Being Gay in a Heterosexual Wedding
Or why I hate traditional rituals
As a gay man with many heterosexual friends I have always been aware of the situations in which I could not fully participate because of my sexual orientation. Since I was a kid playing truth or dare with my friends at school I feared the moment in which I would be supposed to kiss a girl. When I was a teenager I did not want to take part in conversations about girls with my male friends, I would not know what to say since I was never really interested in girls whatsoever. Many social encounters felt weird and problematic, but as I grew up, I managed to avoid most of them and live my life without feeling I had to do things I did not really want to do.
Of course, that avoidance made me get distant from most of my heterosexual friends, who I still cared about, but by whom I simply could not feel embraced. And I made new friends, most of them gays, lesbians and bisexual people who understand all of my concerns about being excluded from a social circle. That was pretty much my life until I got to my mid-twenties and a bunch of my childhood friends decided to get married, most of them heterosexual folks.
Suddenly I was part of their lives again and it felt good to be remembered. One of my closest friends from high school invited me to be her groomsman! So, just to be clear, I am from Brazil and here the groom and the bride invite people to be their “wedding godfather and wedding godmother”, if you are a man, you may be invited by the bride, and that was my case, I would be her wedding godfather. I also have a boyfriend, but considering that he does not really know the couple, the fact that he was not invited to be a groomsman was completely understandable. But at the same time, my heterosexual friends decided to invite eight men and eight women, that means eight groomsman (wedding godfathers) and eight bridesmaid (wedding godmothers). I just did not felt comfortable with that system. The groomsmen and the bridesmaids were later paired together, and I was lucky enough to be paired with a good friend of mine. Anyway, I hated that we had to composed eight pairs, each pair a man and a woman. Why do people need that? Why did they pair us as if we were heterosexual couples? Why the need to pair us at all?
Although I was invited by the bride, as a groomsman, my duties started to be associated with the groom. I was not invited to the wedding shower promoted by my dear friend, the bride. Only women are supposed to participate in the wedding shower, that is the tradition, and guess what? I am not a woman. But I can assure you I would have had a lot of fun with the girls, I can really relate to them and I sure love to talk about boys, I am gay, for f**k’s sake, and even if I was straight, I might feel more comfortable around women! Instead I was supposed to get together with the guys and plan a nice bachelor party, with strippers and all that crap. It is important mentioning that I was not the only gay groomsman, actually we were three out of eight, as far as I know. Do they really want three gay guys to feel comfortable and have fun with female strippers and sexist jokes all around? I mean, I can understand that some gay guys are OK with that, but I am definitely not one of them.
The whole idea of a bachelor party annoys the hell out of me. I do not like the idea at all, and not because I am a puritan. On the opposite, I am very open-minded and that is why I do not think my boyfriend and I will ever need bachelor parties before we get married. If we feel the need of having sex with other people during our marriage we will most definitely have a talk and open up our relationship to different and new experiences. We do not need a “last night of freedom”, because we will continue free after we get married. If I thought that marriages were supposed to take freedom from us, I would never get married.
Unfortunately not everybody thinks like me, so they insist on following the tradition, and I have to keep interacting with five heterosexual guys who really think I am in the mood of planning a bachelor party with female strippers for the groom, to whom I am not that close, by the way. Why cannot people stop segregating others based on their genders? Why cannot they at least ask? “Is it OK for you to do things with the guys?” Am I asking too much? People know I am gay, but they probably do not think much about it. A lot of gay people get invited to weddings by their heterosexual friends and I am sure I am not the only one who feels uncomfortable with the entire situation. Of course I would prefer to help organizing a bachelorette party, but I would really love if people stopped relying on those ancient and sexist traditions that do no good at all. Until then I and many other gays, lesbian and mainly transgender people will have to deal with those feeling and revisit our awkward high school days once more.
