Dearly beloved:

We are gathered here today so I can tell you a story: about my almost marriage, the closest I was able to come, given the times and places in which I found myself.

For the picture to be complete, we need to go back in time and across an ocean to Vietnam. I spent a long and difficult year there, from the fall of 1966 to the fall of 1967, as a captain on the Intelligence staff of the Commanding General, U.S. Army Vietnam. Yes, I was one of the dreaded "gays in the military," carefully hidden away, protected by my pretending.

Soon after I arrived in Vietnam, I barely avoided yet one more lie-detector test-- this the one that would have exposed and ruined me, sending me either back home in disgrace or off to prison as a threat to national security. As a result of this narrow escape, I spent that next year living in fear, not just of being killed, as we all were, but of being "discovered." From that second fear, I learned, there was no refuge.

Once I'd made it home, alive, I thought, No more. If my survival means anything, it must be that I should start living the life I want, not some poor substitute dictated by the expectations of others. My country had taught me to face down fear, and face it down I would.

I tried loving the first man I met, on a dark street in Georgetown in Washington, DC, where men went in those days, very late at night, to find each other. They, I'd been told, were looking for sex, first with one and then another. I was looking for love--that I hoped would last forever. The man I met there was, by some miracle, looking for the same.

"Hi, cutie," he said. "Let's go somewhere." And we did. We went to a park, where we lay under a tree on a blanket he kept always ready in the trunk of his car. A few nights later, we went to the apartment of a friend of his, when the friend wasn't home. Then, after my roommate got married and moved away, we went to my apartment and lived there for seven years.

Two of them were happy enough, four were spent on cruise control, and the last I spent gathering up the courage to leave. Much as I wanted the stability, the dailiness, the monogamy of our life together, I wanted it not to be with him. He was generous and loving, but he left my mind--and later my heart--untouched.

Most of all, I see now, I was becoming restless. I was feeling hemmed in by the propriety of the closeted life he believed we had to lead. ("No one must know," he insisted, though of course everyone knew.) This was the early '70s, and I'd had to watch from the sidelines as the Stonewall Revolution unfolded. Men like me, no longer afraid, were out there on the streets with their arms around each other, thumbing their noses at those who chose to mind.

I should be out there, I thought. I should be right out there with them. So I left. I moved across town to a tiny but wonderful apartment in the basement of a row house on Capitol Hill. And then, as soon as I was settled, I staged my own revolution. I told everyone--family, friends, co-workers--who I really was and the way I intended to live from then on.

"Take it or leave it," I said. Some took it; some left it. I didn't care. I had found the courage, at last, to break the bonds of fear and self-doubt that had held me prisoner for much too long, and I honest to god no longer cared. Most surprisingly of all, I felt no guilt--a great shock and disappointment, I have no doubt, to the generations of fundamentalist Protestants who produced me. But the guilt and shame they would have insisted upon somehow eluded me. All I felt was joy and pleasure at being free.

Not long afterward, I joined the Gay Activists' Alliance, where I found that sexual freedom was every bit as important as the political and personal kind. Fine with me. I leapt wholeheartedly into the wild and crazy bar scene and started having sex with everyone in sight. I danced and flirted and hopped from bed to bed, but my goal was the same as it had been on that dark street in Georgetown. I wasn't looking simply for naked bodies to enjoy and then replace. I was looking for love to last a lifetime.

On Gay Pride Day, in June of 1975, I was standing in a booth I'd helped build, handing out literature about GAA and its activities. I heard a deep voice say, "So how much is a kiss?" I turned. He was tall, strong shoulders, broad chest. Very masculine, very sexy. "I beg your pardon?" I said. He smiled. My knees went weak. "I said, how much is a kiss? Isn't that what you're here for?"

"Indeed not," I said. "We're changing the world here. Let me give you some information. Want to sign a petition?" He laughed. "Yeah, yeah," he said. "That may well be, but I still want to know: how much is a kiss?" "For you," I said, taking a break from changing the world, "absolutely free." And I kissed him.

Love at first sight? Love to last a lifetime? Romantic illusions, some would say. The truest truth I know, I would say. I loved Ted at that moment, and I love him still, almost 30 years later. Sure I love him more. I know him better. We've spent almost half our lives together, and during that time, I've learned a lot--what his hopes are, what makes him afraid, what makes him laugh, the part of him that's fragile, the part that somehow survived years of loneliness and misunderstanding. I know all of that now. But the seeds of everything were there at the beginning. I loved him from the second I laid eyes on him.

Would I have married him then, if that had been a possibility? In a heartbeat. But since it wasn't, we set about creating our own kind of marriage.

We agreed that, tempting as all those other naked bodies might be, we would love--and make love to--only each other. Forsaking all others was the only thing that made sense. Anything else would have been a distraction from what we were trying to build. That, at least, was the philosophical reasoning. I see now, however, that there was a far deeper truth: making love with Ted came to define for me what closeness and physical intimacy were all about. Once I'd had that experience, I was certain that nothing else could ever come close. During all the years we've been together, I've never had the occasion--or the desire--to test this theory, but in a way that only proves how true it is.

From the beginning, Ted and I combined all of our assets into one big pot--for richer, for poorer. No more his, no more mine, only ours. I couldn't help noticing that the part he was putting in was much larger than the part that had been "mine," but before long, all of that was immaterial. Everything we had was ours, and it was more than enough.

We bought a house. We bought rental property. We invested in stocks and bonds and mutual funds and gold and utilities and god only knows what all. That side of it was fine--productive and financially rewarding. The downside was that we had to spend enormous amounts of time and effort making sure that both of us were protected. That if something should happen to one of us, the other wouldn't lose any of this big pot we thought of as "ours." Had we been married in a legal sense, of course, those protections would have been automatic, and we wouldn't have had to worry. But we weren't, so we did have to worry.

For 20 years, neither of us had had any medical problems to concern us. Although friends all around us had been dying--young friends, too many to count--we were both fine, saved in a perverse way by that long-ago pledge of faithfulness. Then, suddenly, we learned what it meant to care for each other in sickness and in health. Out of nowhere, we discovered that Ted's arteries were almost completely clogged. In the space of four terrifying days, we went from an angiogram to see how much blockage there was through a weekend in intensive care to surgery at the crack of dawn on a Monday morning. (I say "we" because I was by his side, holding his hand, every minute he wasn't sleeping or being examined.)

While I sat in a waiting room, surrounded by family and friends, a team of surgeons created five bypasses around Ted's heart. They stopped his heart from beating, put him on a heart-lung machine, operated for six hours, took him off the heart-lung machine, and restarted his heart. That heart with which he had loved me so thoroughly and so well.

Though they were not required by law to recognize who I was or what this patient meant to me, though they would have been justified in holding me at arms' length as no more than an interested bystander, the staff at this hospital in Bangor, Maine, chose to be generous. They not only let me stay with him hour after hour, day after day, they also called me from the operating room three times to let me know how he was doing. And the nurse in the recovery room called to ask me to come there just as he was beginning to stir.

"I thought you'd like to be here when he wakes up," she said. Therefore, a few minutes later, when he opened his eyes, I was sitting beside him, holding his hand, smiling at him. Seeing my face, he says now, was the way he knew he was still alive.

So you see, I've had a marriage--a solid, sustaining, and thoroughly happy marriage--in every sense except for the "legal" one. I have spent most of my adult life with a wonderful and witty, strong and sexy man who has made everything possible for me. I have cared for him and been cared for by him. Laughed with him, cried with him, dreamed with him. He has been my life, and no piece of paper could possibly have made me love him more.

Even so, would I now, all these years later, stand with him in front of a gathering of those who mean the most to us and pledge to him--and to them--that I will continue to love him forever, till death us do part?

You bet your sweet life I would.

Go back to the I Do/I Don't page.

"The Story of an Almost Marriage"
from I Do/I Don't: Queers on Marriage © 2004 Robert Taylor