“What is your religion?”

Coming across with the severity of a grand inquisitor, this isn’t a question we expect from a Lyft driver, though it is a question that transports us. It takes us quickly into another scene, another story, another genre.

Just moments ago, we were having a kiss, one of those perfect city corner kisses that happens when you’re a little drunk on wine and cocktails and each other, hands clinching a waist, one knee bent to lift a high-heeled foot. Passionate and innocent all at once. A kiss for the movies – something straight out of those classics where flush cheeks glow as silver as the moonlight reflecting on the rain-slick streets. That is, if any of those old screen kisses had been between lesbians.

It’s the first of July, and our on-the-road honeymoon which started in San Francisco at the tail end of Pride Month has so far brought us north to Seattle for a few days of sightseeing before we start working our way back east. But for that moment, the world held still.

It only started moving again as I noticed out of the corner of my eye that our ride back to the hotel had just slowed to the curb. Our lips peeled apart into smiles we still wore when we slid into the back seat. We smoothed our dresses under us, and Kat greeted the driver and asked him how he was doing this evening.

“Fine, fine,” he said, sounding strangely irritated. We both noticed and glanced at each other curiously across the back seat, but we shrugged as the car lurched forward, the motion sharply closing the door that I hadn’t yet had time to shut. I’m certainly not one to object if a driver prefers to forego the chitchat. But he didn’t. “Where you coming from?” he asked.

“We had an amazing dinner downtown! This is such a beautiful city!” Kat answered with the kind of chipper chattiness that can’t be faked, or at least that doesn’t come as naturally to me.

When he didn’t respond and I saw his eyes reflecting intensely in the rearview mirror, I tried. “How about you, pal – busy night?”

“Fine,” he said again. And that was when he asked, with a sharp turn that made Kat lean into me, “So what is your religion?”

Our smiles melt off, and we sober up fast. It’s the sort of question at a sort of moment that makes a person want to say, “Excuse me?” except that there is no mistaking it. So instead, Kat simply tells him with a firm, poised politesse, “Sorry, but that’s personal, and I don’t talk about religion with people I don’t know.”

My wife can go from giddy party girl to regal stateswoman in a heartbeat. I adore her.

“Mmhmm,” he mutters something, speeding up. “So, you don’t go to church.” That one isn’t a question at all.

I chime in. “She just politely explained that we aren’t discussing that with you. Respect that, please.” After a quiet beat, I think maybe I can just distract him. Noticing his baseball cap, I try, “So, how are the Mariners doing this season?”

“Yeah,” he huffs, shaking his head, “okay, okay...”

I’m hoping, maybe naively, that that’s the end of it. I’m taking some notes on this with my phone in my left hand as Kat holds onto my right.

“Hey,” she whispers to me. “Where are we going?” I look up, and we’ve turned onto a ramp to an interstate highway. “We didn’t take the highway to get from the hotel to the restaurant, why are we getting on one now to go back?”

“Hey,” I put the question to him, “why are we getting on the interstate?”

“Faster this way,” he says curtly. It could be true. Sometimes, in city traffic, slipping onto the interstate for a few miles can spare you a lot of stop-and-go. Or, it could be something else, the kind of thing feared by any woman in an unfamiliar place in the car of an unfamiliar man. Or something even worse. “You know why you don’t want to talk about your faith!” He raises his voice in a spike of anger and points his finger back over his shoulder as he turns his head toward us. “Because you don’t have faith! Because you are out of touch with your creator!”

“All right, that’s enough!” I raise my own voice even louder than his. “Keep your hands on the wheel, keep your eyes on the road, keep your fuckin’ mouth shut, and get us off the highway at the next exit.” I’ve already decided – we’re going to get out of this car just as soon as we can do it without tucking and rolling.

Kat tugs on my hand. I look to her and she’s holding up the GPS map on her phone. We are still moving in the general direction of the hotel. And he has turned his head forward and returned his hands to the wheel. But he misses the next exit.

“You don’t yell at me!” he shouts back. “And you both should be ashamed!”

Pride Month is over. We’re into something else now. But it isn’t shame. At least not yet.

I abandon the e-mail I was drafting to the rideshare company and open my phone app, still watching Kat’s GPS, trying to decide at what point we would cross a threshold into definite danger and call in an emergency. Meanwhile, Kat has lost her cool just enough to engage him again and tell him that our religion is none of his business, but he likely can’t hear her anyway over his own monologue which he spits out in increasingly splintered fragments of hate.

“You will see what comes from a life of sin! You must not love your families at all, huh! No respect! You need to get right with the Lord!”

“Take us off the damn highway!” I shout again, and finally, he does. And quickly, I do recognize the buildings from a walk earlier in the day. We’re a few blocks from the hotel.

“Pull over here,” Kat commands.

“I will drive you the whole way,” he says.

“Pull over!” I bellow, leaning forward. Kat grabs my shoulder as though she’s worried I’m going to reach around and choke him if he doesn’t. But he does.

Kat gets out first, and I follow rapidly after. While the door is still open, I see Kat suddenly halt and spin back. “My purse,” she says.

As I reach back in and grab it, I see him with his whole arm out the window, shouting at my wife, “You are lost because you have no faith! You have no God! You need to go to church!”

“Hey!” I yell as I stand back out of the car. And then it happens. Words come out of my mouth faster than I can think them much less think not to say them. I say them. “You go to church! I’m gonna go eat that gorgeous woman’s pussy for an hour! THAT’S MY GOD!”

And I slam the door hard enough that the car shakes.

I’m shaking too.

To the shocked smattering of pedestrians within earshot, I look crazed, hysterical, and utterly crass, which at this moment is precisely what I am.

Kat waits for me at the corner of a building, but she pivots as soon as she’s sure I’m coming along, and we fall quietly into step as the whole scene disappears behind us.

“I’m sorry,” I say, as we both catch our breath. I’m unable to look at her face.

“It’s all right,” she says. “It’s over.”

But why doesn’t it feel that way?

Maybe because of a moment I’d almost forgotten, a decade and a half old and a long way from here. It comes back to me now. An incident outside a restaurant one evening in the middle of a science fiction convention, when an old girlfriend and I, both scantily costumed, paused for a kiss in the parking lot.

She was the one to notice and point out the young men in polo shirts with their collars upturned at the table just inside the window, leering at us so very heterosexually. She rolled her eyes and groaned and lifted a hand to them with her fingers separated in the V of the Vulcan salute from Star Trek. I grabbed her wrist and pulled that V to my face and flicked my tongue through it, sparking uproar among the frat boys before we turned and frolicked away.

“Really?” she laughed.

I shrugged and said, “Lick labia and prosper,” without a hint of remorse.

If I’d stopped to reflect on it then – which I likely didn’t – I might have concluded that the act, however uncouth, made a twisted kind of sense, followed a certain tradition and upheld a peculiar legacy of queer resistance enacted through shameless sexual liberation. We are a people for whom to love has literally been a crime, and thus, unavoidably, to make love has for much of our history been an act of transgression against a society that would shun and shame us.

And we have rightly glorified in our transgressions. I came of age and came out of the closet in the era of Queer as Folk and The L Word, when a lot of young gay men still considered anonymous, promiscuous, semi-public sex to be their birth right in a world that denied them the opportunity for anything else, and when a lot of lesbians bragged about getting more action than homophobic bros and laughed at the orgasm gap documented in straight marriages, at men’s inability to please their wives half as well as we could.

We were a generation who, while far removed from Stonewall, remembered that the first Pride Parade had been a riot and knew that by the same token, a riot had been our first parade. For us, celebration and joy and love have always been inextricably bound up with rebellion and resistance and revolution. If the best revenge is living well, then let them watch us marching and dancing and kissing in the streets.

Pride, we have long since decided, is not a sin. And if the two cannot be separated, then when so justified, Wrath must not be either. Just a few years back, there was even a push to bring it to the forefront of our consciousness. It started, as things do these days, as a joke on the internet – something like “hey, how about we make July LGBT Wrath Month?” – and spawned a brief roar of conversation on the growing chasm between the genesis of Pride and the state of it today. Hot takes about the way corporations will paint their logos rainbow with one hand while handing wads of cash to homophobic politicians with the other. Think pieces on how major cities and their police forces can rake in the tourism dollars of a flashy parade of free love for a month and spend the rest of the year brutalizing young homeless queers. There is the general sense that we have forgotten something of our roots, that we have become complacent. Maybe we have. Maybe I have.

I certainly feel something now that I didn’t feel in that parking lot all those years ago. Maybe it’s that simple – that I’m older now, and not the same person I was then. And I’d like to believe that the world grew up a little along with me, that it isn’t the same as it used to be either. After all, now it’s a world where we can get married and adopt kids and put family photos on our desks at work without getting fired – some of us, at least. And yet, every time I allow myself to relax, I’m reminded it’s still a world where a little kiss on the sidewalk, even in a liberal West Coast city, can be a dangerous transgression.

Rationalizations and context aside, though, what I find myself telling Kat, as we walk the last block, is again, “I’m sorry.” She looks over at me. “For what I said. I’m so sorry.”

“Oh,” she says. “Well, yeah. You know I really don’t like the word ‘pussy.’ If you’d just said ‘vagina’ instead–

“I’m being serious.”

“Me too!” she says. “I mean if you’d just said you were going to eat my ‘vagina,’ well... you are going to, right?”

She manages to draw a small smile out of me. “Yeah,” I tell her.

“Promise?” she bumps her butt into my side.

“Yeah.”

“So can we forget about it?”

“Yeah.”

And I try. I really do. From the stylish hotel lobby where our heels click-clack on the marble floor to the mirrored elevator bringing us to our chic modern room where she dims the lights and goes to freshen up while I sit at the window looking out past the smooth cream-shaded brick exterior to the twinkling streets beyond. The whole way, I really try to forget.

But something is roiling inside me, and it’s much worse than getting jerked out of complacency. It isn’t about being spurred to wrath but rather the form that my wrath took, the form I’m so accustomed to it taking. I’m tired of it now. In some deep, wounded way, I’m tired of it all. I’m tired of the very idea that because we are who we are, it means love is rebellion or love is resistance or love is revolution or love is anything at all except love, that love is about anything or anyone except her and me. And I hate myself for letting it be. And by the time she gets back, she finds my cheeks glistening in the soft light.

“Rhi...” she says, sitting next to me on the window ledge, reaching for my hands. “What is it? Did what that man said really upset you that much?”

“No, I’m not upset about what he said,” I tell her. “I’m upset because of what I said.” It’s hard to talk now – I’m sniffling. “Because I meant it.”

“Yeah, but we already talked about that,” she tells me.

“No, I mean the other part, I mean...” she looks confused, and I’m not getting any clearer.

“I don’t even remember – it happened so fast – what did you–”

“Because it is sacred to me!” I erupt, my hands coming to my temples in quivering claws, raking my hair as I hunch over, streaming tears, trying to speak between gasping breaths. “Because I don’t use the word ‘sacred’ for very much at all but loving you – sex – with you – is sacred to me. And I feel like I – I polluted it – lowered it – lowered you – by using it like a weapon, and I’m just so so sorry.”

“Woah, woah,” she comes forward and her arms circle around me, and she holds me shaking. “Shh...” she says as she waits for my weeping to slow, and then she tells me, “honey, I don’t know what to say to all that. Except I can tell you that you are much more upset about this than I am. But if you really need to hear it – I forgive you.”

The words lift something from my heavy heart, and I say little else because there’s little else to say. She leads me to bed, and we lie awake and hold each other a long time. While it’s difficult for me to believe, I sit in the warmth of her and slowly absorb the truth of what she said, which is that she isn’t angry, because as much as I love her, she loves me back so powerfully and so purely that nothing could tarnish or diminish it. It feels miraculous. Like Grace.

And once again, the world slips away, and my head clears, and soon enough we’re both smiling as though it never happened, and while the night isn’t done... the rest is just for us.