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When it comes to gay
marriage, David
Valdes Greenwood, a lecturer in English at the Museum School and
Tufts, sees himself as a cultural icebreaker.
“There’s a lot of misinformation
out there,” he says. “I wanted to
show people just one couple and say, ‘Here’s
what gay marriage can be.
Does this fit with the image in your head?’”
That one couple is his
own. In "Homo Domesticus: Notes from a Same-Sex Marriage” (DeCapo Press
2006), Valdes Greenwood
chronicles the first decade of his
relationship with Jason, from the towels his
Seventh-day Adventist
grandmother sent for their wedding—though she refused to
attend—to the
adoption of their baby girl, Lily. In between are tender, sharply
funny
stories about house-buying, separation, and marriage counseling, not to
mention lighter topics such as “loving someone enough to pick up the
clutter
trail streaming in his wake.”
Valdes Greenwood spent
most of his childhood with his religious
fundamentalist mother in rural northern
Maine. At 16, though, he left.
“I saw what happened when people stayed there:
they were poor, they had
no degree; they were suicidal, depressed, drinking. I
didn’t want
that.” Valdes worked his way through an Adventist boarding school
and
college, growing increasingly dissatisfied with his religion’s lack of
“answers to things.” His grandmother warned him, “You’re going to think
yourself
right out of the church!” She was right.
In college, Valdes
Greenwood discovered playwriting. In graduate
school, he discovered Jason. They
talked about having children on their
second date, moved in together a few
months later, and got married
twice: illegally a year after they met, and
legally on their 10th
annniversary. Valdes Greenwood wrote plays,
theatre reviews, and a
monthly “Coupling” column for The Boston Globe Magazine; he was
teaching fulltime at the Museum School and Tufts and had just adopted
Lily when a book
publisher called.
Still, writing “Homo
Domesticus” came easily, Valdes Greenwood says;
the stories needed to be told.
“Beyond gay or straight,” he says, “no
one ever tells you what marriage is
really like. Very few people talk
about the hard work.” In movies and on
television, he says, “we see the
young love, the new love, the breakup. What we
don’t see is the
sticking it out.”
But now we do.
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