Can Boys Marry Boys?

Beren deMotier * writer * artist * human

And The Issue Burning Issue Is, Can Boys Marry Boys

It has been an interesting spring around our house. We spent February sick as dogs and the wife and I nearly divorced over “gardening issues.” We spent March nursing the kids through more sickness and had a larger than usual dose of family-of-origin interaction. April has already had me running all over town looking for a stove to replace our former faithful companion and now deathtrap extraordinaire. This has taken longer than expected. Mention the word “stove” to our five year old and his face screws up into an ugly grimace and he’ll reply “I hate stoves!” with the venom of a pit viper.

Nothing like appliance shopping with two kids, yessirree.

So now, out of the blue, I have to look into.... Kindergartens.

OK, OK, sounds pretty mundane I’m sure. What’s the big deal after all, one Kindergarten has got to be pretty much the same as another, right?

Not if the Kindergartner’s parents are a couple of homos.

See, I thought we had this thing in the bag. When we moved to our current home, we found ourselves within walking distance of not one, but three schools which our children could attend in consecutive order. Never having been a parent before, I had no idea you were supposed to go around comparison shopping for education. We planned on them going to the neighborhood schools and that was it.

Until our preschool teacher tipped me the wink that all might not be kosher at our chosen facility.

Let me say first that our son’s preschool teacher is a pretty cool lady. She’s a quiet sort of person, not flashy, not apt to break out into Julie Andrews’ numbers or anything like that, but she has, in her way, taken a great stand on Lesbian parenting.

It started little, with her asking us if her daughter could interview us for a paper she was doing in support of gay and lesbian marriage. Which, considering it involved her sixteen year-old daughter going to the home of two Lesbians, might be a big deal to some people.

Where we were really impressed, however, was how she handled the marriage issue in the classroom.

If you haven’t spent much time with five year olds lately, you’d be surprised how much matchmaking goes on in the preschool set. Every day it’s Mary’s going to marry Billy, or Michael’s going to marry Elsbeth or whatever. I myself was engaged to a chubby boy named Douglas (at five). We intended to wed on roller skates. Well, some time ago someone announced to our son that he was to marry a girl in his class called Lilly. At which he said, “I don’t want to marry Lilly, I’m going to marry Rick.”

To be fair to the kids, no one really put up much fuss about it. Rick didn’t seem to mind that our son was expressing his abundant affection in this way and our son didn’t think much about it, though he continued to express it often (this was after he’d gone through a phase where he was going to marry his sister. We did talk him out of that one).

Regarding Rick we’d tell him “you should marry the person you love, and who loves you, but there’s plenty of time to make up your mind about that later.” There were, after all, other fish in the sea besides Rick.

To which he’d reply again that he was going to marry Rick.

Apparently there had been a great deal of discussion among the kids about the possibility of this happening because one day at “Circle Time”, our son walked up to the teacher and said, “I’ve got to know, can boys marry boys?”

To which she replied, “Yes, boys can marry boys.”

After our son exultantly cried, “See, I told you!”, one of the girls turned to another girl and said, “That means I can marry you!” and a grand few minutes of same sex engagement was had by all.

Now the cool thing about this is not that our son plans to marry Rick because Rick is no longer interested and our son has shifted his affection to the little girl across the street and affianced his baby sister to Rick which keeps him in the family, but that the teacher didn’t try to qualify her response at all.

She didn’t say, “Men can marry each other, but not legally.” She didn’t feel compelled to explain that marriage was a very different feeling than the friendship love he was feeling for Rick, which is certainly true, he’s only five, he has no idea about marriage, or attraction or having compatible taste in furniture. She didn’t put a label on it and say that it would mean you were gay. She didn’t say that usually boys and girls married each other but that a boy could marry a boy. She risked her position as teacher and told sixteen five year olds that boys can marry boys.

Which means she told their parents that she thinks that’s OK, both that they act out their childish affection for each other in this way as kids, and in the eventuality that one or two may grow up to be Gay or Lesbian, that they get to act this out for real.

So it was this paragon of acceptance who got me going on my Kindergarten scavenger hunt. Seems that she talked to a Psychologist at the school we planned on going to and mentioned our family and the woman said that we might encounter some intolerance there. So our teacher took me aside one day, and with tears in her eyes, repeated what the woman had told her. She was absolutely appalled that there would be any question of acceptance.

Pretty sweet, huh?

Sadly also pretty naive.

It’s not as though we haven’t expected to one day experience someone in authority who would openly refute our right to be a family. But it hasn’t happened yet. We know that we cannot control the feelings of individual teachers or the parents of kids our kids know. But I have to agree with our son’s teacher that it’s a horrible thing to think of anyone trying to convince our son that there’s something wrong with his family.

That’s not a lesson I want him to encounter in school. At least for a few more years. And so, I’m going Kindergarten to Kindergarten asking how it would be for our son: what recourse do we have if there is intolerance, what is the discrimination policy, how will his teacher handle it when his family tree is filled out with two mommies?

Of course our son is blissfully unaware of this. All he knows is that he wants to go to the same school as his best buddy Rick, even if he doesn’t want to marry him.