The Feb. 18 New York Times has a fascinating article entitled “A Kiss Too Far” (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/fashion/18affection.html) which uses the controversy over the Snickers Super Bowl ad (where an unintentional same-sex kiss leads to violence between two men) as a jumping-off point to explore how, even in America’s most liberal enclaves, what is routine behavior for opposite-sex couples but one fraught with the possibility of adverse and even deadly consequences for same-sex ones.
The article reminded my partner and I of seeing Celine Dion in concert in Las Vegas a few years back (don’t blame me: I was a hostage). Before the concert, a camera roamed the audience, broadcasting photos of attendees onto gigantic screens that hung above the stage. When it settled on heterosexual couples they would often kiss, eliciting roars of applause and approval from the crowd. When it alighted on my partner and I (and another gay couple with whom we had come) we all froze. Quickly we whispered among ourselves about whether or not we too should kiss and eventually concluded that none of us wanted to, out of concern about how the crowd might react. Eventually the camera moved on, leaving us feeling discomfited and a little ashamed of ourselves over our collective lack of nerve.
As a good gay activist, I suppose I should have leaned over and smacked Jeff big time on the lips. The fact that I even thought about whether or not I to do so speaks to how circumscribed gay life remains in America. We are far, far from the day when a gay couple could, without thinking, engage in the same displays of affection a straight couple routinely does.
Will I see that day in my lifetime? I don’t know. But on Saturday Feb. 17 I officiated at my nephew’s wedding in Tampa, Florida. Dwight, who is biracial, was marrying his girlfriend of seven years, Bernadette, who is white. Thing were quite different when my brother married Dwight’s mother in 1971. Interracial marriage was only legalizing din this country four years before that thanks to the ironically-named Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case. In fact, I just finished reading a moving book entitled The Color of Love: A Mother’s Choice in the Jim Crow South (http://www.amazon.com/Color-Love-Mothers-Choice-South/dp/1592288987/sr=8-1/qid=1172415499/ref=sr_1_1/105-9806308-2518018?ie=UTF8&s=books) in which author Gene Cheeks (who hails from my hometown of Winston-Salem) tells his story of being removed from his mother’s home as a twelve year old in 1963 and placed in first foster care and then a state home by the court, which disapproved of her having a biracial baby and judged her an unfit mother because she had done so. For my brother and his wife things weren’t all that much different a few years later as safety concerns forced them to move away from the South to the relative safety of the North. Their first visits to see us in North Carolina in the mid-Seventies were fraught with tensions as we wondered how our neighbors and others would react to a mixed race couple. We simply didn’t know if it was safe.
By contrast, Dwight and Bernadette’s wedding seemed completely unremarkable to all in attendance. In one generation, the world has changed, a fact I kept marveling over during the ceremony and reception. But I was startled, upon signing the marriage license, to see that the state of Florida still asks the race of each member of the couple. Who cares, I thought? But then I realized there are still those who do. When it comes to the acceptability of love, we’re far from out of the woods for those who express it across boundaries of race yet, and even deeper in those woods on the issue of same-sex couples. Bluntly, no, I don’t think I will live to see the day when a kiss will just be a kiss for same sex couples. And that makes me profoundly sad.