Gentlemen Prefer Bonds: Reflections on a Truly Royal Wedding
So, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge attracted one million adoring fans at Buckingham Palace and an audience of two billion who watched the pageantry live on TV.
Indeed, even this old queen set his alarm for 5 a.m. to see what the real Queen had planned, and sat bleary-eyed in front of the flat screen. But as I watched I reflected on the only royal wedding at which I every sipped the bubbly. It was a wedding that my dear friends, Howard and Patrick, had back in June, right here in the U. S. of A.
It was planned on their 31st anniversary—an elegant and quiet affair at the Willard Hotel in Washington. They didn’t go very far after 31 years together…just upstairs to a dignified suite of rooms. I’m always struck by the contrast of a young heterosexual couple getting legally hitched, toasting one another, then changing clothes and heading off with a half drunk ebullient crowd tossing rice, waving wildly and wondering in the back of their heads “will they make it?”
Howard and Patrick did the opposite. They spent 31 years together and built lives around one another and arrived at their wedding on solid ground, having banked decades of love and companionship. Gentlemen prefer bonds. Let the Brits trot out the Princes, Dukes and Earls—I’m perfectly content to know these two gentlemen.
So it was the headline in the Washington Post Style section, a month before the Royals married that really caught my eye. It read: WILL AND KATE: WHY WAIT? I’m sure it covered the pros and cons of their eight year relationship and living together etc.—but as a hetero sexist headline, what could be more insulting? It put the “oy” in Royal Wedding for me.
Why wait? Why wait? Homosexuals have to wait They had a choice. You might as well have written a headline under the segregated water fountains in the south in 1963 with the title “You Should Taste the Water out of the White Fountain!”
Why wait to get married? What was the Post headline writer thinking? Let’s see. I started making the list of those things that kept my friends and hundreds of thousands of gay and lesbian couples like them apart. There are white evangelicals and black preachers who join forces to stop us. There’s a burnt orange speaker of the house determined to find a law firm that will take a pro-discrimination case. That speaker is backed by thrice married rice showered men in public office who have the audacity to put forth a “one man-one woman” law. The math of their own matrimony betrays them.
I wonder if Will and Kate thought of it as they blithely drove through London towne in the Aston Martin with adoring crowds fawning all over them.
Howard and Patrick, driving their own SUV, may be fine and legal in their home “state” of the District of Columbia or now Delaware (as long as they carry all their papers!) but if they cross a state line and unfortunately have a car accident, they’re at the mercy of the locals (often, admit it, yokels) who could easily keep them apart. It wouldn’t happen to the prince and the commoner.
Here at home, Rush, Newt or Rudy would suffer no such indignity with wives one, two, or three. They still get over 1,000 tax breaks year in and year out. Inexplicable.
As we often do, we turn to Stephen Sondheim to explain our world to us. Back in June, the gentlemen who prefer bonds had these lyrics sung by a lovely local talent:
So many people in the world
Don’t know what they’ve missed
They’d never believe
such joy could exist
And if they tell us it’s a thing we’ll outgrow,
They’re jealous as they can be,
That with so many people in the world
You love me.
Who knows if Will and Kate will outgrow such joy? But imagine telling Howard and Patrick on their 31st anniversary that their marriage isn’t valid. We had no media, no flyovers, no crowned jewels, no crazy lady hats, and no horse drawn carriages. We stood in the tiny District of Columbia with 45 of the 49 states around us being unfriendly to us. But, we had a room full of dear friends who loved and wished the happiest couple we’ve ever known another 31 years together.
So that’s why they waited. It’s also why you can never break that bond. Gentlemen, prefer (and deserve) it.
Brent Mundt resides in Washington, DC but lives in Rehoboth Beach.