anne carle
We walked out of the back of the house onto the deck and there they were. Our oldest friends, our favorite coworkers, our grad school allies, our families. Our entire support system right there in our backyard. We'd sent 110 invitations, and 108 people said yes and then actually showed up exactly when we told them to. They brought food, abundant, delicious food, like we asked. They bought gifts. Some stood and spoke about our meaning, individually and together, in their lives. On our right was a string duet someone had donated; on our left was a band waiting to give what some of our friends called the best local live show they'd ever seen. And way in the back was the caterer friend who donated her unmatched organizational skills. A wedding photographer friend and a wedding videographer friend each donated their services, too. And there we were. Standing right up front under the arch, which was under our Bradford pear tree, in our backyard, in Richmond, Virginia. Beside us was our “officiator,” Barb. Our spiritual guide, our mentor, one of the best therapists in town, our friend and outdoor adventure buddy. We smiled back at our people, blindly, as the five p.m. sun lit us up. Slowly that sun descended below our cedar fence, as Barb got things rolling.
We got married on October 15, 2005. We didn't have a priest, a judge, or a marriage license. We didn't have wedding gowns or tuxedoes. We didn't have a church or a high-rise cake with two plastic people on top. Some of this we chose not to have. But because we're gay, some of it wasn't our choice. What did we have? A community event, a unifying celebration, a commitment ceremony. We designed it to be us presenting ourselves to our community and committing ourselves to each other before them. And more than that, it was designed to get a commitment from our community to stand by us, to rally around us, to think about us and our commitment.
Lots of people hesitate to call our event a wedding or our “arrangement” a marriage. Here's a common awkward moment: “Hey! Anne! I heard about your… thing! Your… I don't want to call it a wedding…what do you call it?” They stumble for a second because they don't want to offend us. But it was a wedding and this is a marriage. In a million ways, it looks just like any other marriage. Most of the time we enjoy spending every passing minute with each other tremendously. Sometimes we don't. And we make both difficult and fun decisions together. We help each other through hard situations, we hold each other accountable, we fight, we hurt each other's feelings, we make up, we agree, we disagree. We want to be doing this together for the rest of our lives.
I remember the minute I realized I really wanted to get married. It only came after a long path through lots of experiences I didn't really want or enjoy. I'd had several vaguely close approximations of wedding lust before my actual moment of clarity occurred. I inherited, like lots of girls seem to, this idea that marriage was kind of important. That's an understatement, of course. But there were ways I expected myself to be immune to it. The obvious way was my gayness. But being gay wasn't that simple for me and isn't for any gay person, really. I didn't “come out” as gay (tell people, send press releases) until I was thirty-four. By that time I'd been gay for about twenty years, in my estimation. I knew from forever that I was gay. I had so many crushes on girls—classmates, teachers, rock stars—that I lost count. I can safely say that I never had a real crush on a boy, ever in my life. I faked crushes on boys, though. In fact, I faked crushes on boys up until my thirty-fourth year. A couple of these boys I loved enough to feel lots of pain when it didn't work out. One boy I moved across the country with against all common sense, and then he left me, for a much less gay woman, and I was alone on the other side of the world. But this fake relationship had gotten so far that I'd imagined, if only briefly, that we might get married and have kids, and it might be an OK thing to do. His parents had mentioned it, after all. It turned out to be a good thing that we never got that far. When I moved back home, I figured out that enough was enough.
Home again, I gave up on men. I had a couple more crushes on women. One was fleeting and utterly not serious, the other changed my life forever. I tell Chris now that I knew I loved her when I heard her voice on the phone for the first time. She was organizing a ski trip that I'd signed up to take. Talking to Chris was like chocolate. Or color television. Or something strong and comfortable at the same time. And because the ski trip was a total, utter blast, we became friends. We watched the Winter Olympics together. One night when I was cooking dinner for Chris (sweet potato and black bean soup), I realized that I wanted to be with her. I wanted to be in the position to make dinner for her as often as possible. I had a crush on Chris like I'd had on dozens of other women. And for a few weeks I entertained just handling it the way I always had, by doing nothing, saying nothing, and keeping it to myself. But somehow I realized that what I was really doing was never, ever asking for what I really wanted. And this was suddenly a lot lonelier, and more wrong, than it had ever been.
To say I was raised Catholic is the hugest understatement ever. I was raised by the most conservative, orthodox, throwback Catholic father in an abundant community of conservative, orthodox, throwback Catholics. I got the message early from the community I was born into that there were lots of ways I could end up in hell, but there was one particular way that came with an all-expenses-paid, express ticket: being gay. When I was fourteen I prayed and prayed to be different than I was. And in high school when I couldn't care less for boys, I went on dates anyway, humored their horrible, sloppy French kisses, and said and did as little as possible. Then I went on like this for years. And finally, when I was thirty-four, I called Chris one night and told her I loved her. “I know you think I'm straight,” I said, “but I'm really not.” In some ways it was easier to say how I felt because Chris was gay and out already. She came out when she was right out of high school (no small feat for someone raised in Lynchburg, Virginia). But it didn't mean she loved me back. I said, “The most important thing is that I told you.” I said I wasn't expecting anything just because I told her. But of course I was. I had crossed over into the land of “I know what I want” and there was no going back. For better or worse, I'd reached out.
And then there was this period of about two weeks where I'd said what I said, Chris had responded with kindness but not in kind, and we were just hanging out like we always did. We went bowling on my birthday, where (she likes to remind me) I totally crushed her. And I went to a wedding by myself. A gay wedding. There, as two of my dearest friends committed their lives to each other in front of the many people who loved and supported them, I discovered what else I wanted. I wanted to get married. I wanted to marry a woman. I knew this so certainly, and this was so different from the almost ambivalent interior interrogations I held about every last man I dated or even thought about: Could I date him? Would I consider spending more than two days in a row with this guy? Would it be so bad to have sex with him? What about for the rest of my life? This moment was so different. I felt clear. I wanted to love and marry Chris. It may not happen, I said to myself, but this is what I want. And I finally knew.
As it turned out, all I needed to do was plant that seed in Chris's head. Chris and I had our first date less than a week after my friends' gay wedding. We became inseparable and moved in together six months later. By now, we've faced lots of challenges together—we've left bad jobs, taken new less-bad jobs, bought and renovated a house, started graduate school, raised kittens, put down one of our well-loved dogs, raised a new puppy, and negotiated the perils of a shared bank account. That's just for starters. The challenges we face together go much deeper, too. Chris and I have always been clear about what we're doing together—leading purposeful lives. Starting very early, Chris and I had long, fruitful conversations about our dreams, our spirituality, and our individual paths to emotional health. And as our dating became more than dating, I stated my most heartfelt intention: “I want to grow with you.” Chris agreed, and this is the ball we've always had our eye on. We ask ourselves, are we growing? Together and individually? As our relationship has evolved, growth always comes to mean different, more challenging things. Eventually, it meant marrying each other in front of a community of friends and family.
At this writing, we've been officially married for six months and joined at the hip for four years. We're both thirty-eight years old, acting like some weird combination of boy and girl tweeners. This is who we are, and this is what our life together is like. We can't get enough of each other. But what about the world outside our front door?
Behind every together moment of our lives is a background of contentious politics. We live in the giant shadow of “family values,” which, despite all we know and feel, does not include our family in its approval zone. We're married lesbians in Virginia…which is actually an oxymoron. Vir-ginia's informally known as the state that's least friendly to gays and lesbians, particularly because of legislation aimed at barring the recognition of same-sex couples. But Virginia also definitely reflects an unfortunate national mood. The recent tension has been building, nationwide, since November 2003. That's when things looked like they were going our way, toward an atmosphere of declining hatred and discrimination against gay people and same-sex couples. In November 2003, a judge overturned Texas legislation that outlawed consensual homosexual acts: an antisodomy law. It was a huge victory. A victory for our morale for sure. But it didn't last very long. After a very brief gay marriage movement in California, New York, and other places, America's conservatives pulled together in a massive movement that was eventually called family values. They set loose a campaign of fear that seemed to climax with George W. Bush's reelection. It started in reaction to the gay marriages, and a number of states started enacting fear-inspired legislation.
This legislation, born of the fear of difference, is also doing a pretty good job of scaring the crap out of us. Here's how some specific Virginia legislation could hit us where it hurts. We've bought a house together and we own three vehicles together. We're sharing our lives. If someone was interested enough, say, one of my throwback Catholic aunts (you know who you are), they could dissolve everything we've built together. For example, if I were to be hit by a bus, someone could step in and challenge Chris's right to keep the house, keep the minivan, inherit my life insurance, and on and on. In fact, if I didn't die right away, someone could prevent Chris from making the decisions that only she could make about my medical care… they could even prevent her from seeing me or being present when I woke up or died. George W. Bush's reelection, riding as it did on the coattails of the family values issue, seemed to bring these possibilities closer than they'd ever been before, right into our living room.
Chris admits now that she was in such a funk after the reelection that she wondered why we were even trying… why were gay people even trying to establish safe and sound lives for themselves, together as more or less traditional families? Why not just play to the stereotype and just screw around and drink and drug ourselves to death? Or simply give up altogether, wander off alone, and wait to die?
That's when we decided to turn outward instead of inward. In fact, our whole relationship so far had already represented a turning outward. I came out. I reached out of my homophobic distress for Chris, and she reached back. Now, in what seemed like the perfect time for a gay couple like us to lock the doors and hide our relationship behind the sofa, we reached out together to the rest of the world we knew.
Chris used to say, earlier in our relationship, that she didn't care about gay marriage, because she didn't want to get married. She had no use for trying to fit as a lesbian into “straight” establishments like marriage. I was in a different place because I'd had my moment of clarity about wanting to marry Chris, but I was still conflicted over what this would look like. We watched some couples around us plan weddings that seemed to be imitating, as closely as possible, a straight marriage, some right down to a gown and tux. It seemed laughable and it seemed degrading. We aren't proud now of the feelings we had then. But there was something that rubbed us the wrong way… actually, there was something terrifying about what these couples were doing. Gay people, like any group that experiences oppression, have a lot to be scared of. What would possess a couple to expose themselves to what feels like the whole mean, angry world like that? What we fear, we make fun of. So we laughed and laughed at the formal invitations complete with onionskin and embossing. And we didn't go. Then when all the bad family values legislation started to flood in, I started to point out to Chris, to both of us, that it didn't matter whether we wanted to get married or not. The country was moving toward moving backward, in a civil rights perspective; legislating against a certain group of people in a way we hadn't done since a distant, less enlightened time.
It was on New Year's Day 2005, right in the upswing of the George W. victory lap, that we both simultaneously warmed to the idea of marriage. We spent New Year's Eve with a friend who had rented an old, drafty farmhouse in Bath County, Virginia, right on the edge of Douthat State Park. On New Year's Day, we went hiking. We were by ourselves, Chris and I, on top of a small mountain, and I had a vision. I asked Chris, why don't we take a backpacking trip and have a ceremony for ourselves out in the woods? The way I saw it, it could just be three of us. Me, Chris, and our dear friend Barb, who would perform the ceremony. It seemed like a good idea. We committed ourselves to thinking about it. Personally, I had no idea where thinking would take us. But all ideas, if they're allowed to see daylight and breathe, will evolve. First there was a new idea I had of having another friend come along—a videographer. Wouldn't it be fantastic to document this somehow? Maybe even make a documentary? It was that idea of documenting that added a dimension to our ceremony. Why document? Over the next three months, we answered that question: Because this is important and we want people to see it. It was brewing somewhere in both of us that we didn't want to do this alone, unseen, unheard. So in March, Chris essentially announced that our wedding was too important to hide in the woods on a mountaintop. Chris was right, and we made a new plan. Our wedding had to take place in the center of our universe, in front of our community. We agreed to have a huge-ass rocking ceremony. In our backyard. In Virginia, the most un-gay-friendly state in the entire country.
We started talking about a ceremony. And then I almost don't remember anything between that moment and the moment we walked down the aisle and turned around into the blinding light… almost. What I remember is panic, worry, cold feet, and sometimes total and utter numbness. A coworker asked whether I felt like Bridezilla… but I actually felt more like Groomzilla. Chris pretty much planned everything, while I would nod and say, “Sounds fine.” And it did sound fine… Chris has always had a great instinct and imagination for planning things. I always had a great yawning terror of it. So I went comatose for a little while.
I had some opinions about some things, and shared them. But I felt for a few months like I was underwater. When I finally came to the surface, I freaked out. Sixty days out I could think of a million ways things could turn out terrible. I fixated on very specific details, like parking. One hundred and eight people? Where would their cars go? There was a church parking lot about three blocks away that we could borrow, but what if people didn't park there and just piled their cars up on our street, making our neighbors hate us and creating some kind of incident? What if the police came? I also freaked about having a registry. I'd never in my life sent out little cards to people essentially telling them to go shop for me. And now I was telling them to do it because, yay, I'm gay! And at the very root of these panic attacks was the serious doubt that I really had a community. I was watching all these people say they were coming, and all these other people say they'd do this or that for us for free (catering, music, photography, videography), and I couldn't fathom it. Something must be wrong here. Some-thing's going to screw up. I knew it. A mushroom cloud billowed in my head. Groomzilla was becoming Bridezilla.
Then came the Saving Analogy. Chris might say we both came up with it, but I think she's the one who pulled it out. Essentially, the Saving Analogy illustrated how we were two different kinds of person, and we could take two different roles in making this event happen. Here's the analogy. When we go to Kings Dominion, a local amusement park, Chris is the one to actually get us there. She's the planner; she gets us to pick a date, pile in the car, and drive there. But once we're there and we get to our absolute favorite ride, this bungee jump–swingy thing, I get us all harnessed up and hauled up about 150 feet, and I pull the rip cord. With no hesitation whatsoever, I pull the trigger, and we free-fall, screaming like freaks. So, Chris suggested, she would “drive” us to our ceremony. I would pull the trigger. I'd get us in front of our people, and I'd get us through the nuptials. And I did. Once the moment came, Chris turned from rock to jelly, and I emerged from my gelatinous form and held us up in front of that brilliant sun.
Now that we're married, our community totally lumps us in that “married” category. And there are added communal responsibilities. Three separate families, including my two sisters, have asked us to be on the list to take their children into our homes as our own if anything should happen to the parents. We're so honored to be nominated by our community as good candidates. And we're more than willing to come through for them. In fact, this willingness of ours to be there for other parents and children has become the bedrock of our conscious decision not to have our own kids. When I say it's a “conscious” decision, it might bring to mind this question: “Isn't parenthood for gay people always a conscious decision?” It might seem that way, because obviously, Chris isn't going to get me pregnant accidentally. But there are ways that gay families and parenthood have become a less conscious decision in our eyes. As soon as we got married, we were asked no less than five times by family and friends whether we were going to have children. The question alone is kind of a compliment. But it also reflects a growing expectation (in the gay-friendly world) that any “good” gay couple will build their own family, however they can manage it.
We've been invited to two gay family baby showers in the last three months. In case anybody's curious, I think that baby fever is now just as prevalent in gay people as it is in straight people. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel tempted. Sometimes I have a very secret, unexplored desire to be pregnant (I can hear my sisters choking, a whole state away from here). And Chris is like a genius with kids. She's been working with them for decades. So we've talked about it. Before the wedding, since the wedding. But we, both separately and together, have resisted a full-on commitment to the idea. And it took lots of talking to figure out why. We know right now that the best way for us to grow our community is not to have our own kids but to continue putting ourselves out there as allies to both our parent friends and our children friends. For us (not for everyone, we know), having our own children would mean building a separate family unit… and along with this comes a kind of insularity and isolation from the larger community. We've seen it happen to lots of straight people, to my sisters and our best friends especially. If we stay childless but reach out relentlessly to our sisters, friends, and their children, our family unit will swell and swell. And it's also a way we can complete the circle. These are the people who, when we reached out and held a ceremony, reached right back and held us in their hearts and minds.
Whenever we need to remember we're not alone, we pull out the wedding video and watch our favorite parts. Over and over. Just like any normal bride (and maybe groom) would, right? Here's a moment from our wedding video. My friend Sally stands up to give the last of about ten blessings. “I have faith in the union you are forming today, Anne and Chris, and I believe in the paradoxical beauty of two separate individuals forming one complete love. May you continually meet each other anew each day, and never cease to discover the distinctions that define your individual selves, for they will surely compound and enrich the building of your unity.” In her own words, there was some happy crying and sputtering, too.
Sally was supposed to be the last to stand and give a blessing. We'd planned it out, at Barb's suggestion, to prevent our ceremony from becoming as long as Charles and Diana's. But an unplanned blesser stood up. It was Chris's mother. It was a surprising twist. She hadn't been asked to give a blessing because we considered it enough of a beautiful victory to have her there and completely engaged. That had taken some work. Watching Chris open her mother's heart was one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen. Here's how it began. In March, Chris called her mother and told her about the ceremony, saying that she'd really love for her to be there. Her mother's first response? “In October? I might be at the beach that week.” It's not the response a bride expects from her mother. As a lesbian, Chris had lots of reasons to expect much less from her mother. And her father offered plenty less. He ignored the invitation, wouldn't talk about it, and didn't show up. But as weeks and months passed and October 15 crawled closer, Chris's mom warmed up. This was partly a result of the persuasions of Chris's older brother, Bill, who's also gay. Between Chris and Bill, Becky began to dip her toe into the pool of mother-of-the-brideness.
Then complete and utter chance stepped in. Chris was featured in an article in the Richmond newspaper a few months before the ceremony, an article about her mentoring a local gay youth who was now struggling with thoughts of being transgender. It didn't occur to Chris to share this article with her mother. She imagined her mother would simply never see it. But she did see it. A cousin happened to be in Richmond the day it came out and brought it home to Lynchburg for the entire family to read. When Chris's mother called her, it went something like this: “Chris. Why didn't you tell me you were in the newspaper? The whole family saw it before me. And now they all want to go to your ceremony. You have to send them invitations.” We thought getting Richmonders excited about a gay wedding would be hard enough. We didn't expect to get an excited, engaged crowd from Lynchburg, the home base of none other than Jerry Falwell. But we did.
Then Chris's mother contributed money toward getting our invitations printed. She called often and asked about the arrangements. Becky had always been nice to me, but she became more than that; she was now warm to me. She was embracing me. Which felt even more special because my own parents were deceased. And not only was she going to come to the wedding, but she was going to bring her boyfriend, and they'd stay in town for the night. We thought, victory. But she wasn't finished yet. She stood up and blessed us. “I'm Becky, Chris's mother, and this is my boyfriend, Bob. And I just want to welcome Anne into the family.” It was short, but it was sweet and very, very important. Our ceremony was the first step in our pursuit of a community larger and wider than our immediate families. But in the process of finding this community we rediscovered the people who had loved us the most from the very beginning of our lives.
We did actually say vows. But we didn't gaze into each other's eyes and spill our guts about our undying love for only each other. We could save that for the decades to come. Chances are, we'll need it. Instead we turned outward to our 108 people and said some words from a Native American blessing called The Beauty Walk. Here's a sampling:
Let us be embraced with the love by which the whole creation is moved, the very essence with which all things are held together. Dependent, yet independent, whole yet individuated, in which all are our relatives.
A love by which the whole creation is moved. That's what we shared with our people that day. And they shared it with us. By showing up; by bringing food, gifts, chairs, tiki torches, and lots of other extremely useful things; by standing before everyone and offering blessings; and by saying yes when Barb asked them, at the end of the ceremony, to commit their love and support to our relationship. This love shone a bright light on the dark moments of our lives: my tortured Catholic life in the closet, Chris's homophobic family and hometown, our despair as we witnessed homophobia becoming more and more politically fashionable. When light hits these dark moments, it becomes a lot clearer that our lives are actually big enough to survive and surpass them. We stood under our Bradford pear tree, smiling like crazy, and we knew this. And as the ceremony ended, right at dusk, Barb presented us to our community and they clapped wildly as we walked to the back porch and into the house. But we were going to be right back. After all, the band had started to play, the tiki torches were lit, and the party was just beginning.