With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (21 page)

And what it does for me is important, but what it does for gay children is indescribable. There are children who are watching this vote right now across the country in households that are free to tell people that they believe that they are gay and they just saw the legislature of the greatest state in the Union say that they are equal and that they matter. That will keep children alive. It will give them hope. And it will tell them that it does get better and that they matter.

What a night! Working together, we had prevented teacher layoffs, and marriage equality had become the law of our state. As soon as I could, I ducked out of the press conference to call Kim. I cried tears of joy—for a change. As I later told a reporter, I slipped out of my James Cagney tough-girl mode. I got down to the shore at about one-thirty a.m., and Kim met me on the porch, and we hugged and were thrilled. But not for long because we had fifty-five people coming that day for Kelley’s graduation party, and we had to be up early to prepare.

The party was so much fun. My father came, too, and when I greeted him on the porch, he shook my hand and said, “You’ve had a productive week, child. Keep it up.”

Classic LQ.

K
im and I marched in the LGBT Pride Parade with Governor Cuomo; the mayor; the governor’s girlfriend, Sandra Lee; and my father. I’d been to many pride marches and the crowds are always amazing, but this one was emotional in a way that none had ever been. It was only two days after the vote, and the crowds—hundreds of thousands of people packed in on the sidewalks along the entire parade route—were wild with excitement. People were weeping. They were screaming, “Thank you!” “We love you!”

After we reached the end of the parade route, Kim and I walked back so we could do the parade again and march with the Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats, which is my home Democratic club. I figured the second time wouldn’t be as intense because we weren’t with the governor or the mayor and we didn’t have a big banner, but the response from the crowds was just as wildly happy as the first time around. By the time we got to the end of the parade route for the second time, we were wiped. Kim and I went home and enjoyed a rare quiet night alone together.

We only had a month before the bill went into effect, on Sunday, July 24. Take my word for it, there was a lot to sort out and tons of logistics to put in place, but we got it done. We set up a lottery such that eight hundred couples could get married that first day. By early Sunday morning, July 24, the eight hundred couples were lining up at the city clerk’s offices across the city, waiting for the offices to open at nine a.m.

I was at the city clerk’s office and walked the line to congratulate the couples as they waited to go inside. As I was shaking everybody’s hands, I got to two women, Deirdre Weaver and Nancy Grass, who were all dressed up. Deirdre was clearly a cancer survivor (I learned later that she’d had breast cancer). Her hair was all fuzzy and thin, and you could see it hadn’t grown all the way back in yet. I asked her, “How long?” And she figured I was asking how long since her diagnosis. She said, “Eight months.” It was an emotional day to begin with, but I was overwhelmed. It made me think about the family members who would be at my wedding and those who would not, and about how here was this woman recovering from cancer, and now her family was getting recognized. This couple’s moment summed up the entire reason we had all engaged in the marriage effort.

I
went to watch the first couple be married in Manhattan. I remember hearing the city clerk say, “By the power vested in me by the laws of the State of New York, I marry you.” But for the first time the clerk was saying it for two women, two elderly women who had been together for more than twenty years. One was in a wheelchair with a neck brace. She got out of her wheelchair with her walker, and the other woman helped her, and it was just so lovely. They were lovely, and they had waited decades, and one of the most moving things about them was that the one who was just as old as the other was helping her stand up. Mike McSweeney, who had been a Tom Manton protégé, was the city clerk, and he got to marry them. I later learned that the woman outside who had breast cancer was his college best friend—she had come down so he could marry her.

And then there were two guys in Brooklyn. When the judge said, “Do you have rings?” they couldn’t get their rings off, because they had been wearing them for so long. The judge said, “Let’s not break any bones here, guys.” In Queens I took pictures of a newly married couple, and all their kids were dressed in white tuxedoes and white dresses. The
Daily News
sponsored a wedding at the Old Homestead. A couple of women won the prize, an all-expenses-paid wedding party. But one of their parents had died recently. It made me realize that the delay from 2009 meant a big difference because some people’s family members didn’t get to see their weddings.

That day I went to Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, and I ended the day at Gracie Mansion, where the mayor presided over the marriage of his criminal justice coordinator and a commissioner. What a day!

This wonderful day was of course tinged with sadness and loss. I was overwhelmed with joy, but at the same time I remembered all those who weren’t with us. We do a disservice to people when, after a bad thing occurs in their lives, we promote the belief that they will one day be wholly free of grief and sadness. The truth is, grief will always be with you. It does not have to be crippling or even a bad thing; it is part of you and your life and your world. At times it will feel uncomfortable or even painful and horrible, and at times it will be useful or even powerful. It will work for you if it enhances your capacity to be empathetic or fuels your desire to make the world a better, safer, and healthier place, or if it helps you seize each day. You just have to let yourself feel the bad stuff and cry your eyes out, then fix your makeup and get on with it.

C
HAPTER
13

Light and Shadow

I
never expected to get married. That wasn’t in the cards for me—I had given up on that part of life. I enjoyed leafing through bridal magazines, but only as an observer. My world changed gradually. First, Kim and I found each other, which meant that love—deep and abiding love—would be part of my life’s portion. Then the law changed, and holding a wedding in our city, with our friends and our family, was going to happen. I thought about the waiter at Moonstruck who comforted us the day after marriage equality lost in Albany and predicted that our fathers would walk us down the aisle. How right he was. Kim and I pinched ourselves because it was still hard to believe that we actually could get married. Since we had been together so long and had only ten months to plan our gala wedding, we agreed to skip the formal engagement and get on with arranging it.

Kim had other plans. One evening after we came home from a party, Kim put on a song that we had played constantly when we first met. I guessed she wanted me to consider using it for the wedding or for the rehearsal dinner, and I said, “That’s nice.”

“Turn off the TV,” she said.

“I really want to see this segment.” I didn’t look away from the screen.

Next she brought out a mug, which was a special gift from one of our early Valentine’s Days together—it has a heart and the word
Forever
on it, and it has a lot of meaning for us.

I took the mug from her and said, “Yeah, that’s great,” and put it down on the coffee table.

Finally Kim said, “Will you turn off the damn TV and look?!?”

I looked inside the mug and found a receipt from Bowlmor Lanes in Greenwich Village, where we had had our second date. I had written my phone number on the back of it. Unbeknownst to me, Kim had kept it all those years.

“Turn it over.”

On the other side she’d written, “Will you marry me?”

I don’t know if I was laughing or crying at this point or both, but I managed to say, “Of course I’m going to marry you!”

I looked inside the mug again and found a small box and opened it.

“This is your mom’s ring, right?”

Kim
loved
her mother. She hadn’t given me just any ring—it was her mother’s ring, and I knew how much it meant to her. The week after the marriage equality bill passed, she had taken her mother’s engagement ring and gone to see our favorite jewelers, the Doyle sisters on the Lower East Side, to get it spruced up. She debated adding emeralds because they’re green (me being Irish) or sapphires, the birthstone of the month we met. She decided on sapphires.

The next weekend when Kim’s dad visited our house, we told him we wanted to show him something. I held out my hand, and he looked at the ring. “Is that Mom’s?” he asked Kim.

She said yes, and he started to cry. Kim’s parents had been very much in love. Her father had never remarried after Kim’s mom died. Kim’s mother was the love of his life.

Over lunch with Kim’s sister, Debbie, and her husband and Kim’s brother Anthony, Kim’s father told us about the ring. He had bought it from a jeweler in Newark for eight hundred dollars, which was a lot of money at the time, and had proposed to Kim’s mother under the cherry blossom trees in Branch Brook Park during the annual Cherry Blossom Festival in Newark. That gave us an idea for how to decorate the wedding hall, because our wedding was to be in the spring, right around cherry blossom time.

I had no experience planning a wedding. There hadn’t been a Quinn family wedding since my sister got married the September after our mother died, and it had been a small one. The important thing for both of us was that our wedding be personal, that it reflect who we are, and that it not be a political event. The personal issue was key—and that guided us throughout the planning.

For the most part we wanted a traditional ceremony, and for a while we considered including a religious element—we’re both Catholic—like having a priest give a blessing at the end. But we were sure the priest would get in trouble and it would wind up in the newspapers. How to deal with the press was something we struggled with. We didn’t want to be seen as exploiting the wedding for political reasons, but we also didn’t want to seem like we were embarrassed or ashamed and trying to hide anything. It was challenging to find a balance, especially since Kim does
not
do interviews, a policy that she was not going to change for the wedding. In the end we decided to give certain advance information to the press, and we provided photos afterward, but we didn’t want any press at the wedding itself. That would have been incredibly intrusive and would have made public something that was very personal to us.

The press got wind of our engagement, and Kim’s dad was quoted as saying that I was “a great catch” and that he was “very happy when Kim told me that she and Chris were getting married.” He went on, “The whole family got to know Chris well, and we thought the world of her. I knew how much she meant to Kim and that they loved each other very much.” My father responded in typical form: “It’s nice that [Christine] found a pal to share her life with.” Referring to the change in his thinking since I’d first told him I was gay, he said, “There’s been an evolution.” I was proud of him for the distance he’d come over those years and for saying so to the reporter. Both our fathers were pleased to be able to walk us down the aisle.

After the wedding friends sent us a three-page spread from a newspaper in Norway. Another friend saw something about it in India. Kim’s old college roommate from New Jersey, who made the cake (a five-tiered chocolate chip cake with chocolate custard and buttercream frosting), wound up on the local evening news. And in New York it was on the front page of every newspaper. But to us, from beginning to end, it was our wedding, and we did everything we could to make it a personal celebration, from the invitations, the guest list, and the decorations, to the readings and our vows.

I’d figured that planning a wedding would be a lot of work, but it turned out to be an even more humongous job than I imagined. Because of my work, it was almost instantaneously clear that it would be impossible for me to take the lead. Fortunately Kim (with her sister Debbie’s constant assistance) picked up the ball and ran with it. I did the best I could to help. We were smart enough to hire a wedding planner. But we still had a ton of decisions to make and details to review.

While Kim was doing the heavy lifting, there were things that had to be done quickly that I couldn’t leave to her alone, like getting a wedding dress for me and helping her find an outfit.

I wanted to wear a wedding dress—that was never a question. But I didn’t want it to be some kind of princess dress—I’m in my midforties, and I wanted it to be age-appropriate. I was open to either a short dress or a long dress. I wanted it to be pretty and classy but not silly. I didn’t want to shop for it alone. So I went out with a whole crew of five to ten people: Kim’s sister, Debbie; my friend Emily; her wife, Annie; Amy and Meghan (who work with me); and a few others. Not everybody was there every time, but a lot of them were there most of the time. I didn’t want Kim going with me to look for a dress, and I don’t think she was sorry to be left out of that process.

The first place we went was Vera Wang, where I found a dress I loved. That night I Googled it to show Kim—and found out that Khloe Kardashian had been married in that very dress, at a high-profile wedding, so there was no way I could wear it. I was devastated because that was
my
dress! How could they have not told me that a Kardashian had already worn it? I overreacted wildly, and dramatically took to the bathtub and wouldn’t talk to Kim. Clearly the pressure of finding the right dress was getting to me, and now I had to start all over again.

So we went on the typical wedding dress store tour. Everywhere we went we saw lovely dresses and the people helping us were very nice. But at Carolina Herrera the dresses were exceptional and the people weren’t just very nice, they were very, very nice.

At each place I tried on more dresses than I really thought possible, just because they were there. It was fun. It was like being a little girl playing dress-up, except that when I was a little girl, I never got to play dress-up. I’d try on a dress, and the group would decide if we’d keep it for round two. Then I tried it on for round two, and we decided whether it would stay for round three. Then from there we’d cast votes and narrow it down to the finalists.