Lundon Calling

Marriage … yes, it’s the talk of our times.  These past few decades have truly brought about a crossroad for the topic of marriage … legally speaking.

Legally married couples have maybe had to think carefully about what their marriage really meant … in a very definitive way.  This is a positive factor.

Queers who want to become legally married are also having to define exactly what they want in a marriage, just in case Society decides equality for everyone.  This is also a positive factor.

Almost 35 years ago, my lifemate/soulmate, Patrick, and I had to define “marriage” at that time for ourselves.  It too was a positive experience.

We knew we wanted to be together for the rest of our life and we wanted to make that statement to our families and friends.  It was a new day in the dawn stages of openness for queers and we wanted our lives to count … in a statistical sense for all queers wanting to get married.

A fellow-activist friend of mine – - Rev. Troy Perry, had recently founded the Metropolitan Community Church and the MCC was the first so-called “gay Church”.  Because of my job then as Mg. Ed. of the Coast To Coast TIMES, we had learned about a “Rite of Holy Union” which the MCC was providing for queers who wanted to make a “marriage” statement.

When Patrick proposed marriage to me as we walked to work one day, I said that “gays can’t get married” and he reminded me of Troy’s historic effort.  He also added that he’d rather have a HOLY Union than a CIVIL marriage anyway and be blessed by our Creator.  It sounded like a sane statement to me and we began our quest to get hitched.

The first step would be that Patrick would have to come out of his closet to his family; he had never done this and now we were wanting to tell them we were getting married and wanted to invite them to the “wedding”.  He chose to do this by taking Mom out for dinner on Mother’s Day; we selected a gay-owned fine dining House and his older sister, Linda, joined Mom for the “Mother’s Day dinner with Pat and Ace.”

Coming out is usually pretty stressful for anyone to do and now he also wanted to invite them to his wedding with a man!  Pat was … as we used to say back home on the farm … sweating like a stuck boar pig and I watched as he sought for just the right moment and the right words.  He finally kinda just blurted it out with the invitation to the wedding first and then added that he was gay.  To our surprise, both Mom and Linda responded identically with “well, we were wondering when you were ever going to tell us.  We’ve known you were gay for a long time.”

Well, of course we already had to pick the date for the wedding before this meeting with Mom … we had selected one year to the day when we first laid eyes on one another.  This meant we now had around only three months to get everything in place.  We would have to contact Rev. Perry asap.  We did and immediately began the weeks of Pastoral counseling required by Rev. Perry for all considering a Holy Union.

All of the other “normal” things involved with a regular wedding then had to be faced.  Where to hold the ceremony?  We chose Griffith Park and not a Church and we got a permit to be in the Park for the occasion.  Then there were the invitations and who would be invited … and the Reception and food.  And of course, what would we wear and how would everything fit into our budget.

This three months of living in a pressure cooker time also allowed us to learn so much more about ourselves and one another; what we might be like as a couple.  Of course it also did grant us a time to back out of the wedding just in case we learned that we might not want to live together for the rest of our lives.  We found out we worked well together in a pressure cooker.

We made our holy vows before an assemblage of around 80 straight and queer friends and Pat’s family members … he was a middle child in a family of fourteen.  My family did not attend.  We felt blessed by the thought of a holy union of TWO becoming ONE.

Yes, we knew we didn’t have equal rights as a “married” couple, but we had one another in a Holy union.  And today, as much of a hot topic is as the right of queers to marry their significant others, I’m not sure the path being taken now is the correct approach … but at least it is an attempt.  I honestly don’t know what the best path is … it will probably be a combination of a number of paths simply because of the makeup of our queer community these days!