Pacific Views

The earth moved.

Earlier this week, Multnomah County, Oregon, became one of the very few places in the United States where lesbian and gay citizens enjoy the right to get married. Since Wednesday morning, hundreds of same-sex couples have made the trek to the county office building in east Portland to get a marriage license. Each day so far, the line of people waiting to get a license has wrapped halfway around the block, with new couples joining as others finish their business with the county.

Friday morning, this magpie was standing in that line, in the rain, with her friends Sunny and Miriam, who had decided that it was about time to make their relationship legal. We were with them when they got their license and when they paid for it, and we drove them downtown to Keller Auditorium to get married. If we've ever been in the company of two happier people, we certainly can't remember when that was. (If you want to see them, we included a picture of the happy couple with this post at our other blog, Magpie.)

[Photo © 2004 by Magpie]

Since this magpie is a lesbian, the events this week in Portland have been of more than academic interest to us — even before two of our friends decided to get married. And after standing in line for hours at the county building in the company of hundreds of joyful lesbians and gay men, we are certain that something very powerful is happening here (and, we're sure, in San Francisco, New Paltz, and several Canadian provinces). Our big problem, though, has been in trying to find the words to describe why we've been so moved this week, and why we think recent events in Portland and elsewhere are changing the US permanently.

An obvious thing that's changed is that legal same-sex marriages are no longer a possibility; they're real life for thousands of couples. (In just three days, for example, more than 1200 couples have taken out marriage licenses in Portland. And San Francisco has married another 3600 couples.) The fact on the ground now is that the existing marriages of thousands of people have to be either affirmed or invalidated. Whatever the courts and legislatures ultimately decide to do, they won't be making those decisions up in the realm of theoretical rights. Instead, they're going to be messing with peoples' day-to-day lives. Don't think for a moment that this fact isn't going to matter.

Another thing that's changed is the image of gay men and lesbians. Up until now, the dominant images of our community have been those conveyed by the mass media. Instead of portraying the broad spectrum of lesbian and gay life, the media has reduced the community to little more than those pictures of drag queens and the leather community that are rolled out during Gay Pride. But since mid-February, the media has shown something else: the joyful faces of gay men and lesbians as they exchange vows with their beloved partners. And these faces are indistinguishable from those of any other newlyweds. While we aren't so naive as to believe that these pictures will change the minds of everyone who opposes marriage rights for same-sex partners, we know that the pictures are having an effect on what many of those people are thinking and feeling.

But what the biggest change is the one that we're finding the hardest to describe.

Being someone that figured out we were a lesbian in our mid-30s, after an unsuccessful earlier career as a married heterosexual, we really noticed what changed when we came out. All of a sudden, we had to figure out who could know about our relationships and who couldn't. We had to worry about whether our employer would fire us for being a lesbian, or whether our landlord would decide he didn't want to rent to a queer. We became part of a community that is generally under siege, whether from bigots who like to beat on us, or from the more genteel homophobes who 'only' want to make sure we don't have the same legal and civil rights as heterosexuals. (Here in Oregon, for example, there'll be a state-level 'one man-one woman' marriage amendment on the November ballot. This is just the latest in a series of anti-gay ballot measures going back to the early 1990s.) Even during the good times — and living as a lesbian or gay man certainly has its high spots — our experience is that sense of being under siege is always there, way down deep.

But standing in line at the county builidng on Friday, it was gone. The couples standing in line were happy and proud and normal. Instead of being deviant and depraved and dangerous because of their sexuality, these lesbians and gay men were now just regular citizens going down to the government building to get a marriage license. This is what is ultimately going to undermine the religous right's efforts to push same-sex couples back into the closet. Once someone has experienced what it's like to be 'just like everyone else' — of being a person who has rights — they're not likely to let anyone make them settle for something less.

This magpie certainly won't.

About the photo: The woman (whose name we unfortunately don't know) is not a lesbian, although we're sure she wouldn't be unhappy to be mistaken for one. When we took the picture, she was on her third day of coming down to the county building (in the rain on two of those days) to show her support for the couples who were getting married. Even though she was only one woman surrounded by a bunch of fundy christian protesters, we have no doubt that she — not the fundies — shows us the future.