One of the first lessons I learned in life was that family is where you find it. In my parents' case, that was in England during the mid-1950s. My father was stationed there as part of the NATO post-war forces and, during that time, he and my mom were lovingly adopted by my uncle Norman and my aunts, Rosemary and May. It would prove to be a familial tie that would last decades.

As a child, I learned that, no, they weren't my blood relatives but my parents had accorded them familial standing without reservation and with much affection. Later, I would learn that my uncle and aunts had found each other during while serving in the British ambulance corp. There, in the midst of World War II, during a time of bombs and rumble and death, they found each other. As my siblings grew up, we grew curious about our English relatives. At first, we voiced a simple “why hadn't any of them married?” Later, when we learned that Uncle Norman had purchased a laundromat for our aunts, our interest grew cagier. Why hadn't Uncle Norman married either of them? My parents stood silently by, never answering us fully out of respect for our British relatives' privacy, leaving us to create our own mythology. We decided for ourselves that Uncle Norman had loved them both so much that he could never bring himself to choose between them.

It was, of course, a wildly romantic notion. And years later, after discovering queerness, I garnered the real answer: My uncle and aunts had, in reality, formed an alternative family. And my biological family was fortunate to benefit from their familial love and care for decades.

Indeed, I owe my very identity to my aunts. Before I was born, my mother's desire to high-femme her daughter-to-be was so great that she had planned to saddle me with a name so antiquarian name that it carried images of frills, curls, and lady-like curtsies: Priscilla.

But my aunts saved me by pointing out that my nickname would be Prissy, a name ripe for sneering. Even worse, kids would didn't like me were bound to hurl “Pissy” at me. Horrified, my mother swiftly changed my name to Debra. For which I, in both my childhood tomboy persona and my adult neither-butch-nor-femme queer-loving bisexual self, is forever thankful. (My inner child, the trannyfag, also sends his gratefulness.)

With such lessons starting with my very birth, it's no wonder that on a cold winter's day, a middle-aged me would stand on the steps of Connecticut's state capitol building holding a sign that proclaimed “Straight Mom for Marriage Equality.”

Surrounded by two thousand others people who agreed with me, I used my heterosexual privilege to make a point. I had to. I had to stand as a counter-voice to the well over four thousand presumably straight people who had gathered a week earlier, demanding a Defense of Marriage amendment. I could not let that demonstration – and that desire to further institutionalize prejudice -- go unchallenged.

There, I stood in allegiance to my queer loved ones and in opposition to straight prejudice. As I did, college students aimed their cell phones at me, took my photo, then waved to me, smiling. A butch dyke spotted my sign and cheered me on. Later, she would hug me in fierce, giving solidarity. An air of accomplishment surrounded us as we made ourselves known. Afterwards, when I ordered up a cup of tea before heading home, the guy at the coffeehouse saw the event sticker on my coat and asked me how the rally went. “I wanted to go but I had to work,” he said, adding as he handed me my cup of tea, “but my friends were there.”

And, in old racist terms, I would've never guessed him as queer folk, he passed so perfectly in straight world. I hope I passed equally well in his. And that someday passing itself will pass into oblivion.

Here, in Connecticut, there's a tension in the air. As a border state to Massachusetts, we're well aware that local forces against queer marriage – largely Christian denominations of both the conservative mainstream and evangelical, charismatic persuasions – have begun pressuring the state to act. But for far longer, a group of activists for marriage equality have quietly worked for social justice with state law-making committees. The judicial department has already been asked – and has answered – just what rights queer folks have been denied by virtue of their orientation. It started with hospital issues, grew to include an examination of probate inequalities, then finally in terms of marriage inequality. The codified law has been explored thoroughly and, I suspect, in a depth most U.S. states have yet to contemplate.

In the process, the state government discovered how prejudice proliferated in the deficiency of some 2,000 laws. Already, some next of kin issues, such as wills and hospitalizations, have been ameliorated and equalized.

But despite this new awareness, the tension remains and I expect I'll have to carry my Straight Mom sign again in the near future. When I do, I will hold it to honor the many queer individuals who have graced my life.

Specifically, I will carry the sign for my dear friend, Lynn. In high school, we were fellow musicians and close friends, me with my gender-neutral (even then) oboe, her with her soft butch trumpet. After reading a collection of the letters between Tchaikovsky and his patroness in which he had poured forth the torment of being homosexual, I told her how terrible I thought it was that anyone should ever have to live in a closet. Weeks later, Lynn tried to come out to me. Unfortunately, I wouldn't recognize Janis Ian as a lesbian icon until years later. I missed Lynn's cue.

Today, Lynn is a Methodist minister. She advocates from within for both marriage and ministerial equality. For her, I will hold the sign.

I will carry the sign for my son's friend, Danny. At twenty-one, Danny has just graduated from the special ed school he and my son attend. As someone with Asperger's Syndrome, an offshoot of autism, Danny is incapable of looking you in the eye when he talks, but he carries a In-Synch concert DVD and a large plastic sandwich bag filled with boy band pictures with him everywhere he goes. And he knows Asian muscle boys like you wouldn't believe.

I'll carry the sign for Danny because I adore him and resented the fact that the law gives him more legitimacy to marry as an autistic individual than as a gay man.

I will hold my sign up to remember Anna. During a bitter divorce, her spouse went to Child Services and sacrificed their children to the foster system because he loathed her interests in leather sex. Today, Anna lives with and loves a MtF transsexual. She openly advocates for transsexual rights in a world that's even more hostile to transfolk than it is to other sexual minorities, all while carrying a painful, personal burden foisted upon her by an insensitive and narrow-minded system. I will carry it in the hope that Child Services has overcome its own ignorance and reunited her with her own children. (And Child Services should know better, what with the number of throw-away kids who are tossed because they're queer.)

I'll hold my sign up for my cousin, Mary Ellen, and her partner, Susan. Mary Ellen is actually an uncle-by-marriage's niece but when she came out to her own family, it caused such discord that she moved to Florida. When my dad and his siblings began to retire to Florida, they discovered her there and adopted her and Susan into our family. Two years ago on the sad occasion of my mother's death, I welcomed Mary Ellen with a huge hug and much thanks. Weeks earlier, she had knocked on my mom's door, flowers in hand, on what would turn out to be my mom's last Mother's Day. It was a gesture I will never forget, one that I'll honor by carrying the sign -- especially since the state of Florida isn't likely to give her and Sue equal rights any time soon.

Once again, family is where you find it, what you make of it, and how you appreciate it. Its examples never end.

My “Straight Mom” sign actually honors countless other queer folk beyond those I've singled out here. It starts with my beloved queer writer-friends in Northampton, Massachusetts and includes all the queer folks I worked with in corporate America, lived with in college dorms and known about town. And it recognizes those young queers I remember, from Sherry, that baby butch who bravely started wearing camouflage to high school in 1973, to Tommy, who in sixth grade was a flaming queen-in-waiting, biding his time as he waited for puberty to make him outrageous. Innumerable, these experiences are innumerable.

Of course, I want my queer loved one and friends to have the right to say “I Do” and to be awarded all the benefits that comes with the exchange of vows. I want them to have the same rights I do, regardless of whether they'll choose to exercise them. When I first became aware of gay rights as a teen, I saw people joining up and becoming suddenly visible. I saw them fight against social oppression. And immediately I saw it in the same light I saw the civil rights struggle. It made sense then and it makes sense now. The fight for marriage equality is simply the penultimate step in a long upward struggle for legitimacy and inclusiveness.

Feel free to stand against marriage if you wish. Go ahead and question it as an institution. As a minor league sex radical, I'm more than willing to acknowledge its many faults and shortcomings. But before I can even consider the question of whether the marriage should be institutionally dismantled, I must – I absolutely must – fight for all American to be accorded access to it, and as long my queer loved ones are excluded, their fight for greater rights takes precedence and priority over whether marriage is viable as an institution.

As I write this essay, I've just lost a dear friend to a years-long battle with cancer. Tonight, my family will attend her wake; tomorrow, the funeral service. And I'll remember how, in healthier times, we sat together folding her laundry and talk turned to the topic of loving your kids, no matter what. It would be the one time Nick and I would talk about queer rights (and one of the few times a straight mom would openly broach the subject with me). Nick told that she had walked into adulthood with much of the prejudice of her Catholic upbringing, only to find herself re-evaluating it when a gay friend had come out to her in the workplace. During the months she comforted him after his lover of many years left him, her perceptions would shatter entirely and a new mosaic took shape.

“His feelings were just like mine,” she told me in explaining what exactly changed her mind about queer folk.

His feelings were just like mine. That was the humanizing moment for Nick, seeing a gay man's heartbreak and experiencing it as if it was her own.

I write about Nick not just because she is one of the few straight mothers with whom I've had this pivotal discussion, but because Nick was the first “where you find it” family member of my adulthood. She was the “serious girlfriend,” the ex who came before me, yet she and my husband remained friends. Because they actually forged a friendship out of their previous relationship and because that friendship was so genuine, I did not want to disturb it. So I followed the example set long ago by my gay uncle and lesbian aunts: I welcomed Nick as family. She became one of my bridesmaids, my husband was an usher in her wedding, we would become godparents to her son, and she and her husband would return the honor for our kids.

Life's early lesson came full circle.

Every experience I've had in forming and keeping alternative familial bonds, in witnessing queer love and family, and in seeing straight people embrace their own realizations about sexual equality makes my belief in marriage equality resonant more deeply. Every instance confirms it and strengthens it. Even in the shadow of a sad loss, remembrance plucks the string of resonance and strengthens the melody of the song. And it reminds me that it remains my good fortune that I can claim that my family is, thankfully, everywhere.

Pride colors, included.