All The Same

Just(ly) Married

I don’t cry at weddings. For me, weddings are a joyous moment between two people who love each other that attendees are asked to share in. Hence, I always find them a happy experience assuming:

a. I agree with the spousal choices of the couple in question
b. I like (or at least don’t dislike) the couple in question
c. I am happy with the gift I am giving the couple in question (if indeed there is a gift involved)
d. I am not sitting uncomfortably in some lame outfit or unnecessarily bizarre location mandated by the couple in question.

But tears? Not so much.

However, I did cry at a wedding of two people I didn’t know and wasn’t even invited to this week. It was the wedding of Jeff Zarillo and Paul Katami, two men who after the last few days I feel as if I do know because they were the newly victorious co-plaintiffs of the recent marriage equality case before the US Supreme Court. And as LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stood up for a few minutes in City Hall to marry them, and I watched it being telecast live on The Rachel Maddow Show (which seemed especially apt considering – well, you know), big wet tears suddenly started sliding down my face. Like, really suddenly. Without warning. Even my male partner of 25 years who I am not currently married to (why rush it?) was a bit taken aback. Who is this weird guy crying at a televised wedding and who kidnapped the cynical queen (my words, not YOURS) I’ve lived with for the last quarter century, he must have wondered. Well, I wondered the same thing. Just goes to show you that no matter how much time you spend with another person, or yourself, there will always be surprises.

Work that waterproof mascara, girl.

The same is true of the world. No matter how many years you believe you understand the universe you can always get the rug pulled out from under you at any given moment. Certainly that is also how large groups of people of all sexual persuasions must have felt simultaneously this week when they were told that it will likely be much, much harder for them to cast votes in the next election (and all others after that). Votes that, as the years go by and our electoral differences further solidify between right and left with very little of the soft center remaining (think mismatched Oreo tops without the fillings), become more and more essential if we’re to truly call ourselves these UNITED States.

The Supreme Court also rendered another verdict this week – overturning one of the cornerstones of Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s – Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. This law required that states with a history of discriminatory voting laws against non-white people (mostly southern states) needed to be pre-approved before amending any of their current voting laws. This essentially meant that states that previously made it harder for Blacks (and other non-whites) to vote and went kicking and screaming into what we now think of as the integration of all races in US society, need special policing because they had proven time and time again that they were likely to fall back into their old ways of doing things.

EVERYONE deserves a sticker!

Simply put, if you were a black or brown person, or even a white person who was a member of a certain group in states like Texas, Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia and a few others, you were going to need more sophisticated ID’s and the lines were going to be A LOT longer before (and sometimes even with) Section 4. Think this is my liberal bias? Well, not this time. Since the dissolution days ago of #4, Texas has already proposed a new voting law that says concealed hand gun licenses are acceptable voter IDs but that student IDs and disabled veteran IDs alone are not enough to allow a citizen to vote at their local polling place. Other states like Alabama, North Carolina, Florida and Virginia are also planning to reactivate voting laws that limit the number of hours certain polling places are open (particularly in poor neighborhoods) and put restrictions on advance voting (a time-honored tradition in many African American communities).

Oh – and by the way – Happy 4^th of July.

Boom

Well, at least you could feel the public fireworks spreading for gays and lesbians nationwide as the Supremes ruled that same-sex marriage is officially legal again in California and, even more importantly, that the Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 federal law that defined marriage as solely between one man and one woman, thereby ostensibly outlawing ANY federal rights for same sex couples for all eternity, is unconstitutional.

What does this mean? That pretty soon gays and lesbians who are married in any of the 13 states (and counting) that now allow gays and lesbians to marry – including New York and California, two of our most populated states – will be able to file joint federal tax returns, receive spousal Social Security benefits and participate in hundreds of other privileges their fellow citizens have always enjoyed. That is, in a word I refuse to credit to Donald Trump – huge.

EXCEPT –

There is a problem.

Not to be a party pooper but here’s what I’ve learned as a lifetime member of at least three minorities (gay, Jewish, and men 5’7” & under). The rights of all people deemed less than or the other by those in power are forever intertwined. It is, all of it, the same issue. Who is going to be the next other? That’s anyone’s guess. But I can no sooner be overjoyed at being granted permission to legally marry at long last without being devastated that the rights of my fellow non-white citizens are in danger of being infringed upon at the ballot box in the next election. And this is not because I’m a liberal and certainly not because I am a particularly good person. It’s because – they are all THE SAME RIGHTS.

Equal is equal.

As sure as I’m sitting here writing this, the absence of rights for some other minority group means that my just gotten ones could very soon be in jeopardy. All it takes is a slight tipping of the scales in the other direction that newly discriminatory voting practices could insure. No minority is safe alone. But all are safe if they are woven together. Because contrary to what is being spewed by the far right wing among us – we are a nation that is built on the uniting of minorities: religious ones, freedom-loving ones, multi-colored ones, and even sexually varied ones. This thought does not EXCLUDE the most conservative or religious among us. It simply INCLUDES everyone else.

Wendy Davis, a Texas state Senator who has become a new personal hero of mine, proved that fact when she stood for 11 hours without food, water or a bathroom break and successfully filibustered a pretty hostile group of her fellow legislators in order to stop a proposed Draconian law in Texas that was going to force the closing of most of its health clinics for women and thus severely deny statewide access to birth control services (nee abortion rights) for many females (most of them poor ones).

Greatest American Hero

Ms. Davis, a Harvard-educated lawyer, is blonde, tall, thin and white – all of which make her part of the privileged elite in Texas and most other states. But it took only one day after her victory for the very conservative Texas Gov. Rick Perry, an avid supporter of the now defunct bill, to marginalize her into underprivileged, minority status by roaring publicly that that woman who filibustered had a child at 19 and was raised by a single mother. This quickly lifted Ms. Davis into what Gov. Perry hopes will be one of them in the minds of the majority of the state. Not content to stop there, the governor elaborated: What if her (Rep. Davis’) Mom said, ‘I just can’t do this? I just don’t want to do this?’ …It is unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters.

See how quickly even a successful white woman can be reduced to an unfeeling, immoral, underage mother who, if given the access to the health care she advocates, couldn’t be trusted to not abort her own daughter? Never mind that if you count numbers Rep. Davis, a female, is actually in the MAJORITY of the population. The largest groups among us are not always the most powerful, especially if one travels many thousands of miles away to, let’s say, our financial landlords, China. Of course, sometimes one need to look no further than one’s back door to make that point, as Ms. Davis and the rest of her fellow teenage Moms, gays and lesbians, and the minority voters of the United States so amply demonstrate to those who want to use them as a wedge issue of the future.

However, if you put all of us together – and add the rest of the nation’s immigrant population (that’s pretty much ALL of us aside from native Americans if you go back far enough) – you’ve got something else. It’s called, as we like to say around the Fourth of July, these United States.

Happy Birthday to us (native Americans included). All of us. And that means – everyone.

03.31.13

by notesfromachair

An Eye for an Eye

A different kind of chair…

As I sat in a doctor’s waiting room for hours this week while my partner of 25 years was being treated for an emergency detached retina – surrounded as I was by numerous, very old married couples with walkers and canes tending to each other and being called Mr. and Mrs. this and that by staff while CNN blared an ongoing loop of the Supreme Court hearings on marriage equality in the background – it became quite clear to me that if things got really bad and the doctor or any of those working for him decided to be assholes and think of me as no more than “the ride,” that I could be quite screwed – really screwed – and not in the good way I have enjoyed for the last quarter century. That, in itself, is THE reason for gay marriage – a state of being that my partner and I to this day don’t have much of an overwhelming desire to enter into but will probably nevertheless take advantage of as living and breathing human beings in a societal reality ruled by laws and a medical reality where walkers, wheelchairs and various other physical maladies seem as guaranteed as our eventual legal right to one day tie the knot so as not to be screwed in that no so good way.

Things to note before we go further:

1- My partner is recovering nicely and will have full sight again.

2- Aside from the four plus hour wait, the doc and his staff were great

3- I have overwhelming support from both our family and friends and enough backup to ensure I will have some, but not all legal rights to his present and future medical illnesses and the fallout/aftermath from them. This is the best that can be done right now, a lot better than many others and yet, shamefully not nearly enough of what it should be for two people who have chosen to love each other and spend their lives together for a really, really long time.

But back to the waiting room.

It’s gonna be a while…

At one point an older but not ancient couple (They were in their 70s – which might seem ancient to some of you but to me now just seems “older”) from Palm Springs started talking to me. She was reading one of my favorite books, Angela’s Ashes, so I couldn’t help chatting her up, especially after I heard her dishing to her husband about the bizarre outfit one of her friends back in Rancho Mirage was wearing the previous night in an attempt to look young (That big pink scarf tied on her head, she thinks it looks good?)

In any event, this woman and her husband, a dead ringer for James Cromwell, talked to me about the news report of the new Pope giving up his luxury apartment in Rome (Can I live there?, she asked), the book she was holding in her lap (I’m only on page 2 but so many people keep telling me how good it is) and their grandson, who is a writer.

On the latter, she related:

“He just sold a script. But it’s his first thing and he’s young, so he’s really excited.”

“Oh, trust me,” I answered, well aware that everyone but the gal at the receptionist desk in this office had long passed the point of being considered fresh-faced, “ it’s always exciting no matter what age you are. In fact, after a while you live for that excitement.”

Her husband guffawed at that one in particular and, this being L.A., I began to wonder if this indeed was James Cromwell. Sadly, it wasn’t.

… or I’ve probably been watching to much American Horror Story.

Still, despite the laughs, this same couple quickly grew silent when suddenly CNN began playing arguments made by the lawyer defending California’s Prop 8 anti-gay marriage stance, and the questions being asked of him by several Supreme Court judges clearly in support of that position.

“You know,” said the woman as she turned back to me after the report was over. “We have these two very nice guys who live across the street from us in a gated community. Now why does anyone care if they want to be together? Do you think that’s right?”

I paused for more than a few moments. This was because a. she didn’t know I was a gay man (uh, no she wasn’t blind) waiting for his partner to emerge from the secure medical sanctum inside and b. it meant she, a woman who was statistically assumed to be more than likely against gay marriage, would be asking this question of anyone of any sex or sexual persuasion with whom she was having a particularly friendly conversation with in a doctor’s office. So I said:

“Well, I’m really happy to hear you say that because I’m here waiting for my partner of many years and it’s good to know others feel that way.”

Granted, it wasn’t the most original response but, then again, I was a little taken aback by her boldness and more than a little stressed that I was here at all enduring an unexpected and quite serious medical emergency of the person I share my life with. Perhaps sensing this, she didn’t miss a beat and responded:

“Well, I don’t like when the government tells me what to do about anything, And that includes what I can eat. (Since we weren’t in New York I took that as a general statement and not one directed at Mayor Bloomberg for his desire to limit the size of Big Gulp sodas one can buy on the street). I just don’t think that’s right at all.”

Better not cheat!

This couple didn’t seem to have any family members or any gay friends other than acquaintances, so they then asked me a few questions about what rights I did have as a gay person. They were particularly incredulous that my partner and I couldn’t joint file our federal taxes (“Really, we thought you could,” he said), didn’t understand why we were taxed on health insurance premiums when one partner was covered on another’s policy, were angered when they turned to the television and heard 83 year old Edie Windsor on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington DC, talking about paying more than $350,000 in inheritance tax when her lesbian partner of 40 years died, and just shook their heads when they watched a fundamentalist type on camera talk about the dangers that gays tying the knot posed to the sanctity of marriage. (I don’t know what he’s talking about, the woman commented, her and her husband turning disgustedly away from the set and averting their eyes in disbelief).

Though I know all good things, even waiting room chats in a doctor’s office, must come to an end, I was still naturally disappointed when a moment later this couple’s names were suddenly called and they began to slowly get up. I thought our conversation was over. But in some ways, I realized by their parting words, this conversation had only just begun.

As Mr. Cromwell pulled his extremely tall frame (no, it was NOT him!) out of that fairly uncomfortable waiting room chair, he squarely looked me in the eyes.

“I want you to know, it was really a pleasure speaking with you, ” he told me as he helped his wife get past him. An unusually large smile formed across his face. Then he nodded. As did I.

“I so enjoyed meeting and talking to you,” she said, straightening out her blouse and moving through the inner sanctum door that her husband waited by as she deliberately passed through first. Then, she looked back to me and smiled one last time. And then they were off.

I sat there for a while thinking about this couple, about my life up to this point as a member of a minority group that has struggled for equal protection under the law for many years (well, who hasn’t?), about how much I’ve seen in my relatively short time alive of this struggle, of how many people of my kind have not lived to see our accomplishments up to this point, and about how much more this country and this world has seen and how much more it’s changed through the centuries on so many political, social and moral issues. And then, I thought about this couple once again.

Amen

It is easy, given all the vitriol being tossed about equal rights, messing with tradition, the intent of the framers of the Constitution and God’s Will, to ignore that on the whole we live in a country where the REAL average American (regardless of age) believes in fairness, equal opportunity, and the expansion, rather than the retraction, of human rights. A country where the Constitution is a living and breathing document that allows for the abolition of slavery, the guarantee of women to the vote, and the integration of the races so that anyone of any color skin can live, go to school or work in any place in the U.S. that they choose (well, theoretically, anyway). Never matter that at one point it was not this way. In time and with social change, we live in a place that can, in its laws and rules, also change based on obvious (or as they say, self-evident) truths predicated on the will and evolution of the majority of its population.

That time, change, evolution, whatever you want to call it, has come on the question of gay marriage. Just as I, as a person who never wanted to be married (the living in sin part still really appeals to me), now realize that as the decades go on it is important to make my love relationship legal if for no other reason than that I can’t be legally screwed, the majority of people in this country have decided that to prohibit their gay sons, daughters, friends, co-workers, neighbors, or any other LGBT person they happen to meet in a doctor’s office and strike up a nice conversation with from the same equal rights that they enjoy, is essentially, and in every other way, wrong.

Marriage is not a perfect institution and no marriage is perfect. Neither is love or any particular love relationship, or any one of us. But legally allowing gay people to participate, enjoy and be exasperated by any and all of the above is, in 2013, part of a new social contact – one that consistently changes through the centuries – and one that ensures that this place where we live continues to evolve, grow stronger and survive over time. Mostly, it shows that as a people we’re fair, and we’re in the equality fight for the long haul. Not just for ourselves but for everyone.

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: Gay marriage

All The Same

An Eye for an Eye