A GAY MARRIAGE

While I was living with Don Cherry’s family in Tågarp in Sweden I went back to visit in the communal house in Älmeboda where I had been living the year before. The local weekly paper was lying around and I picked it up. It contained normally only a few items of local interest, but this one had a story that made me chuckle:

A justice of peace in Nevada had married a gay couple trying to make it possible for one of them, who was not an American citizen, to legally remain in the United States. A local homophobe demonstrated his disapproval of gay marriage by going to the judge and asking to be married to his horse, but the judge turned him down on the ground that his horse was underage.

I really loved how cleverly the judge warded off the attempt at discrediting his act of marrying a gay couple.

A few years later I was in America and my lesbian friend Sylvia asked me if I could help a gay friend of hers who was threatened with expulsion by having him for a while at my place in the mountains. I remembered the story and I had a hunch that this was the same person as the one who was married in Nevada and whose story had found its way into Älmeboda’s local rag. And sure enough it was he, still on the run from the American immigration, which of course had not respected the marriage.