My (First) Big Fat Gay Wedding: What Was Different?

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 2:00 PM on June 21, 2009.

I love a good wedding (as long as I'm not the one being hitched)!

I attended my first same-sex wedding last night. It took place in one of those quaint little upstate New York farm towns that's been invaded by artsy hipsters and aging hippies from the city. You know the kind of place -- in the parking lot of the little country store nearby a red Prius with a bumper sticker that read, "The Best Things in Life Aren't Things" sat next to a monster truck with a bumper proudly proclaiming, "Diesel Fumes Make Me Horny!" You might be assaulted by the acrid aroma of fertilizer one moment and the taint of patchouli the next.

Elana, long-time girlfriend of Penny Coleman, our great and passionate writer, was finally making an honest woman out of her -- they've been a nesting pair forever. (The grilled mahi mahi they served must have cost a fortune, so a plug for her book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, is in order -- think of it as a wedding gift!)

And -- this shouldn't be a surprise -- it was pretty much like every other really nice, mildly hippie-dippy wedding I've ever attended.

There was a big tent on a sprawling lawn, tables of food, an awesome cake -- lovingly made by Penny's radiant daughter Sophie -- and revelry lasting long into the night.

Everyone was all decked out and looking great.

There was a series of blessing ceremonies from a mish-mash of different faiths that would have brought tears to the eyes of all but the butchest of cowboys.

The wine flowed freely.

A bride fell in the pool.

Shaky and reeking of wine, I made a sloppy pass at one of the hotties in attendance, who calmly told me, "you should go elsewhere now."

And, of course, every wedding requires one truly awkward moment. In this case it was provided by Penny's son, Charlie, who, during a round of toasts, decided for some reason to offer a tribute to his "first vagina" (I shit you not), and then, in response to the uneasy silence that followed, extended it to "everyone's first vagina" (which I for one found kind of gracious).

The sound system went down, but someone jerry-rigged some music and we danced. There were hugs and tears and congrats and mazel tovs all around.

So, it was just like a straight couple's wedding! 

Except for one key difference: it wasn't really a wedding. It was a reception, and all but a few of the guests were absent when the bride and bride actually tied the knot. Because, unlike folks like me (or, I should say, unlike straight people who aren't terrified of the prospect of being wed), Penny and Elana had to drive to Massachusetts to do the deed, and most of those assembled last night weren't able to make the trip for various reasons.

As I've argued in the past, marriage equality isn't about the right to get married. It's about equal treatment under the law (which is why I'd be just as happy to get the state out of the marriage business entirely as I would to see gay marriage legalized everywhere). "Separate but equal" still doesn't cut it with me, and it shouldn't with you.

And this situation brought home for me the utter insanity of this patchwork of laws we've created -- with marriage equality now the norm in 6 states, a federal "defense of marriage act" and a slew of states whose constitutions forbid it. I know this will change -- that in the future people will look back at the days when it was legal to discriminate against gay and lesbian couples the same way we regard those shameful old miscegenation laws today.

But until that day comes, the situation will remain nothing short of bizarre. Consider this Los Angeles Times story about how gay and lesbian couples in some jurisdictions can end up having a tougher time getting a gay divorce than entering into a gay marriage (and just how surreal is it that gay marriage is forbidden in California, but gay divorce is still fine?).

Or think for a moment about the complexities that enter the picture when you consider that one's sex is quite fluid. Jennifer Finney Boylan, writing in the New York Times, laid out the issue nicely:

Deirdre Finney and I were wed in 1988 at the National Cathedral in Washington. In 2000, I started the long and complex process of changing from male to female. Deedie stood by me, deciding that her life was better with me than without me ...

I’ve been legally female since 2002, although the definition of what makes someone “legally” male or female is part of what makes this issue so unwieldy. How do we define legal gender? By chromosomes? By genitalia? By spirit? By whether one asks directions when lost?

For our part, Deirdre and I remain legally married, even though we’re both legally female. If we had divorced last month, before [Maine legalized same-sex marriage], I would have been allowed on the following day to marry a man only. There are states, however, that do not recognize sex changes. If I were to attempt to remarry in Ohio, for instance, I would be allowed to wed a woman only...

[Legal] rulings have left couples in similar situations in Florida, Ohio and Texas. A 1999 ruling in San Antonio, in Littleton v. Prange, determined that marriage could be only between people with different chromosomes. The result, of course, was that lesbian couples in that jurisdiction were then allowed to wed as long as one member of the couple had a Y chromosome, which is the case with both transgendered male-to-females and people born with conditions like androgen insensitivity syndrome. This ruling made Texas, paradoxically, one of the first states in which gay marriage was legal.

A lawyer for the transgendered plaintiff in the Littleton case noted the absurdity of the country’s gender laws as they pertain to marriage: “Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.”

That's the kind of thing that happens when we confer different rights and responsibilities on different groups of law-abiding citizens.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.