So You're EnGAYged, A Gay Wedding Blog

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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So, as I said in an earlier post, I don’t think the topic of God and homosexuality is as open-and-shut as a lot of our opponents claim it to be. On a really basic level, how the heck could anyone know what God thinks? Why not just give us all the same rights and let God figure it out in the end? But I’m getting off-topic. A lot of arguments are made that are Bible-based, and I’d like to address some of those here.

First of all, the Bible only talks about homosexual relations in terms of sex outside of a marriage or committed relationship…which it always says is wrong. The Bible never speaks (explicitly, anyway) about sex between a loving, committed gay couple. So with that in mind, in my opinion, that the broad argument of “the Bible says it’s wrong” doesn’t have any validity.

Second, let’s look at the “explicitly” comment I made above. Some biblical scholars say that there are loving, committed relationships in the Bible, and because of thousands of years of translations and mistranslations, among other things, they aren’t explicit. One of the readings I plan to have at our wedding, Ruth 1:16-17, references one of them.

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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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Editor’s note: So You’re EnGAYged supports civil and respectful conversation of the topic in this post. Comments will be moderated to eliminate any hurtful or inflammatory comments, or comments that do not add insight to the discussion of this topic

Dana and I were both raised Catholic, but my growing up was a bit stricter. We both attended Catholic grade school and high school, but I never missed a Sunday mass, and I also attended a Catholic university…and have a degree in Theology from said university. With that being said, it’s surprising to me that of all the issues we both had with coming out, none of them were God-related. It’s only when we were shopping for a church that I had any problem. You see, growing up, though I wasn’t the type to daydream about her wedding, there were two things I always imagined, and one of them was getting married in the church I grew up in. Needless to say, that wasn’t going to happen, and finding a different church (and religion) were going to be a challenge for me. The first Unitarian-Universalist church we attended was way too lax. I didn’t feel like I was at church, and that just wasn’t going to work. I need a little structure in my services. The church we ultimately decided on, though, is perfect. It actually feels to me like a church, and that really says it all. I actually get a little weepy every time I attend a service there, which, though really embarrassing, is very telling to me.

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While I was working on the ceremony, I was trying to find a way to honor our parents.  We’re so lucky that all seven of our parents and step-parents are supportive of us and our marriage, and I wanted to express publicly how much that means to us.  Since I’m not into rose ceremonies or unity candles, I thought that reworking the Jewish tradition of reading seven blessings would be perfect.  We aren’t comfortable with the original text, so when I found this beautiful reinterpretation written by Rabbi Allen Secher I knew right away that we should ask each parent to read one.  After some light tweaking, we ended up with these:

Officiant: As our children find partners and build their lives as adults together, each family is enriched and enlarged. Would the parents and step-parents of Emily Kate and Lynn please stand. This occasion is a special celebration for you who brought these children into the world, and who have nurtured them into adulthood. Today you are witnessing another stage in the lives of your daughters.  Emily Kate and Lynn count themselves as truly fortunate to have you all standing beside them today, and have asked that you be the first to bless their union.

Lynn’s mom: We wish for you the special joy of being a couple, making decisions together,  sharing ideas, hopes, and dreams, celebrating life’s joys and confronting life’s  difficulties hand in hand. (more…)

So, as promised, the next item on the wedding agenda has been the ceremony itself (next up: gift registry!).  Mostly it hasn’t been too hard—we decided that we wanted to at least attempt to keep it fairly short and that one way to do that would be to cut the readings and songs out.  So no choosing quotes, although I think we might throw a poem or two into the program if there’s space.  Wording the prayers was a little tricky since there are lots of different religious backgrounds represented in our families, but it ended up fine (the ‘g’ word is ok, the ‘j’ word is not, apparently).

Then we hit our first of two problems:

#1: the vows.  When we had our legal ceremony in Boston we said some pretty standard but meaningful vows to each other.  And we meant them.  So it seems a little disingenuous to stand up at this wedding and pretend that it’s all happening for the first time.  So I’ve been trying to come up with a way to introduce that part of the ceremony in a way that honors our first wedding without distracting from the second.  Here’s what I’ve got:
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Now that the legal marriage is taken care of, planning on the big fluffy wedding is underway!  And one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is how to let people know what we’re up to.  We quietly changed our facebook statuses (now it’s official!) and posted the pictures, but since the legal wedding was more of an elopement we didn’t want to make a big stir about it.  Once we go ahead with the big wedding, though, we’re going to want to splash the news around.

We’ll send out announcements to anyone who can’t make it (or whom we can’t invite) to the wedding, but in terms of announcing our nuptials to the wider world there’s only really one option in the smallish town I come from: the local paper.  Every time I go home to visit I check up on who got arrested, who had a baby, and who got married.  So into the paper we go!  If they’ll have us…

Luckily, there’s a way to check!  If you are considering whether to announce your marriage in your local paper, go read up about it on GLAAD’s website.  They make the point that this kind of visibility helps to normalize gay marriage.  The more coworkers’ children, former classmates, and old babysitters people see getting married to their same-sex honeys the more they recognize that you, their neighbor, are just like them (or so the theory goes).  Plus you get to show off how cute you are!  The site has a sidebar over on the right-hand side with instructions, FAQs, and other handy things including a list of hundreds of newspapers and their stance on announcing lgbt unions.  I find, to my amusement, that my local paper is willing to run such notices, but that they never have before.  Which means that as long as no one in my part of northern Illinois beats me to it (my mother is a serious contender, but seems to have held off for some reason), Lynn and I will get to be the first lesbian wedding ever printed in the paper!

Now I just have to go read the New York Times’ Weddings/Celebrations section to get ideas for what to say in ours…

“What’s in a same-sex wedding ceremony, anyway?”

That, my friends, is the question; although, to be fair, it is not normally posed so bluntly.  Instead I get vague questions like, “You’re getting married?  So how does that work?”  Sometimes I’ll get more specific questions like “Who walks down the aisle?” or “Do you both get ‘given away’?”

Recently Liz and I met with our officiant, Reverend Linda McNamar, who just happens to be the mother of one of my Bridesmates (patent pending on that term, but I’ve got men and women attendants and wanted some catchy way to refer to them) and has been like a second mother to me since my teens.  She brought along a file folder with sheet after sheet of possibilities for our ceremony.  It feels a bit like a Chinese menu: pick one Invocation from column A, pick one reading from column B, etc.  We were even asked what we wanted our officiant to wear on our big day – flowing robes or a sleek pantsuit?  Reverend Linda wanted to be sure we had lots of options, so we would end up with a ceremony that truly reflects who we are, both individually and together.

We are blessed to have an officiant who has had a lot of experience with gay weddings, including some that were legal in California (and we spent some time talking about what minor changes she would make if the state were to reverse the law prior to our wedding in September 2010).  And since this is someone who knew me back when I was a bratty know-it-all teen and loves me anyway, I felt comfortable asking her questions.  Lots of questions.  Because, if I’m honest, Liz and I really didn’t have a good idea of what we wanted yet, we just knew that many of the questions our friends and colleagues have been asking us are things that most brides never even have to contemplate.  And while it is exciting that we can choose anything we like for our wedding ceremony and we won’t be thumbing our noses at any long-held traditions, it’s also a bit overwhelming.  And, traditionalists that we are, we sometimes wish there was such a thing as a traditional lesbian wedding.

I think the three of us had the most fun discussing what we are calling “the wedding staging.”  Both Liz and I are theatre geeks, and we want our ceremony to have the proper dramatic effect.  But perhaps it more closely resembles the complex selections in a football team’s playbook: I’ll fake left, Liz will go right, Reverend Linda will run up the middle… TOUCHDOWN!

Our current idea, ever-evolving, is to have 3 aisles — one down the middle and one on either side — so that we can have a simultaneous procession to the altar up the side aisles (she’ll be flanked by both parents, and I will have my step-dad on my arm) and then a combined recession up the center aisle afterwards, to symbolize how we are coming from different families and uniting as one new family.  Sure, our guests might be looking frantically left and right as if they are at a tennis match, but at least we won’t have to resort to flipping a coin to see who goes first.   And I think that Liz wants it to be clear that just because I’m wearing a tux does not mean that I am filling the groom’s role; I’m still a bride.

We have a lot of choices left to make: Celtic hand-binding?  Unity candle?  Rose ceremony?  But one thing is clear: we’ve chosen the right officiant.

While health insurance does not seem to be included, it will be interesting today to see what kind of benefits he will extend to same-sex partners.

“Mr. Obama, in an Oval Office announcement, is expected to offer details about which benefits will be provided. It is the most significant statement he has made on gay issues, and it comes as he faces intense criticism from several gay rights leaders over what they suggest has been a failure to live up to campaign promises in the first months of his presidency.” – via the New York Times