Liza Monroy will discuss and read from her new book ‘The Marriage Act’ at Bookshop Santa Cruz onWednesday, Feb. 19 at 7pm.
When Santa Cruz author Liza Monroy heard that then-Mayor Gavin Newsom had ordered his city clerk to issue same-sex marriage licenses in San Francisco, she was so moved that she poured her heart into an op-ed celebrating a new era of gender-neutral marriage in the mainstream. But when she showed it to a friend, the feedback was a buzzkill: scrap it.
Except for one line—the one where she explained how the issue was particularly personal for her, because she had married her gay best friend to keep him from being deported.
That’s the story, her friend told her, that people will want to hear.
Monroy took her advice, and this month—exactly 10 years after Newsom ordered the city clerk to issue licenses to same-sex couples—her memoir The Marriage Act: The Risk I Took To Keep My Best Friend In America…And What It Taught Us About Love is being released by Soft Skull Press. Monroy will discuss and read from the book at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Wed., Feb. 19 at 7pm.
In the book, Monroy writes about her marriage to her good friend Emir (to protect his identity, she’s altered his name, and only included his first name), a gay man from a Muslim country who faces a life lived in the closet, or physical violence, if he were to be deported from the U.S. She doesn’t reveal which country her friend is from, instead playfully referring to it as “Emiristan.” The story takes place shortly after 9/11, a time when many Americans had a newfound distrust of anyone from the Middle East, making Emir’s pursuit of U.S. citizenship much more challenging.
It was Monroy that came up with the idea that they should get married, knowing it was the easiest way to ensure him citizenship before he could be deported. Had he been straight, he could have done that with his lover, but since his lover was another man this was, of course, not an option. The irony of the whole thing, that he and Monroy were able to marry as two platonic friends while he and his lover couldn’t, hadn’t struck her yet.
“My concern at the time wasn’t political at all. That was probably the furthest thing from my mind,” Monroy says. “I was more obsessed with not getting caught, and just having our plan work out. Basically, I was 22. It was something rash that we did for immigration purposes.”
Throughout the book, Monroy maintains that what they were doing was likely not even illegal.
“I think it’s all a grey area. I know it’s illegal to marry someone to keep them in the country if they’re paying you, and you don’t know them. It’s hard to say for a couple like us who are close friends, who live together, who share everything,” Monroy says. “I feel like when it comes down to it, it would be a really difficult thing to prove because—and I ask that in the book over and over again—how do you prove love?”
The book describes the details of their marriage, which also brings up a lot of questions about marriage. Is there such a thing as a “real” marriage, and if so, how is that defined? They may have not had sexual intimacy, but they had every other form of intimacy, and in fact got closer through being married. The wedding vows really meant something to them, and so did the commitment they made to each other.
In fact, they stayed married longer than was even required. It’s only required that a couple stay married for two years for a person to gain citizenship. They were married for three years before divorcing.
“We liked it. It was a good marriage. We were good for each other. We were there for each other. We still shared our apartment. We were still best friends—we were even better friends than we were before,” Monroy says.
It wasn’t just because Monroy wanted to keep her best friend in the country that she suggested marriage—there were other motivations driving her, as well. She came into adulthood with a strong need for family and stability because of her lack of it growing up.
“I was an only child. My parents are divorced and I don’t really have a relationship with my father. I always wanted to be married and have a family. I didn’t have a traditional nuclear family unit. I think that led me to idealize it a little bit, and see it as my ultimate dream to build what I didn’t have growing up,” Monroy says.
They might have stayed married longer had a few things not happened. One was that Monroy was starting to get serious with someone else who didn’t like the fact that Monroy was already married. More importantly, Monroy’s mother found out about it and insisted that they get a divorce right away.
Monroy’s mother worked in immigration, specifically investigating cases of immigration fraud. She was exactly the kind of person they didn’t want finding out what they were doing.
“She was really angry. Like, ‘why would you do this?’ It was going against her career and everything she has worked for her entire life,” Monroy says. “Then over time, it was mostly in the writing of the book, when I would go back and interview her and I asked her more about the process and the legal aspects of it, she started to come around and see my point.”
Monroy’s mother has since become supportive. She jokes that if Monroy gets arrested, “it’ll be great publicity for the book,” and she’s even agreed to read her dialogue from the book at readings whenever she’s available.
There is some discussion in the book of the other methods Emir attempted to gain citizen status before they got married—none of which panned out, in part because of how reactionary a lot of people had become toward people from the Muslim world in the aftermath of 9/11.
“People were upset and acting irrationally. At the time, Emir was in the process of looking for a job, and he said, ‘Now they’re going to see my name on the resume and throw it away,’” Monroy says.
That kind of prejudice still exists today, but the intensity of it has calmed down in recent years, says Monroy. She argues that the same can be said of gay rights—while homophobia is in no way gone, there have been incredible strides since Newsom offered marriage to gay couples in 2004.
“You can see the difference that a matter of a decade makes. We’re still in the battle, but I thought it was going to be a much longer, more drawn out kind of thing before we got to the place before we had any equality in gender-neutral marriage. The speed of it is a welcome and happy surprise. I can almost look at this book as a time capsule, and how we learned from history,” Monroy says.
Another odd surprise that Monroy had while writing the book was discovering that there are actually other people just like them out there that have done the same thing.
“It’s definitely something that’s out there, but I don’t think we talk about it that much. I hadn’t heard about that many couples that did the same thing until really recently, when I started talking about the story,” Monroy says.
Since their divorce, the two have stayed close friends. She still considers him family. In fact, he gave her away at her wedding last year to her current husband. It was an emotional moment for Monroy because she often reflected on her lack of a relationship with her father as a driving force behind just how close she and Emir became—and then he played that very role for her on one of the most important days of her life.
Monroy doesn’t at all regret her marriage to Emir because only good things came from it. Emir got to stay in the country, and she gained a new family member.
“The larger effect of the marriage on our friendship was that it brought us closer,” Monroy says. “One thing that my mother said when she first found out was that I’d taken the concept of marriage lightly,” she says. “But I think it was quite the opposite. Every marriage takes work and effort, which was true for us. Either a fake marriage requires those things too, or my marriage to Emir wasn’t fake.”
Liza Monroy will speak at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Wed, Feb. 19 at 7pm; free.
