But I really knew I was a member of the family when I became the object of their truest expression of fondness: teasing. As we filled up at a Shell station one Labor Day weekend amid an extended family camping trip in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I volunteered to run inside and fetch breakfast supplies for the next morning at the campsite.
“Could you pick up some blinker fluid while you’re in there?”
“Sure,” I agreed, not processing the question too actively and somehow not detecting the conspiratorial telepathy among Chasten, Terry, and Sherri.
“For this car you gotta make sure it’s the E-50,” Terry added. “The purple kind.” Chasten nodded in solemn agreement.
I committed the specs to memory. “Uh-huh. E-50, purple.” Got it.
Inside, I found bacon and eggs in the refrigerated section, then made my way to the car supplies. Not finding anything purple or marked “E-50,” I worked back along the aisle a second time, without success, and then started to look for the clerk. Just as I began asking for help, I heard the chime at the door as Sherri came inside. As the other two chuckled in the car, she couldn’t resist making sure she was on hand to witness the interaction. That way, later, around the campfire, she could describe the look on my face at precisely the moment it dawned on me, while repeating myself to a quizzical store clerk, that there is no such thing as blinker fluid.
BACK HOME, AS CHASTEN AND I had become a couple, it was not readily clear to either of us how we were supposed to act in public. But we quickly formed the habit of conducting ourselves like any other couple, and found that we were generally treated that way. The harder part for him was the challenge that awaits any political plus-one: dealing with the volume of positive and negative attention coming to you and to someone you love, as a consequence of a life that he, not you, has chosen.
One day, not long after we had begun to live together, Chasten was making an evening grocery run to Martin’s. In the refrigerated section, he pulled open a glass door to select a carton of yogurt. Eyeing his choices, he suddenly heard a tapping sound next to his ear. Startled, he turned to the right and found someone knocking on the glass.
Abandoning his yogurt selection for a moment, Chasten closed the door between them and asked how he could be helpful.
The constituent’s request was simple enough: “You tell your husband to stop fucking up the streets downtown!”
Evidently the gentleman was not a fan of our Smart Streets initiative. It was beside the point that he may not have fully appreciated the economic benefits of a complete-streets policy, or that he was unaware Chasten and I were not yet married. In that moment, Chasten realized that he, too, had become a public figure, and would have to answer for me as well as himself.
Even as he lives his own demanding professional life as a classroom teacher and head of junior high at the same Montessori school I attended as a child, Chasten has found that he constantly has to represent not just me but also a city administration in which he has no formal role. As we flop down in the living room after a long day of work, most of his stories are about the school day, but some are inevitably about how my work has invaded his. A day won’t go by without some kind of intrusion. It can occasionally be endearing, but just as often it will be frustrating, such as the staff meeting where an idea he mentioned was met with the response, “Is that your idea, or the mayor’s?” Or it’s just peculiar, as when a stranger lobbies him to get the city to stop putting fluoride in our drinking water.
PERHAPS IT IS THE FEAR of any queer person preparing to come out that he or she will be marked as a kind of other, isolated from the straight world by virtue of being different. No doubt many have that kind of experience—indeed all do, at least a little bit. But the main consequence for me of coming out, and especially of finding Chasten, is that I have felt more common ground than ever before with the personal lives of other, mostly straight, people.
Before, I could rarely relate to the stories I heard from others when it came to adult domestic life or romance. Today, being in a committed relationship with Chasten just might be the most normal thing about my life. I no longer have to extrapolate or use imagination to understand what colleagues are describing when it comes to their wives or husbands. Our world at home is full of the blessings of domestic life—and the frustrations, too, from my irritation that it’s hard to get him to fold the laundry as I do, to his bemusement at my stubborn indifference to expiration dates on items in the cupboard.
For this reason most of all, it is mystifying that some persist in describing sexual orientation as a “lifestyle.” In those fragments of our days that aren’t dominated by work, our lifestyle revolves around meals, friends, exercise, housekeeping, sleep, extended family, and the care and feeding of our dog. Trying to visualize it from the outside, it strikes me that my partnered, gay “lifestyle” is a lot more normal, sustainable, and fulfilling than my prior lifestyle consisting almost entirely of work and travel. In that context, something as simple as taking care of a dog would have been inconceivable.
TRUMAN, OUR RESCUE MUTT, was named Lamar when we went to visit him at the foster family that had been keeping him for weeks after a couple failed adoption attempts. A hound and beagle mix said to be about four years old, he had come from Kentucky by way of an animal rescue that specializes in getting dogs out of shelters in high-kill states. He had clearly been badly mistreated, and was at first extremely skittish. As his foster owner in Granger led him out on a leash to meet us in her yard, he avoided eye contact with either of us. As soon as Chasten went to pet him, he pancaked onto the ground in a passive slouch. Maybe the earlier adoptions hadn’t worked out because he just didn’t act very dog-like. But Chasten was convinced there wasn’t anything wrong with him that a few months of love couldn’t fix.
Trying to think ahead, I was more reluctant. Once, weeks earlier, he had wondered aloud about whether we were in a position to responsibly take care of a dog, and I had pointed out that we didn’t even seem to be in a position to responsibly take care of cheese. After all, things constantly went bad in our fridge as we went days at a time without a meal at home. Taking good care of a pet would mean a change in, well, lifestyle.
But the dog was irresistible, and Chasten reminded me that we had a good support network despite our work and travel schedules, especially since my parents lived around the corner. The next thing I knew, we were the loving owners of a four-ish-year-old hound whom we rechristened Truman, after the president who had quipped, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”
Early in my relationship with our new family member, I often thought of this saying with irony. For the first few weeks, he would get up and go to a different room if I so much as made eye contact. After that habit subsided, he still tended to run away and hide under a table anytime I tried to leash him. He wasn’t exactly man’s best friend. But over the months he bonded with Chasten and eventually with me, becoming the class pet in Chasten’s schoolroom and curling up in our bed with us at home. Now I return home to a serenade of barks and howls, a wagging tail, and all of the goofy excitement that you’d expect from a four-legged canine companion.