No, I wasn’t in New York last Sunday marrying Rachel Rawlings, the woman who has put up with me for 14 years now. Not that we hadn’t been hoping for it for a long time, or that we didn’t tear up when we saw the photo of Cheryle Rudd and Kitty Lambert and Niagara Falls lit up in rainbow colors. I do kinda wish I’d gone  there to bear witness, 10 years after Rachel and I got our domestic-partners certificate in Manhattan.

Photo: Kathy Bockus, The St. Stephen Courier.

By the time of the latter in 2000,  itself a sequel to the one we’d secured in San Francisco a year after we met,  we’d already enacted the “in sickness and in health” part of the vows, at each other’s side during hospitalizations, and were about to dance together at my brother’s wedding. In 2004, during what I called “gay marriage fever season,” we jumped at the chance to try for a marriage license in Nyack, N.Y., joining one of a near-dozen lawsuits charging that the ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. But that suit, like the others,  failed before the state’s highest court in 2006, the justices practically begging the Legislature to clarify the law.

But that didn’t appear imminent when we moved to Pennsylvania two years later; we finally tied the knot last year in a small Canadian town just over the Maine border. (We even made the papers — not so much for being a same-sex-marriage but for being the first to marry at New Brunswick’s Chocolate Museum.) Our parents made the trip and our brothers were the official witnesses, something that I’d never have dreamed possible when we met in the 1990s.

Still, as the momentum gathered this year in New York State, we couldn’t help feeling that it was our journey, too. On the day same-sex marriage was voted in, I choked up watching Sen. Tom Duane, whom I’d covered often as a reporter,  speaking about his partner, Lewis Webre, and the bill he’d championed for nearly a decade. And Sunday I loved learning about it on Twitter, as @CityHallNews told me that  “NY County judges prepping to marry ssm couples, affixing brooches to their robes. A reported shortage of inkpads to stamp certificates.” Or from @steven_thrasher: NY #SSM – that “judges don’t say ‘I now pronounce you wife & wife,’ but ‘I now pronounce you married.’ Has a dignity to it.” Absolutely. Over all, 659  couples wed on the historic day.

Rache and I will likely renew our vows in New York, maybe even on our first wedding anniversary. In the meantime, here are some moments many of us will think of as our wedding album:

A week after signing the marriage bill, Gov. Andrew Cuomo was hailed at the city’s Pride parade, along with Sen. Tom Duane and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who proposed to her girl the next day.

12:01, July 24, 2011: Cheryle Rudd and Kitty Lambert start off the day’s festivities with Niagara Falls in the background.

4  p.m.: Rod and Ricky, the pair of Wall Street bankers  in love from the musical Avenue Q, had a wedding on a Broadway stage along with a handful of the industry’s human gay couples.

The cover of The New Yorker Magazine, July 25, 2011.

Photo: David Shankbone Of course, we knew such happiness would be challenged by some people, like this member of the Westboro Baptist Church, which joined for one day with other marriage opponents to stream their rally. (Maybe I won’t put that one in the album, though it’s a useful reminder of why the struggle has taken this long.)

Photo: Jen Doll 5:40 p.m.: Mayor Michael Bloomberg officiates at the wedding of aides John Feinblatt and Jonathan Mintz, to the delight of their ‘tween daughters (and flower girls.)

Please send any photos you  have to supplement these, especially if you were there. We’ll be happy to add them to our gallery. And I’m still so proud of the city where I was born, for helping lead the country into the 21st century.

 

(Originally posted at Women’s Voices for Change.)

A couple mornings after

Given what I’ve posted here, you were likely expecting me to be exultant tonight. And I remain heartened, thrilled cautiously hopeful, and glad for the national results. In case you were curious about my little corner of the swing state, Ward 58 went with the wave, 69 percent for Obama — though not precinct 26, where I voted, with its Russian immigrants and many retired cops and firefighters who went for their fellow veteran.

But I also suddenly want a T-shirt that says “We Are All Harvey Milk.”  Dan Savage, on Salon yesterday, encapsulated what Rachel and I felt:

Tuesday night I was overjoyed.

But Wednesday morning, reading the papers and listening to the news on the radio, my boyfriend and I — we’re boyfriends in the USA, husbands in Canada — sat at our kitchen table and had the exact same discussion we had the morning after the 2004 election: When the hell are we moving to Canada?

The anti-gay politicking that goes on in this country is a bit like a dog whistle: Straight people can’t hear it, but it drives gay people absolutely around the bend. The importance of Obama’s victory can’t be overstated; I’m as moved as anyone else. But the passage of anti-gay marriage amendments in Arizona, Florida and, most heartbreakingly of all, California (and with overwhelming support from African-American voters), along with the passage of an anti-gay adoption amendment in Arkansas, left us both feeling shell-shocked, betrayed and angry.

We’ll see what happens. Personally, I’m in favor of abolishing civil marriage entirely: everyone gets a legal civil union, and leave the multiple definitions of  marriage to the multiple churches.

But it all feels like a dream deferred, as Bayard noticed 20 years ago. That video above is of the new President dancing with a woman whose wedding, seen below, may have just been invalidated. Here’s to dancing with the future, but only if all of us get to do it.

watch this. then again. then vote. then cry.

Running behind, as usual. But I finally saw this, a few days after another viewing of Brother Outsider. A week to the election and I can’t get enough of angelic troublemakers. (I also can’t wait for the flick to come out, whatever Gawker says.)