hemingway...sike.

amidst another trip to the post office annex (!), this time successfully picking up my tori tickets, and craziness at work, i nearly forgot to tell all the 5's of 10's of you reading this blog that i was published in baltimore gay life again! here it is...



I’m old enough now that a lot of my friends are getting married. When I was first out of college and people I’d gone to school with were starting to get married it seemed so strange, so early.

“Well, I always knew that she wanted to do nothing but get married and sing in the church choir,” I snottily told my friends. After all, here I was living on the East Coast, working on my master’s degree, trying to make something of myself. I guess it never occurred to me that getting married and being the best singer in your church choir was an OK goal to have. It wasn’t good enough for me, so why should it be good enough for anyone else?

Now, though, my friends are getting married and it doesn’t seem so odd. We’re not kids anymore, and it makes sense that by the time you’re 25 or 26 you’ve found the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. I look around and suddenly I’m at the age where people are settling down, talking about having kids. The strangest thing is, I find myself right there alongside them.

I’ll just come out and say it: I want to get married. I don’t want to get hitched tomorrow or next year, or even necessarily before I’m 30. But I do want to get married. Going to these friends’ weddings made me feel something I never expected to: I want my own. All of it. Suits and family and friends and music and a reception. I went to a friend’s wedding earlier this summer, and for the first time I felt like I kind of got it. They weren’t getting married because they were expected to, or because they wanted a tax break (though I’m sure that was part of it). They were two people surrounded by 15 of their closest friends, their families standing proudly next to them. These people loved each other, and they were going to have a go at this marriage thing, whatever that meant.

At the same time, going to this wedding made me pensive. I stood aside, watching, knowing that even though I want the same thing that my friends had, a wedding with my family and friends giving us their blessing, I’ll never have it. I don’t say this because I want to sound hopeless; I say it because I know it’s true. My parents will come to my wedding (or my commitment ceremony, or whatever it’ll be called), but I can’t help but feel like they’ll be grinding their teeth the whole time. Don’t get me wrong, my parents are wonderful people who love, respect, and accept me, and I’ve been extremely lucky. I just suspect that they’ll see it as some sort of pretend ceremony, that they’ll be standing there supporting my decision to spend the rest of my life with the same man because they have to, kind of like they have to go to the dentist or spend money on gasoline.

Why does it even matter to me? Why have I experienced this sudden change in my attitude toward marriage? All through college I was diametrically opposed to gay marriage. I repeated the mantra of other radical queers: Getting married is nothing more than another way that gays are trying to assimilate into mainstream society, that we’re trying to buy acceptance from straight people by proving that we’re just like them. Why should queer people base our relationships and our lives on an outdated institution modeled after straights? I thought. We’re queer, after all, so our relationships should forge new territory, make new rules – or maybe exist without rules at all.

As I get older, though, I feel like I’ve begun to understand why gay people want to get married. It’s not just because of tax breaks, and it’s not because they want to show straight people once and for all that there’s more to gay culture than our sexuality. It’s because they’re with someone who they can’t imagine being without. Getting married isn’t a way of guaranteeing that they’ll never lose the other person, it’s a proclamation. They declare, The way I feel about this person is the way I’ve never felt about anyone before in my life. And I’ll stand here in front of all of you and say it.

I want to get married. I don’t know if it’s because I want the validation from my community and my family that a wedding might bring, or if it’s because I want the security of a husband. Or if it’s just because I want something that the government is telling me I can’t have. Whatever the reason, I’m going to have a wedding. But first I have to find the groom.

Robert is a classical singer, writer, and secretary who's proud to live in Baltimore, the gem of the bay. Learn more at http://reluctantreceptionist.blogspot.com.