Photo by Sara Remington (who crouched in the front seat and took this photo while our friend John slowly drove our 1963 Corvair down the street so Sara could get this perfect shot. I’m the lesbian on the right—Lauren is the lesbian on the left.
Hello! I JUST GOT MARRIED! To Lauren, the love of my life! The wedding was in Guerneville, CA, and we spent three glorious days surrounded by an unreal amount of love and beloved community and chosen family and powerful queer joy and energy! There were singalongs and late-night hot tub sessions and a drag brunch and a punk band and a pool party and a taco truck and multiple dance parties and SO many sequins. It was perfect. It was one brief speck of a moment in the vast expanse of the universe, and it was all ours.
We worked incredibly hard to create and craft a ceremony that would feel impactful, personal, and honest, that would acknowledge the joy and the grief that this life brings, and after the ceremony many people1 asked if I would share our words. I kept pretty quiet about the wedding on social media beforehand, because I felt protective. I wanted to keep it close, to preserve the sacred container that we got to exist in. My wife (!!!) is a private person who has zero social media, and though I’m used to being pretty public, I do draw boundaries, especially around my family, my home, and my relationship. But I also know the power of queer visibility, and I know that we have a really fucking great story that means—and can mean—a great deal to many people, queer or not queer. Most importantly, it means a lot to us to share our story. We are proud of our love, our family, and ourselves.
Soooo, that’s why you’ll find a brief synopsis of our love story in print in the New York Times. All the lesbian news that’s fit to print! It’s an honor to appear in those pages that we’ve read for years, always scanning for the queer stories, secretly wishing we could be among them. It feels even more impactful to have our story in print days after SCOTUS dealt its latest blow to LGBTQ rights (the case is based on pure fraud, FYI) which are, just a reminder, human fucking rights.
And! This is all why I’m sharing the following, which is an annotated excerpt of our wedding vows, which were a conversation between Lauren and I, our officiant Julia2 who is a dear dear friend and a legit wizard high priestess, and the community who bore witness to our union. It’s annotated because I’m a nerdy writer and I love annotation, and because our vows are packed with references to many of the queer and feminist authors and artists who mean so much to us, and also because I re-read a lot of Maggie Nelson’s genius book The Argonauts before the wedding and Maggie annotates like no other.3
Finally: we share this today because, as we said in the redwood grove, quoting Mary Oliver: “Joy is not meant to be a crumb.” Joy is boundless, it is essential, it is real—and yet the crush of the patriarchy can have us on our knees, desperately searching for any scrap of it we can find. So, here you go. Here’s our joy. May it resonate, inspire, and move you, and give you the permission, validation, and love you deserve.
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Thursday June 22, 2023.
“Sisyphus”4 by Andrew Bird begins to play; we hear it from the room where we’ve been getting ready, and we know it’s time to begin. This song is the cue for guests to move into the ceremony site.5 As they cross a small wooden bridge into the redwood grove, June and Bonnie6 are handing out programs and vintage hankies.7 The next song is “The Day” by The The,8 and then the last song before the ceremony begins is “Tilted” by Christine and the Queens.9 When guests take their seats they find either a colorful tiny tambourine or a driftwood stick (collected from the beach near our home) adorned with rainbow ribbons.10 When everyone is seated, JULIA, our dearest friend and Universal Life Minister, descends from behind the redwoods. She’s wearing a golden caftan that belonged to her grandmother.
Julia Descending
JULIA: Welcome everyone. On behalf of Kate and Lauren, thank you all so much for being here. Weddings remind us of why we are put on this earth: to witness and participate in these beautiful moments of transformation, to let them bind us together.
On this hallowed ground in the shadows of these eternal redwood beings we will take our beautiful friends and change them in the eyes of the universe and the state into one family.
This sacred claiming of marriage for Kate and Lauren will happen here. This is the place. I ask you all to open your hearts and feel the miracle of this moment.
While we breathe our most beautiful dreams to life, many of us are navigating loss.11 Holding joy and grief together is a radical practice. This marriage will happen without the physical presence of Darlene Pariani, Lauren’s beautiful mother, who passed away in January.12 We know that Darlene is here with us now, we have felt her in the breeze13 and heard her in the cardinals’ song and seen her in the poppies.14 I ask you all to welcome Darlene to this table. Welcome to all our ancestors who made this impossible and miraculous moment a reality.
Bridal party enters! My daughter Ivy and her cousin Maddie walk in to “Without You, Without Them” by boygenius.15 Then we hear “Right Down the Line”, Lucius’s cover of the Gerry Rafferty classic.16 I enter, holding the hand of my son Benson. We hug Ivy and Julia and stand at the altar, awaiting Lauren and her son Rowan, who come next. Lauren looks so beautiful, it’s insane. All of our friends and family are beautiful and beaming and glowing in this perfect afternoon sun.
JULIA: Welcome Kate and Lauren, to your wedding. Lauren and Kate have welcomed all of us to their long and crowded table17, to eat from their garden that they have planted in happiness and sorrow, in courage, in faith, in joy, always for the promise of today.
We are surrounded today by the most incredible love, on the day of the year that gives us the most light.18
The marriage of Kate and Lauren is made of the earth, this dirt, our beloved Pacific Ocean, these trees and beyond: for love is the province of air.19
Kate and Lauren, your love holds the truth that things can be more beautiful than we ever imagined, so long as we have the courage and bravery to let ourselves crack open so we can get bigger and bigger, to live our truth and turn toward joy. You come to this day as mothers, as sisters, as daughters. You come to this day as women. You both are your thirteen-year-old selves asking questions about what could be, and your 40-year-old selves who have found your voices and named your desires. To become WIVES. You are women who chose eternity and eternal return. You chose to tell the truth. To be seen as your whole gay selves by each other and by all of us gathered here today. This claiming is powerful! It is in total alignment with the creative power of the universe! You have cast your pebble into the pool of the universe and the concentric waves of your love and your truth spread out further and further, making those of us here today brave.
What a gift you have given yourselves. What a gift you have given us all!
Your love insisted upon itself. It asked you to take a chance, to delicately unravel and remake yourselves. And now to dance and sing, because to love in this world is radical, it is rebellious liberation!20
Your joy sings bright songs in the dark,21 as you hold each other in the kitchen as your children sleep upstairs. These are radiant points of light that pierce the dark and give validation to the possibility, the surprising miracle of life itself.
Your love matters to us. It shines brightness into our hearts too. Your marriage is in service to everything good and sincere in the world. You have gathered your family and friends together to witness your moment: do you feel our pride, our protection, our fierce love for you that weaves around you?
Your love is gorgeous and sacred, and today we will take your love further up,22 further into the possibility, into the mystery.
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice– though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do– determined to save the only life you could save.
Today, we begin.
What a gift beginnings are
This year began with the most shattering ending.
The person who brought me into this life is gone.24
But the person I will spend the rest of it with is here in front of me.
KATE: We are standing here today, committing ourselves to each other, for life, because we WANT to. Because we choose to. Because we can.25
That is liberation! And it feels incredible. Joy is not made to be a crumb26—it is infinite and boundless. And so are we.
We are joining together in marriage for reasons that are deeply personal, and profoundly political. We know that our love is valid whether we enter this institution or not; our family is whole no matter what.
LAUREN: We make this choice on our own terms, with our hearts, minds, and eyes wide open. Full of radical love.
KATE: We are doing this for us, but also for everyone who wanted to, but could not. For all the Boston marriages27 and lifelong partnerships that bloomed behind closet doors. For those who would have married their loves if only they’d lived long enough to do so.28 For those who don’t live in blissful queer oases like Guerneville,29 who aren’t safe to express their love, their gender, their identity, much live openly with their family as we do.
LAUREN: We choose this union because of pleasure and desire; because of parenting and patience. Because to the degree that it’s possible we want to live and love outside of the crush of the patriarchy.30
KATE: We are two grown-ass women. This is not the first rodeo for either of us.31 We have been to the movies, we have seen how it ends.32 We’ve given birth, we’ve held hands through deaths. We’ve raised babies, managed toddlers and tended to teens. We’ve had many jobs, partners and addresses. We’ve loved and we have lost. We have both been wives before.
And now we get to have wives!
We’ve spent the last 4 years doing very hard, beautiful things. Excavating and experiencing our best, most true selves. The fullest expression of our shapes.33
To do this we had to both open. To each other, yes, but ultimately to ourselves. We had to let go. We had to let things fall apart.
LAUREN: We both hate when that happens.34 And yet we did it.
In our own ways, on our time and terms, we each let the truth and the consequences happen. Head-on, arms open.
It was terrifying. And exhilarating. And totally worth it.
LAUREN: It turns out: we can choose both ourselves and our family. We can have both steady unconditional love and the most passionate desire. A best friend, a lover, a partner in crime. To be the most challenged by the person who brings the greatest satisfaction. It’s all ours.
Kate : As the patron saint Adrienne Rich once wrote: “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”36 We offer that possibility to everyone.
JULIA: Kate and Lauren, your love, your life together is a whole new world, the further up and further in that you go the bigger and more beautiful everything gets. The inside is suddenly larger than the outside. You are radical possibility. Your queer love has been and will be a work of meaningful courage, love, deep friendship and family. It is a whole new way of being mothers: To love in this world is a participatory and reciprocal action. Love is a supercharged aliveness, and your children bear witness to what a life made in love, in desire is.
LAUREN: We stand here today, making this commitment, for our family, our children.
Our world Is an open front door, a crowded table. Quacking ducks, an enormous white rabbit, a scrawny tabby Balls flying over fences, a teenager quietly making art We can tell our children apart by their footsteps
Each pair a different rhythm
We are 5. Sometimes four, sometimes three.37 Always two. Me and you.
KATE: I wish us all quiet moments and alone time, as well as too-loud family dinners, and making each other laugh so hard that we can’t finish our sushi.
I wish for us the ability to articulate our boundaries while remaining open to trying new things. I wish for patience and forgiveness, protection and connection.38
LAUREN: May you always know how loved you are, and may you feel the expansive care and support that our big blended family offers. You have all moved through the last few years with grace, courage, and curiosity. This is the power of queer family, chosen family: there is no limit to our love, and it comes not just from us, but all of you here today, and our communities at home.
JULIA: Friends, you are all gathered here with the sole spiritual purpose of consecrating this marriage. We, as witnesses, are saying “this union is a blessing to us” and to our ancestors, to those who came before who could not dream the kind of life that we have found, and the generations that will come into a future beyond our imaginations. This wedding has bound us all together- we stand together, side by side, conduits of your love. May we always protect this love, this marriage. May we always remember this.
We are charging you all with a sacred responsibility: to protect and keep safe this marriage, this family, and all families and unions like it. Kate and Lauren have shared their vulnerable, courageous and gorgeous love: that has transcended them and overflowed to all of us. What a gift this love is. Protect them. Trust them. Believe them. Show up for them, and ALL queer unions.
I ask you to please respond together to this question with “WE DO”
Do you, the community and family of Lauren and Kate and their children, promise to love and protect their marriage and all queer people today and all days?
Our community shouts and cheers WE DO!
Then we exchange very personal vows that Lauren asked me to leave out of this and I agree (see my next line ;) We’ll leave some details to the sacred container of the moment. After those vows, we get to the rings.
KATE: I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away.
LAUREN: I have no idea how long we have but I’m grateful for every minute.
Our sons come up and present our rings. My son has the ring hidden inside his top hat—he bows to Lauren and presents it to her. Her son takes it sweetly out of his pocket and gives it to me. We hug our boys.
JULIA: Becoming wives is a spiritual and radical act of liberation and rest. These rings are a physical celebration and reminder to be seen and felt as wives from today until the rest of days.
This singular moment in the history of the universe is yours.
LAUREN: The more I talk, the more you listen
KATE: The more we hurt, the more we heal
LAUREN: The more we grind our gears, the quicker we learn to adjust in sync
KATE: The more we laugh the more we remember it’s lighter than we think39
LAUREN: The more places we go, the more I want to see with you
KATE: The more you open, the more I will hold you
On go the rings!
LAUREN: I trust you with my life Kate
KATE: And I trust you with mine, Lauren
LAUREN: Today, I stand before you entirely, completely and fully committed I will try my best to leave my armor and defenses at our front door To be my best self for you and our family Knowing you are the one who knows me best of all
KATE: I stand before you bursting with respect and pride. I feel completely and totally myself. I feel known and happy and very gay And so ready to start this next chapter with our family We’ve been in conversation with each other since the moment we met on the playground. We wake in the morning and make coffee and let our minds rattle our tongues.40 We end in exhaustion and elation. Here’s to doing that, over and over, for as long as we can.
LAUREN: The closer I’m bound in love to you, the closer I am to free. 41
JULIA: DO YOU KATE TAKE LAUREN TO BE YOUR WIFE?
KATE: YES!!!!
JULIA: DO YOU LAUREN TAKE KATE TO BE YOUR WIFE?
LAUREN: YES!!!!
JULIA: By the powers vested in me by the great state of California, the winds in the redwoods, the organizing order of the universe, I now pronounce you WIVES!
You may KISS YOUR BRIDE!
We holds each others’ faces, warmed from the sun, and kiss, as our friends and family shake the tambourines and wave the ribbon sticks. As we’re kissing, our friends Juli, Chris, and Lisa from the punk band MUTT42 come up to the front. Chris sits at the drumset, Juli straps on her bass, and Lisa gets her guitar. She hands me a white electric guitar with a pink glittery strap. I announce that there’s one more thing that’s going to happen. “I dedicate this song to my wife,” I say, and then Lisa starts to play “The Story” by Brandi Carlile, which is basically a lesbian love anthem, and then I sing it and for 3 minutes our ceremony is a gay punk show. We fuck up the song a little but no one really notices and for sure no one cares. Lauren plays the tambourine, the crowd sings along and plays theirs and waves the ribbon sticks and holy shit we did it.
It’s TRUUUUUUUUUUUE! I was made for YOUUUUUUUUU!
And then! Our walk-off song comes on—George Michael’s ”Freedom ‘90”, a song I’ve been obsessed with forever.43 We all dance our way out of the ceremony site, and the rest is perfect magical wedding history.
This song/album was on heavy repeat for us during the summer of 2019. We felt that the whistling was the perfect call the action. It’s a little amusing to me that we kicked off the otherwise-drenched-in-lesbian-and-feminist-references-ceremony with a song by a straight dude, but hey, we contain multitudes, and Andrew Bird is great.
I may have spent the past year painstakingly and obsessively crafting the most perfect playlists for nearly every moment of this wedding (this link is to a megaplaylist of all the separate perfect playlist together!). And our DJ, DJ Campbell, a friend from back in the early 2000s Mission dyke days, did the most perfect job playing it all at the exact right moment, and also bringing in their own perfect jams and vibes the entire time.
Programs designed by BFF and absolute design genius Katy Greenspan! Hankies sourced by our dear friend Leslie (and Lauren who loves vintage textiles) for the inevitable tears. This was a good call! Everyone cried and used the hankies!
And this scene from “Better Things”, my favorite TV show of all time is so so so good. Did I want to perform this dance at the wedding? Yes I did, but I figured most people wouldn’t get it. So, here’s a link so you can watch it!
Julia writes: “In February 2023, beloved Oakland baker Jen Angel was killed in a robbery attempt. When Kate reached out to their mutual friend Amy, who was about to give birth to a son, Amy summed up the duality of the feelings so perfectly and heartbreakingly, writing: "I am so excited for this baby to arrive. Holding joy and grief together is a radical practice. I feel clumsy and tender holding it all, but I know I am not alone. So many of us are navigating loss while we breathe our most beautiful dreams to life every day." To hold sacred space for our community to feel their grief while also celebrating Kate and Lauren's love was of huge importance as we created this ceremony. This ceremony was always going to take place in the physical absence of Lauren's mom. To not acknowledge that grief would have been disengenuous. Ultimately, when we collectively can gather and say "we are here in truth, in pain and in joy, in grief and in unyielding happiness" I think that is religious in the most old-timey use of that word.”
Numerous people have since told us that a breeze came through the trees right at the moment she said this, and then a monarch butterfly proceeded to flutter in and join us for the ceremony. She was with us.
California poppies were her favorite flower, and we gave out seed packets in her honor at the wedding. She loved the cardinals that appeared in her yard in Texas, and since her passing we have seen cardinals everywhere—including in Maui and in Mexico!
An absolutely perfect song from a perfect band. When the album came out we listened to it over and over and this is the first track. At some point Lauren was like “Oh well this is obviously the opening track for the ceremony” and I was like “Fuuuuuck you’re so right!”
I love a cover song, and think this one is just beyond, and even before I proposed I know this would be our walking-down-the-aisle-song. The pace, the rhythm, the sly feminist twist on a classic FM gold yacht rock dude song. Just divine.
Julia says: “From the first time Kate, Lauren and I met about their ceremony, I felt that I needed to hold the two truths: a gay wedding is a social justice statement AND being in wild passionate love and getting married is unreal magic. I had a tarot reading with Michelle Tea, who lasered me right in the heart with this zinger: "LOVE IS THE PROVINCE OF AIR." Once that came into my brain, you quickly see that justice is a human conception, and we are human. Kate and Lauren are dirt and stars and ions collected from the ocean and here. We can touch them. But love, it’s governed by something beyond, untangible, uncontained. I feel this sense about Kate and Lauren, witnessing their love feels like a spiritual ease to me. Don't even try to pin the wind, it’s bigger and greater than anything you could imagine.
Julia says: “I'm not sure why exactly, but in my notes next to this sentence I have this quote from Joan Didion so I suppose it’s instructive. Feels important to have Joan weigh in: ’I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.’"
A reference to Julia’s lord and savior Nick Cave. Julia says: “After Lauren's mom passed away I wrote this quote down as I felt it contained the animating force of living life after a tragedy. ‘To strive toward joy is a calling and a practice. It is carried out with the full understanding of the terms of this hallowed and narrowed world. Pursued with an awareness that joy exists both in the best and the worst of the world, and that joy-flighty, jumpy, startling thing that it is- often finds its true voice in the opposite. Joy sings bright songs in the dark.’”
Julia says: “‘Further up, further’ in is a concept/quote/lifestyle from CS Lewis. At the end of The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis' characters are invited to go "further up and further in" presumably to a heaven that awaits them. I’m obsessed with this concept when I take it away from its fairly obvious Christian underpinnings because to me it identifies that heaven (conceptually) is here for those of us who choose to act upon their lives and find it. To climb further up, further in. Keep going. Keep going. It is perhaps safe to stop but why not keep going. From the very first day I met Lauren and Kate I felt this was “further up/further in” embodied: choosing to be joy.
An early draft of these vows began with this: “A lot of people have asked us why we’re doing this. Why get married (again)? Why stand here, in front of you all, making this commitment?” We ultimately cut the questions, and opted to be declarative (rather than defensive). But still, these are all good questions, and we’ve genuinely appreciated when people ask. I think that anyone entering into marriage should spend time articulating why. Not because you have to explain yourself to others, but because it’s really a good idea to explain yourself to you. And to get clear with each other. Here is why we are doing this! As two women who knew we were queer from very young ages, but who also felt the pressures of heteronormativity (both externally and internally, and in very different ways) it felt important to declare this sense of agency and freedom. The feeling of doing this purely because we want to, because we love the hell out of each other, because we have so much fun together, because of desire and pleasure and joy. Not because of expectations or pressure or because someone else ‘needs’ us to do it. For two mothers in their 40s, claiming and naming this felt crucial.
“Boston Marriage” is a term historians use for the cohabitation of two (middle to upper-class white) women who lived together, independent from the financial support of men, usually between the 18th and early 20th centuries. Historians also love to speculate about whether these relationships were or were not “sexual”, i.e. whether these women were actually lesbians. That doesn’t matter. They lived deeply intimate lives of love and care. They are our foremothers, part of our great circle.
I am thinking here of AIDS. I am thinking of LGBTQ suicide rates. I am thinking of Pulse nightclub, the murders of Black trans women, the young people forced out of their homes and onto the streets, of the violence of poverty and a healthcare system that ignores the marginalized and mentally ill and fails to care for trauma.
A reference to a line from The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson: “But whatever sameness I've noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.”
One of our beloved yoga teachers, Lyz Keating, often refers to the “fullest expression of the shape” as a way to indicate advanced variations on a yoga postures. I’ve always loved how she avoids words that denote someone being “better” or “more advanced” and instead just tells us what the fullest expression of each particular shape can be. When Lauren and I were in the real brambly thickes of our early love I told Lyz about her, and said “I feel like the fullest expression of my shape with her.”
The week before the wedding we took the kids on a ‘Familymoon’ to Maui. We figured it was either insane or brilliant to take off the week before a wedding. Turns out it was brilliant! We had a blast and these lines come from that trip—laughing so hard I thought we’d get kicked out of the nice restaurant, and watching all of the kids be brave and try new things (snorkeling in deep water, zip-lining, new foods!) but also being able to say no thank you to experiences that didn’t feel right. Learning how to come together and connect and be open AND ALSO learning how to give each other space and respect the need for quiet is such a new dynamic that we’re all still learning, and I think it’s one of the keys to blending a family.
More Mary Oliver. In the beautiful book Our World, Oliver writes this about she and her partner, Molly Malone Cook: “We were talkers — about our work, our pasts, our friends, our ideas ordinary and far-fetched. We would often wake before there was light in the sky and make coffee and let our minds rattle our tongues. We would end in exhaustion and elation. Not many nights or early mornings later, we would do the same. It was a forty-year conversation.” Lauren and I read that at some point, and both burst into tears. Like, “That’s us! We do that!” A forty-year conversation!? Goals!
Here ya go, if you made it through all these footnotes your reward is this link to the most iconic music video ever. Freedom! (I won't let you down!) Freedom! (I will not give you up!)
Just... thank you. For generously writing this and lovingly living this and inviting us all to witness, support and adore you both in perpetuity and beyond.
This piece means so much to me, as someone who is navigating late in life queerness and liberation from a heteronormative path. Your love is inspirational!
I am in tears. Again.
Just... thank you. For generously writing this and lovingly living this and inviting us all to witness, support and adore you both in perpetuity and beyond.
This piece means so much to me, as someone who is navigating late in life queerness and liberation from a heteronormative path. Your love is inspirational!