Finally, Marriage Licenses for All

By Susie Bright, SusieBright.com. Posted June 18, 2008.

Everyone I know in California is getting married this weekend. Everyone queer, that is.

Even some of my heterosexual friends are getting in on the action, because no one wants to miss the groovy free-love-and-a-license party down at City Hall. There are some spoilsports, of course. The County Clerk of Bakersfield, (our Country-Western music epicenter!), has outlawed ALL wedding ceremonies so she wouldn't have to face the horror -- the horror, I tell you! -- of watching a groom and a groom kiss each other with tears in their eyes.

Or, maybe her phobia is dykes in tuxes. She says she "doesn't have the resources" to perform marriages of any kind, but behind everyone's back, she was writing a right-wing freaker group begging for solace and legal support.

I can't believe someone this ignorant is still hanging around the State bureaucracy, a gay enclave if there ever was one.

Back in San Francisco, there wasn't a dry eye in the house when Daughers of Bilitis founders, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon got married in City Hall yesterday, by the studly mayor who started the whole gay wedding stampede in 2004, Gavin Newsom.

Del and Phyll are so frail, at their age, it makes you choke up to think of how they've been together since the 1950s, asking for nothing more than a little respect. They are more radical than young people a third their age!

In one California local newspaper after the next, we see the photo story behind gay marriage: it's largely an elderly revolution. These are couples who've been together for decades, coping with the health and legacy issues than any old person does, wanting their beloved to be by their side without harangue and humiliation.

I remember when Newsom first declared San Francisco a "get married!" zone; it was Valentine's Day and the whole city spontaneously broke out in red balloons and pink garlands. You couldn't walk down the streets without people smiling at you like they'd just been dusted with sugar and kissed by the Easter Bunny. It felt as if, for one day, Love Prevailed. And that was a real love, not a romance, because we were celebrating a long-overdue social justice that would not be denied.

Newsom's wedding licenses were subsequently scrapped by the state, under pressure from the homophobic evangelical lobby -- and for the five zillionth time, marriage activists went back to the drawing boards ... how many times do we have to say, Yes, I Do?

This time, even Arnold Schwarzenegger, our improbable governor, cannot put on the pretense that he gives a shit about the Haters. (This is a guy who gave Penthouse an interview in 1981, his weightlifting prime, boasting that American men were too uptight about getting their dicks sucked by other guys; that it's not such a big deal in Austria ... really!)

So, marriage licenses for all, freshly minted, are finally here. It's already a fact in life in so many states and countries; soon the only hold-outs are going to look antediluvian.

However, there are good friends and lovers ... who just don't wanna get married. They are all for justice under the law -- and toasting the bride next door -- but they don't want to be swept into the nuptial tent themselves.

One of our readers, Chris, commented on a previous post:

What should I do about my long-term lesbian relationship? My wife keeps saying she wants to get married, and I don't, because I think marriage is bullshit. It's propagated by a misguided human delusion that we won't die alone and that we can belong to someone -- or whatever people who believe in marriage think.

Chris isn't the only one to wring her hands and hide from the bouquet toss.

I'm not married myself. I never thought twice about getting married, to a man or a woman, for the first few decades of my life. It was never part of my parents' scheme for me, nor did I feel any peer pressure in the 70s, when I was first falling in love. I came of age at a time when weddings were seen as square, anti-feminist, state-pimping bullshit.

My friends who did tie the knot, squirmed as they made their announcement, apologized profusely, and choked out explanations that their parents were putting in the screws.

I patted them on the back and said, "Hey, don't worry about me; I'm your friend no matter what!" As if they had admitted war crimes!

Marriage was seen, in my milieu, as a bourgeois millstone, likely to end in divorce, that was better left uncommented upon, for the sake of sparing everyone the humiliation.

See more stories tagged with: gay rights, california, gay marriage

Susie Bright is an author, editor, and journalist known for her original and pioneering work in sexual politics and erotic expression. She writes about sex and politics every day at her blog.

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