DOMA

In the mid 20th century, it was illegal for blacks and whites to marry.  Illegal. Think about that for a moment.

If you loved someone whose skin color was different than yours, you were not allowed to marry that person. You were relegated to the same shadowed black alleys where women sought illegal abortions that sometimes resulted in their deaths, and were made to feel that the love you felt for a person who simply happened to be a different color was somehow soiled. This is what the gay rights issue now is all about – civil rights.

DOMA – the Defense of Marriage Act signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996 – established that no American state, district or territory could be required to recognize a same-sex marriage that was performed in another state. The law also laid out that the federal government does not recognize gay marriage for any purpose, ranging from issues related to immigration and joint tax filings to the issuance of federal insurance benefits and more.  I’m still not clear on why Bill Clinton, hailed as a bastion of liberalism, signed this act into law.

This week the Supreme Court is hearing a day of oral argument each on the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that voters approved in November 2008. It amended the state’s constitution to define marriage as only between a man and a woman.

This whole issue strikes me as so specious that I am incensed whenever I hear something about it on the news. Why should the federal government or any state government deny gays the right to marry? To adopt children and raise families? To enjoy the same tax breaks and Social Security benefits that straight married couples enjoy? Once again, what’s really going on here is the last, dying gasps of an old paradigm that kept gays closeted for years.

My first editor, Chris Cox, who bought my first novel in 1984, was gay. He lived with Bill, who had a PhD in art history and ran one of Manhattan’s art museums. One day, Chris called and broke down sobbing:  Bill had been diagnosed with AIDS. But they were hopeful, there were new drugs, he would make it, Chris said.

Bill didn’t make it. His death was slow, painful, horrific. He deteriorated in bits and pieces – bodily functions, vision, gone. Bill’s parents brought him home to Minneapolis to die and flew Chris out there from New York every weekend to be with Bill. Chris and Bill were in their mid-thirties at the time. It was the late 80s.

Bill died and Chris’s life fell apart. Within a few months, he was diagnosed with AIDS.  He got to the point where he couldn’t make calls, work, do much of anything. His friend and fellow editor at Ballantine, Cheryl Woodruff, who was Rob’s editor at the time, helped with Chris’s daily life. Susan Sarandon, who Chris had known before she became SUSAN SARANDON, paid for a private nurse.  In 1990, he passed on. Cheryl arranged a memorial service in New York and called to ask me to speak at his service. That he had requested it.  So Rob, Megan and I flew to New York.

During this period that Chris was my editor, Rob and I had been leading  tours to Colombia and the Peruvian Amazon for Avianca Airlines. Chris accompanied us on some of these tours because he wrote travel pieces for Conde Nast and other magazines. In the top photo, he’s the guy on the far right. The photo is old and I couldn’t get it any larger.

On one of these trips, he led me to this beautifully carved nomadic figure in the photo. I bought it and spoke about it as his memorial service. In my mind, his figure symbolized Chris,  the intellectual nomad who took chances on unknown, unpublished writers.

Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins sat behind us at that service and she gave the opening memorial, a moving tribute to an unusual man – not a gay, white, black or Asian man, but a MAN, a HUMAN BEING whose life was cut short by a devastating disease.

So when I hear these arguments in the supreme court about a gay person’s right to marry the person they love, I go back to Chris and Bill. I go back to the late 1980s when the world lost many young and talented gay men and women to AIDS. It saddens me. Even though we’ve made strides as a nation, a people, a collective,  gay marriage remains a divisive issue.

I don’t understand it. Love is love. The gender of love shouldn’t even enter into the equation. Gay or straight, black or white or green, we all deserve the same rights, across the board, coast to coast, state to state, heart to heart.

 

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17 Responses to DOMA

  1. Debra Page says:

    Thank you for this timely and relevant post. It is mind boggling that America STILL has issues like these. When will America grow up? When will America actually embody the Constitution?

    My husband is a black American. I am white of Euro descent. We have dealt with the interracial issues during the past 25 years of our relationship. His parents were not even considered fully human in the USA when they were born!

    When our baby daughter was born terminally ill, “educated” medical personnel asked me if I felt that her condition was due to “mixing races”. What kind of ignorance is that? It is the same kind of ignorance that is stopping the US from adopting a fair and equal marriage law.

    When were we were caring for our sick daughter, the hospice program was part of our care team.This was the early 90’s and AIDS was the primary reason the hospice was such a busy place. Ironically, the volunteers that helped us with her care were predominantly gay men, some with AIDS, and their partners. The tenderness and compassion these men brought to our home was priceless. (Unlike one nurse who abandoned my daughter when she saw that my husband was black.)

    I no longer have tolerance for this kind of ignorance. It makes no sense. We humans are all connected (as the MacGregors have shown through their wonderful work here.) Love grows. We have no right to determine when and where love will blossom, what that love looks like, and who loves who. From where I stand, only love— in it’s myriad forms— is going to help the human race.

  2. Darren B says:

    Bit of a sync here for me as I just spent Good Friday at ‘Bluesfest’ at Byron Bay and one of the acts I got to see was Joan Armatrading,who is black and gay –
    https://www.shetlandtimes.co.uk/2011/04/22/famous-singer-songwriter-to-have-civil-partnership-ceremony-in-shetland
    and who last year married her partner in a civil ceremony of partnership.
    For those who don’t know who Joan is,this was one of her biggest hits –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifARMmcqhD8
    Another song, The Weakness in Me, has been voted the top Lesbian love song in online polls.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pjMwzujbHE
    She is great playing live,too.

  3. Momwithwings says:

    I agree, love is love. I’ve never understood what the big deal is.

    Very good post, as usual!

  4. whoot says:

    As has been mentioned in the last week, and as BOZO had put on record 1/2 a decade ago, the children should be accorded the opportunity to understand the difference. Because at an age prior to adolescence they’re unaware of the physical passionate side of life. A ‘semblance of differentiating” should be maintained, because in FACT they R different. There is a certain amount of sacredness to a supposed life long bound, whether M/W, W/W M/M, but the kids have a “RIGHT” to know of the difference. “ITS ABOUT NOTHING BUT THE LABEL” which is appropriate, I believe.

  5. In the UK a Bill titled ‘Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill 2012-13’ is going through our parliamentary procedures – it’s a slow process but will do doubt be approved see here. At the moment same sex couples can enter a civil partnership which gives them the same rights as married couple – but it’s not ‘marriage’. The Bill will alter this.

    I think you say it all when you write ‘love is love’.

    • Rob and Trish says:

      Some states recognize civil unions, but those unions don’t entitle the partner to benefits etc. I hope the UK bill passes!

  6. Connie J Cannon says:

    My husband and I and our sons have several gay couples among our close friends, and we cherish them and learn from them. This is such a timely post, MacGregors. Now, I realize I’m probably going to be blasted for a portion of what I’m about to write, but be that as it may, this is my personal opinion. SOULS recognize SOULS. Souls don’t make a distinction between skin color, gender, culture, or even age.. SOUL recognizes SOUL, and our souls are drawn inexplicably to those souls with whom we have loving and intimate connections regardless of the current persona that soul may be manifesting.

    In my opinion, (and this is where I expect to be blasted), this kind of soul connection explains why, several years ago, a 37-year-old high school female teacher was intimately involved with her 13-year-old male student, and they had a child together. She of course was labeled a pedophile and was sentenced to seven years in prison, a term that she served. While in prison, she had conjugal visits with the young man, and they conceived another child together. When she was released, he was 21. The couple then married, and they are STILL happily married, a dozen years later. This particular woman was not a pedophile. Her soul recognized in this young student the soul of someone who was a very close loving soulmate, and vice-versa. She was NEVER attracted to any other “child”. Just to him. In spite of the difference in their ages, they remain extremely happy, together, as a couple with a family.

    Understand: I am by no means attempting to say that this is the “norm”. Pedophiles exist everywhere and are devastating. Pedophiles don’t fit this category of the teacher and her soulmate now-husband who happened to have been born too many years apart, yet they found each other and the soul connection was too deep to be denied. This, as I said, is not the behavior of a pedophile but of two people whose souls recognized each other and couldn’t stay separated in spite of our laws and culture in the western world. Bottom line for me in their story is that it supports my own opinion that souls don’t recognize the “clothing” that another soul may be wearing. It doesn’t recognize color, gender, race, culture, age. It only recognizes Soul.

    Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, for me, are excellent examples of this soul-to-soul connection. Both are female, yet their love for each other seems as deep and as real
    and as valid as the love between a man and a woman. To punish the homosexual community by disallowing its members to live the lives that heterosexual people
    are allowed to live, with its benefits, is in my humble opinion a crime against their very essence. And, in my experiences with many gay folks in various aspects of life, they are among the most creatively gifted humans on the planet. In any case, to deny a person rights based on the person’s sexual orientation is to deny the person’s humanity. Again, in my opinion. I think it’s heinous.

  7. Kate I says:

    Well said and beautifully written Trish. Change will come, change IS coming…it just seems so damn slow sometimes. Thanks for sharing your memories of your friend. I too lost a dear friend during that time, to AIDS.

  8. DJan says:

    I am so in tune with you on these issues, Trish. I had a dear friend who died of AIDS in 1989, and I miss him to this day. I organized his memorial as he had requested, and I will never forget him. Thank you for this wonderful look into your past. You are a wonderful person and have an enormous heart. And DOMA? I have nothing to add to the fine words you write here. Sending you Easter bunny hugs.

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