“So, I have to tell you something,” I said to Brian.

“Okay,” he said.

“I have to tell you that I sorta hate weddings.”

“Yeah,” he replied. “Me too.”

“Not all weddings,” I said. “I’ve enjoyed all our friends’ weddings.”

“So have I.”

“I sorta just hate our wedding.”

“We haven’t had a wedding.”

“Well, no, but the idea of having one. I sorta hate it.”

“Yeah,” he said again. “Me too.”

And just like that, the love of my life and I decided that we were not Those Gays. Nothing against Those Gays. I hope that when Those Gays get married, they invite us to their wedding. We promise not to hate it. We promise to bring a good gift, something expensive off the registry. Something nice and tasteful that they don’t have to assemble later, after their Atlantis Cruises honeymoon (something else we will never, ever do).

It was convenient that we were having this conversation in Las Vegas, where I’d brought Brian to celebrate his 30th birthday. I booked us into the Paris Las Vegas hotel, and on our second day there we parked our butts by the rooftop pool and soaked up the sun for about six hours, after which we pigged out on crepes the size of basketballs. Then I took my husband to a fancy birthday dinner at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant.

My husband. We never did have a wedding, but he is my husband. There’s not another word I can really imagine using to describe who he is, to me. He’s the first thing I want to see when I wake up in the morning and the last thing when I go to bed at night. When I’m too tired to deal with what to eat, he goes out to get us food. He keeps my old beater of a car running and mows the lawn since my allergies prevent me from doing it. He’s my best friend and the person I’d rather spend time with than anyone else on earth.

I realized this quite suddenly after we’d been hanging out as friends for quite awhile. One night he met me at a gay karaoke bar I used to frequent, and we were laughing and chatting as usual. Several of my friends were there as well, and one of them beckoned me over and whispered in my ear.

“Is Brian single?”

I shrugged. “Yeah. Why?”

“I was thinking about asking him out.”

A cold chill went through me, like when I was a kid and I fell in a mountain stream in California. I think I coughed a reply, something like, “Oh,” and took a long, long swig of my beer. Then I think I sang some nice, calm little song from the Alanis Morrissette oeuvre.

Two nights later I pounced on him, in my way, and we’ve been together ever since.

At first it was fun to talk about a wedding. I had asked him to marry me, after all, by presenting him with a ring that was two sizes too big, which I later exchanged for one that was just one size too big. And he said yes. And we both cried; it was all very unlike us.

Then the reality set in that we were going to have to pay for this affair ourselves. And after participating in and attending friends’ weddings - and then watching those friends buy homes, get pregnant, and then get pregnant again - we were sort of over it.

For the longest time we just never talked about it. We could’ve afforded a wedding, really, albeit a small one; but we put our money elsewhere, like into decorating our home, slowly, and traveling. By the time we got to Vegas for Brian’s birthday the jig was up; we weren’t going to do this, and we didn’t really want to.

And so, we went to the TeNo store in Vegas and bought rings instead, simple little titanium bands to wear on our left hands. The sales clerk was an adorable little gay guy in his early twenties, and he took good care of us. Because in addition to being the type of people who don’t want a wedding, we also are clinically indecisive. This is another thing that makes the idea of planning a wedding seem like a special kind of hell.

Stefan was the guy’s name, Stefan the Sales Guy, or, as I began to refer to him, Stefan The Case Worker. He cooed over us as we chose matching bands, very plain and simple. When Stefan told us that we were cute together, it was like a benediction. Brian and I went and sat next to a fountain in the Wynn Hotel and exchanged rings, smiles on our faces.

For us, it was perfect.

Then, the next week, California passed Proposition 8. I was devastated. Here in Oklahoma we passed a Constitutional Amendment in 2004 that defined marriage as between one man and one woman (as opposed to, say, four men and three women, or two men, a pile of dirty laundry and a ham sandwich). It wasn’t a surprise when Oklahoma did it; but California was meant to be the great hope; if we’re not safe from discrimination in California, then where?

To be honest, I simply don’t understand why anyone cares whether or not gays can get legally married if they’re not gay themselves. I know the popular conspiracy theory is that if gays get married then they’ll have to teach school children that being gay is okay, and a lot of parents don’t want their kids learning about that stuff at school. Apparently it’s much easier to wage a national political campaign than it is to write a note to your kid’s teacher asking for your child to be excused during those discussions. Who knew?

When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher got mad at me and a bunch of other kids for being excused to attend our school’s Gifted and Talented program during what she considered a very important lesson. She dragged us out in the hallway and reamed us out, as if we’d been given a calendar and told to block out the time we’d like to be gone.

She pointed her finger in my face and said, “You know what, Nathan? You’re too smart for your own good. You’re going to end up killing yourself before you’re 18.”

I was in my mid-twenties before I told anyone that she did that. But in light of that event from my childhood, it seems to me that this nation’s parents have a lot more than homosexuality to worry about when it comes to what their kids are learning in school. After all, most of us spent a whole lot of time trying to recruit ourselves - and having other people recruit us - out of homosexuality, and that never worked. What makes anyone think we could recruit pre-pubescent kids in, even if we wanted to?

WHICH WE DON’T. Just for the record.

What we do want is for the great politically active Christian mass to apply the Golden Rule and treat us as they’d want us to treat them if the tables were turned. What many of us, myself included, want is for all of us believers to set aside what amount to petty political and theological differences and work together on the work of the Kingdom: feeding the hungry, for instance, who number in the millions just here in our own country, or leaving a better environment than the one we were left.

But to be honest, in a pinch I’d take just being left alone. I’d take not being blamed for 9-11 and the general moral decay of America. I don’t see where scapegoating all us gay and lesbian folks is a good museum exhibit of the Fruits of the Spirit as described in Galatians 5, or any of the virtues set out in the Sermon on the Mount. I don’t see what Proposition 8 accomplished except to reinforce the idea in so many gay and lesbian people’s minds and hearts that Christians - and, by proxy, God - hate us.

It was an honor to be included in the GCN film "Through My Eyes," and I think that if you haven’t seen it yet, you absolutely should. I think when you watch that film - well, not when you watch my part, but the rest - you see stories of people who really wrestled with this image of what it meant to be gay. The image we all wrestled - and many of us still wrestle - with is one of ourselves as fundamentally displeasing to God in a unique way that heterosexuals are not. They can cry “love the sinner, hate the sin” as much as they like, but there aren’t any ballot measures defining gardening as sowing only one type of crop in a field or making it illegal to wear more than one type of fabric at a time. No one wants to make it unconstitutional for straight men to hit their wives, and that’s a way bigger threat to marriage than me and Brian and our little uneventful life.

What Brian and I realized, during that wonderful conversation in Las Vegas, was that we already have a marriage, no matter what the law says, and that a wedding at that point just felt superfluous. We hang out with other couples - straight couples, mostly - and we worry about money and make each other laugh. We are, as a couple, who we want to be, and we pray that we learn to be better at loving each other.

Maybe someday we’ll be allowed to get legally married. Maybe when that happens we’ll have a wedding. Or - not a wedding, a party. No tuxedos or complicated dresses. No expensive presents.

Brian will fire up the grill, and everyone can bring a six-pack of beer or some of their grandmother’s potato salad. There will be flowers blooming, and music booming, and we’ll standing the backyard, blinking up at the sun, thinking to ourselves how wonderful and rare it is when any two people find love worth fighting for.