by Joel Derfner
I glanced at it briefly and asked, “Can you add ‘according to the law’ here or something like that?”
“Um . . . why?”
I opened my mouth and let about thirty seconds of my theonly-way-I-can-do-this-and-not-feel-like-I’m-getting-marriedtwice-when-I-get-married-again-later-on-is-to-treat-this-as-thelegal-half-of-something-that-has-another-ceremonial-half thing escape before I shut it again, hoping to God that they wouldn’t show this part. (They didn’t. One of the few editorial choices for which I am grateful.)
The magistrate seemed sympathetic to my concern but, in the end, not sympathetic enough to change anything. “Well, if I’m marrying you,” he said gently, “then . . . it means you’re married. That’s what the law says.”
I opened the door—oh, hey, it’s Sarah, remember to look SURPRISED!—and we got set up, after which the magistrate told Mike and me to hold hands and repeat, “I take you 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.” Then, once we were finished, he said, “And now, forasmuch as you have made your vows, each to the other, I pronounce you are married,” and we kissed.
Then we signed our marriage certificate—“Oh, you have to use blue or black ink,” said the magistrate, and offered me a Bic to replace the purple fountain pen I’d taken out of my pocket to sign my name—Mike’s mother and Sarah witnessed it, and we were done. Then, to celebrate, we had lunch at the only restaurant in Cedar Rapids still standing from Mike’s childhood, a Greek place, where the waitress claimed to remember him from thirty-five years ago and where the camera crew, on break, was very impressed by the flaming cheese we ordered. After that we went to Dairy Queen, where I’d never been and where I instantly wanted to spend the rest of my life. The director didn’t make anybody do anything over again, possibly because there were regular people involved rather than people who had auditioned to be on a reality show, so the whole thing felt much more natural, though my brother’s friends still mock him for the toast he was filmed giving over our ice cream. Finally, when we were done, the director made Sarah stand there as everybody else left so that they could get a fake poignant shot of her being sad and alone, neither of which she was.
I think the show actually had good intentions, but when it aired, despite all the footage they had of me and Sarah being very funny in ways that made complex issues seem pretty straightforward, mostly they just used shots in which I stammered a lot. To be sure, I do stammer a lot, so that couldn’t have been difficult for them, but I don’t know that it made for particularly compelling TV, and I think they could have dug deeper without losing the audience. Toward the end of the season, in fact, they began to, and the show became more interesting, but for me it was too little, too late.
On principle I’m opposed to reality TV, because every show on the air that creates characters from footage of real people takes a job away from a writer. That’s precisely the reason that there are so many reality shows: when the Writers Guild of America went on strike in 2007, the TV networks had to have something to program, and reality TV fit the bill, with, among others, Make Me a Supermodel, The Celebrity Apprentice, How To Look Good Naked, American Gladiators, Dance War: Bruno vs. Carrie Ann, Ghost Hunters International, Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, Scott Baio is 46 . . . and Pregnant, My Fair Brady . . . Maybe Baby?, The Moment of Truth, Miss America: Reality Check, and Gone Country. The problem is that by the time the strike was over, TV executives had realized how much they could accomplish without writers, and now we have Honey Boo-Boo.
The weird thing is that I still buy reality TV completely when I watch it. Even though I know how fake these things are—because I have to assume that most of the shows I watch are a hell of a lot faker than Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys—I still totally believe the villain as the villain, totally gasp that So-and-so said such-and-such, totally commit emotionally to it all. Knowing how artificial it is doesn’t make me any less susceptible to the editing.
A few days after the Iowa wedding, I had an answer to the question of why I was getting married twice.
It was because after the first time I didn’t feel married.
At all.
Though at the time the state of New York didn’t grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples, it did recognize such marriages performed in other states, which meant that my home state considered me married. I could go on Mike’s insurance when it had open enrollment in November, which I fully intended to do, if only because his doctor, who didn’t take my insurance, had a waiting room with décor so soothing it made me feel at one with the universe. But in conversation with friends, when I referred to Mike as my husband, a small part of me felt like a fraud—like, let me perform a little casuistry for you and I’ll show you how it’s so. I had had a marriage ceremony but not a wedding. Or I had had a wedding but not a marriage. Or something like that.
So I guessed there were two options.
Either I’d feel married after the actual wedding ceremony, when I said “I do” (or whatever I ended up saying) in front of my friends and family and no TV cameras.
Or I wouldn’t feel married until legal marriage equality covered all of America, the fifty states and the federal government. In which case it might be a while.
Except a third, disturbing possibility occurred to me as well.
In Antigone, written around 442 B.C., after his nephew Polyneices dies in an attack on the city, King Creon of Thebes orders that Polyneices’ corpse be left out, unburied, to be eaten by birds, so that his soul will never reach the underworld. Creon’s niece Antigone buries her brother anyway; when Creon asks her why she defied his edict, she says, “Zeus didn’t announce it to me, and Justice didn’t ordain laws like it. And I didn’t think your decree was strong enough to override the unwritten, unfailing laws of the gods; those laws are not for today or yesterday but forever, and no one knows when they were made.”
Anti gone won first prize in the festival in which it was performed, but if Sophocles had written it today, I suspect that, given the current political climate, he would have had a difficult time staging it. Because this was the first time in the history of the world that anybody had said anything like this, the first time anybody had ever been so brazen as to claim a right not granted by the state. This was the birth of the idea of moral law, without which no modern discussion of civil rights could take place.
I had, I believed, the moral right to marry Mike, but I didn’t have the legal right to do so. Newt Gingrich did not have the moral right, having started a shouting match with his first wife in front of their children, in the hospital room where she was recovering from cancer surgery, about the terms of the divorce he wanted so he could marry the woman he had been cheating on her with for a year (whom he later divorced so he could marry the woman he had been cheating on her with for a year), to campaign for president as a protector of the family, but he had the legal right to do so. And when your moral rights and your legal rights don’t coincide, it fucks you up.
What if the thirty-seven years I’d spent as a person without the legal right to be married had misshapen me, like a carefully trained and tortured bonsai tree, not to occupy a space in which I could understand emotionally that I now had that right?
I thought about the black Americans who were slaves on New Year’s Eve of 1863 and who the next day, when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, were free. They had spent their lives with their moral right to be free and their legal right to be free in misalignment. Once those rights came together, was there some emotional space those free men and women couldn’t occupy? Was there a part of some of them that couldn’t fit into a world in which they were free?
I thought about Judith Simon, the first girl ever to have a bat mitzvah (the Jewish rite of passage into adulthood, reserved until 1923 for men). Until that moment, she had spent her life with her moral right to be recognized as an adult and her legal right to be recognized
as an adult out of joint. Once those rights aligned themselves, was she able to think of herself officially as a Jewish adult? If not, what then?
What if I never felt married?
The answer lay, I came to realize, in the same-sexers who would be born the day after marriage equality was the law of the land in the United States, because they would be the ones who would never know an America in which they couldn’t marry the people they loved, just like black people born on January 1, 1864, would never know an America in which they were slaves—they wouldn’t have any trouble occupying that emotional space blocked to me.
So perhaps it didn’t matter too much if I never felt married, because they would.
6
Planning the Ceremony
We need to have a conversation about planning the ceremony,” I said to Mike one Saturday afternoon about a month after we’d returned from Iowa.
“You keep saying that,” he said, “but then you never actually start a conversation about planning the ceremony.” This was not an animadversion I could duck, because it was true; I never actually started a conversation about planning the ceremony.
“But that’s because before now we haven’t had enough books about planning ceremonies to make sure we did it right.” Things had gotten complicated enough, I felt, that Karen Bussen’s Simple Stunning Wedding Organizer was no longer enough on its own to guide me.
“And what’s different now?”
“While you were at the hardware store the guy came with my Amazon delivery.”
“Didn’t I forbid you to buy any more books?”
“Yes, but I didn’t listen.” I grabbed his hand and dragged him into the kitchen, where piles and piles of new wedding-planning books teetered dangerously on the counter.
“Okay, you definitely cannot buy any more books.”
“Whatever you say, honey.” We sat down and I grabbed a book at random and opened it. “You’ve got the ring and the man of your dreams,” I read, “and now it’s time to start planning the wedding—although if you’re like most women, you’ve been planning your wedding since you were a little girl. From the gorgeous gown and cascades of flowers to the perfect reception at the perfect location, you’ve envisioned your special day, right down to the very last detail.” I looked up at him. “See, that’s the problem.”
“What, that you’re not like most women?”
“Ha ha sort of,” I said. “I haven’t been planning my wedding since I was little. I never thought of marriage as part of my possible future. So I have no idea what I want to do for the ceremony. That’s why I’ve been avoiding trying to figure it out.”
And I meant it. The fantasies I had begun to entertain during puberty of the tall, well-muscled blond with whom I would fall in love at first sight, who would reciprocate that love, who would complete me, who would have me at hello, who would bear a striking resemblance to my computer science teacher, Mr. Russell—these fantasies had not included marriage, not in any serious way. Neither had the fantasies of the beefy brunet who had all the aforementioned virtues except he would bear a striking resemblance to David Hasselhoff (shut up, he was hot in the eighties).
Early in my junior year of college, one of my straight female friends called me to tell me she’d been dumped by her boyfriend of five years. Of course I ran over to her dorm room so we could glut ourselves with ice cream and cookies, and as we ate she talked about her ruined wedding fantasies. She would never have the dress that made her look fifteen pounds lighter, never have the organ playing the St. Anne Prelude and Fugue as she floated down the aisle, never assemble the bridal party in uncomfortable tuxedoes and impeccably tailored dresses that made all her bridesmaids look slightly less attractive than she did. I listened sympathetically and at appropriate moments spit vile imprecations at the reprobate who had thrown her over, because I am a good friend and because to pass up an opportunity to glut myself with ice cream and cookies would be foolish, but, although I knew far too well the pain of being dumped, there was a very real way in which I just didn’t get any of the wedding-of-my-dreams stuff. These were ideas to which I had never assigned any emotional weight, because any such assignment would have been a waste of energy; it couldn’t end in anything but disappointment. So while I understood my friend’s pain, its source was a black box, enigmatic and impenetrable.
And now, as an adult, I had spent the last seven years in confusion about when Mike and I ought to celebrate our anniversary. Our first date? That would be February 11. Our first date a year later the second time around, after, having dumped him, I came to my senses and asked him out again and he was fool enough to say yes? That would be November 9. The day I told him I loved him? That depends whether you count the first time, when I followed it immediately with “more than the Internet” (October 6), or the time I said it without qualification (God only knows; this was obviously far too momentous an occasion for me to remember its date). If we had been a married heterosexual couple, it would have been easy: we’d celebrate our anniversary on the date of our wedding. But as same-sexers, try as we might, we hadn’t been able to jury-rig an acceptable substitute. (If we’d been an unmarried heterosexual couple we might still have been in the same discomfiting position, but it would be by our choice, and if we got sick of confusion there would have been a quick remedy.)
So how could I know what I wanted out of a wedding if marriage equality was something that for most of my life I’d thought of—if I’d thought of it at all—in the same way I’d thought of the Easter Bunny or the spine of the Democratic Party: something that people have fun talking about but that doesn’t actually exist? How was I to decide whether I wanted a small, tasteful wedding in a quiet hall somewhere or a lavish spectacle in the Parthenon?
“Well, okay,” said Mike. “What do we know?”
“We know that we’re wearing morning clothes.”
We knew that we were wearing morning clothes—that is, tails, waistcoat, and maybe even top hat—because I wanted my wedding to be as formal as possible. (Tuxedos with black tie were originally what one wore for occasions on which informal dress was called for, and tuxedos with white tie and tails for more formal occasions, though irrespective of the color of the tie tuxedos were only for the evening—it would have been the height of gaucherie to wear a tuxedo of any sort during the daytime. But the world has moved on since then, and if we no longer give babies laudanum to make them stop crying and go to sleep then I suppose fashion too must keep pace with the times.) I intended to avoid any and all innovations, personalizations, and cute touches. My wedding would be devoid of whimsy.
“I don’t get it,” Mike had said when I first explained this to him. “Why is it so important to you to wear morning clothes?”
I couldn’t answer him for the life of me, so I distracted him by accidentally on purpose spilling strawberry jam on his shirt; once I removed it—the shirt, that is, not the jam—the afternoon proceeded as one might expect.
But I’ve thought about it a lot in the years since this conversation, and I believe there are a few reasons it mattered so much to me. First of all, as an ardent devoté of Miss Manners, I believe with her that there is a “difference between making an occasion enjoyable and making a significant event into a mockery.” I once went to a commitment ceremony where the two grooms exchanged butt plugs instead of rings. And I had a great time, as did everybody else, but if I was demanding the right to participate in a ritual that would transform me in the eyes of the society I lived in, and then when I won it I made fun of it, then as far as I was concerned I was either a hypocrite (oh, I never thought it was actually that important) or a morass of self-loathing (I don’t deserve the real thing, so I’m going to adulterate it). Of course I am a hypocrite and a morass of self-loathing, but I saw no reason to make those character traits public.
Or maybe it would be better to think in philosopher Walter Kaufmann’s terms. “The absence of all ritual,” he writes in Faith of a Heretic, “would entail nearly total blindness to
the mysteries of this world, while ritual provides occasions when one regularly tries to listen for the voice that the rest of the time one is prone to forget.” How would I be able to hear that voice if I was busy working my vows as stand-up comedy? How could I attend to any mystery if I was worried about whether my dog the ring-bearer would be able to trot down the aisle without stopping to poop?
Comedy is the other side of tragedy; neither can exist without the other. And if there was one moment to protect from the intrusion of tragedy—and therefore from the intrusion of comedy—it was the instant in which I became one with my fiancé. If anything was sacred in the world, then I wanted that moment to be sacred. And humans are slow creatures, so before we arrived at that moment we would need a while to calm down and stop giggling and make room for what might allow us, in however clumsy and clay-footed a way, to transcend ourselves.
That was why we were wearing morning clothes at my wedding.
And as I think about it now, there was another reason, too, one that has to do with the infantilization of same-sexers I’ve discussed. If marriage equality is in some ways about the right to be held to just as high a standard as straight people, then I wanted to set that standard as high as I possibly could and to celebrate its Olympian loftiness. By refusing to accede to any dilutions of the ritual, I could show my refusal to accede to any dilutions of the responsibility I was asking to assume.
“We also know,” I said, straightening one of the piles of wedding-planning books that seemed on the verge of collapse, “that we’re getting married outside.”
When we first started talking about a wedding, years before the actual proposal, I told Mike that my dream location was St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, but I acknowledged that the Catholic Church was unlikely to be brought to its senses while I was still of marriageable age. My worries about the degree of resistance of the Catholic Church took a back seat, however, when Mike told me about his dream wedding, for which we wore shorts and T-shirts. As to a location, when I mentioned St. Mark’s he laughed condescendingly and said, “No, silly. We’re going to go to a forest upstate and get married in a clearing.”