Why Can’t I Get Gay Married?

On a warm Friday evening in June, I was finishing dinner among friends, all of us huddled around a laptop, eyes glued to a live stream of the New York State Senate proceedings. I’m not normally such a party animal, and this was, I assure you, a good deal more raucous a diversion than my median weekend night. But there were extenuating circumstances leading me to override my usual prohibitions on other people and leaving the house: our legislature was about to vote on gay marriage. And it actually looked like we were going to win.

Our host had until recently been the chief of staff for a progressive State Senator, and was explaining Albany’s byzantine mechanics as we watched them, as well as the personal foibles and constituent pressures shaping each Senator’s incoherent ramblings (because, you guys, we have a shockingly inarticulate body of elected officials up in this state). He expected a narrow victory of 33 votes to 29. 32 of the yeas he was able to name, “and one person will surprise us,” he predicted.

“No WAY,” I protested, “we’re going to win by a landslide. All those same cowards who didn’t want to stick their necks out for the losing team two years ago, when the bill was clearly going to fail, will be just as cowardly now. No one wants to be remembered for voting against a historic extension of civil rights.” But when asked if I’d like to back my wager monetarily, I demurred. (A long time ago, I learned a valuable lesson about betting against expertise.)

When it became clear that the Democrats had, in fact, gathered enough votes to legalize same-sex marriage in the state of New York, I slipped through the room’s sudden jubilation of cheers and kisses and big gay hugs and ducked into an empty room to call Brian.

Brian and I became best friends in the sixth grade, right around the time we ended our bitter arch-rivalry, and the sitcom that will someday be based on our adjacent adolescences will be so awesome. There will be charming cross-cut scenes in which we each struggle and fail to confess our romantic inclinations to our respective crushes; mine, a bookish girl-next-door type with long, face-obscuring hair and thumbs sticking through the seams of her sweater-sleeves, and Brian’s, a wiry, crew-cut blond who seems to have stepped off his page in the new Abercrombie catalog for the sole purpose of making you feel bad about your jeans. There will be the cringe-inducing coffeeshop performances of Tori Amos songs, our adolescent falsettos mercifully inaudible over Brian’s ruthless piano-pounding and my overamplified acoustic guitar’s deafening feedback. And who will ever forget the classic scene where we buy each other’s first smutty magazines (remember magazines? This will be a carefully researched period-piece) to settle a dispute about society’s hypocrisies: “It’s no big deal to buy a gay one,” I propose, “because everyone expects gay dudes to be all sexed up. But if you want to see naked women, everyone thinks you’re some kind of sad pervert.”

“No dude,” Brian contests, “because if you buy a gay one, then everyone knows you’re gay.”

We are each so convinced of our respective theses that we march confidently up to the man behind the newsstand buried in the Grand Central subway stop and request the other’s preferred periodical. Needless to say, I lose this bet in a spectacularly embarrassing fashion, but as the credits roll, I’ve learned a valuable lesson about walking a block or two in another man’s shoes. Also, I resolve never to gamble again.

“Congratulations,” I offered through a spotty connection and the lump forming in my throat (because I am the sensitive, emotionally demanding half of our odd couple).

“Double-date wedding!” Brian shouted in his famous sorority girl voice. “You and me, man. Cate and Eduardo. It’ll be so fun!”

While I’ve never explicitly said as much, Brian knew I wouldn’t ask him to stand beside me as my best man while he and his fiance couldn’t get married themselves. He’d have done so without flinching; I’m the one who couldn’t abide the scene I pictured when I pictured it. He knew it was one of the major reasons, a year earlier, Cate and I had gotten our domestic partnership.

Okay, look: we’re not trying to evangelize. There’s no such thing as a perfect progressive, and we each make the sacrifices we feel we can shoulder. I could use fewer incandescent light bulbs, but they’re easier on my eyes when I draw, so I don’t. Neither Cate nor I has ever told anyone else not to get married. We don’t claim to be accomplishing any concrete good. We’re not trying to start a movement, just to live lives we can feel good about.

When it became obvious that we both planned to stick with the other for the long haul, we imagined gathering our friends and family members to help usher us into a civic contract that is unavailable to many of them, or to their kids or their parents or their friends. We imagined the people we loved who had battled to see their dying partners in the hospital, or whose bi-continental relationships had been destroyed by their inability to immigrate, scrolling through our registry. And we didn’t feel good about it.

And so, with as little fanfare as possible, we hopped a G-train down to the County Clerk’s office, where our discomfort calcified. Shuddering teenagers who barely knew each other were ushered into the municipal chapel with their legions of witnesses and paperwork and a justice of the peace for their culturally or religiously mandated unions, while middle-aged gay couples were asked for their thirty-five dollars, handed a certificate, and sent on their way. And it wasn’t just a matter of gravitas: The literature we were given to read while waiting in line detailed the many benefits of marriage not conferred by New York State upon domestic partners:

Because they cannot be considered spouses, domestic partners do not benefit from state income tax advantages, the spousal privilege and confidential marital communications, the ability to take out insurance policies on the other spouse, and other benefits of marriage. A surviving domestic partner does not have any inheritance or life insurance rights absent an explicit bequest in a will.

It went on to list several state court findings against domestic partners, and then, far more distressingly, the well-over-1,000 benefits of federal marriage not available to them, since their unions are not federally recognized. But hey, at least we could now visit one another in jail.

I called my mom. “Oh, okay,” she said, “that’s great.” And then she called back an hour later: “I don’t actually know what that means,” she confessed. “Am I supposed to send you monogrammed towels or not?”

I called my dad. “Well, that’s wonderful, Kenan. You know we like Cate so much… So does this mean you’re engaged?”

These were admittedly difficult questions to answer. What does a “domestic partnership” mean? Brian, ever the fearless one, didn’t stop to wonder. He and Eduardo took us out to an extravagant, alcohol-soaked dinner to celebrate our gay marriage.

“That sounds awesome,” I agreed, because now my best friend could get married, too. And not up in Montreal or, god forbid, Massachusetts, but right here in his own state, in his own town, in his own damn living room if he felt so inclined. And if nothing was stopping him, nothing was stopping us.

Except here’s the thing: Remember those 1,000-plus federal benefits of marriage? Like immigration, and jointly-filed tax returns? If Brian and I were to wed our respective partners at the same time in the same place, I would enjoy all those benefits. But thanks to the Republican Revolution and President Clinton’s craven triangulations, the Defense of Marriage Act prevents their extension to him.

Cate and I, though still domestic partners, no longer consider ourselves “gay married” since gay marriage became an actual thing. What’s more, we can’t actually get gay married anymore. I can’t get married here in New York and request the federal government not to recognize it. The only marriage available to Brian isn’t available to me. I know there are better ones on the market, but that’s the one I want.

When we say New York offers same-sex marriages, or that we have “marriage equality,” we’re congratulating ourselves prematurely. It’s “marriage” in the sense that my favorite vegan Thai place serves “duck;” it looks similar and goes by the same name, but when you open it up, it’s missing a lot of its substance. New York offers same sex couples a soy-based, marriage-flavored product which is clearly preferable to the Domestic Partnerships we offered them last year. But it’s not marriage, and it’s certainly not equality. We’re just not there yet. And it’s not entirely clear how you get there from here.

Obama expects the courts to weigh in some time next year (conceding defeat before the game begins in the manner for which he has become famous, he’s decided he can’t possibly undo DOMA legislatively while Republicans continue to exist). And until then… click here to contribute to the 2012 campaign!

My host’s prediction proved exactly correct, and gay “marriage” squeaked its way into New York state by a 33-29 margin. Because even at its absolute finest moments, Albany is pretty fucking disappointing.

It’s become a common theme of late, and not only at the state level: The Affordable Care Act, financial reform, the first economic stimulus and the newly proposed one; the Obama years have not been without their progressive victories, but all of them have been so qualified, so far short of what we dared to dream, so far short even of being adequate, that they hardly feel like victories at all. Because as people who believe that “exceptional” is something we as a nation do, rather than something we are, and that the Union can always be made “more perfect,” we never really win. At best, we claim higher ground from which to contest the inevitable next battle.

But of course, that kind of thinking isn’t terribly productive. We have to set our sights somewhere, I guess, and here’s where I set mine:

If Cate and I ever do get married, if we ever have a kid, and if that kid should find himself approaching the future’s equivalent of a newsstand to buy the future’s equivalent of Playgirl, I want him to be worried the proprietor will figure out not that he’s gay, but that he’s fifteen. Now that would be equality.