SCOTUS Decision Increases Access but for Me it is Just a Bandaid

It was 2005 in a small, stuffy classroom on the third floor of the aged humanities building that Cathy Connolly, one of my most important mentors and a transformational educator, first related that policy change occurs far after the war has already been won. It seems that yesterday’s Supreme Court decision beautifully exemplifies this. Yet again, while I have felt the ‘winning of the war’ occurring for more than a decade, I also understand that while policy change may be the dinosaur, it affects peoples’ lives in a very real way everyday. I wonder how different my life would have been if this Supreme Court decision had occurred when I was 18? I know I would have felt much more ‘normal’ and I would likely have married Christi right after I graduated from college.

Coincidently on the very year that I fell in love with Christi (1994), I also fell into a mineshaft while backcountry skiing with the boys and dislocated my shoulder. The dislocation became reoccurring and by the end of my freshman year in college, my ski coach was insistent that I have surgery. My left shoulder, now fully functional, bears a large scar that is characteristic of the not-so-micro incisions necessary at the time. It runs from the skin atop my acromioclavicular joint down to my armpit. The skin of the scar is puckered, soft and white as compared to the tan, weathered skin around it. Sometimes when I am stressed out, I run my fingers across the soft skin and somehow it comforts me. Sometimes when we lie in bed, Christi does the same thing and I think it comforts her too. Sometimes when I lift weights, I watch the way in which the scar moves and stretches and I realize what an important part of me it has become. And let’s face it, it is def totes frickin’ sexy – Fo Shizzle (I hear that Fo Shizzle was just added to the dictionary so I’m ignoring the red spellcheck underline).

            For me, knowing that Christi and I can now engage in the union that is, according to Justice Kennedy’s landmark words, “more profound” than any other, that we could form a marital union that would allow us to, “…become something greater than [we] once were” seems very much like having someone hand me a Band aid (one of the tiny ones that have the stretchy fabric) and saying that I can now place it across the scar that so beautifully contributes to the architecture of the skin as it stretches over my rippling deltoid. Of course, the Band-Aid will not help (all rhetoric intended). But, even more importantly, the Band-Aid would obscure something that tells my story, that makes me more beautiful.

            Please do not misunderstand this lack of desire to embrace an institution as a statement of objection to equal access. Please know that it is the very opposite and I want ALL couples who want access to this institution to have access. However, I dream of a liberated space in which all Loves are acknowledged, celebrated, and liberated, and question whether an institution (“the institution of marriage”) has to legitimize love? As the very foundations of Queer Theory would attest, when we strive to align with the norm, to be comfortably placed into the institution, we simply create a culture of Othering. Michael Warner (who writes a beautifully subversive book on the topic – see below), would say that in our efforts to cling to the norm, we create “the stigmaphope world”. There is a chromatograph of Loves and Desires and someone (or perhaps I should say, parts of all of us) will always be outside of the norm.

Thus, now that the relationship that I have with Christi could be considered ‘normal’, our most difficult job begins. We gain privilege to an ‘elite, country club-type’ institution. And, as we heard from Justice Kennedy, it , “embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family”. Our most difficult job now becomes not being a part of what creates “the stigmaphobe world”. As we gain access to privilege, we gain responsibility. We believe that our love has (for 21 years) been “profound”. We believe that our relationship embodies “the highest ideals of love” (interesting that neither of us would use the word sacrifice) and we believe that together, we have become something greater than we once were. We have done all of that without the affirmation of an institution. And let’s face it, neither one of us wants to cover that wicked sexy scar with a silly little Band-Aid anyway.

The aforementioned, wonderfully subversive read:

Warner, M. (1999). The trouble with normal: sex, politics and the ethics of queer life. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.