Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Wellfleet

This is what happens when I am away from the computer for a long weekend, or M. needs the computer at night, or I come home and sit in front of the computer in my underwear with nobody to talk to. Too. Many. Entries. At once.

Anyways, here are two photos of the latest entry in Reception Blitz 2006. It's in Wellfleet, and it's super cute.




Spare tires and spare thoughts

Damn M. and his decision to cash in on his 4 (but currently nine) free issues of Time magazine, the latest of which was waiting to greet me in our mailbox when I got home, demanding that I Lose That Spare Tire! Since when does Time magazine care about my spare tire? As if I weren't already consumed enough with my spare tire after bumping into my friend MB on the walk home from work and deciding that maybe we'd try to make the virgin 2005 voyage to Jones Beach this weekend, and joking that ha ha neither of us were quite ready for our sungas (look it up) and ha ha better do some sit-ups and ha ha I can't even suck my gut in anymore how about you and ha ha ha......

But then he walked down the steps to go to the gym, while I came home and sat in front of the computer in my underwear......and my spare tire.

M. and I drove upstate for the long weekend with our slightly older and more affluent home-owner friends, S&P. It was relaxing and my arms got some nice color while sitting on their lawn yesterday morning but otherwise, as usual, the weekend did nothing but make us rue our own dismal lack of a home, weekend- or otherwise. M. even pointed out that we could put a down payment on a house with what we're likely to spend on our wedding, and he had a point, but I snuffed that idea before it gained much girth, as I am still banking on the hope that I will massage both a wedding and a down payment out of my parents, like my siblings have all done.

It was strange, we saw some of S&P's friends upstate with whom we've become familiar, and I know I'm hyper-sensitive and intense about the whole thing, but with almost all of them, when I told them we were getting married, I got either no reaction or an indifferent one. These are all gay men in their late-thirties to late-forties, all of whom are in committed relationships of varying time spans, and all of whom are nice and open and friendly, and I guess I still expect everyone to jump up and down like our closest friends do, and spend the next hour talking about how exciting it all is. So maybe part of it is, as usual, my overwrought expectations. But maybe there's more? Maybe it's a generational thing? When I brought it up to M., who really didn't notice what I noticed, his opinion was that gay men of that generation aren't so into the whole marriage thing, maybe even to the point of being against the whole marriage thing. Like, they don't get it, don't get why we'd do that, or especially why I'd need to call it marriage. I, of course, analyzed it a little deeper and predictably entered into more sticky reasons like resentment and jealousy and insecurity, but maybe M. is right. Maybe it really is just a matter of Oh no, there they go again, these gay Gen-X-ers, slapping on their tuxes and running off to P'town and driving all of our hard-earned homo-separatism right into the ground.

I just editorialized, that's not really at all what M. meant, but the basic gist is still there - - maybe it's all just kind of foreign. Or maybe I'm just a hyper-sensitive freakshow whose feelings get hurt when relative strangers don't drool all over my hope chest. Or maybe they really are all insecure that they're not doing it, or resentful that we are, and maybe they'll pelt my Just Married sign with eggs.

In other news, I called my mother when we got home last night, and she is now supportive to the point of volunteering to accompany M. and I when we drive out to the Cape to check out the reception places at the end of June.

Maybe I should watch what I ask for.

Monday, May 30, 2005

Groomzilla of the Week Award: May 28, 2005

This being Memorial Day weekend and all, I thought it would be fitting to choose a Groomzilla of the Week who represented not only the very best that a psycho groom can offer, but the very best that a red-blooded red state 'Merican groom-of-the-People can offer.

To be fair, Rick Santorum has worked his little hiney hard enough to earn the Humanzilla of the Week Award, but this will have to do. According to last weekend's NY Times Sunday Magazine, Rick has put his groomzilla faith into action first by forcing his faceless wife to spend the majority of their marriage in a state of expectancy (read: knocked up), and then by locking her inside the house to homeschool them all. And now he's making us all his bitch by reminding us that gay marriage is, indeed, a threat not only to his marriage, but to legitimate, misogynist marriages everywhere. Use the force, Rick.


Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Old dog old habits

I was hanging out with my friends HN and SM from highschool last weekend, and we got to perusing some of my old journals. I came across the following entry from sophomore year, which doesn't quite translate from the fierce, fed-up scrawl of my youth to the typewritten form, but which does serve to prove the following:

1) I have always been impatient;
2) I have always been hyper-critical of those whom I love but who diverge from my neatly-laid plans;
3) I have always been irrationally obsessed with porn;
4) I have always been prone to violent veerings from one subject to the other; and
5) I have always, bottomline, just wanted to find somebody to love.

Aug. 9

I can't fucking stand this. The 12 days that need to pass before I can get my license seem like 12 years. I can't depend on myself, because I always need someone to drive me. Papa Gino's doesn't even deliver here ("Sorry, that's out of our radius") - screw their radius, I'm hungry! Anyway, my mother had to go to a shower, so she didn't have time to bring me. My sister's cooped up in her room, so if I bugged her she'd probably rip my head off. I cannot fucking stand it. Plus, I'm tired, so I'm in a bad mood anyway. My mother doesn't help w/ her suggestions when I'm in a sucky mood. "How about minced ham?" Minced ham?!? What the hell does minced ham have to do with pizza. What? If you feel like pizza you can just eat minced ham and you'll be completely and totally satisfied. I think not. I'm hungry!!! I can't stop thinking about porno movies. I just want to see one, because I never have. Just the ones on Showtime, but those don't count. I don't know, it's all so confusing. I NEED A GIRLFRIEND!!!

Monday, May 23, 2005

Hard for me to say I'm sorry

Maybe it was the full moon.

Maybe it was the overprivileged Manhattanite children who had been sitting in front of me, emailing on their sidekicks and distracting me from Matt Dillon's aging, slightly puffy, yet generally still attractive visage.

Maybe it was the Starburst that stuck to my sneaker in the mens room, and then the toilet paper that stuck to that.

Maybe I was hypoglycemic.

Whatever the case, when I came home yesterday from a midafternoon screening of Crash and discovered that M. had not informed me that our friends had left a message inviting us over to watch the season finale of Desperate Housewives, even though my movie was in the aforementioned friends' general neighborhood, and I had spoken to M. twice on my forty-five minute walk home, and M. was not going to be able to watch DH with me since he is finishing up classes this week, I was in two syllables, livid.

Seven syllables? Irrationally livid. Like, I couldn't see straight. And, as usual, I snapped, and I pouted, and I said unfair things about M.'s inability to cope with school-related stress in any other way than acting like a concentration camp victim. And then, a tiny little voice crept into my head and whispered, "Psst, Phil? Shut the fuck up."

And I told that little voice to go screw himself, which instigated a silent, three-minute knife fight between me and the little voice, during which the little voice suffered enormous physical insult but ultimately achieved his initial aim.

Battle-weary, I called our friends to accept their invitation, gave M. a brief, pouty kiss, and headed out the door.

And then, on the train, it started again. "Apologize. Apooooologize. Apologizeapologizeapologize, you always say you'll apologize when you realize you're being an asshole, and you were definitely being a hypoglycemic lunar-powered asshole, so just freaking be a man and apologize for once." And I tried hard to fight it, tried replaying meaningful Matt Dillon scenes in my head, tried concentrating on wishing that the song currently playing on my I-Pod (All Night, Janet Jackson) had been playing twenty minutes earlier when I was alone on the sidewalk and could continue to perfect my catwalk.

But the L train took forever, and I eventually ran out of defenses, and there weren't even any Poetry in Motion's to get me through the final rounds, and so by the time I got above ground, Tiny Little Voice was at my steering wheel, and I watched helplessly through cloudy eyes as he flipped my cell phone open, dialed home, pushed the earpiece against my ear, and forced the words from my mouth........."I'm sorry."

And you know? It wasn't so bad. In fact, once I got the words out, once the apology was floating up there there in plain sight, I realized that I actually meant it, that I actually wanted to tell the man I love that I was sorry for being such a huge jerkoff, and it felt kind of new and strange and good to acknowledge that I, Groomzilla, had made a silly boo-boo but still had enough sense left over to own up to it, and to avoid another unnecessary night of awkward silence based on my own, monstrous stubbornness.

Not that I'm going to make a habit out of it, but still.

Saturday, May 21, 2005

Groomzilla of the Week Award: May 21, 2005

Just when it was looking to be a slow week for groomzillas, forcing me to play an easy back-up card like Al Reynolds or Kenny Chesney, I just got word from M., who heard it through US Weekly, that Katie Holmes is now spending time at the Scientology center in LA, thus making it official that Tom Cruise has sealed his fate as a major groomzilla, a journey that began with Nicole, took a brief detour with Penelope, and has now moved to the high speed lane with Ms. Holmes.

First he cleaned her car without her permission, then he dragged her around from red carpet to red carpet, molesting her and in the process giving her what appears to be a harsh case of herpes, then he started talking about marrying her, and now he has clearly demanded that she hop on the L Ron Hubbard express bus to Insanity.

Thank you, Tom, for making my petty nagging and misguided door-blockading look like child's play.




Tuesday, May 17, 2005

I'm Too Sexy for This Blog?

Is my blog too vanilla?

A friend at work pointed me to a friend of a friend's blog, which I have come to envy not only because it is funny enough to have made me expel my allergy-compounded nasal contents all over my keyboard on more than one occasion, but also because this guy talks so candidly about things like his sex life and, well, his sex life.

Then I was just performing my nightly ritual of catching up on Gawker, Defamer and Fleshbot, and I come across this guy's blog, which - granted, he makes a living out of gay porn - is also filled with entries that make my blog look like a turtleneck jumper next to his crotchless leather hotpants.

My blog is about getting married.

I talk about hotel availabilities in Provincetown.

My Comments sections are filled with girls either urging me to stop spamming their bridal website or girls encouraging me to attend their electronic quilting bee.

Should I be talking about my sex life? My proclivities? My turn-ons?

The short answer is no.

The long answer involves 1) the fact that one can only have a sexy blog if one has a sexy, somewhat anonymous blog; 2) the fact that wedding blogs are, by default, not sexy; and 3) the fact that I have already shared my blog with my friends, my sister-in-law, office-mate Judy, my therapist and - because I am sadistic and misguided - inevitably, my mother.

More cake, anyone?

Monday, May 16, 2005

Say what?

The exciting news is that a reception venue finally wrote back to us.

(No, not Inn on the Blue Horizon. Vieques is so April 2005.)

The less exciting news is that I need an interpreter. Here's a copy of the email:


Dear XXXX,

Thanks for your inquiry. We need a little more information from you. Do youhave any idea how many people you will be having at the ceremony? Sat. May20th and Sat June 3rd are the dates we have available for a wedding where wewould close the restaurant to the public. The cost for this is $2500.toclose the inn. The price per person depends on the menu and is usuallyaround $150 In addition, you must buyout the rooms at the regular rate.forboth Friday and Saturday night. There are eight rooms ranging in price from$165 to $325. Depending on the number of people we could either do a sitdown dinner(65 people) or buffet/tray pass (100+ people).Another option is to have the entire ceremony including food on the westdeck. and we would still be open to the public in the dining room. The basicfee for that would be $1000 (the per person price of course would depend onthe menu) and you would have to rent for the weekend The Delft HavenResidence, The Chauffeur's Cottage and The Harbor's End Suite. A third option is to rent all three rooms upstairs and get married on thenew upstairs deck, the fee for this is $500.This could only accomodate about25-30 people, you could have a cocktail party/reception (price per persondepending on menu) for about an hour then come downstairs to the dining roomfor dinner.The last two options could be done on any weekend that the rooms areavailable.As you can see there are numerous possibilities, so it would be best tospeak with David at your convience.Hope I've given you enough information to get started. If you have anyquestions please feel free to call me at 866-xxx-xxxx.

Sincerely,
Reenie @ The Red Inn


Whatchoo talkin' bout Willis?

Did I miss something? These people all speak in hieroglyphics. I think somewhere in the middle of it all is something about a respectably priced Western deck, though, which will now serve as the setting for my internal paper-doll wedding show.

The Dingoes Are Eating My Baby

As usual, I'm quickly becoming one of the girls. It's my life story. Elementary school, kick ball with the girls. High school, reading Cosmo in the library with the girls. College, mud masks with the girls. Grad school, learning how to social work with girls. Girls girls girls.

And now? Despite an ambitious attempt to stake my claim as alpha male - albeit one who lounges about in a burgundy fur and uses the latest copy of Martha Stewart Living as something to write on while completing the Sunday NY Times crossword puzzle - I am once again falling into the clutches of womandom.

GroomzillaTM was supposed to be a vehicle for me to profess my lonely and angst-filled place in life as a gay groom-to-be, a beacon of light beckoning others of my kind to come together in a giant, lavendar Iron John drum circle as we talk about angst and gay marriage and America's Next Top Model.

Instead?

Look.

And look.

They like me now. Some of them, anyways. And they're trying to make me feel welcome and asking me questions and being all nice and smothering me in girl. And I'm falling right into it.

Must...resist......Remember...purpose...

Guys? Guys............? Are you out there..........?

(echo?)

(echo)

(echo)

Sunday, May 15, 2005

I'll have the Can of Worms with a side of Alienation, please

So I seem to have ruffled some veils by posting past my welcome over at indiebride.com.

I'm trying not to turn it into a Black Thing, but I have to say, the minute I walked into the room I couldn't help but notice how they all put their bouquets in their front pockets. Some of them are nice, though.

Anyways. I don't know, I guess I'll go lay on my couch and watch Vera Drake, which just came in the mail yesterday as one of M.'s Netflixx's.

Because if anyone knew what it felt like to be a pariah, it was Vera.

Saturday, May 14, 2005

Groomzilla of the Week Award: May 14th, 2005

I'm pleased to announce the first official Groomzilla of the Week Award.

This week's award goes to Showdog Moms & Dads' Brandon, who I'm equally pleased to announce is way, way more of a nightmare than me.

Congratulations, Brandon! Something good to cry about!



Friday, May 13, 2005

The Taming of the Groom

So I just got back from dinner with my friend KP up in Da Bronx, where we gorged ourselves on chicken and chorizo and plantains and rice and beans and too much Sangria at this restaurant of-unkown-ethnic-origin (Dominican? Puerto Rican? Peruvian? Uzbeki?) underneath the 1 train. I wouldn't say that I am pleasantly full, it's much more of an awkward tightness in my belly which is fading at about the same, slow rate as my Meat Coma.

And our two-hour dinner conversation left me with two unanswered questions.

First: why do people in the Bronx feel the need to garnish everything with Maraschino cherries?

We had sixteen of them floating in our Sangria along with a pound of sliced bananas, five oranges and a pineapple tree. And then a drug rep sent breakfast over to one of my Friday morning meetings last month, part of which was a beautiful fruit plate on which had been strewn piles of fresh cantaloupe, honeydew, strawberries, pineapple.........and at least one full jar of Maraschino cherries, complete with Maraschino cherry juice, topped off with walnuts. There is a fine line between Fresh Fruit Plate and Fruit Plate Sundae.

Second: does marriage have some sort of de facto corrective effect on couples?

KP was telling me how, when she was first married, she used to be a little bit of a nightmare when it came to arguments with her husband. Now, some years later, she has mended her ways. M. was telling me earlier in the week about a girl he goes to school with, who was telling him how she and her husband would get into nasty drunken arguments when they were first married, which have since subsided. The list goes on, been-there bride after been-there bride, seen-it groom after seen-it groom, talking about then vs. now, first-married vs. married-married.

This leads me to wonder what I will be saying four years from now, which should put me about a year or two past the "first married" stage of my marriage. Because really, I am already a little bit more than a complete nightmare of a boyfriend. I argue like a trial lawyer. I'm a nit-picker. I'm never wrong. I give my friends free reign but expect M. to sit, beg and heel on a two-inch leash. I have too much to drink, get pissed off at M., and lock him out of the house.

Will marriage make me better?

Do I get a forgiveness period between now and two years into my marriage, maintaining my insanity until my marriage has had a chance to cure me? After all, if I were to fix everything now, what would I be able to say about how I behaved when I was first married?

Worse still: since we're not married yet, does this mean I'm only going to get worse before I get better? All of my current bad behaviors are technically pre-married, not first-married. Before I can speak, with a knowing grin, a shake of the head, a roll of the eyes, of my own first-married years, do I need to first get married, and then figure out some sort of even worse, erratic personality glitch on which my marriage might work its magic?

Or, as M. and I have traveled the same road as many a modern couple, gay and straight, cohabitating for four years before we finally take the Plunge, are we already technically in our first years of marriage? Am I already making an example of myself, the "Before" photo that I'll be able to look back on in a few years from the safe vantage point of being the "After" photo?

Am I already a work in progress?

What is it about marriage - official or otherwise - that makes us want to be better people? What is it about marriage that makes us have to be better people? Maybe the real question is a little bit of both of these, and maybe the answers are pretty obvious.

Sanity. Exhaustion. Love. Growth.

Just as there will come a day when I am ready to move out of this maddeningly accessible, endearingly multifaceted, but undeniably overpriced and infuriatingly loud city (cue fire truck racing down 9th Avenue past screaming girls opening door to deafening roar of bar), there will likewise come a day when I am tired of the drunken arguments, finished with the over-controlling-ness, too frail to jam the stepladder under the front doorknob. And I will still be imperfect, I will still be doing something that, ten years later, I'll be able to say I used to do. I'll also still be doing some things that I'll keep right on doing until I hit my grave (read: arguing like a lawyer).

At the risk of sounding vaguely like that God-awful new "The L Word" theme song, this is life. This is love. This is marriage.

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Which came first?

As I sit here at my computer in my underthings, finished with another long day of saving lives, waiting for my latest seancody.com clip to download before I attempt to make linguine with clam sauce, it occurs to me:

do wedding plans make people crazy, or do crazy people make wedding plans?

That poor Jennifer Wilbanks has now entered a "facility" for "treatment" of an undisclosed "nature." OK so she has a history of petty larceny, clearly has some impulse control issues and, given her skeletal features and geographic locale, it wouldn't floor anyone to discover that she had an image disorder or three.

But let's face facts, folks: Jenny went crazy because Jenny had a wedding guest list of 600 people.

Clearly, the paper-thin nerves connecting her sanity to the rest of her brain melted out of her nostrils some night last February as she tossed and turned in bed after five too many Xanax-n-Ambien cocktails, having once again stayed up past 3am trying to rectify her seating charts with her pew bows with her pink pastel Jordan almond take-homes.



Is this what becomes of some of us? When starry-eyed Jennifer shot the moon and invited the entire tri-town population to her nuptials, did she seal her fate as future slouch-backed, vacant-faced chin-drooler at the Duluth Home for the Matrimonially Insane?

I think I may be in a common slump faced by us brides-to-be. It's really too early to plan too too much, but then again if the wedding might be in 12 months, it's too late to not at least have started thinking about it, because really, didn't so-and-so book her reception 2 years in advance, and what if all the best places get taken, and which weekend in May has the least historical precipitation, and if I'm going to hand-print the invitations then that's two months right there, add another month for the calligraphy class, not to mention finding the right band and the right hotels and and the right tulle baggies for the pink pastel Jordans and JESUS CHRIST THERE'S NOT ENOUGH TIME IN THE DAY IT JUST MAKES ME FEEL LIKE POPPING A COUPLE PROZAC AND CUTTING MY HAIR AND HOPPING ON THE NEXT CHINATOWN BUS TO VEGAS..........!

So before we start judging Jennifer, or pitying her, or thanking God we didn't (almost) marry her, we would all do well to take a good, hard look in the mirror and remember, there's a crazy little Jennifer in each and every one of us.

Or, for the unfortunate other fifty percent, a crazy little Jennifer laying beside us in bed every night, staring at the ceiling, quietly fretting about just where he's going to find enough chairs, bows and pastel nuts for 600 godforsaken wedding guests.

Monday, May 09, 2005

All by myself

I'm home sick today with what is either a nasty cold or a nasty new wave of allergies. Either way, it feels like someone is gently but firmly pulling on my uvula while simultaneously spraying a fine Tobasco sauce mist down my throat. I'm sure that my Saturday night - which started off with too much beer, plateaued with dancing at the Pyramid club with mainly out-of-town gays and heavyset bachelorettes, and culminated with barricading M. out of our apartment with two kitchen chairs and a step-ladder (because I am also Boyfriendzilla) - did not help matters.

So I'm feeling sorry for myself, which leads me to feeling alone, which - with just a little stretch - leads me to feeling like the only gay Groomzilla in town.

I googled "Groomzilla" the other night to see if my new blog had made it to the webcrawlers yet. I was dismayed to find that it had not, but even more dismayed to receive what, in Google circles, might be considered a successful hit search - the full ten pages of results with the right-arrow indicating an indefinite number of pages to follow.

In other words, I had not coined the term. This makes sense, as "Bridezilla" has become fairly commonplace in the marriage lexicon, and it does not take an inordinate amount of creativity to achieve the masculine form.

After my initial dismay and resignation that my GroomzillaTM coffee mugs and baseball caps might not come to be, I felt a sense of tentative hope - - if there were 100+ pages of Groomzillas out there, surely there must be others of my kind that could lead me to our Mothership, to our homeland, where I might bask in the comradery of other lonely, obsessive-compulsive gay grooms. But click after click, all I found was one example after another of a creature that makes no sense at all: the obsessive-compulsive straight groom. What's up with that? Who let them in? It's not enough that they own the world, now the hetero guys want to own the wedding plan as well? Fucking misogynists.

It was similar to the feeling I had when my recently-married friend MK directed me to a couple of different bride-to-be online forums she thought might help me get started with my own planning. One of them, she noted, had an entire discussion thread devoted to grooms. I didn't need to be asked twice, I headed straight to indiebride.com, certain that enlightenment and kinship were soon to be mine. What I found instead, however, was a subtle ploy by a thousand crazy brides-to-be to gain control over the one territory they had yet to claim: their fiances. With increasing urgency, I clicked and back-clicked, and found myself slowly drowning in a sea of bridal hysteria: "Where do I find a 'manly' hair accessory for my fiance's ponytail?" "How do I get my color-loving boyfriend to settle for a charcoal tux?" "How do I get my fiance to take my name?" "My boyfriend thinks I'm crazy!"

Am I really doomed to roam the planet alone? I wasn't serious when I wrote that first entry, it was just artistic license. I was kidding. Seriously, where are My People? I scan the wedding photos in the Sunday Times, and - on the rare occasion when I find anything - all I see are middle-aged gay urban professionals hanging out of their rented trolleys with one arm, champagne glasses tilted towards the camera with the other arm, eyes glittering frantically with the secure knowledge that they have not only Made It as head curator of the historical Mewley estate in Croton-on-Hudson and founding partner of Greeleigh Boggs and Matthewson, respectively, but they have Made It to the Sunday New York Times Weddings Section!

My People are not in the Sunday Times. Or the Monday New York Post, for that matter, where I just read about a man who is suing the David Barton Gym for $25,000 for emotional distress suffered from repeatedly witnessing patrons giving each other bathroom stall blowjobs and participating in impromptu steamroom three-ways. In a gym in Chelsea....? I never. Groomzillas are too busy over-planning and being monogamous to waste time on anonymous gymnasium sex.

They've got to be out there somewhere. I can't be the only one. Could it be that we are all holed up at our PCs, desperately seeking electronic signs of solace? Or do we tend to live in places other than Manhattan, where temptation and activity and hustle and bustle prevent us from even finding a relationship in which to nurture and develop our inner, crazed grooms? This Sunday's Times also had a big article on lesbian brides, who make up something like 80% of all gay weddings in the US. Between the lesbians and the middle-aged guppies, I'm not left with much, am I?

That guy sitting alone in the coffee shop downstairs, is he one? The guy struggling with his Bird of Paradise in my yoga class, maybe him? Do I go back to indiebride.com, my head hung in shame, and pick off whatever scraps of comfort they might have left for me on the great carcass of group kvetch? Do I get the prototype coffee mug made, carry it around town, nonchalantly waving it in front of me in the hope that it catches the eye of a kindred soul?

Or do I make the most of my sick day, run down the street for a Medium Number Two with a Diet Coke to go, and drown my sorrows in the copy of Hotel Rwanda we just NetFlixxed?

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Plan B

So it looks like Puerto Rico is off. The distance, the cost, the potential headaches, the fact that nobody from the Inn on the Blue Horizon is emailing us back... As I've told some of my friends, I am really needing to mentally vilify Vieques as a potential wedding locale as a means of getting over it, so anyone with anything bad to say about Puerto Rico, Puerto Ricans and/or destination weddings, let it rip.

Within ten minutes of the first inkling that Vieques was a no-go, I was already investigating other options. Mainly Massachusetts, and mainly the Cape. Provincetown is a likely candidate, although it seems a little too........Gay Wedding 101/"Queer as Folk" (Showtime, not BBC) for me. Wellfleet is supposed to be pretty, too. This one's my favorite so far:

http://www.theholdeninn.com/index.htm.

Papa can you hear me?

I got a letter from my mother last week, the latest in a series of correspondences we've been sending to one another since I broke the Big News.

The first was a card she sent me, letting me know that, despite our strained telephone conversations about The Engagement, she was There For Me, and proud of me for my continued efforts to shove my life in my family's face.

I followed this up with a hand-written note to Mom and Dad, thanking them for being so gracious towards and supportive of M. and I over the past few years, and asking them for their continued support and, oh yes, their participation, over the coming months. I thought "participation" was a general enough term to cover everything from attending my wedding to helping me pay for it.

My mother followed this up with the aforementioned letter. Type-written, signaling to me that it contained enough Sensitive Information to warrant the ability to delete, cut and paste as needed. She started off by agreeing with me that, yes, sometimes it was easier to express one's feelings in the written, rather than verbal, form. This was followed by her assurance that, while she didn't feel Puerto Rico was the ideal place for my wedding - why not choose someplace closer, and more easily accessible, and where everyone speaks English? - she would continue to Be There For Me in whatever ways I needed her to be.

Oh, and p.s., your father doesn't know that he can attend your wedding with a clear conscience.

After sobbing, alone, in a curled-up ball on my bed for half an hour, I called my mother. Left a message, returned to my curled-up ball for another half-hour -- during which time I also phoned M., against my better judgment, to interrupt his study group and tell him, through quivering gasps, what had happened, but really I'm okay, don't worry about me, forget I called -- and finally got a call back from Mom.

We talked about how hard this was for me. How hard it was for her. I talked about how unfair it was, how this was supposed to be a happy time. She said she knew that, and it was just going to take everyone some time to get used to. I sobbed about what a good person I am, and how I love my life and who I've become, and how I deserve to be happy. She agreed and told me I was Perfect. I didn't get into the fact that much of my therapy has centered around me dealing with the aftermath of 29 years of being told I was perfect.

We talked about Puerto Rico. How it would be hard for my brothers and sisters to bring their kids. Good point. How it would be a nightmare trying to plan a wedding from so far away. Very true. How Aunt Mary wouldn't be able to go, seeing as she doesn't fly. Aunt Mary?? The last I'd heard, my mother had told Aunt Mary I was gay and Aunt Mary has asked my mother if I'd seen a psychiatrist. I told my mother I hadn't realized she'd want to invite Aunt Mary, let alone any friends. Who else would she invite? Pat Kelley. Mrs. Kelley?? Did she even know I was gay? "Oh, Pat Kelley has more gay friends than you do." And so on and so forth. The Powells. The Dowlings. The Dolans. I had a brief glimpse of the potential road this could all take, where one invitation mandated three others, until 70 invitees turned into 170 invitees, leaving me with something that read more like the Wollaston Golf Club members directory than a guest list.

We talked about my father. And talked about my father. And talked about my father. I'd try to change the conversation, telling my mother I didn't want to Perpetuate Her Tendency to act as my father's intercessor, mediating my contact with him. I told her that the very least I deserved was for him to tell me himself if he wasn't coming. She made some excuses for him. Old dog, new tricks. Set in his ways. Traditional. Following what the Church told him. I told her it was a shame that an institution that was supposed to be built on the Golden Rule, on love, on respect, spent so much time telling its members who they were expected to hate, to spurn, to alienate. It was a shame that my father was being told that homosexuality was a sin, but boycotting your son's wedding was okay. Where are the Church edicts about loving your children, the Papal press releases about compassion and acceptance?

The next morning I had an email in my inbox from him. Telling me how "this matter" I've been discussing with my mother is ruining his marriage and his relationships with his family and friends. How I'm not going to change his mind, just like he's not going to change mine. How he doesn't want to read about it, hear about it or talk about it any more, from this point on. Oh, and p.s., you know I love you, and you and M. should feel welcome in our house, and we'll all go fishing.

The day after that, another phone call from my mother, checking in to make sure I was okay. Telling me that she and my father were going to be in Long Island the first weekend in June, and asking if M. and I might want to come out for brunch. What was bringing them all the way out to Long Island?, I asked, a trip that would require at least six hours of driving and/or ferrying for my father, his bad back and his recently replaced knees.

"Oh, Mr. Zine's son is getting married."

Saturday, May 07, 2005

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.

Evil is born

I am a 29 year old self-professed nightmare of a gay groom-to-be.

My boyfriend and I have been together for 5 years. We live in Manhattan and recently got engaged.

It has barely been one month and I have already felt the distinct rumblings of the dark creature conceived that fateful evening, a monster who came into existence the moment I slipped the ring onto M.'s finger. Irrational fixations on wedding locales. Obsessive ruminatings on buffet vs. sit-down, DJ vs. live band, ecru linen suits vs. light-weight cotton. Compulsive guest list revisions.

This hell-spawn inside of me will only grow larger and more terrifying with the passage of months. I have resigned myself to this fact, to the certain knowledge that one day soon, my strength will be depleted, my defenses crushed, my soul eviscerated, giving birth to a new creature - part-human, part-demon, all evil. Doomed to roam the earth for eternity, or at least until next May, striking terror into the hearts of gay fiancees, mothers-of-the-grooms and banquet halls everywhere.

My baby. My burden. My Groomzilla.

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