Lawfully Wedded Husband

by Joel Derfner

And so I think it’s far, far too easy to march around with signs that say, “Hate is not a family value,” shouting about hate this and hate that and hate the other thing and not letting people get past the word “Jesus” before we glitter-bomb them. Doing so feels great, because after all the crap that’s been hurled at us for years, decades, centuries, millennia, hurling some of it back is extraordinarily liberating.

  But it also lets them—and us—off the hook. It allows us to avoid the hard work of actual dialogue. I don’t mean you-think-onething-and-I-think-another-so-let’s-find-a-way-to-agree-to-disagree dialogue, because that’s not enough; agreeing to disagree about whether same-sexers deserve equal treatment under the law would be a pretty pathetic resolution. I mean working to help them see things from our perspective, which requires first working to see things from theirs.

  As to how we go about doing so—well, I don’t know. I do know that research by Gregory M. Herek shows that it takes, on average, two positive interactions of some depth with a same-sexer for a homophobe to change his or her mind. Maybe part of the answer involves having as many of these interactions with as many people as we can. If I could figure out how to drop every bigot in the country into the house or apartment of a same-sexer for a month so a whole lot of people could turn a whole lot of thems into uses, I’d be doing that instead of writing this book. Sure, some people’s minds are less open than others’ to begin with, and sure, there are people, not even sociopaths but regular people, who will be unable to change the way they think, just like there are same-sexers who are unable to change the way we think about whatever group we think of as “them” in any given moment, people of color, devout Christians, effeminate gay men, whoever. But I don’t believe it’s beyond human ken to understand that we and the people we see as our enemies are the same, and that in this matter we all want exactly the same thing.

  Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s chocolate ice cream calling my name.

  Epilogue

  It’s October of 2012, and as Mike and I are now coming up on our two-year anniversary it seemed appropriate to tie up a few loose ends.

  I did not win the HGTV Urban Oasis Giveaway, even though I stayed up all night the night before the wedding writing entry cards and addressing envelopes and filled up both our neighborhood mailboxes so completely on the way to the airport that there was no room left in them and I had to send like five hundred of the entries from Puerto Rico. In the end the contest had fifteen and a half million entries, which means that by filling out and sending all those index cards along with entering online every day I increased my chances of winning an apartment in the Residences at the W Hotel, if my math is correct, from 1 in 256,410 to 1 in 3,846. Fortune chose not to smile upon me, however, and the apartment went to some college kid in Florida who claimed to have entered only once. I’m not sorry to have made the attempt, though; it makes me feel like I haven’t completely lost the ability to tilt at windmills.

  Apple juice, I discovered not long after the wedding, is a perfectly acceptable substitute for wine according to even the strictest interpretations of Jewish law, so there are no problems there and I can still think of the Japanese Hill and Pond Garden as Eden.

  After our Brooklyn wedding ceremony, unlike after our ceremony in Iowa, I do feel married. I call Mike my husband and feel that I’m telling the truth. I don’t know that I would feel the same way if I lived in a state whose laws, unlike those of New York, didn’t recognize marriages of same-sex couples, but, for better and for worse, I don’t really have any way of finding out, because the answer sure as hell isn’t interesting enough to be worth moving back to South Carolina.

  Our long string of not suffering as a result of marriage inequality was finally broken a few months ago, when the IRS sent Mike a letter telling him he owed $16,000 more in taxes than he’d paid.

  “Oh, my God, honey!” I said, full of excitement, when I understood why they wanted what they wanted. “We’re being discriminated against because we’re gay married!”

  (My excitement might have cooled significantly had a few phone calls not cleared the issue up, but they did. There are a lot of same-sexers, however, who are not in a position to joke about things like this.)

  The day after we got back from the honeymoon I walked into the kitchen with a bag of groceries. After I had taken the pasta and the vegetables out, after I’d put the dairy away, after I’d eaten less of the ice cream than I wanted to because I knew Mike would be annoyed that I’d eaten any but if I left a lot then he would get over it more quickly, I went to the stove and reached up to get a pot to boil the water in.

  And there, sitting on the shelf, were the pot and pan lids that had been missing since I dragged them into the basement along with everything else in the kitchen years before. They shone as brightly as they had the day I bought them.

  “Where did you find the pot and pan lids?” I asked Cathy on the phone as I chopped a tomato.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Our pot and pan lids have been missing for years, but you obviously found them when you cleaned up after the party and put them back with the pots and pans. Where were they?”

  “Joel, I didn’t find any pot or pan lids.”

  “But you must have, because here they are.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t get too much sun in the Caribbean?”

  When Mike came down for dinner, I asked him, and he had no idea where they had come from either. “Maybe we should call your mom,” I said, “and get her to ask 28 what he thinks.”

  “No, because he’ll just say they were where they needed to be.”

  “And then yell at us for not talking to him in so long.”

  All I can think, really, is that the pot and pan lids had lain in wait for years until they could return as some sort of metaphor about marriage or completion or healing.

  Or maybe they just appeared when we were ready for them.

  Appendix

  A Brief and Highly Biased Legislative History of American Marriage Equality with Respect to Sexuality

  The first marriage of a same-sex couple in the United States, I was surprised to learn when I started doing research about the question, took place not in 2004 in Massachusetts or California, nor in 2000 in Vermont, but in 1971 in Minnesota, when Michael McConnell and Jack Baker plighted their troth, marriage license, wide lapels, and all. McConnell and Baker, who was president of the first gay student organization in the United States (FREE, “Fight Repression of Erotic Expression,” formed a month before the Stonewall riots in New York City catalyzed the gay rights movement) and also president of the University of Minnesota’s student body (his campaign poster, which showed him in jeans and high heels, read, “Put yourself in Jack Baker’s shoes”), were denied a marriage license in Hennepin County and, after filing suit in the state Supreme Court, skipped, well, gaily over to Blue Earth County, where they were issued a license. Eventually the Minnesota District Court ruled that Hennepin County was correct not to issue McConnell and Baker a marriage license, but nobody ever said or did anything about Blue Earth County, so as far as I’m concerned McConnell and Baker are legally husband and husband.

  When they celebrated their nuptials, however, I was not yet a twinkle in my mother’s eye, and when a few couples in Colorado followed in their footsteps in 1975 (“You have failed to establish,” read the government’s letter to one, “that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots”), I had yet to learn the alphabet. The marriage equality movement as I know it began on May 5, 1993, when the Hawai’i Supreme Court ruled that the state might not have a constitutional right to forbid same-sex couples to marry. The citizens of Hawai’i at once took brisk and efficient care of this by amending their constitution so that the state definitely had a constitutional right to forbid same-sex couples to marry, but at this point I had never been on more than two dates with a man, not counting that twenty-three-year-old Seth I’d sort of half-dated in high school, and given the fact that whil
e we were making out on our third date I burst a zit and got pimple gunk all over his face, not to mention the fact that I guess he was my statutory rapist, it’s probably best not to count him anyway; while I was naturally dismayed at the change in Hawai’i’s constitution, therefore, that dismay was greater in principle than in practice.

  Six years later the Vermont Supreme Court held that excluding same-sex couples from the benefits and protections incident to marriage under state law was unconstitutional. The Vermont state legislature took brisk and efficient care of this by creating something called a civil union, a new status designed to include same-sex couples in all the benefits and protections incident to marriage under state law. This wasn’t marriage, but it seemed pretty damn close (though it became clear before long that the benefits and protections incident to marriage under state law in which same-sex couples were included meant everything except any of the benefits and protections incident to marriage under state law). By this time I had been on more than two dates with exactly one man, though given the pants he wore on our fourth date I suppose it’s best not to count him, either.

  Before long Ontario had thrown its hat into the ring by allowing same-sex couples to get married married, followed swiftly by other Canadian provinces. While, having just broken up with a guy who’d named a cat Beautiful Music, I had at the time no desire to get married, I still took a theoretical interest in the subject (actually, he’d broken up with me, but how embarrassing is it to admit that one has been dumped by a guy who named a cat Beautiful Music?). But I saw two problems with the idea of getting married in Canada. First, after poking around I discovered that, while apparently all you need to get married in Canada is vertebrae, if two people married in Canada want to get divorced at least one of them has to have lived there for at least twelve months. I think Montréal is great and all, but my heart did not leap at the thought of spending a year of my life in a country where milk comes in bags. (Of course any marriage I contracted would be indestructible and so I would never need to worry about divorce, but I was working on the better-safe-than-sorry principle.)

  More important, though, I didn’t want to get married in another country, because I wanted to stand on unshakable ground when it came to the Constitution of the United States. I don’t particularly wish to end up before the Supreme Court, but I can imagine a situation in which Associate Justice Antonin Scalia—may his eyes be put out with a carving fork only to regenerate immediately so that they can be put out again from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time—decided that the Constitution didn’t require the United States to recognize marriages of same-sex couples performed in another country, and I can imagine a compelling (if repugnant) argument being made to support such a decision. No; if Associate Justice Antonin Scalia—may his skin be peeled off layer by excruciating layer while he is doused repeatedly with salt-laced moonshine—was going to deny me the right to marry, his ruling was going to be so clearly unconstitutional that future historians would be able to look upon it only as an indication of how absolutely batshit crazy those third-millennium savages were.

  Heterosexual-only marriage fell to the sword next in Massachusetts, whose Supreme Court finally went all the way in 2004 and said same-sexers had to be allowed to marry, no “benefits and protections” or “state compelling interest” about it. As I hadn’t stopped reeling yet from the Beautiful-Music guy, my view was still academic, but I was nevertheless excited about the potential future I could imagine in which I was not insane enough to date somebody who would own a cat to begin with—excited, that is, until then-Governor Mitt Romney started digging through state congressional archives and found Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 207, Section 11, otherwise known as the Marriage Evasion Act; passed in 1913, it forbade out-of-state couples to marry in Massachusetts if their marriage wouldn’t be considered valid in their home state. This seems an odd action to find so problematic as to prohibit by law, until one discovers that in 1913 nationally renowned boxer Jack Johnson, who was black, had just married Lucille Cameron, who was white, thereby throwing the United States into an epic battle over the evils of interracial marriage, or, as they called it back then, “miscegenation” or “amalgamation.” The Massachusetts law was designed to prevent a flood of out-of-state mixed-race couples from going to Massachusetts, getting legally married there, going back to their home states, and drowning American decency in their miscegenated filth. (This was a time, remember, when if seven of your great-grandparents had been white and one had been black you were known as an octoroon and trying to eat at a white restaurant meant that before the evening was through you would end up hanging from a tree.)

  In the twenty-first century, miscegenation having been permitted for decades and American decency having survived somehow all the same, bloody perhaps but unbowed, I guess people had forgotten about the Marriage Evasion Act. But when Governor Romney, nothing if not an effective husbander of resources, realized he could use it to prevent out-of-state same-sex couples from going to Massachusetts, getting legally married there, going back to their home states, and drowning American decency in their homosexual filth, he took it out of storage, dusted it off, and gave it pride of place on the mantelpiece again. And now the only way same-sexers who lived outside of Massachusetts could get married there was to move to one of the states in which same-sex couples weren’t expressly forbidden to marry—a group that before long consisted of only Rhode Island. On August 31, 2007, there were also four hours during which same-sexers in Iowa could legally obtain marriage licenses, but the judge who rendered that decision immediately issued a stay of his judgment until the whole thing could be sorted out, which I appreciated at the time, because otherwise I knew Mike would have had me on the next plane to Cedar Rapids, and in the end only two gay couples got married in Iowa that year.

  Which brings us to the beginning of chapter one.

  Acknowledgments

  My first thanks, as usual, must go to Joy Tutela, still the sexiest agent in America, David Black, still the second-sexiest agent in America, Raphael Kadushin, the sexiest editor in America, and Matthew Cosby, Saryta Rodriguez, and Luke Thomas, the sexiest assistants in America.

  Without Sarah Rose I wouldn’t even have been able to have the idea in the first place, much less execute it in anything like an interesting way.

  The many friends who read bits and pieces large and small already know how much I appreciated their feedback, but it’s worth saying again. I highly recommend Nancy Rawlinson (nancyrawlinson.com) and Anne Mini (annemini.com) if anybody’s looking to work with a freelance editor; without the advice they gave me, along with that of Victoria Cain, Kirsten Childs, my brother, Jeremy, Chris Hampton, Leonard Jacobs, and Julia Sullivan, I’d have been lucky to dig half as deep as I did. Ted Kadin both kept my Talmudic interpretations from going too far off track and is a fantastic calligrapher (tedkadin.com).

  Dr. Kleinbaum kept me sane.

  And Mike forgave me.

  Any mistakes are the fault of Charles and David Koch.

  LIVING OUT

  Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies

  David Bergman, Joan Larkin, and Raphael Kadushin

  SERIES EDITORS

  The Other Mother: A Lesbian’s Fight for Her Daughter

  Nancy Abrams

  An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin

  Gad Beck

  Gay American Autobiography: Writings from Whitman to Sedaris

  Edited by David Bergman

  Surviving Madness: A Therapist’s Own Story

  Betty Berzon

  You’re Not from Around Here, Are You? A Lesbian in Small-Town America

  Louise A. Blum

  Just Married: Gay Marriage and the Expansion of Human Rights

  Kevin Bourassa and Joe Varnell

  Two Novels: “Development” and “Two Selves”

  Bryher

  The Hurry-Up Song: A Memoir of Losing My Brother Clifford Chase

  In My Father’s Arms: A Son’s St
ory of Sexual Abuse

  Walter A. de Milly III

  Lawfully Wedded Husband: How My Gay Marriage Will Save the American Family

  Joel Derfner

  Midlife Queer: Autobiography of a Decade, 1971–1981

  Martin Duberman

  The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag: And Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era

  Edward Field

  Body, Remember: A Memoir

  Kenny Fries

  Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans

  Philip Gambone

  Autobiography of My Hungers

  Rigoberto González

  Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the Movies

  Patrick E. Horrigan

  The End of Being Known: A Memoir

  Michael Klein

  Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders

  Joy Ladin

  The Last Deployment: How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq

  Bronson Lemer

  Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me

  Jaime Manrique

  Body Blows: Six Performances

  Tim Miller

  1001 Beds: Performances, Essays, and Travels

  Tim Miller

  Cleopatra’s Wedding Present: Travels through Syria

  Robert Tewdwr Moss

  Taboo

  Boyer Rickel

  Secret Places: My Life in New York and New Guinea

  Tobias Schneebaum

  Wild Man

  Tobias Schneebaum

  Sex Talks to Girls: A Memoir

  Maureen Seaton

  Outbound: Finding a Man, Sailing an Ocean

  William Storandt