Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Zeddi Lee
Sometimes, the best way to overcome a limit is to reach beyond it,
to grab hold of that reality and draw it back into the present moment,
try it on,
see how it fits.
That’s what San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom did
on Valentine’s Day, 2004,
when, without any particular legal basis,
he announced that San Francisco would begin issuing marriage licenses
to same-sex couples.
It was a grand gesture, symbolic and photogenic.
Now, I had always been mixed-emotioned about marriage.
Not having access to it made it easy to be judgy about it,
“It’s old-fashioned. It’s sexist!”
My partner Oren and I were on the same page about this.
We had registered as domestic partners
for its slim bundle of coldly described rights,
but we had never had a ceremony.
That was too marriage-like,
and we did not want to mimic an institution
that did not want to have us.
But the television coverage was compelling.
(Laughter)
And so were our friends -
I mean, not compelling exactly -
desperate!
After two weeks of watching same-sex octogenarian couples
standing in line in the rain,
eating damp wedding cakes sent by out-of-state well-wishers -
a spectacle of love
that did more to change public attitudes about gay people
than any campaign, litigation, legislation or protest in American history -
our friends couldn’t stand it one minute longer.
“You have to get married! It’s a historic moment!” they said,
meaning, “I have to go to a gay wedding! It’s a historic moment.”
(Laughter)
Slowly, our resistance gave way to the romance of it.
We decided to do it.
I drove down to San Francisco City Hall.
By this time, there were no more lines around the block;
instead, there was a computerized appointment system.
I took a deep breath
and walked into the county clerk’s office.
“I’d like a spot on the wedding docket, please.”
“Sorry, we’re all booked up.”
“All booked up?”
“Yep! Next six weeks, booked solid.”
“Hmm ...
What about beyond that?”
“Oh, wide open!”
“Well, great! I’ll take one of those appointments.”
“Sorry, we can only make appointments six weeks in advance.”
(Laughter)
“So I have to come here every day
to try to get an appointment six weeks out?”
“Uh-huh.”
(Laughter)
“Can I do this by phone or online?”
“Sorry.”
I gave up; clearly, the marrying life was not for me.
(Laughter)
I trudged a couple of blocks to a restaurant called Ananda Fuara
to drown my sorrows in garlic-free vegetarian food.
When I walked in, I saw my lawyer friend Jeff with his boyfriend.
I told them how I’d been bested by the bureaucracy,
then I sat down to order my lentil loaf.
As I was raking up the last dry crumbs,
(Laughter)
Jeff appeared at the table.
“Listen,” he said,
“We have a wedding appointment for March 11,
but the law is so up in the air.
We’ve decided not to use it.
We’d like you to have it.”
“Did they mean it?”
I didn’t want them giving up their shot at a wedding
just to do a good turn for me.
On the other hand, maybe they weren’t ready to commit.
Maybe they had good reason for cold feet,
and I was giving them an honorable way out.
“Thank you.
Yes.
Thank you.”
And we were off.
We had less than two weeks to pull this thing together.
It was impossible to get Oren’s parents over from Israel,
or my sister from Japan.
But my mother bought a plane ticket.
We asked county supervisor and former stand-up comedy Tom Ammiano
to officiate.
We told our friends to cancel their plans.
We organized hummus and cake for our celebration afterwards.
We bought shirts.
(Laughter)
The day arrived.
Breathless, we showed up at City Hall and met up with our entourage.
Jeff was there too in order to verify
that he was relinquishing his appointment to us.
He and Oren and I took a deep breath,
and walked into the county clerk’s office.
"We are here to get married."
"You have an appointment?"
“I have an appointment,” said Jeff.
“And I’m giving it to them.”
“I’m giving it to them.”
“I’m sorry, wedding appointments are not transferable.”
(Laughter)
"But that makes no sense. There’s no fraud here.
He’s standing right here, saying it’s okay,
and you already allotted the time for his wedding!”
"Yeah, not transferable.”
“No, but you don’t understand.
My mother flew here from Chicago,
Tom Ammiano is waiting in the rotunda.
I have 31 people in the hall,
and flowers!”
I added flowers, pathetically,
as if somehow flowers would tip the balance.
(Laughter)
“Not transferable ...”
“What’s going on here?”
It was Nancy Alfaro, the duly appointed San Francisco county clerk.
“They don’t have an appointment.”
I repeated my whole litany, including the flowers.
“Go stand over there,” she said,
pointing to a spot in the office
that we quickly came to understand as the “problem couple pen.”
(Laughter)
We were not alone there.
There was another "problem couple,"
Nicole and Amita,
two young African American lesbians,
both deaf,
who had driven up from Riverside to get married.
They had an appointment,
but they had not told City Hall they would need an interpreter.
Hence, consignment to the pen.
We smiled at each other and exchanged rudimentary pleasantries.
I should tell you that as an undergraduate,
I had taken a semester of American Sign Language.
And in the intervening quarter century, I had never had cause to use it.
(Laughter)
But it was important to me to stay in practice,
so I used to sign a little bit to myself a song on the radio
or the newscast on TV.
And in the process, I had begun to make up little signs ...
(Laughter)
for words that I didn’t know.
(Laughter)
I wasn’t signing with any real deaf people,
so what was the harm?
(Laughter)
Except that over time, I began to lose track …
(Laughter)
of what signs I had learned and what I had invented.
And so,
when Nancy Alfaro would come over
with an update about her search for an interpreter,
I would translate this to them and then study their faces
to determine if what I had just given them was information or gibberish.
(Laughter)
“You know how to sign?” Nancy Alfaro asked.
“Oh, no. Just a little bit from college.”
“Can you sign their wedding?”
“Oh, no.”
“I need you to sign their wedding.”
“No, that would be a terrible mistake.”
(Laughter)
“Listen to me.
I cannot send them home to Riverside today not married.
You must do this.”
I was about to object again,
but the wind was taken out of me by Oren’s knuckle deep in my ribs.
“What about our wedding?” he asked.
“Your boyfriend signs theirs, then you can have yours.”
(Laughter)
Before I knew what was happening, I was whisked to a wedding chapel
that could have only been designed by a civil servant.
(Laughter)
Nicole and Amita didn’t bring any friends with them,
so my buddy Emily,
a lawyer who had long been fighting the marriage fight,
stepped up to be their witness and to take pictures.
The officiant, some city functionary, pressed into overtime matrimonial duty,
opened his script:
“We are gathered here in the presence of these witnesses
to join in matrimony Nicole and Amita.
We are here with ... ” -
point to Emily, point to self -
“Unite in marriage you and you.”
(Laughter)
“The contract of marriage is most solemn.”
“Marriage is important,”
(Laughter)
“and is not to be entered into lightly.”
“Marriage is very important.”
(Laughter)
“But seriously and thoughtfully,
with the full realization of its duties and obligations.”
(Laughter)
“Marriage is very, very important.”
(Laughter)
I spelled half the ceremony on my fingers.
I watched frequent confusion on their faces
give way to looks of love and joy between them.
I was embarrassed about my ineloquent hands.
On the other hand, Nicole and Amita did not need a lecture
on the significance of marriage.
Nobody getting married in San Francisco that month did.
They kissed, we hugged them,
Emily and I raced up the stairs to the rotunda balcony
where we found Tom Ammiano, with Oren and our gang of people,
ready to begin.
“We are gathered here in the presence of these witnesses
to join in matrimony Oren and Erwin,”
the same script as I heard downstairs, that now I knew so well.
We ran through the canned vows,
and then we added words of our own,
Hebrew from the Book of Ruth.
(Hebrew)
“Where you go, I will go.”
(Hebrew)
“Where you lodge, I will lodge.”
(Hebrew)
“Your people will be my people; and your God, my God.”
(Hebrew)
“And where you die, I will die,
and there I will be buried.”
We kissed, we ran downstairs to submit our paperwork,
we waved goodbye to Nicole and Amita,
who were two and a half minutes ahead of us in the wedding assembly line …
(Laughter)
We piled into the car
my mother, my cousin,
my husband, and I.
We turned on the radio to hear the breaking news bulletin:
the California Supreme Court had just halted the weddings.
We canceled our celebration and went right to a protest march
down Market Street.
My mother held a sign that someone handed her, saying:
“That’s my family.”
Oren and I carried sheets of notebook paper
on which we’d scribbled “Married Today.”
A few months later, all of the weddings were invalidated.
But in that time, something had happened.
We had reached beyond a limit,
a limit of law,
a limit of language.
We had grabbed that reality and drawn it back into the present moment
and tried it on like a wedding tux,
or a bridal veil.
And we discovered that we liked how it fits.
It took another four years
before there was a legal window of opportunity for us to marry again,
and then another seven years
before the US Supreme Court made it the law of the land
and we were able to exhale.
It always seems strange to me,
when people ask us how long we’ve been married,
to say, “Nine years,”
when we’ve been “us” for 23.
But we will be the last generation with this disparity,
with marriages that are icing
on an already fine and fully baked cake.
We are here,
united
in love.
Marriage
very, very …
(Laughter)
(American Sign Language) Important.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheering)