No Republican Shall Inherit

Jared: "Now this was the mid seventies. I was on an airbase in Florida. We had to keep the fighter planes loaded because, you see, this was only twelve years after the missile crisis. We had to be ready. Who knew what the Russians were up to? We were geared up. We were ready to fight." // A metaphor, maybe. A photo on their Tumblr page with a caption in yellow prose. Bruce: "We always knew—for 35 years—we always knew whatever we did, or whoever we were with, we knew where we'd end up. That's my best friend. There is nothing on this planet I love more, and if someone jumps in the middle of us, we'll cut their fucking throats, do you understand? We have guns. We're Trannie Oakley, okay? We will shoot them." // In October 2016, with Hillary Clinton poised to win the presidency, Bruce and Jared asked—may it please the court—for their adoption to be vacated. They'd seen it happen all their lives. A friend would die—HIV, old age, cancer—and the family would annul the will: "They'd say, 'They were never family, they ain't no kin.' And they'd take the house, they'd take everything. Highway robbery." // When Jared got cancer in 2005, Bruce adopted him, and for eleven years each carried a card in his wallet: Case Number FA-2005-137: "Family recitation: grantors have established a legal, lineal relationship in Tulsa County." It meant their will would be honored. It meant Bruce could visit Jared in the hospital. They'd seen friends turned out by hospitals refusing to honor decades of love. // Jared: "They cleared the courtroom until all that was left was a man in an orange jumpsuit shackled to a hook in the floor, and us. Now, we're not used to hearing 'no,' so when the judge ruled that the adoption would not be vacated and we couldn't be legally married, well…. But later we learned that he asked our lawyer, 'Y'all gonna take this up?' And that meant he wanted to establish a precedent: If he told us 'no' and then wrote the decision in such and such a way, and we could get a 'yes' from the state supreme court, then there'd be a precedent. And then Trump happened."