At around the same time that anti-gay activists were making frantic declarations about preserving marriage by excluding queers, two of our friends embarked on two legal, heterosexual, loveless marriages. One of the grooms entered the contract so that his Canadian fag hag could remain stateside; the other was lured in by a fourth-degree Friendster from Mexico who offered a large sum of cash in exchange for an opportunity to be naturalized. Both relationships have proven successful, if not somewhat unstable: the foreigners get to stay, but under conditions normally reserved for the production of children and consolidation of property. The institution of American Marriage is plenty strange already; and introducing the even-more-arbitrary institution of American Immigration has a tendancy to turn everything upside-down.

For example: in the mid-90s, Kelleth Chinn was touring France with his band, Big Soul. At one concert, a bilingual french woman happened to be present in the audience, and wound up helping the band to communicate with the other concert-goers. Kelleth and the French woman totally fell for each other, but their situations prevented them both from moving to a new country; so they dated from opposite ends of the Atlantic for three years. Finally, she moved to the U.S., and after a few weeks of dating in person, they got married. And now, a few years later, a movie's been made that's grounded loosely in the Oakland-based couple's experience.