I’m not an early adopter. When it comes to tech gear, I’ve always
thought you should never buy the 1.0 version of anything, because the
bugs won’t have been worked out. I have been ahead of the development
curve on some things, though, and one of them is queer marriage. I was
legally married to someone with matching genitals before this case in
California was even a gleam in Gavin Newsom’s eye.
How so, you ask? There’s always been a loophole in the
queer-marriage blockade: transsexuals. I married someone who was born,
and who lived the first 30-odd years of her/his life, as female. He
then decided to change his legal gender to male. No matter
what you have in your pants, if one of you has ID that says
male and the other female, you can get married in
just about any state in the union. (The details of how you change your
legal ID are too long to go into. But in Washington, it does not
require that someone have any genital surgery. Most female-to-male
transsexual people don’t, because it’s expensive and the results are
often not great.)
For the curious: It works the other way, too. If a man and a woman
are legally married and one of them gender transitions, they’re
still legally married. The state cannot undo a legal marriage
against the will of the couple. So a certain kind of same-sex marriage
has existed for some time now.
Before my husband’s gender transition, he’d spent years in the dyke
community being very out as a queer. And after that transition, he and
I could pass as an average heterosexual couple. But we didn’t think of
ourselves that way. And we knew that if the country was ever taken over
by militant Christians (or more militant ones), the two of us
would be up against the
firing-squad wall with the rest of the
queers. The hair on his face and his deep voice would not make up for
the fact that he also had a vagina and a uterus. In our minds, we were
two nonconforming queers taking advantage of a loophole.
So right around the third anniversary of our first date, in the
finest tradition of young, dumb heterosexual people, we went to Vegas
and got married. I remember standing in line in the courthouse of Sin
City, waiting to get a marriage license. The clerk went through the
usual questions and asked for our IDs. He looked at my husband’s
driver’s license, with its Sex: M designation, glanced up at his face,
and then handed it back without a flicker and stamped our application.
It was that easy.
And it was also that dumb.
My getting married was a mistake. A big one. There were a number of
reasons why, but one big problem was that both my husband and I had a
lot of unexamined baggage about the concept of marriage.
I spent a decade assuming that my sexual orientation meant I’d never
get legally hitched. And that was fine with me—I didn’t feel much
need to have my love life blessed by society. But when I found myself
in a situation where I could have a big, splashy, in-your-face
wedding—well, it seemed like an opportunity to give a good ol’
Johnny Cash–style “fuck you” to the straight world. I’m here,
I’m queer, I’m marrying my tranny lover, and you can’t stop
me.
I certainly didn’t think being married would alter my life in any
day-to-day way. It was just a ceremony, a piece of paper, and a cheaper
rate on health insurance.
Although I must have had some dim
flicker of concern, because I recall saying to my lover, “This isn’t
going to change anything about our relationship, right?”
He assured me it would not.
To this day I don’t know if he really believed that, or if he was
just telling me what I wanted to hear. But either way, I was naive to
not understand that Nietzsche was right: When you look into the abyss,
the abyss also looks into you. That piece of paper, the fact of being
legally married, changed a lot of things in my relationship with my
husband. As the full weight of the matrimonial chain settled onto us,
he began to bend, and adjust his stance on what our life together
should be, in order to carry it. He began to act, in fact, like a very
traditional heterosexual married man, and he expected me to act more
like a traditional little wifey. Which I utterly refused to do.
“But we’re married now,” he’d counter, as though being
Mr. and Mrs. erased all our previous identities. We struggled
to communicate in our new roles, we tried therapy, but in the end, I
was too firmly wedded to my outlaw ways. I dropped my end of the chain
and left.
I hadn’t understood what it would be like to be legally
married—and I sure hadn’t thought about what an ordeal it would
be to get legally divorced. When you’re queer and you break
up, you just… leave. It doesn’t ease the heartbreak, or make finding
a new place to live—let alone dividing up the dishes and the
DVDs—any easier. But I can remember the unpleasant churn of my
stomach when I sat amid a welter of half-packed suitcases and realized
that I hadn’t even begun to end my marriage. At that point, the only
thing I wanted to be to my husband was a distant memory. But in the
eyes of the law, I was still just as much his wife as I’d been on our
wedding day in Las Vegas. Once you get married, it ain’t over until a
judge says it’s over.
(It’s true that even if we hadn’t been married, my husband and I
could have tangled our money and property up in a way that required
attorneys to pick it apart. But it’s not the same thing. Which is
exactly the point, isn’t it?)
I don’t think I’ll ever get married again, to a woman or a man. If
that’s what you and your partner want, then you have my best wishes.
Having the legal rights of a marriage can be a valuable thing. But be
aware that the institution behind those rights can affect your intimate
relationship, so don’t say, “I do” on a whim. Or you’re likely to
achieve parity with straight people in a whole new way—by
undergoing the same lengthy, unpleasant, and expensive ordeal when you
want to say, “I don’t.” 