I Believe Gay's Are Born Gay
When I was four years old, my mom took me to the local swimming pool one afternoon. The two attendants on duty in the women's locker room caught my eye immediately: they were both middle-aged, with matching wedding bands, and kept giving each other that king of secret look/smile that I was used to seeing my parents give each other. I couldn't take my eyes off them: although I had never seen either one of them before, there was something that I identified with very strongly in their faces and their gestures toward each other. They were obviously a couple, but I had never before seen a couple made up of two women (or two men, for that matter).
I asked my mother (still without taking my eyes off these two), "Mommy, are those two ladies married?" She answered me that they were married, but not in the way mommies and daddies were married because the law didn't allow them to do that. She explained that even though they couldn't get married in a church, the reason they wore matching rings was that in their hearts they were married, and they lived together the way all married people do.
I was thrilled to hear this, and immediately announced to my mother that "when I grow up, I'm going to marry a lady!" She asked if I didn't think I was too young to decide who I was going to marry, and I told her in no uncertain terms that I knew I was going to marry a lady when I grew up. In all the times we returned to this discussion during my childhood, teenage, and young adult years, the answer was always the same: "I'm going to marry a woman when I grow up!"
So here it is, years later. I have lived with the same woman now for 17 1/2 years, and because we were living in Massachusetts when gay marriage became legal there, we've been legally married (in some states, anyway) for four and a half years. My mom was too ill to come to our wedding, but she was thrilled that we had gotten married. Interestingly, her only reaction to my having a legal wife, and my sister also having a legal wife, was "Oh good, now I have four daughters instead of only two!"
