Since I am still occasionally surprised to learn that someone I know or work with hasn’t figured out that I’m gay: my husband (Michael) and I are both men, and we’re very much in love with each other and happy together.
Tag Archives: love
‘Fessing up, part 1
I was working on a post, in reaction to an op-ed I read last weekend, in which I was ranting a bit.
Okay, it was more than a bit. I was probably well into self-righteous smugness. I took a break to catch up on some news, and came across another story that, as I processed it, made me realize that I was being extremely hypocritical in my rant.
I will return to the topic, and try to write something perhaps a bit less sanctimonious, because I think I have something worth saying on the matter. But before I do that, I have to make a confession or two…
Speaking of pink boys, et al
I love Goldfrapp’s music, and this… this is just amazing:
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Also, if you didn’t read this already, go check it out:
My Son Wears Dresses; Get Over It “To me, loving a child who is different, a target and seen as vulnerable is my role as a father and decent human being.”
Rejoice, spouse and spouse
I had a post about other things scheduled for today, but then I got caught up watching the live feed from city hall in Minneapolis, where same sex marriage became legal today. And I think it would be better if we all just rejoiced with these couples:
Photo gallery: Gays marry in Minnesota
Photo gallery: Weddings at Como Conservatory in St. Paul
Gay couples rush to wed as Minnesota, Rhode Island legalize same-sex marriage
I think my favorite from the live blogs is the tweet from sometime in the early morning from a person watching at City Hall: “I’ve got this down: cheer, clap, cry, repeat.”
When it IS broke…
Many years ago—I think it was just before Ray and I moved in together (thus, years before Ray got sick, years before the chemo, years before he died)—I called Ray to confirm when we were next getting together.
He was crying.
It took a few minutes to get the story out of him. He’d been on his way out of a store, and he stopped to hold the door open for someone. Another person ran by on the sidewalk, bumping into Ray and knocking his shopping bag to the ground, which was followed immediately by the sound of breaking glass.
Ray had just purchased some sort of glass sculpture. I don’t know what it was of. All Ray would tell me that it was “beautiful, just beautiful.” But it had been smashed to a million pieces, he said.
I asked him what store it had been, so I could go buy him another one. But that just set him off worse, because it had been a present for me. He repeated how beautiful it was, and that he couldn’t afford to buy another one, and the person who had caused it to be smashed hadn’t even stopped to say he was sorry.
Nothing I could say or do made him feel better. And there was nothing anyone could do at that point. If we were living in a Lifetime movie, maybe the person who had knocked the bag from his hands and kept running, waving dismissively when Ray called out, would have encountered us again, and there would have been some kind of amends making.
But we don’t live in Lifetime movies. Sometimes bad things happen, and we just have to live with them. Ray got over it. Life went on.
I was reminded about that incident this week when I found another present from him broken.
I don’t know how it happened, for certain, and probably never will.
It begins a few weeks back when we were having a mini heat wave. We’d had enough hot days (for our climate) in a row that we’d decided to put the window fans up. During the summer we have mounted window fans running in the kitchen, the computer room, and the bedroom. Depending on which side of the house and what time of day it is, they’ll be either blowing fresh air in, or blowing hot air out.
So the second day the fans were going, I found a print on the floor. It’s a large piece of art our friend, Sky, made a few years ago. It’s a reclining courtesan in a green and blue kimono. It isn’t mounted in a heavy frame, it’s just matted. It’s 18 inches by 22 inches, so it isn’t a huge life-size portrait, but it’s large.
It hangs in our bedroom on the south wall. After I confirmed that Michael hadn’t taken it down for some reason, I decided that it must have been knocked down by the wind. We had fans in the window on a thermostat, and we’d forgotten to turn off the standing fan when we left for work in the morning. It had been a little windy that day. I figured there must have been some inopportune gusts of wind that knocked it off.
Never mind that it is nowhere close to the window, and other similarly lightweight pieces are hanging on the wall Closer to the fan. I figured either the wind angle had been just right, or because all of the other simply matted pieces are smaller—they hadn’t had enough surface area to catch enough wind force to bring them down.
Then this week, I found something else on the floor. In exactly the same spot the picture had landed. A resin “sculpture,” about 10 inches tall, which had been on a shelf about a foot below the picture.
Ray had given me the sculpture about a year after we moved in together. It’s an odd thing: a fairy tale castle built impossibly on a pair of rock spires coming up out of the ocean. At the time Ray gave it to me, I think he said that it reminded him of something I’d written. I didn’t remember writing about that sort of castle, but I write both sci fi and fantasy, and I tended to talk to him a lot about ideas I hadn’t yet turned into a story, so maybe it was something in one of those.
But this gets us to the part of the earlier incident that I could never tell him. Ray and I had very different tastes in decorating. We both tended to like very different kinds of kitsch (and yeah, sometimes my tastes are extremely kitschy). So when he said the glass sculpture which I never got to see was “beautiful,” I knew that there was more than a slim chance that I might have thought it hideous.
This resin thing isn’t hideous, but it’s not the sort of thing I would have ever bought myself. Even for only a quarter at a garage sale. So, even with his explanation that it reminded him of something I wrote, I didn’t quite understand why he thought I would like it.
I’m quite certain some of the things I gave him elicited the same reaction. Sometimes you think someone will like something, and you’re just completely wrong.
I haven’t kept every knick knack and tchotchke Ray ever got me. His family members asked me for some of them to remember him by. I gave a few others away to friends who expressed an interest. One particular friend, Kats, suggested when I was agonizing, about a year after Ray died, over a bunch of things that I really didn’t like but couldn’t bear to just toss, that I mail them to her (since she’s as much of a packrat as I am). She said she would find them good homes. We both knew that she would probably toss most of them, and that she was prepared to lie to me if need be about how she’d kept them all. But sometimes you need a little help deluding yourself when you’re being irrational.
This castle, though, I kept. I can’t really say why, because I don’t like it for itself. Neither do I dislike it. It’s just every time I look at it, I think of Ray trying to explain to me how it reminded him of stuff I wrote. Ultimately, it reminds me of the journey we both went through trying to learn to understand each other better.
So when I found it on the floor, broken in several places, I was more than a bit annoyed. Also, confused. I had an explanation for the picture falling down two weeks ago. This was something else. It’s too heavy to have been blown over, at least inside the house. The only other thing I found disturbed was a small plush Tigger that had been near it on the shelf. And one of the fragments that broke off was embedded, at a really weird angle, into the wooden bedstead. If it fell off the shelf, bouncing off the bedstead is almost a certainty, but it just looked odd.
We don’t live in a house, but rather a triplex. On the other side of that wall is the neighbor’s kitchen. A previous tenant had a tendency to slam the cupboards a lot, and sometimes it would make the pictures shake on our side. I haven’t heard anything like that with the couple that have lived there the last few years, but if it’s happening at a time of day when we’re not around, I wouldn’t hear it, would I?
It would be simple enough to glue the castle back together if I could find all the pieces, but I can’t. On the other hand, it’s just a silly tchotchke which, truth be told, I haven’t looked at at all in the last several years except when I decide to clean up that end of the bedroom. It’s just a thing, not a person. I should just get over it and move on.
And I will. But I don’t have to like it.
Internal monologue
This is a beautiful short film, amazingly written by a 17-year-old. I don’t want to spoil it. So I’ll put my comments out of sight. Don’t read them until you watch.
Why I’m proud
“If it’s just who you are, why be proud about it?”
It seems like a reasonable question, right? I mean, if we’re born this way, what is there to be proud of? It’s not like we did it, right?
If you’ve ever asked that question, or been tempted to ask it (especially if you think it’s a clever question) here’s what I need you to do: imagine one of the really big St Patrick’s day parades. Imagine a very big, bearded, slightly inebriated Irish American in that parde. Now imagine yourself wearing a t-shirt with a British flag printed on it, and some slogan such as “The Irish are all terrorists!” in really large print. Now imagine yourself confronting the inebriated Irishman in the middle of the St. Patrick’s Day parade and demanding that he explain just what it is he has to be proud of, anyway, just because he was born Irish?
If you are a straight or straight-identified person living in our society, having grown up going to schools that encouraged your childhood crushes, that held dances that celebrated your teen age boyfriend/girlfriend relationships, watching movies where 99.9% of the plots include at least an element of either boy-meets-girl or boy-rescues-girl or woman-gets-her-man, et cetera, much of your existence is the result of a system of privilege which is the equivalent of that t-shirt.
So that’s the first thing I have to be proud of: I haven’t been crushed by the forces of homophobia, I didn’t commit suicide in my teens, I survived all the beatings, I managed to avoid being driven into addiction or a life of loneliness by all of those people, assumptions, and cultural expectations that said I couldn’t love, and if even I could my love didn’t matter, my very self was false.
I survived all of that and became a productive member of society. I found a man who promised to love me and stay with me the rest of his life—and he did! And after he died, I was lucky enough to be found by another wonderful man who somehow isn’t put off by all my obnoxious personality traits and has the audacity to love me!
We have a circle of friends who run the spectrum from straight through bi and gay, and contrary to what I was told again and again throughout my childhood, how lovable or worthwhile any of them are has absolutely nothing to do with their orientation.
I’m proud not just because I’m still here and I’ve survived, but because all of those people marching in Pride Parades all around the world have survived. From the freaks to the wallflowers, from the lesbian moms and gay dads to the queer aunties and uncles, from the straight parents of lesbian & gays to the straight kids of gays & lesbians, from the queer soccer players to the queer sci fi nerds (and there are a lot more of us than you think!), from the drag queens to muscle daddies and gym bunnies, from the dykes on bikes to the queer corgi owners club (sometimes one of the largest groups in the parade), from the go-go boys to the clog-dancing lesbians, from the queer quakers to the gay service members, from the cyber sluts to the snap queens, from house spouses to the queer executives… in short, every bi, gay, trans, lesbian, gender-non-conformist, queer, homo, fairy, butch, femme, st8-acting person or ally who has survived another year and is still ready to stand up, be counted, and throw a fabulous party.
I’m proud because we have endured hate, which has taught us how to love better. I’m proud because we have fled the shadows, and showed the world our light. I’m proud because no matter how many times we’ve been knocked down, we have gotten back up.
I’m proud because we’re all here, and we’re beautiful!
Why marriage matters
Bill was a medical laboratory technician. Scott was an architect.
Bill said he was walking with friends one night on their way to have drinks when he saw a really sexy guy on a motorcycle waiting for the light to change. A bit later they saw the motorcycle parked in front of a bar. It wasn’t the one they were heading toward, but Bill wanted to meet the guy on the ‘cycle, so he convinced his friends to go in. Bill found Scott inside, tried to strike up a conversation. Scott didn’t seem interested, but wasn’t completely unfriendly, either. Eventually another guy that Scott had been waiting for arrived, and it seemed obvious that they were together. Bill’s friends didn’t want to stick around, so he and his friends went to the place they had originally been headed to.
Hours later, Bill was still with the friends at the other bar when suddenly a voice asked if he could buy Bill a drink.
Scott had heard Bill’s friends say where they were going, and once he had concluded some unfinished business with his ex, had come looking for him.
Less than a year later they were living together. They bought a house together. Scott’s family all lived in or near the city, and over time came to accept Bill into the family. Years later, Bill’s still got teary-eyed telling about the first time Scott’s brother’s daughter called him Uncle Bill. “This was the 70s,” he explained. “It was far more common for families to refuse to even meet your brother’s gay lover.”
The house they’d bought was something of a fixer-upper. They worked on it together for years. Even with Scott’s connections in the real estate industry, they hadn’t been able to get a bank to give them a mortgage in both their names. Scott had insisted, then, on drawing up a contract so that the money Bill put into a special account they had set up for house expenses would be recorded as equity in the house. Scott had also insisted on drawing up wills. “He didn’t like to leave things to chance,” Bill told me.
One day at work, Bill got a phone call from one of Scott’s co-workers. Scott had been in some kind of highway accident. Bill hurried to the emergency room. Arriving at about the same time as Scott’s mother.
It was too late. Scott had been pronounced dead on arrival.
Over the next few days, Bill was busy with funeral arrangements. It was all a bit of a blur, of course. All those tedious details seem unimportant in the face of the enormous sense of loss.
“I should have known something was up from the way Scott’s father and brother were acting,” Bill said. “I didn’t really notice until the wake, when I noticed they were both absent.”
When Bill arrived home after the funeral and wake, he found the father and brother along with a lawyer. They had a court order, barring Bill from removing any property from the house until an inventory had been completed by a court appointed agent. Scott’s father was contesting the will, on the grounds that Bill had coerced him into signing it.
Bill couldn’t afford to put up much of a legal fight. The will was thrown out, though the equity contract was not. I don’t know all the the legal details, but the upshot was that Bill had to move out, and was only allowed to take items that he could prove he had paid for himself. The family did have to pay him the equity, thanks to one of the precautions that Scott had set up, but they seized nearly every piece of furniture and nearly every personal item in the house.
Bill wasn’t allowed to take even any book, photograph, or paper that he could not show was his personal property. Because the mortgage was in Scott’s name, the presumption was that the house and all property within was Scott’s. Bill, as far as the law was concerned, was just a roommate. “At one point,” Bill said, “I thought I was going to have to produce receipts for my own underwear. As it was, more than half of my own family photos went to them, because I got tired of arguing over every page in every photo album.”
As part of the equity settlement, he was also forced to sign an agreement he would never try to contact any of Scott’s family members again. Even though at that point Bill really needed the money, he balked at that, until Scott’s brother informed him that if he didn’t, the brother was going to say to the police that he overheard Bill making lewd comments to one of the nepews. It was a lie, but as the brother said, “Who do you think they’ll believe?”
Some time after the last legal document had been filed, Bill received an unmarked envelope in the mail. Inside were some polaroid photographs. Someone had piled all of Scott’s sketchbooks from his years of art classes and beyond, made a bonfire, the took pictures of the fire. “Of course they took all his sketchbooks, and of course they burned them. Half of Scott’s sketches were of men.”
Even when there is a will that specifically names one’s unmarried partner, the law stil considers said partner a stranger, for legal purposes. Blood relatives can contest wills on all sorts of grounds, and any non-relative has a disadvantage in regards to burden of proof.
Marriage, as opposed to civil unions or any other arrangement, changes that. In both formal law and common law principles, a spouse is not just counted as a blood relative, but is automatically the nearest relative. If other family members contest a will, it is considered an intra-familial dispute, and the burden of proof switches.
Yes, Scott died in the early 80s. This may lead you to think that in our more enlightened times this sort of thing can’t happen.
You’d be wrong. There’s the case of the two young men who had been together for several years, until one died in an accident just last year. His family were able to legally prevent his surviving partner from even getting a look at the full police report about how the young man died. The surviving partner was told not to try to attend the funeral, or else.
Or two older men, both retired, had been living together for decades. They’d had a ceremony together years ago and exchanged rings, but their state doesn’t even recognize civil unions. One of the men, as his health has deteriorated with age, began to exhibit dementia. His sister had herself appointed guardian and kicked the other partner out. When the story broke just a few months ago, the partner who had been kicked out had had to sell his wedding ring to get enough money to travel to relatives of his own who would let him live with them.
There will always be people who disapprove of the people their grown children or siblings choose to share their life with. But if the law recognizes our marriages the same as it does any heterosexual couple’s, there are thousands of legal protections and safeguards available to protect us and the ones we love from such people.
Marriage is how we say, both socially, culturally, and legally, “this person is family.”
It’s a right that every adult should be able to exercise.
Why I love him
I love Michael because:
- His first reaction when he hears someone is having a problem is, “How can I help?”
- He loves to re-read his favorite books again and again.
- He reads an astounding number of new books every year.
- He will spend hours letting me babble about a book, a TV show, or a movie that he isn’t really interested in without complaining.
- His smile always makes me feel happy, no matter how bad a day/week/month/year I’m having.
- When I’m ranting and raging about something that isn’t working, or that I’ve broken, or that’s just really bothering me, he says, “Okay, honey” without any sarcasm or flippancy in his voice at all.
- He can fix unfixable equipment.
- He’s got the prettiest eyes.
- He acts as if my extremely nerdy mathematics rants are interesting and important.
- He tells me when I’ve screwed up, but always in private.
- He doesn’t say, “I told you so” even though he has the right to dozens of times every week.
- He kisses really well.
- He can always find things I lose, often right away.
- He just laughs when I point at something he can’t find that’s right in front of him.
- He makes the most yummy chicken soup from scratch on the entire planet.
- He finds ways to anonymously help people.
- He doesn’t complain about my weird music.
- When I’m going overboard with the Christmas music, which he can’t stand, he either puts on his own earphones without saying anything, or asks if I can skip to another song.
- Even though he absolutely hates tomatoes, he helps me grow my own.
- He has great legs.
- He has, on way more than one occasion, when learning that someone is limping along on a dying computer, assembled a better system, installed software (sometimes going to interesting lengths to find out what sorts of software the person uses without telling why), tested everything several times, then shipped it off to the person as a surprise.
- He looks good in a worn work shirt and heavy duty Carhartts.
- He rocks a Victorian frock coat and top hat.
- He’s comfortable with us both quietly working on our projects at home all night.
- He can chop vegetables faster than the human eye can follow.
- He laughs at my lame jokes.
- He finds humor in nearly every situation.
- He believes in people.
- Even me when I am convinced I don’t deserve it.
- When I asked, “Will you marry me?” he grinned brighter than the sun and said, “Yes.”
Six months ago today…
…the sweetest man on the planet said, “I do” when asked if he would take me as his husband.
Making a big fuss about a six month “anniversary” is a bit silly. For one thing, one of the Latin roots of anniversary means “year”—the literal definition is “returning yearly,” so the phrase “six month anniversary” is nonsensical. If you were to insist on a Latinate word for it you could call it the semi-anniversary, but then someone is going to say, “Don’t you mean semi-annular” at which point you have to explain that semi-annular refers to the shape or form of a half-ring rather than a unit of time and once you’re down that pedantic rabbit hole you might as well give up.
Marking the lesser milestones seems premature when you’re talking about a brand-new relationship, because you’re presumed to still be in the giddy state of having not really gotten to know each other, and where hormones and the novelty of newness makes one more prone to overlook any signs of incompatibility. There is also a fear of jinxing things.
Neither of those would seem to apply to us, having been together for more than 15 years. But that immediately raises the question, shouldn’t we observe the anniversary of the day we met, or our first date, or the day we moved in together, et cetera, rather than the date of this more recent formalization of the existing relationship?
I have several responses to that one.
The less obvious response is that neither of us had the foresight to make a note of the precise date of those other events. We don’t even agree on when we first met. Michael remembers meeting me at an early morning panel on a Friday at NorWesCon (NorthWest Science Fiction Convention). I don’t recall that meeting, but rather remember meeting him at a Saturday room party at the same NorWesCon. Which is why for years Michael said we should just think of NorWesCon as our anniversary. Our first go-out-for-dinner date was in February ’98, a few months after Ray died. I think it was the 7th, but I’m not completely sure. We made plans to move in together, but we were going to wait until after the anniversary of Ray’s death, because it seemed unseemly to do so before that. But a series of bizarre incidents with two of Michael’s roommates made me feel he wasn’t safe there, so we accelerated plans and what with the flurry of events that ensued, we don’t quite agree on which month the actual moving in happened, let alone which day. Our various registrations of domestic partnerships (in different jurisdictions, et al) were dictated by external legal and insurance-requirement reasons, without much planning or fanfare.
My next argument is that the vast majority of married couples have all of those significant dates, too, but the one everyone focuses is on is the date you stand up in front of witnesses and an officiant to say “I do,” even though the emotional commitment happened before that point.
And my biggest argument is that the date for which the even vaster majority of friends, family, and acquaintances of all those married couples consider “real” is the date that one became legally married. That’s when you made things official. That’s when society gave the stamp of approval (or at least recognition). If you’re required to produce proof, that’s the date which will be on the certification you can request from an appropriate agency.
For us, that date didn’t become possible until we had already been together for many years. We did it on the first day it was legal in the state we reside in for several reasons. Yes, one was because we’d been waiting for a long time, goddammit! Another was that it was a date where it was easy to get several of the people we wanted to be there, there (though given how many of them volunteered to stand in line with us at midnight when licenses were first available, if that’s when we wanted to get ours, I realize that easy wasn’t one of their requirements).
But it was also because that day, December 9, 2012, was the first day in America that same-sex couples were allowed to marry as a result of a vote of the people. Yes, three states passed marriage equality on Election Day, 2012, but by pure chance, Michael and I lived in the state of those three whose constitution gave the earliest date such a law became effective. We beat out Maine by 20 days, and Maryland by 22.
If I’d really wanted to be historical, we should have tried to be one of the couples married after midnight by the county judge who came in to do those. Admittedly, it would have been very cool to have our official marriage certificate signed by Judge Mary Yu—isn’t that the coolest name for a judge? Regardless, I’m proud that a majority of our state citizens were willing to recognize the basic humanity and fairness issues involved. Do I think it should have happened years ago? Of course we wish the culture had been less intolerant long ago. But that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate the fact that a lot of people have reached that conclusion—so having our anniversary on the historic day lets us commemorate that event, too.
And I can’t help being a product of my culture. I grew up with everything from fairy tales, television, family, and the community at large saying that the milestone worth marking is the wedding day. Not the day you signed civil union papers. Not the day you realized that his smile was something you would go out of your way to make reappear. Not the day you first signed a lease together. Not the day you caught yourself changing a favorite recipe because he doesn’t like tomatoes. Not the night you bought a major kitchen appliance together. Not the day that you first realized that you never wanted a morning to dawn without him at your side. Not even the day you picked up your marriage license.
No, the date you’re supposed to remember, the date that matters, is the day you got married.
So, yeah, even though I’m a bit of an old man, and we’ve been together for as long as we have, I’m going to keep being a bit of a silly, giddy newlywed. I’m probably going to keep saying “Happy Anniversary” on the 9th of every month for the rest of the year. I’m going to keep getting a silly grin on my face and a tear in my eye when I realize it’s been another month since I stood there, holding flowers and trying not to cry too hard to repeat my vows.
Because six months ago today, the sweetest man in the world married me. And don’t you forget it!
Font Folly 