CAMPOut: Get  Me To the Insurance Office on Time

First, I got a call from the News Journal asking me what I thought about the whole gay marriage debate. I said something very bland about wanting equal legal rights but not caring whether it was called marriage or not. They quoted me verbatim. Only they added "said Fay Jacobs, gay activist."

Yipes! When did that happen? I don’t consider myself a gay activist. I’m a columnist who happens to be gay. And I write about my life and the things that are important to me.

So am I a gay activist? If so, I’m also a theatre activist, downtown activist and Schnauzer activist (Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho Dobermans have got to go!).

I’m less a Gay activist than a Fay activist. I speak for me. I mean what’s gay about ranting and raving about TV commercials, Yoga class or rescuing cats? Okay, the cat thing might be nearing the line.

Half-smarting and half-proud of the pigeonholing, I went about my business, which happened to be planning a vacation to Alaska. Owing to my vast ignorance of geography (If you get a blue question at Trivial Pursuit, don’t look at me) it was weeks into vacation research before I realized our departure city was not Vancouver, USA.

Hmmmmm. Canada: lots of the current vituperation over gay marriage in this country has been stoked by our progressive Northern neighbor. Hmmmmmm.

"Hey Bonnie, want to get married in Vancouver before we leave for the cruise?"

"Sure. I’d love to."

Time out: Before I continue, let me weigh in on gay marriage.

• I don’t care what it’s called, as long as Bonnie and I can get the legal and financial protections afforded married people.

• If gay marriage had been legal, we would have married in 1982.

• Since my religion (and lots others) already unite gay people in synagogues and churches, is a religion banning gay marriage suddenly our national religion?

• Why is this a religious issue, when marriage is a legal and civil rite performed between individuals and the state?

• And where was I when the separation of church and state went missing?

That having been said, my innocent question to my girlfriend suddenly became a snowball rolling down the glacier face.

It took just a little over sixty seconds to find the Gay Vancouver web site and click onto the flashing Gay Marriage link. There, I learned exactly how to get the marriage license (walk into an insurance office), what kind of I.D. we needed (just a Passport will do), and how to arrange for a gay-friendly marriage commissioner to do the deed. It turns out that the license office is four blocks from our hotel and one of the commissioners is ten minutes away. A few e-mails later and the whole thing was arranged.

At that point, we alerted our travel buddies, Robert and Larry to our plans, and they, decided to take the leap too. Now it’s going to be a double wedding.

"Okay," I said. "Let’s keep this quiet until we get home. We’ll surprise everybody."

Yeah, right. One whispered comment to a friend led to another and then we started having to call people and tell them, lest they be insulted they weren’t in the loop. If we missed you, we didn’t intend to.

As for our families, not only are they pleased, but they’re glowing. My father is sincerely thrilled about the wedding, and also, I suspect, that he doesn’t have to pay for it. There’s a Jewish mother in Florida announcing her son’s plans to the whole canasta group.

My sister, who’s sweet, but not always up on current events, accused me of eloping so she couldn’t be there. Uh, Gwen, same-sex marriage is not legal in the U.S.

"Oh, I forgot," she said.

"Well, you’re the only one," I replied.

Telling our family and friends was wonderful and we are all lucky to have so many people really happy for us. But I certainly had no intention of publishing our intentions until that cute and hilarious columnist Marc Acito pre-empted us in the last issue of Letters.

In the middle of all my wedding planning I opened Letters to read that Marc and his boyfriend crossed into Canada from the state of Washington to be hitched. Congratulations, Marc!

But when he was planning his wedding I bet the commissioner had heard of Washington State. The first person I talked to actually sounded like that joke "Dela-Where????" I had to explain I was calling from a small, but important state on the east coast of the United States.

"Oh, is it near North Carolina?" he asked. The two of us could use a good atlas.

So what with Marc bringing the subject up, and the rest of the world’s news focused more on gay marriage than Iraq, California and the Terminator combined, it felt right to join the conversation.

Our quartet left Rehoboth for Vancouver on Thursday, August 21. Our rehearsal dinner will be airline food. The wedding is set for the day this issue comes out. We get on the cruise ship for our Honeymoon that afternoon. It remains to be seen if we raise our hands when the Captain asks newlyweds to identify themselves. After all, we don’t want to add to reports of hundreds of passengers coming down with the vapors on a cruise ship.

As for tradition, we’ll be taking SOMETHING OLD: Us!!!; SOMETHING NEW: the latest copy of Letters to pose with it at our wedding; SOMETHING BORROWED: yeah, like the whole trip from Mastercard; and SOMETHING BLUE: hmmm? My varicose veins? The Planter’s Peanuts bag from the flight? Me, when I think that I have to leave my own country in order to celebrate something so important and joyous.

And somebody call Guiness and see if we can get into the Book of Records for the longest engagement in history.

We’ll have much more to report when we return. In the meantime, I am not an activist. I’m a bride. Or is that Bonnie?