

Last week my sister K and her middle son, my nephew A, who is 12, came to visit for his spring break. I can’t even remember the last time I got to spend so much time with K, my baby sister who is in her forties now, 2 marriages, 3 sons, the oldest a sophomore in high school.

K did an internship at Viacom in the late 80s when she was in college and I was living with my first long-term boyfriend in Fort Greene. She stayed with a friend a few blocks away, and I saw her frequently. Near the end of the semester, she got a job offer but decided against the entry-level-5 girls-in-an-apartment-in-a-shady-neighborhood-because-that’s-what-you-can-afford-but-it’s-New-York life, finished college, moved to Louisiana, got married. We’ve stayed very close but our lives are very different now and we don’t see each other enough.

It was a wonderful week. The weather was perfect, cool and sunny -- it was supposed to rain later in the week but never did. Broadway shows, fancy dinners out, the Empire State Building. My nephew is 12 and not easy to impress, but he fell in love with New York a little. I think Dim Sum in Chinatown kinda blew his mind.

Other wedding news: we finalized the liturgy (our minister, a Unitarian Universalist, gave us a big binder of suggested language, from which we cut and pasted what we liked), and mapped out the procession, recession, etc. Our RSVP date has come and gone. I think the number of guests is a little over 60.

We confirmed plans with the woman doing the flowers. Peonies, white lilacs, iris, grape hyacinth, tulips. Forsythia, if she can get them. Spring came so early this year.

We confirmed the menu for the cocktail hour and dinner after the ceremony.

In non-wedding news, my co-writers and I signed a new option on Lizzie Borden with a new group of producers. We’re making plans for an August production. More details soon.

The Wedding Chronicles, cont.

C and I had brunch at French Roast on the Upper West Side today with my old friend S and her husband. I don’t see S nearly as much as I’d like to. It’s so hard in New York to sustain attention on anything that isn’t right in front of your face at the moment.

S is a playwright. We used to live next door to each other on East 10th Street, back when I was with J and she was single. She watched our cats when we were on tour, and she sang in the “Cowgirl Chorus,” Y’all’s backup choir, for many years. She met and married her husband some time during my hiatus from New York, so I don’t know him well, but he was, until a couple years ago when he left to start his own business, an attorney at the same firm that C is an associate with now. Artists marrying lawyers.

Afterwards, C and I took the train down to Chelsea Market to look for a few goodies to add to the gift bags that C’s mother is putting in the hotel rooms of our out-of-town wedding guests. Apparently this is a thing people do: the hotel gift bag. (My first experience of it was at the wedding of C’s cousin’s son in Savannah recently. In our room we found a bag with bottled water, ibuprofen, and an assortment of snacks. I particularly enjoyed the cheese straws.) C’s mom has picked out a few items already, but we want to add a couple New York-ish things, too. We found some Brooklyn-made “spicy pickle flavor” potato chips (OK, I hate the word, but yes, they’re “artisanal”) and bought a bag to sample. They’re tasty.

C’s family is wedding-crazy. Which is good because I didn’t know the first thing about how all this stuff works. Until I started to contemplate my own, I found weddings very creepy. And, well, I can’t say that I don’t still think most of them are. The difference I guess in my thinking is that, while weddings in general are likely to be pretty revolting, mine is of course going to be wonderful.

I don’t mean to say that my family isn’t super-excited and helpful, too, but it’s hard to compete with the resume of my in-laws-to-be. I know I’ve said this a few times, so I apologize if it’s becoming tedious, but the size and degree of involvement in each other’s lives of C’s family is seriously like nothing I’ve encountered except in 19th-century novels. These folks have been to a lot of weddings. They know the drill.

And C’s brother is also getting married this year, in the fall (just a regular heterosexual wedding) so it’s a wedding frenzy for the C clan.

Everyone asks how the planning and preparation is going. I think we’re more or less on top of it. C bought my ring yesterday. It’s very similar to his engagement ring, a vintage gold band with a stylized orange blossom design. Most of our invitations went out a couple weeks ago, and the last few -- I didn’t have addresses for some people and I’m a terrible procrastinator, but the protocol says 6 weeks in advance so we’re still within the bounds of good wedding form -- will go out tomorrow morning.

We spent a good part of the afternoon yesterday planning the ceremony. The Unitarian Universalist minister who is officiating, though she stressed that we can do anything we want, gave us a binder arranged “Chinese menu style,” as she said, with several choices for each section: welcoming the guests, readings, the homily, declaration of intent, vows, etc. based on a traditional Protestant wedding order of service.

My inclination all along has been to make our wedding as traditional as possible. I want our guests to feel safely oriented, to know that, while we are two men, it’s just a wedding. I want to hear the phrases we all know, like “dearly beloved,” and “for better, for worse,” and “by the power vested in me by the State of New York” (that’s my favorite), and “do you take this man?” and “I do.”

We made all our choices, and I think it’s going to be lovely and touching. We only stumbled twice. First, when I showed C the poem I wanted someone to read right after the processional, during a simple ritual in which our parents will light a candle together to begin the ceremony. It’s one of several poems Harold Pinter wrote for his wife Antonia Fraser. (I just finished reading her memoir of their marriage.) It’s a beautiful, short and evocative poem about being and staying in love.

C hated it. He found it precious and obscure and thought it read like a Christopher Guest-style parody of itself. I was crushed -- because I loved the poem and thought it was perfect for our wedding but also because now I will never love it in the same easy way I did before.

I doubt that any skill is more necessary to cultivate in order to have and sustain a marriage than the ability to not take your partner’s difference in taste personally, to shake off the hurt feelings, and to move on, so the parents’ candle ritual will happen in silence, which in the end, because the purpose of the candle ritual is to create a mood of reverence and sacredness, is much better than would have been muddying the moment with a poem.

The other disagreement was about the prayer we chose. We both love the St. Francis of Assisi blessing (“God, make ___ and ____ channels of your peace, that where there is hatred they may bring love, where there is hurt may they bring the spirit of forgiveness, where there is doubt, faith, where there is despair, hope, etc.”). I wanted to leave out the “God,” at the beginning in order to make it more universal, less alienating and more meaningful to our non-believing friends and family.

We argued heatedly. His argument is that “God” is a universal word. It means whatever notion someone might have of what God is. True. When I hear the word now, I translate it as something along the lines of “the goodness in all creation,” or “the creative force,” or simply, “love.” But, as a lifelong agnostic, getting to that sense of equanimity about the word has not been easy after decades of feeling threatened and manipulated by it. The fact is that most of the time when you hear the word God in the public sphere it’s in the context of making someone feel less than or outside of the group of people who hold similar views about what is godly and what is ungodly. My God is not the God who hates homosexuals and disobedient women and foreigners and artists and communists and prostitutes and free-thinkers and homeless people and the poor.

C feels it would be aggressive to edit the prayer. I feel it’s aggressive not to. The word is in there twice. We took out one of them. We’ll both get over it.

Respondez-vous sil vous plait.

I got in some serious hot water with my last post -- which was not an installment of the Marriage Chronicles but a screed against the Catholic Church. I offended two people who are very important to me: C’s brother and my friend M in Syracuse. I know more about my friend’s -- who has a long history of peace activism, prison ministry, and social justice work, and whose home is now a Catholic Worker House devoted mostly to hospice care for people with AIDS -- than I do about C’s brother’s faith, but I am certain they are very different types of Catholic. Regardless, they are both deep believers and they were both offended, and, looking more closely at my words in light of their reactions, I was embarrassed by my lack of nuance.

I want to talk about the wedding, so I won’t try to recast my argument here and now except to address one thing. Religious folks often respond to agnostics’ or atheists’ criticism of their beliefs and institutions by saying, “you just don’t understand faith.” What I want to say is that I absolutely do understand faith. I might not have faith in a particular story or institution, but I have a deep, unshakable faith that human beings are good and that our ultimate purpose is to figure out how to love each other and the world we live in as best and as much as we can. I doubt these things every day, which is why I know I have faith in them. My anger at religious institutions comes from that faith, not from some desire to tear people down or be right or smarter or to get attention. Just wanted to say that.

OK, the wedding: RSVPs are trickling in. We invited about 95 people and we have room for 75, maybe 80.

When we first started talking about a wedding, we both said we wanted something small, “just family and close friends.” The picture I had in my head was maybe 20 or 30 people. But everyone on the list is someone we couldn’t imagine not inviting, and there are still many I feel terrible about leaving off the list. As we all know C’s family is huge. He had to leave out whole branches of it. I don’t have a lot of family besides my mom and dad and siblings, but after all the traveling and moving around I’ve done, and just being so damn old, I have dear friends everywhere.

Time and geography played a part in the selection. I gave preference to friends who’ve been more present in my life lately, leaving out some whom I’ve been very close to at one time or another but don’t keep in touch with as much any more. And I invited friends from New York who are more likely to be able to come over friends whom I care just as much about but who live far away.

One of the things I’m most looking forward to is bringing all these people together. Not just mixing C’s world with mine, but mixing together all the worlds within my world. It makes me smile to think of my parents hanging out with my friend M and his partner who have the Catholic Worker house in Syracuse where I stayed so many times during the years when I was touring. So many people who’ve been such an important part of my life for so many years have not met each other.

And that reminds me that we still have to decide where everyone sits for the reception dinner. I have this vision of stimulating conversation based on groups of people with mutual interests but possibly different points of view and life experiences, but whenever I spend a few moments thinking about who to put with whom I get a little crazy. We want people to meet new people but we also want to seat people who know each other together and not separate families.

C and I decided that we will sit at a table with just our parents, since there seemed to be no other clear line of cutoff short of having 30 people and their kids at our table. Everyone says not to worry too much about where we’re seated because we won’t spend much time sitting.

I’ve started reading up on Istanbul for the honeymoon. We booked a cruise from Istanbul to Venice, and we have a day and a half in Istanbul before the boat leaves. I bought a book called Strolling Through Istanbul (the maps are impossible to read on the Kindle) and another called American Writers in Istanbul. I’ve never been to that part of the world. I’ve never taken a cruise (though I’ve taken a 14-hour ferry ride from Aberdeen, Scotland to the Shetland Islands, one of the most thrilling and memorable things I’ve ever done), but I love the idea of being stuck on a boat with very few decisions to make. I don’t know if it’s a personality trait of mine or if I’ve just reached a point in life where I’m wearing of making decisions but the idea of being free of it is immensely appealing.

Cross-posted at The Bilerico Project.

There Will Be No Chicken Dance.

My work schedule is Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, so I have a mini-weekend in the middle of the week. Wednesdays are often booked up in advance with meetings to do with the business of my latest theater project, my Lizzie Borden musical which is entering a new production phase, and doctor’s appointments -- until recently I hadn’t had health insurance for many years, so I’ve been making up for lost time with eye surgery, treatment of various skin problems, dentist visits, etc.

But some Wednesdays are all mine, and I relish the glimpses of a life that is productive, fulfilling, and whole. Last week I spent the whole day writing my last blog post. I’d had all these changing and unfolding thoughts about marriage which I hadn’t had time to organize and write down and post until last Wednesday and it all came flowing out. When that happens -- or on an even bigger scale, like when I spent 2 weeks at MacDowell Colony last fall writing pages and pages of the stories I’d been storing in my head for years -- it’s both gratifying (to finally have it down on paper and see that I am still capable of producing good work) and disheartening (to see so starkly how prolific I would be if I could devote every day to this work instead of a day job).

But then maybe if I was sitting here every day writing at a more measured pace, I would miss the pleasure that comes with finally letting it all out like a good piss after you’ve been holding it in the car for too long.

I have a chicken simmering on the stove which this afternoon will become, among other things, tortilla soup. I just spent an hour composing a draft of our New York Times wedding announcement. I am going to devote a couple hours to the theater piece I began at MacDowell, and either before or after that I plan to search for poetry that we might use in our wedding ceremony and do a little research on Istanbul because we’ll be there for a day and a half before our honeymoon cruise departs.

We mailed our invitations Monday, so I guess many of them will have arrived by now. They contain information about our “wedding web site,” which has travel and lodging information for guests and a link to our gift registry. It has taken me a while to get used to the idea of a gift registry. My family and friends have been so generous throughout my starving artist life, lending me a hand when I’ve needed it over the years. To ask them now to buy me stuff just because I’m getting married makes me uncomfortable. But the first question many of them have asked when I’ve announced our marriage is “Where are you registered?” so maybe I have to accept the fact that this is the protocol. This is the world I live in now.

Last week our cake topper arrived by FedEx. We bought it on ebay. We didn’t like many that we found online. Some were just too silly (like one with one of the grooms climbing up the side of the cake) or mix and match grooms standing side by side but not relating to each other in any way. Lots of them looked like children, and a surprising number were made from Fisher Price “little people” painted to look like grooms. Dressing up dolls and children to look like adults creeps me out. We finally found one that looked like two fairly generic men, one with his arms around the other, in simple tuxes.

We were surprised when we opened the box to see just how gay they were. Like super-gay, Platonic ideal of gay-gay. The picture online didn’t show their pursed-mouth, pink lipstick and rouge faces and fey expressions. They look like stoned lesbians. I bought some acrylic paints on my way home from work yesterday so I can tone down their makeup and paint their jackets dark green and their ties pale yellow, like the ones we’ll be wearing. Don’t hate – I love fey boys and lipstick lesbians. I just want the cake topper to look sort of like us.

I didn’t want a cake topper at all, at first. I thought it was gauche or too kitschy or something, but I changed my mind. I also didn’t want dancing at the reception. I was horrified by the possibility of the chicken dance at my wedding. But my friend T reminded me that, regardless of the fact that I don’t like dancing, people want to dance at a wedding reception. They want to cut loose and drink a little too much and have fun. Of course. Why would you not want two grooms on top of your wedding cake and dancing at your reception? I swear sometimes I don’t know what I’m thinking. (The band we hired plays 1920s and 30s jazz. There will be no chicken dance.)