I want to tell a story. It’s the story of a night of celebration, and of hearing the silence that is our silence as the kids raised up in the gay marriage era.
At fourteen years old I stood on the lawn of Cambridge City Hall on the evening of May 16th 2004. At midnight, when the calendar turned over to May17th, the city began issuing their first marriage licenses to gay couples. There were wedding cakes, champagne, and costumes. There were old couples and young couples, people milling about and people who’d planned for months to be waiting on those steps. There were even straight people.
I’d arrived by accident. One of my moms has the wonderful habit of pulling over the car on a whim for an adventure. We were on our way home when we saw a few dozen people on the lawn in front of City Hall, and so we stopped, got out, and stayed. I bet she knew that the evening would turn into something spectacular. It got dark, people kept arriving, and by the time the doors opened at 11pm, there were over one thousand of us on the lawn. We’d been there for a long time, eating and talking, holding candles and singing, so we went inside when the flow of people pushed to the doors.
Cambridge City Hall is a beautiful, but very small old building. We were standing up in the mezzanine. People were giving speeches. The mayor, the lawyers. What I heard were not the words of the people standing behind the podium, but the sound of people sharing joy, of laughing, of loving the new world in which we lived where change had happened. There was a palpable, genuine awe that a meeting of gay folks could take place in a house of law for the purpose of celebration, not fear or punishment. The speeches were ceremonial.
One person spoke of the kids of LGBTQ parents. The room went quiet, and I heard myself and a few sparse cheers call out. A hollow feeling crept into my throat as I recognized: we weren’t there. The kids of these couples were either at home, too young, not yet born, or much worse, never to be. Maybe the kids were grown now, taken from their gay parents as children when the courts had found gay dads and lesbian moms unfit to parent.
We have been such an emblem of the gay marriage movement trying to prove that we too can be normal and just like our peers. And yet, we were not in the room. And we have often not been in the room when our families are the topic of conversation.
When the doors of City Hall opened and we spilled out, thousands of people stood by the doors throwing rice, singing songs, cheering, kissing, and dancing. Thousands of people had stood outside and were waiting to celebrate with us complete strangers.
Why remember this day at the beginning of Gathering Voices? Because that day I felt an infusion of warmth and joy from being surrounded. I love LGBTQ communities, I love our depth and strength and big belly laughs. Gathering Voices is a celebration of that.
I remember that day also because Gathering Voices is fills that silent space where our voices could have been.
