There were two comics that I still remember well from the 60's that featured weddings. The first was when two pairs of legionnaires got married in Adventure Comics #337. The cover said it all. They were walking between two rows of their teammates who were holding up wands, and each newly married couple was smiling. Of course, getting married meant they all had to resign from the Legion because of the code against married legionnaires. It all seems rather quaint now, and the marriages were fake anyway. The Legion had learned about a potential threat, and so they pretended to marry and leave the Legion in order to outwit their foe.
The second comic book marriage was the summer Fantastic Four annual, featuring The Wedding of Sue and Reed. Their foes all used the event to attack the team and their friends. It was quite a donnybrook because so many villains showed up to ruin the blessed event.
Obviously, being a gay teenager, I could only tangentially relate to those two comic book events. It would have been inconceivable that two men (or two women) would, or could, ever get married. Not that I saw my life as being that of a permanent bachelor, though that was always a possibility.
When the cadet whom I had met while teaching at the Air Force Academy was forced to resign, he moved in with his much older boyfriend at the time and, for a few years anyway, they lived happily ever after. Dick died in 1989 of AIDS (though he said he had liver cancer). Dan, the former cadet, died in 1995, just before all of the drug cocktails appeared that helped so many survive for many more years or indefinitely.
Had the two not died, they may not have married one another even if it were legal. Dan was about to leave Dick before Dick got sick; and he was going to move to California and in with another man who lived in San Francisco. Eventually, after Dick died, Dan did move to the coast.
But the two had lived together for most of the 80's, and that inspired me more than ever that two men could live with one another happily, whether legally married or not. Besides, gays being able to legally serve in the military was still a far more important issue for me because I still had hope, back then, that I might be able to serve again, finish out my career, and then retire.
When the Gay Marriage issue became much more significant, I was convinced that it needed to be approached skillfully and especially cautiously. Americans were not easily going to accept gays getting legally married, most significantly by calling it "marriage". Calling it a "domestic partnership" instead certainly would help ease the transition, or even "civil union" might also work. But publicly calling our relationships marriages, while demanding that straights give us full equality, at the same time insisting that we were married just like they were, was not going to happen any time soon. I believed that years ago when I wrote my own gay "wedding" book, HARMONY OF SPHERES. And I still believe that is true all these years later.
By demanding the whole thing, we are not going to get much of anything. And what we most need, what we fully require, are the legal protections that marriages/partnerships/unions provide, regardless of what we, or society, calls our couplings. So while we are able to legally marry in a few states, primarily in New England, we cannot even have legal domestic partnerships or civil unions in many, many other states. If marriage initiatives go before state legislatures or congress, we have no chance for sufficient support for passage. If such initiatives end up on state ballots, we have even less chance for passage, as we saw in Maine and California. Even the currently constituted U.S. Supreme Court is not likely to give us marriage any time soon. I think that's sad and unfortunate, but it appears to be true.
So, the all-or-nothing, no-compromise faction has failed us overall. Just as they failed us back when we at least got "Don't Ask; don't tell" instead of nothing. Civil rights, unfortunately, almost never come all at once, even when they are legally granted. Groups have almost always had to settle for half measures and baby steps. And even when full equality is finally granted, it still must evolve in the practical world even though it might have been fully accepted in the theoretical world.
Sadly, while I may applaud the efforts of those who want to marry like the legionnaires or Sue and Reed did in comic books in the 60's, unless we all want to move to Vermont, I don't see us getting anything like that elsewhere unless we are willing to accept terminology such as domestic partnerships or civil unions first. We may very well get to serve openly in the military in the next couple of years--and I was beginning to believe that I may never see that happen in my lifetime. And I am totally convinced, though perhaps not in my lifetime, that we will see marriage eventually. Just not in most of the nation. And not now.
The second comic book marriage was the summer Fantastic Four annual, featuring The Wedding of Sue and Reed. Their foes all used the event to attack the team and their friends. It was quite a donnybrook because so many villains showed up to ruin the blessed event.
Obviously, being a gay teenager, I could only tangentially relate to those two comic book events. It would have been inconceivable that two men (or two women) would, or could, ever get married. Not that I saw my life as being that of a permanent bachelor, though that was always a possibility.
When the cadet whom I had met while teaching at the Air Force Academy was forced to resign, he moved in with his much older boyfriend at the time and, for a few years anyway, they lived happily ever after. Dick died in 1989 of AIDS (though he said he had liver cancer). Dan, the former cadet, died in 1995, just before all of the drug cocktails appeared that helped so many survive for many more years or indefinitely.
Had the two not died, they may not have married one another even if it were legal. Dan was about to leave Dick before Dick got sick; and he was going to move to California and in with another man who lived in San Francisco. Eventually, after Dick died, Dan did move to the coast.
But the two had lived together for most of the 80's, and that inspired me more than ever that two men could live with one another happily, whether legally married or not. Besides, gays being able to legally serve in the military was still a far more important issue for me because I still had hope, back then, that I might be able to serve again, finish out my career, and then retire.
When the Gay Marriage issue became much more significant, I was convinced that it needed to be approached skillfully and especially cautiously. Americans were not easily going to accept gays getting legally married, most significantly by calling it "marriage". Calling it a "domestic partnership" instead certainly would help ease the transition, or even "civil union" might also work. But publicly calling our relationships marriages, while demanding that straights give us full equality, at the same time insisting that we were married just like they were, was not going to happen any time soon. I believed that years ago when I wrote my own gay "wedding" book, HARMONY OF SPHERES. And I still believe that is true all these years later.
By demanding the whole thing, we are not going to get much of anything. And what we most need, what we fully require, are the legal protections that marriages/partnerships/unions provide, regardless of what we, or society, calls our couplings. So while we are able to legally marry in a few states, primarily in New England, we cannot even have legal domestic partnerships or civil unions in many, many other states. If marriage initiatives go before state legislatures or congress, we have no chance for sufficient support for passage. If such initiatives end up on state ballots, we have even less chance for passage, as we saw in Maine and California. Even the currently constituted U.S. Supreme Court is not likely to give us marriage any time soon. I think that's sad and unfortunate, but it appears to be true.
So, the all-or-nothing, no-compromise faction has failed us overall. Just as they failed us back when we at least got "Don't Ask; don't tell" instead of nothing. Civil rights, unfortunately, almost never come all at once, even when they are legally granted. Groups have almost always had to settle for half measures and baby steps. And even when full equality is finally granted, it still must evolve in the practical world even though it might have been fully accepted in the theoretical world.
Sadly, while I may applaud the efforts of those who want to marry like the legionnaires or Sue and Reed did in comic books in the 60's, unless we all want to move to Vermont, I don't see us getting anything like that elsewhere unless we are willing to accept terminology such as domestic partnerships or civil unions first. We may very well get to serve openly in the military in the next couple of years--and I was beginning to believe that I may never see that happen in my lifetime. And I am totally convinced, though perhaps not in my lifetime, that we will see marriage eventually. Just not in most of the nation. And not now.
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