A Case of Mistaken Identity

I drove a friend of mine to the dental surgeon last week. He had to undergo one of those episodes of high-tech carnage that rebuild the jaw. It involved bone paste – I’ll leave it at that, and you’ll thank me. It required heavy sedation, of course, so I was to pour him back into the car and get him home afterwards.

I left him with a 20-something female nurse, ran an errand, came back, waited an hour, and then the nurse brought me into the operating room. My friend was still in the chair, a touch of blood on his lips, utterly stoned out of his kug. Whatever they had given him had done the job. He was hobnobbing with the Mars Rover, or maybe Voyager 1, out in the heliosheath. But I digress.

The nurse started to explain to me the sequence of aftereffects of the surgery and asked me to wait for the surgeon. He came in, dressed in his scrubs. We introduced ourselves and he said, “Let me show you what I did.” He ignored my queasy protest that it wasn’t necessary and brought up an x-ray of my friend’s jaw on a huge screen. I learned some things about modern dental surgery, luckily without any detailed graphics, and then he launched into the necessary details of my friend’s care and feeding for the next week or so. Ice packs, Ibuprofen, swelling, Vicodin, lukewarm mush, the works. I nodded, wondering why I needed to know all this.

I filled my pockets with gauze and ice packs and the nurse and I raised my friend onto his wobbly legs and guided him through the hallways towards the front door. We stopped to let him use the rest room. The nurse and I waited. After a pause she said, “So, are you two…….related?” Two things occurred to me.

One was the realization that she and the doctor thought that we were a gay couple. Ok, a guy in his sixties with no wife or children on his “In case of emergency” form gets brought in by a guy in his fifties. A slightly younger man who was quite gentle and solicitous about helping his temporarily dizzied friend down the hall.

The second, more important thing was that they did not care. In the internet meme parlance, “And not a single shit was given that day.” All they cared about was that my friend used his ice packs and stayed away from crunchy foods. Our relationship, whatever they thought it to be, was irrelevant beyond irrelevant. The nurse was asking out of basic human curiosity, no more.

I explained that we were old friends, and that he lived down the road from me. Maybe I explained a little too much. Not that it mattered. I could have fabricated a story about getting married and she would have sincerely congratulated me.

Later, when my friend had returned from geosynchronous orbit, I told him about it and he laughed. “Yeah, I get that sometimes.”

It’s just a mildly amusing anecdote, but it is also a data point. Here in Vermont, at least in this professional office, we seem to have passed some threshold of acceptance. Beyond acceptance, indifference. I thought it was a big deal when the Vermont legislature passed the same-sex marriage bill and a friend of mine called another friend of mine (the woman she loved) from the House chamber and proposed. Well, it was.

However, in a way it seems as if this non-incident, this kind of unheralded non-event is even a bigger deal. We’re not at the gates of utopia yet, but I am sure that other non-events like this are happening all over the state, every day. Every such act of recognition and friendly indifference is the swing of a mallet, driving bigotry another sixteenth of an inch into the ground. Perhaps we are actually moving towards a time when gender orientation will become so much background noise.

Secrets and Rights

The Vermont House of representatives passed a bill granting marriage rights to same sex couples last Thursday. The vote was 94-52; not the two thirds needed to override Governor Douglas’s promised veto. No doubt the Governor’s mailbox is full these days.

The controversy has me thinking of two stories about people in my life.

Let’s call them Holmes and Watson. They were friends of my parents, and then friends of mine. They were part of my parents’ circle of friends, two of the usual suspects at a dinner or cocktail party. Their names went together in a guest list. “We’re having the Smiths, the Taylors, Holmes and Watson, and the Petersons.” They were in middle age when I first met them, a pair of solid citizens who ran a successful local business. They were involved in local politics and charity, volunteering and giving. They were both World War II veterans, which was how they met. They were not ostentatious about their sexual orientation, but they presented themselves to the community as a pair. They were together for over fifty years. When Holmes was in his mid-eighties he became ill and died. He and Watson had exercised enough forethought to put in place powers of attorney and living wills. Nevertheless, without that preparation, Watson would have had no inherent right to make those final medical decisions nor to bury his partner of five decades. They held up their end of the bargain, with each other and with the community. The community accepted them and respected them, but ultimately failed to do right by them.

Then there is my own maternal grandfather, who died a couple of decades ago. I was doing some genealogical research a few years ago and came up with the surprising fact that he was born into a Hasidic Jewish family. My mother was as surprised as I was. All we knew was that he had left his family at the age of 14 and made his way in the world. He had distanced himself from his family to the degree that my mother had never met them. He had gone to Yale, gotten a medical degree, and become a professor at the University of Virginia, marrying my grandmother in the late 1920’s.

I have never found out why he left his family and hid his origins. I have a theory, though. A smart young Jew never would have been allowed into Yale in that era, and probably never would have obtained a position at the University of Virginia. More importantly for my personal existence, he definitely would not have been allowed to marry a well-bred young woman from an old Virginia family. He had to remain closeted to the grave.

Throughout history couples have been barred from marrying because of religion, ethnicity, politics, and class. As I just pointed out, a religious difference that would be irrelevant today was, within living memory, an absolute bar to marriage. It is only in the past few decades that we have started to fully acknowledge our equality and change the law to match our new understanding. This latest law is part of that movement. The governor will almost certainly veto it, but he is pushing back against history. Someday people will look back at this with a kind of incomprehension, the way we might look at my grandfather’s secret life. It’s just sad that for some time yet we will fail in our responsibilities to our fellow citizens.

Governor Douglas’s contact page, by the way, is http://governor.vermont.gov/contact.html .

Update on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 3:14PM by Minor Heretic

Today the Vermont House overrode the Governor's veto by one vote, 100-49. The law takes effect September 1st. Equality under the law begins for all Vermonters this fall. The leaves will turn colors again - it will be a great season for weddings.