We were already 'married.' Why did a Supreme Court ruling make us want another wedding?
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Version 0 of 1. We deployed all the trappings of the “real” thing: the rabbi, the broken glass, the poster-size image of ourselves on which guests could scribble good wishes. There was a best man and a matron of honor, a carefully curated playlist and embossed Vera Wang invitations on which our parents pretentiously requested the “honour” of everyone’s presence. We exchanged gold Tiffany Atlas rings and created a Bloomingdale’s registry that swung for the fences because, hey — can’t hurt to ask. Oh, and there was cake. A beautiful, absurdly expensive and, ultimately, disgusting cake. Until recently, we considered what happened that day in March 2007 to be our wedding. Although we acquired no marriage-like rights — domestic partnerships didn’t exist in Nevada, where we lived then — we dared anyone to downgrade it to a mere “ceremony.” We even claimed that ours was the more genuine version of “marriage,” because we did it purely out of love, not to access the goodies bestowed by the government upon even the most insincere straight couples. But eight years later, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June in Obergefell v. Hodges that all states had to recognize same-sex marriages, our 2007 milestone suddenly felt mildly counterfeit — as if we had been playacting and everyone around us had been indulging our delusion. So, like many gay couples of a certain age and duration, we took a mulligan. Last month, we cordially invited our closest family and friends to our “legal wedding.” Translation: For real this time. Miles and I are a part of a cohort that exists solely because of a peculiar historical anomaly, in which countless same-sex couples had legally meaningless but otherwise traditional weddings long before we knew whether the government would ever deign to legitimize us. Now, with marriage equality available, many of us are having second weddings — and asking our loved ones to partake, essentially, in the same union twice. “We had our first wedding in 2001 in our friends’ living room at a time when my pretty Catholic parents wouldn’t even meet my husband — and I didn’t even use that word until a couple years ago, really — for coffee,” says David Trout, 55, of Seattle. “By the time it was legal, my folks were fully on board, and we had so many new friends who didn’t know us then who wanted to celebrate with us. So we did it again after Washington made it legal, this time with a rental hall, an aisle to walk up and very cheesy toasts. There were even bachelor parties.” [Life after Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage] History moved much faster than many of us expected. As recently as 2009, Oregon-born Anne Marie Wagner and England-born Anna Fardell threw wedding receptions in Britain and the United States to honor their British civil partnership, which carried neither full marriage rights in the U.K. nor legal recognition from the United States. “I didn’t ever think that there’d be anything better,” says Wagner, 29, now a law student in Edinburgh, Scotland. This past August, after the U.K. as well as the U.S. embraced same-sex marriage, the couple “upgraded” their civil partnership and threw a massive, black-tie Scottish ceilidh to fully certify their relationship as an equal marriage. “When we first started talking about this, we said, ‘We’ve done this twice, maybe we just sign the papers,’ ” Wagner says. “But I never liked the concept of a civil partnership; it felt very much like we were being placated. So when this all changed, I was overjoyed and felt it was something to celebrate.” In our case, our lives had changed significantly from March 2007 to June 2015. Our house in Vegas was rendered worthless by the Great Recession, so we left it to the short-sale vultures, and I took a journalism fellowship in Ann Arbor, Mich., which reawakened in Miles the desire to junk his 20-year-career in TV news and pursue an African American history degree at the University of Michigan. Now, we live here for good. By the time marriage equality happened, we had been through the sudden losses of his mother, two beloved pets and all of our savings. The same week the Supreme Court ruled, our adoption agency informed us that we were approved as adoptive parents; we are in the wrenching process of hoping a birth mom picks us to raise her baby. [Dustyn and Scott’s marriage is about the blissful and the banal, no matter what the Supreme Court rules] So much had changed — our friends, our careers, our hair colors, our addresses, our priorities. In 2007, we promised one another our love and presumed we had a clue what that entailed. Now, we had clawed our way through very dark times, supported one another through dramatic risks, and knew how well we performed amid real adversity. I had screwed up my vows the first time around and secretly wished for another chance, knowing most people never get that. But as I mulled what I would say this time, I realized it would be essentially the same spiel I had planned in 2007 — only now I knew enough to mean it even more. For Trout, another wedding provided family members who once didn’t understand a chance to right a wrong. “My mother cried the whole time, and my dad even tried to pay for some of it,” he says. “It was cathartic for them and, if I’m honest, for me, too.” Similarly, one of my three sisters skipped our 2007 wedding because, at a difficult moment in her life, she had left Judaism to join the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a church that did not approve of what we were doing. This created a deep rift, one that Miles had trouble moving past even after she renounced that faith and apologized profusely. We didn’t have another wedding just so she could atone and prove her contrition, but that was, indeed, a special perk. Mostly, though, like Wagner and Fardell, we did it publicly and with some fanfare again, because our closest friends and family really wanted to see us “actually” marry. “If I had it my way, I would have done it once and only once — like everybody else,” Wagner says. Indeed, as Miles and I stood before a federal judge and our 50 guests in late October, I realized this wasn’t just about us. We asked a dear friend — one of the two nonrelatives who also attended our 2007 wedding — to deliver a nonreligious reading. She selected a passage from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s marriage equality ruling. My mother, a semi-professional singer who offers a serenade at most important family functions, rewrote the words to a Vanessa Williams ballad, turning it into a sort of gay-wedding torch song that rued “some silly law” that had been in our way. Even my usually stoic stepfather-in-law gave a tearful toast that made a point about our country’s belated but welcome embrace of love’s universality. These do-over ceremonies, I realized that afternoon, serve as victory laps for nongays, too — and they deserve them. They are, after all, the folks who in recent decades had changed their minds, and then the world around them. Rarely is such important progress rewarded with an open bar, a buffet lunch and, yes, really bad cake. Friess is a freelance writer in Michigan. |