The Monk and the Skeptic by Frank Browning

Author:Frank Browning [Browning, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593765682
Publisher: Soft Skull Press

CHAPTER FIVE

SACRED AND UNHOLY UNIONS

In which Brother Peter and our interrogator dissect the matrimonial cake.

When at age forty-two my dear friend M. began buying copies of Brides, Bridal Guide, World Bride, even Modern Wedding Cakes & Chocolates, I began to worry. Militant antiwar protestor, civil rights activist, gay health counselor, and—briefly—flirtatious prospect, how was it possible that she had tripped into the trap of taffeta and lace? There were, of course, good legal reasons for her to take on a traditional matrimonial contract, not least securing vital rights for her soon to be foreign-national husband. Marriage throughout most of the world and most of recorded history has conferred both statutory and property privileges. But fine gowns and five-tier cakes?

The party was grand: outdoors in summertime on an antebellum estate surrounded by gargantuan oaks. A seven-piece—or was it nine?—band that kept everybody high-stepping until the stars captured the heavens and we had almost regained adequate sobriety to drive back to Washington. Hardly the only homo present, I remember nonetheless feeling the same gut-grinding outsiderness I’d felt at all the other weddings I’d been invited to, the worst having been the family affairs where presumably well-meaning but doubtful cousins and in-laws tilted their horsy heads, bunched their eyebrows, and probed. Surely my own glorious day would not be too far distant—would it?

“Heaven forefend!” I recalled saying once after gulping down every passing champagne flute I could reach. “You might not find the bride to your taste.” The tongue-blinded in-law was still struggling for an appropriate response as I excused myself, traded for a new flute on the passing tray, and made for one of the few kindred souls in attendance.

If funerals have always been at once bittersweet blends of loss and chattery picnicking, weddings have always given me effusions of controlled nausea. It’s not that I bear ill will or bad tidings on those who’ve been swept up in the nuptial dance. The celebration of human bonding is surely one of the great triumphs of civilization, never mind the reality that marriage often proves to create more bondage than bonding, as exemplified by current divorce statistics or the record of wifely liquidations that were a hallmark of Henry VIII’s reign no less than the punitive terms of Sharia. Joy is to be snatched wherever it can be found. And I would be the last to discount the value of community recognition of a genuinely joyous bond. My nausea arrives not even from the sense of being excluded, generally, as a same-sexer. My tendency to reflux arrives from the gas of anachronistic displacement; the ritual as commonly codified speaks to an era in which we, homo or hetero, do not live, and the manner by which we do live nowadays bears little if any relation to the terms of the legal contract.

Brother Peter, again, proved himself helpful in understanding my discomfiture. Hardly surprising, he is adamantly and unyieldingly opposed to granting the seal of marriage to same-sex couples. Equally, he is not especially

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