Come to California,” I said.
?“I will if you marry me,” Ira replied.
This was two days before I was leaving for Los Angeles for work, and a week after same-sex marriage had been legalized there, making it reciprocally legal in New York State, where we live.
“No,” I told him bluntly. “Not now.”
He didn’t take offense. “Whatever,” he said.
There are plenty of reasons not to tie the knot. Like many men, I had always been in fierce and firm command of them all. First off, as someone who had been a defensive single most of my adult life, I still believe that solitude makes you a deeper person, not a lesser one. So I felt kind of guilty for being in a couple.
Then there’s the fact that marriage often lasts about as long as a Botox injection. And what is marriage anyway but (if I may be so pretentious) a hetero-normative institution that clumsily mixes property and the State with the divine and ethereal ideals of love?
For years, Ira and I had mocked the idea that gay people wanted to get in on something we associated with an expensive party and useless gifts from Williams-Sonoma. How did gay liberation become marriage fetishization?
We rolled our eyes each time the same-sex marriage issue flared up — when gay people charged San Francisco’s City Hall (Rosie O’Donnell leading the herds) and when they flocked to New Paltz, N.Y., where a maverick mayor was performing marriages that were legal for even less time than Eliot Spitzer spent in office.
Besides, why bother with the logistics of marrying in California when we had already become legal domestic partners in New York City three years earlier?
That gray day in March 2005 we walked into a crowded area of City Hall past formally clad brides and grooms waiting to have their legal ceremonies in a chapel that wasn’t available to us.
No matter. After filling out some paperwork, we stood before a bespectacled woman behind a dirty plexiglass window. She took our driver’s licenses, stamped a certificate and handed it to us.
“So that’s it?” I asked her.
“What do you mean?” she replied sternly.
“I was hoping you’d say something ceremonial.”
She frowned, then looked out at us and softened. “Congratulations, you two,” she said. “And don’t let me see you coming back here to undo this, O.K.? If you break up you’ll have to sign more forms.”
We thanked her, took some pictures, and on our way out ducked past a family throwing rice that wasn’t for us. “So now we’re as married as gays can be,” I said.
And so we were. But then, later, I was explaining our legal status to a friend.
“So it’s like having a parking permit,” she said.
Is that really how the term “domestic partnership” sounds? To me it was always official enough, and suitably symbolic of our commitment. After all, we did buy a weekend home together since tying our knot, and we bought an apartment, too.
Then, after the kind of hysteria that only a New Yorker can have about real estate, Ira gave up his rental lease in SoHo, sealing all escape hatches and removing all safety nets.
So why did I need to marry him in California — essentially again — well into our fourth year together?
But now, with Governor David Paterson of New York getting behind same-sex marriage so vociferously, and with Massachusetts joining California and Canada as yet another option for New York couples to take a trip and return home legally wed, marriage is not so easily waved away.
“Being gay and single is becoming the new smoking,” one friend said.
Hours after turning down Ira’s proposal, I found myself alone in a theater watching the “Sex and the City” movie. Marriage, the film seemed to be saying, is both a problem and a solution.
And as unsettling as it is to me, a man with single survivor guilt, I can’t imagine life without him.
referrence:www.sterlingtiffany.com
