Why Not Wife?

Up here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where Trump flags fly next to those honoring the confederacy, I sometimes find myself playing the old familiar pronoun game.  Every gay person of a certain age knows how it works:  “My partner isn’t here now; they will be up next week.” 

It’s not so much the violation of pronoun and antecedent that I mind--although the English professor in me balks at that, too.  It’s the intentional ambiguity, the reluctance to come out to, say, the ladies on my summer golf league. 

When the Ladies Golf Association assembled this year’s directory of members, they asked for the obvious bits of information: address, email, phone number.  But they also wanted my husband’s name; they include them parenthetically in the listing.  Even though I married Liza last year, I left mine blank. 

I would like to take pride in having a wife.  I think of all the newlyweds who beam as they introduce their new spouse: meet my wife, my husband, they say, reaching for the other’s hand.  They are thrilled to be married, to belong to a long-standing tradition that recognizes their union as something beyond that of a relationship, more bound than a simple partnership.

But, out of necessity, gay people have long-used euphemisms.  We speak of our partner, which makes it sound like we’re in the joint business of selling shoes.  We go legal: our significant other.  Back in the 1970s, some more brazenly said, “my lover.”  But of course they didn’t say that to straight people.  Recently, one lesbian comic said she was going to start using “traveling companion.”  I laughed at that, but “I’m here with my traveling companion” sounds no sillier than referring to the love of my life as my partner.  Yet I still do it.

I would like to believe it’s just difficult to break old habits, but I know it’s more than that.  It’s fear.  Yes, marriage has been deemed legal for same-sex couples, but it’s not really accepted.  At best, people are bemused or slightly shocked; at worse, people are disgusted, even revolted.  The public’s adoration of Ellen notwithstanding, it’s still a revolutionary act to be gay.  As the shootings in Orlando remind us, it’s still dangerous to be gay.

I don’t know how long social change will take, how long before marriage isn’t automatically assumed to be the joining of a man and a woman.  Still, surprised to find it legal in my lifetime, I doubt that I’ll live to see it accepted.  But I believe I have to do my part to affect change. In next year’s directory, listed with (Bob), (Albert), (Thomas), and (Henry) will be (Liza).