For me, one of the smallest results of the recent Supreme Court marriage equality decision, is that I’ve started to refer to my husband in conversations, as “husband.” We had been together for 15 years prior to getting married, and married for about a year when the decision came down earlier this summer.  Previously, even after getting married, I was more likely to use the word “partner.”

 My rationale was that we had been together for so long and the word “partner” was what he had always been. There seemed no need to change. Now that I’m referring to him as my husband, I realize that wasn’t it at all.
This became keenly obvious to me while at a conference last month where I talked to a lot of people, and where I consciously made sure I referred to him as my husband. Guess what– no one blinked an eye at it, even though I expected they would. Did you catch that? I expected that they would. I pride myself for being as “out” as I can be, and humbly had to accept that here was a place I was still, internally in the closet. Inside my head, our relationship was not equal or I was afraid others would judge it thusly. But no one I spoke to, saw my relationship as less than theirs. 

Sure, there are anti-LGBTQ persons out there, and a few are ultra-vocal. These aren’t necessarily the folks one runs into everyday. So why is it that deep down I felt the need to protect myself from criticism by using the more generalized term of “partner”?

All of us carry around some amount of ‘fear of attack,’ depending upon when and how we were raised as well as what our life experiences have been. And this means that ‘coming out’ has to be a long term process, as we can’t know when there will be something that illustrates our own internalized closet. 

Additionally within the larger LGBTQ community, there has grown a needed focus on TQOC (Trans and Queer persons of color). In that effort to make visible the lives of persons so often invisible to the larger community, there is an implied bias against white cisgender persons, as if being a white Gay male means that you have it easy. How much further we may get if we stop the competition of victimhood and embrace the fact that all LGBTQ persons carry experiences that impact our outness and our level of personal liberation. 

My husband, reading over this post, says, using the word “husband” is no small matter at all! It used to grate on his nerves when others used that word in the past. His issues and rationale were different than mine, but what we share, and many others may as well is alike. The recognition of the value of our relationship as equal, is connected to an external event (thanks Supreme Court) as well as connected to our own internalized histories.