WHAT DATE RAPE AND GAY MARRIAGE HAVE IN COMMON

It’s the making something smaller, see.  Shrinking it, paring it down.  It’s the less-than symbol disguised as simple adjective, trying to upgrade from coach to compound noun:  Date Rape < Rape. Gay Marriage < Marriage.

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It’s the Pinocchio Complex, see.  Not quite as real as Rape, not quite as real as Marriage.  Synthetic somehow, highly sanitized: surely not flesh and blood, not here and now.  Surely not a real-life boy-and-girl, (boy-and-boy, (girl-and-girl…doing God knows what to each other.

It can happen so many ways, for better or worse, for richer or poorer…All these possible permutations are likely to trip us up.  We need our rapists in back woods and dark alleys, stocking-capped strangers rising out of the fog.  We need our weddings in churches, a 1:1 ratio of skirts to suits, bouquets to boutonnieres.  We need to know the thing we know isn’t really something else, so we call it less-than, see.

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Do you remember what our math teachers said about the way the parted lips should face?  The smaller opening toward the larger, toward the thing of greater weight?  Mine said to think of it like Pac-Man eating pac-dots, which are small blips inside a blue maze, easy enough to consume.

So the mouth is always eating that which comes after it, making it less than it was before.  The way date is taking a bite out of rape, taking a bite out of crime.  (Take that, McGruff.  The way some marriages are whittled down like old wood—valid Here-But-Not-There, There-But-Not-Here.  (Mythical, in some places, as Atlantis.

Date Rape < Rape. Gay Marriage < Marriage.

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But what will we tell the children, the fraternities, the county clerks, the beer distributors?  What reparations will be made to Vera Wang and Jose Cuervo?  Will there be white space on the docket or the Christmas card?

Think of the things we’ll have to think of that we never thought before.  Like when the “stewardess” became a “flight attendant” and stopped wearing pantyhose. Order a Clamato juice and sip on that for a while.  Does it take you back? Think of all the parentheses we’ll never remember to close.

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Julie Marie Wade is the author of Wishbone, a Memoir in Fractures, Without: Poems, Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems, Tremolo: An Essay, When I Was Straight: Poems, Catechism: A Love Story, and SIX: Poems. She has won numerous awards, including the Colgate University Press Nonfiction Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes, eighteen Pushcart Prize nominations, and many more awards. Her work appears at the Academy of American Poets, The Kenyon Review, The Lost Angeles Review, The Rumpus, and many others. She teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and reviews regularly for The Rumpus and Lambda Literary Review. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives in the Sunshine State.