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With This Ring . . . : Ready to Wed? No, Mom.
They were mildly interested when New York lawmakers voted to allow same-###### marriage. Then his stepmother called. “She congratulated me on gay marriage passing and said, ‘This is a great opportunity for you,’ ” Mr. Breslow said. But there’s a problem: Mr. Breslow, who calls himself queer rather than gay, philosophically opposes marriage. “I <a href="http://www.abestsunglasses.com/category-1022-b0-Fendi+Sunglasses.html"><strong>Fendi Sunglasses </strong></a> don’t understand the concept of legalized monogamy and normalcy,” said Mr. Breslow, who has a brother, Jacob, also gay. “My brother and I both studied queer theory.” His stepmother, Lorraine Gray, won’t take no for an answer. “I don’t have any girls,” said Ms. Gray, 52, a psychotherapist in Oakland, Calif. Never mind that she also has two other sons, 18 and 22, who are straight. “My gay kids are more fun than my straight ones,” she said. Being gay has downsides: social bias, discrimination and homophobia, to name but three. But one blessing gay people have had was not having to endure pushy moms (and some dads) pestering them about when they are going to settle down and marry. With same-###### marriage now legal in New York, some gay sons and daughters are starting to feel the same heat from parents as do their straight siblings. “I’ve been tracking it on our site’s chat boards,” said Carley Roney, editor in chief of the wedding site the Knot, which has had a gay wedding section since 1998. “Now that more states are legalizing gay marriage, parents are saying, ‘Oh, good, so you told me this was serious and I’ve been supporting you, but now you can make it official.’ ” In a sense, it’s no different from what <a href="http://www.abestsunglasses.com/category-1029-b0-Ray+ban+Sunglasses.html"><strong>Ray ban Sunglasses </strong></a> drives overbearing parents everywhere. “Parents come to me with an existential anxiety to know that their children are going to be O.K. and taken care of when they’re gone,” said Naomi Bernstein, a clinical psychologist in Great Neck and Rockville Centre, N.Y. But gay weddings have special meaning for some parents, especially if they struggled to accept their child’s ######ual orientation. “Parents with gay kids initially might think they’re not going to have a quote-unquote normal life,” Dr. Bernstein <a href="http://www.abestsunglasses.com/"><strong>cheap ray ban sunglasses</strong></a> said. “But once they get over that, they say: ‘O.K., great. You’re gay, fine. But now nail someone down who can take care of you.’ ” JUST as important, a civic wedding offers social validation, not just before the state, but in the eyes of relatives and friends of the parents. “The parents have been supportive, but now they want the payoff,” Ms. Roney said. One parent seeking that official stamp is Vicki Robinson, 58, a physics professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester. Ever since Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the same-###### marriage bill on June 24, Ms. Robinson has been nudging her 27-year-old daughter, Stephanie Pollanen, to marry her girlfriend of six years, Lindsay Hall. “I’m a Bible-thumping Lutheran who just got my church to put rainbow stickers on their door,” said Ms. Robinson, who is divorced and uses her <a href="http://lnx.u2place.net/u2foto/displayimage.php?album=lastup&cat=0&pos=6"><strong >Going Green in New York: One Co-op’s Story</strong></a> maiden name. “If they were married, I would feel more like I could write Lindsay’s name in the family Bible in ink.” But her daughter has refused to share her thoughts on marriage, so Ms. Robinson has taken to following her daughter’s Twitter feed for signs of matrimonial chatter. “I intercepted a Twitter tweet of my daughter’s one day to a friend indicating that perhaps a wedding was on the horizon,” she said. “So I took my daughter and her girlfriend out to dinner and bought several rounds of martinis, and her partner happened to spill that they had discussed plans for a fall wedding.” Nothing has been set, but that has not stopped Ms. Robinson from planning the big day in her head.
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