Married in Albania

DAYS REMAINING: 364

Last weekend, I was back in Massapequa visiting my parents on Long Island. We went around the block to visit my ninety-one year-old grandmother, where she greeted us with a plastic bowl of peanut M&Ms and thoughtfully turned down NCIS for the duration of our visit. Because Jewish grandmothers from Long Island are required by the Torah to cut helpful articles out of the newspaper (I’m paraphrasing the Torah), she had clipped out a piece from Newsday about Judge Vaughan Walker striking down California’s Proposition 8 as unconstitutional. She handed me the article and asked, “What does this mean for you?” To which my answer was: “That mom still has to go to Iceland.” Because as long as this insane political tug-of-war continues (You can! But now you can’t! Now you can! We meant can’t! You’re an abomination! But I love Ellen and Neil Patrick Harris! How can such a paradox live inside so many Americans?), we don’t want any part of getting married in the place where everyone’s rights are supposed to be self-evidently equal, but of course are not.

And now, a brief trip around the world.

Back in July of 2009, I was floored by a piece of news. The primarily Muslim nation of Albania, previously best known for a) being attacked by Mussolini and b) a song written by Coach on Cheers introduced a piece of legislation that would have paved the way for legal same-sex marriage there.

In Albania.

The final gay rights bill did not, in the end, include legalized gay marriage, but it did advance human rights for gays in a number of important ways. And you’ve got to give a little credit to a country where homosexuality wasn’t decriminalized until 1995. Oh! And gays can serve openly in the Albanian military. USA! USA!

Anyway, all this Albania Mania got Eric and me to thinking there was probably a reality show in this somewhere. If our own country didn’t want us, we would travel to all of the world’s nations that would allow same-sex couples to wed, pouring our big gay greenbacks into the economies of the countries who wanted us most: Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Iceland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and Sweden. Eric and I both work in television production; surely, with one TV show we would tap into the zeitgeist and find a politically correct production company to fly us around the world and pay for us to get married. Twelve times. Hey, look. I paid for a new car and a move to New York with money provided by a wildly successful game show that consists entirely of people falling hilariously into water and mud. All I’m saying is that stranger shows have happened.

We were stymied not by the challenges presented by the rigors of television production, but rather the residency requirements of some of the countries where same-sex marriage had been legalized. It’s not that I wouldn’t want to live in Belgiuim for three months before we were allowed to get married there, but, y’know, who would feed the cats? And in The Netherlands, where you can smoke weed inside the Anne Frank Museum, you cannot wed a same-sex partner unless you are a citizen. That’s fine. We didn’t need our own show anyway. Look at what a reality television career did to Britney and Kevin. RIP six years ago, Brevin Federspears!

Enter Iceland.

While I’ll grant you that Canada might have made for a slightly more obvious choice, there are actually a few reasons we decided on Iceland instead. To start, they just legalized same-sex marriage two months ago, so that’s awesome. And they have a lesbian Prime Minister! And they passed their gender-neutral marriage bill by a margin of 49-0. And magically, the country didn’t spontaneously collapse. (Lucky for us, that had already happened.)

We love Canada. We love Vancouver and couldn’t imagine having a wedding anywhere else in Canada (I LOVE YOU TORONTO LET’S NEVER FIGHT AGAIN CALL ME), but Vancouver is six hours away from our place in New York. So, in a victory for opportunistic spin, we were able to tell my mother, a famously nervous flier, that her flight from New York to Reykjavik would be shorter than her flight from New York to Vancouver. And she’d need a passport (her first ever) either way.

Then of course, there’s this "America" country you may have heard about in the news. The ones with the Palins and the Roves and the “wedge issues” that keep people from gaining equal rights as a means for a group of people to score cheap political points at that group's expense.

I completely respect anyone who gets married in one of the states that allows for full marriage rights (sing ‘em with me if you know the words: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Washington, D.C.), but there’s something about it that just doesn’t sit right with us personally. We lived in California during the 2008 election and the whole Prop 8 mess, and we decided that we didn’t want to get married in one state and then leave that state and not be married anymore when we got back to our home state. Or, worse yet, get married in one state and then have the voters of said state strip our legal right to be married away on Election Day. I’m so glad for the existence of those 18,000 couples who got married in California during the too-brief time it was legal there, especially because those 36,000 brave souls live in a legal limbo that helpfully complicates the argument that same-sex couples are either married or they’re not.

But at the end of the day, Eric and I are determined to have a wedding, not a "Gay Wedding." We’re intent on excluding the phrase "gay wedding" from our invitations, in our vows, in our speeches. We are two people who want to get married. Just being normal is our subversive form of activism. We’ll get married in this country when it’s legal everywhere, and it can just be called a wedding. Until then...sorry, mom, you’re still going to have to get a passport.