Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s song “Same Love” featuring Mary Lambert hit airwaves in October 2012, and it’s still one of my favorites. It hits me hard right in the chest, in a good way, in a loving way, and in an angry way. It’s a love ballad that I sing along with Mary Lambert to my wife (in the car, even when wifey isn’t around). I belt it out with tears in my eyes, “My love, my love, my love, she keeps me warm. And I can’t change, even if I wanted to.”
My heart swells with incredible force when I look into my wife’s eyes, and I thank the universe for her every day. But I’m also thanking Macklemore for creating waves in the rap world by laying down respectable tracks about gays and lesbians. This anthem to marriage equality keeps my hand in the air, waving like a cheesy concert goer with my iPhone flashlight screen aflame. I get angry when I think about how long it’s taken to make a song like this, one that addresses how rappers inexplicably hate on gays and the Religious Right uses its coercive power to discriminate against gays just because they don’t know the intricate depths of why and how homosexuals could possibly be like the heterosexuals.
But we are very similar, in fact, we are the same. And our love is the same. We keep our lovers warm at night, we hold them in the morning light, we argue over mundane household junk, we plan and raise families together, we go see movies, we are moved by the melodic rhythm of music, and when we hear a romantic song, witness our partners doing something kind or smart, or just dance barefoot in the grass under a light thicket of rain, we fall in love with our darling sweethearts all over again.
Photo by Our Labor of Love, Equally Wed cofounders Kirsten and Maria Palladino
