Lawfully Wedded Husband

by Joel Derfner

  And I was like, oh, my God, I’m an idiot. Because how could it be any other way? If a group of Christians showed up at my house to tell me how their exclusion was identical to mine as a Jew, it would be all but impossible for me to listen to anything they had to say, because all I would be thinking was, right, because you can’t turn around without hearing somebody talk about how this is a Jewish country founded on Jewish principles and come December you can’t take a step without hitting a menorah or go shopping without being confronted by store employees dressed as Maccabees and your grandmother refused to tell you a single story about her childhood ever because all her friends were slaughtered in concentration camps? If a bunch of heterosexuals came to talk to me about how they experienced the same difficulties I did as a gay person, I’d slam the door in their faces but not before saying, “Of course, because politicians regularly compare your relationships to bestiality and incest, and you grew up believing that you would never be permitted to marry somebody you loved, and anywhere except Manhattan, and even sometimes there, you have to think carefully about what it might cost to hold your boyfriend’s hand!” How could a mass of white people descend upon black neighborhoods saying, “We’re suffering the same injustice as you,” and expect to be granted a listening ear? (Or, as I saw it expressed on one black same-sexer’s blog, “If your rapist were raped and came to you asking for help, how do you think you’d respond?”)

  So I realized that my oh-we’re-all-being-oppressed-together point of view had been a little naïve.

  Still, I thought, aren’t we all being oppressed together?

  By a few weeks after the victory of Proposition 8, the racist comments online were out of control. “It was niggers,” read a comment I saw on Towleroad.com, “yes that’s right I said it, niggers who voted for Obama on one hand and then on the same goddamned ballot voted to erase a fundamental human right for an entire class of citizens. The day every black person in America is singing ‘free at last’ is the very same day that millions of ignorant homophobic Obama-voting niggers vote to keep gays as third class-citizens.”

  It could be pointed out that the Internet has never been the first place to turn for coolheaded, rational discussion. But the racism wasn’t just online. Apparently, at a Los Angeles gathering one protester shouted to a black gay couple: “The niggers better not come to West Hollywood if they know what’s best for them.” One would think that the “No on 8” signs the couple was carrying would have earned them some measure of immunity, but evidently one would be wrong.

  When I read about things like this I am appalled at the selfishness of white gay men. I think white gay men should fucking know better.

  Disenfranchised people will never get anywhere oppressing other disenfranchised people, especially after we all saw Milk and, if we stopped drooling over Dustin Lance Black at the right moment, we all heard Sean Penn as Harvey Milk say, “Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us-es, the us-es will give up. And if you help elect more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised.”

  How can it be anything but crystal clear that outsiders are all the same in our exclusion? It’s one thing to be fighting against people in power who are stepping on us, but if we’re stepping on each other then what are we but their creatures, doing their miserable work for them while they laugh at us all because as far as they’re concerned we will never be us and always be them?

  And don’t even get me started on white gay guys who won’t sleep with black guys or Asian guys but insist they’re not racist, because they fucking are.

  “I don’t see how I can write it,” I said to Mike before I started working on this book. “I’m so aware of my privilege as an upper-middle-class white man. Talking for hundreds of pages about how oppressed I am seems an act of effrontery so brazen it defies measurement.”

  I mean, do same-sexers really need another book enumerating our woes as the population 3.4 times as likely as others in America to have an annual household income exceeding $250,000, the population twice as likely as others to have graduated from college, the population 77 percent of which “believe[s] in indulging [it] self ”? (I suspect those numbers might turn out very differently if broken down by sex, race, and income, but all that would do would be to make the advantages even starker in the populations I’m talking about.)

  The time I felt this most sharply was in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election. That year 861,664 families were foreclosed out of their houses, despite a moratorium on foreclosures. Twenty-two thousand Americans died because they didn’t have health insurance. One out of every ten black kids had a parent in prison (as opposed to fewer than two out of every hundred white kids). And it seemed like, wherever I looked online, the only thing white gay men could talk about was Hillary or Obama, who’s better for the gays—or, as I came to think of it, HillaryorObamawhosbetterforthegays. Some of the commentary was remarkably insightful and thought-provoking; some of it was pro-Clinton, some pro-Obama, a very little pro-McCain. But none of it ever addressed anything except HillaryorObamawhosbetterforthegays. A report is released showing that more than one out of every six children in America lives below the poverty level? The next day the gay blogosphere is all, HillaryorObamawhosbetterforthegays. A tsunami kills 78,000 people in Burma? HillaryorObamawhosbetterforthegays.

  Back in my dating days, I spent a particularly unfortunate evening with a fellow who’d just been to his first Log Cabin Republican meeting; when I got home, I added to my online profiles the sentence, “You don’t have to be political, but if you are you should lean to the left.” A month or two later I got a funny response to one of those profiles that included the sentence, “I’m a Republican, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to stand up for my rights.” I wrote the guy back and wished him luck but said I thought we probably weren’t right for each other. What I wanted to say was, “I don’t give a damn if you can stand up for your rights. I want to know whether you can stand up for other people’s rights.”

  This, by the way, is why I find the Log Cabin Republicans so contemptible. It’s not that they’re so deluded they think their party cares about them, though they are. But at least the guy talking about Obama-voting niggers wasn’t betraying what he thought of as his own people. Log Cabin Republicans, as I see it, in order to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor, are perfectly willing to sacrifice not just outsiders but their own brethren.

  In any case, what Mike eventually said in answer to my question about how I could write this book was, “Just because the battle for marriage equality benefits you doesn’t mean it isn’t worth fighting.”

  “Watch this, honey,” I said to Mike, and pressed play on the computer.

  “Atlanta native Demetria Mills wants what many women in their thirties want,” said Tom Brokaw. “To marry the person she loves.”

  “It’s an important transition in life,” said the woman with light brown skin who appeared on the screen. “It’s an important way of becoming a family.”

  “One man standing in her way,” continued Brokaw, “is Pastor William Sheals.” He asked a dark-skinned man in a fire-and-brimstone beard about his refusal to marry Mills and her partner.

  “It’s unacceptable,” said Pastor Sheals, “it’s ungodly, and it’s unnatural.” Comparisons to forbidding an interracial couple to marry, he continued, were irrelevant. “Being born black is not a sin nor a choice.”

  “It just drives me crazy,” I said, “all these people who think we choose to be gay.”

  “Well, to be fair,” Mike said, “there’s strong research, but nobody’s actually proven we don’t.”

  “Why are you like this?”

  “Because it makes you love me.”

  “But seriously, doesn’t it drive you crazy?”

  “I just don’t like framing the argument in those terms. If we did choose to be gay, would it be okay to say we couldn’t get married?”

  “No.”

&
nbsp; “Exactly. We don’t choose our sexuality, but that’s irrelevant.”

  And he was right. So after that conversation, I’m reluctant to make the standard but-you’re-wrong-homosexuality-isn’t-achoice objection, because it leaves room, however implicitly, for the idea that there’s something wrong with homosexuality. Like, if being gay were a choice, we’d definitely choose otherwise, but it’s not, so we’re stuck with this defect and can’t you just let us get married because you feel bad for us?

  But being gay isn’t a defect, not any more than it’s a choice.

  If it were a choice, however—if we just woke up one day and said, Gee, that Barbra Streisand sure has a great voice, I think I’ll go have sex with an attractive man and hope nobody beats me to death or anally rapes me with a toilet plunger on my way home!—I suspect that Eric Zorn would have been able to write almost the same article, comparing marriage discrimination toward same-sexers to marriage discrimination toward people, for example, who have chosen different religions.

  Sexuality-Based Objections to Marriage Equality Religion-Based Objections to Marriage Equality

  “ Support traditional marriage. Children must be raised with morals and principles.”

  —California Senator Roy Ashburn, press release, 2005 “Throw into this devil’s brew of modern culture the fact that persons of different religious . . . background marry and have children and you have situations in which the children of these relationships . . . grow up with little or no spiritual/moral instruction/guidance.”

  —comment on kendallharmon .net, 2007, on the dangers evil Catholics hold for good Protestants

  “The law of our state protects and preserves the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman.”

  —Alabama Attorney General Troy King, 2004 “You must either annul this marriage or trample underfoot all our maxims, upsetting this section of our law and removing from marriage the sanctity of the sacrament to which it has been raised.”

  —M. Jamme, 1783, on the dangers evil Protestants hold for good Catholics

  “Aware of the social stigma of living with homosexually-behaving adults, school-aged children generally suffer stress associated with their shame, embarrassment, [and] fears of peer rejection.”

  —George Rekers, A Rational Basis for the Arkansas Regulation, 2004 “It would be a bad idea to marry a woman who is not properly Jewish, in which case your children would be stigmatized and would themselves be unable to marry Jews.”

  —Rabbi Shraga Simmons, Legiti- mate Conversion, 2005

  “In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.”

  —Sen. Rick Santorum, AP interview, 2003 “Those who have relations with Jews or animals . . . are to be buried in the earth alive, while their possessions are taken for evidence or the public good.”

  —French legal code, thirteenth century

  I could go on (you should see some of the things people have said about marrying Zoroastrians), but I won’t. I’ll just say that people all over the world have been using marriage to marginalize minority groups for thousands of years—Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia—and the arguments, down to the individual words they use, are always the same.

  The day after I showed Mike the video of the Tom Brokaw interview, I watched it again. And this time, halfway through, I sat bolt upright in my chair.

  “Dad,” I said when my father answered the phone, “what was the last name of the guy you represented in the Mississippi miscegenation case?”

  “Mills,” he said. “Roger Mills.”

  “That’s what I thought you said.”

  And two minutes with Google proved my suspicion correct: Demetria Mills, the Atlanta woman with light brown skin whose desire to marry her girlfriend Pastor Sheals had called unacceptable, ungodly, and unnatural, was the daughter of Roger and Berta Mills, the couple whose marriage my father had helped make possible in the face of opposition from people who thought it was unacceptable, ungodly, and unnatural.

  Talk about destiny weighing heavily on a family’s shoulders. Demetria Mills worked, according to the Internet, in the Civil Rights Office of the Department of Education, as did her father, so I looked up her number and called.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Is this Demetria Mills?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Demetria Mills, the daughter of Roger and Berta Mills?”

  “Are you a telemarketer?”

  “No!” I said, and we had a long conversation about her work, my work, her parents, my parents, her fiancée, my fiancé, civil rights, marriage equality, and Jane Austen.

  “Pastor Sheals bristles,” Tom Brokaw had said, “at the suggestion made by Mills and others who compare the struggle to legalize same-sex marriage to the fight for civil rights,” followed by Sheals telling us that he was “appalled by comparing the two. Apples and oranges.”

  There’s something in this: it’s very difficult to make comparisons. In many ways, black people and (white) same-sexers have little in common other than the circumscription of our liberty. Each group can lay claim to advantages the other doesn’t share and obstacles the other doesn’t face. Black people, for example, in contrast to most same-sexers, are except in rare cases unable to avoid violence and discrimination by remaining in the closet. And much of black America, unlike most of same-sexer America, is still bound by the transgenerational poverty that keeps the evils of slavery alive and well today. Same-sexers, on the other hand, cannot expect a politician who compares them to animals to be called to account for it, which for the most part black people can. Black parents aren’t likely to kick their kids out of the house for being black, and those kids aren’t likely to be bullied into suicide because they’re black. Same-sexers can almost never lean on the rock of the church, which has sustained the black community through so much, for support, moral or practical.

  (Of course, being black and being a same-sexer are hardly mutually exclusive. When I asked black same-sexers about their experience at the intersection of these two groups, they tended not to think in such a binary way. “I just think the whole discussion is so old-fashioned,” said one. “I’m like, check your watch.” Another said that as a rule he experienced more overt homophobia than overt racism but also that he never knew how to respond to white gay mens’ appropriation of the persona of black women. “Can’t black women,” he said, “have their own identity?”)

  In The New Yorker in 1993, Henry Louis Gates warned against establishing “a pecking order of oppression. Measured by their position in society,” he went on, “gays on the average seem privileged relative to blacks; measured by the acceptance of hostile attitudes toward them, gays are worse off than blacks. So are they as ‘oppressed’? The question presupposes a measuring rod that does not and cannot exist.”

  What it comes down to is this: analogy is at the center of human cognition. In these matters it may be an inexact tool but it’s still the best one we’ve got, and we have to use it, keeping in mind as we do that “compare” and “equate” mean two very different things.

  “The only times comparisons to the black civil rights movement do seem to get any foothold with the black community,” my friend at the LGBT organization had written me, “are when the messengers themselves are black. But those messengers are REALLY hard to find, sadly.” One of the most persuasive such messengers, I think, is Mildred Loving, who said on the fortieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that bears her name:

  My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God’s plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation’s fears and prejudices have given way, and today’s young people realize that if someone loves
someone they have a right to marry.

  Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

  I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight, seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.

  As Mr. Combs grew sicker the election and the Proposition 8 vote gave way to other concerns; after Mike’s father died and his mother finally moved upstairs, although we could have married legally in Connecticut and Massachusetts (the law there had changed to allow same-sex couples to marry even if they lived elsewhere), Mike and I, by unspoken agreement, had put our plans on hold. The damage done to our relationship by his parents’ moving in with us and our months-long failure to deal with it healthily was going to take some time to repair. I still really wanted to go to couples therapy, but Mike was still too busy, so we figured we’d just let things rest for a while.