Uncle Yarv #3: gay edition

"I hope you know this will be the most decadent weekend of our lives."

Inuktituk from Buenos Aires writes:

I am a man engaged to a man, and we are planning to get married next year.  Marriage is my favorite traditional institution, and from what I read, I think we have similar views on it. 

How do you suppose a wedding between 2 men can be arranged such that it balances (1) respect for the incredible importance of marriage as a social institution, (2) acknowledgement of differing comfort levels of attendees of a "gay wedding," and (3) willingness to celebrate an inherently relatively novel manifestation of the institution in a manner befitting to us, the couple?

I would suggest copying the only gay wedding I have ever been to, except that it involved a chartered plane, an old European palace, Seal and David Blaine. At one point during this affair I turned to my wife and said: “I hope you know this will be the most decadent weekend of our lives.” And so it proved.

If you have the budget—do something like that. And invite me. I am no David Blaine but I can be pretty entertaining on a stage. And I’m cheaper.

Obviously I am not gay. Or if I am, I don’t know I am. However, I am an atheist, which is basically the same thing. Oriana Fallaci, who was also an atheist, once interviewed the Pope and was like: Pope, I want to be a good person, but I don’t believe in God. And the Pope was like: no problem, my child. Just act as if you did.

As someone who is not part of any living tradition, unless it is communism or at the very least (may Allah forgive me for uttering the word) Unitarianism, but who has the same attitude as you toward tradition itself, I think it is a bad thing to LARP tradition. I am even (slightly) skeptical of actual converts.

When in Babylon, do as the Babylonians. Because there is no real tradition of which you can honestly be part, except for the modern tradition in which everyone invents themself, you have to invent yourself.

But if you understand how these traditions work, your self-invention—to be exact, whatever marriage ceremony you invent—can be inspired by the things that work about one or more traditional rituals (hopefully not in a cheesy ecumenical way).

You cannot have a gay Catholic wedding. It’s a contradiction in terms. You can have a gay Catholic-inspired wedding—so long as it is not an impious counterfeit of the real thing, or close enough to offend your Catholic friends. I sense that you kind of get this.

And arguably, the right tone for a wedding can be created in a completely free-form, even hippie style. For some people—that’s their family tradition. (My family tradition is called “City Hall.”) All it takes is the requisite tone of seriousness and weight. You definitely do not want anything about your wedding to be in any way cringe.

If you wanted to bend over backward to respect your homophobic friends, it is not at all impossible to have a wedding without an onstage kiss. I don’t think most people would want to go this far—but it would demonstrate a kind of odd, self-sacrificing tolerance not much found in these bitter days—a real tolerance. Yeah, okay, maybe not.