The Boyfriend
This group, Chris Kuhrt, Stephen Schilling and Mark Simon, who have sung together for years, donned their finest gentlemanly apparel, made themselves up and pressed play on their boom box after waiting patiently for a couple of hours for the right moment to perform. They marched out with posters depicting Elizabeth Taylor getting married at different stages of her life; it was amusing that they chose her as the poster-girl since she's been married so many times, and none of them can. I took it as a statement that they'd like the same opportunities we have to marry, to be able to make mistakes in those marriages, as well as to divorce - all acts that most of us, and I'm saying we as heterosexuals, may take for granted.
I've known Mark Simon, a member of the group, for a while now. He was the biggest supporter of my CoTour catalog a few years back. I wanted to support him by including his group in the wedding. I felt that it would have been cowardly not to address the equality issue when approaching the subject of marriage, and when he told me about this song they'd been practicing, I added The Boyfriend to the roster.
The song, duly appropriate, was "I just want to get married"
They were bombastic and harmonious, charming and exaggerated. They punch up the volume of their own homosexuality, shaking hips and flouncing hands and giggling like girls, all the while singing about this very real, very serious topic. They were well into the song when I looked around the room and noticed a large disparity. The side of the room with my friends, my family, Bec and Ruben's friends, and the artists, were all delighted and clapping and laughing, but the side of the room where Bec and Ruben's families were sitting was visibly shaken and not amused, as well as uncomfortable. It underscored the schism on the topic, and brought another layer to the dynamic of this wedding, this art piece, this merger of peoples. Not all of it would be harmonious. That's what makes it more interesting, though I do feel badly that the families were confronted by this on the day of their children's wedding. Though, that said, generation gaps exist, and their families are not rare in that there will be topics they and their children don't see eye to eye on. The room returned back to the celebration at hand.
Their statement:
“This was a musical salute to The Elizabeth Taylor 8 and the civil rights struggle of The Friends of Liz.”
