Galvin - The best party of our lives: stories of gay weddings and true love to inspire us all

A LSO BY S ARAH G ALVIN

The Three Einsteins

Copyright 2015 by Sarah Galvin

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by Sasquatch Books

Editor: Hannah Elnan
Production editor: Emma Reh
Design: Anna Goldstein
Cover photograph: Charity Burggraaf
Copyeditor: Janice Lee

Lines from Mouthful of Forevers reprinted with permission from Andrews McMeel Publishing

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-63217-013-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-63217-014-9

Sasquatch Books
1904 Third Avenue, Suite 710
Seattle, WA 98101
(206) 467-4300
www.sasquatchbooks.com

v3.1

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BECAUSE I VE ALWAYS FIGURED I D MOST likely spend my life with a woman, getting married was something Id never really thought about before same-sex marriage was legalized in Washington. Honestly, the legal situation barely mattered, though, because marriage didnt seem that relevant to my life. My parents divorced when I was twelve, and the only significant ceremonial family gathering I can recall after that involved four people scattering my grandpas ashes under a bust of Freud. I had family members who were married, but the big topic of discussion in the family was usually the arts. There was plenty of conversation about love, but any kind of love was considered desirablenobody really mentioned marriage.

I certainly had no interest in weddingsI had the impression that they involved a boring time in a church followed by a bad dance party and, best-case scenario, free drinks. In 2012, though, I got a summer job at a catering company that owned two wedding venues, and over the course of one season, the number of weddings Id attended jumped from maybe two to over fifty. Sometimes the venue booked two weddings a day. It was surreal and a little disconcerting to lay out one couples polished rocks and bags of monogrammed candies and then make way for the next couples color-coordinated napkins and shot glasses. I served enough champagne to fill a Cadillac and enough hors doeuvres to bury one. I saw couples who seemed meant to be together and ones Id give about two months. I had no dreams of my own wedding yet, but whether maneuvering trays of hors doeuvres around bouquets of red roses or blow-up dolls dressed as cowboys, I noticed how each wedding reflected the relationship it celebrated. It was fascinating and often beautiful.

In this venue there were, as tradition dictated, separate rooms where the grooms and best men and the brides and bridesmaids convened before the ceremony, and I always felt a little uncomfortable bussing or bringing drinks there. The room for women was all pink and tulle, and the room for the men resembled a ski lodge. There was a wall in the grooms room where decades of newlywed men had pinned their boutonnieres, and as someone whos refused to wear a dress since the age of five, I absolutely knew that should I get married, my boutonniere belonged among them, at least in spirit. But of course, I wasnt welcome in that room, under those circumstances. It was the first time I can recall feeling personally excluded by laws against same-sex marriage. Several other queer people worked there, and I remember one of them quit. It had bothered him too much.

The following year, I began writing a column called Wedding Crasher, a series of write-ups of local weddings, for the Stranger, Seattles alt-weekly newspaper. (No actual crashing was involvedthe paper received a handful of invitations a month.) The column began in celebration of the overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in the Windsor v. United States trial. Soon after DOMA (which dictated that no state was obligated to recognize the legal validity of a same-sex relationship even if it was recognized as marriage by another state, and defined marriage for the purposes of federal law as the union of a man and woman) was found to be unconstitutional, same-sex marriage was legalized in Washington.

For years, the Stranger had run a Party Crasher column, which I adored. There was an open invitation to request a Stranger writers presence at any Seattle-area party, and every week staff would pick out the most appealing and send someone to cover it. I started reading Party Crasher as a teenager, before I was old enough to go to real parties, and it was my favorite column in the paper. Every week I flung open the newspaper box on the corner by my high school, full of anticipation. My reaction to the glimpse of adult freedom Party Crasher provided was something like an aspiring pioneers first visions of the frontier.

It was hard to believe some of the scenarios in Party Crasher existed outside of moviesthere were, for instance, a party celebrating the addition of a stripper pole to a privately owned hearse and a party involving several marching bands and a game of tetherball where the ball was on fire. I soon began hosting my own parties at every opportunity (i.e., whenever my mom was out of town). The most memorable of these was Trashmas, which happened in spring and involved a large quantity of garbage, Livingston screw-top wine, and old Christmas decorations my friends collected from neighbors driveways. Also of note: a party hosted in a garage-sized house my friends and I built out of cardboard and gay porn, where our all-girl GG Allin cover band played its first show. The latter, especially, made me realize that with enough work (and duct tape and slightly damp cardboard), it is possible to manifest dreams into reality.