Famous Feminist Breaks Vows (by Tony Hoagland)

“I love the story of the famous feminist who decided to get married finally after years of expressed contempt for it, for what she had called the Declaration of Dependence and ‘the sanctioned endorsement of the testosterone conspiracy.’ But here she was, filling in that blank on the certificate, her name in ink like blood and she feeling a little dizzy after all the swerves in that momentous signature.

Some people said it was a breach of revolutionary trust but I liked the sight of her walking her guy under the corny arch of flowers, wearing her white, unbleached cotton non-corporate-exploitation-third world wedding dress—past the pew of rape counselors and libertarians, the lesbian separatists not-so separate anymore, crying to see their friend so ordinary.

There are five different equally valid reasons she would not like my saying she is a better man than me, but really, what else do we mean by brave?—having all your life tried to prove the opposite and then one day to simply say ‘I am like everybody else. Let me be folded back into the tribe like a stalk of grain into the sheave; like a word into the book.’ And the old convention of the wedding night—all that frizzy grey hair and laughter in the dark.”

—Tony Hoagland, “Famous Feminist Breaks Vows,” The American Poetry Review (Vol. 38 No. 2)