"When my heterosexual clients decide to get married, it usually marks a transition in their relationship, a deepening into a different kind of commitment to longevity, a vow to be faithful to whatever promises they make to each other about the shape and structure of their relationship. For heterosexual clients following the traditional path of dating-engagement-marriage, the wedding is a rite of passage in their relationship, a public invocation and formalization of new rules and boundaries.
For queer clients getting married, it’s a political action. Some have come to me to work out their feelings about marriage because their children have asked them to get married, wanted their families to have the same rituals and signifiers as their peers in school. For many couples, the ambivalence about getting married, about having a wedding, stems from the sense that they have already been married, sometimes for decades. "
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http://www.lgbtpov.com/2010/02/visible-and-vulnerable-my-marriage-and-the-psychological-impact-of-prop-8/
Visible and Vulnerable: My marriage and the psychological impact of Prop 8
Visible and Vulnerable: My marriage and the psychological impact of Prop 8It’s a strange anxiety that permeates my psychotherapy practice these weeks of waiting, after the end of testimony in the Prop 8 trial, and before the final ruling.
It seems like most of my clients are talking about marriages, their own or others’, among their families and friends. Conversations start and stop—halting, hesitant. Some of my politically active heterosexual clients hesitate to talk about their marriages or engagements while their lesbian, gay and transgender friends are in awkward, political limbo.
Queer clients talk cautiously about the struggles in their partnerships as though fearing any exposure of problems in queer marriages works against the cause. It’s a vulnerable time. My clients walk through the world with heightened awareness of visibility and vulnerability. And so do I.
In my psychotherapy practice, marriage has been a frequent topic since Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were wed by Gavin Newsom in 2004. Couples who had always dreamed of a recognizable signifier to mark their relationship began to plan weddings. Couples who had never considered getting married because it wasn’t a possibility now had to make a conscious decision. And a few heterosexual couples who had refused the institution of marriage out of solidarity with their lesbian and gay friends now began to consider getting married. Parents of clients began to speculate about which partner would adopt whose family’s name.Even my partner’s mother who assumed we’d get married wondered if I’d be taking theirs.
My partner and I have always been ambivalent about the institution of marriage, its misogynistic history as a business arrangement between one man and another. And yet we also come from families where marriage works. My partner’s parents were married for more than 50 years. My parents, still in love, are an interracial couple who married at City Hall in Los Angeles in a small ceremony with a few friends as witnesses. That was just two years after Loving v. Virginia.
We never planned on getting married. For years we were registered domestic partners, covered on each other’s health insurance, named on emergency forms, and shared our bank accounts. But because we are both longtime activists and easily pissed off, when the polling numbers for Prop 8 started making us nervous, we planned a quickie Halloween City Hall wedding.
Meanwhile, in my psychotherapy practice, my clients were surprised by the things that scared them. The ones who were already deeply committed to their partners with visions of a long life together discovered that they weren’t frightened about the idea of being married. Mostly, they were frightened by the idea of a wedding, and what weddings and the process of marrying signified in their families of origin.Marriage creates a common language in any given family system to talk about relationships and commitment. For some clients, this has meant thinking about the ways in which they are determined to have marriages different from the marriages of their parents and grandparents. For other clients, and for me and my partner, marriage has given us a common language with our parents to talk about the ways in which our relationships are similar, and to acknowledge the ways they have modeled loving and committed partnerships.
About a week before our wedding, we went to San Francisco’s City Hall to fill out our paperwork. Walking through the rotunda where just a few weeks earlier we had attended Del Martin’s political memorial, a woman in jeans and a sweatshirt approached us, out of breath, shy and urgent. She and her partner of eight years had traveled from Alaska with their two young sons to get married. The first vacation they had ever taken with their kids, they were getting married because they wanted to adopt a third child. Though they were raising their two biological children, an adoption social worker told them that their chances of having a child placed with them were better if they had a tangible, legal marker of their relationship. They hoped that the adoption agency would consider a marriage certificate as proof of their stability.
I watched them, their ease with each other, the ways they calmed each other’s fears as they told us their story, the ways they kept vigilant over their two sons gleefully running up and down the steps of the rotunda. What other proof did they need? Witnesses. My partner and I stood teary next to them as they read their vows, crying and holding hands and hurrying through the ceremony as their restless boys raced each other on the marble steps.
The morning of our wedding we woke to rain. My parents, who had arrived the day before with my 74-year-old auntie, were already dressed and making lattes in the kitchen. We woke up my aunt and got dressed. Our friend Becky, who planned to meet us at City Hall, called to ask if we had flowers. “Ummm,” I said, looking at the dark sky. “I’ll get some,” she said.
It was still raining when we arrived at City Hall. Waiting for a few friends, we watched the activity around us. Occasional bursts of applause from balconies and landings announced new marriages. With less than two weeks until Election Day, LGBTQ couples like us were marrying as quickly as we could, just in case our rights were taken away. My auntie, who spent her childhood in Manzanar Internment Camp, watched the couples intently, nodding her head. Becky arrived carrying a bouquet of Japanese lanterns that symbolize fortune and blessings, and whose bright orange blossoms were the perfect color for the dark Halloween morning.Kids in costume swarmed the halls and balconies. Groups of eight-year-olds wandered from their classmates as their teachers called for them. A nursery school teacher in a Cruella de Ville costume and white-striped wig led a procession of children dressed as 101 Dalmations, clad in safety-pinned tails and white and black spotted t-shirts. Our friends emerged from behind the Dalmatians, and we walked up the stairs to a small, quiet balcony.
When my heterosexual clients decide to get married, it usually marks a transition in their relationship, a deepening into a different kind of commitment to longevity, a vow to be faithful to whatever promises they make to each other about the shape and structure of their relationship. For heterosexual clients following the traditional path of dating-engagement-marriage, the wedding is a rite of passage in their relationship, a public invocation and formalization of new rules and boundaries.
For queer clients getting married, it’s a political action. Some have come to me to work out their feelings about marriage because their children have asked them to get married, wanted their families to have the same rituals and signifiers as their peers in school. For many couples, the ambivalence about getting married, about having a wedding, stems from the sense that they have already been married, sometimes for decades.I wondered the same thing, standing in the balcony, holding my partner’s hand, our loved ones gathered around us. Weren’t we already married? Hadn’t we already made these promises when we knew we were in love and committed to being together? When she moved across the country because of my career? When we flew to Florida as her father was dying and stayed for weeks to take care of her mother? When I was wheeled in for surgery and she paced in the waiting room, calling my parents with updates? When we set aside our weekend plans as a couple because one of our friends needs some TLC?
Our marriage ceremony was brief. It was performed by our friend Steven, a San Francisco City Health Commissioner and AIDS educator who talked as much to our friends and family as he did to us. He asked them to vow to stand in support of us as we move through the world, and as we move through the day-to-day joys and difficulties of continuing to build the life that we’d been building together for years.
Photo by Dina Boyer
Steven asked if we had rings. Fifteen years earlier, a beloved friend in the AIDS activist community had given me a set of silver stacking rings, placing them gently on my ring finger as a reminder of my connection to my community in the wake of a terrible season of deaths. Though my partner and I had exchanged rings years earlier over an intimate dinner at home on an anniversary, we had wanted something to mark the occasion of our legal marriage. Taking apart the set of rings and giving one to her in our ceremony marked not only our marriage to each other, but located us within a community to which we would continue to be committed.
After we signed the marriage papers, Steven kissed us goodbye and hurried off to catch a plane to Africa. He was going to help open an AIDS clinic.
Part of the uneasiness in the LGBTQ activist community about the focus on marriage has stemmed from a concern that a movement toward nuclear families would move us away from a commitment to community. Had gay marriage been legal in the 1980s and 1990s, would the community have knitted together so closely to take care of our friends and chosen family dying of AIDS?
Activists, myself included, feared that a LGBTQ focus on the family would deter us from a commitment to fighting for health care, fair and humane immigration policy, and end to torture, poverty, gendered violence, and class and race based disparities in education. But as I’ve settled into my own marriage, and watched some of my clients settle into theirs, I am reminded that the fear is only true if we believe families exist in a cultural vacuum, outside of our responsibilities and connections to our communities.
After leaving City Hall, my parents took us to lunch where my father and our friends toasted us, and we them.
The rain kept falling late into evening, drowning the candle in the pumpkin my mother had carved. We couldn’t stop smiling at each other as we handed out Halloween candy to the neighborhood children, our silver rings catching the glow from the porch light.Finally, exhausted from the day, from our vulnerability and visibility in the long battle, we went to bed early: my parents to the guest room; auntie to our bedroom; and Oliver, our 80-lb dog, thinking it was a slumber party, kept trying to join us on our lumpy living room futon.
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