Do You Wanna’ Dance?: By Eric Marcus

We went to a lovely wedding last weekend—a “regular” wedding, as my late grandmother came to call weddings between a boy and a girl. Two hundred people in a beautifully decorated hotel ballroom on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, all gathered to celebrate the happy occasion. Not that it should matter, but I was glad to see that we weren’t the only gay couple among the two hundred guests, although we were the oldest of the three male couples by about a decade.

During the reception, when the twelve-piece band tore into one of our favorite seventies classics, my partner of thirteen years asked me to dance. We both love to dance and we love dancing together. I won’t pretend that we dance at straight weddings without hesitation, but over the years as gay people have become more visible and we’ve grown more comfortable, we’ve gotten less hesitant and less concerned with what people might think. So at last weekend’s wedding, which was hosted by a liberal, warm, and embracing family we didn’t think twice.

Still, there were some surprised looks as the two middle-aged gay guys took to the crowded dance floor. Most of the looks were of happy surprise (there were smiles and I didn’t stop to ask). But there were also a couple of scowls from people a decade or more older than us. It’s not like we were surprised by the smiles or disappointed by the scowls. Our place in society is still a work in progress and it will be a long time before our open presence is a total non-event.

But there was one thing that did surprise and disappoint us. Neither of the other two couples danced a single dance. One couple sat out the whole evening. And while the other couple never left the dance floor, they never danced with each other and their partners were always women.

I’m the first person to say—and I’ve said this for a long time—that gay people need to move at their own speed when it comes to how public they choose to be about the fact they’re gay. Coming out is a very personal thing and we all have different comfort levels. That said, I wish we hadn’t been the only boy-boy couple on the dance floor. And I wish this for a couple of reasons.

First, it would have been nice to have a little company. For one thing, if there had been another same-sex couple on the dance floor, the attention paid to us would have been diluted. Second, we gay people still have work to do when it comes to our visibility. And while I don’t think that everything we do has to be a political statement, being ourselves in a public setting sets an example. The more we’re all out there, the more people will grow accustomed to seeing same-sex couples, and, one hopes, the more comfortable they’ll be when we do normal things in public, like dancing at weddings, greeting each other at airports, or shopping together at the grocery. And we know from past experience that as people get to know us they support the legislation that’s important to us, from employment protections to domestic partnership and gay marriage.

Dancing at a wedding isn’t quite as heroic as the public demonstrations of past decades when the early gay pioneers fought for our basic rights, but it’s still an opportunity to make a difference, however incremental. Besides, it’s fun. And we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that not dancing sends a message, too.
Eric Marcus is the author of Making Gay History and the forthcoming book for teens, What if Someone I Know is Gay? www.ericmarcus.com

“Who Plays the Husband and Who Plays the Wife?”: By Eric Marcus

August 7, 2007

We spent this past weekend at a lovely resort in the Berkshires with our straight couple friends, Bob and Debbie. It was all so totally normal that you could almost forget that being a gay couple was ever an issue anywhere (although I’m well aware that it remains a plenty big issue in many ways and in many places). But there were a number of reminders that we still live in a world that assumes couples come in bi-gender pairs. And not everyone has comfortably adjusted to the fact of our existence.

Like a lot of places we’ve traveled to, there was a welcome note from the manager waiting for us in the room when we arrived. We’ve kept a collection of these notes from over the years because it’s fun to look back to see how they’ve been addressed: Mr. & Mrs. Marcus or Mr. & Mrs. Karpfinger. Or the notes are addressed to the two of us by name or, as was the case this past weekend, the note was addressed only to my partner, presumably because it was his credit card under which the reservation was made (although they knew that the two of us would be occupying the room).

The real fun came at dinner the first night when the four of us were scanning our menus and discussing our choices. I commented on the cost of the various tasting menus and Barney asked where on the menu I was looking. “The bottom of every page,” I said, trying desperately to hide my impatience, because it was plain as day where the prices were listed. Then Debbie said, “I don’t see them either.” It seems that someone on the wait staff had decided that Bob and I were the husbands, hence the menus with the prices (the resort is a little old fashioned when it comes to its menus), and that Barney and Debbie were the wives who needed to be kept in the dark about what the meal was costing. We had a good laugh over that one, wondering what the conversation must have been like in the kitchen as they tried to figure out our marital roles. How did they decide? Was it my manly swagger? The way we took our seats (I let Barney choose where to sit and sat down after he did)? Or was it just our overall demeanor?

With Bob and Debbie it was fairly evident who wore the pants in the family (Debbie was wearing a lovely summer dress and Bob was in coat and tie), but the waiter had no idea whether it was Bob or Debbie who was the primary wage earner. In any event, the whole thing was way confusing and totally unnecessary. They could have simply asked us about our chosen roles or they could have made things easy for themselves and given us all menus that included the prices. (The idea of priceless menus seems a little silly anyway.)

If we really wanted to have some fun, we might have asked the waiter how they came to decide who got which menu. And maybe that would have been a good thing to do—a teaching moment, perhaps, so they could think about how to handle things differently the next time they encountered a same-sex couple. Or if we’d really wanted to have some fun we could have informed the manager that we were new age, post-feminist Mormans and that Debbie was the matriarch of our happy band. Debbie liked that idea best.