Last weekend at a wedding, my partner leaned toward me and, with tears in his eyes, said, “We are seeing the future.”
And it’s a good future. Or, as some of us old folks like to say, “The kids are all right.”
Earlier at the wedding, I found myself thinking, “Fuck those people who want to destroy all this.” Because this wedding was the antithesis of all the horrific violence that is being done to our country (and in the name of our country) right now.
This was a wedding for our times. It was a queer wedding. The people in attendance were quite diverse — a mix of genders, races, ethnicities, ages, backgrounds, and home locations.
The couple – one woman, one nonbinary person – met at the orientation for the graduate program in public health at U.C. Berkeley in 2021. I mean, these are folks who chose to study public health during a pandemic, so you know already they are people who are out to make good trouble in the world.
As a rule, I’m a bit skeptical about marriage. I’ve spent most of my life single and while I’m now in a committed relationship, we aren’t planning to get married for reasons that range from philosophical to practical.
But I do like celebrations and I also like the people who got married, who are neighbors of ours. Their joy in each other is wonderful.
The wedding ceremony reflected that individual joy, the political awareness of the complexity of the times, and the vital importance of ritual in our lives, not to mention the joy that comes from gathering.
The wedding was sumptuous, with fancy dress and fancy food, in a lovely outdoor space in nearby hills. But it also included so many little things, some as simple as translating much of the ceremony into Spanish for family members who had traveled a long way and spoke little English.
Many people – both participants and attendees – dressed up with lots of glitter. Some wore fairy wings. My favorite was a friend of the couple whom I have never seen wear anything that wasn’t black and who always wears a knit cap. They wore a shiny black suit and the cap, along with fairy wings.
It is possible to be frivolous and celebrate and still claim your own identity.
Because the people getting married have a large collection of family and friends, there were lots of people there, many who came from across the country and even other countries.
There were lots of kids as well as a good number of people in my age range.
It was, in short, a celebration not just of one couple’s marriage, but of all the progress we’ve made over my lifetime in creating a rich and diverse society.
The joy of it all made me realize that this progress is impossible to destroy. Yes, people are trying to do that. Yes, a lot of people will be harmed. But it will survive.
Diversity of gender, of race, of ethnic heritage is the future. Efforts to push us all back into binaries and categories, to increase discrimination, to wall off our borders – all that will fail.
This is the right side of history. This is why my partner – a noted pessimist – cried with joy at the prospect of the future.
Of course, celebrations are important even if they don’t push the boundaries of society’s rules. We are – as I mentioned in my discussion of WorldCon – a social species.
We need to get together in joy. We need to celebrate the milestones in people’s lives.
And we also need to build a society where it’s easy and safe to do those things – something that is extra-hard right now when a minority of white supremacist bigots are trying to tear down what’s been done so far and a few billionaires don’t think the rest of us exist.
Those people are dangerous, but they’re not smart – not even the billionaires, who think they are. And they’re on the wrong side of history.
We saw the future at a wedding last weekend.