People say the funniest things when you tell them you're having a lesbian
wedding. As some readers of the Weekly may have noticed, my longtime
whatchamacallher and I got married recently. Or, to be exact, we got
committed, since our ceremony was not a marriage in the eyes of the state.
The first question people asked us, almost invariably, was "What are you both wearing?" It was easy for me to answer, because I had dreamed forever of wearing a long, white, silk dress. My betrothed, on the other hand, took forever to make up her mind--black tuxedo? white tuxedo? traditional Brazilian costume? She ended up wearing a beautiful cream-colored linen suit.
Others were more direct. "Which one of you is the groom?" insisted the man at the tuxedo store. "Are you the bride and she's the groom?" asked my maternal grandmother, 91, when I broke the news.
"We're both the brides," I explained.
"How can there be two brides?" she asked querulously.
"Magic!"
Another one we encountered pretty often, especially from the Brazilian side of the family, was "In a church? Really? With a real priest?" Yes, and not just any church and not just any priest--Stanford Memorial Church and the Rev. Bob Gregg, dean of the chapel. We were the church's first lesbian ceremony; two gay male couples had preceded us down the aisle.
Balancing his respect for our relationship and his deep spiritual commitment to performing gay and lesbian union ceremonies against potential criticism, Gregg did a masterful job of making sure our ceremony was special and meaningful.
"Who's your caterer/florist/photographer/band?" came from those who had recently experienced marital madness themselves or were in the thick of it. Long discussions about the merits of buffet vs. sit-down ensued, which are far too boring to relate here and had absolutely nothing to do with the homosexuality or heterosexuality of the event.
You who have been through it know what I mean when I say that for six months I walked around with my bulging matrimonial binder surgically attached to my left arm. Psst--I've got a great tip for saving money on centerpieces.
But most people knew exactly what to say, which was the beauty of the whole thing: "Congratulations." Never before in my eight years as a lesbian have heterosexual people treated our relationship with such unequivocal, unforced positiveness.
It was as if the wedding gave them a clear way to react to us as a couple, a mental receiving line to go through: This is a wedding. I know how I'm supposed to respond to a wedding. I'm supposed to get happy and excited and go buy housewares.
Actually, the housewares part of it turned out to be the only time that we encountered heterosexism so entrenched that we couldn't dislodge it. At all three of the stores where we registered--Macy's, Williams-Sonoma and Crate & Barrel--the registries were on computer data base systems that required one of us to be the bride and one the groom.
We tried and tried to find a way around the problem, because we knew neither of us had friends who would look for us under "groom." Despite the well-meaning attempts of local employees, the system seemed to be set in stone. "It's on a hard drive! A big, big, hard drive," explained one friendly but computer-illiterate bridal registry associate.
We thought of hiring a hacker, but finally we compromised: I was the groom at the bridal registries, she at the tuxedo store.
In the event, of course, none of this mattered a whit. It diminished our pleasure in the day not at all that the flowers were delivered to the church instead of the Gamble Garden Center, where we had our reception. Or that there were artichoke hearts in the salad instead of palm hearts (get it, palm hearts, from Brazil?) in the salad.
What mattered was what we said to each other, in the presence of 75 of our closest friends and relatives. What mattered was that Nana's mother and two of her best friends had flown all the way from Brazil to be there; that both my parents were there to walk me down the aisle and both my siblings to stand up with me and catch me if I fainted. (I didn't.)
Now that it's over, people say, "How does it feel to be married?" and "Do you feel different?" It's funny, but I don't think we feel too different from any newlywed couple. After a brief period of letdown--inevitable after the proverbial happiest day of our lives--we are happier than ever, enjoying being in love and calling each other "my wife," looking forward to our honeymoon next month.
As fate would have it, another lesbian couple celebrated their commitment ceremony the same day, just down the street from us. I talked to one of those brides the other day, and she said that everywhere in town they went, we had been first: the stationery store and so forth.
Perhaps those who didn't know quite what to say to us thought of something the second time around.
Resources/ Two Brides/ Photos/ Wedding Announcements
