On Taking Things for Granted
When I was in sixth grade, my teacher assembled us all on the carpet for an activity. We were going to be making a pros and cons list to organize our thinking. The year was 2014 and gay marriage had just been legalized in the state of Wisconsin. We were making a pro and con list on gay marriage in our classroom. My teacher nervously fidgeted with the Crayola marker in her hand as she explained that some new legislation had passed, and that it was controversial, so she wanted to have a class discussion about it. As a trans educator, I have mixed feelings about this.
Looking back, it seems like a very out-of-line lesson to do a pro con list of essentially queerness (since I’m sure we weren’t critiquing the institution of marriage), but also, I find it important to engage your students with civil politics and current events. I like that we were able to have a mediated conversation about gay marriage in the classroom, but I wish I didn’t have to hear and see my classmates say that they think being gay is wrong and have that validated by my teacher. I remember three things about that time. Addison (my best friend) breathing too loudly, Andrew saying that being gay is a sin, and that I felt dizzy. I remember that both sides of the pro and con list were full. I remember thinking why are we discussing this? It’s already in law. I remember thinking, does this mean my aunts weren’t married before? And I remember thinking that somehow this was about me. My best friend and I were at the time “dating”. This meant that we were two children of opposite sexes that liked to hang out together. We sat next to each other in class, during lunch, and would play the same games at recess. Sometimes, if we were feeling particularly affectionate, we would hold hands. We didn’t know then (at least I didn’t) that we were actually both gay and were just friends. We would learn the term “beard” a few years later and look back and laugh. But for the time being, in a classroom in New Berlin, Wisconsin, in 2015, we didn’t have that language, only the inkling feeling that the results of that list would be about us.
When I was really young, the way my child brain interpreted the lesbian relationships of my aunts was that they loved each other so much that they didn’t care that the other one was a woman too. Since I had seen heterosexual couples as the default, I had to work that in somehow. But as I grew, I came to understand that some women fall in love with women not in spite of their gender, but as a beautiful part of that love. Ten years later, a film at a queer film festival, I would watch two women at the end of their love story as death parted them. With my adult brain, I took a long hard look at what gay marriage means practically. It means being able to visit your sick spouse in the hospital, since “best friend” doesn’t count as family. It means having legal custody over the children you raise together. It means two names on the deed for a house. It means your assets staying your assets, and it means getting to choose how to bury the love of your life. These are things that 11-year-old me would not be able to express, and certainly couldn’t write down in a T-chart. I didn’t understand marriage as a legal contract so how could I possibly understand the legal benefits, the real benefits of it?
All my adult life, I have taken it for granted that I would be able to marry the person of my choosing. It wasn’t until this film that I really stopped and wanted to thank the people that fought specifically for gay marriage. Gay marriage wouldn’t be legalized nationally for around another year, and queer folks were not unified on this subject (say no to monoliths people!). Some thought it silly or even counterproductive to assimilate and define our relationships through the church and state. Some thought we had bigger problems at hand. Some thought marriage as a whole was stupid. Sometimes I agree with them, and then this film comes along. And shows me exactly why marriage equality was and still is something worth fighting for, and what is at stake.
