Why do I feel more positive about Davis v. Ermold? First, there’s no disagreement among lower courts about Obergefell v. Hodges. In addition, Kim Davis’s petition centers on a procedural issue rather than the constitutionality of same-sex marriage itself. And finally, even Justices Thomas and Alito, who wrote in 2020 that Obergefell created “a problem” for people with religious objections, stopped short of calling for it to be overturned outright.

However, it’s also true that, according to the Movement Advancement Project, twenty-four (24) states still have both statutory and constitutional amendment bans on same-sex marriage, three (3) states have constitutional amendment bans only, and five (5) states have statutory (i.e., legislative) bans only. That’s thirty-two (32) states that, if given their druthers, would ban our marriage.

Only nineteen (19) states, (plus D.C.) have affirmatively codified marriage equality in state law or their state constitution as of today: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.

These numbers don’t make me feel safe. They don’t reassure me that, in this political climate, our marriage will stand. We once thought Roe was settled law, too. But instead, the Court ruled in 2022 that “the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.” Is that’s what’s in the cards for Obergefell? And, even if we’re somehow immune to changes in the law because we’re already married, will future generations have the freedom to love that we currently enjoy?

If your state is not listed above as already safe, I encourage you to join with organizations such as the National LGBTQ Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign who are demanding that same-sex marriage be codified before it’s too late. And yes, that includes Wendy’s and my home state of Virginia. In the words of Urvashi Vaid who’s been called “the most prolific LGBTQ organizer in history, “There are things to do.” And I’d add, “It’s time to do them!”

If you’re looking for inspiration, watch this new, short documentary about Urvashi Vaid: https://www.therearethingstodo.com/

In the meantime, I want to share with you a story that happened eleven years ago today, October 7, 2014, when marriage equality came to Virginia. If you’ve read my memoir, Living Into The Truth: A Daughter’s Journey of Discovery, you’ll be familiar with this piece. If you haven’t read it, I hope you enjoy this slightly modified excerpt (you can purchase the full memoir wherever books are sold).

Closet—Do Not Enter

Wandering through the cluttered aisles of an antique mall I almost never visited, my phone lit up. A text from my friend Jeanne burst onto the screen in all caps: “THE SUPREME COURT JUST LET IT STAND—SAME-SEX MARRIAGE IS LEGAL IN VIRGINIA!” For a moment, the world around me froze. Over the past decade, one state after another had opened the door to marriage equality, but Wendy and I had promised each other we’d wait until we could marry right here, in our home state. We hadn’t expected that day to come anytime soon. And yet, there it was—history, glowing in the palm of my hand.

As soon as I heard the news, and before I could chicken out, I called Wendy at work—not something I often did, especially around lunch time. As a high school librarian, she usually had a library full of students and no time to talk. I thought she might make an exception for this call, though. When she picked up the phone, the impatience in her voice told me that I’d better get right to it, so I did.

“You wanna get married in the morning?” I asked with an impish lilt.

Her pause was palpable as she digested my out-of-the-blue question. The library sounds muted for an instant. I felt my heart skip a beat.

“Yes!” she said, her enthusiasm unmistakable. “Oh, my God! I can’t believe it!” Her words spilled out in a rush as if she’d been holding her breath. “But I gotta go,” she continued. I could hear students’ animated voices rising in the background. “We’ll talk when I get home.” And with that, the line went dead.

I stared at the phone in my hand, my face reflecting back on the now black screen. The person I saw there was no longer a secretive, closeted young woman afraid of exposing herself to the world. Instead, I saw a confident, almost-60-year-old lesbian who refused to let others define her or be influenced by their judgements.

My parents taught me how to live in the closet by their example. Their secrets about their children’s parentage and the shame surrounding it instilled in me the feeling that I couldn’t live my life in the open, that hiding my true self, especially those parts that others might object to, was a prerequisite to a happy, or at least safe, life.

All that was behind me now. I could no longer keep my secrets, and I would no longer keep theirs. When I met Wendy in 2009 and we fell in love, all pretense was gone. She lived her life out in the open—at work, with her parents, her church community, and her extended family. Even if I was inclined to return to the closet, which I wasn’t, we made a mutual decision to live our life as publicly as we could. Wendy has too much integrity to cover up who she is, and when we became a couple, we celebrated it with all who knew us, regardless of how they felt about our love.

Less than two years after meeting, we did what was unthinkable for most of my life—we held a church wedding. With the brief exception of sitting around a campfire at my friends’ ceremony in Long Island many years before where I imagined the two parts of me—the visible and the closeted parts reuniting into one being who lived and loved openly—marriage, especially legal marriage, was never in my vision for myself. Why wish for something I couldn’t have? But even more central was the question that had driven so much of my life: why stand out, why show people who I was in such a visible way, especially because they might not like it?

Although I had been out at work and in my public life for fifteen or more years at that point, standing and declaring my love in front of a church filled with people still seemed a step too far. All that changed when I met Wendy. I finally felt ready to take that next step, or, in this case, giant leap, into married life.

Our wedding represented so much more than the typical commitment ceremony. The 150 people in attendance included Wendy’s family, her parents, brother, aunts, and cousins and the largest gathering of my family ever assembled, with my brother, nephews and nieces, and cousins on my mom’s side who I hadn’t seen in years. My work colleagues from as far away as Seattle and Wendy’s from across town came to celebrate with us, and of course, several church friends from our Unitarian Universalist congregation where we held the wedding joined us.

The ceremony and reception that followed was a public statement that our love could not be denied by anyone, legally or not. It was an affirmation of the community that held us, and it was a call to them to help us survive the inevitable discrimination and prejudice we would experience in our lives together. In lieu of wedding presents, we asked guests to donate to Equality Virginia or the Gay Community Center of Richmond (Now Diversity Richmond) raising over $6,000 for these two organizations. We wanted to help make it possible for all people, not just us, to celebrate their love. Little did we know that four years later, the world would tilt on its axis, and marriage equality would be available to us in Virginia.

Making It Legal

When we approached the Henrico County Clerk’s office the morning after my romantic lunchtime proposal to apply for a marriage license, we had no idea what to expect. We arrived before they opened and waited in the parking lot for a few minutes before excitement and nervousness got the better of us. Surprised to find the county administration building open and people already passing through security, we took our place in line. No one entering looked like a gay or lesbian couple on a similar mission. We were the first and only. At least as far as we could tell.

As we reached the clerk’s office on the second floor, Wendy and I looked at each other and smiled before Wendy pulled the door open.

“We’re here to apply for a marriage license,” one of us—I don’t remember which one—said to the woman behind the counter.

“Fill out those forms,” she replied, pointing to a table with pink and blue forms secured on various colored clipboards. “It doesn’t matter which one you complete. Either color will work,” she went on. I could see the smirk on Wendy’s face and feel the one on my own.

Being the butchier of the two of us, and because I’ve never liked pink, I picked up a clipboard with a blue form. Wendy, who loves pink, gravitated to that one.

The office had gotten a little busier in the few minutes it took us to complete the forms, so as we approached the counter again, this time with forms in hand, we waited behind someone dressed in a suit, probably an attorney. When he completed his business, we handed our pink and blue forms to the clerk. She accepted them without a smile, and I wondered how she felt about this new wrinkle to her work, specifically, how she felt about same sex couples getting married. I couldn’t help it. I’d spent a lifetime wondering how people perceived me—judged me—and just because I lived my life out in the open now, didn’t mean that worry disappeared.

For the next several minutes, we waited while she attempted, with wrinkled brow and pursed lips, to plug our information into their computer system. Two other women hovered over her shoulder, watching her every keystroke. Perceiving our apprehension, one of them attempted to reassure us, “The computers haven’t been updated yet, and we have to cover for her when she goes to lunch, so we have to know what to do.”

We nodded. So maybe the stress-filled faces were just that—people trying to figure out how to do their jobs now that they were being asked to do something new. That’s what I wanted to believe.

When the clerk finally handed us our license, she didn’t say congratulations. In fact, she didn’t say anything. Wendy took the license, and we turned to leave—Wendy to her left toward the door we came in and me, for some unexplained reason, to my right. As I approached the door in front of me and reached for the handle, I stopped short. Printed in bold letters at about eye level were the words, “CLOSET” and beneath that “DO NOT ENTER.” Without skipping a beat, I said, apparently loudly enough that others heard, “Whoops, wrong door. I just came out of there.”

People burst out laughing. From the resolute businesspeople in line to the harried clerks behind the counter, people laughed. We did too. The tension that permeated the room just moments before broke apart as if a glitter bomb had exploded above us and rained down on everyone.

We left the building still laughing, our eyes wet, knowing that on their first full day of granting same-sex marriage licenses in Virginia, the staff at the clerk’s office would have a story to tell around the dinner table that night.

“That’s going to be something they’ll remember,” one man shouted across the parking lot as he waved his hand at us.

I was glad to bring other people joy on our joyous day!

An hour later, we stood in the botanical garden we loved, illuminated by late-morning light spilling through the trees. Six dear friends surrounded us—one smiling from an iPad—and in just six minutes, it was done. It felt as if our church wedding four years earlier had paused mid-vow, and this was the moment we finally finished it.

This time, when we kissed, the light that bathed us seemed to stretch far beyond the Commonwealth of Virginia—reaching toward every place where love still waited to be recognized.

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By that time in my life, I was so used to not asking questions that they didn’t even cross my mind. I didn’t question the nuns about things that no longer made sense about my Catholic faith; I didn’t question myself about why I wasn’t like the other girls my age who couldn’t talk about anything but boys; and I didn’t question my parents about their earlier lives. I just smiled when Dad told me about his courting ritual and thought how bittersweet that sounded. As I remember it now, I regret not trying to find out more.

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Then I said the words, “Her dad told her Norman was our real father.” I let the declaration hang unsupported in the air between cell towers. Before it crashed to the ground with the weight of the silence, I swooped in, “What do you think?”

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“Oh, they’re beautiful,” Marcia exclaimed. “Just what I imagined.” I thought I could detect a tear rolling down her cheek, but she wiped it away with one hand while she picked up the photo of Marlee’s headstone with the other. She pulled it to her chest and held it there, closed her eyes, and mouthed, “Thank you.”

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I hadn’t given a lot of thought to my parents’ secrets over these intervening years. With Mom gone, and only one living relative of their generation left (an aunt who married my uncle after all this had happened, so didn’t know anything), I’d pretty much given up any hope of finding out the truth. Instead of letting it worry me, I just let it go and focused on my own life.

Or so I thought.

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We picked this house because it was as far away as possible from the non-profit where I worked while still meeting my board’s requirement of living in the county. We didn’t want to run into board members or clients at the grocery store and have to explain why we were together. Living in the middle of nowhere lowered that risk. 

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The phone line fell silent and then, “They fired me.” Her voice was devoid of expression—no affect, only words.

“What!?” I couldn’t make sense of what she was saying. I must have misheard her.

“They fired me,” she repeated it in the same hollow tone. “The dean called me into her office and said, ‘we’re letting you go.’”

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I didn’t like weddings. When my elementary school classmates played wedding instead of cleaning the church like we were supposed to do on Friday afternoons, I steered clear, and not just because I didn’t want to get caught—although that was a key motivator in those days. I hated the thought of wearing a wedding gown and being the focus of everyone’s attention. And even more than that, I hated the thought of belonging to a man.

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I squirmed in my chair at his question as I imagined Mom sitting across the table from me. “I’ve thought about it,” I replied, not looking up from my plate. “It sure would make my mom happy.”

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I picked up the packet and held it in my hands like one would embrace a precious family heirloom. I pushed open my door, dropped my book bag on the floor, and crawled up on my bed, all the while not taking my eyes off the envelope. The return address popped off the page like a neon sign. State of Michigan Vital Records Office. I could feel my pulse quickening. My apprehension about opening it surprised me. Were the records contained in this envelope really vital, and if so, to whom?

This would be the first time I’d seen my birth certificate. Certainly, this official document would tell me the truth. Seeing Robert L. Smith listed as my birth father would put to rest any nagging questions I had. I would have legal proof of who my “real” father was.

I stared at it in what felt like suspended animation. It’s just a birth certificate, for God’s sake. I sucked in a breath, slid my finger under the flap, and carefully opened the envelope. When I pulled out the embossed paper, I ran my fingers over the back of the raised stamp before unfolding it.

As soon as I looked at the page, I knew something was wrong. A date stamped at the bottom caught my eye. Oct 25, 1962. That didn’t make sense. I was in second grade in 1962. Why was my birth certificate issued seven years after I was born?

I scanned up the page. There, under Father, wasn’t Robert L. Smith, the man my mother told me was our father, but Norman W. Marquis, the man who adopted me. What? How could he be listed as my father on my birth certificate?

Just as Dad did in making Mom throw away her photographs of Bob, history had again been rewritten. This time by the State—on my official, verified, certified, recorded, and filed birth certificate.

Or had it?

Maybe the State had corrected an error it made at the time of my birth. Maybe Norm really was my father. If the State erased all evidence of the role Bob played in my life, maybe it was because he didn’t play a role. I sat back on my bed and let the pillows comfort me.

How was I going to learn who I was if all I discovered was that more evidence had been compromised? If even the State colluded with my parents to obfuscate the truth? A feeling of despair came over me as I realized I had little hope of ever knowing who my father really was. This document wasn’t going to tell me anything.

I would have to piece the puzzle of my family together on my own and, in that moment, when even the State conspired against me, it seemed like an impossible task to a teenage girl with her own secrets to keep.  

A couple years after I saw my birth certificate for the first time, my mom’s sister, Wilma, who we called Aunt Babe, sorted through a large box of photographs at her dining room table. I’d come for the weekend. Just like when I was younger, I loved visiting the farm, and because it was only an hour’s drive from school, I made it a regular part of my college routine.

Although we often spent my time there outside with the peacocks, geese, and their horde of cats, roaring thunderstorms kept us in on this day. Aunt Babe pushed a stack of photos across the large walnut table where we’d held family gatherings when, as a kid, we made the trek from Arkansas back to Michigan to visit.

“You might want these,” she said, without looking up.

I pulled the stack toward me. I immediately recognized Marlee from the grainy horse picture I had seen a few years earlier hidden in my mother’s dresser (see Ch 4: Whisperings for the backstory on this photo). I can imagine I let out an audible gasp. I know my eyes widened because I can feel that happening as I write about it.

In many of these pictures, Marlee is younger than the ten- or eleven-year-old girl who sat confidently astride a horse, although a copy of that photo was there, too. Some photos showed an infant, others a toddler, and still others a precocious child of five or six. In every picture, I saw the slender, dark-haired woman who would become my mother cuddle this child in her arms, stand beside her holding her hand, or push her along in a baby carriage. The love they felt for one another infused the images so that each photo feel warm in my hands.

When a slender man with dark hair, sporting a white t-shirt, appeared in multiple shots, I figured out who he was, but I asked anyway, “Is this Bob?” The hesitancy in my voice was unmistakable. I had no difficulty calling him Bob. Uncle Norm had become Dad, so it just seemed right to call Bob by his name. My hesitation came not from using his name but from realizing how little I looked like him.

“Um hum,” she replied, staying engrossed in the photos before her. And then, after a pause, she asked, “Haven’t you ever seen him before?”

“No,” I replied. “Mom doesn’t have any photos of him.” I answered with a nonchalance that ironically felt forced. I didn’t add that my dad made her get rid of them. I figured Aunt Babe could surmise that.

The three of them looked like a family. Their hair, their skin coloring, their dress. They belonged together. I wondered if, held up against a similar photo of the same woman with a different man and two red-haired children, I would feel the same.

Aunt Babe said I could have the photos. I scarfed them up like they were Hershey’s chocolate squares she always had stocked for me in the cabinet behind where I sat.

“I don’t know what’s on these,” she said as she pushed a few rolls of 8 mm film toward me. “But you might find something there worth watching.” I snatched them up too.

When I got back to my apartment, I didn’t look at them again—the photos or the videos. Just having them in my possession felt like I’d robbed a bank. As anxious as I was to know about my family’s history, every time I got closer, I felt myself pull back, afraid of what I might discover. I couldn’t help but feel that way now. I wanted to know, but what if I learned more than I bargained for?

I stashed the photos and the film away in a cardboard box and slid the box on to the top shelf in my closet. Someday, I’d look at them. Someday, I’d pull the photos out and study the facial features of this family that wasn’t mine. Someday, I’d borrow an 8 mm movie projector, thread the delicate film through the reels, and watch this family come to life.

But not now. As much as I yearned for the truth, I felt in my bones that I wasn’t ready to know.

Although I still hadn’t re-examined the treasure trove of photos or watched the home movies Aunt Babe gave me, the next time I was home I surprised myself with an overwhelming desire to sneak back into Mom and Dad’s bedroom to get another look at Marlee’s photo, the only vestige of the past I was aware existed in my mom’s life. I now had my own copy of the photo hidden away, but something pulled me to connect it with the one I’d seen so many years before.

I slid open the drawer quietly just like I watched Mom do so many years before. The smell of lavender wafted into the room and transported me back to that day years before. What had I learned since then? My birth certificate had been altered to reflect my adoption. The photos from Aunt Babe convinced me of how well the family of Mom, Bob, and Marlee belonged together and how out of place my brother and I would have looked with them. But that was about it. I was a sorry excuse for an investigator.

I slid my hands underneath her sweaters. Instead of encountering the single photo I’d expected, I felt a stack of papers. I carefully slipped the pages from the bottom of the drawer and immediately recognized Mom’s handwriting on the lined sheets of three-hole punched notebook paper. Paperclipped to the top of her pages was a letter with the words Reader’s Digest stamped across the top. My heart skipped a beat. Why would Mom have a letter from Reader’s Digest? It didn’t take long to find my answer. “Thank you for submitting your moving story,” it read. “Unfortunately, we are unable to publish it at this time.”

Reader’s Digest? Mom submitted a story to Reader’s Digest?

I felt as if some invisible force pushed on my chest and forced the air from my lungs. This made no sense. Mom wasn’t a writer. She’d never been a writer. Writing was so out of character for her that I might as well have discovered she’d come here from another planet. I sucked in a breath. And then another. And as I did, I sat down on the bed and began to read Mom’s words.

“My daughter died when she was just eleven.”

It’s about Marlee. Mom wrote a story about Marlee. I stared at the text in my mother’s halting handwriting, and her grief washed over me— a grief she’d already carried with her for over twenty-five years. And then, just as suddenly, the grief twisted into guilt. If I had been a better daughter, couldn’t I have assuaged her anguish, couldn’t I have done something to make it better?

I don’t remember what else she wrote. Today, I would give anything to recall more of her words, to know which memories she felt important enough to write about, which details she included, and to learn something about how she felt during that horrific tragedy. I remember thinking that the writing wasn’t very good, that I could understand why Reader’s Digest had rejected it. But on that day, I was too astonished to learn that Mom had written a story—written anything—about her life, to take in her words. I was too overwhelmed with my own insecurity about who I should be to her to focus on the content of what she wrote.

As I sat on the edge of the bed, I realized how much of my mother I didn’t know, how much she kept hidden away, and how much I was following her lead. That’s what stayed with me—the feelings we never shared, even more than the stories I never knew.

The book of Mom’s life, and by association, Marlee’s, stayed closed to me. I didn’t ask Mom about the story she had written and, of course, she never brought it up to me. Her secrets had secrets, and she was so afraid of being criticized for the things she’d done wrong, she couldn’t even share the things she’d done right.

I, too, was afraid—afraid of the answers Mom might give to my questions and afraid of the questions she might ask me in return. After I’d been exposed for having a “unsavory relationship,” (see “Ch 08 Holy Outing”) I spent most of my college days attempting to recover the trust I’d lost with my Mom, by (re-) covering up who I was becoming.  I had my own adult life to figure out and truths (and lies) to live into. Despite my nagging questions, those priorities would consume me for the next few years.

Read Chapter 10: “Intervention”

If you just subscribed, you can read previously published chapters of If You Only Knew by following links in this table of contents. If you ever fall behind, this is the easiest way to catch up.

One afternoon after my shift, Mom summoned me into the family room. The air conditioner was no match for the relentless Arkansas sun as it beat down through the picture window at that time of day. The family room was the last place I wanted to be, but this was a rare request, and it didn’t feel like challenging it would be in my best interest.

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In this story, Hitchcock asks the boys, Jupiter, Pete, and Bob, to visit a professor friend of his who has a mummy who whispers to him in some mysterious language. The boys’ job is to figure out what the mummy is saying and why he is saying it. When Mom’s mutterings interrupted me, I had just reached an exciting part where Jupiter disguises himself as the professor and gets the mummy to whisper to him. For a minute, when Mom spoke, I thought it was the mummy whispering.

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