Here Come the Brides! is a new book edited by Audrey Bilger and Michele Kort, and published by Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Watch the trailer for the book below:
Here Come the Brides! is a new book edited by Audrey Bilger and Michele Kort, and published by Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Watch the trailer for the book below:
Here Come the Brides is available from Amazon, and more information can be found on the book's website.
Below is an excerpt from the book - comedian and Cherry Bomb co-host Gloria Bigelow's essay titled "Another Word for Marriage":
It’s one of those moments when you wish you were not alone.
I was awakened from a disco nap with a text from my girlfriend that read, “They’re voting.” I rolled over and grabbed my computer to live-stream the vote for marriage equality in New York. I grabbed my trail mix, desperately needing something to chew on while votes were being counted.
As I ate an almond I wondered if I would soon be able to legally make the severity of mistakes my heterosexual friends have made. Would I,too, have the opportunity to feel the same joy on the day of my wedding, or the same anger as I sat across from my once-beloved-now-turned-nemesis in our divorce lawyer’s office?
About a month earlier, my lady and I were discussing marriage. It had been taken off the table for us once Proposition H8, as we like to call it, passed in California. She had said that she didn’t really want to marry unless it was legal. But with New York’s push for fairness at the front of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s agenda, marriage was back on our table.
So there we were at Tiffany’s, looking at their conflict-free diamonds, being ignored by the people behind the counter while other heterosexual customers came in after us and were eagerly attended to.
As I was admiring, or drooling rather, over a beautiful Lucida cut set in platinum, I turned to my girlfriend and said, “Do you see a ring you would like?”
She smiled. “I get a ring, too?”
“Of course,” I said. “Everyone in this relationship gets an engagement ring.”
She smiled again. We waited for someone behind the counter to help us. No one offered. We walked out.
It dawned on me that the women behind the counter had no idea that we would be standing there for the same reason as the preppy guy in khakis, or the fifty-something couple who tried on the most beautiful two-karat Tiffany Soleste engagement ring. We were invisible.
I mentioned to my mother that my lady and I were considering premarital couples counseling. She screwed up her face and said, “Marriage? Marriage, Gloria!?! Is there anything else that you could call it?”
Eggplant.
Or foxtrot.
Or . . . a committed relationship in which we decide to live together based on love, common beliefs, and fidelity; in which we share our hopes, dreams, and lives; not much unlike the one you had with Daddy, or my brother has with my sister-in-law, but one that my own mother doesn’t think I deserve even if it would give me the same rights and privileges that she shared with Daddy for twenty-eight years. It seems a little wordy, but there may be something to it. Does she not see my relationship for what it is?
Invisible.
Marriage. At different points in my life I have found myself on either side of the issue. As a not-so “straight” women in my twenties, raging feminist that I was, I deplored the idea of marriage. It’s a societal construct . . . it’s obsolete . . 53 percent end in divorce . . . blah, blah, blah. You know, the patented manifesto that came along with my unshaven armpits and a well-worn copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves.
As a lesbian whose love has been discredited by everyone from my mother to the federal government, I’ve found many reasons to reject the idea of marriage entirely—in a sour-grapes kind of way. In the “I don’t really want to have full protection under the law,” or “Full protection, tax breaks, and being able to visit a partner in the hospital is for suckers and I don’t need it, I’m a postmodern queer bucking the system before it bucks me” kind of way.
But sometimes, when I’m quiet and feeling less like an anarchist, less like a radical, I ask myself: Why would anyone take the leap? Let’s just say you decide to get married. Never mind that you’re single, or it’s complicated, or we don’t have those rights—let’s just say none of that exists and you decide to get married. Why would anyone do it?
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