"Will you gay-marry me?"

I had dinner last night with The Clairvoyant and The One at a fish & chips pub that is gluten-free (beer aside), serves sweet potato fries and uses no trans-fats in its fryers. This says more about my dining companions than it does about me, I can assure you. But the food was really good, and the menu of fish options was marvelous. Had some oysters shooters, which always brings some of my young-and-wild-New-Orleans days to mind.

The dinner conversation was typical of these two. An episode or two from "Lifestyles of the Fit and Gluten-Free," some detailed information about their attempts to conceive. And there's always sex; when we want to amuse ourselves, sex is always on the table.

But last night, I introduced a diferent topic by brining my Couples Therapy project to show to The One. He's an artist who, considering the rendering of the Hawthorne Bridge he did most recently, is poised to make a nice living as an artist when he finds the right rep. The One's ability to realistically portay industrial structures and still evoke the emotion that his pieces do will eventually win him some followers. I am a HUGE fan.

I am not all that much of artist, however. I tried some stuff and as I said earlier, I'm proud of my pieces. There's only one that, every time I look at it, my body gives me negative feedback. My eyes don't like it. My stomach doesn't like it. My jaw doesn't like it, either. My whole body kind of revolts at the sight of it, to tell you the truth. I may not be an artist, but I know what looks bad, and I've made one of those. But just one. I could've stood not to show it to The One, but I did.

In any case, my pieces did at the table what they were created to do. They provoked some serious conversation about marriage. The Clairvoyant and The One are an interesting twosome with whom to discuss this issue with, too.

They're engaged, but they don't actually seem all that interested in getting married. TC says she wanted to be proposed to and wants to be with The One for the long haul, but she also doesn't like the financial implications of getting married. She says she's done the math, and it will cost her household $100 more a month to be married, mainly because The One has all sorts of tax breaks and financial assistance, such as low-cost health care, at his disposal on accounts he's a Poor Starving Artist.

If I understand her correctly, TC mainly wanted to get married because she thought it was standing between her and pregnancy. The One had told her he would marry her "after she got pregnant" to appease his Mormon family, and TC thought that there was some kind of psychological mumbo-jumbo at work there. So they got engaged. She's since found out, however, that one of the herbal or vitamin supplements she's been regularly taking contains something that makes pregnancy highly unlikely and increases the odds of miscarriage. In the days of back-alley abortions, it was used as a "home remedy," to borrow S2's words.

I guess I should find out what this ingredient is and tell the rest of you. But I can't remember right now.

In any case, ever since she found out that their fertility is all good and that she was accidentally thinning the lining of her uterus with her health-care regimine, TC's quit that supplment, chilled out and figures pregnancy will come along eventually.

It seems she's also cooled a bit to the idea of marriage.

In fact, last night, discussing all this marriage stuff, she said, "I've been wondering if we couldn't just have a commitment ceremony -- never get the license but tell our families we're 'married' anyway?"

The marriage now seems designed mostly to appease the pressures of The One's family, especially the grandparents who wouldn't give TC the time of day so long as she was just The One's "girlfriend."

"You would not believe how much differently they treat me now that we're engaged," she said. "Before, it was like I was totally invisible, that I was NO ONE to the family because we weren't married. Well, if we had the ceremony and never told them we weren't actually 'married,' they would NEVER know."

She liked the idea a lot. Then she asked:

"Do you think it's OK to lie like that?"

I suppose you could always go down to City Hall and sign up on the domestic partnership registry, I replied. Then you could tell them you 'went to City Hall and did the paperwork.' And your wedding invitations could just say something like, 'Join us in celebrating the loving union of two souls,' or something like that. I mean, if you didn't use the word 'marriage,' it wouldn't be a lie. It would just be a sin of omission.

"I really like that idea!" TC said. She turned to The One. "Do you think your family would fall for it? We'd have to keep it secret that we weren't actually 'married.' My family might be kind of pissed, you know, to come all the way out here for a ceremony and we're not actually getting married, but what they don't know won't hurt them. Right?"

Before The One replied, I jumped in: You know, whether there's a license there or not, it's a celebration of your love for each other and a public statement that you are committed to each other. Why should your family care, TC? That doesn't seem like them.

The One replied, "This is why I am so sick of this crap. You think gays have it bad, try being in our shoes! Everyone is pressing us to get married. Every time we get together with my family -- even when it's just the guys -- the topic can start anywhere, but eventually it comes back to 'When are you going to marry her?' The pressure is ridiculous."

(More travails of heterosexuals and the hidden stigma of marriage, which was the subject of the lecture I gave to my class. Too bad I did not include this particular male viewpoint.)

But here's where the conversation wandered into new territory, as it often does with TC, who has been described by The One as "a new-age Archie Bunker."

"You know," she said, "it's like you just want to say fuck it and not do it just to spite them. The One keeps suggesting we simply tell our families we eloped and never do anything about it. But I don't think they'll find that satisfying enough. I think we ought to try this gay-marriage thing! You know, just have the ceremony and not actually get married."

She turned to The One. "Why don't you ask me to gay-marry you instead?"

He looked at her: "Will you gay-marry me?"

"Yes, yes!" she replied. "I will soooo gay-marry you! We'll get gay-married and just tell everyone that it's a real marriage."

The One looked at me, cocked a brow and said, "I imagine it might be kind of odd, you know, if we were prevented from getting gay-married just because we're straight."

We don't discriminate, I replied.

But inside, my stomach was churning a little. And considering there were no trans-fats in my food, I know it was the conversation that was beginning to take its toll, not the rice oil or whatever.

I don't want to be outraged. I don't want to feel angry. Especially not at my friends. And, in truth, I'm not the least bit mad at The Clairvoyant and The One. I feel some empathy for their situation and found their "solution" to be humorous in many respects. The stigma of marriage is such that not only is it burdened by absurd expectations and the notion that married people deserve more respect, it also has grubby little hands that keep trying to pull unwilling people into its clutches.

However, I see an ugly cultural subtext in the discussion the three of us had: Being gay-married is "fake;" it's not a "real marriage."

My friends want to have a commitment ceremony -- the common but not exclusive province of gays and lesbians -- because they don't actally want to participate in the legal institution of marriage. But their families won't accept that as a "real" thing. So they're considering "lying" to everyone and saying they're getting married when there's no legal certificate to back up their claim.

It's not real. It would be a lie.

It would be a "gay marriage."

Oh, really?