When the California Supreme Court nullified those 4,000 same-sex marriage licenses, it presented just a minor battle in a long, long journey for advocates of same-sex marriage.
For you rightward folks who feel self-righteous about the decision, or if you are firmly in the middle, confused about whether it’s really a matter of civil rights and discrimination, I offer a simple piece of advice.
Go to a gay marriage ceremony, then see how you feel.
Stand in the back by the organ — the big one that makes all the joyous noise. Or if you’re crashing and feel uncomfortable, hide behind a rubber plant. Just go. You’ll be amazed.
It’s not about politics.
I must admit, I never really understood gay marriage until one weekend late last year.
Maybe I never understood weddings, period. For my straight friends, weddings were drunken, sentimental affairs. As for myself, I eloped. Then got drunk.
But my gay friends never really considered marriage. Most of them just lived with each other. And then died.
Nobody ever got as far as an altar.
Then I attended my family’s big fat gay wedding — my cousin Pauline’s ceremony.
Forget about the legal contortions and gobbledygook you’ll hear from paid advocates on both side of the issue. When you go to a gay ceremony, one thing becomes apparent: The wedding is so fundamentally American — as American as free speech — that it’s hard to imagine how anyone can fail to recognize a union based on such an unabashed public declaration of love.
Before going further, I must say that while the function was big and fat with nearly 400 people, I questioned whether it was really all that gay.
After all, this was a wedding where two brides made a pair — a lesbian pair. And that’s fine by me. As a straight male, I have definite lesbian tendencies. That is, I really like women, too.
At the wedding, Helen Zia, the author and former Ms. Magazine editor, helped make the distinction for me and schooled me on the lingo.
“Gay” acted as a general description, but “lesbian” was better because it was more specific for my cousin.
“‘Queer’ would be the inclusive term,” Zia told me. “Or you could say ‘GLBT’ for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender.”
So be it. The whole affair was really my family’s big fat QUEER wedding.
But the pressing questions straight people tend to ask are these:
Are these really weddings? Are the participants really married?
Certainly, my family’s event was a celebration of love and diversity.
The Episcopalians provided the Church (St. Gregory’s of Nissa on Potrero Hill), and the Catholics provided most of the wedding celebrants. But the spiritual head of the ceremony wasn’t a Catholic priest or the Episcopalians’ gay bishop. It was a Buddhist reverend from the Zen Center — a woman — who presided over a totally mixed-race affair: Filipino Americans, Japanese Hawaiians, Filipino-African Americans, regular African Americans, Japanese Caucasians, regular Caucasians, Latinos, South Asians, Chinese Americans.
It was so San Francisco.
And while it was queer, in some respects, there was nothing all that queer about it.
It sure looked like a wedding.
My cousin Pauline Guillermo, dressed in white and wearing a floral wreath, came down the aisle, following four of her sisters — my cousins Faye, Mildred, Tessie and Cyndi.
Then came Pauline’s partner, Jill Togawa, also in white and wreathed. The two of them, women in their 50s, had found in each other the loves of their lives.
Pauline held Jill’s hand. She spoke of having the courage to be herself. “To stand before family and friends and let them see how deeply I feel,” she said.
Jill was in tears. “I vow to have the strength and courage to love and honor you,” she said. More tears.
Nothing queer about tears at a two-bride ceremony.
They exchanged rings. They kissed. A bell was rung. People cheered.
“We called it a ‘devotion ceremony,’” my cousin Pauline told me later. “I don’t call it a wedding. We struggled with it. We chose the words carefully so that everyone understands we have a devotion to each other. It’s our special bond.
“We’re not following Massachusetts. We’re not following Canada,” she said. “We were creating our own family [in church] today and telling everybody, ‘This is us.’”
I asked the presiding Zen priest, the Rev. Hilda Ryumon Gutierrez-Baldoquin, what it was I just witnessed. Was it a wedding? A marriage?
“It’s a ritual of two women who wanted to commit themselves to each other in a public way, the essence of bringing in the community for support,” she said. “They’re married in their own eyes and all of ours. That’s what matters.”
If you’re blessed to experience a ceremony, as I did with my cousin Pauline’s, all you notice is the love.
And then you can see for yourself how hateful, intolerant and discriminatory this madness over marriage really is.