Virginia, So Close, and Yet So Far Behind

I've been living in Washington, DC for more than ten years now. I live inside the District of Columbia, which is a really small city, with a metropolitan area that extends far into the neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia. I don't usually have to travel very far outside of the District, I almost always can get anything I need in DC, but I have had to travel for work many times into Virginia, for meetings, and for a few years, I worked in Arlington, Virginia, which is right across the Potomac. In distance, it is not so far from my safe and comfortable environment, where my partner and I enjoy domestic partnership privileges, and legal protection from discrimination under the law. But once I cross the river, the pleasant landscape of Virginia becomes a frighteningly hostile place if you're gay, like me.

Virginia has sodomy laws, and I understand them to mean that you can't have any kind of consensual adult sex in any position but the ones that the missionaries taught us all long ago. That law applies to straight people as well as gay people, but is only ever enforced on us homos. I worked in Virginia for 2 years, and never had to break that law. Now when I go to Virginia, it's usually to get hardware at the Home Depot, and luckily, the urge to commit a felony has never consumed me, even though the ladies in orange aprons are pretty sexy.

It is illegal for me and most of my friends to have a drink in a bar or a restaurant in Virginia. It is illegal for us to adopt each other's children in Virginia.

I always dread the drive into Virginia because not only do the laws prevent gay people from marrying, they prevent us from entering into any sort of contracts that would give us any of the same legal protections. They prevent the company that I work for from providing me with the same benefits that straight people take for granted. As I drive in Virginia, I imagine a backward population, I imagine that to have elected such lawmakers, the people of Virginia must really hate me. I am always a bit frightened, since anyone in Virginia can buy a gun, and I'm always so distracted that inevitably, I get lost. I'm afraid to turn around in some suburban driveway, what if some guy named Bubba comes out of his house with a shotgun saying to his neighbor, "Hey Earl! Is that a lesbian?" And Earl replies, "Yup, it shure is! Shoot it! Kill it!" If I'm lucky, they kill me and I get stuffed for the mantel over the fireplace, with my rainbow T-shirt and Doc Martens, but if I'm not so lucky, I have to go to a hospital in Virginia, where my health care power-of-attorney means nothing, and my partner can't even visit me in my comatose state, let alone try to get me out of there.

The laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia are not just backward, they are nasty and mean. Most states don't want gay people to marry (what sort of wedding shower would a mother give for her son and his partner, and since he has such good taste, wouldn't it cost a fortune?). People get freaked out thinking about those wedding things, parents dream of their children marrying spouses that will impregnate and produce grandchildren, they are wary of artificial insemination, and adopted babies from China.
While most straight people don't want us to marry, very few of them go so far as to deny us the right to share finances and protect each other in case of sickness and death. Bubba and Earl and the people of Virginia live in an era of repression and bigotry, and I will only go to Virginia when I absolutely have to, and there is no other alternative in DC or Maryland.

Bubba and Earl, kiss my dyke ass!

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