Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi’s marriage will be the first celesbo wedding of it’s kind and the spotlight holds a certain amount of pressure. No one’s getting exclusive coverage. DeGeneres and de Rossi are going the egalitarian route like proper lesbians and sending photos out to everyone.

This should keep the press from stalking them like hungry wolverines and they’ll get to put out a positive image of queers in matrimonial bliss all over the media. Seems like everyone’s celebrating, except a few bitchy tabloid queens. For example, this nasty quote in Defamer: “Ellen has a history of replacing her partners when they get older and Portia is looking a little ropey,” says one tabloid insider. “She’ll totally undermine the gay community if the marriage falls apart.” It’s a good thing the welfare of the gay community doesn’t hinge on my ability to keep a relationship, because I’d sink our ship for sure.

Luckily Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon will have their second San Francisco marriage and they’ve been together for over 50 years.

In celebration of queers getting gay California marriages, I’m getting a gay California divorce. My divorce is gay because I’m gay, but my marriage was a straight one. It was 15 years ago and I just never got around to dissolving it. I started the proceedings when one girlfriend wanted to get married, but dropped the ball after our inevitable, painful, drama-filled break-up. I picked up the paperwork again when another partner wanted to marry me, but then, of course, we broke up.

The story of my marriage goes like this: my then boyfriend Ian and I moved to San Francisco together when we were 21. I remember the day we walked over the hill from the Sunset District into the Castro and suddenly all the men were holding hands and we both thought “home.”

A year into our new San Francisco life, Ian left town for six months to make a film in Southern California. During that time I mysteriously developed a new habit of sitting at the dyke bar in the evening, chatting with the very butch bartender and getting excited when older butches would send me drinks. I was in my bi-now-gay-later phase and scared I’d be rejected for not being a real dyke, so it took a few weeks before I got up enough nerve to actually start making out with girls. Soon enough though, I was hanging out at the club every weekend, making out with half-naked girls on the dance floor. (It was all the rage to go shirtless at that time.) Next thing you know, I developed several major crushes and started pining to get laid. One night, my biggest, hottest crush wrote her number on my hand as she was leaving. I was so turned on and she was so fucking cool about it, looking over her shoulder as she walked away mouthing “call me.”

I woke up with a hangover and cried when I realized her number was illegible, smeared from holding a sweaty Corona all night.

Ian came home shortly after that and I immediately confessed my newly realized dykeyness. He said something like “duh,” and we talked about the ramifications, ultimately deciding we were in love and we’d just stay together and see what happened.

Six months later I was working a regular job with benefits and wanted to add Ian to my medical insurance. So, one day we just got on the Muni to City Hall and paid 80 bucks to get a marriage license. When the clerk told us you actually had to have a ceremony we were at a loss. We didn’t want a ceremony; we just wanted to share medical benefits while one of us actually had them.

As an answer, one of our friends registered as a minister in the Universal Life Church and signed our license into legality. Her Haight Street apartment had roof access and a Kool cigarette billboard you could climb on to, so we had an impromptu wedding party. Someone went to Safeway and got me a bouquet of purple kale and plastic rings for a quarter. We climbed up the billboard, vowed to never restrict or oppress each other in any way, and our manic panic blue-haired, heavily pierced minister pronounced us married. I tossed some kale into a group of wasted friends, Ian got dental insurance and we continued with our bohemian life. We eschewed the terms husband and wife, and everything stayed the same. For the next few years, we slept around with various friends, had three-ways and occasional four-ways, and made out with boys and girls of various genders in that San Francisco kind of way. Eventually I fell in love with a woman named Karen, and my polyamorous, free-loving bisexual phase came to its natural end. That was 10 years ago.

The thing that strikes me about my half-ass straight marriage is how easy it was for me to get and how much I took it for granted. My lesbian relationships have all been more conservative and traditional than my one straight one. But now that I’m a monogamy-inclined femme dyke with a slight U-haulish tendency, I can’t get that same piece of paper.

So now that gay marriage is legal in my home state, I’m officially celebrating with a big gay divorce. I just received divorce papers in the mail and I signed and sent them back on Friday. With a soon-to-be ex-husband and two failed marriage proposals, I’m starting to feel a little like Liz Taylor, so I’m avoiding anything to do with marriage from here on in. But it's good to know California would give me one if I wanted it.