by Joel Derfner
So I’m going to offer my own sociologically and anthropologically unrigorous definition of marriage as an arrangement whereby, in pledging publicly to take care of each other, previously unrelated people become a family.
This definition has the advantage of including married people among Muslims, the Nuer, the Nayar, the Toda, the Caingang, the Eskimos, the residents of seventeenth-century Fukian, and future Jews, not to mention in Sumeria, Ur (Abraham’s homeland), and Las Vegas, thereby rescuing from annulment and sin what I suspect is the greater part of all the marriages ever contracted in the world. It leaves members of the Bella Coola and the Kwakiutl married to other people’s feet out in the cold, unfortunately, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they’ll forgive me for not being a sociologist.
It also has the further advantage of excluding two bugbears of the Defenders of Traditional Marriage, incest and bestiality. “If we allow gay marriage,” they froth rabidly, “what reason can there be not to allow incest? Or bestiality?” Given that I have never heard of or read about a single person who seriously advocates incestuous or interspecies marriage, and neither have you, one would think we could cover same-sexers with the marriage umbrella without losing a whole lot of sleep, but evidently one would be wrong, so my definition should be cause for great relief among the Defenders of Traditional Marriage (I’m sorry for the ironic capitals, but I can’t leave them out; no matter how hard I try, my pinky always ends up on the shift key of its own volition, as if somebody had decimated my corpus callosum and left me with Alien Hand Syndrome), since “previously unrelated” rules out incest and “people” rules out puppies and jellyfish, though not, alas, the Real Housewives of New York, New Jersey, Atlanta, Miami, D.C., Beverly Hills, or Orange County.
(The reason not to allow incestuous or bestial marriages, by the way, has nothing to do with same-sexers getting married. If a father wishes to marry his daughter or a farmer his horse, there can be no meaningful consent on the part of the daughter [because of the power imbalance in the family dynamic] or the horse [because it can’t understand human speech], and instead of marriage, what you have is rape. That’s the reason.)
(Another version of this froth is, “What reason can there be not to allow polygamy? Incest? Bestiality?” but it seems ridiculous to put polygamy, which I don’t see any problem with, on the same moral level as the others. Changing “people” to “two people” in my definition would take care of this but it would also exclude every marriage in every polygamous society that has ever existed on earth, which seems too costly an exchange.)
When you get married in America today, you promise somebody you’ll take care of him or her, and you make that promise in such a way that there’s somebody who can hold you to it, even if only in theory. If Mike and I got married in front of a bunch of our friends and family, and in ten years I finally got fed up with his goddamn home and garden shows and said, that’s it, I’m leaving, there would be a bunch of people in our lives who would say, but you promised. This wouldn’t necessarily be enough, in the end, to stop us from getting divorced, but according to Robert Cialdini, the author of a book called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, studies show that giving a commitment to someone in front of other people makes you twice as likely to keep it as giving it to someone with nobody else around.
The people who attend a wedding aren’t guests. They’re witnesses.
So maybe that was how I would manage the question of why I was getting married twice, I thought once I realized this. It was just going to be me, Mike, and the magistrate in Iowa. No witnesses. Which meant that, in a way, an essential part of my definition wouldn’t hold true: “publicly.” If there were no guests at the Iowa ceremony, then it wouldn’t fulfill all the requirements for being a wedding, so there would be a reason to have the second ceremony: without it, we wouldn’t be a family.
The more I think about it, the more I think that’s what’s at the root of all the furor—the idea that same-sexers can forge kinship. After all, if people really didn’t think we were capable of committing to caring for those we love, they wouldn’t be churning out what Jonathan Rauch calls “Anything But Marriage” laws faster than you can say “Britney Spears and Jason who?,” because such laws doallow us to make that commitment, albeit in a second-class way. No, it’s got to be something about the word “marriage.”
Because I’ll tell you, if the United States government passed a civil-unions law tomorrow and enforced it vigorously, if civilly united same-sex couples really did have every legal right married opposite-sex couples had, it would still be unjust. And here’s why:
Joel and Mike
Sitting in a tree
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
First comes love
Then comes civil union
Then comes baby in a baby carriage.
No child is ever going to mock another child in the schoolyard with such a rhyme. It doesn’t work that way. No parent is ever going to answer the question, “How do people become a family?” by saying, “Well, when two people love each other very much, they enter a relationship of mutual interdependence and then they have kids.”
The word “marriage” means “family.”
I think opponents of marriage equality are absolutely terrified of the idea that same-sexers can form families. We can and do form families, of course, but, as long as we can’t get married, society can pretend that we don’t. That’s the reason for all the marriage hysteria. And it’s the real reason that we need the right to marry.
There are LGBT activists who oppose the struggle for marriage equality, pointing out that it can distract us from the plight of people whose problems are far more severe than ours, which is true, that it can reinforce societal inequalities, which is true too, that it can stifle the subversion that has always been a part of same-sexer life, which is also true, and that it will benefit only the mostly white and well-to-do subsection of the same-sexer community agitating for the right to marry. But that’s where I think they’re wrong. I think that marriage equality will benefit the entire same-sexer community, not because of what it will allow married same-sexers to do but because of what it will allow—perhaps force—straight people to perceive. It wasn’t lack of a marriage certificate that kept Janice Langbehn from Lisa Pond’s side as she died, not the absence of paperwork that led county workers to deliver Harold Scull and Clay Greene’s cat to the pound, not a legal question that forced Louise Walpin and Marsha Shapiro to bankrupt themselves caring for their dying son; it was a failure to understand that these were—and that we are—families.
And if my gay marriage, as the overweening subtitle of this book suggests, is going to save the American family, this is how it’s going to do it. Every same-sex couple that gets married in this country will create one honest-to-goodness, undeniable American family. And maybe that will be enough to make up for all the marriages—and therefore all the families—being ostensibly destroyed by things like Illinois’s civil-union law.
As far as why the Defenders of Traditional Marriage are so horrified at this notion, I’m not sure, but I suspect it’s that, if two people of the same sex can become a family, then the family can exist without a man’s authority over a woman. And according to Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History, changes in marital gender roles have tended to go hand in hand with changes in societal gender roles; during the Enlightenment, for example, political thinkers began to question absolute monarchy at the same time as ordinary men and women began to choose spouses for themselves rather than simply doing whatever the paterfamilias told them to do.
Which means that the idea of same-sexers marrying each other might be the mirror image of a society that can function without the oppression of women.
A frightening vision indeed.
Well, that was a nice try, that oh-it’s-not-in-front-of-witnessesso-it’s-not-a-real-wedding thing. It was working pretty well, too, in fact, until my father called and asked whether he could attend the Iowa proceedings. After whic
h my brother called and asked whether he could attend the Iowa proceedings. I could hardly say, “No, you can’t come to my wedding or reasonable facsimile thereof,” so now we’d have witnesses.
And Mike was furious.
“You promised me from the beginning that this whole thing would be low-key,” Mike said to me. “But if your father and brother are coming, then my mother will feel like she has to come, and this is turning into a big deal. You promised me you’d protect me, and you’re breaking your promise.”
Mike was over the reality show. He has some control issues (by “some” I mean “a lot of ”), and he felt incredibly uncomfortable with the idea that images of him were going to be circulated over which he had no power. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea as far as images of myself were concerned, but I guess the Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys people had persuaded me that it wasn’t their plan to mock us like the brides on the first season of Bridezillas, who were told only that they were going to be on a series about brides, and if something like that happened then I guessed I’d ruined both our lives, so I was just keeping my fingers really tightly crossed.
(It was perhaps not my wisest move to apprise Mike of my family’s plan to attend immediately after we had spent three hours on camera, with Sarah in tow, getting our marriage license application notarized. The notary was a friend of Mike’s sister, and once we had filmed her notarizing the application three times [“Are you married, Sarah?” she asked during the third take, after the assistant director had come over and whispered in her ear; Sarah rolled her eyes and said, “Jesus Christ”] and gone in and out of the building and the office eight hundred times, Mike was clearly relieved to be done with this, until the director was like, okay, let’s film the three of you having lunch afterward, which took another two hours.)
“You know I hate this,” Mike continued, “and yet you have no problem volunteering my time and my energy and my image to be filmed doing whatever they want for however long they want it.”
“If you knew how many times they’d asked for you,” I said coldly, “and I told them you weren’t available, you wouldn’t have said that.”
“Well, it doesn’t feel like that to me. To me it feels like you lied and manipulated me into doing what you wanted me to do and then abandoned me as soon as you could—oh, wait, that’s because you did.”
“Do you think this is easy for me? As of now we’re getting married in two weeks, unless we’re not, because I don’t know if Iowa is a real wedding or not, and you—”
“This is exactly what I didn’t want! I don’t care about Iowa! I have never cared about Iowa! I don’t care about the legal and etiquette stuff ! I’m doing this for you and you’re just taking me for granted, and I’m beginning to wonder why we’re getting married in the first place.”
Neither one of us slept particularly well that night.
“Listen,” said Sarah, once the sound guy finished adjusting her microphone, “I may have figured out the solution to your dilemma about which wedding is the real one.”
“Really?” My heart lifted. Sarah had wanted to tell me this on the phone, but the director made her wait until we were together so they could film it.
“A wedding in America today is two events. One legal, one ceremonial. They can happen at the same time and place for straight people, but not necessarily for gay people.”
“Okay.”
“If you and Mike were straight, or you lived in Massachusetts or some other state that allowed same-sex couples to get married, everything would be really simple. You’d invite a bunch of your friends to a ceremony recognizing your commitment to each other, and right after the ceremony you’d sign a piece of paper that meant the government recognized that commitment. It would all feel like one big thing, and the next day you’d wake up and be married.”
This made perfect sense, but there was a problem. “Even so,” I said, “there’s still no reason for us not to go to Connecticut the day before our ceremony and get married there. That would be much more like one event. But by prostituting myself and my wedding for whatever measure of fame might come from this television show on a channel we hadn’t even heard of before we auditioned, I’ve put months and a thousand miles in between the two events. How is that not making it two weddings?”
“Come on, the only thing the extra time and distance do is make the separation easier to see.”
None of this conversation made it onto the show, of course. But the more I sat with the idea, the more I thought that maybe this would turn out okay after all. When Mike and I stood in front of the magistrate in Iowa in a week, we’d complete the legal aspect of our wedding but not the ceremonial aspect. That would have to wait. Iowa was my wedding, part one. Part two had yet to be scheduled. And I needed both.
“Sarah, are you sad that Joel’s getting married and you’re not?”
“Oh, my GOD. I don’t know how many times I can tell you that I’m nothing but thrilled that Joel told me he’s engaged. Just because he’s the one getting married it’s not like he’s living my fantasy or anything.”
(This did make it onto the show, edited as follows: “Joel told me he’s engaged. He’s living my fantasy. He’s the one getting married.” As a voice-over to footage of Sarah crying, though what she had actually been crying about in the footage was her terminally ill mother. I wish I were kidding. For what it’s worth, this was the edit that made me decide to write this chapter like I’m writing it, so if you were involved in Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys and you’re reading this and you’re upset at how much I’m revealing about how the show was made, remember, please, that you talked my ear off about how you were making an honest documentary and then you showed Sarah saying the exact opposite of what she had actually said. It was at this moment, 12:56 to 12:59 in episode 2, that you traded your right to my silence for the chance to make my friend look bad. And if you search your files you’ll see that I never signed the nondisclosure agreement, so you can go fuck yourself.)
We hadn’t chosen the date on purpose, I explained to the director a couple days before the wedding. It just happened to be the most convenient date. But I was really glad—honored, in fact—to realize what it meant that I was getting married on May 17.
Because May 17, my civil-rights-lawyer father had told me, was the 54th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the case that rang the death knell of segregation in this country (de jure segregation, that is; go to any public school in the South and you’ll see the shocking health of de facto segregation). “Separate is inherently unequal,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren. What I hadn’t realized until my dad explained it to me was that he didn’t mean, “If you create black schools and white schools, then, society being what it is, the black schools are going to get less money, lower-quality supplies, and fewer teachers, so for all intents and purposes separate is unequal.” It was true that in most cases segregation gave black facilities the short end of the stick, but in Brown, the two schools in question were of substantially equal quality. The issue here wasn’t the practical effects of segregation; the issue was segregation itself. That’s what Warren called “inherently unequal.” On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously not that segregation was wrong because it created an injustice but that segregation was wrong because it was an injustice.
(Of course in the early 1990s the Rehnquist Supreme Court vitiated Brownso thoroughly it might as well never have happened, with the result that American schools are now more segregated than they’ve been since 1968. Oh, well: thanks for playing.)
I’ve already discussed the discomfort I feel agitating for a right demanded by a mostly white, mostly financially comfortable group of people when there are others in America and in the world who are in much worse shape than we are.
This felt, nonetheless, pretty damn meaningful.
Needless to say, none of it found its way into the show.
So finally Mike and I flew to St. Paul, Minnesota, and drove
to nearby Rochester to stay with Mike’s cousin DJ and DJ’s boyfriend, Kevin. Mike still wasn’t happy about what we were doing, but having expressed his anger he was much better able to weather his own displeasure. After leaving our bags at DJ’s house, we went to the mall and visited Kevin at the Zales Jewelry store he managed. (The Zales was apparently not doing an extraordinary amount of business, probably because it was one of six jewelry stores in the same mall. This made me think that either a) somebody had a really bad sense of retail design or b) Minnesotans were a lot richer than we realized.)
The next day, after the assistant director’s repeated phone calls, Mike’s acquiescence to the request for nice clothes, and our five-hour drive to Cedar Rapids (our first stop was the county registrar’s office, where we managed to pick up our marriage license with only one small hitch, when Mike threatened to murder me if, as it appeared, I had actually left my photo ID in Minnesota, but it turned out I had only been looking in the wrong pocket of my bag), we headed over to the magistrate’s office on Planet Again, where we drove into and out of the parking lot several times, and finally walked with my father, my brother, Mike’s mother, Kevin, DJ, and a camera crew into the magistrate’s waiting room.
“Look over this and let me know if you want to make any changes in what I’m going to say,” said the magistrate, obviously nervous in front of the camera, as he handed me a copy of the ceremony text.