This piece originally appeared in the  Threepenny Review, as a contribution to a symposium on marriage.  e.

"Are you married?” people often ask us here in Norway, where we now live.  “Yes,” I reply.  They hear the answer knowing it comes with an asterisk: yes, in Norway – his country, their country – we’re married; back in my own homeland, the United States of America, we’re not.

       Strictly speaking, Norwegian law describes what we have not as ekteskap, “marriage,” but as partnerskap, “partnership.”  Only in the Netherlands, as of April 1, does actual same-sex marriage exist (though even there gay couples aren’t fully equal: they’re denied overseas adoption rights).   Yet Norway comes close.  Same-sex couples here aren’t entitled to wed in Norway’s state church (which seems headed for disestablishment anyway); we cannot adopt together (a matter now before Parliament); and our legal ties mean nothing abroad (which is something the Dutch can’t do anything about either).  Otherwise, partnerskap is equivalent to ekteskap.  Over time, indeed, the use of separate words has faded, the word ekteskap increasingly being used – by ordinary Norwegians, and even on some official documents – to describe both homo and hetero wedlock.

       Norway’s partnerskap statute was our salvation.  It gave us – a mixed-nationality couple – a place where we could live together within the law.  In Norway, I have all the rights of any spouse of a Norwegian citizen, including health-care coverage and residency rights.  Here we’re family, each of us indisputably acknowledged as the other’s next of kin – although every time we fly to the States we instantly become single again, and he’s just another foreigner on a three-month visitor’s visa.

       Some would explain our two countries’ striking policy divergence by pointing to Scandinavia’s vaunted liberalism; yet in many ways Norway is quite conservative.  The difference, I think, is this.  Many Americans argue that recognition of same-sex marriage would outrage their “values.”  The U.S. was founded on abstract ideals, and for many Americans “values” inhabit an exalted, often religiously conceived empyrean far removed from their own real lives.  Little wonder that, when same-sex unions are discussed, "marriage” in America can easily float free of reality and become the locus of images, at once absurdly idealized and highly conventional, that bear little resemblance to anybody’s married life – and that leave no room whatsoever for the reality of homosexuals.  It is, ultimately, for the sake of those bogus images that gay Americans continue to be legally marginalized, denied access to the most fundamental social right (and rite) of all.

       Norwegians are more earth-bound.  Some may be uneasy around homosexuals, but are disinclined to exalt their discomfort to the level of lofty principle or to believe that such private attitudes should shape public policy.  Realism is paramount.  They accept the objective fact that homosexuals exist, and in a polity founded on equal rights and responsibilities, same-sex marriage seems to most of them only fair, reasonable, practical.  The official partnerskap/ekteskap ceremony is striking in the unsentimental realism of its language, its emphasis on the couple’s membership in and obligations to the commonweal. Hearing those words, on the May morning when we took our commitment vows, I felt myself to be a part of something mature, decent, and at once liberal and conservative – in the best senses of both words.

        And I felt – and still feel – awed.  Awed that we were able to enter Oslo’s courthouse that day, say a few words, sign a paper, and walk out into the bright Nordic sun joined in the eyes of the law.  It’s something that many heterosexuals take for granted – and that involves rights they may never reflect on.  For a gay American, it can seem nothing less than a miracle.

THE THREEPENNY REVIEW, Fall 2001