So the last post, that was the rational part. (Of my response to HRC's new campaign for gay marriage rights.) HRC almost always appeals to the rational side of my brain, that's what bugs me about them. Then I pasted their little message into my browser and gave it a quick little read to see what kind of dopey legalistic spin that had put on this one, and I got to this line:

Finding a soul mate and building a life together is an integral part of the American dream.

Yeah, reading it back now, it still is partially the product of a grownup debate-team star. It could come right out of a legal brief: this is an integral part, it's the American dream. I must have glossed right over those words the first time. Because they slipped in a couple other phrases that reached up out of the screen and slammed a big burly fist through my heart: Soul mate. Building a life together. Dream. Finding a soulmate and building a life together may or may not be the American dream. I don't care. They're my dream. And they're missing. And there's this huge gaping hole in my life that's eating away at me every morning when I wake up because of it.

That's why I've been posting so much crap about gay marriage on this blog. Gay gay gay gay gay! What gay blog. Can't you ever talk about anything else? It's been much gayer than I ever intended or foresaw. I do have other interests. But lately, this one has suddenly be thrust into the forefront. The sodomy decision, the Canadian marriages, the MA ruling, my breakup with my boyfriend . . . That last one may not apply to all readers. But that's the one that really smacks me in the face, refuses to allow me to forget what I need, what I've got, and how far I've got to go. Finding the little bastard is the first assignment, figuring out what to do with him once we hook up will be the next trick.

I've always wanted to get married. For most of my life I thought I was a straightguy and I spent most of my 20s and over half my 30s trolling for a wife. I was sleeping with men part-time since I was 28, but until at least 37, I was still hoping to make it work with a woman. Of course I was. I wanted a wife, I wanted a marriage, I wanted a family.

Letting go of that dream was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. Harder than recovering from the fall that crushed one of my vertebrae, harder than the year I spent in a bodycast recovering. Much harder than Army Basic Training or Officer Candidate School or living in the Kuwaiti desert for two years. Those seemed pretty hard at the time, but were nothing compared to admitting I was a homo.

Hard enough that I was sleeping with men for nine years before I could admit the obvious. Hard enough that I'd been secretly lusting after them for close to thirty years before I could admit the obvious.

So in a big scary shouting match with my shrink one summer morning, I suddenly saw how ridiculous the dream was and I finally let it go forever. But if I can't marry a woman I don't see why I can't be allowed to marry at all.

Who I marry is between me and him and God, and that's all that matters at the most basic level. I will marry a man, one way or the other, just like my current minor heroes Chip and Reichen.

But marriages transcend every other form of commitment, because they haul the outside world in to participate in the contract. A marriage is much more than promising one other person you'll stick by her until death do you part. You can promise that in the bedroom. Or in a burst of sudden rapture as the fading sun licks the Rockies on your first harrowing hike through the crest of Lemhi Pass. Marriage is about standing up in front of all your friends and families and God and the state and everyone and everything that matters to you, and promising in front of us that you'll honor that oath or look like a great big ass. It's the asswipe factor that gives the event its gravity. That and the legal repercussions. Marriage represents the most intrusive legal contract imaginable: everything that I have, everything I will ever obtain no longer belongs to me. It now belongs to this new entity merging two different people, relinquishing our individual rights and forging them into this new legal entity called a couple. A married couple.

Those two things, the asswipe threat and the legal entanglement, those are the forces that invest marriage with such power. Neither one may keep you together once you hate each other, but each one scares the shit out of you about the possibility. I know why I'm not married yet. Because I've loved a lot of people, and I've wanted to take a chance with a few of them, just not that much of a chance. Marriage takes on significance only because so much is at stake. I can have half of the marriage stake right now. Everything but the legal half. Reichen & Chip have half already. I want the whole thing. Desperately.

In theory I can already get the other half. My high school prom date shocked me a few years back by coming out herself. My first little lipstick lesbian. About two years ago, she moved to Denmark, renounced her citizenship and bore a set of twins. She got both halves, plus a traditional nuclear family, plus Denmark. But she had to find a Danish woman to do it. And renounce her citizenship.

I don't want to do either. I want to remain an American. I want to stay in America and enjoy life, liberty, and especially the pursuit of happiness. Liberty to marry, happiness with the man of my dreams.

If I could just find him.