20 Years On: Affirming LGBTQIA+ Love Remains Important

We are intended into the world as we are.

My husband, Jim, and I were married this past weekend — as it happens, on the 20th anniversary of marriage equality in Massachusetts, where we live. New beginnings are among our most life-affirming moments. Life is hard, and these occasions help us keep on keeping on, in the face of our inevitable, accumulating losses.

Everyone needs these moments, and everyone has a right to be affirmed, to love, and to be loved in fullness, in the sunshine of a beautiful spring day, pressing newly wedded lips on the steps of a church, as passing cars honk their approval.

The kiss-honking happened in what would be considered a conservative, rural town. The past two decades have shown that we do, indeed, evolve, but in fits and starts — a few steps forward, a few steps back — bending toward justice but also stooping under the weight of what we still carry.

LGBTQ+ people are again under assault. We are all threatened when our right to be in the world as we are becomes someone else’s prerogative. This cannot, must not be. We are better than that, and we know it.

Jim and I began our wedding by thanking friends and family for making our day possible. Here is what we wrote and said, entitled, Acceptance.

“The 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich often spoke about grace. He described God as ‘the ground of being.’ The ground of being — that place upon which we stand.

If you are born gay or lesbian, your ground of being is the same as someone who is not born that way. We are different, but we share the same ground of being. Everything has a place in God’s creation.

Tillich said, ‘You are accepted by that which is greater than you. Accept that you are accepted, and you will experience grace.’

For many gay people, accepting that you are accepted is hard. Believing that you belong is hard. Standing firm on that ground of being can be hard. Finding grace can be hard.

All of us are intended into the world as we are. We are meant to be here as we are. We two are here because we have found the grace of accepting that we are accepted.

Everyone in this room has given us this gift. Your love, compassion, understanding, and acceptance have brought us to this beautiful place on this beautiful day.

We thank you for this immeasurable gift of God’s grace.”

When I proposed to Jim a few years back, I told him we needn’t be married in a church; we could elope, as I’d done in my first marriage. He’d pushed back, “So many couldn’t marry for so long; we can, so we should. We should celebrate and be affirmed the same way everyone else can — surrounded by our family, friends, and community.”

Jim’s sense that we should marry in the embrace of our families, friends, and community was notable not for its novelty but for its normalcy, and that’s progress. But it can all still be taken away.

The older you get, the more you realize that it’s the utterly normal, simple human connections that matter more than anything else.

As I stood on the altar and held Jim’s hand during the wedding ceremony, in what we both described as a state of gracious awareness, the affirmation from those assembled was palpable. It actually took my breath away.

We all need to be affirmed — not just accepted, but affirmed for who we are, as we are.

We owe this to one another and to ourselves.