Last week was a stormy one in the U.S., marred by political and racial strife, while the Covid-19 pandemic continued to spread in large sections of the country. Except for two days, when Stew and I felt a welcome respite from all the gloom. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that "[a]n …
Continue reading Thoughts on a joyful two days, amid the bad news
Looking back on a relationship many said shouldn't beOn June 20 Stew and I celebrated our forty-fifth anniversary. That's four decades plus five more years that we have been together. It's been quite a run for a relationship that initially was condemned by preachers, ignored by legislators and scorned by most everyone else, as if the …
While it worked, for more than thirty years in fact, the Republican political strategy of divisiveness—the use of "wedge issues," to pit social, racial, religious and political groups against each other in order to gain political advantage—worked quite well.Southern white voters abandoned the Democrats in favor of the Republicans, even if they brought brought with …
The U.S. Supreme Court's decision today, legalizing same-sex marriages throughout the United States, comes six days after Stew and I celebrated our forty-third anniversary together, on June 20.The date is somewhat imprecise, as we didn't have—indeed, we were denied—the benefit of even the most modest civil ceremony or other recognition of the beginning of our …
For Stew and me, news about the progress of marriage equality doesn't come from headlines or the the noise from the burgeoning circus parade of Republican presidential candidates but from private yet significant moments at airports, car rental counters and hotel registration desks.It's always bugged me that at airport customs and passport checkpoints Stew and …
If we may wade into stereotypes for a second, the organization of Saturday's Gay Pride parade in Mexico City was typically gay—that is to say, rather chaotic—and its punctuality typically Mexican—it started a couple of hours late. Next to the big-city Gay Pride parades in the U.S. that over the years have acquired glitz and …
Contrary to all the advice to leave most of our belongings behind when we moved to Mexico, a semi-trailer nearly full of furniture, books, kitchen utensils and china, garden tools, pictures and unidentified "stuff" followed us down here. It wasn't even an act of conscious hoarding: Stew and I became so frustrated and enraged trying …
The following were the words for the service at our wedding:THE MARRIAGE OFSTEWART HAMMER AND ALFREDO LANIERSaturday, September 28, 2013at The First Parish of Stow and ActonThe Rev. Tom Rosiello, officiantOPENING WORDSIt is my privilege to officiate at this wedding. Until just a few years ago,when two individuals of the same sex who loved each …
We got to the church an hour early, not that we were anxious or anything.Or maybe we were. I know I was, at the strange prospect of getting officially married by a minister, in a church, and not in a "commitment," "civil union" or other faux-marriage ceremony gay couples have invented over the years to …
Same-sex relationships typically begin with a bump in the night and until recently never were allowed to rise above the furtive, the unmentionable, not something you'd bring up in church or at a Thanksgiving dinner, or expect to find celebrated in the local newspaper's social page.That mum if not explicit disapproval weighed on the relationships …
El Rancho Santa Clara 