Update: Seems like it was just the first 100 comments. After that every comment is by a dude named “Colon Cleanse.”  (You don’t know me, Colon!)

But in real life the honeymoon had to wait, and after ten days going from Philly to the Catskills back to Philly then to Brooklyn and Manhattan before returning to Philly on our extended wedding/ Fireplug family reunion tour, we actually had to, you know, work for a living.

I’m writing this on company time, having picked up another weekday of office work, which now puts me somewhere around 50 hours a week between my various jobs. When your health insurance eats up a quarter of your salary, you do what you can.

So a long-winded, carefully-composed narrative of our wedding won’t be forthcoming today.  Besides, this is the internet; who has the attention span for narratives? How about a couple of pics instead…

Since the Fireplug had something like 12 or 13 family members making the trip from Philly to Brooklyn bright and early the morning of the ceremony, the Fireplug’s mom decided to rent an entire bus. What showed up was a stretch limo – the kind with an interior neon ceiling that changed colors, with tiny artificial stars shimmering overhead. I could almost pretend like we were kicking off a Saturday night trip to our junior prom, but really it was Wednesday morning,  and we were heading up the Pennsylvania turnpike.

The driver had some trouble navigating the limo through the narrow streets of Brooklyn Heights, and we arrived at the promenade with only a few minutes to spare. The wedding photographer snapped this as I emerged from the limo, fretting:

There’s a few other photos here. (Thanks again to Jonathan Gati for the great shots.) Various friends and family converged on our location but I continued to fret. The judge was late. No judge, no wedding. There’s a reason I shy away from event planning. I fret.

But the judge arrived with seconds to spare.

I believe our ceremony lasted about six minutes. It included the exchange of vows we’d written together, which I later posted here.

I made it about two words in before this happened to me:

Yeah, I totally cried. Sue me.

My friend Norman Brannon snapped this photo. That’s the Fireplug’s mother beside him; his best man, Joel; and his niece, the flower girl I mentioned in that other post. Beside me stands my father, my best man that day.

I don’t remember what we were laughing at. In fact, I can’t be certain the ceremony lasted six minutes, because a fierce case of tunnel vision overtook me. Beneath the promenade ran the East River, and beyond that stretched the skyline of Manhattan. Somewhere in there stood the Brooklyn Bridge. I saw none of it.

I only remember one thing from the ceremony.  The thing I tried to focus on during our vows. This face:

And I’ll think I’ll just leave it at that.

“I think it’s just a few minutes till our stop,” the Manly Fireplug said.

“You’re supposed to talk in a whisper,” I said, pointing to the Quiet Car rules posted on the wall.

“Oops!” he said. “This is going to be so hard!”

I promise to tell you “I love you” every day.

I will encourage you in your work and dreams.

I will celebrate with you our joys and stand beside you during our hardships.

I will remember your favorite things and surround you with them.

I will cherish the strengths and imperfections that make you Joe.

I will fight for you, care for you, and protect you.

I will never give up on you.

I will give you the room to be your own man.

I will cultivate honesty, compassion, generosity, and a sense of humor.

Together we will build a home where friends and family are loved and celebrated.

We will be companions in this life.

The Manly Fireplug‘s sister recounted for us how she asked her 7-year-old daughter if she’d like to be the flower girl at a wedding. The girl, who loves Cinderella and pink and the Little Mermaid, jumped up and down and said “YES!” Then, “Wait, who’s getting married?”

“Uncle Joey.”

“UNCLE JOEY’S GETTING MARRIED!!” Her eyes got wide and she jumped some more. “To who?”

“To Mike.”

The girl stopped jumping. “Mike?!?”

“Yes, Mike.”

The girl looked doubtful. “How does that work?”

“Well,” her mother said, “Sometimes boys like girls, like me and your daddy. And sometimes boys like other boys. And sometimes girls like other girls. The only thing that matters is that you love someone. That’s all that matters.”

The girl was quiet as she considered this. “Does Mike like dogs? Because Uncle Joey likes dogs.”

“Yes, honey, I think Mike likes dogs.”

“He better.”

“What the hell?” I asked the Manly Fireplug. “Are we the only homosexuals in the whole state going to New York to get married?”

I joked to friends about feeling overexposed. That even I was tired of us. Media whores, a couple of friends called us on Facebook, with what felt like an even mixture of humor and bitterness.

I grew increasingly uncomfortable, due in no small part to my upbringing in Minnesota, where the greatest sin is calling too much attention to yourself. But there were other reasons, too.

After the first article appeared, I received two emails, spaced five days apart, from someone I began to refer to as my “Secret Internet Admirer,” someone who used an anonymizing email program to cloak his real address. I’ll spare you the admirer’s particular vitriol, a confusing mixture of jealousy and homophobia that indicated less than full mental health.

I can’t be certain that my admirer was the same troll with whom I’d recently exchanged a volley of ridiculous emails, but the timing seemed suspect. He (I thought of the admirer as a he, though I couldn’t be certain) looked harshly upon the particular nature of my relationship with the Fireplug. Those who know us would never accuse us of being poster boys for traditional marriage, and so the admirer’s opaque argument fell flat with me.

What concerned me was how he ended both emails, two sentences in all caps: DO NOT GET MARRIED! CANCEL THE WEDDING!

I didn’t want to get melodramatic about a troll (and legally this post right here could be construed as encouraging him), but my admirer was talking about the event that would gather together my husband, our families, and our closest friends. So when the rental hall sent over our contract, I paid close attention to the security guard clause.

The Fireplug encouraged me to shake it off, as I spent the next few days scanning friends’ and acquaintances’ Facebook posts for anything vaguely suspicious, and examining anyone in public who looked at me a half-second longer than necessary. As the days passed without another email from my admirer, my paranoia faded. Mostly.

I told the Fireplug the interviews were starting to feel weird. Like we were putting this deeply personal event up for public dissection. So when Channel 11 called, the Fireplug told them we weren’t available.

Immediately I felt regret. Like we were passing up the chance to do some kind of greater good. Bring attention to the cause of same-sex blah blah blah. A lofty sentiment, sure, but maybe I really wanted the attention. So we did a couple more interviews.

And nothing happened. The articles and stories were little more than sound bites, hardly noteworthy, even to me. For the story they told – a couple of guys going to New York to get married – seemed like distractions from the story forming inside my own head.

I dutifully answered the reporters’ questions about why New York, and why now. After the third interview I stumbled upon my own sound bite, which I worked into subsequent interviews: at some point you just have to live your life, and not wait for California’s stamp of approval.

But all the while my conscience nagged at me, asking me a question that, with my handful of part-time jobs, book-writing, volunteering, etc., I hadn’t had the space or perspective to answer.

And that question wasn’t, “Why New York?”

It was: “Why marriage?”

A question I wasn’t sure I could answer. Which, let’s face it, is a tad disconcerting. For I was about to make the most important promise of my life. To a man making the same promise to me.

The reporters’ calls stopped, and the media moved on.

I’ve had a little more time to reflect on that enormous question. And I’m still not sure that I can articulate a worthy response. As the wedding edges closer, what strikes me most is that the promise I’m about to make doesn’t fill me with fear or doubt.

I had one of those unstable childhoods that left me hungry for affection and afraid of abandonment. Common stuff, I know, but they formed me. And though there are no guarantees in life, especially in love, the Fireplug was about to offer me the closest thing.

All I know is that as the big day nears, those long-held fears are diminished not by the prospect of his promise to me, but by my promise to him. I forget myself for a few seconds when I think of what I’m about to pledge: that even in the toughest times I will be his companion. That I won’t give up on him.

It was disingenuous of me to call our wedding a “deeply personal event.” We’re inviting our family and friends. It’s not personal, it’s communal. Others will have opinions on our mutual suitability and future prospects.

Hell, there’s that tense moment in every movie wedding when the minister asks, “If anyone has any reason why these two people should not marry…” (And if any of you are planning on dragging my Fireplug onto a city bus like Dustin Hoffman, I will hunt you down.)

What comforts me aren’t big answers for that big question. Rather, it’s just a feeling inside me when I picture our big day, an intuition, a sort of quiet space in the eye of the storm, impervious to trolls and judgments and Channel 4, a space big enough for me and one other man.

His name is Joe Gallagher, he owns Joe’s Barbershop here in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, and we’ve known each other a few years now. Back when he first picked up a pair of clippers, he rented a chair in my barber’s shop. I used to sit in Pasha’s chair and just stare at Joe. A few months after Joe rented the chair, Pasha up and died of a heart attack in his mid-40′s, and so I naturally used the occasion to switch barbers. (I never said I wasn’t capable of cold calculation.)

Joe had a partner at the time, so I contented myself with feeling his hands touch my head every couple of weeks. He wasn’t stingy with advice. After hearing the 22nd installment of my doomed long-distance love affair with another blogger, he spun me around in the chair, looked me in the eye, and barked, “You just need to get fucked. Really hard.”

He had a point.

I went off to grad school in NYC and Joe opened his own shop. When I moved back to San Francisco in the summer of 2006, Joe was single. We started working out together and one thing led to another. He swears I spent a lot of time bending over in front of him at the gym, putting weights away. I never said I was a fool, either.

Fast-forward a couple of years. Joe proposes to me as I lay sedated in a hospital bed with a collapsed lung. I think the experience clarified for us that we wanted to spend whatever time we had left in this world together. The sedation just made it easier to say yes. Not long afterwards, California passed Prop 8, taking a legal wedding off the table.

Like most couples we hit a rough patch, but came back together with renewed purpose and respect. “People don’t change,” the cynics say, but I have first-hand experience to the contrary. With every passing day he became more solidly the partner I’d always wanted. I had to work to do the same for him.

We’d talk about heading off to one of the other states that had legalized same-sex marriage. Joe turned 50 . “I’m not getting any younger,” he warned me. But I kept dragging my feet, wanting to wait until it was legal in California again, wanting to celebrate such a day in the place we call home, with our friends.  But there were no guarantees that Prop 8 would be overturned, and eventually I realized that we could both get what we wanted. We could get married somewhere else for real, and still come back to celebrate with friends.

Which is a very long way of saying that I’m getting married. In like five weeks.

I now understand why people take a year to plan these things. “What are your colors?” a florist asked Joe a couple of weeks ago.

“Um, colors?” he said.

Yeah, we’re not that kind of gay.

The Bay Area Reporter ran an article on some of us heading to NYC to get hitched. You can read it here. My only caveat is that I now better understand why some people feel slightly misrepresented when interviewed by the media. The whole Cher thing was sort of a joke. Also, the idea of a “traditional” wedding matters less to me than the idea of sharing the day with friends. But if that makes it traditional, then I guess I want a traditional wedding.

Two days later CBS radio interviewed us as well. It’s a nice, short piece, and you can hear it here.

Then ReyRey of ReyRey’s Photography offered to shoot some engagement pics, including the one above.

Joe and I had talked about keeping the whole thing low-key. It’s not like we can afford to throw a party for 500 people. But there is no low-key with Joe Gallagher. Frankly by now even I’m starting to find myself overexposed. But it seemed wrong not to mention it here, where I’ve chronicled ten years of my life, and where some of you have been kind enough to follow along.

Goddamn, I’m going to have a husband.

I’ve grown up to be a private man who plasters his private life all over the internet. Few of us are consistent at all times. But as any honest writer would admit, the life I spill here is just a version of the “real” one.  Every sentence considered and measured, every paragraph revised until most, if not all, its errors have been rubbed away. A manufactured self is the one I’m most comfortable displaying.

I’ve spent a good chunk of the last year on athletic fields, working my way through a couple of seasons of softball, a season of casual Fall Ball, and an out-of-state tournament or two. I took this photo standing beside the batting cages in Palm Springs, waiting my turn while the Manly Fireplug swung away. But in sports there’s no revision or erasing. You make mistakes in front of other people on those open, sun-drenched fields. And you either let those dropped balls kill you, or you figure out a way to shrug them off, hoping with practice and persistence that the next time will be different.

I don’t know about you, but that ball doesn’t look to me like it’s going anywhere. Here I am, three months after hitting my first “homerun” (that word is in quotation marks because that day in Vegas the blue called me out at home plate, after the catcher turned to tag me and we collided and I broke my wrist).

Though I’m batting against the league’s top-ranked, undefeated team, it doesn’t even look like I’m playing softball. It looks like I’m golfing. Like I’m going to knock that ball a few feet, send it skittering across the shallow infield, maybe to land right back where it started, in the pitcher’s lowered glove. It looks like my three teammates on the three loaded bases will just have to wait for the next batter to get them moving. It looks like I’ll groan again in frustration, trudge back to the dugout, where I can resume sulking in the company of my outsized expectations, sure that I will never again regain my softball mojo.

It doesn’t look at all like the ball will sail over the pitcher’s head, over the second baseman’s head, and over the outfielder’s head too, landing somewhere deep in right-centerfield, giving me plenty of time – this time – to run my little ass off around all the bases, chasing my teammates all the way home, where I will touch that plate and let out a primal scream that will vent every frustration of the last three months, before I remember that I’m from the Midwest and that I should just fade politely into the background.

I mean, that’s just what it looks like.

(Photo by John Chen)

When I was a bit younger I used to be cynical about rainbows, but now I just appreciate the fact that someone got me a cake.

My 40th came and went without a lot of anxiety on my part. This partly comes from watching a few others panic at their 40th with less than perfect grace (and not wanting to do the same), but really I think it has more to do with the fact that I’ve been 40 since I was nine years old.

In other news I’ve been working pretty hard at two jobs, one of which sometimes involves washing attorneys’ dishes, and the other of which involves the title “manager.” Somewhere in between I work on my book.

My wrist has been healing up nicely, and though I have yet to be *officially* cleared by the surgeon, I jumped into my first softball game last weekend, and while I have yet to regain the confidence I was edging towards when I broke the damn thing, I didn’t completely disgrace myself. So there’s that.

Thanks to those of you who shared a little about your families in the last post’s comments section. I think most people could write a book about that subject.