Courageous Love: Deb Hardy & Kerry Mullen

In May of 2004 the radio was full of retrospective on the struggles and events which led to the US Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. That decision – 50 years ago on May 17th, 1954 – established that separate is not equal, thereby mandating desegregation of public schools.

The most important thing about this decision is its demonstration of a foundational principle of democracy: The protection of the minority.
Desegregation was a cumbersome decision to implement for many reasons.
One, that the neighborhoods remained segregated and children had to be bused. In many areas of our country, the supreme court decision made life more difficult. It also unleashed a tide of hatred that became murderous. Nonetheless, the court did the right thing. One key step on a long, long national journey toward justice. A struggle that continues.

Fifty years later, on Monday morning, May 17th, 2004, I accompanied church members, Deb Hardy and Kerry Mullen to the city clerk’s office here in Gloucester where they applied for their marriage license. As we went into City Hall I quipped, “Uh oh! Three of us!,” recalling some of the signs held by opponents of “gay marriage,” warning that marriage would disintegrate into threesomes, foursomes, and, worse: Next, people would be wanting to marry their pets! “I should have brought my dogs!”
It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the folks at the clerk’s office could not have been nicer. Behind the counter and standing in front, all of us were a little nervous. And all of us were beaming, neighbors on a new adventure.
Our experience at that office has been echoed by every gay and lesbian couple I’ve talked to. If this buoys your spirit as it does mine, consider writing to the clerk’s office and the newspaper to praise them.

I can’t recall a stranger time in my experience. Members of our community cross a legal bridge from separation to inclusion on a lovely sunny May day and wars across the world become increasingly grim.
I have never felt more deeply the quiet, sustained comfort and joy in our Unitarian Universalist church where 30 members are meeting and talking and studying what it means to be a truly welcoming congregation. And yet my heart aches for friends and acquaintances struggling with pain. As William Blake writes:
“Joy and woe are woven fine,
a clothing for the soul divine.”

I have known days when I shook my fist at fine sky of spring in the morning. And yet I always felt better for the walk I took.
Cry, then, weep into the whirlwind, the sky with its fine, mocking blue,
nevertheless weep. Perhaps its a kind of self-baptism, a small, salty washing, having taken its cue from innumerable mornings, washed clear by wild storms in the night.
In my memory – at the very center of the spring wash and sunlight of the friendly clerks and the vows exchanged by couples who’ve been together no fewer than 15, 20, even 49 years – at the very center, comes an image from 1969, 35 years ago, when I was a 19 year old sophomore in New York City. I went with my friend Ruthie to a fine high-ceilinged apartment on West 10th St., one of those fine old brownstones of Greenwich Village.
Ruthie’s parents had told her she had to go, to visit this acquaintance of theirs, the woman who lived on West 10th St. Resenting her parent’s pressure, Ruthie made me go on what turned out to be a condolence call. I remember standing in a sparsely but finely furnished living room. Light flooded in from the street, through grand, tall windows. The woman was dressed in dark clothes, huddled in a corner chair. She raised her eyes and looked at us, standing a some distance across the room. Ruthie had told me, “lover.” and “lesbian,” strange words. Ruthie mumbled her scripted sympathy and we stared at her and the woman nodded, then bowed her head and returned her eyes to the tiny sanctuary of her hands.
Of all the images stored in my heart over these many years since, this is the one that says: “Alone. Bereft. All alone.” The woman, so small in the vast sunlit room, returned to her weeping, And Ruthie and I escaped down the stairs and into the sunlight and blue skies of our youth.