The surprising delight today was running onto my dear old friend Rene and Kele and getting to witness their wedding. They are both so beautiful, and the serendipity of our meeting was blissful magic.

I feel like a kid on a Christmas Eve. It’s less than two hours away, but I can’t wait for the Marriage Equality Act to become law.

It’s a little odd that I’m so excited. After all, New York same-sex marriage does nothing for me personally right now, and it was unable to salvage my relationship with a foreign national I fell in love with.

And yet, I know this is a momentous occasion in the civil rights history of our nation. I have been so blessed to talk to people about why it is important to them. Over at the Voice, I was  able to interview the first couple that’s getting married, and one of the four Republican senators who changed his mind this year, and the National Organization for Marriage defector. I am continually touched by people’s stories of love, evolution, and change.

And I’m damn proud right now to be a citizen of the Empire State, which is taking a morally righteous stance tomorrow and leading the nation and the world on LGBT equality.

Also tomorrow, I’m going back to Middle Collegiate Church for the first time in a very long time. I have cut my ties there, largely because I don’t respect the Senior Minister nor the board, but a memorial service is being held for an old friend of mine. I am looking forward, in a strange way, to saying my goodbyes, and also to seeing so many old dear souls. Many of us who have left the church will be in attendance. Middle was a huge part of my own civil rights journey, as well as my acceptance and celebration of my own sexuality. It will be bittersweet and, dare I say, spiritual to have a moment there, the first place I ever fought for same-sex marriage, while celebrating the life of a dear straight friend who used to sing with us on our gospel choir’s float in the Pride Parade.

It’s going to be a hard night to sleep. But I better. It will be a long and hot, if wonderfully, day tomorrow, quite full of all dimensions of the human experience.

Lt. Dan Choi and activist lawyer Yetta Kurland came out to the Village Voice’s Strike Fund Benefit Party at Public Assembly in Williamsburg tonight. I was also so touched that Alex Goldmark, Anne Wrider, Bruni Pabon and Louis Perego Moreno came out to support my-coworkers and me as we attempt to negotiate a fair contract with our employer.

Continue reading →

Or, Why New York Marriage Equality Is Meaningless (To Me, Right Now)

Sitting in the New York Senate gallery the evening of June 24th, next to activists I’d been covering for years in their fight for marriage equality, was unquestionably one of the highlights of both my career and my life. As a gay writer who has covered this issue for a long time, and as person whose interracial family of origin began before Loving v. Virginia was law, it was an emotional moment. The tears were flowing freely around me that night, shed alike by the defeated National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown, and by LGBT New Yorkers who had suddenly received over a thousand legal rights previously denied to them.

My own tears wouldn’t come for a couple more days, though, when I had to put my boyfriend on a plane that would take him away from me forever. For as wonderful as the passage of the Marriage Equality Act is, it does nothing to save my relationship with the man I’ve grown to love over the past three years. Continue reading →

This image — of a seven year old boy waiting patiently for the vote — says it all for me. If you want more words, check out my coverage for the Voice.

Thank you, Mom and Dad, for making today possible.

My story about three generations of Ruben Diaz Sr.’s dynasty is on the cover of this week’s Village Voice (the Queer Issue). It was fun to take a long, deep look at this family which, despite how the New York Senate acts this week, personifies the evolution of gay marriage more than any other.

Dear Dad,

I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately. I do this pretty frequently anyhow, but since I had my surgery last Thursday, you’ve been on my mind.

I’ve particularly thought of you as I’ve laid around in your very own flannel pajama pants. I think I thought these pajamas were kind of fuddy-duddy when I was a teenager, and probably goofed on them. But in the nearly eight years since you’ve been gone, I have worn them often, and they are the perfect item to slip over my ginormous foot boot. Continue reading →

Among all the breaking news about the battle for marriage equality in Albany, Out magazine has published my profile of “Multiple Marriers” PD Wadler and Ric Brown, who are getting married in every jurisdiction until same-sex marriage is legal everywhere.

As my friend writer Michael Luongo pointed out, PD’s answer to one of my questions was priceless: What does Rick mean to me? I don’t know how to answer that. It’s like, I’m not here for myself. He means everything to me. I can only think of him like he’s a part of my body. It’s like thinking, “What does your leg mean to you?” I can’t imagine living without him or being without him. We fit so well together. I’m really — eccentric? Idiosyncratic? — and he proves that there’s a pot to every lid. He was the guy who was interested in Judy Garland and the Watergate hearings. We’re really good together, and in the past few years, we’ve become much more of a team. And I think that good marriages are like that.

Read the full article in Out.

I thought about my biological mother for the first time in a very long time this morning. I don’t think of her in terms of concrete memories very often.

But today, I woke up and had a very distinct recollection. I thought of her singing “This Little Piggy” to me. This must have been when I was four or five. We were still living in Ventura. I can picture her holding my foot, and singing, my yellow baby blanket vaguely in the outskirts of my field of vision.

This little piggy went to market,

(It will have an in-grown toe nail removed)

This little piggy stayed home,

(where it will remain relatively untouched)

This little piggy had roast beef,

(eating cows in peace)

This little piggy had none,

(but it will have some stitches)

And this little piggy went, wee, wee, wee all the way home

(As far from the main surgical site as possible.)

I’m also remembering how I always mixed up “This Little Piggy” with the story of the wolf and the three little pigs.

This is the last morning where I’ll wake up with right foot as it is. (I asked if I could have the bit of bones they hack off, perhaps in a jar of formaldehyde, but my usually accommodating doctor politely told me no.) The good news is after the break some bones and remove some excess bone, my stupidly large 15 EEEE foot could be reduced to a 14, so I’ll have a slightly less pain-in-the-ass time finding shoes.