The Real Threat is When Love Doesn't Matter

Every time I hear some idiot like Rick Santorum talk about how gay marriage threatens his marriage, or some supposed "liberal"  spout off about the fight for marriage equality hurting progressives, I think back to my friend Tim, a performance artist with spiky blond hair who I met in San Francisco in the early 80s.

Tim moved to Italy just as I returned, somewhere around 1985 or 1986. In Milan, he met and fell in love with one of my friends, a young doctor named Pietro who had been hopelessly in love with my housemate when I lived there. In 1989, I went back to Italy for a short visit, and found out that both Tim and Pietro had AIDS.

So here was Tim, sick and far from his family in Wisconsin and his friends in San Francisco, getting inadequate medical care and outdated health information. He could no longer work. Why didn't he go home?

Because Pietro could not get permanent resident status in the United States, and Tim wouldn't leave him. Tim died 7000 miles from his friends and family because he couldn't simply marry the man he loved and come home, as any female US citizen could have done, or as he could have done with any female Italian citizen.

There were many of us who never saw Tim again, and were not able to help or support him in any way as he was dying. And since some of our friends from those days who also had HIV are still alive, it cannot be ruled out that Tim, had he been back in San Francisco and getting the kind of medical care they did, might also still be alive.

I had another friend who I'll call Joe, who nursed his lover, who I'll call Bill, through a long losing battle with AIDS. During the years before Bill died, his parents never once contacted him or took any responsibility for helping care for him or made any effort to be in his life. But when he died, having left his whole estate to Joe, the family swept in and had the will challenged in court, claiming that the very fact that he was the caretaker for their son was undue influence. The judge agreed and threw the will out. Many comments were made in the ruling that indicated that the "nature" of their relationship was intrinsically exploitative - not their personal relationship, which no one had any evidence of and which was not discussed in any way during the case, but simply the fact that they were both men. They were not far apart in age and my friend had fairly substantial resources of his own and was not some floozy out to rip off his lover. Nursing someone with AIDS, which I have done, is not a walk in the park and not the kind of thing you sign up for just to get a condo.

Once the will was thrown out, Joe lost everything that he and Bill had together. He wasn't even able to keep Bill's clothing or other personal effects, because the family, one day during the trial, had the locks changed on the condo, and Joe hadn't known when he left that day that he'd never set foot inside again. I don't know if you've ever lost someone you deeply loved, but sometimes those little things, like the clothes they wore that still smell like them, or the last book they read, mean incredibly much when they are gone.

I cannot count the number of men I know or knew who came home from their lovers' deathbeds or funerals to find the locks had been changed on the home they had shared, sometimes for many years, with their partners. Even in the face of wills, many judges simply let their own aversion to homosexual relationships be the deciding factor in how they ruled.

Then there were the families who flew in at the eleventh hour and threw all of us out of the hospital rooms of our friends. And no one could do anything about it, because despite all the months and sometimes years we had been caring for these people, we were legally nothing. Had the lover been the legal spouse, or even the common law spouse, they would have had immediate legal standing to say who could be present in the hospital or at the funeral, to make medical decisions.

Yes, people did start getting powers of attorney and other forms of legal protection. Some of them couldn't afford to get a lawyer, some of them could. Some of these legal documents worked, some didn't - some hospitals and courts just wouldn't enforce them or threw up so many obstacles it was like starting from scratch every single day. I laugh when I see some well-meaning "liberal" suggest these types of documents as the solution for gay partners for medical and inheritance issues. Been there, done that, doesn't work.

I lied, actually. I don't laugh. Usually I get really angry. Sometimes, though, I cry.

Comments

[ol cranky]

The analogy that gay marriage hurts or undermines "traditional" marriage (or even marriage that doesn't include a man anally raping his wife) makes about as much sense as my saying my neighbor can't have a clambake or eat peanuts in his backyard because I am deathly allergic. Come to think of it, the gay marriage analogy makes less sense, because if I have to go to my neighbors back yard for something & come in contact with the offending allergen I could be injured. If the sanctity of Rick & Karen Santorum's marriage is so easily threatened/undermined by gay marriage - they need to get their asses into marriage counseling.

[Ben]

The fact is that judges like the one who ruled against Joe are, if anything, increasing in number. I'm convinced that same-sex partners deserve the legal protection they're not getting.