Krysta Tippett asked recently, “Was this a year that asked questions, or answered them?”

The year 2017 was definitely a year that I asked a question: can two men form a marriage?

2018 answered.

I was promised at birth that my whims and my will would lead every conversation. I would get credit for my every success and I’d be excused for my every failure. I would never have to acknowledge the labor or anyone’s devotion for me to be seen as a strong independent person.

For a marriage between two men to work, I needed to let all of that go.

One thing we are not taught as men is how to do the labor required to provide these privileges for others. For a marriage between two men to work, we owe each other a lot of labor that is culturally seen as womanly.

Feminine labor.

And, for me, to transform marriage from a noun into a verb, I was forced to understand and ultimately reconfigure the interpersonal flows of emotional labor in my life, our lives. It allowed me to privatize my labor of community access and inclusion from the colonial dominant culture, to be the mother of my own, independent family.

I’ve spent my whole life being a gay man in full view of an entirely straight community. Harford County wouldn’t give us husbands legitimacy without our demanding it, as you may have guessed. That was an entire lifespan on the margins, centering the structural pillars of power in my community —straight people, other men.

In order for Kevin and me to live a fully realized marriage after our wedding in June 2017, we had to completely tear down and rebuild our understanding of community (aka our entire community itself). Only in the emptiness of a tilled field, were we able to ask you, the community:

Who are you to our relationship?

Instead of our usual, what does our relationship have to be to you?

With marriage, Light was brought to the shadows. Our home in the margins became the center— bringing with it the radical structural change that only that process can bring.

Gay marriage created a new kind of masculinity. It strives for empathy and moral courage, listening to and interrogating pain. It’s active, engaged.

It can be gentle.

Y’all, I howled my question into the night sky, and 2018 answered.

Yes, my marriage works in a way no one has ever seen before, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Not a single,

goddamn

thing.

Welcome to the #NewMasculinity, fam.

Next question.