by Joel Derfner
But then, in April of 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples could not constitutionally be kept from getting married. I tried to keep this information from Mike, but he found out somehow and started teasing me with the idea of having our legal wedding in his home state. “It’ll be great!” he would say. “We can send out invitations on cornhusks.”
It wasn’t that I found Iowa objectionable as compared to the other forty-nine states. But when my father was a child, his parents, in an exception to the Eastern-Europe-to-New-York-to-Los-Angeles migration pattern of immigrant Jews in the twentieth century, spent a few years in Davenport, Iowa, and stories of his boyhood there, each more torturously wholesome than the last, were a staple of my youth, so I developed something of an allergy; when Mike discovered this, he joyously exploited that allergy as a way to tease me, and in the end I couldn’t get married in Iowa because I knew that upon crossing the state line I would have a seizure.
In the months after the Iowa Supreme Court decision, though, I was rescued by Vermont, New Hampshire, and Washington, D.C., which joined Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Iowa as places where same-sexers could legally marry, along with the sovereign nation of the Coquille Indian Tribe in Washington State and Oregon, as long as one member of the couple was Coquille. Neither Mike nor I is Coquille, but I was pleased to have as many alternatives as I did, especially because it made it easier for me to put my foot down and say absolutely no way was he dragging me to Iowa for a wedding. “It would be so much easier,” I said, “to do it on the east coast.” Then I pulled out the big guns. “Easier and cheaper.”
“That’s true,” said Mike thoughtfully, his grandparents’ Depression-era attitudes toward money, passed along in an unbroken line, coming to my aid, and I thought I’d dodged a bullet.
Then the reality TV people called.
5
Dealing with the Legal Business, Take Two
Take a look at this link,” said the email from my friend Sarah. “It’s a reality show looking for straight women and their gay male friends.”
“Are you and your friend the real Will & Grace?!” read the website to which the link took me (I quote it verbatim). “Are you a gay guy living with your straight best girlfriend? Are you a straight girl whose best friend happens to be gay? Do you finish each other’s sentences? Have you already forwarded them this flyer and are on the phone freaking out? Gay guy and straight gal ‘couples’ who have outgoing personalities, active work and social lives and most importantly......a super close relationship. Couples from all walks of life are encouraged to apply including professionals, creative types, and executives. Roommates are a plus but not necessary.”
“Should we go?” she wrote.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I don’t like the punctuation of this announcement. Also, we’re not roommates.”
“Thank God.”
It was 2007, and the show, we found out when we arrived at the audition, would be, unsurprisingly, about friendships between straight women and gay men and was to be called Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys. The audition basically involved us gossiping with each other on camera about the guy Sarah had gone out on a couple dates with who had been an amazing kisser but who, she had discovered, refused to open a bank account because he was certain that in the coming world collapse everyone was going to go back to the barter system, so that was that for him.
“Do you have any questions about the show?” the guy running the audition asked when we were done.
“Are we going to be voted off ?” Sarah asked. “I don’t think I could handle that.”
“No. There won’t be any voting.”
“Are we going to have to live in a house with other people?” I said.
“No, you can stay in your own house.”
“Good, because I hate other people enough already without having to live with them.”
But afterward, though we waited for our phones to ring, we kept hearing nothing, so we had to assume the producers had made the bizarre decision not to use us. When I got a call in January of 2010, therefore, I was surprised to hear the voice on the other end of the line identify itself as that of the director of Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys.
“Yeah,” she said, “the project took a while to get off the ground, but it’s been picked up for next season, so I’m calling some of the people who were interviewed to see what’s up and try to figure out the right couples to cast. We’ll be shooting from February through April.” We talked for a while, and when I mentioned that since my previous interview I had gotten engaged her ears perked up (at least such was my telephonic impression). “Congratulations!” she said. “Have you set a date for the wedding yet?”
“We’ve tried a couple times,” I answered, “but we keep having to cancel. So our plan is to do it at some point this year.”
“Would you be willing to get married on camera?”
“Gee,” I said, thinking quickly. They hadn’t chosen the couples yet, and the opportunity for them to shoot a gay wedding would have to weigh heavily in our favor. “If we could do it without interfering with the actual wedding ceremony, I don’t see why not. I mean, I’ll have to ask Mike about it, but I’m sure he’ll be fine with the idea.” We talked some more and it gradually became clear that if they could film my wedding then Sarah and I were all but guaranteed to be cast. When the director and I hung up, it was with the understanding that I would talk to Mike and she would call me back in a few days.
Now, I am as red-blooded a narcissist as any who ever sat transfixed by his own reflection, so I found the idea of being on a reality TV show more thrilling than just about anything short of elevation to the nobility, and even then the decision would be a tough one in the case of anything less than a marquisate. In addition to the fifteen minutes of fame vouchsafed me by Mr. Warhol, however, I had an additional reason for wanting to be on the show, which was that, as a writer and composer, I will never make any money from my work if people don’t know my name. (Mind you, I will probably never make any money from my work if people do know my name, either, but why not add a nauseating uncertainty to the equation?) I figured that, while I was unlikely to reach the heights of glory achieved by Khloe Kardashian or Bethenny Frankel, being on my own reality show couldn’t hurt my chances in bookstores.
So the next day I told Mike about what had happened. “She even said they’d be interested in filming the wedding,” I said carefully.
“Oh, God,” he said.
“What a terrible idea.”
“I know, right?” I said immediately.
Crap.
“What did you tell her?” he asked.
“Well, I didn’t want to say no without checking with you. You know, in case you were into it.”
“I’m not.”
“Good. Me neither.”
“I just think a wedding isn’t something that should be scheduled by a production company.”
“Exactly.”
I spent the next couple days trying to think of some argument that would persuade Mike to see the situation differently, but I came up empty. I’d been with him for long enough to know all the nuances of all his tones of voice, and in this case those nuances left me no room to maneuver. So when the director called again and asked whether I had talked to Mike about the idea of filming the wedding, what came out of my mouth was, “Yes, and he’s absolutely on board with it.”
It was like watching myself push myself off a bridge.
But I realized after hanging up that the situation wasn’t really so difficult. After all, he hadn’t actually refused to get married on reality TV. He just didn’t think the wedding should be scheduled for reality TV. So all I needed to do was schedule the wedding for reality TV without letting him know that that was what I was doing.
“Hey, honey,” I said the next day as we prepared dinner, “I think we should have a spring wedding. Why don’t we get married in April?”
“This April?”
“Yeah.�
�
“That’s less than three months away. Do you want me to chop the peppers?”
“No. But we can do something really informal, we don’t have to—”
“Joel, I have my board-certification exam in May, and I’m going to need all my energy to prepare for that. I can’t get married in April.”
“I don’t know, I guess I just feel like April is the right time.”
“Well, you’re wrong. And would you either chop the peppers or give them to me?”
Back to the drawing board.
“We want you to be one of the couples we follow!” said the director the next time she called.
“That’s so exciting!” I said.
For a month I tried to come up with a way to guarantee my appearance on reality TV while not making my fiancé leave me, which would eliminate the reason for my appearance on reality TV in the first place, but since I lose my movie ticket between the window and the ticket-taker the logistics of such an endeavor were beyond me.
“Maybe this wasn’t the best choice you’ve ever made,” said my therapist.
“Fuck you,” I said.
Finally I gave up. I wrote Mike an email confessing my duplicity and apologizing and telling him that I would do whatever he wanted me to do, and I sent it to him one morning shortly after he left for work. “In all of this, the most important thing to me is you,” it read. “I’d rather respect you and your feelings than do the show.” When he came home that evening he didn’t say anything about it during dinner and he didn’t say anything about it during Project Runway and finally I couldn’t take it anymore and said, “Sowhatdidyouthinkaboutmyemail?”
“Oh, did you send me an email?” he asked. “I haven’t checked since yesterday.” (Mike is one of those maddening people who don’t need to check their email more than once a day, and sometimes not even that, whereas if I can go the whole five minutes at which I’ve set my mail program without checking manually at least once I consider it a triumph.)
“Yes, I sent you an email, and you have to go into your office and read it now, but I’m going to stay right here so I don’t have to be there when you do.”
He raised an eyebrow suspiciously. “What have you done?”
“Just go check your email.” He left the room and though I saw and heard Tim Gunn saying, “Make it work!” the only thing I could take in was the pounding of my heart. After a few minutes, Mike came back.
“Well, I knew something was going on,” he said exasperatedly, “because you were being so weird about it.” I realized I was holding my breath but I couldn’t let it go yet. “I mean, I’m annoyed,” he went on, “but I can see why you did what you did.”
“Okay,” I said, “but if it means forcing you into anything you don’t feel comfortable with, then I’m not doing the show. Partially because such a beginning can’t possibly be good for a marriage, but mostly because you need to come first.”
“Well, if we just did the legal stuff for the cameras and then had the ceremony later on, would that give them what they need?”
“Probably.”
“Okay. Then as long as it’s the smallest, quietest, lowest-key event possible, let’s do that.”
I inhaled deeply, breathing for what felt like the first time in weeks. “It will be the smallest, quietest, lowest-key event in the history of time. Compared to this event, amoebic cell division will be like Y2K.” What had I done in a past life, that I should go unpunished for such a crime in this one?
What I didn’t take into account was that Mike, mental health professional though he be, sometimes has trouble knowing what he’s feeling in any given moment.
And what he was feeling in this moment, it turned out, was rage.
“Sweetheart,” said Mike, “it’ll be fine. It’s not that big a deal.”
“You don’t know me at all!” I cried, frantically pulling things out of cupboards and drawers. The camera crew was on its way over for the first morning of filming the two of us together, and I had realized that my plan to make us breakfast on camera had a fatal flaw, which was that if I did it my usual way, then America would know I made waffles from a mix.
“Then just make them from a recipe,” Mike had said.
“No,” I had responded—why was this so difficult for him?—“because the whole point of this is to make America think that I’m a brilliant cook, and what kind of brilliant cook doesn’t know the recipe for waffles off the top of his head?”
“Okay, honey,” he’d said, giving up. “How can I help?”
I’d paced back and forth like a tiger in a cage. “That’s it!” I said finally. “All I need to do is divide a bunch of waffle mix among the flour, the sugar, and the cornmeal and then pretend I’m measuring out the quantities by memory when in fact I’m actually just reassembling the right amount of mix!”
There was a brief pause. “If that will make you happy,” he said.
So now I was scrambling to gather the materials for the perpetration of my fraud, apportioning the mix in easily memorable amounts between the sugar, the cornstarch, and the flour, finishing the job just as the camera crew walked up to our front door.
I was able, in the event, to measure a cup from the actual box of waffle mix while the cameraman was changing a battery or something, though I made sure to block my action from view with my body so that the director wouldn’t see what I had done either.
“So,” I said to Mike once the cameras were finally rolling and we sat eating breakfast in the dining room, where we had never, ever eaten breakfast before but where the light, according to the crew, was better, “where should we do the legal stuff ?”
“You need to give the audience some context,” said the director. “Say, ‘No matter where we have the ceremony, New York State doesn’t allow same-sex couples to marry, so we have to do the legal stuff somewhere else.’”
“Okay.” I turned to Mike. “No matter where we have the ceremony, New York State doesn’t allow same-sex couples to marry, so we have to do the legal stuff somewhere else.”
“So where should we do the legal stuff ?” asked Mike. He was incredibly stilted and even terser than usual, which is saying something.
“I don’t know,” I said, almost as stilted as my fiancé. “It would just be great to have just one wedding.” Oh, Jesus, I thought. With lines this sparkling, I’m sure to win an Emmy. “What’s your impulse?” A moment passed before a smile touched the corners of Mike’s lips and a you-owe-me glint shone from his eyes. I don’t know how I didn’t see it coming, but I didn’t.
“Iowa.”
“Oh, God,” I said, because he had won. Americans make fun of Germans for expressing volumes with a single word—my favorite example these days is “Weltschmerz,” which means “the mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state.” Well, that’s nothing; in English all it takes to say, “You lied to and about me and manipulated me into going on this damn television show for you and believe me you’re going to be paying for it for a long time but let’s start with this” is one four-letter word spelled I-O-W-A. I knew I was beaten, and he knew I knew.
“You’re going to make me do this in a cornfield, aren’t you?”
“Barefoot.”
“Oh, God.” I had a sudden thought and eyed him suspiciously. “And what are we going to wear?”
“Overalls.” Okay, he was actually kind of brilliant in front of the camera. “Or those tuxedo T-shirts. That’d be good.”
The crew finally finished filming our breakfast and left. “Crap,” I said, walking back into the kitchen, as Mike began to relax again. “I’ve completely forgotten how much waffle mix I put in the flour, sugar, and cornmeal.”
“Then baking,” he said supportively, “will be an exercise in hope.”
We didn’t talk about what had happened, but later that day he sent me a link to an online clothing store that sold overalls and tuxedo T-shirts.
Reality shows, it turns out,
are just as staged as everybody thinks they are.
Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys seemed to be fairly conservative in this regard, in fact; most of the scenes the director staged were reenactments of events that had actually happened or at least enactments of events that hadn’t actually happened but could have. We weren’t directed to throw drinks in each others’ faces, for example, or to talk smack about each other to common friends (there was always the possibility that we’d be edited to throw drinks in each others’ faces or talk smack about each other to common friends, but there wasn’t much I could do about that at this point). What all this meant, if I understood my friend who worked in the TV industry correctly, was that Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys was not a reality show but a docu-reality show, which is to say that it wasn’t fake enough to be a reality show.
Within those parameters, however, it seemed like anything went. One Wednesday, for example, Sarah and I went to see my friend Ted Kadin, an Orthodox gay ex-rabbi calligrapher (I’m not making that up), to talk about a ketubah, the Jewish wedding contract. Ted is a serious scholar and had all sorts of things to say about Jewish traditions of marriage, but during a break in filming, the director said to me, “I met this guy at a bar last night who I think would be great for Sarah. He was reading a book. I got his number.”
“That’s terrific! What was the book?”
“I don’t remember. Something smart.”
“I’m sure she’ll appreciate it.”
“No, I need you to tell her you met him at a party and gave him her number, so then we can film them on a date together. He said he’d be fine with it.”
“Um . . . okay.”
Probably the most striking example I can give happened the day I showed up where and when they’d told me to and asked what we were going to be doing, and the assistant director said, “You’re taking Sarah to a matchmaker, because you want her to be as happy in love as you are.”