Lawfully Wedded Husband
Page 1
LIVING OUT
Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies
David Bergman, Joan Larkin, and Raphael Kadushin
SERIES EDITORS
Lawfully Wedded Husband
* * *
How My Gay Marriage Will Save the American Family
Joel Derfner
The University of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press
1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor
Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059
uwpress.wisc.edu
Copyright © 2013 by Joel Derfner
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Derfner, Joel, author.
Lawfully wedded husband: how my gay marriage will save
the American family / Joel Derfner.
pages cm—(Living out: gay and lesbian autobiographies)
ISBN 978-0-299-29490-8 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-299-29493-9 (e-book)
1. Derfner, Joel. 2. Gay men—United States—Biography.
3. Gay authors—United States—Biography.
4. Same-sex marriage—United States.
I. Title. II. Series: Living out.
PS3604.E754Z46 2013
811′.6—dc23
[B]
2013015044
for
my father
Contents
Introduction
Lawfully Wedded Husband
1 Saying Yes
2 Researching Family Marriage Traditions
3 Deciding on Living Arrangements
4 Dealing with the Legal Business
5 Dealing with the Legal Business, Take Two
6 Planning the Ceremony
7 Taking Stock of the Relationship
8 Taking Care of Last-Minute Details
9 Getting Married
10 Living Happily Ever After
Epilogue
Appendix: A Brief and Highly Biased Legislative History of American Marriage Equality with Respect to Sexuality
Acknowledgments
Lawfully Wedded Husband
* * *
Introduction
What are you guys wearing tomorrow?” asked the assistant director of Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, the reality show my fiancé, Mike, and I were being filmed for in May of 2010.
“I’m wearing jeans and a nice vest,” I said, “and Mike will be in shorts and a T-shirt.”
There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. “Joel,” the assistant director said, “this Iowa wedding is the culmination of your story arc.”
“Right.”
“If you’re not dressed up, people will think you’re not taking it seriously.”
“Look,” I said. “I promised Mike that this would be as low-key an event as we could possibly manage, and I’ve already broken that promise in more ways than I can count. Not dressing up is the one shred of evidence left that I actually care about his feelings.”
“This is bad,” the assistant director said, and waited.
“Okay,” I said finally. “I’ll talk to him about it.”
“Great,” said the assistant director. “It’ll really help the audience understand what a special thing you’re doing.” I put my cell phone in my pocket, went back to the table at the restaurant where Mike and I were having lunch with his cousin DJ and DJ’s boyfriend, Kevin, and promptly did not talk to him about it, because Mike’s fury was already just shy of the boiling point, and the last thing I needed was for it to get any hotter less than twenty-four hours before our nuptials.
But then the assistant director called back, and then he called back again. In total he called four times during a one-hour lunch to ask about what we’d decided. At some point I realized he wasn’t going to stop, so, bracing myself, I said, very gently, “Mike, the TV people called and they want to know, what would you think about . . . picking up some slacks, maybe?” Mike stared at me in silence. “And, um, a nice shirt?” I could practically feel the waves of rage emanating from him.
“Oh, fine,” he sighed at last. “I need a new suit anyway.”
The next morning, Mike looking spiffy in his new suit, we drove with DJ and Kevin from their place in Rochester, Minnesota, to Mike’s hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one of only three states in the union at the time where two men could legally marry each other, met my father, my stepmother, Mike’s mother, and my brother at the magistrate’s office, and headed in.
After an attempt on my part, not remotely convincing, to feign surprise that my friend Sarah was waiting inside—the reality show was about the friendships between straight women and gay men, and she and I had both been forced to discuss on camera ad nauseam our disappointment that she wouldn’t be at the wedding, but of course I’d known all along that she would—the magistrate told me and Mike to hold hands.
“Joel, repeat after me,” he said. “I take you, Michael, to be my spouse, to have and to hold, from this day forward, to love, honor, and cherish, to comfort and respect, in sorrow and in joy, as long as we both shall live.” I repeated after him, and then he went through it again with Mike. Once we were finished, he said, “And now, forasmuch as you have made your vows, each to the other, I pronounce you—”
But I suppose I really ought to start from the beginning.
1
Saying Yes
I bought more ornaments for the Christmas tree!” Mike called as he closed the front door behind him.
“We already have too many ornaments for the Christmas tree,” I said, not looking up from Persuasion. Louisa was about to get her concussion, and I’d be damned if I was going to interrupt the story now just because my boyfriend had passed a store with shiny things in the window.
“I know, but these were so fabulous I couldn’t help myself. Come and take a look at them.”
“But I’m reading.”
“Too bad. You have to come look at ornaments.”
“Fine,” I snapped, dog-earing the page—Captain Wentworth was unlikely to have a change of heart while I wasn’t looking—and walked into the living room, where Mike stood beside the Christmas tree taking things out of shopping bags. (I’m Jewish, but Mike is not, so I seize the holiday as an opportunity to decorate.) I sat down on the couch, picked up the nearest bundle of pink tissue paper on the coffee table, and unwrapped it to find a huge, glittering purple star. “Oh, my God,” I said; I could tell Mike was manipulating me by playing on my weakness for purple, but I was powerless to resist. “You’re right. That’s gorgeous.”
“See?”
Perhaps this was worth a few minutes before returning to my book after all. I unwrapped another ornament, which revealed itself to be a shiny tin ear of corn.
“Hmph,” I said. Mike is from Iowa and thinks of himself, because it drives me crazy, as a corn proselyte. He feels he has both the right and the responsibility to torment me by threatening to replace our chandelier with a corn-shaped light fixture or buying shiny tin ears of corn with which to titivate our Christmas tree. It’s awful, but I haven’t figured out yet how to stop him.
I unwrapped a couple more ornaments, which were, I was grateful to see, closer to the purple star than to the ear of corn. The contents of the last box, however, when I got it open, looked, confusingly, not like an ornament but like a ring sort o
f thing. It was round and heavy and gold, with an engraved pattern and a little pink jewel—lovely, but far too small to be a Christmas tree ornament. I turned to Mike, puzzled, and saw that he was down on one knee.
“Joel,” he said, “will you marry me?”
And I looked at him, looked at the man who had been my comfort and my support for years, through trials and tribulations greater than I had ever expected to face, gazed deep into his eyes, so full of love, and said, “Hang on a second.”
“What?”
“I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Okay,” I answered, “I haven’t been an astrology addict for years and years but this is super-extra important so I have to go check and make sure the moon isn’t void of course. Stay right there.”
I leapt over the coffee table, ran into Mike’s office, prayed as I woke his computer up that the Cablevision gods might choose to be merciful today and allow us the elusive Internet access for which we so grossly overpaid their earthly representatives, checked the void-of-course ephemeris online, ran back, leapt over the coffee table again, turned to Mike, took his hands, and said, “Yes! Yes, I’ll marry you!”
“I don’t know, you left me hanging a long time. I’ve been having second thoughts.”
“Get away from me.”
“Your shirt is on inside out.”
The ring was a little big; when I pointed out that we’d need to have it resized, though, Mike furrowed his brow. “I don’t understand. I used one of your rings as a guide.”
“Which one?”
“The one on the chain in your desk drawer.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“Honey, that ring is a replica I bought online of the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings. That’s the only size it comes in—they sell it with the chain because you’re not supposed to wear it. Didn’t you see all the Elvish lettering?”
“I’ve always thought you were the greatest force for evil in the world.”
But we spent the evening watching romantic comedies with his arms around me all the same.
At this point, in 2007, Mike and I had been together for about four years; we’d known each other for a couple of years longer than that, but it’s difficult to characterize the beginning of our acquaintance without some explanation.
We met, shortly after my previous boyfriend had inexplicably discarded me, on a dating website called planetout.com—this was in the four seconds during which there existed gay dating websites where you could arrange a date you weren’t certain was going to end with your clothing on the floor, though I belonged to the other kind of website too, since sometimes when you’re in the mood for your clothing to end up on the floor you don’t want to risk having to keep it on—and I responded to Mike’s initial message even though he used the word “impending” when he meant “incipient.” I’m not sure whether it was my charmingly self-conscious neediness or the fact that I was a composer of musical theater that attracted him, but in either case he was good-looking enough that I was happy to write him back.
A month earlier, after a dinner so interminable it broke the laws of physics, I had started scheduling dates in the afternoon, so Mike and I met for the first time during lunch in midtown Manhattan at Café Edison, known to many in the theater community as the Polish Tea Room (since nobody in the theater community can afford to go to the Russian Tea Room) and spent an awkward hour together, by the end of which I knew that he wasn’t my soul mate—he was too boring—but not whether he was entirely without merit, so we arranged to have dinner a few days later. During the after-dinner sex, he said, “Do you think we’re going too fast?” and the look I gave him was filled with such contempt for the idea that it gave the rest of the encounter an aggressive character I found highly satisfying.
We began seeing each other with some frequency, though there was a little confusion as to what this signified. As far as I was concerned we were having casual sex and not-dating (note the hyphen), but when Mike referred to me one day as his boyfriend, I felt, though he could not have been more mistaken, that correcting him would almost certainly involve an uncomfortable conversation, and it seemed foolish to converse uncomfortably when I could be having sex instead. When I mentioned the incident on my anonymous blog, The Search for Love in Manhattan, several commenters cautioned me to take care, but what did they know anyway?
So I continued having casual sex with and not-dating Mike and blogging about it, and having casual sex with and not-dating several other men and blogging about it, and having casual sex unencumbered by not-dating with still more men and blogging about that, too. After nine months or so, Mike told me he was going to Boston for a year to get a degree in public health and I took the opportunity to dump him not that we were going out anyway because we weren’t.
Mike is one of those weirdos, though, who stay friends with their exes, which he clearly thought I was even though I obviously wasn’t. I don’t really see the point of being friends with people who have had the bad judgment to stop sleeping with you, but saying no would have required more energy than saying yes, so there we were, friends for a year or so, until one night he said, “I was surfing the Web the other day and I read your blog.”
Well, the long and the short of it, told in more detail in my hilarious and deeply moving book Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Ended Up Happening Instead—which I wish I had called Confessions of a Stereotype, because the current title makes it seem like a piece of fluff, which it’s not, so you should totally read it—is that I came clean, about everything: the extent to which I’d been having casual sex with and not-dating other men (“Oh, I figured that out,” he said, “the day I saw bite marks on your ass”), the cavalier attitude I’d taken toward our relationship, my view of him as a divertissement. But the thing is, being honest felt so good that I started hanging out with him more, and eventually I asked him out, and he said yes—God knows why—and now, four years later, the opportunity to take it back had come and gone, so we were pretty much stuck with each other.
I appreciated this a great deal, because I couldn’t imagine how anybody else would have stayed with me after what I’d put him through, which included a couple years of deep depression (mine, not his) during which he would try in vain to keep my attention as we conversed because I was either a) thinking about how he wasn’t good enough for me, a train of thought I felt it my duty to share with him (he was in medical school and I was getting certified to be an aerobics instructor), or b) crying. I would have dumped me. “I’m a doctor,” he said when I asked him later on how he had been able to stand it. “I know depression and anxiety aren’t permanent.”
Mind you, I’d put in my own time too, when during his residency he was on overnight call every other day, which meant that he cancelled on me nine times out of every ten we made plans, and the tenth time he was either so exhausted I might as well have been by myself or so irritated I wished I were, and I still made a delicious pie to bring to his parents’ house on Thanksgiving, without consciously resenting it. I remember seeing a statistic before Mike graduated from med school that the divorce rate in psychiatric residencies was over 100 percent, which would mean that psychiatric residents got divorced, remarried, and got divorced again, and, while when I saw it I thought it was ridiculous, I’m now surprised the number isn’t over 200 percent. (By the way: while Mike has no problem with anything I might write about him or our life together—a stance that baffles me utterly, but whatever, he’s an alien from Mars—he’s said he doesn’t feel comfortable with my writing about his work, so let’s just say that these days he runs an inpatient unit at a city psychiatric hospital and leave it at that.)
Then one day, when he had been in residency for a year, there was an article in the paper about a gay couple who had bought and renovated a dilapidated house through a program run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and before nightfall we had made a bid on a
house in Crown Heights, the Brooklyn neighborhood famous for its drug dealers and for the race riot it had hosted in the nineties. The Department of Housing and Urban Development proved remarkably difficult to buy a house from, however, and then the economy went to hell, but eventually we moved in and managed to live together for a year and a half without producing a spectacular murder-suicide, at which point he knelt and proposed marriage to me.
The question of marriage had first entered our life as a couple in 2004, not long after we had started dating again, when the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared that preventing same-sex couples from marrying was unconstitutional (for a brief and highly biased legislative history of American marriage equality with respect to sexuality, see the appendix, “A Brief and Highly Biased Legislative History of American Marriage Equality With Respect to Sexuality”). In response, Jason West, the twenty-seven-year-old mayor of New Paltz, New York, not to be outdone by his neighbors to the north, announced that he would begin performing marriages of same-sex couples. He was stopped after several days by a restraining order and charged with nineteen misdemeanor counts of solemnizing marriages without a license, but New Paltz remained a metonym for marriage equality, and same-sexers kept going there and getting hitched; so many, in fact, that somebody in New Paltz started a waiting list to accommodate the hordes of same-sexers who wanted to take advantage of the city’s legislative willingness to play fast and loose.
(In this book I’m sometimes going to use the term “samesexer” rather than “gay.” For better and for worse, “gay” as a descriptor of sexuality is an adjective often applied only to men, and men are not the only people interested in getting married. I find “LGBT” stylistically unacceptable as an adjective, though not quite as tragic as “lesbigay,” which enjoyed a thankfully brief popularity in the early nineties; furthermore, use of such blanket terms to discuss marriage equality fails to take into account the fact that marriage laws can apply differently in different cases to bisexual and transgender people—the latter especially, given that in some states legal sex is what’s on your driver’s license and in others it’s what’s on your birth certificate. “Queer” has political connotations that lead many people to reject it as a label. Hence, “same-sexer”: somebody who has relationships with or is attracted to people of the same legal sex. If it was good enough for Gore Vidal, it’s good enough for me.)