E-Mail This Article to a Friend I don’t Sure, gay marriage is legal now. That doesn’t mean I’ll be walking down the aisle anytime soon. BY DAVID VALDES GREENWOOD

The rice has been thrown for gay couples from as far away as Arkansas. Unitarian ministers have exhausted themselves running from one same-sex wedding to the next. And, as far as I can tell, no meteorite has struck earth. History has been safely made.

Can I come out now and say I’m not getting married?

Don’t get me wrong — I love weddings so much I even had one myself. Nice affair for 80, complete with two grooms, show tunes, quotes from Virginia Woolf and Tony Kushner — you know, a really gay wedding. We had a reception with all the usual elements: relatives who had to be kept apart, a lecherous grandpa putting the moves on pretty blond girls, and guests discreetly trying to figure out if they were the same sexual orientation as the hotties on the dance floor. Hell, we even registered for gifts, a concept that had to be explained to me, but which, once I grasped it, struck me as a fiendishly marvelous idea.

It was all very matrimonial.

But this was nearly 10 years ago, which made it kind of outlaw. Nothing legal: the "powers vested" were vested by us, thank you very much. By having a wedding, we were laying claim to a ritual society wanted to keep off-limits. Because our wedding didn’t formalize anything in the eyes of the law, it offered an excellent opportunity for reinvention: instead of a row of tuxedoed groomsmen, five of our attendants were women. Instead of a priest, we had a poet. Instead of vows, we had Sondheim and Shakespeare.

It was a blast, if I do say so myself. And I have corroboration: a friend who had been to a double-header that day — a traditional wedding in the morning, ours in the afternoon — came up to me at the reception to thank me from the bottom of her heart for having an interesting wedding. From her purse, she produced a napkin from the previous affair; it was the ultimate in predictable corniness: embossed with doves, the couple’s names, and the horrifyingly dysfunctional lyrics "Two hearts beat as one." This, she said, epitomized the whole ceremony. What our wedding represented was the power to rebel, reinvent, and re-imagine the whole construct.

But now gay marriage has gone all legal on us. It requires a justice of the peace at the very minimum, if not a cleric of some kind. There is paperwork to sign, as well as blood tests to undergo (to keep us from having slope-headed children, presumably, though the biological odds are very long). Now a gay wedding conjures images not only of cake and bouquets, but of taxes, estates, and the specter of divorce court. In other words, it’s just like a straight wedding.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Straight people are lovely, and some of my best friends are straight — no, really, I mean it — but I got over needing to keep up with the heterosexual Joneses a long time ago. If I wanted to be straight, why would I have bothered with all those hold-my-breath I-have-something-to-tell-you coming-out speeches when I was young? If straightness provided all my models, I’d be wearing khakis and sneakers and talking about the NFL draft.

I mean, come on: I’m a man with a crush on Kevin Bacon and fantasies of removing five degrees of separation. My personal style would best be described as Urban Dandy (you should see this fabulous polka-dot scarf I found!). And I don’t just have favorite musicals, I have favorites by era. So if my life doesn’t meet the straight ideal in other ways, must it line up neatly on the marriage front?

I do understand why other people want to be married: those with children who need to protect them; those who don’t trust their families not to interfere during times of medical crisis; and those who pay taxes (uh, okay, everyone) who want the perks available to married people. But I have no kids, our families fawn over us as a couple, and I don’t remotely support the idea that the government should give anyone cash prizes for being married. From durable power of attorney to joint property ownership, we have acquired numerous meaningful pieces of paper, just not a marriage license.

Yet everyone assumes we must be salivating over that particular slip of paper. From thousands of miles away, the calls came in to find out if we were married yet. Old students, relatives, even savvy marriage-scorning friends just had to know: had we set a date? Well, yes: January 1995, and the government was not invited.

The state wasn’t there when we first moved in together. The state wasn’t involved when we went to couple’s therapy and endured a separation after eight years together (perhaps the way our relationship most resembles straight marriage). And it wasn’t a factor when we recovered and decided to keep plugging away at this funny thing called love. Blessed and beleaguered, I couldn’t possibly feel more married than I already do.

Admitting this out loud in the wrong rainbow corner has occasionally made me feel like I’m wearing a Fred Phelps T-shirt or a Bush-Cheney campaign button. Say something off-message like "Wouldn’t it be a better idea to encourage the state to get out of the business of sanctioning marriage?" and I swear to God that what some listeners hear is "I am an asshole who wants to keep you from eating cake."

But trust me, even though I’m not heading to a clerk’s office anytime soon, should anyone try to take this right away from me, I will revert immediately to the role of civil-rights commando. I will be what I was in the months before May 17: a rabid equal-marriage proponent, calling my state legislators, protesting wherever needed, and generally on fire to make sure that, like all my straight friends, I get a choice in the matter.

For now, hold the rice. But I reserve the right to ask you to throw it later.

David Valdes Greenwood can be reached at impersonalstuff@aol.com