LOVERS WITHOUT BORDERS: Ben Smith

One of the reasons we're supposed to care less about gay marriage than about black civil rights is that the stakes are so much lower today. Then it was about what might be called basic freedoms to live and work. Now it's about secondary rights such as inheritance and health care, things that can be addressed by contract law. As Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said in a February presidential debate, at the center of the gay marriage debate is "terminology."

Tell that to David Kloss. In the summer of 2001, the 54-year-old oil exploration manager made a terrible mistake: He fell in love with a Canadian. Soon, he faced a choice shared by thousands of American citizens: Leave the man he loved, or leave the country.

The source of the dilemma is federal immigration law, which is based on the seemingly innocuous principle of "family reunification." Kloss' partner, Remi Collette, 35, moved to San Francisco to join him. But Collette was officially a tourist. He couldn’t work legally, and he couldn’t stay indefinitely. If Kloss and Collette had been a straight couple, they would have counted as a "family." Getting papers and eventually citizenship would have been a routine, bureaucratic process. As gays, they faced a stark choice: break the law with illegal work or a sham heterosexual marriage, or join the diaspora of self-described "love exiles." ...

A group that represents cross-border gay and lesbian couples, Immigration Equality, estimates that there are more than 25,000 such couples in the United States. Many break the law. They place advertisements like this one in The Washington Blade, a gay paper: "Marriage-Minded GWM/GAM couple (1 American, 1 foreign), seeks lesbian couple (1 American, 1 foreign) for marriages of mutual interests."

That's a risky move, however, one that carries penalties of imprisonment and deportation. So in 2002 Kloss sold his beloved house in the center of San Francisco, with its view of the Marin headlands, and moved with Collette to Toronto. Last year they were married under Canadian law, which allows gays to bring in partners.

Kloss was lucky to have even that choice. If the partner doesn't hail from one of the countries with such a policy (which also include the United Kingdom, Israel, and several European states), gay couples find themselves perpetual tourists, insecure and unemployable.

more
posted by Eve at 12:16 AM VOTE

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home