“You don’t understand. That is a twenty dollar bottle of moisturizer.”“Sorry, sir. It’s over the three-ounce limit.”
I’m standing in the airport security line, flying for the first time in a few months. Somehow, I missed the latest memo on insane travel restrictions. As a result, I’m now locked in a standoff with a man who has obviously had this conversation umpteen million times.
“If I bend the rules for you, I gotta bend ‘em for everybody else,” he says, and tosses half of the contents of my shaving kit into a trash bin.
I’m on my way to Vegas, to serve as Man of Honor at my roommate Kit’s marriage to his boyfriend, which will be perfectly legal in all fifty states.
It’s complicated.
Kit is a guy who was inconveniently born with girl parts, but he’s been working with medical professionals lately to correct that little error in manufacturing. His boyfriend Terrence was also born with girl parts, but he took care of that a few years ago. So now Terrence has a driver’s license identifying him as “M”, while Kit is still at this early stage classified as “F”. We’ve got an “M”, we’ve got an “F”, and we’re ready for Vegas. The best part is, even after Kit becomes legally classified as “M”, the marriage will still be valid. So I’ll finally have the satisfaction of seeing a legally married gay couple- it just took a pair of tranny boys to figure out how to do it.
Pause for a moment, and picture how long it took me to explain this to my mother.
A few hours later, I’m smoking under a palm tree outside the Las Vegas Marriage License Bureau, watching Kit and Terrence through the plate glass window. It’s almost midnight on a Saturday, so the cast of characters inside is pretty entertaining. One window down from my couple is a very drunk pair of college kids that stops talking to the clerk every ten seconds to make out. And one window down from that couple is an Asian businessman who appears to be marrying a middle-aged whore.
Speaking of middle-aged whores, my cousin flew to Vegas once and then drove all the way out to The Mustang Ranch with the express intention of losing his virginity. He had grown tired of waiting and really wanted to get the first one out of the way, so he engaged the services of a professional. Apparently the one he selected was having a really bad week, because she started crying before they even got undressed. They offered to get him a new girl with a sunnier disposition, but apparently nothing kills a hard-on quite like a sobbing hooker.
But I’m digressing. Back to the transsexual wedding. The next morning, we’re up bright and early to head over to civil court and get this marriage thing taken care of before brunch. The judge performing the ceremony looks exactly like one of the Skeksis from “The Dark Crystal”, if it were going as Bea Arthur for Halloween.
Even though we know we’re here on a technicality, thanks to that “F” on Kit’s license, it’s still very jarring to hear him called by his legal (female) name. And Judge Skeksis keeps saying that name over and over, as if reassuring herself that the “bride” really is a “woman”. In all the planning of this blessed event, I don’t think any of us ever considered the fact that Kit would be referred to as someone’s “wife”, which is patently absurd. Kit’s twice the man I am, in half the size, which technically makes him four times the man I am, I think. Math is hard. But then it’s done. Kit and Terrence are legally married. The fact that these two people could marry, but only when one was finished with his gender change and the other was just getting started, speaks volumes about how insane the whole argument against gay marriage really is. But today is encouraging, because my friends got what they wanted, and we got to bend the rules a bit.
And remember what the airport guy said: If they do it for some people, eventually they’ll have to do it for everybody else.
