The Brides Wore White

September 15, 2000

The music was familiar. "We’ve only just begun…" So was the passage from Scripture. "Love is patient, love is kind…" Vows invoking The Lord were exchanged along with simple wedding bands. All around, people beamed at the happy couple. Some folks cried.

Champagne was guzzled and hors d’ouevres were gobbled as well-dressed attendees mingled and gossiped above the din of other people guzzling, gobbling, mingling, and gossiping.

At dinner, chicken or fish were the choices. Before the cake was cut, toasts were made by fathers, uncles, step-mothers, half-sisters, and college roommates, all wishing the new couple health, happiness, and a long life together.

Yes, other than the fact that there was no "lucky fella," it was a beautiful, traditional wedding. Much more traditional than I’d expected. Actually, I don’t know what I expected. A freak show? The heavens to start trembling and the ground to open up before me? It was all rather normal really…even if the minister was an Episcopalian. When I looked at it in the face, it was really no big deal.

I have met people and seen things in New York City that I never encountered anywhere else. What is right and what is wrong aren’t easy for me to define anymore. I mean, the big things are still easy. Murder is still bad. Rape is still bad. Microwavable French fries are still bad. But everything else is pretty much up in the air.

"Maybe your mind is just opening up," a friend of mine suggested. Maybe. Wouldn’t that be a bitch if all those smug bumper stickers turned out to have merit.

Whatever the state of my enlightenment, all I know is that this wedding of two women didn’t seem wrong. It was just different. And sometimes that’s scary. But that’s my problem, not theirs. And anyway, familiarity is the best remedy for fear. I left the celebration really hoping that these two would succeed in their marriage.

America isn’t changing, dear reader. It has changed. Permanently. But one great thing about America remains. We all enjoy the right to be left alone. Lesbian couples, black kids walking down the street at Harlem at night, buck hunters in Colorado. All of us have the right to be left alone. For as another bumper sticker reminds us:

Unless You’re a Hemorrhoid, Get Off My Ass

Broadway Jim Sosnicky