The Write Thing

The news from Buenos Aires is not auspicious. Acceptance of marriage as a rightful option for gay couples still seems remote. There is a clash of powers, and the church has deployed all of its soldiers (including makeshift ones) to go fight one more battle before they win a partial war, a war of ignorance, a war of non-commitment. Let them out into the public square, have them express themselves and their self-righteousness.

A law for gay marriage may not be passed, and curious euphemisms will be invented to substitute the rightful status: civil union, domestic partnership, or the French PACS, which at least contemplated common taxes — a perk not to be neglected when looking at the hefty tax income percentage the common mortal is required to give the government in that society.

I can consider myself lucky. Because of my relentless pursuit of a nationality I was entitled to, I can marry the person I love, if she and I so desire. I can be a married gay person in Europe and legally enjoy the same benefits as heterosexuals. However, am I really an equal? There lies the question. Many years ago, while visiting a friend of mine in Denmark, she casually commented on a friend of hers who was married to a person of her own sex. The takeaway of that conversation was that, although gay marriage has been a perfectly viable option in Denmark since the late nineties, she still did not feel she could publicly announce her status without being looked at differently. And that was a shame, I thought, not yet knowing I would once find myself living as a gay person.

So today I know that money will be eventually the decisive element in shaping legal openness to gay families. It will take a long time, but at some point there will be no choice but to see the alternative family model coexisting with you, no matter how many people you can gather around a metropolitan landmark on a given day to go say that gay marriage is unconstitutional, perverse, and against nature.

In a silent, almost imperceptible way, this is happening here in the US, slowly, like the advent of the Spanish language which now has almost equal presence to native English. Slowly, economic power in the hands of the gay community will not leave room for anything but a legal status. Today, the country that hosts me does not accept marriage on a federal level, but gay people still have kids that do not know what a traditional household of mom and dad looks like. Still, US federal law does not grant reality a legal framework. There are kids in many states that are the product of artificial insemination regardless of whether that state has a law that will give their gay moms or dads the option of a legal contract. All of this reality is happening closer to me than I would have imagined. And that is right, that is the truth, regardless of the law.

I agree. The law would be the icing on the cake, le coup final that would make everything right and would allow us to put our heads on the pillow and sleep in certainty. Marriage is like a green card as opposed to a temporary visa. But we are far from that greencard on a global level, so we still go for the temporary visa. Eventually, the greencard will come and nationality will be an option. Today, we can only lobby for it, and hope that eyes will be opened soon to the new reality, once the economics of being gay tears down the barriers of the higher powers with less economic leverage.

It is still early for that. Patience will be necessary until the moment comes. And it will.

Two sister towers stand imposingly at the center of Kuala Lumpur’s downtown, on a hot and rainy afternoon. We made that trip together from Singapore, trying to absorb the contrasts of South East Asia in a symbolic nutshell. The flight was short, but the ride from the airport longer than we had considered. There was little time…there is always little time.

And we crossed the frontier with Malaysia, back into safe, police-controlled Singapore, to catch up on sleep while fully dressed before our early morning flight. And there was a last look at the hotel rooftop, where we had slept the night before under the stars. And I could tell you were already mellow with me, different, as if I had grown into you despite yourself, as if you were no longer fighting that inner battle between saying it or not saying it. And I could sense you drifting away into the land of your own demons.

We crossed a less marked frontier in that trip, and I still choose you. My racing heart betrayed me yesterday as we lay on the couch and you finally told me what your life is really about in that city on the West Coast where I have been banned to set foot, at least for now, the outcast of our love. I knew you were going to say something important, and I still don’t know what else I will be learning about your life before me. Yet, oddly enough, we keep blaming space and time for the complexities in our relationship.

Space and time we may not have, so perhaps it is best to go with what we do have. And that is love, unknown as experienced in this life, flaky and afraid, trying to withstand the fears of us. All we will ask of it is to surmount the great divide between our mirror images, so different in many ways, and see if it makes it through and it finally builds the bridge. For that, we only need to hold on to the walls of the Menara as we climb.

You hurt today, so much, and I love you.

It has been ages since I was last able to sit down and write for me instead of my clients. There is such a dreadful gap between what I promised myself I would be doing systematically once I landed in Houston and what I actually have done that I feel like an addict with no chance of recovery. I have promised myself I would be writing more, but I ended up spending most of my evenings working or deciding on furniture purchases.

It is only for the past couple of days that I have owned a rather pricey but charming desk with a banker’s lamp that I always craved and never quite indulged in. In Woolfian terms, I have only now secured a “room of my own”. So I might as well use it…although I must confess the couch and small Ikea table I got for myself simultaneously in May are tempting enough to write on. Parts of this place that I now start to recognize as my home are coming to life, designed by me and my taste (or lack of). It is a major step towards the overcoming my own homelessness, the snail’s shell inside of which I am finally free at my pace and with my choice.

Yet all of this housing independence — minus ownership — is happening while someone is by my side, albeit still quite physically removed to make anything simple. Perhaps that is the most obvious and challenging side of my freedom, the planning on my own while I know that we both might plan otherwise one day. I know the time for togetherness will come, and it will be the way it is meant to be. For now, my own time is this, set on Houston rhythm, with large roaches that hang on trees (like they did in Buenos Aires), with hot mornings filled with sunlight entering the kitchen, with her sleepy voice at the other end of the line when we can speak, with me retreating into myself for now, going without much thinking of the future, as if I was taking this for granted. It is not, or it may not be, but she and the space she gives me makes it all feel like home.