Ashley Harness: A love that, today, may dare to speak its name

On a Minnesota summer day in 1981, my parents stood in their billowy sundresses to say "I do." Neither of them thought to call their ceremony a wedding. No family members were present. Instead, a small group of friends celebrated their "commitment ceremony" at the only church in town that would have them.

As two women, my parents didn't know how to imagine a world where their love could be honored legally. In 1981, the country had just inaugurated Ronald Reagan, who didn't say the word "gay" in public until Rock Hudson died of AIDS in 1985.

So my parents made their own way toward the family they wanted, without the trappings of church or state. In early 1983, I was born -- one of the first babies born in Minnesota to a lesbian couple via a donor dad.

We lived in two worlds. At home, my parents followed the tradition of Gloria Steinem's strident yet seamlessly elegant brand of feminism. Books by Susan Sontag and Alice Walker littered our coffee table. I wore a "question authority" T-shirt as a 2-year-old, while one of my moms wore patchouli oil. We went to a predominantly gay and lesbian church every Sunday.

But beyond their carefully constructed world of supportive friends, my moms were private about their sexuality. Circa 1990, they both wore the requisite perms of the era. Neither of them ever left the house without lipstick ("Bali Brown" on one and "Berry, Berry" on the other). They never held hands in public. "This is my friend," one mom would say of the other to a new acquaintance. They were protecting the family they had worked so hard to create.

I learned to protect myself, too. By the time I started preschool, I knew how to answer a stranger's innocent question, "What does your dad do?" And when at age 16, after years of crushes on boys, I fell into the tortured, ecstatic love of an adolescent with another girl, I continued to follow my parents' model of living as they had taught me to drive -- defensively. I told my best friends only. After all, I went to a prep school where graduation meant walking under a flower-laden trellis down the aisle, girls in white dresses and boys in blue blazers, two by two.

It wasn't until I got to college on the East Coast that I realized I had the emotional survival kit of a 50-year-old lesbian. Far from the example of my parents, most of my gay and lesbian peers paraded their sexuality like any other college kid in 2001. And while part of me felt they took the struggle of generations past for granted, I envied their freedom. I wanted desperately to live and love with the fearlessness of a post-AIDS-as-gay-cancer, post-Will-&-Grace, post-legalized-sodomy college student.

Slowly, I learned to let the distance between my public and private selves collapse. I settled into myself somewhere in between my mothers' lipstick-laden norm ("Honey, you should always have some color on your face") and my peers' gender-defiant fashion statements. And one springtime day, I joined my girlfriend on the main green of campus and kissed her lightly on the lips, in that routine way that couples do upon greeting. The ordinariness of it all shook me. Nobody noticed; but to me, that one small peck in public was one giant leap out of the way of life of my childhood.

Three years after college and living in New York, I leave that old survival kit at home most days. That's why my reaction to the California marriage decision surprised me. When news of the ruling popped up in my in-box, tears welled in my eyes. This was one of the most diverse and biggest states in the country, saying yes to my family and my future. This was a Republican Supreme Court justice whom Ronald Reagan had once put on the Los Angeles municipal bench saying yes. This was a state that has set legal trends throughout history saying yes.

I hadn't known, but I needed the affirmation. After all, marriage is the ultimate melding of our most personal selves and our public lives. It is the public sanction of what makes us human -- the capacity to consciously give, experience and receive love.

"I never imagined we could get married in my lifetime," one of my moms, now 60, said recently.

Yet this week we watched the first gay and lesbian couples in California marry legally. And in my lifetime, I imagine even my home state of Minnesota will offer us no less.

Ashley Harness works at a public interest communications firm in New York.