Kevin and Javier - The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Sometimes in life you are the flight attendant who must suddenly fly the plane. The pilots are dead, fuel is low and many people still have not received their beverage and snack, but there are bigger issues at hand. It is time to get involved. You heed the radio call from the control tower and realize it’s up to you to land the plane. You have never been a pilot, but figure a pamphlet or perhaps a DVD provided by Boeing will get you through. When my friend Kevin the Big French Poodle called one evening insisting we go to California to fight Proposition Eight I could see I was soon to receive my pilot wings.

Rarely does Kevin get political. He mostly enjoys catalog shopping, quiet evenings at home and an occasional trip to Chula Vista with his boyfriend Javier to visit the in-laws. I’ve known Kevin since he moved to the bottom of Bon View Drive the same summer Marci Purr became a Jehovah’s Witness. It was the summer all my friends were exploring new options caused by spiritual thirst, lactose intolerance a messy breakup or getting engaged to a vegan.

Marci made flesh the new zeal of recent religious converts and pondered the proselytism of Kevin. He was Marci’s first target since her own spiritual renovation. But when Kevin’s homosexuality became apparent she fled from him the same way she now ran from blood transfusions, voting and Christmas.

Kevin is a huge French Poodle, a “standard” which might have tipped Marci off from the start, but no. He is also the only dog I know that insists on going to the groomer every week. He confided once his wish he were born a Collie or an Afghan with long flowing fur, the kind Cher would have if she were a dog.Instead Kevin visits the Bark Avenue Day Spa where Eduardo, a Doberman recently graduated from the Sherman Kendall Academy of Beauty Arts and Sciences, chemically treats Kevin’s fur to create the windblown look he longs for. Without irony Kevin will tell you being gay was how God made him and we should all be how God made us, and in the next breath will describe the full retinue of hot rollers, blow dryers and chemistry that makes Kevin, Kevin. But each month he leaves the salon his fur blowing in the gentle breeze. He dreads the humid weather of the summer which plays havoc with his “look”. When Kevin runs through the park he imagines he is running in slow motion.

I had not heard of Proposition Eight until Kevin called. Several of my friends have told me I should be more political but it sounds like a lot of work. So when I asked Kevin to explain Proposition Eight the dead silence at the other end of the phone told me I might just as well have said “Jesus? Who is Jesus? Tell me about this Jesus.”

Apparently and according to very informed sources, traditional marriage is just one swift kick from collapsing into nothing but meaningless sex with shared health care benefits. Destroyed would be the mutual commitment, the shared view of life, not to mention the children, the mortgage, the Visa bill, and the credit rating. These same highly informed sources also have it on good authority that people will soon be marrying their pets which will be just one more burden on said health care system when you considered the added cost of good veterinary coverage. Marriage will be so weakened that only the most intrepid will wade into its swirling tide, what with lesbians of the deep lurking to pull you under while tearing away your children to become one more recruit to the gay lifestyle.

Proposition Eight would add an amendment to the California state constitution defining marriage; one man, one woman – that’s it. The amendment would also negate any recently legal same-sex marriages, throwing Kevin’s and Javier’s three-month-old nuptials into the fetid swamp of aborted matrimony -their whisper-white wedding album tumbling into the oozing, decomposing wreckage of millions of traditional marriages. The Proposition Eight proponents ignore the pungent dung of heterosexual broken homes. Distraction is their method – “look over there! That woman just married her Chihuahua. Watch out, here comes your second wife" and it's not the good kind you get when you hit middle age and make a lot of money. It's polygamists shopping at the Gap in plain sight of your children. To quote Kevin, “the rubble of traditional marriage ain’t caused by the queers, dear.”

Now of course the thing that has me most alarmed about Proposition Eight is the wastefulness it would cause. Hundreds of couples are spending millions of dollars on frappe and cakes and ice sculptures and spray on tans all in preparation for the “big day”, the big day that has taken generations to arrive.

Kevin and Javier spent months creating a wedding so extravagant, so stylish, so over-produced that the wedding video came in two versions – one being a “Director’s Cut”. The mixture of Javier and Kevin’s family was a little uneasy. It was Guadalajara meets the Episcopalians of Greenwich Connecticut. The effluvia and detritus that adorn every elegant reception came under particular scrutiny. There were piñatas, but the rakish pinks, yellows and oranges had been replaced with the tasteful taupe, antique white and delarobia blue of the Westchester Country Club. There was a Mariachi band, but they played Air Supply and Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” the most popular song of both weddings and paradoxically funerals. The whole event was one big stylish compromise, which after all is what marriage is all about anyway.

And then there were the families, Kevin’s parents and all his siblings were there with their reserved comportment and naturally curly fur and right in the thick of them was Kevin, all highlights and flowing tresses, you would have bet he was adopted to look at the whole clan.

Kevin’s grandmother had had herself died especially for the event, apparently a throwback to some elegant poodle fashion from the 60’s as a tribute to her gay grandson and his tribe. Her tearful howls throughout the ceremony while touching and hearfelt were highly annoying and at one point got so out of control that it started half of the other guests baying, barking and yowling, turning the wedding momentarily from a joyful celebration into a mournful chorus of canine wretchedness. It was like when an ambulance drives past the pound.

All of this pagentry for naught, wasted, because traditional marriage was stewing over the cannibal's fire and those angry haters from the Christian Right were stirring the pot and blaming the gays. I recently saw one of "those people" protesting gay marriage, holding a sign that said “G.A.Y., God Abhors You” and that was all it took , sending me up the aisle and into the cockpit ready to help land the plane, staring cross-eyed out the window, just like Karen Black in Airport 75.

Of course this was all before I found out I would miss the catnip festival in the Coachella Valley and I would need to write out a check and the whole thing started to sound much more complicated than landing an airplane. Then of course I felt a nap coming on and told Kevin I would have to call him back. Well, Kevin and Javier left without me. I got a postcard from the front lines just yesterday.