in these parts, summer’s arrival signals the beginning of intense wedding season. In New England, naive expectations of a warm, sunny wedding day mean that local churches and temples find their aisles clogged with rice from June till September. But such traditional visions were never mine. In typical contrarian fashion, I got married on New Year’s Day, just as a blizzard headed into town — and I married a man to boot.
My husband and I — and we use that term in the non-legal sense — considered ourselves married on that snowy day in 1995. Since then, having attended weddings in orchards, back yards, a barn, a forest, mansions, and even a few churches, it has become clear that straight people still corner the market on matrimony. We’ve been to only two lesbian ceremonies and not a single gay-male wedding in all this time. It’s been up to our straight friends to put our good suits to good use and send us scurrying to Williams-Sonoma for gifts.
In the course of 20 or so weddings, we’ve had plenty of time to reflect on what it means to be a gay couple who consider themselves married in a society that doesn’t necessarily see it that way. For one thing, we’ve had to accept that we’re still a cultural oddity, despite the passage of more than 30 years since Stonewall. Even in an age where farm wives can name Rosie O’Donnell’s girlfriend, our very existence seems to give well-intentioned wedding planners pause.
I don’t know why it’s so difficult to get a handle on the concept of boy-loves-boy/boy-marries-boy, but clearly we cause confusion among our friends’ families as they work over their guest lists. Though we’ve used the shared last name Valdes Greenwood for as long as most of our local friends have known us, neither of us is a wife who changed her last name legally, so dutiful list-makers scour Emily Post to find out how to address our invitations (instead of, say, asking us). Somehow, they always settle on calling us Mr. Valdes and Mr. Greenwood, names we ourselves haven’t used in seven years. With those designations, we could well be strangers or roommates, either concept apparently easier to reckon with.
The wedding rituals themselves also remind us that we’re operating from a different construct. For example, the strictly gendered division of the wedding party into groomsmen and bridesmaids reflects the way heterosexual kids are socialized. Not surprisingly, the fact that we are girly-boys, who grew up in the gap between assigned sex roles, influenced the make-up of our wedding party: four women and one man stood up for us. Unbound by tradition, we were ringed about not just by those of our gender, but of our spirit.
We were — and are — also unbound by law. When our friends hear "with the power invested in me by the state of Massachusetts," I often wonder how potent those words are to them, or if — like any birthright — this statement is taken for granted. For us, these words can be a bittersweet reminder of what we cannot have, of how our love intersects with the limits of our citizenship. The first time we heard the blessings of the state pronounced on a queer couple, it was in Vermont, at a lesbian civil ceremony, and the effect startled me: my eyes filled with tears. For a same-sex couple, these are not words to be hurried by on the way to a kiss.
After the bride and groom make their way back down the aisle and the partying begins, a few more reminders of our status remain ahead. Wedding after wedding, we are seated at the Gay Table. The Gay Table typically consists of us and either the lone other-gay-couple (there never seem to be more than two sets) or someone’s single gay friend in from out of town. The assumption seems to be that the resulting group will click simply because we have gayness in common, as if perceived sexual habit is a much better connection than little things like interest, experience, or personality. Even in the most liberal settings, the hint of tokenism is inescapable when all our mutual friends are seated together, while we are stranded at what might as well be called the Blowjob Table.
Later, when the dancing starts, there is always a moment when we hesitate. We know that, no matter how much the newlyweds themselves love us, there are bound to be guests who didn’t come expecting to see two men cutting the rug together. Be that as it may, my husband and I (behaving in predictably Gen-X fashion) paid for swing lessons a few years ago, and we damn well want our money’s worth on the dance floor now. So we take to the floor — step, step, rock step — and forget gender and politics, simply enjoying each other in the moment. In this way, we’re celebrating love — ours and the newlyweds’ — which is, after all, what weddings are for.
Someday, if our lives and love last long enough to see same-sex marriage become legal, we may have another ceremony. At that one, whether in summer or in a blizzard, I hope the only thing that seems odd is that it took so long for such an event to be possible.
David Valdes Greenwood can be reached at valdesgreenwood@att.net
