I go to the Mairie du 18e arrondisement to get information on marriages. A French friend said she’d think about marrying me to help me stay together with Paul.
“Est-ce que je peux avoir des informations concernantes les mariages?” I tell them I just wanted some info. I have to go up to the second floor, down the hall, and into the door on the right—the marriage office. They want to see my ID card. I flash it while reminding the lady I only want an info kit.
“J’ai bien compris,” she snaps.
Well, excuse me, bitch. I don’t even want to get married. I’m just getting this info to see if I even want to bother going through with the whole “mariage blanche” bullshit just to stay legally in France with my German boyfriend where neither of us even want to be.
She checks off all the boxes on the checklist: medical visit, birth certificate, declaration of single status, residency papers, proof of address, electric bill, phone bill, lease, etc. I’d have to go to the American consulate to get some of these things…
An American soldier buzzes me through the security doors. “What can I do for yeh’?”
“I’m here for information on marriages.”
“Yeah? Well, don’t do it.” Hee, haw, haw.
Inside, the receptionists are all French, leaving me the choice of listening to zere Engleesh or reducing myself to my habitual role of faltering foreigner. Only the American consulate would hire local help to deal with “its own people.” Being American doesn’t make you part of anything.
I decide to mix languages, just to annoy the woman behind the counter. I say “marriage” and she gets out forms. I tell her I want information, not forms. She says an info kit doesn’t exist. I know it does because this is the American embassy, and our government has an info kit for everything. Besides, I already got one last year and have since misplaced it.
I decide I’ll fill out the forms after all. She sends me to someone else. I have to explain my situation from the beginning. They hand me papers. They take 120 Francs.
Can I really go through two, three, four, five more years of scenes like this just to stay with Paul? Just to have the right to look for a job in a city where I don’t want to be? To be treated like a foreigner? To be asked about my wife…
“So, ‘ya got ‘yerself a Frenchie, ‘eh? The women here are really somethin’! They don’t make ’em like that back in the States.” Hee, haw, haw.
I’ll have to convince myself that the presence of scenes like that in my life is too surreal to be taken seriously. I will have to go around pretending not to hear half of what is said to me.
I’ll stay in France in that semi-existent state for five years just to win the grand prize of Double Nationality. I’ll have to stay put—even if work were to call Paul somewhere else—or all that trouble will be for nothing.
• • •
As Paul and I step from City Hall in our matching tuxedoes, we are showered in rose petals, awash in the flicker of flashbulbs. We’re finally married, so now we can focus completely on our relationship, rather than on the struggle for the right to have one. Twelve months later, my working papers will be handed to me. I can carry on with a career in publishing in France, or we can go to Germany, where I’ll take a part-time job teaching English while studying German. Or, we can go to America where Paul will have his green card after filling out a few papers and undergoing a couple of harmless inspections that will prove conclusively that we are, indeed, a couple. We can move around when and where we want…
Plip! I burst the soapy dream bubble and return to reality. If we want to survive as a couple, we’re not going to have an easy time of it. We’ve got to cheat the system. Either I stay here illegally in France after my visa expires, or I marry a woman and pretend to be straight. Or Paul does the same thing in the U.S. Or a miracle happens, and I land one of the dozen or so jobs snapped up by foreigners without working papers each year in France.
Fags and dykes are liars and swindlers because we have to be. We are a threat to society because society is a threat to us. I have no loyalty to any country, because no country has any loyalty to me. As a fag, I can accept society and think of myself as the scum at the bottom of it, or I can accept myself and see society as a rotten cesspool to be escaped.
I’ve always believed, fundamentally, the latter of these options, but sometimes I have to hate myself just enough to accept the dominant structure if I hope to survive within it. I’ve been on this terrible teeter totter as long as I can remember: Maybe it’s me, or maybe it’s them, or maybe it is me, but maybe it’s them after all, or is it me or they who are crazy or me who is they who are me who are…
I don’t really want to marry Paul. I just want a paper that says I choose to live with him and that he chooses to live with me. The paper would give us the same legal rights as hetero couples. I don’t want to say, “Till death do us part.” That agreement is as outdated for heterosexuals as it is for homos. It’s an agreement we’d be fools to fight for.
If gays and lesbians win the right to marry, we’ll have, in some ways, lost the battle. Our marriage, when and if it ever comes, will be a token tossed at us from a towering political platform. Its face will read: “Congratulations, you have won the grand prize of Gay Marriage to the man of your choice (see Lesbian Marriage Token if you are a lesbian). This marriage is not to be mistaken for a Holy Heterosexual Marriage, though it bears many (if not all) of the same rights and privileges. It is a token, given to the homosexual community out of their consistent nagging and tiresome protestation.”
The other side will continue, in illegibly tiny print: “Warning: anyone entering the institution of Gay Marriage will be judged with a rigorous series of double standards no longer applied to heterosexual unions. You and your ‘partner’ will need to withstand fag-bashing, job and insurance discrimination, family pressures, ghettoization, and hostile, confusing government legislation in any countries, states, counties, or districts that fail to recognize this partnership. In addition, any additional expenses arising from homophobia or socially taboo illnesses such as HIV will not be funded by this government’s tightly budgeted social aid program which gives preference to couples who have shown a history of responsible, monogamous, hygienic practices over the course of their legally documented lives together. The ‘homophobic’ legislation which propagated unprotected promiscuity and drug use up until the passage of this current legislation will not be considered an excuse for a murky past since there are plenty of nice gay boys and girls who have patiently stood behind the flag of their country, praying to God for this chance to be considered morally pure and happy behind the locked doors of their private white houses in the suburbs.”