The "polite gays," was how Tracy and Kathryn described themselves. Not
political or loud, not obvious or overt, but understated, in keeping with their
Oklahoma surroundings. Never asking anyone to think too hard or talk too much
about the fact that they were gay at all. Except now they were about to ask
everyone they knew to think about it, because they'd decided to have a
wedding.
"Okay, here are our wedding plans, right here," Tracy Curtis said, opening
her notebook at the Hideaway Pizza and scanning the friends she and her partner,
Kathryn Frazier, had invited to their inaugural planning session. "If you'll
notice, this notebook's empty. We need help."
"Tracy, I don't know." Across the table, one friend half-raised her hand. "I
just haven't been to many gay weddings. And I'm gay. We're in kind of uncharted
territory."
They were at this restaurant because in October the Supreme Court decided to
let several lower court marriage rulings stand, which made same-sex unions legal
in some of the country's reddest states, including theirs. The next day, Tracy
and Kathryn picked up a marriage license on the advice of a lawyer friend who
told them to hurry before this suddenly opened window closed. But after a
two-minute ceremony, Kathryn, 39, went to work and Tracy, 44, went to a doctor's
appointment, and then went home and cried because what they'd just experienced
felt like checking something off a list, not like getting married.
And so now, in November, they were at the Hideaway to plan an actual wedding,
to take place in a state where 62 percent of people in a recent poll said they
didn't approve of same-sex marriage — and 52 percent said they felt that way
strongly.
One friend suggested that the reception could have a casino night theme. A
teenager at the table wondered why the couple hadn't chosen their outfits a long
time ago — "Because, honey, we didn't think we could ever get married in
Oklahoma," Kathryn explained — and someone else started ticking off venues.
Tracy had a vision of guests holding candles. But centerpieces? Flowers? Music?
Thinking of it all made them feel overwhelmed, especially when it came to one
question above all: Who would come to this wedding?
A few nights later, the couple sat at their dining room table and went over
prospective guests. They still didn't have a venue, but they'd chosen a day, in
January, and they'd made enough save-the-date cards to send to 86 people, a list
Tracy had written on the bottom of her Bible study worksheet and kept
re-counting.
"Are they coming?" Kathryn asked, pointing to one of the names in
surprise.
"I don't think they'll come," Tracy said. "We're just sending a postcard to
be polite." She looked at another name and laughed. "I just cannot imagine
inviting her to this wedding."
But they would, they decided. They would invite everybody to this wedding and
let them decide for themselves whether to come.
"It feels very emotional and vulnerable to be inviting all these people,"
Kathryn said.
"But that's why you have a wedding," Tracy replied.
So the next week, they put the save-the-dates in the mail, and soon after,
the invitations, and then they waited.
---
Oklahoma. This was a place where Kathryn's workplace had a cussing jar, a
quarter per swear, and the words written on it, "Let Go and Let God." Here,
Christianity was the religion — Tracy and Kathryn were believers — and Oklahoma
football was the religion — Tracy and Kathryn were believers — and people could
be decent and kind and judgmental, sometimes all at once, which was why, when
Tracy told some Rotary Club friends that she and Kathryn were getting married,
she kept her eyes planted above their heads so she wouldn't have to look at
their faces.
Tracy and Kathryn had been together for seven years and known each other for
18, but they began worrying about everything in their lives that could be
disrupted by this ceremony. They worried about offending people. They worried
when Tracy called their top choice for a venue. At first the woman who answered
the phone said the location was available, then she asked for the bride's name —
"Kathryn" — and the groom's name — "Tracy" — and then, when she figured out that
Tracy was not a man but a woman, she explained that they didn't do same-sex
weddings and wouldn't accommodate the party after all.
"We had our first run-in with meanness the other day," Kathryn told her
mother, Jane Webb, the next morning when they met for breakfast at a Cracker
Barrel.
"Well, did you have to tell them it was a gay wedding?" Jane brainstormed.
"Couldn't you just say you were having a beer fest?"
"No, Mom."
"Now, I haven't told him about the wedding, and I'm not sure that I intend
to," Jane said a few minutes later, bringing up her own worries about her
husband, Kathryn's stepfather. He hadn't reacted well to learning she was
gay.
Kathryn wondered: Would her stepfather come to the wedding? Tracy wondered:
Would her parents come? Her empathetic mother and her ex-military father?
What about Kathryn's boss, Tim? He and Kathryn talked all the time about
homosexuality and the Bible, and his wife, Kelly, was the leader of Tracy's
Bible study. The two couples had eaten dinners at each other's homes and been
friends for more than a decade — but would Tim and Kelly come to the
wedding?
The person Kathryn wondered about most was her biological father. He had
raised her; after his divorce from Jane, it was the two of them alone in a
small, boxy house in the middle of open plains. He was a rural postman and the
job suited him — a solitary route that took him down the same path, every day, a
hundred miles of roads. His world was predictable and contained, and Kathryn
hadn't found the right way to talk to him about the wedding.
Tracy didn't know they hadn't spoken. She sent his invitation in a batch with
all the others — and now Kathryn had no choice but to call her father, or he
would learn about the ceremony by checking the mail. As the words about the
invitation came spilling out, they became words about why she and Tracy had
decided, despite all their worries, to have this wedding.
She told him that she didn't think there was anything wrong with the way she
and Tracy felt about each other. She said that marriage was an important rite in
the history of humanity, something people had been doing throughout time, and
something she wanted to be a part of. She told him that marriage, as a value,
was American.
He didn't say anything. There was only silence on the other end of the
line.
"I'd like for you to come," Kathryn said after a while. She left it at
that.
---
The first RSVP arrived in the middle of December, addressed to "Bride
Central." Tracy saw it in the mailbox but made herself wait until Kathryn was
home to open it. Inside was a response from a teenage girl Tracy had mentored at
a homeless shelter. "This will be my first wedding!" the girl wrote, and the
couple took the card inside and started to make a pile: three more "Will
Attends" arrived the next day, five the day after that.
By then they'd found a venue, a tea house on Main Street, whose owner
recalled telling them, "I haven't been exposed much to that life, but I love all
God's children," and by then Tracy's mother had phoned with a request.
"Tracy," Diana Lobrano asked her daughter in a serious voice. "Would you
consider wearing your grandmother's wedding dress?"
Tracy snorted before she could help herself. The gown may have been an
heirloom, but her grandmother was a diminutive size 6 and Tracy was a tall 14 —
it would never fit. But in that moment, Tracy began to realize that other people
were taking this ceremony seriously.
They ordered trays of cupcakes and truffles, downloaded dance tutorials and
made multiple trips to Dillard's, where a white-haired clerk sold Kathryn a gray
blazer and helped Tracy find an evening gown, then a different gown, and a
different gown when she still couldn't make up her mind. They told the clerk
they needed the clothes for a wedding; they were too worried about what she
might think to tell her the wedding was theirs.
A few weeks before the wedding, Tracy's parents arrived from South Carolina,
where they'd moved several years before. On their first night in town, her
father came into the kitchen while Tracy and Kathryn were washing dishes. He
told them he had a question he felt a little awkward about asking.
Bill Curtis was politically conservative. A retired technical sergeant with
the Air National Guard, he thought that things might have been easier before the
repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, when someone would know another
person was gay but not talk about it. He questioned news polls that said that
the majority of Americans supported same-sex marriage. People on the coasts
might, he thought, but he wasn't sure about people in the middle of the
country.
He also thought that his daughter was a good person who deserved to be happy,
with the same rights as everyone else, and so he had packed a gray suit and a
selection of ties and driven 17 hours with Diana to be at the ceremony.
Now, in the kitchen, he asked, "Is there a role you would like me to have in
this wedding?"
He didn't mean to presume or impose, he said — he just wanted to offer.
---
A week before the wedding, the pile had grown to 67 affirmative RSVPs:
Tracy's sister, in California. An old friend in Washington state. Brandon, the
22-year-old Tracy and Kathryn gained custody of after his mother died five years
before, would be driving up from Florida. There were a handful of no's — "This
is our annual duck hunt weekend," one invitee apologized — but Tracy and Kathryn
were starting to feel optimistic. "Maybe I underestimated the people around me,"
Tracy said. They still hadn't heard from Kathryn's boss, Tim, though, and they
still hadn't heard from Kathryn's dad. They'd visited him for the holidays, but
he didn't bring up the wedding then and neither did they, and finally, with six
days to go, Kathryn telephoned and asked whether he was coming. There was
another uncomfortable silence.
"I don't want you to hate me, and I don't want you to disown me," she would
remember him telling her. "But I just want things to stay as they are." He would
not be coming.
Kathryn didn't ask him why. "Mad is not the right word," she told him. "But I
am disappointed."
Two days later, Kathryn's mother called. She would not be coming either — a
medical procedure had been scheduled for a few days before the wedding and she
didn't know whether she'd be recovered in time.
"It's really okay," Kathryn told herself.
A few hours after that call, Tim stopped by Kathryn's office to ask about a
service request in Prague, a small Oklahoma town several miles out of their
normal coverage area.
"I told them I'd have to bill them double," Kathryn said.
"At least," Tim said.
"It's about a 50-minute drive."
"I trust you," he said, and soon after he left, Kathryn's cellphone rang.
Tracy was on the other end. She'd just gone to the mailbox and found an RSVP,
she said. It was from Tim and Kelly. They wouldn't be coming.
"Mmm-hmm," Kathryn said, staring at the window in front of her as Tracy told
her about the thoughtful card the Lashars had sent along with their RSVP.
A few minutes later, Tim came back in. "Where is Prague, anyway?" he joked.
"Isn't that in Europe?"
Kathryn took a deep breath. She laughed, and meanwhile, back at the house,
after Tracy talked with Kathryn, Tracy's father pulled her into the kitchen and
asked that his daughter hear him out on something.
Don't recite vows, he suggested. Have a party, not a wedding — it just seemed
like that might be the sensitive thing to do. Besides, he pointed out, the
couple was technically already married.
That wasn't the point, Tracy remembered telling him. Their ceremony in
October had been done in haste with court decisions in mind. They wanted, she
told her father, to feel married.
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