So You're EnGAYged

This month, I have been really focused on marriage and what it means. During May, we celebrated my graduation and mourned a death in my family. It’s a lot to be handed in one month. Soon, Ginger will finally meet the last of my extended family, and of course, it kills me that it will not be under better circumstances. This has reminded me that marriage is about supporting each other through life’s joys and hardships. We are really living this right now. When I realized that my new in-laws want to come and be a support through the funeral even though they didn’t know my grandmother, I rediscovered how much it means to me to have this new family.

Marriage is also about supporting each other’s life ambitions.

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This is a post written before Mandy’s wedding last weekend! She’s now a married lady!!

While the wedding is only a few days away, I’ve been a wife for 17 months already.  The question I have spent a lot of time answering lately, posed by myself and others, has been ”Why have a wedding if you’re already married?” -  so the question of “Why marriage?” hasn’t been knocking around my brain for a while.  But the question of “Why marriage?” was one that I spent a lot of time pondering, even before I was set to be married.

Back before I was a part of a marriage, I devoted my academic studies to marriage and the queer identity.  I wrote my graduate thesis on the topic of how queer identity is influenced by the “performance” of contemporary interpretations of wedding traditions and the legal, social, and economic factors of marriage and the wedding industry.  *Insert snyde academic remark about the social construction of “love” and the perils of heteronormative sterilization of queer identity here.* (For the record, I was very much in favour of marriage and saw it as having a great deal of positive potential for shaping the future of queer community-building… but anyway…)

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You want to know one reason why same-sex marriage should be legalized? Because it’s been going on, in some form or another, for centuries. From the Roman Empire to the Ming Dynasty and beyond, LGBT couples have been pledging their commitment to each other. And guess what – society as a whole hasn’t imploded yet. Here are a few more modern facts in the history of gay marriage.

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Hello Supporters & Allies, Critics and Sign-holders… Dear People Against Gay Marriage and People Against Marriage… How’s it going, Peanut Gallery and the Preached-to-Choir,

I’d like you to meet my wife.

Her name is Alex, short for Alexandra, previously known as ‘Topsey.’ She is 5’2″ with eyes of brown that squint up real tight when she smiles. Roughly 99% of the time, she orders a mocha from a coffee shop; the other 1% of the time, we are in California and she orders Iced Tea instead. She became my wife, my civil partner, on 17th April 2010. She is the medic and I am the writer. She loves to read and I think the Blue Whale is the most amazing creature on earth. Sometimes I tell her she has whale’s eyes, cause hers are so soft and compassionate, but she doesn’t really like that all too much… In case that wasn’t reason enough to fall in love with her (and for those of you that can’t hear her laugh or watch her smile, I can understand there might be some disconnect), let me explain why I married her.

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Ah, Facebook.  The sweetness of camaraderie and the agony of drama, all in one tidy little package.  I resisted joining for a long time because I felt it would be little but a distraction and an annoyance (see also: Myspace).  I forget what inspired me to join, but whoa nelly, have I ever taken a shine to it since I did.  It’s been wonderful to reconnect with old friends and family members who don’t live nearby, and I love having one central place to share links, news, and discussions with almost everyone I talk to.  I’ve even “met” a few new friends there.  I think it’s fair to say that I’ve become a convert… and I’ll be happy when Stacy finally sees the light and gets an account.  (AHEM.  Hint hint.)

However, with all the information flying around there, you’re bound to occasionally learn something you wish you hadn’t about a friend or family member (and I’m not even referring to the health conditions that some people apparently feel are worth a status update).  I recently learned that someone I’ve known since childhood is against gay marriage, and I’ve been really wrestling with how to address the subject ever since that dastardly little tidbit popped up in my News Feed.

Even though this person isn’t someone that I regularly see, and so I’m not exceedingly hurt by their position, I definitely believe on many levels that it’s my responsibility to say something.  First of all, I consider being GLBT something to celebrate, and I believe we should always speak our truths.  Secondly, I think that the only real way people who discriminate against us will ever change their minds is through personal contact, and as such I choose to be an ambassador for the GLBT community if the opportunity comes up.  It gets harder to discriminate against an entire section of the population if that section is made up of faces and names, especially faces and names that are familiar and well-liked.

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Throughout the wedding planning process I’ve gotten tons of support from my family and friends.  Almost everyone I tell about the wedding is excited for me, and excited in exactly the same way as they would be if I were marrying a man—they ask about colors, flowers, location.  They want to know what my dress looks like and if I need help decorating for the reception.  All of this is very reassuring to me.  Even the friends who are very religious or live in conservative parts of the country respond this way, and it reminds me to give people a chance and not to judge them (after all, who is the judgmental one if I’m prefacing their introduction by saying they’re religious?).

One exception to this has been my grandparents.  (more…)

I’ve been thinking lately about names.  At least part of this started with that terrifying story of the woman who was hospitalized in south Florida while getting onto a cruise and whose partner and children were denied access to her bedside by the hospital staff.  I want to know the best way to deal with a situation like that in case, god forbid, it ever happens to us.  Would having the same name be some sort of get-in-free card smoothing confused staff members into believing that we really are related before they get a chance to discriminate?  What if it was a child who was in the hospital—would the same name (and both names on the birth certificate) make some small but crucial difference?

But part of this is being inspired by other (less scary) things.  The least of these was in choosing a return-address stamp and being annoyed that there is no way to get a monogram with more than one last initial.  Then there’s the house I walk by on my way to work with a sign saying “The Nelson’s” which I note every time for both its incorrect punctuation and the sort of cozy implications of family that come from having a shared name.  And I think about our imaginary future children and wonder if I’ll be sad that we don’t all have the same name—and the immediate recognition from strangers that we are family.  I realize that people will know that we’re a family anyway and that my kids will be my kids whether we’re called the same thing or not (my two stepsiblings each have different last names, and both are different from their mother’s, and they are obviously related to one another), but I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.

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