"Love, Marriage, and Ringing Bells" (Speech given in favor of Marriage Equality at Pentecostal Church April, 2011)

The truth is I’m a lot like you.  I grew up in a small, Irish-Catholic neighborhood in Queens.  We’d go to church every Sunday, and for a while every week my faith was tested and reconfirmed during one particular part of the mass.  Our priest would lift the Eucharist up to God to ask for a blessing, and every week during that part of the mass, I would hear bells ring.  I would wait for this moment the whole mass, and it would happen – every week and in every church we ever wound up in.

  I’d look around marvel at these grown-ups around me who would take this miracle in such stride.  No wonder they acted like they knew everything all the time!  This was such a gift because during this part of my life, I understood every “good” person completely and pitied every “bad."  There was no doubt in my mind that I would spend every waking moment of my adult life living for this God everybody was talking about, and would for sure read that giant book of rules he sent down because what’s one lifetime in the blink of eternity - even to a six year old?  I even figured I’d grow up to be a priest.  (It hadn’t dawned on me yet that a women priest might be unlikely.)

  Then one week we got there late and had to sit right in front; and that was it.  That was the day I watched in horror as some altar boy casually rang bells underneath an indecently short altar skirt.  My faith plunged.  I felt real doubt for the first time.  I literally remember sweating!  I looked at that book and decided right then and there that when I grew up, I was going to read every word of that book and figure out for myself exactly what I should be doing before eternity.

  Doubt has since been a tremendous force in my life, but I’ve managed to keep it under control. 

  The universe is an inconceivably big place, and it seems now as though we actually live in a multiverse.  There is no doubt in my mind anymore that in the end we’ll all find out that in many ways we were all right the whole time, and realizing my sexuality really put this quest on the very top of my priority list.  I am so blessed that I was given my perspective in life because it’s helped shape everything I love about life, about God, and about me.

  And I mean it wasn’t easy, and for a long time I was your typical Irish-Catholic homophobic lesbian.  Then I met my wife, and everything about everything changed.  We all must have something that teaches us which way we should follow.  It’s what keeps us going because once you’ve glimpsed true happiness, there’s no turning back.

  My wife lived a “straight” life before she met and fell in love with me, but she knew how to live. 

  She didn’t go through that long self-hating homophobic period because she didn’t doubt her own heart the way I did, and the way many do.  She’d kiss me in the middle of town and show me how many folks really cared one way or another.  She taught me to stop worrying about them, to experience the moment.  And then she made those moments amazing.  She taught me how to let my spirit encompass my own skin, and I will never be able to thank her enough for that.

  Thirteen years later, if it wasn’t for prejudice and discrimination, my life would be absolutely perfect.  But these things are complicated and persuasive, and they weave their way into our minds in very seductive and manipulative ways.  There are things I can’t even talk about here due to their increasing power against me but I will do my best to try.  Simply put, since meeting my wife I have known no other way to live but honestly, and that has left me vulnerable.  Happy, but vulnerable.

  We’re not here to try to change anyone’s religion or lifestyle and there is no malevolent agenda.  We’re here because it seems as though only ignorance of these issues keeps them sustained.  Only fear can fuel the illusion of control that leads people to believe that my sexuality could be somehow “caught” by my students.  Only misunderstanding leads people to think that my right to marry in my church has anything to do with your right to marry in yours.

  Eight years ago I gave my wife the most valuable thing I had.  My mother had left me her diamond engagement ring.  When I asked Amy to marry me, it was a request of my spirit and not my brain, because my brain would have never predicted that I would be anywhere close to up here right now with you.  I grew up in the age of the almost same-sex Melrose Place kiss, - where the closest thing I ever saw to my desires reflected on TV was Roseanne Barr letting a woman kiss her just before wiping her mouth off all over the woman’s shirt as they hugged.  None of that had anything to do with my self-realization.  I promise you, it’s much more likely one can be influenced straight than influenced gay.

  And as silly as we’re often made out to be through insensitive jokes or the media, I hear nightmares about the injustices allowed to occur.  A woman just like me on vacation in Florida with her kids wasn’t allowed to be there at her wife’s deathbed, because that state doesn’t consider her “family”.  Parents have tenuous rights at best over their children because someone thinks we’re out to “destroy” marriage.  There are well over a thousand benefits, rights, and privileges married couples are entitled to in this country, and although some may be ridiculous, only five are offered to couples with Civil Unions.  It’s not about a label of “marriage”; it’s about the time and efforts it takes for individual people to see the problems and the effects this segregation has on our lives.  I can’t even get the state to issue me my son’s birth certificate with my sex intact.  The state does make mother-mother birth certificates, but someone in the New York City Health Department doesn’t believe me when I tell them I’m female.  I am currently on our copy listed as my son’s male mother.  It’s been three tries and sixteen months since my son was born and this is still not (if you’ll pardon the pun) “straightened” out!

  I met New York State’s Senator Shirley Huntley a couple years ago, an African-American women in partial control over my right to parent my son, and to all these arguments she told me to that I could come back when my people had suffered 400 years of oppression and slavery, and then I could complain to her.  The fact that gays have been around forever, and that we’ve been so oppressed as to scarcely be identified, and incidentally, that my wife happens to be Jewish; all of this was lost on this woman.  But this is what we have to deal with.[UPDATE: A few years after this post was published Senator Shirley Huntley was one of the three NYS Senators to switch sides and vote in favor of Marriage Equality!  Thank you Senator Shirley Huntley for your brave ability to evolve!]

  Yet listen, I’m really not complaining.  I love my wife more every day, and every moment of injustice is worth having her next to me through it.  My son was the first thing I’d prayed to God for in years and that was the very day we conceived.  We are having so much fun with the first we knew we wanted a second, but childbirth is the single most dangerous thing a woman can to for this society, so I wasn’t going to make her do that twice.  It was more expensive for me to conceive because there was nobody in her family who we could ask to be a donor like we did with Takoda.  I knew I’d be paying $500-1000 dollars each try.  Knowing it took us four years to make Takoda, I just prayed that this time that we’d get pregnant as soon as possible and wouldn’t you know - we got pregnant on our very first try that time?

  So now we have to navigate this second path – Do we spend another $3000 dollars for her legal adoption of the child that I birth? (- which would be free if our marriage were legal in New York City by the way!)  Should we have Amy’s blood tests sent over to the hospital prior to my labor so that the staff there doesn’t claim her breastfeeding him will be a risk to “their” patient’s life, since she is not the “real” mother (as they did me)?

  It’s funny because I understand some of the objections.  In another universe where I’m straight and probably a priest or a nun or in the very least an avid church attendee, I’m just like these people.  Instead of feeling lucky, there was a time I actually felt betrayed by my father when he told me his only concern about my sexuality was that my life would be more difficult.  I felt that if he believed all the things he’d exposed me to, if he really was a Christian that is, that he must not love me enough to worry about my afterlife if “converting” me wasn’t even on his agenda.  I could hardly deal with the implications my sexuality had on my afterlife, but as a parent – why wasn’t he flipping out?

  The truth is there are so many different people out there and so many different beliefs and expectations about those things we just can’t all know.  I’d like to think that eventually, once I’d lived long enough, I’d have met some of them and learned to understand the ones I’d pitied. 

  We’re not asking for any “special” privileges here and it’s got nothing to do with how far it can go – like how polygamists would benefit or how other people would try to marry animals.  This is a group of people who have gone through a plethora of extra challenges just to come to the point of being able to experience love.  Just like so many others, these are two consenting adults who want to share the true love they’ve found with their children and make a better world to live in. 

  Society must take some responsibility to recognize and protect that love, the way it recognizes and protects the love between men and woman of all other different kinds of races, and religions, without prejudice and without discrimination.  I believe society owes this to me, and to my wife and my son and our community, for all the years it took for us to recognize ourselves, face those challenges, and finally learn to live the life God gave us fully, happily, and without shame or regret.

  Once you understand what we’re really asking for, you realize it’s not your responsibility to condemn or condone anything.  Marriage is a right that our society uses too protect children and families.  Those children and families are here whether you like it or not.  Your responsibility for Marriage Equality is secular, and not religious.  We’re asking for our spiritual and religious leaders to have the right to marry us, just like your spiritual and religious leaders have that right to marry you.