In case you didn’t know, we wanted to tell you, on this, October 11, National Coming Out Day: We’re gay.

In particular, K and I are a same-sex couple. We’ve been together for just over 11 years.

Why bother you with this when we could be telling you about our honeybees? Our intention is not to make this blog political. And we probably won’t mention it again (or at least until next October 11), but it is part of who we are and part of what shapes our life here at HQ, and it is important to us that it’s never treated like a secret. And our feeling is that there is a lot of debate in the abstract about what rights and protections gays do or do not deserve, what dangers the very existence of gays do or do not pose, and it is important for more people to have a concrete example of just who these gays we’re talking about are. To whatever degree we can, we’re happy to be one more concrete example.

We usually use this day to let our friends and family know what’s been going on in the realm of gay rights in the past year, both in the policial sphere and our more personal sphere. In the political sphere, the headlines from this year are that New York became the sixth state in the nation to allow same-sex marriages (the others are Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, and our very own Iowa, as well as Washington DC). Back in Washington State (where we moved to Iowa from), the Tribal Council of the Suquamish tribe also began allowing same-sex marriages for their tribal members. In the military, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a policy which prevented service members from being openly gay, was repealed. On the internet, the It Gets Better Project, a collection of user submitted videos meant to bring hope to young people being bullied, feeling isolated, and at risk for suicide because of being gay, caught on like wildfire.

In our personal sphere, it is different being gay here in the rural Midwest than it was in Seattle.

When we lived in Washington, our straight friends could get married, but not us. Here in Iowa, on January 20th, we were able to get married, too. Does it make a difference? Of course. There is a difference between introducing someone as your girlfriend and as you wife. And in marrying us, the state government is saying it does not hold our relationship below any other, same-sex or not. That feels really good. Did we have a big wedding? Nope. Some of this is personal (we can’t imagine why being the center of attention in a crowd of people sounds like fun for anyone else). But our bigger reason is that this is not the marriage we really want to be celebrating. While the state government of Iowa might be doing all it can for us, our marriage is not equal to any straight marriage. The federal government and the rest of the states (NY, MA, CT, NH, VT excepted) don’t recognize it. This means there are a whole list of benefits given to married couples by the federal government that we don’t have access to. And when we make trips out of Iowa, even into our closest big city, Omaha, Nebraska, a mere hour away, the few protections Iowa is able to give us disappear. We may be married according to Iowa, but most other states will treat us like strangers. When that gets fixed, we’ll have a big wedding and celebrate finally being married the same way a straight couple is able to be married.

Marriage aside, a lot of people were curious, or worried, about how we’d be treated here as a gay couple. We might just be self-conscious, but I think we stick out here more than we did in Seattle, for lots of reasons, but our relationship is one of them. That means we’re less likely to do something that makes us stick out even more (like hold hands while walking down the street), but more likely to be upfront with people right away (them-”Why did you come to Iowa?”, us- “Because we could get married here!”) so there isn’t awkward speculation. And I can’t speak to everyone’s experience of small towns and rural folks, but it seems to us that when you know you’re going to keep running into the same people, those people become worth meeting and worth knowing. And maybe as a consequence of that, we’ve had nothing but positive interactions with everyone so far. I’m glad that gay marriage hasn’t been a big issue in the Republican primaries so far, but even if it does, I truly believe that people are civil if you give them the chance to be, no matter what their politics, and that the more we’re interacting with people as real life individuals, the less abstract opinions matter.

By tomorrow, we’ll be back to posting about things like honeybees. But we’ll still be gay. So even if we’re not blogging all about it, you’re still welcome to talk to us about it, anytime you like: kanda {at} alesandrini {dot} com