Wedding Madness Part II: What Is Wrong With You?

Everybody loves a good love story. Even alterna-girls in steel-toed army boots and shaven heads love love. In the early 1990s, Sassy Magazine was the poster child for alterna-girl (or should I say "alterna-grrrl") culture. One year, Sassy put out a Valentine's Day issue where they had their staff members talk about how in love they were with their partners and tell these shmoopy how-we-met stories. It was as sappy and mundane as anything in Seventeen Magazine. The next month, Sassy published a letter from a reader saying that she was offended because, as a lesbian, she felt unrepresented and slighted by this shmoopy heterosexism and was disappointed in Sassy. It was the first time I met the word heterosexism and it was the first time that I thought about how gay kids must feel on Valentine's Day.

Being bisexual is fantastic. You can go your whole life living the heterosexual lifestyle and no one will ever know that you sometimes bat for the other team, to use an over-used and lame expression. The only downside to bi-ness is that you get convinced by TV and mainstream media that you are totally straight. I remember this episode of Degrassi Jr. High where Caitlin is worried that she might be a lesbian. By the end of the episode, Caitlin learns that it's normal to have "these feelings," but it doesn't mean that she's gay. That is all. So I grew up thinking that "these feelings" were just hormonal blips in my otherwise straightness. I lived my life as a nice, straight girl the whole time. And thank god, because I don't think my family could have dealt with a gay daughter.

My parents aren't really cool with same-sex marriage. The one difference between my mom and my dad is that my mom is a good 60s hippy and feels that people should be allowed to do what they want as long as it causes no harm. Anything that increases the love quotient in the world is fine with her. (And yet she's a practicing Catholic. My mom is full of contradictions.) My dad, on the other hand, completely loses his mind when it comes to same-sex marriage. He gives me this weird argument about how it isn't natural or traditional or something. (And yet he's an atheist. My dad is full of contradictions.) My mom and dad have these huge arguments about it where my mom says to my dad, "What business is it of yours if two men want to get married? How will this affect you? What difference does it make to you?" And my dad answers, "You let two men marry and next people will be marrying their dogs." Which is when my mom says, "That's a stupid argument and you know it." And that's when my dad grumbles and concedes. It's always the same argument. It gets really tiring, especially since I have to hear the same argument on TV or radio every night, but with bonus inflammatory rhetoric.

My mom and dad are both traditional Italians, but my mom knows that things weren't always better in the past. This is probably because my mom is female and she remembers the big brouhaha she caused in her all-Italian neighbourhood when she went to college. Her dad, my grandad, was asked by a neighbour, "Why are you wasting an education on a girl? She's already twenty, she should be getting married. How are you going to marry her if she's got an education?" Apparently my meak and mild grandad had a fit and told the guy off, using a lot of colourful language. My mom also remembers how freaked out my dad's mother was when she heard that not only was my mom old (twenty-four), but she also had dated other men before my dad (the horrors!). This is something my grandmother has never accepted and it's been over thrity years now that my folks have been married.

You would think that my dad and his cousins would have moved on after all these years and started to modernise. But, no. Just last week, my mom and dad went to the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of one of my dad's cousins. As usual, my dad's cousins all came around and asked my mom about me: "Is Sandra married yet?" My mom told them that no, I wasn't married, but that I was living with someone. Apparently they all made sad faces and said that that was really too bad. I asked my mom how she answered them. "I told them that I wasn't happy with your choice, but it's your life and you can live it however you want. Then they said, 'You're taking this so well. It shows that you're educated.' These people are so stupid. They just expect everyone to fit into their little box. They won't make their box bigger, they just expect everyone to get smaller to fit their box. They're so stupid.

"Even Pina was complaining about her daughter. 'She doesn't wear make-up. She won't wear a skirt. She doesn't like boys.'"

"So Pina's daughter is gay?"

"No, she's not gay," answered my mom. "She's just not what her mother expected. She's not gay."

"You know, Mom, by the law of averages, someone in that family has to be gay."

"I guess," said my mom. "But not Pina's daughter."

No. Not Pina's daughter. She's probably just having "these feelings" that are perfectly normal. It'll go away in time for her to be married.

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