This blog is a work in progress. This weekend our church is having a service honoring its gay couples, and has asked us both to talk about our relationship.
It's a tall order trying to compress nearly 30 years together into an essay, and I don't consider what follows to be the last word on it.

The biological family is supposed to be normal, yet mine was anything but. I came from an abusive family. My mother was always in a chronic rage, so I had to move a couple of doors down to live with my maternal grandmother. Her husband and son, who lived with her, were both in a chronic rage that probably helped to inspire my mother’s, and my mother was constantly there anyway because everyone in the family was involved in operating “the stand,” a small cinderblock luncheonette on industrial Delaware Avenue right behind the house. Well, everyone except my father, who was a guard at a nearby brewery and was usually drunk. For the most part, they treated me as though they hated me – I was an embarrassment and an inconvenience at best. I couldn’t communicate with them about anything and they taught me nothing but how to be neurotic. I left home while still in high school.

SG was the first real family I ever had. Before I met him I was desperate to be loved and went from relationship to relationship with people who treated me as bad or worse than my family. And even when I experienced love – someone who accepted me as I was, someone I could trust with anything, someone who was always there no matter what – it took me years to soften, to allow, return and celebrate that love. For a long time I remained suspicious and surly. A writing student once asked me when adolescence ends. I told her for men, about thirty – for women I had no idea. I was joking, but in my own case it was a generous estimate. My midlife crisis lasted longer than most relationships, but SG saw me through it, three hospitalizations for disabling depression, the deaths of literally everyone in my family, and more. That’s love. And now we’ve been together longer than most of our friend’s grown children have been alive.

We met in the fall of 1978. SG answered an ad I’d placed in a gay newspaper where I was then working as an editor. He sent me a long , rambling, warm and wonderful letter – and a very tiny snapshot from which I couldn’t tell all that much. I rode out to meet him at the Lancaster train station – talk about a romantic spot, it was like a scene from a movie – and as I was getting off the train, I kept thinking, “I know I like him. I hope I find him attractive.” Then I saw him, and I kept thinking, “I hope he finds me attractive.” We’ve been together ever since, and I still think he’s pretty cute.

We’re mostly like any other couple, but there are differences. One night we ate at the local Burger King, and SG told the young man who waited on us to ring up one check because we were “together.” He’d been very friendly up to that point and said, kiddingly, “You make a nice couple.” SG said, “we think so.” The cashier didn’t say another word and his face turned to stone. When we left, I pointedly said to him, “You’re Welcome.” Gratifyingly, that Burger King is now closed.

Sometimes the difference is brought home more painfully – when I went to identify my mother’s body at a Philadelphia hospital I insisted that the morgue attendant let SG remain with me, and he told me later she was very rude to him. I was so grief stricken I could barely function, and didn’t notice at the time – or I would have given her a piece of my mind. At SG's mother’s funeral the minister tried to insist that I not be allowed to sit with the family. SG's sister put him in his place. It’s amazing how you sometimes find yourself having to face bigotry in situations that you think would naturally impel any decent person to go out of their way to be kind.

And the law is another matter. Though we’re longtime spouses, we’ve both had to lie on occasion – saying we were half-brothers – in situations where hospitals allow only relatives to visit. Until recently I was covered by SG's Blue Cross at his job – but when he got another job and we picked up our own Blue Cross, we learned that Domestic Partner insurance no longer applies. Blue Cross will only cover domestic partners if an employer’s group policy does. We now have to pay premiums on two individual policies. Imagine how a married couple would feel if they were told one partner was suddenly no longer covered.

Our straight friends regularly tell us of incidents where they respond to homophobic comments from coworkers and such by citing us an example of a gay couple whose relationship has lasted longer than half of “normal” marriages. But we only feel extraordinary when other people make us feel that way. We feel normal. We wish everyone could see the simple truth that we are.

(c) 2007 by Jack Veasey