Yet the joy for many of us is tempered by the passing of Proposition 8. The country has come so far in electing an African-American president and at the same time the blue state of California has voted to ban gay marriage. One prejudice was torn asunder while another erected a rampart.

It’s been that kind of election cycle. Our African-American president got here by telling us we should not vote for the woman candidate.

Meanwhile, the Republicans did nominate a woman to be vice-president. But her reliance on her charm, good looks and cutesy attitude rather than her intellect made her a giant step backwards for feminism.

Then there is the possibility that the reason prop 8 passed was because the African-American candidate brought too many African-Americans to the polls. The theory is that Black Churches were preaching against the abomination of gay marriage.

Of course Barack Obama never said he was in favor of gay marriage, either. It’s like our fiancé is so sweet to us when we’re alone but is a different person when his friends are around. If Obama had come out in favor of same-sex marriage he probably never would have gotten elected. Politics is a funny game that way.

In the spirit of that game I have a proposal, a new proposition to go up in a special referendum: Proposition 8 ½.

Proposition 8 ½ states that marriage shall be defined as the union of two people who love each other. Said unions shall be recognized by the State regardless of all manner of craziness and lunacy that may ensue.

Proposition 8 ½ has been carefully worded to encompass as much of the human comedy as possible. Rather than target the institution of marriage and ask specifically that same-sex couples be allowed in I am proposing we swing the doors wide. With some of the relationships that pass as marriages already this broader approach is n everyone’s interest.

Let us look at what this proposition means.

“Two people who love each other.” That seems pretty straight forward, or gay forward, which is just like straight forward only better dressed and it leans slightly to the left.

It is the second sentence that needs a little unpacking. “Said unions shall be recognized by the State regardless of all manner of craziness and lunacy that may ensue.” What does this mean?

Put most simply, marriage already encompasses a wide swath of relationships, many of them crazy and lunatic. By stating that the State must recognize all manner of craziness we are throwing the doors wide open for gay relationships. When you look at marriage today two men or two women being married just isn’t that odd.

Let’s look at some relationships that already exist and qualify as marriage.

You can live in separate houses, you can live in separate states, and so long as you are straight be considered married under the law.

You can claim to be staying late at work while carrying on an affair that your spouse knows about but doesn’t want to admit and so she punishes you with cutting remarks in front of friends, your marriage bed a cold, desolate wilderness, and, so long as you are straight, still be considered married under the law.

You can be polyamorous sex gods, at least in your own minds, sleeping with every living, breathing soul within 25 miles of San Francisco and so long as you’re straight still be considered married under the law.

You could have gotten married because you thought it was the right time, you know, because you were tired of going out every Saturday night looking, and because all your friends were getting married and you wanted someone to go with to their weddings, and now you realize you don’t really know who he is but as you’re starting to learn you realize you don’t like him and so lately every time he comes through the front door you are seized by a desire to punch him in the face. That could be your situation, and so long as you’re straight you are considered married under the law.

You can be in it for the money and so long as you are straight be considered married under the law.

You can lie to your spouse about everything except your name and so long as you’re straight…

But you can be in a committed relationship for 10 years, own property together, raise children, love one another in the face of strong societal resistance, and if you are the same sex not be considered married under the law.

Unless of course that law is Proposition 8 ½. Then the State has to recognize all manner of craziness and lunacy.

Proposition 8 ½ holds a mirror up to straight people and their marriages. Let’s not let the churches promulgate the myth that marriage between a man and a woman is considered holy simply by being. Let’s not let them control the image.

Let’s put it into law, marriage is all kinds of crazy.

You can hate your husband and still be married. You can love watching your wife have sex with large Turkish men and still be married. You can also be two men or two women and still be married. If you’re in love, that’s enough for us.

There is a flip side to Proposition 8 ½. By defining marriage as something that exists between two people who love each other we would be effectively annulling, well, more marriages than I care to name here.

(To all my friends who think I might mean you, I don’t mean you. I mean our other friends who we’re always talking about. You know who I mean.)

There you have it, Proposition 8 ½, subversive and loony but perhaps just what we need.

Proposition 8 ½: If you’re in love, that’s enough for us.

What can I say, it’s a good bumpersticker.

Straight people, if you are thinking of getting married, I highly recommend attending a gay wedding. The Unitarian Universalist Church on Franklin and Geary will be holding a marathon of them from November 1-4.

Really, go, you’ll learn something invaluable. You’ll learn that a wedding is about joy.

If proposition 8 were to pass, Feh, Feh, it would not only be a defeat for gay marriage but a defeat for joy.

That is the most amazing aspect of a gay wedding. The joy is palpable. It is bouncing through the room, perfuming the air. When the ceremony ends the room bursts into raucous applause and people begin to hoot and holler.

It is the marriage of the two meanings of the word gay; both the modern slang for couples of the same sex and the thousand year old term meaning joy or great mirth. The modern slang has overshadowed the original meaning. You may read about “gaiety” now and then but rarely will someone refer to having a “gay old time.”

There is joy and great mirth at these oh so modern weddings. They truly are gay. And in being so they return marriage to one of its essences.

One essence of marriage is the contract, a deal struck between two people involving assets. There’s the dowry (current assets), a promise of children (future assets), and the promise to take care of one another (perpetuity assets). Guests are invited to witness the deal and hold people to that contract.

Not a very enticing picture. As we evolved we sewed love into the fabric. Now guests were invited to witness the declaration of that love. Guests were invited to witness a man and a woman state, “I choose you.”

That is the essence of modern marriage, to stand before your community and declare, “This is the person I love.”

And oh, how we lost that.

How common and expected it is to see a bride and groom stressed out as their nuptials approach.

What’s the guest count?

Will Aunt Aida be offended if we don’t invite her?
Yes.
But she lives in Minneapolis and hasn’t left her house in fourteen years.
Doesn’t matter.

What about the menu? Should we serve fish?
It has to be sustainably caught.
Well, didn’t George and Martha have Aquaman cater their wedding? Let’s get his number.

And the venue?
I’d like to get married in the Church I grew up in.
Well, I want to get married in a house built of sustainably farmed straw by three humanely treated little pigs.

Straight people suffer under the weight of a massive paradigm.

Women who have been dreaming and revising their weddings for twenty-five years, the church, the dress, the music, the first dance.

Men who have been told that on that day their joy ends.

Ah, straight weddings, a bride nervous in case it is not exactly as she pictured it and a groom nervous in case it is exactly as he pictured it.

Gay marriage has no such paradigm. Gay couples have not spent a lifetime watching gay weddings in movies, hearing their mother’s tale of her gay wedding day, or going to their perfect gay sister’s perfect gay wedding.

Gay marriage is a virgin forest, pristine in its utter newness. There has been no time for anything to grow other than the essence of marriage.

At a gay wedding there is great joy at the right to stand before your community and say, “This is the person I love. I choose you.” There is little else.

There are two great ironies in all this.

One is that all those people who oppose gay marriage, those who will vote yes on proposition 8, believe marriage is sacred. And here they are opposing the marriage of people who have stripped marriage down to its sacred essence.

These people opposing gay marriage got married in the right church, to the right person, in front of the right people, with the right food and the right pop song to dance too; possibly by Elton John.

Many of them simply missed the point. But they’ll be damned, quite literally, if they allow two people to marry in the spirit of love, and little else.

The other irony is that if proposition 8 is defeated and gay marriage slowly becomes precedent these current marriages of joy will be a short-lived experience. Within a generation gay men and women will have built up their own paradigms. They will have their own images to live up to, their own dreams to get just right.

It will be beautiful because gay people will take the right to get married for granted. And it will be terrible because gay people will start worrying about inviting Aunt Aida and wearing the perfect outfit and finding three humanely treated little pigs who know how to build.

There will be joy, but joy tempered by expectation.

Right now there is only joy. It’s a beautiful thing.

So vote no on 8. Vote for joy.

I was 26-years-old living in Goa, India, on a research grant to study the international rave culture.

All right, it wasn’t a research grant. I was in school for my masters.
And true what I was doing could only loosely be defined as studying.

All right, fine, I was only thinking about going back to school for my masters.

And in the spirit of full disclosure it wasn’t Goa it was Brooklyn.

But Brooklyn was a hot bed of psychotropic activity at the turn of the millennium. It was also home to one Anna Belvedere, temptress and critical theory major. She liked to tell people we met in a rathskeller drinking absinthe smuggled in from Prague. We actually met while getting high on a fire escape at a house party. This didn’t stop her from insisting that I call her my little green fairy.

At the time I was having a great deal of fun with mushrooms. Not shitakes, though they can be hilarious. These were psychedelic mushrooms. I liked walking down to the water and watching the
Manhattan skyline sway to and fro.

To bring this all together one night Anna Belvedere and I were lying in bed when she turned to me and said, “You don’t love me enough.”

This is a horrible thing to say to a sensitive young man from the east coast. To not give a woman enough love, that’s so 1950s, so devaluing, so patriarchal. It wasn’t until moving out to the west coast that I learned to say, “That’s your bag.” The west coast is all about the art of throwing it back on your partner.

Still on the east coast, I was wracked with guilt. Anna hammered the point home with accusations of hegemony, hermeneutics manipulation, and my mother’s penchant for befriending large bosom women. Anna Belvedere’s breasts could best be described as two eggs, fried.

The next day I ate some psychedelic mushrooms and walked down to New York Harbor. Sitting on a bench on a pier I could see the water from the river being drawn up into the skyscrapers. The skyscrapers bloomed into soft petals, red and yellow and white. People were freed from their offices and lay in communion on the new flowers. There was a sense of oneness to the world.

And in the middle of it sat Anna Belvedere with her big words and little breasts. I felt an opening towards her. It was love and desire. It was a belief that through Anna I could connect to the whole of existence. (It was shortly after this experience that I moved to the west coast.)

When she came home I grabbed her and kissed her and extolled my love to her, even using the word parsimonious to describe my emotional withholding. I looked it up. Anna gazed at me with delight and asked where all this had come from.

I told her about my vision. She gave me a funny look. I told her I had the vision while on mushrooms.

Anna Belvedere erupted. Nothing real ever happens on drugs she screamed. Nothing profound can occur while on drugs. She threw her shoe at me. I had demeaned our relationship by thinking about it while on drugs. I was hit in the face by a very small bra.

Our relationship ended then and there. I had been torn about the experience for years. Until the other day when I came upon this study that just came out of Johns Hopkins.

It seems scientists administered psilocybin to a group of older religious folks. Psilocybin is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. Johns Hopkins gave psychedelic mushrooms to forty-something churchgoers. Many of them reported intense, deeply felt spiritual experiences, experiences of connection with the divine. You can see the study here:
http://www.csp.org/psilocybin/

And here:
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2006/07_11_06.html

Two years after taking the psilocybin these people were reporting that the experience had deepened their faith, created a more positive attitude ion life, that it had altered the way they see themselves in
the world. Magic mushrooms had helped some of them have primary mystical experiences.

A-HA! Take that Anna Belvedere. I walked down a frightening road to discover my love for you. And what I found was true. It was true I tell you! Johns Hopkins says so. But your narrow little mind was too full of big words to see it.

Very often what is happening on drugs is a glimpse of a something quite honest. It is a veil being lifted. And then the veil comes back down and since it is all we have ever known we assume the veil is real and our drug-induced experience must be the falsehood.

But that’s not so. You couldn’t see that Anna. And thank god, because you, Anna Belvedere, were crazy.

On the basis of this groundbreaking study I’d like to take a moment to right a number of wrongs done me.

Beverly Kozciuzko, remember that time we were high and I said you were the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, well it wasn’t the drugs talking. It was the honesty with which I saw you.

Simone Bouvier, I always knew that wasn’t your real name, but when I told you that was the best sex of my life it wasn’t the GHB talking.
It was my self opening and recognizing how beautiful our experience had been.

And to the 75 women I’ve declared my love to while on ecstasy, that was the E talking.