My big fat gay Sunday NY Times rejection

Two straight weeks of compulsive email checking finally resulted in a disappointing Friday for a certain pseudo-psycho-homogroom. The piece I submitted to the Modern Love column in the Sunday NY Times Sunday Styles section? Rejected. I thought it was a shoe-in, thought they'd like someone different than the whiny whiny girls they typically feature, but this was evidently not so. Certainly not a reflection on said homogroom's writing prowess. Anyways, here it is in all its glory:



Growing up in south suburban Boston, the youngest child by six years in an Irish Catholic family of seven, there were two things in life of which I was certain: the world was an infinitely fair and peaceful place, and I was going to get married someday. Marriage was omnipresent in my life. It was in my journals, where I would not only reflect upon which girls I fancied on a given day, adorning their names with hearts or flowers, but more specifically, which girls I wanted to marry. It was in my play time; I can still feel the dizzying bliss of rolling across the lawn with Meagan Cleary, our arms locked tightly around one another as we covered each another in precocious kisses, celebrating our recent imaginary nuptials. Marriage even pervaded my solitary time, inspiring me to write a four-verse song complete with a heartfelt, if simple, refrain, Let me take your hand, let me take your hand, sweet voices in my mind calling, let me take your hand. The decidedly uninspired bluegrass melody I conjured up to accompany it notwithstanding, other seven year olds have faired worse.

It was not a foreign feeling, then, to find myself kneeling on the steps of the Jane Street Theater twenty-two years later, ring in hand, waiting for My Intended to turn around so that I could put forth the question that had been waiting impatiently by the door for the better part of my life. It was the eve of our five-year anniversary and we were reconstructing our first date. First, a few beers at that no-name bar on Greenwich Avenue – which, disappointingly, had gone the way of so many dirty dive bars in the city and was now populated by more day-traders than derelicts – followed by a walk through the West Village and down Jane Street to the theater where we’d seen Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Twenty-nine years of yearning, plus a few minutes of botched conversation along the way as I tried to replicate the Perfect Pre-Proposal Speech I’d finally nailed in the shower, had all led to this. I was shaking, I was scared, but I was here, finally here.

I took a final, dry swallow as our eyes met, and the words came spilling off my tongue:

“Marry me?”

M.’s eyes widened as I stumbled to my feet, both of us at a temporary loss for words – he, because I’d both caught him off-guard and spoiled his own plan to present me with a temporary candy ring two minutes later, and I, because I had short-circuited my brain with Pre-Proposal Anxiety. We held each other. I asked him again.

“So, will you? Marry me?”

“Yes.”

Yes! He said yes! My M., my heart, had said yes, had said he’d marry me. M., the culmination of a journey that had taken me from an adolescence filled with alternating fears of eternal damnation and social exclusion, through a college experience that found me toying with a year and a half of clandestine man-on-man action only to run scurrying back to the safe haven of heterosex – where I promptly fell in love with a woman I could easily have married were it not for the nagging fact that she wasn’t a man – and finally to New York City, where I closed the closet door behind me and never looked back. Or never for very long. And not with anything more than a day or three of tearful gnashing of teeth. And, after four months of wondering if I’d made the right decision, followed by another five months of enjoying the physical benefits of that decision every chance I got, I found the man who made the whole trip worthwhile. M.

A few beers, a show on Jane Street, and two honeymoon-stage months later, I bailed. I needed my space, needed to test the waters, sow my oats, hook up with that guy I’d been emailing since before M. had technically asked me out. But really, M. and I were still an item, still hung out, went to the beach, fooled around. For a couple of months anyway, until one night when I broke out the one-two punch of chastising him for falling asleep in the middle of Xanadu – nothing to do with Olivia Newton-John in particular, just a general sense of rage when anyone falls asleep during any movie, most likely stemming from my mother’s predilection for regularly conking out in the middle of the TGIF television lineup during my formative years – and then initiating yet another post-coital discussion about my relationship angst. After that, not so much talking or fooling around. In fact, no contact whatsoever for about four months. At which point, having sown my oats in unfortunate field upon unfortunate field, I convinced M. that I was Ready, and I threw out that dirty old oats bag, and eventually, skeptically, he took me back.

And now we were getting married.

If only it were that simple.

Gay weddings are relatively uncharted territory. Men and women have been finding same-sex fulfillment and commitment since the dawn of time. There are countless gay couples today who have been in committed relationships for years and decades, with or without the exchange of rings, the taking of vows, the pomp and circumstance of ceremonies and receptions. But only in recent years has gay marriage – and I use the term in its broadest sense – become a socially familiar, if not acceptable, concept. As a small number of states have started to allow civil unions, domestic partnerships, and even gay marriage, many gay couples who have for many years thrived happily in their unofficial partnerships have taken advantage of the changing social tides, recommitting themselves to one another under the eyes of the Law. Just as many committed gay couples are happy to stick with what they’ve got, feeling every bit as ‘official’ as the next couple. It works for them.

My generation is the first to have such a range of gay marriage options at our fingertips, and to have them at the so-called “marrying age” of our late twenties and early thirties. It’s a doubled-edged sword, though. On the one side, it’s completely uncharted territory. On the other side, it’s completely…uncharted…territory. Gay marriage is ours to make of it what we will. We cannot be bound by particular rules and etiquettes and expectations when the historical framework does not exist, the centuries of carefully developed and well-worn paths of Right Way and Wrong Way have not been laid. We are completely and absolutely free to do what we want, when we want, how we want, and nobody can bat an eyelash because, well, nobody knows what gay weddings look like.

A typical bride and groom planning a heterosexual marriage will follow a more or less predictable course. The diamond rings, the proposals, the phone calls to the parents. The engagement parties, the gift registries, the bachelor and bachelorette parties. The bridesmaid dresses, the rehearsal dinners, the blood tests. The ceremonies, the receptions, the honeymoons. Each of these steps might be modified according to personal tastes or penchants for the non-traditional, but the basic skeleton remains, providing the bride and groom with potentially constricting, but undeniably familiar and reassuring, signposts as they wend their way to the altar.

Where are my signposts?

It’s nice to have tabula rasa, to be liberated from the shackles of societal norms and expectations of what makes a wedding a wedding. Many a bride, I am sure, has yearned for this very freedom. Still, nobody ever died from just a little bit of guidance, did they?

M. and I both set aside the Saturday after our engagement to call our mothers. M. went first. I watched anxiously from the living room, trying to decipher his tones and movements through the closed French doors to our bedroom. Oh no, he’s got his forehead pressed against the window; is he crying, is he angry, is he going to jump? His phone call complete, M. reported that it had gone well. An initial holding-of-breath as his mother had processed the news, but smooth sailing after that. I was next. My mother and I made the usual small talk, the usual updates on work, weekend plans, siblings, weather patterns. A pause, and then she asked, as I knew she would when I rehearsed the conversation,

“So…what else is new?”
“Well…M. and I have decided to get married!”
“Oh…? How are you going to do that?”

M. and I are opposites in many ways. He is the yin to my yang, the Capricorn to my Pisces, the 90s grunge to my Top 40 pop, the realist to my idealist – and when it comes to all things gay, he is also the pacifist to my activist. Where I push the envelope, he toes the line. Where I call my mother and tell her I’m getting married to a man – a man who, in their defense, my family truly loves and to whom they have been nothing but gracious – M. calls his mother and couches the conversation in soft terms like ‘making it official.’ We have an ongoing argument about whose approach is better. I still maintain that the only way to have self-respect is to demand respect from others, but M.’s slow-and-steady-wins-the-race strategy certainly gets a more favorable response.

Politics aside, the real concern here isn’t how we told our mothers or what kind of a response we got – and again, to her credit, my mother is coming around, as she always does – but the fact that we even had to worry about it in the first place. When most heterosexual couples I know would have been on the phone to their parents within a few hours of the proposal, pressing both of their ears to the receiver as they delivered the news, why did M. and I have to set aside a special, somber time three days later? We’re just as in love as those other couples. We’ve probably been together longer, and we were just as excited about our engagement. So where was our excited phone call? The night of our engagement, we went on to have a romantic, starry-eyed, candlelit meal. Yet even in those tingly, early hours, I knew. No matter how happy I felt, something was different. There would be no phone call that night, or even the next day. The signpost was there, but it wasn’t for me. There’s a temptation to turn the situation around, to tell myself that our engagement night was that much more special because it was just about us, could only be about us, no parents involved. But my therapist has been encouraging me to acknowledge the painful things in life rather than always tie things up with a pretty bow. So I’m acknowledging the pain, because it’s there, clear as day – a lump in my throat, a weight in my heart, a wistful sigh. No pretty bow.

As if the familial and societal baggage weren’t a heavy enough load to bear, M. and I both come with a full set of our own. Like I said, I’m the activist, he’s the pacifist. There is some irony here, because while my activist demands the right to all the trappings of a traditional, heterosexual wedding – right down to the proposal-on-bended knee – M.’s pacifist feels that gay marriage is necessarily distinct from hetero marriage, and should look thus. So who’s the real activist? When I bring up the idea of our parents walking us down the aisle, M. pooh-poohs this as an undesirable vestige of the archaic practice of a father giving away his daughter like so much chattel. I dream of declaring our vows in front of all of our friends and family, preferably with a religious leader present, and then moving on to a reception complete with first dance and wedding cake. M. tells me he would prefer to have the two of us, our parents, and a few friends in a closed room, followed by a “party.” M. gets anxious thinking about the possibility of public spectacle, and I get angry thinking about the possibility of none. I tell him – or at least, I think very intensely in his general direction – that he needs to take a closer look at his internalized homophobia, which is clearly preventing him from feeling worthy of the wedding we both deserve. In actuality, it’s hard to separate what does and does not have to do with us being gay. Mightn’t my mother have some of the same reservations if I were marrying a woman? Couldn’t M.’s preference for a small wedding have much more to do with his generalized anxiety and stage fright than with his self-acceptance as a gay man? It is tempting to take anything negative and attribute it to our oppression as gay men, to shout homophobia. Undeniably, homophobia – conscious or otherwise – will color much of our experience, but it is important to distinguish oppression from aggravation. It is also important to remember that I have always been a well-meaning but painfully misguided idealist, approaching the world – myself, my mother, my boyfriend, my marriage – with a set of expectations that can never be met.

Maybe those mythical signposts are just that – myths. Maybe they are remnants from a world that doesn’t exist anymore, written in a language that has little relevance to those entering into modern marriage, gay, straight or otherwise. Maybe, in a lot of ways, we are just like every other engaged couple, and the things we discuss – I would say ‘argue about,’ if only I hadn’t recently started an argument with M. regarding what I felt was his inappropriate and unfair use of the word ‘argue’ to describe what it was we were doing as we discussed some wedding particulars – are being discussed my a million engaged couples around the world at this very minute.

Maybe I am just another Bridezilla. Groomzilla.

We discuss location – originally Nantucket, because of his aunt Faith’s enormous yard and the legality of gay marriage in Massachusetts. Our friends have offered an even more enormous yard behind their beautifully restored historic home in the scenic Hudson Valley. Another friend suggested we do it in Vieques, the idyllic island off of Puerto Rico where we vacationed shortly after we got back together. As I am wont to do, I have become obsessed with this idea, while M. – although equally as excited about the prospect – has assumed the role of Realist, raining on my parade with his concerns about distance, cost, distance and cost. We discuss the guest list. We discuss the fact that a quarter of the list, by default, will consist of my siblings and their spouses. Half the list if they bring their children. He discusses the option of not inviting children, to which I discuss right back at him the unlikelihood of his brother attending without his one child, which would then make it unfair for me to tell my siblings that they cannot bring their twenty children. We discuss lodgings. We discuss the chances of my father getting on a propeller plane to make the trip from San Juan. We discuss how we are going to pay for all of this. When there are two grooms, who pays for what? How do we broach the subject with our parents? Thankfully, we do not need to discuss bridesmaid dresses, but we do discuss the food. The music. Lightweight cotton versus linen suits. I discuss my choice for first song (REO Speedwagon) and wedding ring (platinum, preferably brushed). M. discusses how much easier it would be to run away and elope, and I tell M. to bite his tongue.

In the privacy of the shower, where I get my best thinking done and where I cannot increase M.’s anxiety, I discuss with myself what I will say in my vows. Whether we will walk in from opposite sides of the grassy field overlooking the Caribbean sunset, or just stand in front. Where we should register for gifts, and if a Kitchen-Aid mixer would be too bold of a request. Whether simple grilled fish would be an appropriate menu choice. How M.’s face will look in the late-afternoon light. How I’ll do my hair. What we’ll name our children. What my father will say in his speech at the reception, if he’s there to give one.

With the help of therapy and a little time, I am learning that the world is no longer an infinitely fair and peaceful place. Things will not always go how I expect or wish them to go. As a gay man in America, they will go this way even less. I don’t like it, but I can live with it. One certainty remains, however, and it grows stronger and clearer with every passing day, every morning of looking into M.’s face on his pillow, every kiss goodnight, every ‘I love you,’ every argument. The details are a little different than I’d foreseen, but the truth remains: I am getting married.