I remember vividly the day I realized for the first time that I was in love.  A more magical, wonderful moment there has never been.  I’d gone through most of my adolescence thinking love and sex were boring, stupid, icky things only jocks and dweebs cared about.  And then in an instant the world, and my life, became more richer and fuller then anything I could have ever imagined before.  When he smiled, I smiled.  When he looked at me a certain way, my heart would skip a beat.  Life was more wonderful, more beautiful, then I’d ever thought it could be.  Everything my eyes beheld seemed to radiate the joy I felt inside of me.  The future beckoned, bright with promise.  So long as we could be together I thought, everything was possible.  I was 17.  He was 17.  I would live my entire life over again, and every bully’s fist, every curse, every attack on my person, every assault on my intimate spirituality by piss ignorant bible thumpers, every job I’d ever been fired from for being gay, every opportunity denied, every tear I’ve ever shed in loneliness…I’d live it all over again, so long as I could live that moment over again too.

Now I’m 53, and desperately lonely.  But I know better then to blame my sexual orientation for that.  Rather, I never fully appreciate how much harder a gay person has to work at finding their other half, even in the best of tolerant cultures, let alone ours.  We are few, and when you realize how hard it is for heterosexuals to find the love of their lives, you wonder how gay people can even hope to stand a chance at it.  But many of us do…I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and it is beautiful.  Some people are just naturally good at the dating and mating game.  But most of us aren’t, and especially the deathly shy and clumsy ones like me.  But were I heterosexual, I’d have had the unquestioned support of the culture around me in guidance and nurturing and encouragement.  Instead I had to endure not merely indifference, but outright hostility toward my efforts at finding love.  I can’t help thinking now, how much different my life might have been had I lived in a culture where same sex lovers were given the same respect, the same chance to succeed, that heterosexuals take for granted.  I’d have known earlier on that boys could fall in love with other boys.  Perhaps I’d have been more ready when my first love came into my life.  Things may have turned out differently.  But I didn’t grow up in that culture.  I grew up in one where the lives of gay people are the monopoly money with which so many heterosexuals buy their righteousness.

My fury at the way same sex marriage is under attack is in large measure a reaction to my own loneliness I’m sure.  I don’t think even my close friends know how utterly solitary my life is these days.  Fighting off the loneliness is a constant battle and it leaves me emotionally drained.  And then I hear some self righteous jackass step up to the pulpit to denounce same sex lovers as unfit to enter into the Sanctity Of Marriage and I think of how much that unmitigated contempt for the hearts of gay people has taken away from my own life and I just want to shove their faces into a burning wall.  It’s that kind of anger that worries my friends, and I’ve had more then a few recently tell me that I’m getting too angry.  But as long as I still believe finding my other half is possible to me, I’m unlikely to act it out.  When I meet him, I want to be worthy.  But I won’t deny that it is a struggle to keep anger, from becoming hate.

Sanctity.  I’ve loved and lost several more times since I was 17, but even so my dating history is a pitifully short one.  I’m just too damn shy.  Most of the heterosexuals I knew in school had been on several times as many dates as I’ve ever had by the time they were out of college.  You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find prince charming, as they say.  And it’s true.  But when it did happen to me, it was so wonderful, so awesome, so profoundly life affirming that to this day I just can’t grasp what kind of bottomless pit must exist in someone’s heart to make them want to spit on the affections of two people in love.  But every time they say they’re fighting to protect the sanctity of marriage, that’s exactly what they’re doing.  And I am convinced now, that a lot of them do it knowing full well how deeply it cuts into the hearts of gay people.  But if we don’t bleed, they’re not righteous.  So we have to bleed.

Sanctity…let me tell you about Sanctity…

Partner’s death ends happy life on ranch
2 decades together mean nothing in Oklahoma law

By Jessie Torrisi
Columbia News Service
December 31, 2005

On the face of it, Sam Beaumont, 61, with his cowboy hat, deep-throated chuckle and Northwestern drawl, is not so different from the ranch hands in Ang Lee’s Critically acclaimed film "Brokeback Mountain," which opened in  Indianapolis on Wednesday.

"Listen," the character Twist says to del Mar as part of a dream that goes unrealized. "I m thinking, tell you what, if you and me had a little ranch together –little cow and calf operation, your horses – it’d be some sweet life."

That pretty much describes the life Beaumont had. He settled down  with Earl Meadows and tended 50 head of cattle for a quarter-century on an Oklahoma ranch. "I was raised to be independent. I didn’t really care what other people thought," Beaumont said.  In 1977, Beaumont was divorced and raising three sons after a dozen years in the Air Force when Meadows walked up to him near the Arkansas River.

"It was a pretty day — January 15th, 65 degrees," Beaumont said. "He came up, we got to talkin’ till 2 in the morning. I don’t even remember what we said." But "I knew it was something special."

Beaumont moved to be with Meadows in his partner’s hometown of Bristow,Okla., a place of 4,300 people. Together, they bought a ranch and raised Beaumonts three sons. The mortgage and most of the couple’s possessions were put in Meadows’ name.

"People treated them fine," said Eunice Lawson, who runs a grocery store in Bristow. But in 1999, Meadows had a stroke and Beaumont took care of him for a year until he died at age 56.

That’s where the fantasy of a life together on the range collides with reality. After a quarter-century on the ranch he shared with his partner, Beaumont lost it all on a legal technicality in a state that doesn’t recognize domestic partnerships.

Meadows will, which left everything to Beaumont, was fought in court by a cousin of the deceased and was declared invalid by the Oklahoma Court of Appeals in 2003 because it was short one witness signature.

A judge ruled the rancher had to put the property, which was appraised at $100,000, on the market. The animals were sold. Beaumont had to move.

"They took the estate away from me," said Beaumont, who said he put about $200,000 of his own money into the ranch. "Everything that had Earl’s name on it, they took. They took it all and didn’t bat an eye.

Every state has common-law marriage rules that protect heterosexual couples. If someone dies without a will, or with a faulty one, his or her live-in partner is treated as the rightful inheritor.

But only seven states currently give gay couples protections — such as inheritance rights and health benefits — through marriage, civil unions and domestic partnerships. What’s more, Oklahoma last year amended its state constitution to ensure that neither marriage nor any similar arrangement is extended to same-sex couples.

Last year, Beaumont moved to nearby Wewoka, Okla., to a one-bedroom place with 350 acres for his horses, white Pyrenees and Great Dane to roam.  

Sanctity.  I got your Sanctity right here…

He said he was continuing to fight the cousins, who are suing for back rent for the years he lived on the ranch.

Sanctity.  They took the ranch Earl left to his beloved Sam away.  But you need to understand that it wasn’t so much about taking the ranch away from Sam, as taking Earl away from him, and everything inside of Sam, that remembers Earl in peace and contentment and joy.  That’s why they’re suing for back rent.  So that Sam won’t be able to remember any of the years they had together without feeling pain, so any place inside of Sam where there was once love, must be emptied.  They want what was rightfully theirs, back.  Not merely the ranch, but the love Sam felt for Earl. 

When they speak to you about the Sanctity of Marriage, this is what they mean.  Our hearts must be empty.  Our lives must be empty.  If they’re not, if we’ve somehow managed despite their best efforts to find our other half, then we’ve stolen what rightfully belongs to them…Sanctity…And they want it back.  If they have to cut our hearts open to get it.

Sanctity.

One final note…  I don’t expect everyone in my life to agree with every political or moral stand I take.  And there was a time when I’d make exceptions for family.  But since mom passed away a few years ago my heart has grown that much lonelier, and that much harder, and I am disinclined now to accept excuses, let alone make any for people who have been content to sit back and watch me walk into my fifties utterly alone.  I have gone to bed with an aching heart for far, far too long to politely ignore the knife in my back.  If you’re about denying gay people, if you’re about denying Me, the means to find our someone to love and to build a life together with them to the best of our ability…And That Damn Well Means Also The Right To Marry Them If They Consent…then you are no friend of mine.  I do not know you.