Stories Have Meaning

Yesterday and today are important days in the fight for equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. The HRC has encouraged people to wear red in support of Marriage Equality (please don't call it gay or same-sex marriage, you don't say straight marriage), which has prompted most of my Facebook friends to change their profile pics to a red version of the HRC Equality symbol.

I didn't. I did change my pic to one of Ellie and I at our wedding though, because that was more important to me--putting real faces on this situation, reminding people that, should we ever move to one of the 40 states that don't recognize our marriage, we're as good as strangers to each other. It's not that I don't appreciate the love, support and sentiment expressed by my family and friends--things like this really do go a long way toward promoting acceptance and understanding by a larger audience. But a symbol is often just that (think about all the times women post their bra or purse color in "support" of breast cancer awareness--that goes nowhere to help further the research toward a cure). I don't think this is the same, but I'm still undecided about how I feel about all this.

I do know how I feel about the image I posted above. This morning on my commute, I checked Facebook and saw this image on the personal account of Erica Ewing Photography (yes, I'm cool enough for my photographer to friend me on Facebook!). For some reason, THIS made me tear up. I found Erica by accident at a wedding expo and instantly connected to her. It helped that she recognized Jeremy from a blog post he'd done previously. Her answer to "Have you done a same-sex wedding before?" also helped. Erica smiled & said "I haven't had the opportunity to, but I hope I can" or something like that. So many of the other photographers were disingenuous: smiling too wide & avoiding eye contact because they didn't want to be rude, but clearly NOT comfortable with the idea (you're being obvious, so I won't even think to hire you, don't worry about it); or making up excuses about why they don't have experience with same-sex weddings (I don't actually expect most mainstream photographers to have experience, I really just want to know how to feel about it).

Erica is a professional photographer, and she made money off of us (that's why one goes into business for oneself--to make money), but she CARES--the gifts and time and repeated comments about how much she enjoyed our wedding have gone a long way to make me realize that we ARE just like everyone else.

I lucky to know part of Erica's reason for changing her profile picture, but I don't know the story behind most people's change--these stories are what will change the minds of the undecideds, the ones who don't think they know anyone affected by Marriage Equality, who don't think they know an LGBT person. Don't just change your profile picture, tell the world WHY you're changing it.