On Credit

Washington State Supreme Court justice Barbara Madsen owes me a few
thousand dollars.

If it weren’t for her—and the four other justices who opted to
uphold a ban on same-sex marriage in Washington State two years
ago—we wouldn’t have put $6,195.17 in wedding expenses onto our
Visa, a bill we’ve been chipping away at for more than a year.

Let me back up a bit. In July 2006, my girlfriend, Sonia, and I had
already moved to Portland, but we were still eagerly awaiting a
decision in Washington’s Anderson v. Sims case, the one
challenging the state’s same-sex marriage ban.

Ever since Sonia and I had played a minor role in sparking the case
back in 2004—that’s a long story involving my first marriage, to
Dan Savage, and some panicky, misinformed gay-marriage activists in
Seattle who’ve never heard of the telephone—we’d been ready to
get hitched. Not long after attorneys argued the case at the state
supreme court in Olympia, we’d picked out two wedding rings and tucked
them into my top dresser drawer so we could dash to the King County
building on a moment’s notice.

It was the perfect scenario, we told our friends: Neither of us
wanted a traditional wedding, with all of the expenses and the
guaranteed family drama. Dashing downtown in whatever we happened to be
wearing that day, surrounded by whoever could join us on a moment’s
notice, and following it up with dinner wherever we were in the mood to
go that night was way more our style. We just had to wait for the
court’s green light.

The decision came down on July 26 that year, but the news wasn’t
good. There’d be no county-building-steps ceremony for us. And where we
lived, in Oregon, there was a constitutional amendment banning same-sex
marriage.

Shit. What were we going to do with those rings? We’d had them
engraved, so we couldn’t return them. And we refused to do a
consolation-prize commitment ceremony.

By the end of the year, we had a new plan: We’d slip up to
Vancouver, BC, for our seventh anniversary in April 2007 to take
advantage of that country’s enlightened marriage laws. While we
wouldn’t be able to smuggle our Canadian marriage rights or
responsibilities back across the border, the government-issued
certificate made the whole thing seem, well, real.

But by the time we arrived in Vancouver in April, our quiet,
impromptu little ceremony had morphed into a wedding—with the
bills to match.

Perhaps because we’d be returning home to a place where our Canadian
vows wouldn’t legally count, we overcompensated by making sure the
parts that would count—the meaningful-to-us stuff—were
perfect.

That meant renting out an entire bed and breakfast for the weekend,
to host a dozen friends. Then there was dinner for everyone after the
ceremony, at a lovely restaurant called Delilah’s—they even
printed up menus with our names on the top. Add two new outfits, gifts
for our guests (including M&M’s printed with our names and our
wedding date), and a pink cake. Back in Oregon, we’d shelled out $104
to legally change my last name, and we’d also hired a local letterpress
company to crank out beautiful wedding announcements. If we weren’t
going to invite our families, I reasoned, we had better break the news
in the classiest way possible. (I think it’s just possible we
were overcompensating for our second-class status.)

The night before our friends arrived, we broke out the credit card
again, treating ourselves to massages, manicures, and pedicures at a
chichi spa downtown. It’s our wedding, we reasoned, as we
looked at the pricey menu of services. I gulped when they handed me the
$556.40 bill. Even with the exchange rate, that’s a lot of money for
nail polish and aromatherapy oils.

Here’s the irony: Within a month of returning to Oregon, our state
legislature adopted a domestic-partnership law—one that gives
registered same-sex couples in Oregon all of the rights and
responsibilities of marriage that the state can bestow. (Unfortunately
most of the really important rights are bestowed by the federal
government, which refuses to recognize same-sex relationships.) The law
took effect this past February, and we were one of the first couples in
line at the Multnomah County building to file our paperwork and pay our
$60. There was no visit to a spa, no cake, no announcements, no
vows—and no Visa bill to deal with for the next year.

Like Oregon queers, Washington State queers have the option of
registering their domestic partnership with the state. The
domestic-partnership law in Washington doesn’t include as many rights
as the law does in Oregon, but state senator Ed Murray and state
representative Jamie Pedersen are committed to adding to the
domestic-rights package in Washington every year until it, too, offers
same-sex couples all the rights and responsibilities that the state can
possibly offer.

Until you can reverse the supreme court ruling in Washington State
and secure full marriage rights, broke and cheap queers might want to
stick with a nice, simple domestic partnership in Washington and avoid
the temptations of California or Canada. Taking on credit card debt
when you marry—for real, legally—is just too tempting.