A couple of weeks ago, Russ and I went to go see the band Travis in concert. Travis is a band I’ve loved since high school. I remember the first time I heard them do a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “River”, I felt the song in my whole body. Their music is so beautiful and moving and fun. So I was ecstatic to go see them perform live.
What made it more exciting was that I was going to get to share the show with Russ. Russ has never been a big fan of Travis, but he definitely likes them. But the timing of the concert was totally perfect. At the time, Russ and I had just had a conversation about the state of our marriage and how it feels stronger and more joyful than ever. We had hit a little point of tension on the Monday before the concert, but we worked through that tension better than we have ever worked through a conflict before, and coming out on the other side of that conflict the way we did made us both feel stronger and happier and more appreciative of how far we’ve come. By Monday night, we were feeling so incredibly safe and secure and connected and flat out joyful about our love, so to get to go to the Travis concert on Tuesday night as a way to celebrate felt extremely appropriate. We had an amazing conversation Tuesday morning, and I decided to upgrade our seats at the last minute.
I had such an astoundingly good time at the concert. I sang until my throat was sore, I danced unabashedly, and I kept looking at Russ and squeezing his hand because I was so glad I was getting to share that moment of joy with him. Ever since, Travis’s music has been resonating in a new way, as a reminder of how far Russ and I have come and of that night when we went to the concert.
The Saturday after the concert, we were already scheduled to have a photography session at our house. This year in our relationship felt significant to mark - 20 years since we started dating, 15 years since we got married, 10 years since we made our marriage legal. Plus we didn’t have many pictures of the two of us since I got my LASIK, and I thought it would be nice to capture this time in our life together in our house. I was hoping for a “cozy” vibe to the pictures. But what I couldn’t anticipate when I scheduled the photography session was just how connected and joyful things would feel the day of the session. And I think that feeling and that connection ended up getting captured really perfectly in the photos.
Last Wednesday, Russ left to go to a work conference in California. He travels a fair amount for his job, and before he left, we talked about how this trip probably wouldn’t be so tough in terms of missing each other because of how great things felt between us. But it turns out the opposite was true. I think I was so enamored with how much I was basking in the strength and joy between us, that it felt like a bigger emptiness when Russ wasn’t around. I had a harder time with Russ’s being gone this time than I normally do. I almost didn’t know what to do with myself. I got a bit more depressed than I have in a while. By the time I was driving to the airport yesterday afternoon to pick him up, I felt like I was vibrating out of my skin with anticipation of having him back.
Now, the point of this blog post was not to brag about my marriage. I don’t necessarily think there’s anything wrong with being proud of the great marriage that we’ve worked hard for - and a lot of people feel no shame about bragging about their families when the bragging centers around their kids - but I didn’t intend for this post to be solely about my marriage’s greatness.
One of the things I did while Russ was out of town was FaceTime my cousin Jenn, who I mentioned in a previous post. Jenn is an extremely passionate person who, like a lot of us right now, feels like she needs to do SOMETHING about the state of the world we’re living in. Jenn and I both live in red states, and it seems like there is a new atrocity that we’re being asked to accept every day, if not every hour. Whether it is that people are not allowed to be legally recognized - or even allowed to use the right bathrooms- for the gender we are, or reproductive rights being denied, or the active destruction of our planet, or the threat of being sent to “wellness farms” for the medications we take - there is some new horror that we are being asked to allow every moment. And Jenn and I have brains and hearts that work very similarly, and have an impossible time accepting even the smallest of injustices, let alone these massive ones. We ended up FaceTiming for almost 2 hours, and at one point I told her that I think we each need to pick our thing. It is impossible to do everything we want to do and fight every fight that needs to be fought, but we can each do a thing to stand up for what’s right, and it’s a matter of figuring out what our thing is.
I remember being 13 years old and wondering how I was ever going to live my truth as a queer person, how I would even survive past the age of 13, and then seeing a picture of two male sailors in World War I kissing. That told me that people like me have been around for a very long time. And I then saw pictures of adult same sex couples, older people who had been together for decades. Those photos gave me hope and showed me that a future was possible.
I told Jenn that, at this moment in our history, I hope that some 13 year old queer kid sees the photos of Russ and I from our photography session. That seeing me - an almost 40 year old queer nonbinary AMAB person - totally in love with my queer partner of 20 years shows that it is possible to have a queer adulthood. Because there are almost certainly many, many queer kids who see what is going on in our country and wonder if they will have a future, and I am evidence that a future is possible. And not only is it possible, but it is also potentially an extremely joyful, safe, life-giving, and strong future. I told Jenn that at some point over these last several weeks, I decided that my one thing I could do is have my queer joy, because my queer joy in defiance of all we’re facing is proof that it is possible to have it.
I am still horrified by everything that this administration is doing, but I am also heartened to see that the resistance is growing. And maybe the direness of the situation in our country makes the joy in my marriage seem that much more significant by contrast. But I will continue to celebrate these moments of queer joy as much as I can, if only to prove that they are possible.