by Joel Derfner
“Well, aren’t I nice?” I said. “And I have good instincts. Sarah has actually been to a matchmaker before.”
“Yeah, this is the same matchmaker. But we thought it would add a nice element to your storyline.”
The sign on the matchmaker’s door said “Club VIP Life,” which made me think I was going to walk in and find myself face to face with Eliot Spitzer, but no such thing came to pass. The matchmaker interviewed Sarah, asking the same questions, I assume, she’d asked her before, and Sarah gave the same answers she’d given before, and I sat beside her and murmured supportively. The matchmaker promised she’d do her best to find Sarah a good match.
“Shit, I’m really sorry, guys,” said the director after she reviewed some of the footage, “but can we do that again? Joel, the label on your soda bottle was showing.” The assistant director came over and removed the label from my bottle of Diet Mountain Dew (“If anybody wants us to promote their product, they need to pay for it,” he’d said the first day, when I asked him why I had to take my shirt off and replace it with one without a logo), and we shot the entire interview again. Then the director interviewed us each individually. “Sarah has high standards,” said the matchmaker in her interview. “She wants to find somebody who she can have as close a relationship with as the one she has with Joel, and it’s tricky. But we can do it. It won’t be problem.”
“Watch this,” laughed Sarah. “They’ll edit that so she says something like, ‘Sarah wants . . . a relationship . . . with Joel . . . it’s . . . a problem.’”
Would that she had been wrong.
(“We also have a gay division,” the matchmaker said to me as we were leaving, handing me her card. “So if you have any friends who might be interested, send them to our website.” The URL was nyclubelite.com, and I couldn’t imagine that any gay man who saw it wouldn’t think it was NYC Lube Lite rather than NY Club Elite. I emailed her to tell her this and suggest she move the site to nycclubelite.com or newyorkclubelite.com; she wrote back, “ha ha ha! you’re so funny!” I wanted to reply and tell her no, I meant it, but then I figured I should just leave well enough alone.)
I wasn’t thrilled with the idea that America would think I was the type of person to choose a matchmaking company called Club VIP Life, but a few weeks after our visit to the matchmaker’s, the crew came over to my house and filmed me discovering the place online, reading very positive reviews, and calling to vet it before bringing Sarah by, so I felt better about the whole thing.
I wish I could say that living your life on camera felt really weird, or, barring that, that living your life on camera started out weird but came to feel really normal, but for me it was more like a game you play at somebody’s seriously extended birthday party. I suspect it’s different for people on, say, The Real World or Project Runway or other shows that film their participants twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but for Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, the crew showed up for several days of filming, went away for a few weeks, came back for several days, went away again, and so forth.
There were four people in the crew: the director, the assistant director (that wasn’t actually his title, but it was how I thought of him), the camera guy, and the sound guy. The director was a very petite, very intense woman with very red hair; whenever we took a break or stopped filming for any reason, she could be heard on her cell phone trying to find homes for abandoned puppies. This was very important to her; at one point she failed to place a dog before it was euthanized and it put her out of commission for an hour.
The assistant director was an equally petit Indian guy who looked like he was twelve but wouldn’t tell us how old he actually was, and when we Googlestalked him to find out he got really upset. He dressed far more stylishly than anyone I have ever met and appeared to eat nothing and was very funny. Every time they came back into town for filming he would tell me about the men he’d met since the last time they were here, and I would give him dating advice.
The sound guy was really attractive, so although I had figured out fairly quickly how to attach my microphone I preferred to let him stick his hand up my shirt.
The camera guy changed from session to session but rarely said anything at all.
Sarah and I began to refer to our lives, while the crew was there, as taking place on three planets: Planet Earth (where there were no cameras filming our conversations), Planet Reality (on which I pretended to have given her number to somebody I hadn’t actually met at a party that I hadn’t actually attended because it hadn’t actually happened), and Planet Again. Planet Again was by far the most annoying of these, because it took up the most time.
“Guys, can you say that again? The bus ruined the sound when it went by.”
“Joel, can you ask her that one more time, but over here? The light was really bad.”
“Sarah, can you go back to, ‘I don’t think you’re right,’ or whatever you were saying? The radio in the car that passed by was really loud, and we don’t have the budget to get the rights for the song.”
But the worst part of Planet Again, no question, was the entrances and exits. On the day of the matchmaker scene, for example, once we finished filming the interactions, we went in and out of that building for an hour, and I’m not exaggerating—it really was an hour. We took the following shots: our entrance into the building from far away behind us, our entrance into the building from close up behind us, our entrance into the building from in front of the door as we walked up to it, our entrance into the building with the cameraman walking backward in front of us, our entrance into the building from inside the building, our entrance into the elevator from behind us, our entrance into the elevator from inside the elevator, our exit from the elevator from inside the elevator, our exit from the elevator from the hall in front of the elevator, our exit from the elevator from in front of the Club VIP Life office door, our entrance into the Club VIP Life office from the far end of the hall, from in front of the office door, from inside the office, our exit from the Club VIP Life office from inside the office, from in front of the office door, from the far end of the hall, our entrance into the elevator from down the hall, in front of the elevator, and inside the elevator, our exit from the elevator from inside the elevator and in front of the elevator, and our exit from the building from inside the building, from the door of the building, with the cameraman walking backward in front of us, and from far away.
And if that was tedious to read, imagine how much worse it was to live.
If I had to evaluate myself and Sarah as citizens of Planet Again, I would say that we were halfway decent. We could usually manage a pretty good recreation of an impromptu exchange we’d just had, or even a more complex scene, complete with surprises and interruptions. There were times, however, when the director asked more of us than we were able to give. The first day she filmed us, for example, a day or two after she’d filmed Mike and me with the waffles, she said, “Can we do the scene where Joel tells you that Mike proposed to him?”
A pause. “But that happened two years ago,” I said.
“Yeah, I don’t think we can do that convincingly,” said Sarah.
“Well, how about we just give it a shot? If it doesn’t work, we won’t use it.”
We went to sit down on the park bench, along with my dogs, Sasha and Zoe (I’d brought them because we figured that if at any point we couldn’t think of something to say, we could always just play with the cute animals). We stared at each other in uncomfortable silence as the pigeons cooed around us.
“Those terrible pigeons,” Sarah said, which I thought was a good start. “They, like, sit on my windowsill and have babies. They reproduce and shit. The pigeons on my windowsill are getting more action than I am.” The scene went on in this fashion until I finally worked my way around to telling Sarah I had news, at which point I held out my hand, making sure the camera caught my engagement ring (the one Mike sized using the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings—he had obligingly resized it after
the proposal).
“NO!” said Sarah. “That’s AMAZING!”
“Yes! Mike proposed! We’re going to get married.” I gave her what I hoped came across as a smile full of uncontrolled joy.
“Joel, that’s wonderful ! CONGRATULATIONS! I’m so, so happy for you!” She gave me a huge hug.
“Sarah, are you jealous of Joel?” asked the director.
Sarah’s brow wrinkled. “Hunh?”
“I mean, you’re single and Joel is getting married. Are you jealous?”
“Um . . . no? He has the worst brain chemistry of anybody I know and his boyfriend is obsessed with trees and made him move to Brooklyn?”
“Okay, well, can you talk about how you’re happy for him but you really wish you had somebody too?”
“That would be gross.”
“Okay, but,” said the director, and this went on for another ten minutes, until finally just to make her stop we agreed to attempt an approximation of the exchange she was requesting. I held out my hand again.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” said Sarah.
“Nope. Mike proposed. We’re going to get married.”
“Joel, I am totally happy for you, BUT IT SHOULD BE ME!” She couldn’t do it; she had slipped into her let-me-imitate-people-I-want-to-make-fun-of voice. “It’s supposed to be me!” Nope, still didn’t work.
“Can we not do this anymore, please?” I finally asked the director.
“Sure,” she said. “That didn’t work. I had to try, but we won’t use it.”
“No problem,” I said.
(They used it. The “it should be me” version. In a scene that led the Salon.com reviewer to call Sarah “a selfish nightmare.”)
“Can you guys talk a little bit about why you think gay marriage is important?”
So Sarah fake-asked me to talk to her about some of the legal implications of marriage inequality, and I started talking about the 1,138 federal rights and privileges married people had that we didn’t.
“Why do you think the government gives those rights to married people?” she said.
“Well,” I said, and I was no longer fake-talking but actually thinking about this, “I guess it’s probably because the government has an interest—a reasonable interest—in making marriage attractive. First of all, studies make it pretty clear that married people are healthier, happier, live longer than single people. But even looking at it from a more mercenary point of view, the more people there are who take care of each other, the less the government has to spend to take care of them, right? If I fall down the stairs at age sixty and break something, I’ll need help.”
“You’re going to be spry and fit at sixty,” Sarah said loyally.
“Naturally, but in the alternate universe in which I’m not and I fall down, I’ll need medical support, I’ll need physical support, I’ll need emotional support. If Mike has promised to look after me, then he’ll probably give me at least some of that support, and help me gain access to some of the rest of it, which means that I won’t need to ask the government for all of it.”
“Though, since you’re an upper-middle-class white man, the government will probably listen when you do ask.”
“I wish you were wrong. But I guess married people are given those rights because marriage saves the government a lot of money, while also creating a lot of stability in society.”
None of this, of course, made it onto the show. Just the pigeons and the made-up jealousy.
But if getting more people married would further the government’s interest, what reason, really, can it have to bar same-sex couples from the state of married bliss?
(It turns out, in fact, that I was wrong; there are plenty of studies suggesting, for example, that single people are happier and healthier than married people, or that, while married men live longer than single men, the numbers are reversed for women. But this is America; the government can’t allow its policies to be set by things as silly as data and scientific analysis.)
“So here’s my conundrum,” I said to Sarah the next time we were being filmed. “I’m getting legally married in Iowa, because I can’t do it in New York.”
“Right.”
“And then I’m having a ceremony somewhere else later on.” Much later, in fact, though the reality-show people didn’t know yet that they weren’t coming anywhere near the thing.
“Right.”
“So which one is the real wedding? Like, when do we celebrate our anniversary? And if that’s the real one, then why am I having the other one?”
“Whatever, it doesn’t matter.”
“No, I feel like it’s improper to have two weddings. Miss Manners would disapprove.” I meant it. I was incredibly uncomfortable; I had to get my wedding right, and this felt wrong. (None of this made it on the show either, which is a shame because I think it’s an interesting question and not above the heads of reality-TV viewers.) “This is actually a serious problem.”
“So you need to figure out what makes a wedding a wedding.”
“Or, put another way, I need to figure out what the definition of marriage is.”
“Gays and Lesbians have a right to live as they choose; they don’t have a right to redefine marriage for the rest of us.” According to the website for the National Organization for Marriage, which is a national organization against marriage, this is the single sentence most effective at persuading people to oppose marriage equality. Over and over again during the last decade or two we’ve heard arguments about the definition of marriage and redefining marriage and the time-honored definition of marriage and oh my God I want to bash my head in with a dictionary made of granite.
So what is the definition of marriage? The whole “between a man and a woman” thing from Proposition 8 doesn’t work, because what about all those guys in the Old Testament like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Here, too, Mrs. Grossman’s Sunday School instruction has stood me in good stead; a look into the Bible has confirmed my suspicion that they violated the one-man-one-woman principle. Furthermore, in addition to the Big Three we also have King David, who had eight wives and ten concubines, and his son King Solomon, Jesus’ twenty-eighth-great grandfather, who must have had some big father issues, because he had three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines (not to mention being the product of a felony—David married Solomon’s mother Bathsheba only after he’d had her husband sent to the front lines of battle so he’d be killed and Bathsheba would be single).
In fact, it turns out, the Biblical patriarchs were far from alone in their failure to comply with the one-man-one-woman standard. Here are some more examples of a broader definition than the Defenders of Traditional Marriage would like:
In seventeenth-century Fukian, China, men could marry men.
In nations currently governed by Islamic law, a man can marry up to four women (and if he moves to Israel he can stay married to all of them).
In African tribes like the Nuer of Sudan, women can marry women and even, on occasion, ghosts.
In Indian tribes like the Nayar of Kerala, a woman can marry as many men as she wants.
In other Indian tribes like the Toda of Tamil Nadu, when a woman marries a man she also marries all of his brothers.
In South American tribes like the Caingang, any number of men can marry any number of women.
In Eskimo societies, couples can marry other couples.
In Pacific northwestern societies like the Bella Coola and the Kwakiutl, a person can marry another person’s foot.
Jews, according to some, will as of 2040 no longer be subject to the thousand- year Edict of Rabbenu Gershom ordering them to practice monogamy so as not to arouse the hatred of the Christians among whom they lived. (I discovered the others from various sources, especially E. J. Graff’s What Is Marriage For? and Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History, but this last I only found out when I tried to crowdsource some question or other about marriage by posting it as my Facebook status and somebody mentioned Rabbenu Gershom
in his reply and I went and looked him up, so thank you, Aidan Gilbert, a thousand times thank you, because I think this is spectacular.)
Perhaps the simplest way to put it is that the Defenders of Traditional Marriage have a right to live as they choose, but they don’t have a right to redefine marriage for the rest of us.
But if marriage isn’t “between a man and a woman,” then what is it? The English common-law definition (English common law being the starting point for much of American law) is the remarkably similar but more specific “voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others,” but that’s difficult to take seriously, given the tendency of the conservative married politicians and prelates who espouse it to claim they’re hiking in Appalachia while they’re actually in Argentina having sex with their mistresses, like former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, or to get caught in adulterous affairs with members of their staffs who have appeared in videos with them extolling the virtues of abstinence, like former Senator Mark Souder.
Or with guys in the next bathroom stall, like former Senator Larry Craig, who earned a score of 0 from the gay-rights group Human Rights Campaign before being arrested for soliciting sex from a male police officer in a St. Paul airport restroom.
Or with guys in their congregations, like Bishop Eddie Long, whose sermons about how same-sexers deserve death culminated in a march he led in support of the Federal Marriage Amendment before he was brought to court for having sex with underage members of a group of his male parishioners known as the Spiritual Sons. “Young man,” he apparently told one of them, “you can call me daddy,” though it’s unclear whether this was before or after the fellatio.
(God, they just make it too easy. I almost feel bad for them.)
The one thing that every tradition of marriage seems to have in common, as far as I can tell—even Hammurabi’s Code, the four-thousand-year-old codification of the Sumerian Family Laws, which contains decrees like, “If the wife of one man on account of another man has her husband and the other man’s wife murdered, both of them shall be impaled” and the surprisingly enlightened “If a man violate the betrothed or child-wife of another man, who has never known a man, and still lives in her father’s house, and sleep with her and be surprised, this man shall be put to death, but the wife is blameless”—is that they create kinship.