Driving
home yesterday evening, I was stopped at a light when two attractive
young women crossed the street in front of me. They were probably in
their early 20’s, and they were holding hands.
When
they reached the other side of the street, the blonde leaned into her
girlfriend and kissed her. It wasn’t a peck. It was amour, baby.
It
took me a moment to remember the last time I held a guy’s hand in
public, gay bars excluded. My Torontonian friend Jasper locked arms
with me one morning while walking down Young Street. That doesn’t
count. It was in Toronto, and who was going to mess with a
6-foot-seven-inch black man wearing a full-length lynx coat?
Years
earlier, I was walking through Provincetown with David, my partner at
the time. We had our arms around each other, and as we walked toward
a restaurant, I began to make out the faces of my aunt, uncle, and
three little cousins gawking at us from the window.
I
suddenly stopped walking as if I had reached the edge of a cliff.
It
will be a year ago this week that New York passed its landmark
legislation making it legal for same-sex couples to marry. At the
time, that seemed like a different kind of cliff.
None
of the horrors predicted by opponents of gay marriage have come true.
Opposite-sex couples continue to marry, and there have been no
changes to their family bonds.
But
gay couples are still growing accustomed to our new freedom. We still
don’t benefit from many privileges that are available only to
married opposite-sex couples.
And
the new law didn’t automatically liberate gay couples. Some of us
have been fortunate enough to never experience inhibitions about
public intimacy; have no fears about witnesses to our expressions of
affection.
But
for some of us, the thought of kissing even our husbands and wives on
Main Street remains unimaginable. We can have legally binding wills
drawn up that convey our end-of-life desires, but the freedom to
convey our desires in this life still comes in small increments.
This article appears in Jul 18-24, 2012.
