Steven LaChance Blog

December 2017. The air smelled like the holidays and pine needles. We stood in a room full of people who’d fought for us, cried for us, waited for us. My hands shook holding the marriage license—a piece of paper I never thought I’d get to sign. Seven years later, I still remember the way my husband’s voice cracked saying “I do.” Not because he was nervous, but because we’d spent three years clawing toward that moment. Three years of hiding, then hoping, then demanding. Ten years of love. Seven years of legal. Now? They want to call it a loophole.

Let me tell you what a loophole looks like:

It’s 3 a.m. in 2015, refreshing the Supreme Court blog like it’s a lottery ticket.

It’s holding his hand in a restaurant in 2015 and feeling a stranger’s glare burn a hole through our intertwined fingers.

It’s the sound of my mothers happiness when we finally told her, “We’re getting married. For real this time.”

Our wedding wasn’t a loophole. It was a rebellion. A quiet, stubborn “f— you” to everyone who said we didn’t deserve the mundane magic of marriage. The fights about who left dishes in the sink. The way he still steals my socks. The bills and the doctors appointments and the way he hums off-key in the shower. They’re trying to reduce all of that—seven years of that—to a legal technicality.

Here’s the truth they don’t want you to know: Love is not a legal concept.

It’s the scar on his knee from when he tripped carrying our groceries upstairs. It’s the voicemail he left me to tell me he loves me too. It’s the way he still kisses my forehead when he thinks I’m asleep. You can’t litigate that. You can’t “grandfather in” the way he memorized my coffee order or the nights we spent ugly-crying through a gay drama because it felt like someone finally saw us.

But here’s what keeps me awake now: the what-ifs.

What if we drive through a state where our marriage evaporates at the border?
What if, at 70 years old, some nurse looks at our wrinkled hands and says, “Sorry, family only”? What if our grandchildren grow up in a world where their grandfathers wedding photos are just… artifacts?

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Tell that to the gay 20-year-old who texts me, “Will I ever get to marry him?” Tell that to my husband, who still flinches when someone asks, “So, are you two… roommates?”

They want us to believe this is about “states’ rights.” Bullshit. This is about erasing the ordinary. The ordinary that we fought to make extraordinary. The ordinary that was never handed to us—we pried it loose with bloody fingers.

I’m tired. God, I’m tired. But I’m also so goddamn angry. Angry that after ten years, we’re back here. Angry that “I do” might become “Did you… really?” Angry that they’re using words like “policy” to gaslight a generation that just wants to love out loud.

So here’s my vow, retroactive to December 2017: I will never stop being married to him.

Not if they burn the license. Not if they call it a phase. Not if they make us stand in the rain outside some county clerk’s office again. Our marriage isn’t in a filing cabinet—it’s in the way he laughs when I burn the pancakes. It’s in the shoebox of road-trip receipts from when we fled our hometown to find a place that wouldn’t hate us. It’s in the text he sent me yesterday:“Don’t forget to eat your protein babe.”

They think this is about laws. It’s not.

It’s about the 3,652 mornings I’ve woken up next to my husband. The 87,648 hours we’ve spent building a life that fits us. The irreplaceable, unmovable weight of a decade.
So let them try. Let them argue. Let them write their opinions and slam their gavels.

We’ve already won the only argument that matters.

Stay loud. And keep the protest sign—and the marriage license—where you can grab them fast. We are going to put boots to the ground if we need to. We are going to fight and this time it is going to make the days of ACT UP pale in comparison. Because the one thing they will never do is silence our protest. I will be with you marching and fighting along side with you. Our lives have been protests. We got this.