Category: Politics

There are plenty of days when the only gay person I talk to is my husband. On a day like today, when he’s out of town at a conference and I’m home with the kids, I don’t even get that. I’m relatively certain that I didn’t speak to any gay people today.

I dropped the kids off at school this morning, said good morning to some parents and some teachers. There’s a dad who is possibly gay, by which I mean that I get a vibe and have seen no evidence that he’s married to a woman. We see each other at both of my sons’ schools most mornings, but I didn’t run into him today. There’s a foster mom who I’m pretty sure is a lesbian, and if she has a foster child and if that child is in kindergarten, first, or second grade, we usually cross paths. I saw her car this morning, which has more bumper stickers than any other car in town. But I didn’t see her.

I took my sons to therapy this afternoon. They’re both straight women. One of them has a sister who is a lesbian, but it’s not like we’ve met. Does that count?

We had dinner with my parents. They’re straight, too.

It’s possible that the guy who made my coffee this morning is gay, or the woman at the drive-through pharmacy window.

Obviously, it’s also quite possible that any of these people I have assumed are straight, based on their marriages to people of the opposite sex, are bisexual.

When I was in school, I had lots of gay friends that I saw every day. When I had a job, I had plenty of gay coworkers that I saw every day.

Now, though? I live in the suburbs, in the Republican part of Massachusetts (that’s really a thing!), and I only see my gay friends on Facebook.

For gay men, Austin and I became parents extremely early. I’ll be thirty-five next month, and my sons are five and seven. Not a single one of my gay friends from high school or college is a parent yet. That will change next month, when a friend from high school and her wife are due to have a baby. Another friend from high school just announced that she’s expecting a baby later this year, too. I haven’t seen either of these women in seventeen years, though, and that doesn’t seem likely to change any time soon.

What I’m trying to say is that most of my interactions are with straight people. Strictly based on the numbers, it’s pretty likely that both of my children are straight, too.

And on 364 days out of 365, that’s fine.

But sometimes it’s exhausting.

Maybe it’s exhausting today because I’ve been by myself with the kids since Sunday afternoon, and I’m just exhausted.

Maybe it’s exhausting today because gay people were unceremoniously dropped from immigration reform, and it’s a vivid reminder that we really are second class citizens, begging for scraps from the table.

Maybe it’s exhausting today because I’m filled with anxiety waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the marriage cases this summer. What if we lose? Prop 8 broke my heart on election day in 2008 because it seemed like that year we maybe had a chance to change the momentum. And this year has been going so well for marriage equality, but what if it’s all just leading up to an enormous, heart-breaking loss at the Supreme Court this summer?

Whichever of those straws broke this camel’s back, today I am tired of straight people.

Not some straight people, not just ignorant straight people or bigoted straight people. Allstraight people.

Because here’s the reality: we can never really be sure of you. Not all the way. Sometimes people who look like allies throw you under the bus. Maybe you believe in my equality, but only until it’s inconvenient. Maybe you think it’s kind of sort of understandable that gay people were dropped from the immigration bill, because isn’t it better for the greater good to be served?

Tomorrow, I’ll go back to liking you. Tomorrow, I will try to politely explain how what you said devalues gay people and assumes our lives don’t have quite the same value as yours. Tomorrow, I will pretend it’s not annoying when you ask a question about my wife. Ha ha, of course it’s not annoying, and of course you assumed that I married to a woman! Why would you have ever considered any other possibility?

But tonight? I’m tired of you.

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decisions on the Defense of Marriage Act and Prop 8 are a big win, but we need to be careful not to trick ourselves into thinking that the war being waged against LGBT families is over. June 26th will be remembered as a turning point as long as we remember that no one has equality until we all have equality.

If you had asked me a month ago, I probably would have told you that I expected to be dancing in the streets when the Supreme Court handed down decisions in the marriage cases. I was confident that DOMA would be struck down and that marriages would begin again in California. And I’m extremely happy about those rulings, but I find it more difficult to generate that level of dancing in the street excitement.

I stayed up into the early hours of the morning on Election Day in 2008. I was absolutely convinced that Proposition 8 would be defeated in California. It would be a turning point! It would be the first time that voters defeated a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, and I knew — absolutely knew — that California could do it. Would do it. I drank lots of tea, watched returns on tv, cried when Obama won, and waited.

Eventually, of course, it became clear that I was wrong. Prop 8 passed. I was stunned. I didn’t know how to react. Logically, I didn’t think I should feel so … defeated. I mean, I didn’t even live in California anymore. I lived in Massachusetts. I was already married. I can’t have been alone in that feeling, because I’m pretty sure that many of our marriage victories in the last few years are a direct result of the shock LGBT felt after losing on Prop 8.

Where are we left, though, after this week?

Well, some Americans are less equal than they were when the week began. By gutting the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court has diminished our democracy. Within hours of the decision, Texas began to implement an extremely restrictive voter id requirement. It’s going to mean that fewer citizens, fewer legitimate voters, will be able to vote. The most fundamental right we have in a democracy, and it is being stripped away.

In the marriage cases, the answer is less clear.  Some of us, those who live in states where we were already somewhat more equal, have become … even closer to equal. My family now enjoys the same legal protections as every other family, as long as we remain in a marriage equality state.

Immediately, or pretty close to immediately, we should begin to receive some pretty sizeable tax refunds from the federal government. We filed protective claims on our taxes back to 2008, the year we got married. That means that we should be able to receive refunds for the extra taxes we’ve paid in the last four years. Without getting too specific about our finances, that’s about $10,000 in total, mostly because I’m a stay-at-home dad and don’t have income, while my husband does.

For the future, it’s hard to say what the economic benefit is for us. It depends on when I return to the workforce and what kind of money I’m able to make when I do. It’s unlikely that it would have continued to cost us $2500 annually, because the number was going down each year. What this means in terms of social security is unclear, too, and will also depend on what the next thirty years holds for me in terms of a career. What is clear, though, is that the same rules will apply to us that apply to our neighbors. No more special rules just for us.

It looks like yesterday’s ruling may be most important for binational couples, since they were the ones at risk of not even being able to live with their spouses. For couples in equality states, and those with ready access to travel to an equality state to get a marriage license, it seems like this will be a real remedy. We need to make sure that the LGBT community creates a system to assist economically disadvantaged couples in non-equality states to access this remedy. The gap between deportation and a life together might be as small as two airline tickets and a marriage license fee.

We cannot allow ourselves to forget, for even a moment, issues like employment discrimination, economic justice, housing discrimination, violence, access to the full range of physical and mental health services. LGBT people are impacted disproportionately by disparities in those areas, and yesterday’s Supreme Court decisions do not provide a direct remedy for any of those painful, damaging injustices.

Some of you are rolling your eyes at me right now. It’s because I said “direct” remedy, implying that there is an indirect remedy of some kind to be found in yesterday’s ruling. I think there is, and it gives me enormous hope. I think (and Antonin Scalia agrees with me, so … yay?) that yesterday’s decision on equal protection grounds opens doors for an awful lot of equal protection claims to be made not only in marriage, but also in employment, in housing, and in health care.

Plenty of people do not believe in marriage. I think an admirable case for marriage as oppression can be made. (To summarize, but please go read it anyway: the fight for marriage equality draws money and attention away from other LGBT issues, and that marriage is primarily an economic tool that perpetuates capitalism, thereby disadvantaging those we claim it is helping.) It’s not that I disagree with those arguments. I don’t. I just think it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll see enormous structural changes made to any of those institutions in our lifetimes, and I think that seeking more justice within those systems is more likely to meet success.

But there’s another reason, too. I live in Massachusetts. I grew up in Massachusetts, just down the road from where I live now. But I left for a while. I went to college in upstate New York. I moved to California with my boyfriend. He graduated from boyfriend to partner and we moved across the country again, to New Jersey. I came back to Massachusetts and he became my husband.

I am not sure if I can even begin to explain the difference between the Massachusetts where I went to high school, ten years before marriage equality, and the Massachusetts where I live now with my husband and sons, ten years after marriage equality became a reality.

On the surface, it looks pretty much the same. My parents live on the same street, in the same house. Every morning, I drop my children off at school, and I drive down the same street that I drove down on the evening I came out to two of my closest friends.

But it’s not the same. Marriage equality is more subversive than it sounds. In small ways, my commingled sock drawer chips away at assumptions.

Ten years ago, reasonable people could oppose marriage equality in Massachusetts and remain reasonable people. In much of the United States, reasonable people can oppose marriage equality and remain reasonable people. But you can’t reasonably oppose civil equality in Massachusetts anymore. Declaring your opposition places you on the fringe. It makes you the bigot down the street. And most people don’t want to feel like bigots. They’re either forced to embrace their bigotry, and watch while people hurry their children away from them, or to change their minds. Or at least close their mouths.

I think you’ll like what the DOMA decision does for life in the United States.