So, before I really start, I wanted to take a second to thank all of the people who made tonight possible. Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, Vera Wang for the amazing dresses, Abigail Kursh for catering, my manager for making so much of this happen, our wedding planner Gloria Ortega, each of the artists who have performed tonight, HBO for recording all of this. And most of all, I wanted to thank all of the ones who have helped me to grow and to change as a person. You know who you are.
The person who is standing before you wasn’t always the way she is right now. Confident in her ability to succeed, her sexuality, the people that she cared about. In fact, she didn’t used to be that way at all. So much time has changed her into becoming the woman that she is today. But it wasn’t just time.
So, I know I was a serious bitch in high school. Oops….am I allowed to say that? HBO, help me out here. Yes? No? I know I could have phrased that differently, but it’s true. There’s a lot of people in the audience tonight who are from me and Brittany’s past who would completely agree with that statement, and I don’t blame you. But see, if you take away the bitch mask and you take away all of the sharp edges, there’s something that I share with a lot of people out there. And that something is that I had a dream.
I remember the first wedding that I ever went to. My family probably remembers this one well. I was five years old, and it was the wedding of the little ring bearer here’s parents. I was asked to be the flower girl, and I remember how mad I was that I had to wear a pink dress. I’m pretty sure I literally chucked the flower petals in people’s faces when I walked down the aisles. But I guess a five year old can get away with that sort of thing. Well, if you gloss over the fact that my mom gave me a thirty minute lecture after the wedding about how inappropriate that was. But the one thing that I remember out of that whole experience was how… special the wedding seemed. Yeah, I threw bits of flower in people’s faces and got scolded for it, but… I couldn’t help but notice how much the bride and the groom loved each other. I remember looking at the little bride and groom figurines on the top of the cake when I was five years old and hoping that one day, I could have a wedding like that, and be on top of a wedding cake. I guess you could say that’s where the dream started. But as you’ve probably noticed by now, my fairy tale turned out a little bit different than that.
I remember the first time I saw her. I was nine years old, in the fourth grade. I was known as the one girl who wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty… I stole the candy bars from the boys, I beat boys at their own sports and I would come home covered in mud. I really wasn’t into all of the girly stuff, it didn’t make any sense to me, and all of the girls who spent all their time preoccupied it for the most part as a nine year old bothered me. But then one day.. there was this new blonde girl who transferred into my fourth grade class. I remember one of the first thoughts I ever thought about her was how pretty she looked. She had this platinum blonde hair and bright blue eyes and these little freckles on her face, which, eventually faded away but at the time I thought they made her different. She was one of the girly girls, but she was much more independent of them. I watched what she did with her free time at recess, and it mostly consisted of her making her own dolls and unicorns out of grass and leaves and playing with them by herself out in the field. I thought she was interesting, so I remember I approached her and asked her about what she was doing. And we would play together. And I guess that went well, because eventually we became best friends. We joined cheerleading together in middle school, I was the first one in our grade to lose my virginity and she was a close second, and then eventually, before we knew it, boom, we were in high school. Both of us made the Cheerios as freshman, and I remember how excited we were. We were going to be teen royalty, and that was all that mattered to us in the entire world. Between the two of us, we slept with almost every single boy on the football team our freshman and sophomore year. I dated this one boy named Puckerman on and off…. sorry, I went there, deal with it. Our best friend Quinn, who just so happens to be the maid of honor of the evening was our best friend, and the three of us did everything together. Went to the mall together, slept with the same guys in the same year. Anyone who went to our high school knew us as the Unholy Trinity. Everything was good and fine and normal for a while I guess…Brittany would sleep around, I dumped Puckerman because he had low credit score, Quinn got pregnant, I started hooking up with Brittany. Wait. Back up. Woah woah woah, I’m sorry, did you all hear that right? What did I just say, that I hooked up with Brittany? Yeah, I did, and for a really long time I just thought it was this weird thing I did whenever Puckerman wasn’t around or whenever one of the football players was convinced I had an STD. It was normal to hook up with a girl every once and a while as long as it didn’t mean anything, right? Well… as it turns out, it meant something. My junior year of high school was when those random hookups started to mean more to me than just random hookups. I just remember thinking….oh my god. No, it couldn't be true. No way. I remember not wanting to reveal to anyone at the time how much panic and pain I had when I realized that I was really falling for a girl. Was it true? Could it be real? This wasn’t normal, and I knew that it wasn’t normal, so why was I feeling this way? And this was where my fantasy changed. I shoved the groom down into the cake in my mind, and put another bride figurine down next to it. Because yes, in my junior year of high school, I realized it for the first time. I was gay. For a really long time I was angry at the world. I took out my buried feelings on other people and I hurt a lot of people that I really care about. I guess it tamed down for a little while the second she finally realized that she didn’t want to date the guy she was dating at the time and that she really wanted me as her own.
I guess I could go into what happened after that. How there was this other girl I had a crush on for a long time, or how I lost her for six months of my life and how my entire world felt like it had fallen apart and was over. But I guess when it comes down to it, it always comes back to this. To us. We have gone through so much, pain and pleasure, good and bad, happiness and sadness, fall and winter and spring and summer over and over again. I’m not the kind of girl who really wants to believe in magic, you know, because who really believes that magic exists? But if there’s anything magical I believe in, it’s us. We have gone through everything. Time and time again when there are problems are conflicts, we have worked our way through them, we have held on and we have made it work for each other. We have formed such a support system, and even adopted our first member of our own little family, that goobery husky that you saw running down the aisle. I believe in us. I’m proud of us, and I’m proud to call her mine. Brittany S. Pierce, you are the light of my life and I know that there is no one else in the entire world who I would have let myself settle down with. Who knows me better than I know myself and who is willing to look past all of my flaws and my darkness. I really can’t wait for the beginning of the rest of our lives together, and if I’m being honest? I might not believe in magic, but I believe in our magic. Because we are the magic in my world.
Thank you everyone.
