How many Americans get to say that they have proudly attended their gay sister’s wedding ceremony with full family in attendance? Now, how many get to see it TWICE, with TWO sisters, in a single year? My family, that’s who. It has been a banner year for courageous love in the Finn family.
I have the joy and privilege of being the baby sister of two extraordinary, strong, intelligent, remarkable women named Maggie and Joanie. Our family is large enough that they experienced being gay in America across two generations: Joanie came of age in the late 50s, and Maggie in the early 70s. But each of them also was born too soon to be fully embraced as they are at the age when that makes all the difference in your self-esteem, your choices in life, and your happiness.
They were each forced into taking undesirable forks in the road to bury their love. In Joanie’s case, she fell in love with Annie in college in 1960. Not a good time for lesbian love, for sure. I remember Annie as a very young girl. I remember her being around, and how happy Joanie was at that time. Joanie was always artsy, and I remember her being the epitome of what, to me, was a beatnick (for the record, beatnicks remain in my mind much, much cooler than hippies could ever hope to be — I think it was all the booze, the poetry, the cigarette smoke, and the black clothing).
Annie was fun and down to earth. She helped to care for me as a baby, and I have impressions of her inside me. Apparently, I was told, Joanie and Annie used to take me into the bed to comfort me when I was crying. My mom was kind of a heavy sleeper, what with all the Canadian Club and all
So they would step in to feed me or hold me during the night.
At one point, Annie just disappeared. Joanie got married in 1966 to a man we all thought to be strangely cold and conservative — nothing like the free, disorganized, serendipitous spirit that lived inside our Joanie. She lived a quiet life in a sub-division in Bucks County, Pennsylvania where they raised their one son, and where Joanie, a faithful Catholic, taught theology at an all-girls’ Catholic school. Annie at some point disappeared. It was as though I had lost a fifth sister, and I never quite understood why she was gone. Apparently, she had become a nurse anesthesiologist, joined the Army, and went to Vietnam. She also married, but the marriage was short-lived. I found all this out later on.
Flash forward to the year 1998. Joanie’s son was married the year before. I got a call from Joanie that she was leaving her husband after 32 years of being deeply unhappy and troubled, but waiting for her son to be settled. She was leaving him to return to Annie. They had loved each other all those years.
I never knew all the details, but when Joanie told me this, it all felt right. It all made perfect sense. Annie WAS my fifth sister afterall, and the intuition of a little child can be frightfully accurate, or so I am learning from my son. I always knew that Joanie loved Annie.
This week, I finally got to see them take their vows in New Jersey, one of the states that has had the compassion, and the foresight, to allow civil unions for gay people. My brother Peter wrote an amazing blessing, talking about the eternal love of God and of our late parents, all of whom were looking on Joanie and Annie with pride, support, and deep love. I was bawling, and so was my sister, Maggie, herself legally married in Massachusetts to her precious Joy this past March. What an amazing day this was.
I’ve been to straight weddings all my life, even held a few of my own :), but nothing compares to Joanie and Annie, in their own living room, standing and facing each other with honesty and abiding love, promising their lives with no cultural mandate to do so, as is the case with all of us in the straight mainstream. Their love is the kind you fight for, that you do as an act of courage. You can’t hide in the security and stability of a gay marriage the way you can in a straight one, if that’s why you marry. There is no template no “Gay Bride” magazine, no Filene’s basement rush of the lesbian brides. These folks are pioneers, and they pave the way not just for open gay love, but for the rights and dignity of humanity in all its God-made shapes, sizes, stripes, colors, and desires. Theirs is a love that takes courage, not compliance, and I am so proud that two of my sisters have the fortitude to be open in the world with who they are. They make it easier for everyone who is different in any way.
Joanie, Maggie, Annie, and Joy. I love all of you so very, very much. Thanks for being who you are — I am more because of you.




