Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 101
It’s Friday, February 13th, 2004. I go to work at the community centre. It’s in a school and my job is overseeing all of our youth programmes.
I’m sat at my desk around ten thirty in the morning and the phone rings. It’s our finance director telling me that our executive director, who’s the same age as my dad, has gone to city hall to get married.
“What?!” I say.
“Didn’t you hear, the mayor and city-county clerk are issuing marriage certificates to gay and lesbian couples,” she tells me.
Without even thinking about it I hang up the phone and call my girlfriend who is having a day off hanging out with friends across town.
“Do you want to get married?” I say.
“Um, yes?” she replies.
“Meet me at city hall in an hour,” I say and head out the door.
I don’t even remember telling anyone what I was doing. If my boss could do it, so could I. I jump the J-Church metro train to the civic centre and head to city hall.
It’s a magnificent building. Spanning two full city blocks, with a gold gilded dome and an interior of sandstone and marble throughout.
I can’t remember if I ever set foot in city hall before that day. What I can remember is meeting my girlfriend and getting in line behind at least 200 other gay couples with the same idea. The line stretched down the street and around the block.
We wait for eight hours before meeting with the registrar. In that time I find out we need a witness. I immediately call my friend Lily, who is always up for an adventure. She comes straight away, all the way from the East Bay.
We fill out the paperwork and then get in line again. This time waiting for an available justice of the peace.
There are gay and lesbian couples, their witnesses and a justices of the peace scattered throughout the building, from the entrance lobby, across the grand first floor, up the sweeping stairs, and on every gallery overlooking the main hall.
Every few minutes you hear an outburst of clapping and cheering, another couple completing their ceremony.
There is so much love in the air you can almost taste it.
And then finally it’s our turn. Our justice of the peace is on a second floor balcony. As we get into the elevator, we cross with another couple coming out of the elevator. They’ve just been wed.
We say congratulations and they say thanks. One of them hands me the bouquet she’s been holding. She tells me they don’t need it anymore, but we do.
We head upstairs. The ceremony takes all of five minutes and then that’s it, we’re married.
The city of San Francisco knowingly broke the law when they started marrying gay and lesbian couples. It went on for an entire month before a court order shut it down. Something like 4,000 couples were issued marriage licenses over that month.
In August that year the Supreme Court of California voided all 4,000 marriages. And just like that our government told us we were “less than” simply because of who we loved.
The case worked its way through the system until May of 2008, when the state ruled in favour of San Francisco and legalized gay marriage. That summer some 10,000 couples wed before the November 2008 election when the California public voted on the issue, overturning the decision and making gay marriage illegal again.
Imagine having your rights bandied about like a fucking tennis ball. Back and forth, you can marry, you can’t marry, you can marry, you can’t.
The 2008 election was a confusing one for me. The same morning I found out my country had elected our first Black president was the same morning I found out my home state voted against gay marriage.
That morning I cried more tears than I remember crying ever before or since in my adult life. And they were tears of both joy and sorrow and I felt both emotions equally.
Lately I’ve been feeling like that again. Deep sorrow at the clear prevalence of systemic racism all around and within us and deep joy at the uprising, the sheer numbers, the unfettered creativity, the unapologetic fighting back of the resistance to that systemic sickness at the heart of our society.
I find it deeply frustrating when people who have never experienced racism want to debate it and the strategies those directly affected by it employ to try and end it.
What a waste of time and energy. Instead, I pray that they try listening deeply, understanding clearly, searching for a glimmer of empathy in their hearts and stoking it.
Instead I pray they try practicing deep humility in the face of the real, undebatable truth that they simply don’t know anything about. This is one thing (of probably many) that they really don’t know anything about.
Opinions are never strictly objective. They are formed of our conditioning. We are conditioned by our life experiences and opinions, views, thoughts, perspectives grow from the seeds of that conditioning.
That is why it is so important, essential to ensuring greater justice in this world, that we all closely examine our conditioning for the shape it has molded us into. A shape we do not have to take up unconsciously and then defend to the death.
There is a choice. And in that choice is true freedom. In that choice we all might liberate ourselves from the stories of separation and supremacy and wake up into the truth of interrelatedness and equality.
To those who have yet to join the fight for racial justice, this is what I want you to know:
I don’t want to debate whether the Black Lives Matter movement is legitimate or going about demanding justice in the “right” way. Instead, I want to have courageous conversations about what it feels like to be human right now.
What does it feel like to watch a Black man have the life smothered out of him by an ambivalent white police officer?
What does it feel like to walk the streets in your skin?
What does it feel like to know we live in a world built on the backs of Black and Brown bodies?
When we feel into the humanity, vulnerability, fear, shame, confusion, and whatever else reveals itself in this exploration of our depths that I am inviting then we can talk about what might come next.
Then we can roll up our sleeves and get started.