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Plus We Saved a Thousand Dollars

Jeremy Cook

    The guy who wrapped me up in a great big bear hug was not, it turned out, a guy. A reasonable mistake under the circumstances—in addition to the fact that her close-cropped hair was tucked messily into a canvas ball cap, she was overweight in a way that renders a person sort of androgynously shapeless, especially when wearing a baggy T-shirt and cargo shorts, and what otherwise would have been obvious feminine features were obscured by jowls, wrinkles, and those bookish glasses with thick black frames. She was, I figured, a few years over fifty, and weighed maybe five times that. The breasts she pulled me so tightly into could easily have been those of an obese man.
    “Such a wonderful thing!” she was saying, squeezing me tight. “So, so wonderful!”
    After releasing me, she turned immediately to my brother, Ricky, and enveloped him just as hungrily.
    “Wonderful, wonderful! I’m so happy for you two.”
    You two. The words failed to register, nor did I catch the embarrassed mumble of my brother’s reply, because I had already turned proudly to my parents, who were standing just a few paces away as we took in the unexpected festivities.
    “See that?” I called over to them. “Guy just came up and hugged me!”
    It wasn’t until the “guy” had stepped back into the boisterous crowd jostling by that my wife, Cynthia, set me straight. She had been crouched beside us, petting the “guy’s” dog. (Apparently you’re allowed to walk your dog in San Francisco City Hall, just one of a million reasons to love that city.)
    “That was a woman, dipshit.”
    “Oh.”
    “And she thinks you’re marrying Ricky.”
    “Ohhhhh.”
    A reasonable mistake under the circumstances—not only were my brother and I wearing suits and matching boutonnieres, we had vastly different hairstyles, and while I was as clean-shaven as I ever permit myself to be, Ricky was cultivating a vague Van Dykeish sort of thing that Cynthia had already repeatedly advised him to remove with whatever sharp or abrasive object might be at hand in a civic venue (Charisse is OK with that thing on your face? Today of all days?), all of which disguised how much alike Ricky and I actually look, almost twins. At that moment, though, we could very well have passed for romantic partners about to tie the knot, and in light of the momentous historical circumstances, circumstances we had become aware of just a minute or two earlier—that’s exactly what the “guy” had assumed.
    This was Friday, June 28, 2013, the day my brother got married.
    Not to me, though.
    Obviously.

***

    Just two days shy of my brother’s second anniversary, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its Obergefell ruling, making same-sex marriage legal in all fifty states. And lo, among opponents of gay rights there was much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. But it should be remembered that however historic, the decision was merely the climax of years and years of progress by the gay rights movement, during which the outcome of Obergefell was augured by a patchwork of legislative and judicial victories that had already established marriage equality in 36 states and DC. And one of those victories, the anti-gay-marriage crowd would probably be delighted to know, very nearly derailed my brother’s—I’ll use their preferred adjective here—“traditional” wedding two years before.
    But I should explain.
    Berkeley, CA residents Kris Perry and Sandy Stier were the lead plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger (!!!), the Supreme Court case that, back in the summer of 2013, overturned California’s ban on same-sex marriage—i.e., the infamous Proposition 8, whose passage by referendum in 2008 invigorated a Christian right that had watched with some admixture of alarm and disgust as Americans’ acceptance and even embrace of homosexuality ballooned over the previous decade. The unlikely success of Prop 8 inspired redoubled efforts to implement gay marriage bans elsewhere, efforts that Obergefell has since pretty much defanged. Notable among these efforts was the production and broadcast of “A Gathering Storm,” an ad in which an attractive, multiethnic group of people representing targeted states take turns saying things like “I’m a Massachusetts parent helplessly watching public schools teach my son that gay marriage is OK” while dark thunderheads churn menacingly in the background. There’s lightning, even.
    The Supreme Court issued its 5-4 Perry ruling two days before my brother’s wedding, a small civil service involving just parents and siblings (and one voluble sibling-in-law), officiated by a San Francisco marriage commissioner. And just an hour before the ceremony was scheduled to begin, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dissolved the stay it had imposed on same-sex marriages as the lawsuit challenging Prop 8 worked its way through the courts. Thus the way was immediately cleared for countless gay couples to be legally wed in California for the first time in nearly five years.
    Perry and Stier, as you might imagine, didn’t waste a second.
    While we, Ricky and Charisse’s wedding party, milled and chatted at the base of a grand marble staircase, awaiting our appointment with the commissioner—she would, we’d been told, emerge from the chambers at any moment to perform the marriage right there on the spot as people bustled by on various municipal errands—we became aware of a growing commotion down near the Hall’s entrance. The lower steps of the staircase pooled elegantly into the center of the Rotunda, forming a kind of low platform on which we stood. The noise intensified, other millers and chatters turned their heads, and suddenly we found ourselves engulfed by a roiling tide of spotlights and boom mikes and TV cameras. And people. Lots of people. Happy people. Cheering people. People who danced and snapped photos and waved flags. There were rainbow flags and American flags and those navy blue flags with a yellow mathematical “equals” sign on them. At the heart of the scrum were two middle-aged women in obviously coordinated light gray clothing—one wore a skirt, the other a pantsuit—holding hands and marching purposefully forward, their gravity towing the jubilant throng along with them.
    Some quick investigatory Googling by members of our party filled us in on who these women were and what, exactly, was going on. My brother and I stood there shoulder to shoulder, watching.
    “Looks like you picked a good day to do this,” I said. “Story for the grandkids.”
    And before he even had time to respond, some fat guy walking a dog burst out of the crowd and pulled me into a great big bear hug.

***

    They have an endless supply of objections, the people who continue to fret about the “Gathering Storm,” and no one who’s been paying attention expects a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling to muzzle these folks any time soon. We’ve heard their claims about the pernicious consequences of same-sex marriage again and again and again.
    One of their claims is that traditional marriage will now inevitably suffer, which in turn will degrade and eventually dissolve the family, the very fundament upon which all society rests. Another is that gay marriage is a slippery slope. In fact, Chief Justice John Roberts’ Obergefell dissent explicitly raises the specter of polygamy, but fears of even more bizarre marital arrangements infest a certain segment of the American populace. If, the argument goes, a man can marry a man and a woman can marry a woman, then surely it’s only a matter of time before a man can marry his parakeet and a woman can marry her Jimmy Choos—or before, let’s just say, a brother can marry his brother.
    There are other objections, of course, lots but aside from the explicitly scriptural ones, these two seem to be the most stubborn and pervasive. And however unbidden, however logically or empirically unsound I’ve always found them to be, these objections swarmed me that day like a cloud of gnats, irksome and inescapable.
    Because what, I couldn’t help wondering, would the somber, earnest “Gathering Storm” characters make of my brother’s “traditional” wedding, now seemingly thwarted in a government building—a government building in San Francisco—as a wave of gay rights celebrants washed over us? Even the weakest imagination couldn’t fail to see the synecdoche of the scene, and given the various slippery slope (and other) arguments that have flitted about over the years, imagination is something gay marriage opponents have buckets of (when it suits their needs).

***

    Almost an hour after The Hug, we were still waiting on the commissioner. The Perry-Stier crowd had receded to the back of the Hall, where paperwork was being filled out and filed and various arrangements for the ceremony were being made. I know this because earlier that afternoon we had been through the very same process, a small bureaucratic obstacle that nobody minded because we were all so excited for Ricky and Cha.
    Now, though, we were bored and antsy. There was a fancy sushi dinner waiting for us down at the Embarcadero—and, more importantly, champagne and cocktails.
    “They said to wait here, right? The stairs? Not somewhere else?”
    “Maybe they forgot?”
    “Wait, you sure it was 3:30? Hey, did everyone else hear 3:30? Who told us 3:30?”
    “Should someone go back there and remind them?”
    “I definitely heard 3:30. It was 3:30, right?”
    “Dammit, we should be half drunk by now.”
    Neither Cha’s family nor my own are the kind of people who feel comfortable imposing. In general, we’re patient and passive, loathe to make a stink, deferential almost to a fault, particularly in public.
    Cynthia, however, is none of these things.
    “Obviously they forgot. Can I please go yell at them now?”
    “It’s not your wedding,” I pleaded. “Don’t make a scene. She’ll come soon. It’s probably just all the commotion, right?”
    So we continued to stand there, waiting, which gave me plenty of time to think. And what I wound up thinking was, Fuck. They would just love this, wouldn’t they, seeing us standing here, neglected and forgotten?

    Uh-huh, look it there. Barely an hour into the thing and already REAL marriage gets tossed by the wayside, ta-ta now. Got those poor kids waiting to start the kind of life all humanity depends on, just HUMANITY is all! Just a shame. Maybe they don’t even get married today. Maybe they figure, hell, why even bother. This how we gonna be treated? And that other couple there, that dark-skinned girl—what is she, you think, mulatto? arab?— arguing with her husband about should they pipe up, maybe now that there’s just a divorce in diapers. Probably so. The men outta just go find themselves another man and the women go find themselves a woman and then everyone’ll throw ‘em a big old party like for them dykes in gray. What’s that? You asking why don’t the brothers just marry each other? Hell, might as well. That’s where we’re headed.

    And so now, suddenly, on a day when my mood should have been nothing but celebratory, I was instead frustrated and pissed, upset both because I knew I was probably being unfair to the whole “Gathering Storm” crowd—surely, their bigotry is rarely so free-wheeling and cartoonish—and because part of me wasn’t totally convinced that I was. Being unfair. And given the occasion, the moment, my little brother’s big day, it was a shame that I had to be thinking about this at all.

***

    So, well, yeah, Cyn was right: the commissioner had forgotten—a reasonable mistake under the circumstances. News that Perry and Stier were on their way had set the Hall abuzz, generating no small amount of distraction and confusion among the commissioners and other civic personnel. The impromptu parade and swarming media had, of course, only exacerbated the situation.
    And this is precisely where the “Gathering Storm” folks would howl about neglect and social tumult. Traditional marriage pushed to the margins. Disorder. Confusion. Brother marrying brother, for God’s sake—or something damn close to it.
    But then here’s what happened.
    After first extracting a promise that she would comport herself with the utmost civility, we allowed Cynthia, chaperoned by Cha’s mild-mannered brother Herb, to go inquire about the holdup. The commissioner came hustling out almost immediately, her black robe aflutter above a pair of shuffling Birkenstocks (really), embarrassed and extremely apologetic.
    By way of atonement, instead of performing the ceremony there in the busy Rotunda as initially planned, she herded us into an elevator that took us to the fourth floor balcony, from which we were afforded a magnificent view of the Hall’s Baroque interior. (We later learned that a $1000-dollar fee is usually charged for the balcony’s use in weddings.) Two levels below us, the Perry-Stier ceremony was taking shape on the Mayor’s Balcony. The happy crowd, having followed them upstairs, was just beginning to settle in around the couple, its noise fading to a melodic hum. California Attorney General Kamela Harris, whose refusal to defend Prop 8 in court had prompted the law’s dissolution, would be the officiant.
    As with almost all forms of moral miscalculation, the problem with objections to gay marriage is that they’re preoccupied with hazy philosophical constructs—Tradition, Natural Law, Slippery Slopes—or silly conceits whose baseness lurches fully into view only when they’re nakedly articulated: e.g., “romantic commitment fundamentally depends on a penis penetrating a vagina.” Such preoccupations put abstractions and anatomy ahead of people. Not that philosophical constructs are unimportant; big abstract ideas like Justice and Equality are at the heart of movements that produce things like the Obergefell ruling. But we often treat these values as ends when in fact they are means. As such, they matter only insofar as they pertain to immediate human experiences like joy and sorrow, and only insofar as they bring good people together (or keep them apart).
    In what I’m guessing is probably a very rare statistical anomaly, Cha’s two brothers both happen to be gay—I’m fairly sure they have no intention of marrying each other—and in fact it’s through them that my brother even had the good fortune to meet his future wife.
    When Ricky moved to Silicon Valley as a recent college graduate, he knew almost no one. To broaden his social horizons, he Googled up a couple recreational sports leagues and joined. It wasn’t until warming up for his first game with South Bay Volleyball Club that he realized his mistake. SBVC turned out to be a member of NAVGA, the North American Gay Volleyball Association (yes, a real thing). His new teammates, who had of course pegged him that day as a fish out of water as soon as he entered the gym, teased him duly, then became some of his first friends in the Bay Area.
    On that team was a good friend of Herb and Aegin, Cha’s brothers.
    And so now here we all were, a newly minted family, the very fundament, yes, on which all society rests, and two floors below us another family was being simultaneously consecrated—not just Perry and Stier, but in a way, the scores of people who’d gathered spontaneously and joyfully because something big had changed that would allow unions like these to be replicated again and again and again, hopefully forever. These people were happy for themselves and for others, happy enough to publicly bear-hug total strangers and congratulate them for doing something that would surely make their lives better. The “guy” with the dog had been mistaken in the superficial particulars, just as I had been about her, but she was right in spirit. And though the upheaval had, true, been a bit of an inconvenience at first, it had ended up literally elevating us all, and without costing us (mostly) heterosexuals a thing.
    How’s that for synecdoche? It was beautiful up there on the balcony.
    The commissioner, having finally regained her composure, directed us to form a semi-circle around Ricky and Cha, then proceeded. Again, nothing fancy—just a simple, quiet ceremony to celebrate a union that had taken root long before and would continue to grow long after. And as we all stood there beaming, cheers bubbled up at intervals from the crowd below, one particularly loud burst making itself heard just as Ricky and Cha were exchanging rings so that it was easy to imagine that all the cheering was in fact for them. And really, it might as well have been.

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