Lawfully wedded husband
Wednesday September 10, 2008
Recently I came home from a week in Provincetown, Mass., to a mail slot jammed with catalogs, bills, magazines, loan offers—and an invitation to a wedding reception.
What a fitting coincidence, to return from a vacation in a seaside resort town long treated as a summertime haven for gay men and women, in the first state of the union to sanction gay marriage, and find a set of two formal envelopes requesting my presence at a very public celebration of two men pledging their lives to one another.
I’ve known Chuck, one-half of the happy couple, for almost 10 years. We met online, and he was the first gay guy I became friends with after renouncing reparative therapy.
Before I bought my truck and when he still had his old one, he helped me move from an apartment in suburban Atlanta to an apartment in Buckhead. One fall five or six years ago, we played on a gay softball team together.
Now he’s doing something I’m not sure either of us ever dreamed would be possible, all those years ago: getting hitched to someone he loves.
In this month’s issue of The Atlantic, writer Andrew Sullivan—who, funnily enough, I saw riding a bike while I was in Provincetown—talked about the significance of his own induction into the tradition of matrimony. “Everyone involved themselves in our love. They asked how I had proposed; they inquired when the wedding would be; my straight friends made jokes about marriage that simply included me as one of them. At that first post-engagement Christmas with my in-laws, I felt something shift. They had always been welcoming and supportive. But now I was family.”
For years Chuck has been traveling to Austin to spend time with Daylon’s family, but I suspect this ceremony will, just as it did for Sullivan, further solidify his bond to his newly official kinfolk.
Will I follow one day in their footsteps? It remains to be seen. For whatever reason, I don’t fall in love easily. But I’m grateful for the trailblazers, mavericks and upstarts before me who have paved the way for making it an option. Including Chuck.
