March 15, 2007

Setting The Record Straight

By STEVE FRIESS

THE RABBI'S TENTATIVE VOICE ON THE PHONE put that awful pit right back in my stomach. This was supposed to be the one who would do it, a pastor-for-hire so fast and loose with the rules that it wasn't clear he'd even been to a proper brick-and-mortar rabbinical seminary. No doubt he's one of those called in on short notice to officiate at the clichéd nuptials of any number of drunk or impulsive Jewish lovebird visitors. You know, a guy with real high standards.

And yet, a proper liturgical education wasn't the only thing missing. He also lacked a certain common sense.

"I wish you both well, I really do," Rabbi Craig said. "But the state of Nevada has outlawed same-sex unions. I think there could be a legal issue if I participated in such a ceremony."

I just hung up. I may have said goodbye, I'm not sure. I was too much in a daze. I'd now been through rejections from three rabbis, and by far this was the stupidest response I'd heard. I'd been raised to believe rabbis are sages; this schmuck believed he could actually be arrested for presiding over a religious ceremony. It was such an idiotic response I just couldn't, in my dejected state, muster the energy to set the guy, uh, straight.

I tried that with Rabbi Sanford Akselrad of Congregation Ner Tamid, the Green Valley synagogue I attend on High Holidays. He gave me a heartfelt, though unfortunate, response that he hadn't made the religious "leap" yet to officiating at a gay union. I asked him to meet with my partner, Miles, and me on the theory that our terrific personalities and evident devotion to one another would sway him. He told me he'd be happy to meet, but it was unlikely to change his mind, as he knows and loves other same-sex couples and it wasn't his unfamiliarity with such folks that keeps him from blessing their relationships.

Miles and I decided to go the Jewish route because Miles is a lapsed Catholic whose religiosity is limited to putting up a beautiful Christmas tree and giving up his diet for December. On the other hand, I have a strong attachment to my Jewish identity and don't accept the divinity of Christ. Because of this, I couldn't accept a Christian minister.

You may think it wrong of me to even expect such cooperation from people of God or, at least, that I should have been prepared for a tough search. But here's something you might not know (and that each rabbi seemed surprised I did know): The Reform Jewish movement has sanctioned same-sex marriage since 1999 and, in fact, there have been rabbinical summits devoted to devising a template of gender-appropriate verbiage for such occasions. It's one reason Reform Judaism is the largest branch of the faith in the United States; it treats Scripture as something to reinterpret as people become more enlightened about human nature.

True, the movement also leaves the door open for each rabbi to make his own personal decisions as to what he is willing to do.

But I guess I didn't expect this to be so difficult, partly because this isn't my first gay wedding, and the other one was a breeze in every way conceivable. I wed my first partner in a creekside ceremony in Sedona, Ariz., in July 1999 after we had been together six years. The rabbi who officiated was a friend of my sister, who lives there, and he was only too eager to participate. The fact we were two men didn't make Rabbi Billy blink; it was the fact my now-ex was a practicing Catholic and that it would be an interfaith service that caused him a little soul-searching.

My ex and I gave up on our mess of a marriage about three years later, a fiery and traumatic end that propelled both of us into belated but truly worthwhile searches for our truer selves and toward life goals that we probably couldn't have achieved together. It wasn't an amicable dissolution to be sure, but that merely supported the significance of our wedding because it showed that even without legal ties, a divorce is a divorce with all its attendant misery and complexity.

I met Miles two years later and discovered that, while everyone always told me that relationships were hard work, they weren't supposed to be as hard as what my ex and I endured. I was also 32 when I met Miles and equipped with better judgment and life lessons that I didn't have when I got involved at 20 with the first fellow. I proposed to Miles on bended knee next to a roaring fireplace at a resort in Portland, Ore., last April. He said yes, obviously, and we're all set to have the event with some family and a few close friends at a suite at the Palms in mid-March.

We had our pick of venues, by the way, unlike what we would've found in 1999 if my ex and I had wanted to do this here then. Nowadays the chapels at Wynn and any of the MGM Mirage and Harrah's properties happily would have taken our money. We also didn't have any trouble registering at Bloomingdale's; registering for a same-sex wedding eight years ago caused great confusion in Macy's computers.

Of course, Rabbi Craig is right about something; our ceremony will be legally meaningless. We know this. And we don't much care. We're asked every so often why we don't travel to Massachusetts, the only state that offers full marriage rights to same-sex couples. We can only say that we aren't marriage tourists, an odd breed of gay who fly off to whatever locality will issue a marriage license in order to collect them or to make our relationship into a political statement. To get married in Boston would be as legally insignificant as getting married in Vegas since such rights aren't transferable. We'd rather spend that money on the attorney who will draw up contracts to make us financially and legally responsible for one another in the several ways our local laws do allow.

In some ways, the fact we're not getting married to access the goodies the government bestows on even the most insincere straight couples -- and this being Vegas, there are an awful lot of those -- makes our event all the more genuine. If we could, we would. But we can't, nobody's expecting us to and even many of our gay friends don't see the point. Yet we believe so strongly in the concept and in our future together.

We do have one other aim: to formally create a new family unit surrounded by the support and love of those who wish to be a part of that unit and who want to help us make a success of it. We are in the process of adopting a child in the coming year, and we won't be able to teach her about the importance of solemn vows and fidelity without showing her the pictures and video from the day her parents declared theirs for one another. The only reason not to do it is because it's not legal, and that really shouldn't be the most important reason anyway.

I would have loved to have explained that to any of the rabbis who rejected us as well as to my ironically twice-married sister who became a Jehovah's Witness cultist since my first wedding and who is abstaining from the ceremony for a list of flaky reasons (or so my father tells me; she cares too little to call and explain) and, thus, the rest of my life.

This story does have a happy ending or, rather, beginning. Being gay in this culture, you get used to willing it to be thus.

Eventually we stumbled on Rabbi Mel Hecht -- another Reform rabbi in Las Vegas but one conspicuously absent from the list of those I was told to consider by the folks at the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas. He's a bit of a rebel, often seen as impertinent, we'd later learn. We came to his office to consult and sat with his Lhasa apsos in our laps as he explained that he'd never done a same-sex wedding in part because he'd never been asked. It gave him some pause, which made that pit return to my stomach yet again. But then he decided he was ready. And so off we go.

So far, we adore Rabbi Mel and his wife, Micki, who is also an ordained rabbi, and we can't wait to see them in action when the next High Holidays roll around. They're big personalities in the best, most Vegas sense of the word, with tales of their dealings with the Jewish mobsters of yore and kvetching about everybody around.

Plus, they have that wisdom I was raised to expect from my clergy; already they've succeeded in teaching us an important marital lesson. At the end of our first meeting, Micki burst into the office, excited to meet the two men who would be her husband's firsts.

"I told him he better do it," she said, greedily taking the credit.

Rabbi Mel looked bemused and askance as he nodded in agreement.

"It's the secret to a happy marriage," he smiled. "Do what your spouse tells you to do."

Steve Friess is a national Las Vegas-based freelance writer and co-host of two podcasts, "The Strip" with his fiancé, KVBC Channel 3 producer Miles Smith, and "The Petcast" with Las Vegas Sun education writer Emily Richmond. Find his work and these shows at www.stevefriess.com.

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