This weekend I had occasion to attend my first same-sex wedding. Erin and I were invited to the wedding of our friends Adam and Doug at the Chinese Garden in Portland. The short version is that it was a beautiful ceremony and a great party. It was difficult not to be happy for two people so obviously in love devoted to one another. Having been recently married ourselves, I was impressed by how there’s nothing like a wedding to make one fall in love with being in love.
Because it was the first same-sex wedding I’ve attended, I found myself very conscious of my reactions to what I was seeing. I wasn’t offended by anything- far from it- but I was struck by how odd it all felt. When I thought about it, it was easy to recognize my feelings as the attitudes I’d been raised with. These attitudes- calling them prejudices seems harsh but probably not altogether inaccurate- came not from my parents, but from the world I grew up in. Growing up in small-town northern Minnesota, homosexuality simply wasn’t considered an issue, so accepted was it that it was just wrong. It wasn’t until I went to college and actually got to know gays and lesbians that I had an opportunity to get to know someone whose sexuality just happened to differ from my own as a person. That was when I learned that, aside from their sexuality, gays and lesbians weren’t a whole lot different from anyone else. Like the rest of us, they just wanted to able to live their lives in the best, most authentic way they could. That sounded easy in theory, but in practice proved as elusive as it was challenging. Turns out it’s not easy trying to live in a society that defines you as second-class and “less than” simply because of who and/or how you love.
I’m always reminded of how uptight heterosexuals are by comparison when I’m in an LGBT group of people. It’s a different culture, one that I don’t always feel comfortable in because I’m not a part of it. Any discomfort is my own because I don’t know that I’ve ever felt unwelcome in a group of LGBT individuals. I’ve found myself having to recognize and get past the attitudes I was exposed to growing up and hadn’t realized that I’d managed to internalize. Even as open-minded and accepting as I try to be, sometimes I run across something I react to in ways I hadn’t expected…if only because I’ve never been forced to confront those feelings.
Back to the wedding…. Once I adjusted to the displays of affection between members of the same gender- the sight of two men kissing struck me as odd, for instance- it was a lovely ceremony and I had a great time. In addition to having fun with people I truly enjoy, I was presented with an opportunity to recognize attitudes I hadn’t recognized or even acknowledged in a long, long time. As happy as I was for Adam and Doug, I was even happier to have been forced to recognize and acknowledge the remnants of attitudes I’d long-since forgotten. I was reminded once again that LGBT is merely a label that works to prevent us from seeing a minority class of people for who they are- human beings who want the same things from life as anyone else. That seems like it should be a basic truth, but judging from what I recognized in myself, there’s still much work to be done.
It’s been said that you can’t save the world until you save yourself. This weekend I learned just how true that is. In my case, it was about coming face to face with feelings that I hadn’t previously been forced to confront. The first step in fixing a problem is acknowledging that you have one…and the first step of any journey is always the hardest.
