ceremony

Panin and Steve originally planned to have the County Clerk marry them today, and then to celebrate with all of us afterward at home. Then they thought, what if we surprised everyone and actually got married at home, with everyone here to celebrate? But Steve had to tell Grandma, to make sure we timed it when she would be here. (Hi, Grandma!) And Panin one evening was talking with the middle school friend group and couldn’t figure out how to explain what would be happening tonight without telling them, too. Now, there are fewer than 10 people in this room who didn’t already know that we’d be having a marriage ceremony for Panin and Steve right here, today. So to Bill, Brandon, Chris, Dave, Dustin, Katie, Kelly, Nick, and Sam SURPRISE!

To everyone else: welcome. I will give you fair warning that because Panin is my little brother, and because Steve is one of the drier and more sarcastic fellows I’ve encountered in life, this service consists almost entirely of teasing.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered together today because Panin loves…

Twig.

Panin and Twig are obsessed with each other. In fact, Twig is likely skulking about somewhere in this very house right now, waiting the rest of us out until she can have Panin’s full, loving, and undivided attention again. You might never guess it from how they interact with each other, but Panin is actually allergic to cats. He has had a perpetual sniffle for the past three years since Twig moved in, but when I ask him about it, he shrugs and says he doesn’t care. No overinflated histamine response will stop him from mashing his face into her fur every day when he gets home. He will suffer the discomfort, indefinitely, because he just loves her that damn much.

One might wonder, as the old adage goes, “If you love her so much, why don’t you marry her?” As it turns out, there is no law in the state of Michigan explicitly prohibiting this. I am a researcher, by training, and so I actually looked that up. On the other hand, there is no law permitting it either, and one could easily imagine that marrying a cat would be socially, let’s say, frowned upon. So instead, Panin is doing the next best thing: he’s marrying the human who brought the cat into his life.

When I asked Steve how it was that he first knew he was in love with Panin, Steve said it was Panin’s “smile, his laugh, the way he treats my cat.” Truly, it seems without question that, without Twig, we may not all be here.

Even just six months before Steve first met him, Panin couldn’t have married Steve any more than he could have married Twig, legally, in the state of Michigan. In reading coverage of legal debates at the time, I recall vividly that the arguments against that possibility, which are circulating in our political discourse still today, were eerily akin to those that had been used just half a century prior, to insist that the sanctity of marriage must be preserved by not letting Black people marry white ones. But now, we are finally in an era – in this time and place – when Panin and Steve, in all of who they both are, can marry each other. As my favorite line in Hamilton goes: “Look around, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now.”

I want to invite you all to do just that: look around. A year and a half into a global pandemic that I never could have imagined even just six years ago when Panin and Steve first met, I am reminded every day of how lucky we are to be alive right now. In a time of great uncertainty and dramatic change — when gatherings have gotten smaller and getting to share in life milestones in person has become a rare privilege — we are the privileged few, not only to be alive but also to be here, together. When I was talking with Steve about what motivated the intimate spirit and tone of this wedding, he said, “We just don’t know that many people.” I like to think that’s not true. Instead, we are special, chosen from among all the people that Steve and Panin do know, to be the ones to witness and support their hopes for their continuing partnership, their fantasies for their future together, their promises to each other. ...And then to eat pizza and play board games afterward.

When I asked Steve and Panin why this was the day they wanted to get married, they referenced, of course, the Earth, Wind, and Fire song, “September.” “Do you remember,” asks the opening line, “the 21st night of September?” Over the years, lovers of that iconic song have assigned a great deal of meaning to that date. It’s the day when one season changes to another, just before the Equinox, when light and dark come to us in equal measure. But Al McKay, Maurice White, and Allee Willis, who co-wrote the song, have shared that McKay wrote the tune first and White knew early on that the first line would be “Do you remember?” and that he wanted to call the song “September”. When the three sat down to put more lyrics to McKay’s tune they ran through all the days of September to see which one fit best rhythmically and had the smoothest mouth feel. You can try it yourself, if you’re not already--which you probably are, because obviously we’re human. That’s it. That’s why we’re here on a Tuesday night, with jobs to go to in the morning, watching these two get married. Because of the way the lyrics felt in the songwriter’s mouth. And because Steve proposed earlier this year on a beach in Miami, with a clearance ring from Kohl’s and the romantic overture, “Can I ask you a stupid question?” and Panin loved it all. Once they were engaged, they didn’t want to put this moment off until 2024, when the 21st night of September would first fall on the weekend. As Steve said, lovingly, “Let’s just get it over with. Let’s just do this thing! I’ve already waited five years!”

Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire was so into astrology that he named the band after the elements associated with his sun, moon, and rising sign. Panin and Steve share that appreciation of astrology, as do I, and so I looked up their horoscopes for this week. The one that I found most captivating was for Panin’s rising sign, the constellation that was rising on the Eastern horizon at the moment that he was born, which is Virgo. This horoscope was written by Chani Nicholas, the internet’s favorite queer astrologer of color. She says, “What if, at the pinnacle moment of a screen romance, the lovers said, ‘I trust you,’ rather than, ‘I love you’? Rather than committing to another person when you feel those first wing beats of infatuation, what if we waited until we trusted them? How might that change the plot?” This was, in some ways, the plot for Panin and Steve. Steve says that he knew, within their first year together, “‘Oh, yeah..this is the guy that I’m going to marry.’” But the first time that Steve and Panin talked about marriage, Panin said he didn’t want to get married until he was absolutely sure that the person he was with was the person he wanted to be with. In other words, he wanted to know that he could trust this person, the situation, their partnership. The horoscope goes on to say, “Trust is a considered letting go. You can’t rush this softening into another person, but it does require you to relax into an arrangement you can’t control. Like tree sap, trust also needs time and effort to cultivate. It nurtures the people involved, and it glues them together.”

For Panin, the softening began when he first told Steve about owning every single Final Destination movie that had ever been made, and Steve, excited to learn this detail, gave Panin a big kiss. For Steve, it was the fact that Panin did not bat an eyelash when the impulse would come upon Steve to march around the house like a T-Rex. “I hope you don’t mind that I’m a weirdo,” Steve once said to Panin, and Panin said, “I love that part of you.” In separate conversations, Steve and Panin each said that the other one was very sweet and very nurturing. Panin remembers that, one time when he was having an especially hard day working at Northville Winery, Steve came by just to give Panin a hug and tell him that everything would be okay. For Steve, it was watching his cat love on Panin unlike she does with anyone else in the world – including Steve himself.

The word that Panin used the most in describing their relationship was “comfortable.” The word that Steve used the most was “understanding”. A turning point in their relationship was when they realized, though, that they weren’t totally comfortable and that there were parts of themselves they were keeping from view because they didn’t yet trust each other’s understanding. Steve said they feared that, if they revealed all of their true selves, their relationship would fall apart. For Panin’s part, he told me once just a few months ago that – as a gay, Black man growing up in a straight, white suburb – he had spent so much of his life concealing himself, creating a persona that he believed to be acceptable to those around him, that the him that is really him has only recently started opening up. And opening up to Steve, through the curious and loving conversations that they have always been able to have together, has helped Panin open up to himself.

Each time one of my siblings has gotten married, it has encouraged in me a very welcome meditation on the nature of love. When my big sister married her husband three years ago, those meditations brought me to an understanding of what love IS. Love, I came to understand from their example, is a demonstrated commitment to easing each other’s way. This time, with Panin and Steve getting married, I am learning from their example, what love DOES. Love opens people up — to others and to themselves. It inspires trust: “a considered letting go.” Like Chani Nicholas says, “It nurtures the people involved, and it glues them together.” Neither Steve nor Panin can remember the first time they said, “I love you,” but, as Panin told me, “To me it doesn’t matter, because I feel like we have that moment every other day.”

When I asked Panin and Steve how each of them had changed in these past five years together, Steve said, simply, that he is happier. Panin said that he is less guarded, and this is consistent with the way that the horoscope closes, “When it comes to your platonic and romantic partnerships, Monday’s full moon in Pisces beckons you to loosen one or two plates of armor. To listen to the submarine pulses of another person and co-create a fantasy.”

As it happens, apart from rhythm and mouth feel, the 21st night of September is a special time for co-creating a fantasy. It is the Equinox, when the balanced co-existence of light and darkness offers an apt metaphor for the equality of partnership. It is also the full Harvest Moon. The Harvest Moon is so called because it rises unusually close to the time when the sun sets, the full bright moon extending the period of light – just as days are getting noticeably shorter – so that farmers had more opportunity to harvest the crops that had grown throughout the summer. The cycle of planting and cultivating, too, seems especially appropriate for a wedding – a moment of reaping what has grown in the five years since Steve and Panin first met each other.

And then there is the fact that the moon is full. A full moon makes it easier to see, harder to rest, more likely to dream. A healthy, loving partnership does the same: it makes it easier to see who you are, what you fear, what your tendencies are in relationship with other people. A healthy, loving partnership makes it harder to rest on old beliefs about yourself, it poses challenges to the narratives scripted from your fears, it disrupts your existing tendencies in relationship with other people and calls upon you to engage with new ones, based on what you and your partner both want and need. A healthy, loving partnership also makes you more likely to dream – together – about the future that you and your partner want to create.

So now, I want to invite Panin and Steve to do some of that dreaming with us as witnesses. They have decided to do so with vows that they have borrowed from some lesbians online. We will now share those with all of you.

Panin, I’ll give you a few words at a time. You can hold the ring on Steve’s finger while you repeat them.

“Steve, I want to thank you
For how fun and beautiful our life is 
Because of you.
Your attention to every detail
Of what’s needed for us to be happy and fulfilled
Is the reason our life just keeps getting better.
I promise to work with you to build our future,
And never take for granted
What you bring to our partnership.”

Steve, I’ll give you a few words at a time. You can hold the ring on Steve’s finger while you repeat them.

“Steve, I want to thank you
For how fun and beautiful our life is 
Because of you.
Your attention to every detail
Of what’s needed for us to be happy and fulfilled
Is the reason our life just keeps getting better.
I promise to work with you to build our future,
And never take for granted
What you bring to our partnership.”

And now, by the power vested in me by TheMonastery.org, I am thrilled to be the first to pronounce you, husbands. If it is not too much for your introverted sensibilities, Steve, to do so in a room full of people, I welcome you to mark this moment with a kiss.