The original version, “She’s Funny That Way,” first charted in 1929, sung in different releases by Gene Austin and Ted Lewis.

I wasn’t fully out yet, so I privately celebrated Dylan’s queer advocacy, not considering I might use the track in my own wedding. At that time, I was deep into a thesis on Dylan’s creative process. The song had come out earlier that year, on the 2018 album Universal Love: Wedding Songs Reimagined. We face each other in sweatpants and sweaters, and I command Alexa to play Bob Dylan’s “He’s Funny That Way.” He peels away from our spreadsheet of guests, supplies, and expenses to meet me in the bedroom of our Brighton apartment. It represents how much we’ve invested in our relationship, and in ourselves.Ī week before our reception, three days married, I beckon Peter to come listen to the song I’ve chosen for our first dance. For both of us, then, this reception serves as a coming out party, the kind many queers crave when they finally embrace who they are. Peter distanced himself from his Pentecostal parents a few years earlier, in his late twenties, when he fled his homeland. Peter’s family isn’t here at all, except for his sister and cousin Skyping in from Trinidad, waving and blowing noise makers through Peter’s laptop. They leave after the taco buffet, though, as it was getting late and roads are icy tonight. In place of my parents, two sets of aunts and uncles drive down from Vermont to join the forty or fifty guests gathered in this side room of a warehouse brewery just north of Boston. As for my dad, he died of a heart attack nearly a decade ago, so he gets a pass. And, she doesn’t do well in the cold, even though she’s from New Hampshire. It’s December, and she plays piano during the holidays for churches and old folks’ homes, so she has prior commitments. With only three weeks’ notice, Mom declined to fly up from Orlando. Peter and I fell in love after more than a year of dating, and now that we’ve decided to do this, to get married, we’re moving fast.

After performing the straight guy into my early thirties, I’ve just started coming out to family and friends. Mom hasn’t met Peter-in fact, she’s only recently learned to ask about him on the phone. I’m in dark jeans and the gray coat I bought when I flew home to Orlando for a friend’s funeral, the coat Mom urged me to take back to Boston, just in case. We’re dressed in the same clothes we wore to the ceremony at Boston City Hall ten days earlier, Peter dashing in his fitted black slacks and suit, a flower in his lapel. On a table behind us rests the last of the wedding cake, a homemade near-disaster we salvaged by plopping a store-bought cake atop our own lopsided attempt, drizzling the two with chocolate, and festooning the confection with fruit-stabbed toothpicks and a wooden sign that reads “Love.” Koozies in a stack bear Peter’s design, a round emblem that reads Paul & Peter, Boston, 2018. Glittery balloons hover over a platter of cake pops. Our backdrop, a wall of beer barrels, rises above a wood-slatted bar.

Bob Dylan’s scratchy croon leads a piano and strings while Peter and I sway in each other’s arms.

Fruity rumpus party town