Sasha and Keri

“I want to marry you the minute I can.”

Sasha and Keri first met at science camp in the sixth grade, though they did not realize this until much later. Both attended Presentation, an all-girls Catholic high school. “Sasha was the first person I met at Presentation High School, at Hi There Day.” They were friends, though not close, but Sasha “knew Keri to be a good person and someone who I liked.”


“We lost touch after graduation and Keri got it in her head to do a search on the internet for me.” “Sasha was always really nice to me. I was very shy and anyone who was nice to me always stuck out in my mind. I had thought about her over the years, and thought about her when I heard that her daddy died.” This was in 1998.

Keri wrote Sasha a note asking if she had attended Presentation. Sasha says, “When I got the note, I thought ‘oh no, someone from high school.’ But she was so nice I thought she deserved at least some response. But I was thinking that this girl is Mormon, so she is probably married to a Mormon husband and has a half a dozen children. So I thought, well, if we are going to have any conversation I am just putting it out there that I am a big dyke. I said it more politely than that, but I wanted to be really up front about who I am so that if there was any weirdness about the religion thing it was out there. She wrote me back, and in the footer of her email was an Indigo Girls lyric. I thought, ‘hmm, that’s interesting, and you say you’re not married.
Well . . . !’ ”

Keri had not come out, even to herself, at this point. “I was raised very Mormon. My folks had a bankruptcy and I quit school to help my family. I still lived with them. I had gone on a few dates with men but not many and at the end of them I would let them hug me but that was it. I had never kissed anybody. So Sasha and I were emailing and then talking on the phone. And one of the first conversations we had I asked her, ‘How do you know if you’re gay?’ She wrote me this beautiful letter, several pages long, and told me that I was beautiful. I thought, ‘you don’t know that I’m beautiful. You haven’t even seen me for 15 years!’ But she told me, ‘I remember who you were.’

“We started having these marathon phone conversations. Which was really funny, because I had dated these guys before and always told them, ‘Listen, I talk on the phone all day at work so if you call and I don’t want to talk, it’s nothing personal.’ But I would get on the phone with her, and she was living in San Diego, and we were having three hour phone conversations.”

Sasha says that one of the things she really noticed about Keri “was that you were kind. I had ended a relationship a couple of months earlier and I thought, ‘forget it. I’m not doing this again. This is too painful and too difficult so no way.’ But there you were. And you were so nice. And I just couldn’t stop thinking about you. I was thinking about you all the time. And it was crazy, because at 31 or 32 . . .” Keri finishes the thought, “I was a Mormon girl living at home with her folks!” They both laugh.

Sasha continues, “I thought, I do not want the responsibility of being The One who possibly screws her up! But it was one of those things. I was irresistibly drawn. I had to write her. I had to call her. And I had to see her. So six or eight weeks later I was in San Jose for a friend’s bridal shower and I arranged to have coffee with her. But after getting some encouragement from friends, I arranged to have dinner instead.”

Keri was still in “friend mode.” She had no idea that Sasha was interested in her. But when Sasha came to pick her up for dinner, Keri says, “My mother knew.” Sasha observes with a laugh, “She gave me the stank eye.” Keri continues, “My mother had told me ‘she’s interested.’ And I said, ‘no she’s not. We’re friends. We’re just going out to dinner.’ I had talked to my mother before that and asked her, ‘What if I was gay?’ She said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t be thrilled because it’s easier if you’re not. But I will always love you and there’s nothing you could do that would change that.’ ”

Before they went to dinner, Sasha says, “Keri came downstairs. And to me she looked like she was dressed for a date. I admit that I was probably seeing a lot of what I wanted to see. So she took me up to her bedroom to have a little conversation,” Keri adds, “Because my mother was planted in the living room and was not leaving.”

“So we got out of the eyes of the watchful chaperone and Keri said, ‘I have a present for you,’ and she pulled out an envelope. In the envelope was a handwritten story—and Keri has beautiful penmanship—and an Eisenhower silver dollar. The story was about a man who always rode the bus. And he was very crufty and grumpy and negative. And one day this negative old guy gets on the bus and he says, ‘I don’t even have quarters to get on the bus. All I have is this worthless old Ike dollar. Can someone give me change?’ A man on the bus changed the dollar into quarters. A few days later the same man gets on the bus but the crufty old man isn’t there. He asks the bus driver where the old man is and the driver says, ‘didn’t you hear? He died.’ So the man decided to keep the dollar to remind him that every day is a good day. Keri had written in her note that she was giving me that dollar to remind me that every day is a good day.” Sasha smiles, “Can you believe that? And to me, this was cementing the deal. She was still in friend mode, but to me . . . .”

Sasha still has the silver dollar and carries it with her in a bag that Keri sewed for her.


They drove to the coast for dinner. On the drive, Sasha told Keri, “You know, I’m kind of sweet on you.” Keri replied, “Oh, I like you too,” completely missing Sasha’s meaning. “Sasha has a very intense gaze. At dinner I was looking down a lot because she was really paying close attention, and I’m shy. I was more shy back then. And it kind of threw me.”

After dinner Sasha suggested they walk down to a little landing down a narrow path. “And I don’t like heights,” says Keri, “But I walked down. And when we were down there, she went to kiss me and I gave her my cheek. I was shocked. I wasn’t expecting it.” She turns to Sasha. “Then you kissed me again and I let you. And it was my first kiss. I’m not really one for public displays of affection. And there was the restaurant with all the windows looking straight at us! Then we went back to the car, and I held your hand. I sat and was thinking the whole way to Santa Cruz. We kissed over the water there. And I liked it. We went to coffee and we started talking. When we got back to the house, I asked you to kiss me again.” They both smile and laugh.

There was a misunderstanding because when Sasha dropped Keri off at home, she said, “I’ll see you the next time.” Keri thought she was saying, “that was nice and maybe I’ll see you when I’m back in San Jose.” But, Keri remembers, “she had told me she missed having someone say hello to her when she got home. So when I got home I left a message on her answering machine so she would have a message saying ‘welcome home’ when she got there.”

Sasha says, “I had no idea I had committed this faux pas. I was elated. I was on Cloud Nine. I woke up happy the next day and I wrote you a poem,” Keri adds, “which I slept with under my pillow for a very long time.”

When Keri got home, her mother asked, “Did you have a good time?” Keri said, “Yes, I had a wonderful time.” Her mother asked, “Did she kiss you?” and Keri answered, “Yes, and I liked it very much.” “I could tell my mother anything. And she was afraid that Sasha was a total dog who was doing a rebound thing. She was very afraid of me being hurt because I was very naïve. So I didn’t tell my sister or my dad because my mom asked me not to.”

“My mom loved Sasha. And we really took it slow.” She told her mother, “I really wish I could tell dad” about her relationship with Sasha. She came home one night “and my mother said, ‘okay I told your father.’ I thought, ‘what part of “I wish I could” didn’t you get?’ When her father got home, he acted as if nothing had happened. Keri asked, “Are we okay?” He said, “About what? Oh, that.” And then he “repeated what my mom said about how it would be harder, but he still loved me.”

After they had been together for about a year, Keri and her family learned that her mother had cancer. Keri was visiting Sasha in San Diego for Christmas. It was 1999, and they were getting ready to go to a New Year’s Eve party when Keri learned that her mother had a grapefruit-sized tumor in her lung.

Shortly after that, Sasha moved back to San Jose because her mother was losing her eyesight. Keri’s mother was in the hospital for several months and while she was there, Sasha would visit and bring her rosemary “so she would have a scent of outside. When she died in August, Sasha put a bouquet of rosemary in the grave along with a pouch with a crystal that she had given her months before for comfort during her illness.

Keri’s father asked that Sasha’s name be presented with the names of the rest of the family at the Mormon temple even though Keri “wasn’t out to any of my church members.”

Around this same time, they had been in the process of looking for a house. After her mother died, she threw herself into looking for a house. “That’s how I dealt. My mother was my best friend. That’s what I did so I didn’t have to go home and face the memories. I channeled all of my energy into that. That way I was moving forward and not dwelling.” Sasha was a little overwhelmed because she had been very close to Keri’s mother, too. “My mother called her ‘puppy Sasha’ because she said she was so eager to please and be loved.”


When they bought the house, Keri’s church members offered to help her move. Keri “wanted to be up front and frank. So I said to the wife of the bishop, ‘You know, Sasha and I aren’t just friends. We’re partners.’ And she said, ‘Oh honey, we’ve known that for a long time.’ And they helped us move. It was wonderful. But that’s why it was extra hurtful with Prop 8, because some of those people who helped us move made donations to the campaign. That same bishop, their family made a donation. It was so painful. I haven’t talked to my mother’s best friend since I found out that she donated.”

Keri tells me about a coworker with whom she considered a friend. This woman approached Keri the day after the election and said, “I want you to know that I still love you but I voted yes.” Keri wonders why she felt the need to share this. She was flabbergasted. The woman continued, “You should have known that I voted this way because I am very conservative.” Later Keri said to her, “You know, it hurt me, and it hurt my family, and it hurts people who have gay family members. You say that it isn’t a personal thing and that you still love me, but it is very personal to me.” Another coworker told Keri that her church was very strongly supporting Proposition 8 but that she voted no because she knew and loved Keri.

She received much more support from her coworkers than not but is “amazed by how all of that support can be colored by this one person who felt the need to assuage her guilt by saying ‘oh I still love you, but I voted yes.’ She could have just said nothing. I continued to be civil, but it took me a while to forgive her. I’m there now where I think I’ve forgiven her. But I don’t look at her the same way. Which is very sad to me.”

Keri says “Sasha was a little hesitant to get married because she had had all of these relationships, but she was my first. I had all this focus and all this love to give her. I was ready to get married.” Sasha says, “I had never had a commitment ceremony with my other two partners. And I thought getting married was a very serious thing to do. I had seen friends who had commitment ceremonies and I’d seen them split. I’d seen them buy property and then seen them split. And I didn’t want this to be one of those things. So even though we’d been together for 4 years at that point I wanted to be sure that even if it was a symbolic wedding—I had no illusions that Gavin’s experiment was real—even just standing up and saying it was a very real gesture. I talked to a close friend about it. Ultimately, I said, ‘I’m just going to do this and trust that this will work out.’ ”

They had an appointment to get married, but before the date arrived the court ordered the city to stop performing marriages. Sasha says, “And when they called us and told us that all the weddings had been cancelled, my heart was broken. And I knew that it was real.” After that, Keri says, “We decided we weren’t going to get married until it was real. We weren’t going to have a commitment ceremony.” But they registered as domestic partners “the first day we could.”

In 2008, “All of a sudden the news started buzzing that the California Supreme Court was going to rule on whether same-sex couples had the right to marry. And lo and behold, we did! When that ruling came out, the minute I heard it I called Keri up and I said, ‘Shall we go shop for a wedding dress? I remember crying on the phone, too. I wanted to do this as soon as I could. After the 2004 thing I told Keri, ‘I want to marry you the minute I can. As soon as this becomes legal, let’s get married.’ We got our marriage license on the first day it was available. We were seventh in line. But we planned to have the ceremony a month later because we wanted it to be nice and we wanted to prepare for it.”


Sasha wanted to be married in a civil ceremony at City Hall by a commissioner or a justice of the peace because that is how her parents were married and they were married for a long time. Keri wanted to be married someplace pretty. The San Jose city chapel is “unlovely.” So they agreed they would be married at San Francisco City Hall. Sasha says, “It doesn’t matter how big the ceremony is, or how much stuff is around it, or if there is a minister or a thousand people watching you. The act of having that document, that binding contract, that’s really it.”


Keri says, “My very Mormon father came down from Utah in his Sunday suit. And my sister and her fiancé came. Sasha’s sister and brother were there.”

I ask what being married means to them. Sasha says, “I would give Keri my kidney. I show up to help take care of her dad. Keri shows up to help me with my mother. Marriage means to be there completely and unconditionally for each other.” Keri adds, “And to have it be recognized. It’s a subtle difference, to have this acknowledged as real. That nobody is going to come in between us.” Sasha says, “Nobody is going to say, ‘you’re not family.’ That still happens. People get run out of the emergency room. We don’t have to explain ourselves to anybody as a married couple. It’s ‘of course.’ It’s dignifying. It’s real.” Keri says, “It almost made me love her even more, just knowing—this is my wife.”

They refer to each other in different ways. They always called each other “partner,” or “girlfriend” before getting married. Sasha says, “I don’t really gravitate to saying wife because of all that old feminist training I have about ‘wife’ and property and subservience and all that. It feels weird to call her my wife because then I wonder, ‘am I the husband?’ So since it doesn’t flow for me, it’s easier to say that she’s my partner or my girlfriend.” Keri says, “I say ‘This is my wife.’ And I like that. I did not call her my wife before we got married, even though I considered myself married because I had made a commitment. And I knew about myself even before I got together with Sasha or discovered that I was gay that I was monogamous. And I knew that once I gave my heart it was going to be forever. And that’s what I have. I can’t look into my future 5 years, 10 years, 50 years without seeing Sasha in it. I just can’t.”


Sasha says, “When we started going out, I knew with Keri that I had to be all in. Which was different from my original strategy post-breakup of not getting tied down. I knew she was a special person. I did not want to do anything unless I felt it. And I felt it after one date. I knew I had to decide right then what I wanted to do with this. I knew she was real. I went with the intention of going all in.”

Keri adds, “I told her that we had to build a strong foundation. That we would go slow and easy and build it up so that leaning on each other there was nothing that would crumble underneath us. I’m really glad that we moved slowly the way we did. We had our first date in 1999 and moved in together in 2002. I look at her sometimes and I think ‘My god, I’m married to the girl I met across the hall at Presentation!’ My dad calls Sasha his other daughter and signs cards to her ‘Love, Dad.’ We’ve been through a lot together. Marriage is supporting each other through good times and bad.”

Marty and Rich

“It was a perfect moment. It wasn’t somebody else, it was us.”

Marty and Rich met 33 years ago. I ask them to tell me the story of how they met and started dating and Marty says, “Ah, well. We never dated. Rich had been dating an acquaintance of mine named Mike for a couple of months. I was at a bar in San Francisco when Mike saw me and introduced me to Rich. And we just stared at each other. We didn’t say a word. And Mike just kept trying to move Rich along because they were supposed to be going somewhere else. And we just kept staring at each other. It was love at first sight. So finally since he couldn’t get Rich out of the bar, Mike asked me to join them. We barely spoke that evening. I can’t remember more than two or three words that we said to each other. The next day we were at Rich’s parents’ house. It was the three of us-Mike, Rich and me, and Rich’s older brother at this pool party and then things really evolved between Rich and me. Two days later I moved into his apartment. Two days after that we opened a joint bank account. And that was 33 years ago.”

They never discussed that they were committing to be together forever. “It was just, ‘Of course!’ ” Marty says, “I wasn’t looking for a partner. I had just gotten out of law school and hadn’t had time to have much fun. I was planning to have fun.” He laughs. “And then I met Rich and everything changed. But there was no sense of crescendo or anything. It was just, well, now I’m hitched for life and things have changed.”

Rich grew up in San Leandro and then went into the military. He came out shortly after he left the service. “And my whole world changed. I was 22. I had my 21st birthday in Vietnam.” When he met Marty, Rich says, “I had just come out. I was just beginning to enjoy the gay life and the disco scene. I had lost 35 or 40 pounds and I was having a great time. And I met Marty and we moved in together and things just changed, I was moving in a new direction."

At the San Jose flea market in 1976


Marty and Rich never had a commitment ceremony, but “we started wearing rings 11 years before we got married. The major decisions are not made, they just happen.” Rich says, “It’s weird. We just think together. It’s like noncommunication communication.” Marty adds, “It was after a play. We went down to Macy’s and I said ‘let’s go look at rings’, and Rich said, ‘okay.’ ”

When they registered as domestic partners in 2002, there was no discussion. Marty simply scheduled time when Rich could come down to his office and have a paralegal notarize the form for them. “We had been together 27 years at that point. It was a no-brainer.” But they did not get married in 2004 when San Francisco began performing same sex weddings. “We knew that wasn’t going to go anywhere.”

They were in Europe in 2008 when the Supreme Court decision was announced. At first they did not talk about getting married. But, Marty says, “Suddenly it hit me. They were talking about Proposition 8. And my former law professor Jesse Choper was on the news and he said that regardless of what happens it’s not going to be likely to overturn what happened before November 4. So his advice was to do it now. So there was a mad scramble.”

“It was an extremely stressful time. I thought we’d go down to the Marin Civic Center and get a license when the time was appropriate. But then I realized I hadn’t talked to Rich about it yet. There was a time when we first met when for about a month he kept asking me, ‘will you marry me?’ Well, that got old after a while and it never came up again. But then in June 2008 one night after dinner I simply said, ‘Oh by the way, the answer is yes.’ ” Rich knew what he was talking about immediately.

The real question then was how to do it. At first they thought they would get married at the Civic Center, but that could only happen during the week, so they would have had a coworker come with them to act as a witness. To Marty “that didn’t seem right because none of our family could be there. And as I thought about it more, I realized there was something else that was missing. All my life when I had been to Jewish weddings I had seen couples standing up there under the chuppah and the rabbi giving the Seven Blessings, and it really bothered me that I couldn’t do that. I had always thought if I had a wedding it would have to be a Jewish wedding. As I thought about it I knew that was what I wanted to do.”

So Marty “called the gay synagogue in San Francisco and talked to the rabbi’s assistant and asked about doing a Sunday wedding. He said, ‘Oh its fine, the rabbi would love to perform the ceremony for you I’m sure. But we need to schedule counseling sessions.’ ” Not only was there some urgency because they wanted to have the wedding in the summer when their relatives with school children could be there, but Marty asked the rabbi’s assistant, “ ‘Counseling? What kind of counseling?’ and he said, ‘Premarital counseling.’ And I said, ‘Perhaps you didn’t hear me. We’ve been together 33 years. We don’t need counseling.’ He said, ‘Oh, but the rabbi and the cantor are both very insistent on it. Because Jewish marriage has special responsibilities.’ So I said, ‘Ok, thank you very much.’ ”

Their next thought was that they would get married in Alameda County because Rich’s mother lives there and she is quite old and was in a wheelchair. But as Marty looked into it he “got very depressed because this wasn’t going to be a wedding,” but just a civil ceremony.

“I had heard about Congregation Rodef Sholom in San Rafael. They have three rabbis, it’s a very big place. I got through to one of the rabbi’s assistants and she said, ‘Oh! We’ve been hoping somebody like you would call!’ ” Marty and Rich laugh. “She was very excited. The rabbi called me an hour later and he said, “Oh! We were hoping somebody like you would call!’ He agreed to hold open two dates and I started to make phone calls. First I called my brother. I had been best man at his wedding 25 years ago. He lives in Phoenix, and so does my father. I called my brother and I said, ‘I’m getting married and I want you to be my best man.’ There was a stunned silence on the phone. I almost thought he was going to ask me who I was getting married to. A few days later, my brother and I decided August 3 would be the best day because of the kids’ school.

“Cousins from Seattle, Chicago and San Diego flew out. My father came out with my brother and his family from Phoenix. They wouldn’t have come if it hadn’t been a big Jewish wedding. They wouldn’t have come for a civil ceremony. Then the reality gradually sunk in on me. People started asking questions: ‘Where’s the reception?’ And I thought, ‘reception?’ ‘Are you booking a hotel?’ ‘A hotel?’ ‘Are you going to register?’ ‘Register?!’ Other things I could deal with easily like, ‘Where are you going on your honeymoon?’ ‘Honeymoon? We’ve been together 33 years, really.’ ”

“So I found a hotel and got a block of rooms. And I called the synagogue and asked them to recommend a Jewish caterer. I chose one, and Rich and I met with him. It took us 3 days to decide on a menu. It was very stressful. I arranged a family dinner the night before and an open house the afternoon before. The wedding was on Sunday and we decided to have the reception at the synagogue because my father was using a walker and Rich’s mother was in a wheelchair and it would have been too complicated to go somewhere else.

“A few days ahead of time the rabbi’s assistant called and said, ‘you should know that there are bound to be glitches.’ And I said, ‘Oh, yes,’ but I had no idea what I was in for. I mean, there was all the stress that anybody has when planning a wedding. But I also had to talk to the rabbi. I didn’t want to offend him, but I wanted to remind him that he had to take special care in the ceremony where it says ‘Chatan v’kalah’, ‘the groom and the bride,’ that he should say, ‘chatan v’chatan,’ ‘the groom and the groom.’

“The first glitch was that my uncle from Chicago had flown in, but it turned out that he had booked a flight back to Chicago an hour and half after the wedding started. So he stood in the photos before in front of the synagogue, but then he got in a cab to the airport before the ceremony.

“Then there was Rich’s mother. She had broken her arm and was in a wheelchair and was very frail. There were a lot of questions about whether she would make it. Then the rabbi was late. It was a 12:15 wedding and at 12:10 he still wasn’t there. I knew he had another wedding that morning on Mt. Tamalpais and I kept thinking, ‘did his car go off into a ravine up there?’ I was looking around and the whole family had flown out. And I thought ‘we have to get married today, they’ve all come out for this Jewish wedding. If the rabbi is going to kill himself he can do it tomorrow!’ ” Marty says, and laughs. “I was really stressed out by the whole thing.”

“The rabbi rushed in at the last minute. Rich was still greeting the guests. So then it was time to start the wedding. And the rabbi got everyone into the synagogue. The ceremony was in two parts. For the first part, Rich and I would sit at a long table facing each other to sign the ketubah, the Jewish wedding contract. Before this, though, I was going to walk in with my father and then Rich would wheel his mother in. The rabbi had everybody standing around the table, humming to welcome me and my father in. Then Rich’s mother realized at the last minute that she had to go pee. There was a handicapped restroom but she needed assistance because she was frail and had her arm in a sling. I was trying not to look at my watch as we were waiting for them to come in. It seemed like a quarter of an hour. And everyone was humming. The rabbi brought the volume down and up occasionally. And he would run to the door and look to see what was happening. No one knew what was happening. There were 6 people from Rich’s family who had never been to a Jewish wedding before, so they were wondering what this was all about. I was afraid that that something terrible had happened.”

When Rich and his mother came in, they all moved up to the bimah, the platform on which the wedding would take place. Marty’s three cousins and his nephew were holding the chuppah, and the other guests surrounded them. Marty and Rich had bought a special tallit, a prayer shawl, from Israel that they wrapped around themselves. “It was a perfect moment, a perfect 30 minutes. It wasn’t somebody else, it was us.”

Rich’s “mom was really happy at the ceremony. There is a picture of us while we were signing the ketubah and you can see that she’s really happy, even though she’s in so much pain from her broken arm.”

Signing the ketubah


“When we got home we just lay down on the bed and thought, ‘God, we did it!’ I was just immobile. I was just exhausted. The whole weekend is just a blur. There are photos of all of us standing in front of the synagogue and I don’t remember any of it.” Rich says, “I do,” with a smile. He continues, “Marty was running around like a chicken with his head cut off because he had done all of the arranging. The rabbi was late. Most things were going right but some were going wrong.”

Rich, “It was magical. The ceremony, but also the synagogue. There was something in the air. It seemed so peaceful and so welcoming. I’ve never experienced that. That feeling continued into the synagogue and the service.” “I didn’t think it would ever be possible. That was for straight couples and I was gay so I didn’t think I would ever have that opportunity. When we got back from our vacation and heard about the ruling, even then I thought it wouldn’t last, that it wouldn’t happen. When Marty started planning, it was scary. Getting married in front of all the relatives, my mother and my brother, they knew we were gay, but it felt like ‘I’m not supposed to be doing this,’ like I was being bad by doing it. Not that I didn’t want to; I really wanted to do it, but there was this nagging feeling that I was doing something wrong. Marty had a really different life growing up. I was in the military and in Vietnam, and where I worked I had to hide very carefully the fact that I was gay. At one point in the company that I just left, people found out that I was gay including the ones who worked for me. It was very redneck and I got death threats and the FBI was called in. This was in 1998 or 1999. So it’s weird. I felt so muffled, so handcuffed, so drowned. So when I thought, ‘we’re going to get married in a synagogue with all these people?!’ . . . it’s just so different from how I had lived, being so secret and so careful. It felt so strange. But it was so wonderful at the same time.”

I ask Rich how getting married has changed things for him. “Marty said it first. That there is a different feeling after getting married. It is hard to describe, hard to put your finger on. It was really nice. And I pretty much lost, let go of, being afraid. If somebody comes up and asks me now, ‘Are you and Marty gay?’ I would say ‘yeah’. I wouldn’t hide anymore.” I ask if losing the fear is just from getting married, and Rich says, “Yeah, pretty much.”

Marty says, “It felt different after getting married. It felt a lot different. I still can’t completely put my finger on it. I think a lot of it is the sense of having our whole relationship validated by having all of these people standing around the chuppah watching us get married. It was a different feeling for us than getting married and then having 33 years of marriage afterwards. It was first 33 years of marriage and then the wedding. Everybody acknowledging the relationship and making the effort to fly in from all over the country, and having the Jewish ceremony. I never thought the external validation was necessary for our relationship. After all it’s survived for 33 years. But now it’s different, it feels like . . . We had already scheduled a trip to Chicago a week later. The trip was planned long before the wedding. And we had dinner with my uncle, the one who had to leave before the ceremony. And he said to Rich, ‘Well, you’re a member of the family now.’ And I said, ‘Rich has always been a member of the family.’ He didn’t say anything. But it just feels different. My father referred to Rich as his son-in-law, which was the first time he’s ever done that. But there is something about being married instead of being domestic partners. I mean, nobody knows what ‘domestic partners’ means.”

Before they got married they referred to each other as “partner.” When they got the licenses but before the wedding they started calling each other “spouse,” “because ‘husband’ just seemed like a strange word. You think of a wife having a husband. But then during the ceremony the rabbi turned to me and asked, ‘do you take Rich to be your husband?’ I was startled for a moment because that’s not even part of the Jewish ceremony. But then I said, ‘Yes!’ and that’s how I’ve referred to him ever since.”

Rich still uses the term “partner.” “I don’t think I’ve used the word ‘husband’ yet because it has that connotation of ‘husband and wife’ and it just seems odd.” Marty says, “But you’ll get used to it. After all, you told the rabbi that I was your husband!”

When I ask what words they would use to describe their relationship, Rich says, “Implicitly connected. It’s like I was saying earlier, our communication almost isn’t verbal. We like the same things, we do the same things, we like the same clothes, we react to things the same way. It’s like we’re the same person.”

Dave and Yann

“Being married is something that kids really understand. And now we can tell them we are married.”

I met with Dave and Yann on a weekday evening as they were getting Albert, their two year old, and Thomas, their one year old, ready for bed with the help of Yann’s aunt Consuelo who was visiting from Venezuela.

Albert, Dave, Yann, and Thomas


Dave and Yann met on April 20, 2002. Dave saw Yann at a bar and told the friend he was with how cute he thought Yann was. But Dave was shy, so his friend approached Yann for him. “Yeah, he was very shy,” says Yann with a laugh. “I think I spoke more with your friends than with you that night.”

Still, they connected and Yann invited Dave over for dinner later that week. “I actually made sushi and crème brulee, which was not easy. But it must have been convincing enough because he came back!” Dave was packing to leave for a business trip the next day and he was gone for a week. For the first few months, Dave was gone “it seemed like every other week. And I was wondering if it was ever going to be more than a couple of days at a time.”

They dated for about a year and a half before they moved in together. They stayed at their apartment in the city for another year and a half before they started looking for a house in anticipation of adopting children.

In 2004 when the weddings began in San Francisco, “I guess we took too long to think about it. We weren’t sure we wanted to do it in a rush, and we wanted to have our families there. And then the weddings were cancelled. We figured we would do it next time if there was a next time.”

In 2005, “we had our own kind of commitment ceremony between the two of us.” Yann’s work was sending him to Philadelphia a week out of every month. Because he was gone so much, “we decided we wanted to do something special. We decided to have a ring exchange.” Neither formally proposed, “but we talked about making it formal, doing something that really shows that we are together.” Yann cooked dinner and “we exchanged some words that I don’t remember at the moment." Yann laughs, "Tragic! Nothing like having kids to lose all of your memory,” and then continues, “We did promise that we would be there for each other forever.” Dave says, “It was our own little commitment ceremony. Very private. But we also talked about what our wedding would look like if we were to have one. It would involve our family and our friends.”

Having children “had always been something that both Dave and I knew we wanted. We discussed it on our second date.” Dave adds, “That was one of the big things that attracted me to Yann, was that he wanted a family, the same thing that I wanted.” As Dave is talking, Albert grabs for the recorder and Yann pulls him away and tells him “No.” Albert looks at Yann and Yann adds, mockingly stern, “being cute will not get you out of it.” Albert smiles, climbs in between Yann and David and snuggles in.



In 2004 they began trying to adopt. They registered as domestic partners then because “they told us that it would look more favorable on our home study if we showed the commitment to the domestic partnership. We were holding out for marriage but we did the domestic partnership for that.”

The first agency lost some of their paperwork and after a year and a half told them that they did not present a good case for adoption because Yann, who is from Venezuela, did not yet have his green card though he was in the country legally. They switched to another agency who told them that Yann’s status was not a problem. Within 8 months they were matched with Albert. “The happiest day of our lives. He was 9 months old when we brought him home. And we had him for 3 months when we got a call from his county social worker saying ‘Albert’s baby brother was born. Would you consider opening your home and your hearts to him?’ ”

They knew that they wanted to adopt a second child, and were still discussing it when the call came. They had assumed that they would finalize Albert’s adoption and then begin the process again. But now, “Albert is going to get to grow up with his biological brother and that is really important.” They first saw Thomas when he was 4 days old and brought him home when he was 10 days old. “I am so glad that we got to experience what we didn’t with Albert.”

At the adoption


They have taken the boys to Venezuela, “And family comes from all parts of the country to see the boys. It’s the same thing when we take them to New Mexico,” where Dave’s family lives. Yann relates, “When I came out, it wasn’t easy of course. But especially with my dad. For two years we didn’t talk to each other. And he had been slowly warming up. He knew Dave, and loved him, but he was still distant. But when the kids came it was a completely different story. I think people still have a hard time understanding the notion of a gay couple. But a gay family is a family. For my dad there was no ambiguity about what a family is. It immediately made sense. I’ve never seen him so natural and relaxed and easy as when he came to visit us and the kids.”

In 2008, when the news came that they could get married, Yann says, “This time we weren’t going to waste any time. The minute the Supreme Court made its decision, we called each other and said, ‘okay, do you want to do this’ and I started looking for the first appointment.” Dave’s parents and nephew were going to be in San Francisco for vacation around the middle of June. Yann called “every county in the Bay Area to find an appointment while Dave’s parents and nephew were still here.” But, Yann says, “My parents couldn’t come. My father was working and my mother was taking care of my niece.”

They got married at 5:00 on June 17 at San Francisco City Hall on the Mayor’s balcony. “That was such an amazing experience.”

Not only were Dave’s parents and nephew there, but the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, with whom Yann sings, were planning to be at City Hall that day “at 5:30 to sing for the weddings that were going on. They snuck in early and there were 30 or 40 of my friends who sang for us. They sang ‘Irish Blessing’, which is one of the significant songs of the Chorus. We sing it when you join the chorus or leave, if you bring your parents to hear the Chorus we sing it for your parents. If you get married we sing it for you. So they sang that for us.” Dave says, “We were each holding one of the boys. We were so nervous that day, we forgot Thomas’ bottle. While we were in the middle of reciting our vows, Albert whacked his brother on the head. So Thomas was wailing.” Both men smile at the memory of the day, wailing child and all.

Dave says, “I always wanted to get married but didn’t know what it would look like. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect wedding. The energy that day in City Hall, the celebration that was going on. It was perfect. I had asked my 13-year old nephew to stand in for me as my witness. Before we went down to City Hall I told him, ‘You know, there may be protesters.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Bring ‘em on!’ ” “After the ceremony we came out of City Hall and lots of friends were there waiting for us,” Yann says, “you felt special that day. Everybody at City Hall was so nice and helpful. Somebody at every step made you feel really special. It wasn’t a Vegas wedding, that’s for sure!”


They went to dinner with friends, “and then we had to go home early because we had to put the boys to bed,” says Yann with a laugh. “It was great. And the fact that we were able to have our kids there was great.” Dave says, “It was a great moment.”

Even before they got married, Yann says, “We really didn’t like the word partner, and we wondered how to present each other. ‘Lover’ is too romance novel from the 18th century. ‘Partner’ is too business-like. So we started using husband.”

Since getting married, Dave says, “our relationship feels more cemented. We had the rings and we had verbally committed to each other. But the fact that we have a marriage license just cements it more for me.” Yann says, “Even though I was using the word ‘husband’ before, now, legally, he’s my husband. Whether it’s upheld is a different story. But legally, at least for this month, he is my husband. In my heart he will always be. But now when I say that to people they can’t say, ‘well, that doesn’t exist.’ I say, ‘I’m sorry, I have a paper to show for it.’ Also, for the kids. Being married is something that kids really understand. And now we can tell them we are married. We can tell them, ‘your parents are married, and you were there.’ ”

They wonder what the future holds for their marriage, legally. “I guess that was the first one. We’ll see if we have to have another one. I hope we don’t. If we could get federal recognition I would go for that one.” Dave adds, “Then we’ll have a real ceremony.” “Yeah, if we could plan and have a little more time, and more family. If we could have the Venezuelan and French side of the family there that would be nice.”

I ask what words they would use to describe their relationship, and Dave says, “Complete. I would say, complete is the word. I’ve got complete love. I’ve got a complete family.” Yann says, “in the words of Mama Cass, ‘There’s something groovy and good in whatever we’ve got.’ If it’s one word I would have to choose ‘tender.’ There is tenderness in everything. Even our arguments have tenderness. There is love all the time; for ourselves, for our kids. It feels that way. When you come home, all the harshness of outside you leave outside and things are mellow and smooth.” Dave adds, “My favorite moment of the day is to walk through that door,” and Yann completes the thought: “and these two guys,” and he nods at Albert and Thomas, “run and jump and yell, ‘Daddy!’ It’s great.”

Yann and Thomas

Billy and David

150 people gathered for the wedding at the other end of the beach just waiting for the word that David had said “yes” . . .

Billy and David were introduced in 1999 by a mutual friend “who decided long before we did that we would be a couple.” This was in San Luis Obispo, where both are originally from. They were “on opposite ends of the same social circle for years.” David knew they were being set up but Billy did not. They met at a birthday party for David on June 7 thrown by their friend. When David “blew out the candles, it was all I could do not to look at Billy.” He pauses and smiles, “And I got my wish.” Billy adds with a grin, “You wished for something tall and blond.”

After the party, David kept finding excuses to see Billy. For the next two weeks they saw each other every day for lunch or dinner or afternoon coffee. Billy had “come out of a miserable relationship not many months before and I had determined I wasn’t going to date anyone. So I wasn’t even approaching this as a dating thing. I thought we were just friends. But then the friendship grew. So I started pushing every button I could think of to see if there was a match there. But when we had had almost every meal together for a week I wondered, ‘Do you think we’re dating?’ ” David adds, “I made a comment to him after lunch one day that wasn’t supposed to sound, um, the way it sounded. I said, ‘We should do something together that doesn’t involve a table between us.’ ” They laugh. “And Billy said, ‘Oh really,’ and I said, ‘no, no, no I just meant something besides lunch!’ ” “So we started dating seriously. Very seriously. I think we moved in together after about 3 months. David had a tiny apartment with a crazy neighbor, so he moved in with Billy.

In 2003, “we got married the day before we moved to San Francisco.” For 3 years David had been asking Billy to marry him, and Billy kept saying, “Yes but not yet, yes but not yet.” The last time David had asked, Billy said, “Don’t ask again. I’ll tell you when I’m ready.”

6 weeks before they were going to move, Billy started planning a surprise wedding. “I got my three best girlfriends together and gave them a thumbnail of what I wanted and told them to run with it. And to call me if they needed anything. And they did. They are good friends, really good friends.” The girlfriends knew it was a surprise, “The whole town knew it was a surprise,” says David.

Billy sent out postcard invitations that said, “Top Secret! Mission Impossible! Don’t RSVP by mail!” The week before the wedding the invitation to one of David’s brothers, the one who “I haven’t always had the best relationship with,” was returned undelivered and David pulled it out of the mailbox. All he saw was the front of the card with his brother’s name and address. Just as he was about to turn it over Billy snatched it out of his hand. David asked, “What’s going on? What is this?” Billy “pulled out something about having a reconciliation dinner” for them. David said, “ ‘No. Just stop!’ I screamed at him. I was so pissed.” “He was madder than he’s ever been with me and I just swallowed it and put my head down and said, ‘yes dear, yes dear, I’m so sorry.’ All the while I was laughing inside because I knew what was really going on. That’s the closest we came to a slip. There were times when there were 4 people in our house who were all emailing or working on their computers on wedding plans. And David was sitting on the couch right there” but didn’t know a thing.

They were literally in the process of moving—looking for an apartment and jobs and running loads of their belongings up to San Francisco. The day before the wedding, they drove up to San Francisco and dropped off a trailer full of stuff. All of their clothes had been moved, so Billy discreetly went from box to box to get the clothes they would need the next day. When they returned to San Luis Obispo they showered and got dressed, supposedly for the going away party being thrown for Billy and David and two other couples who were moving out of town at the same time.

“People were arriving from out of town. There were an awful lot of people who flew in from out of town for that going away party,” David says. “Some of them arrived around midnight the night of the going away party. I thought that was a little strange. But the entire time I didn’t pick up on a thing.” Billy says, “You have to understand. This is a party in an apartment with people who partied together all the time. And every time David walked up to a group of people having a conversation, the conversation died because everyone was talking about the wedding the next day.” But David says, “I had no idea.” We all laugh in amazement and Billy leans over, touches David's face gently and teases, “You can be the pretty one.”

The next day, June 28, as far as David knew there was going to be another going away party for Billy thrown by the people at the salon where he worked. It was a barbeque on the beach. They arrived at the party and after a bit Billy said he wanted to make a speech. “I want to thank you all for supporting me all these years and I want to ask your support for one more thing. I have a very important question for David.” He turned to David and said, “ ‘Will you marry me?” David jumped on him and they nearly fell over in the sand.

While this was happening, someone in the back of the gathering was on the phone with someone on the other end of the beach where 150 people were gathered for the wedding and waiting for the word that David had said “yes.” When the word came, the wedding party let off fireworks on the other end of the beach. It took David a little while to figure out what was going on. “He told me there was going to be a wedding and I said, ‘okay, when?’ And he said, ‘Everybody’s here. Your mother’s here.’ And I said, ‘What?!’ I felt like I was on drugs. I was insane. I had no idea what was going on.” They drove around with a friend for about 10 minutes while Billy explained what was happening, and to give the people at the “going away” party time to move to the other end of the beach. Billy explained, “I’ve been planning this for 6 weeks. Right under your nose. And you didn’t have a clue, you poor thing. We’re going to get married. I’ve written the vows. You can do anything you want, but I’ve written them with you in mind.’ He said, ‘Whatever you wrote is fine. Just don’t expect me to do more than repeat short phrases, please!’ ”

When they got back to the beach, the party set off more fireworks as they descended the stairs. There was an aisle down to the water’s edge where there was an arch with flowers. There were seals in the water that were curious about what was happening and swam up and watched the ceremony. A good friend whom Billy has known for about 17 years performed the ceremony. He is a minister of the Universal Life Church and had performed ceremonies for a lot of the couples they knew, “and the ceremonies were always very powerful. Very personal. He always sits down with the couple beforehand and talks about what they want in the ceremony and does a counseling session.” I ask how this worked for Billy and David since David did not know the wedding was taking place until that day. Billy says that the minister told him, “I wouldn’t normally do this but I have seen the two of you together for long enough that I’m sure this is right.”

David says, “I was amazed. It was fantastic. And I was dumbfounded. Not just that they could pull it off, but that I could be so stupid!” he says with a laugh.


Right after the ceremony they registered as domestic partners with the state.

They did not get married in 2004 “because we weren’t sure what the legal complications would be with our domestic partnership.”

In 2006-2007 Billy had the opportunity to spend a year studying Japanese in Japan. David insisted that he go, even though David could not join him. “It was challenging. We had Skype, so we talked almost every day.” “That was one of those amazing relationship moments. I said, ‘I’d really like to go study in Japan,’ and David just said, ‘Go.’ ” David says, “I figured if I interfered in that decision at all, that would make me the worst spouse in the world. What am I going to say, ‘no you can’t go because of my needs'? No, this is the only chance you’re ever going to get to go live in Tokyo for a year.”

It was a hard year also because the restaurant where David worked closed for renovations for 11 weeks, so suddenly he couldn’t make the rent. He lived off of Billy’s emergency funds. “It’s funny, we’ve just taken turns. When we first started seeing each other, I was the one with a good income and David was doing the starving student thing. And we have since flip flopped so many times between who has money and who doesn’t have money that there is no way we could keep track. It’s such a nonissue.”

When he was in Japan, it was the first time Billy had ever lived by himself without a family, a roommate, or a boyfriend. “Setting up my own house and making my own decisions, I really got to enjoy that. Coming back to a relationship and a house that was shared . . . .” David says, “and that I had very much made my own . . .” “we had some tension, we had some squabbles. I had brought back tons of stuff from Japan and there was no room for it.” David says, “I had spread out to fill in all the space he made when he left!”

They got married in 2008 “almost by accident.” Billy was at City Hall the day the marriages first started taking place with a friend who wanted to write a gay wedding planning manual. “And I asked one of the city employees what the legal complications would be with our domestic partnership. And she said, ‘Who cares. Do it anyway.’ ” Billy called David and asked, “Do you want to get married?” David agreed so they filled out the paperwork and returned the next day, June 18. It seemed so insignificant after “our real wedding. When we walked out, David said, ‘I feel like I should have an “I voted” sticker.’ It felt like we had performed a civic duty.”

For Billy, however, the marriage had particular significance since it meant “I could change my last name, which I never really liked. If you don’t have some legal cause like a marriage, you have to go through a lot of legal rigamarole. You have to get the court to take notice, which costs $300, you have to advertise in the legal notices section of the paper for 6 consecutive weeks before. But with the marriage I just walked in and did it.”

David calls Billy his partner or his boyfriend. “I don’t really like husband. It sounds like something you do to animals. It’s not a noun, it’s a verb.” Billy is “more likely to use boyfriend. In part because that was my nickname for him for so many years. In our circle of friends everyone knew that if I said, ‘Boyfriend’ I meant David.” David chimes in with a laugh, “Some of them still call me ‘boyfriend.’ ” David says, “I’ve tried to use ‘husband’ but it seems like such a weird word to me. Maybe it’s just because I’m not used to it. But it seems so hetero. It’s vocabulary that belongs to Them, it doesn’t feel like it belongs to us. There is this tension between gay marriage being this liberal, almost far left thing to the rest of the world, but at the same time it’s the most traditional, conservative, normal thing I’ve done. That comes into play when I decide what to call him. I wouldn’t refer to him as my husband to my mother because my parents had the traditional till-death-do-us-part 40 year marriage, and that seems more like a husband.” Billy says, “I think I’m more likely to use ‘spouse’ in conversation.”

Has anything changed? “For a couple of days there was a little surge of ‘Oh god! We’re married!’ But then we realized, we’ve been doing this for 10 years. But I think our relationship has been legitimized for a lot of people that I’ve known since childhood. There were people who saw it on Facebook and got very excited and said, ‘Oh, you got married!’ and I said, ‘yeah, five and a half years ago.’ Somehow the huge ceremony with heartfelt vows, performed by a good friend of ours and surrounded by all of our friends and family, that doesn’t count. But the 3 minute ceremony with the total stranger in City Hall—‘I do’, ‘I do’, ‘sign here and here,’ that one counts. It’s so ironic.”

I ask them to describe their relationship. “Solid, dependable. Peaceful, funny. We giggle a lot. We laugh together a lot. We don’t yell a lot. We don’t fight. I can probably count on one hand the times we’ve actually yelled at each other. And usually it’s that one of us yelled at the other and the other one said, ‘stop right there, I got it.’ ”

Christian and Jim

“We don’t want to politicize our relationship or anything about the love we have for each other.”

Christian and Jim met on AOL on June 2, 2002. Christian is a native of San Francisco and is the CFO for an arts nonprofit. Jim is an Information Systems manager at a homeless youth agency. He moved to California from New Jersey for college in 1990. Christian was looking for someone else on AOL, but saw Jim’s profile and commented on a quote that Jim had posted from Medea, “O Zeus, why? O, why have you given to mortals sure means of knowing gold from tinsel, yet men's exteriors show no mark by which to descry the rotten heart?”

Jim had had a recent string of false-start dates and flaky online encounters. Christian thought the quote was charming and hilarious and missed the tinge of bitterness with which Jim had chosen it, so he sent Jim an instant message. They began to correspond and eventually set a date to meet later that same day. They agreed to go for a walk starting at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. They walked from there to Coit Tower at the top of Telegraph Hill. They were enjoying themselves, so they kept walking to North Beach. Then to Nob Hill and then to Russian Hill. By the time they circled back to Jim’s apartment on lower Nob Hill, there was clearly some chemistry.

But Christian had ended a 13 year relationship about 5 weeks earlier. He told Jim this and Jim said that he enjoyed being single. When they said goodbye, Christian thought they would be friends and did not know that Jim had any romantic interest. Jim thought it was a great first date. Christian caught a bad cold right after that, so there was no second date for a couple of weeks. When they did meet, Christian says, “I still remember what he was wearing, and thinking, ‘he’s cuter than I remember!’ ” Even then, though, things were “a little tempered” because Christian was still in the process of selling the house he had shared with Jerome, his ex, and settling into a new place to live. He says, “The more I got to know Jim, the more worried I was because I really liked him and I thought it was too soon and I didn’t want him to be the rebound guy. But at some point I stopped trying to set him up with other friends of mine.”

Christian ended up talking about Jim to Jerome. Christian and Jerome remain good friends to this day, and separated because “we realized we were more like brothers.” Christian’s other friends “couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that Jerome and I were breaking up, so they didn’t want to hear about me dating someone new. Jerome was having a very similar experience. So the only ones we could talk to about what was going on in our lives were each other.” Christian had been dating a few people casually but when he mentioned Jim Jerome said, “Tell me more about this Jim. I have a feeling about him.”

Jerome was one of the first people Jim met when he and Christian started dating. At first Jim didn’t want to hear about Jerome, but Christian explained that they were still selling the house and that Jerome was still very much part of his daily life and that wasn't going to change. So they arranged to have dinner. Christian says, “We were all a little nervous.” When Christian introduced Jim to Jerome, completely unrehearsed Jim held out his hand and said, “Hello, I am the second Mrs. de Winter.”* That broke the ice completely as they all burst into laughter.
*The second Mrs. de Winter is the never otherwise named narrator of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Rebecca, who was the first Mrs. de Winter, is dead and everyone talks about her constantly to the second Mrs. de Winter.

Christian says, “it has been one of my greatest joys in life that we have all become good friends, that Jerome is still very much a part of both of our lives. And they don’t gang up on me too much,” he adds with a laugh.

Christian found himself calling Jim nearly every day, and “failed miserably at keeping him at a distance.” He adds, “So much was wrong about us when we first met. So much did not make sense. We had so many arguments and tense discussions in the first 3-5 months of our relationship. Then we had it all worked out. We came at dating from very different perspectives. Jim had had a couple of relationships that lasted a year or so and he had never lived with anyone. We had very different scales of what it meant to be in a relationship. But Jim was a really quick study,” they laugh. Christian explained that “I knew that the odds weren’t good for us based on our circumstances. We had this really tense discussion in the beginning where I told him that seeing each other once a week wasn’t enough. But then Jim did the most romantic thing a man can do. You go to them and ask them to change their behavior and they do. I made my case, and Jim said, ‘okay that’s it. You want more, I’m clearing my calendar. I’m all yours, buddy. Make it good!’ I thought, ‘yeah, right, that’s what you say.’ But then he did it and I thought, ‘My god, he totally changed his behavior. Who does that?!’ It was very charming.”

For about 3 months they were “in boyfriend mode” and after that they had to admit that they had stronger feelings for each other. “The first year was a little hard, but now we are very much in sync with each other.”

On the one-year anniversary of their first date, Christian surprised Jim by renting a room for them at the Hyatt with a window overlooking the Ferry Building where they first met. There was champagne and room service and at the end of the evening, though he hadn’t been planning to, Jim asked Christian if he would spend the rest of his life with him. “He immediately said yes. I was very excited. During the cab ride home the next morning I told Christian I was going to call my mom and my friend Amy and tell them I’m engaged. I said, ‘I’m going to tell them you said yes.’ ” Christian wondered out loud, “What did I say yes to?” Jim realized that it had not occurred to Christian that he had popped the question. “And no one likes to hear, after someone has agreed to marry you, that they didn’t quite understand the question.”

The confusion only lasted for the cab ride home. Christian says, “You have to understand that the idea of spending the rest of our lives together sounded like a perfectly wonderful idea. But I thought that was our commitment ceremony right there and then at the hotel. I did not know that Jim was expecting to have a real ceremony. Until that very moment that was something I thought I would never, ever do. But see, I can change behavior too!” They both laugh. “When Jerome and I met in 1989, we would sometimes hear about people having a commitment ceremony and the response would always be very much like, ‘Oh, they’re having a little “ceremony.” ’ It was so not endorsed or embraced by society. And my feeling was that I didn’t want to have a play wedding, and if I were to have something like that I absolutely wouldn’t want it to follow any of the traditional marriage rituals. I wouldn’t want it to be a mock wedding. And I think weddings get out of control; people make themselves crazy and go into debt and it becomes more about the wedding than the marriage. And so much of traditional marriage ceremonies is about the woman as property and so many of those traditions are part of the marriage ceremony but people do them anyways because they’re there. Neither of us really wanted to be the ‘groom.’ So I had an issue with ceremonies to begin with that I had to get over.” He pauses and adds, “In the course of a cab ride.”

Jim definitely had a ceremony in mind when he asked the question. Once Christian articulated what he didn’t want, it was easier to figure out what they did want: to be surrounded by friends and family at a fun party that was “a celebration of what we had built together and what we were hoping to have together.” They knew they didn’t want gifts, because they already had a full household. They agreed on a date, June 5, 2004, wrote some things to read to each other, and chose three close friends to speak. But there was no officiant and no one pronounced them partners or spouses. Originally, they weren’t “planning to have so much talking or exchange rings. We weren’t even sure there would be a ceremony. But people really impressed upon us that they needed something. Especially our women friends insisted that we exchange rings.” Jim didn’t require much convincing. “We needed to have some ritual. Rituals are important and meaningful.”

Christian relented and they bought rings. “Even then, we learned a few things about societal expectations. Because we got them a few weeks early and just immediately put them on. I went to work, and we had a full staff meeting. My office was all women at the time, and I said something in the meeting and gestured with my left hand.” Every eye in the room locked onto his hand and they all protested that he couldn’t wear the ring before the ceremony. “So we had to take them off.”

I note that neither is wearing a ring during our interview. They explain that they don’t wear them around the house, but wear them when they go out. Jim runs into the bedroom and gets a small dish made of coconut shell that they bought on their honeymoon in Hawaii and where they put the rings when they come home. They put the rings on.


Jim’s family came from the east coast and Christian’s whole family came. It was the first time the families had met, and the whole event “was incredibly moving.”




They did not get married in February that year. Jim says, “I had picked the date on June 2, 2003 and it was June 5, 2004. That was the only date I planned to get married in my life, and I was not going to jump when Gavin Newsome said, ‘come down and get married.’ If it was going to be there for us, we would do it in June and if it wasn’t there for us, then we figured when we were able to get married we would get married.”

In 2008, Christian proposed to Jim. “How many times do you get the opportunity to say, ‘but you did it last time’?” “This felt different than 2004. But then we heard immediately that there would be this Proposition on the ballot.” Jim says, “we had been talking about it daily because new information kept coming out. And it was unclear what the status would be for people who got married.” Christian adds, “That brought up a certain amount of wanting to stand up and be counted.” Jim recalls that one day during this time, “We were sitting on the couch watching something stupid. I said something clever and Christian said, ‘You should marry me.’ I said, ‘You haven't asked.’ And he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him, and I said yes.”

They got married on Gay Pride weekend on the 4th floor balcony of the rotunda in City Hall. “We decided to do this for ourselves, and we didn’t anticipate how it would feel. We definitely wanted to be counted, but in some ways it felt like we were just catching up on the paperwork. But what we didn’t expect was the euphoria and good will of everyone around City Hall.”

Christian says, “I am not kidding, 2 guys wearing a suit and walking to City Hall at that time were going to get congratulated by everyone —bicycle messengers, homeless guys, everyone. There was so much good will.” Jim describes the scene when they arrived at City Hall. “They were expecting people from all over the country for gay pride weekend. It seemed like all the other functions of city government had shut down. They had deputized everyone to perform weddings, and they were just over the moon.” Christian says, “Everyone we talked to had these big smiles on their faces. We probably interacted with 15 people over the course of the morning applying for the licenses, getting them, and so on. Everyone was clapping and cheering. At one point this very exhausted looking guy in jeans and a t-shirt with a camera asked us if we would like him to take photos.” Jim says, “He did it pro bono. He told us that he knew we hadn’t had much time to put our wedding together so he would like to be our wedding photographer. He took nearly 100 pictures. It was just one of those random, wonderful moments.”

Jim had decided earlier in the week that he would bake the cake, but he didn’t have a 9-inch round cake pan. They went to Bed, Bath and Beyond and when they were paying for it the cashier asked them what they were making. Jim told her it was a wedding cake for an impromptu wedding. She asked, “ ‘Who’s getting married?’ and I said, ‘well, we are,’ and she started to cry. She thought it was beautiful that we could finally get married and that she was being part of history by selling us a cake pan. We just weren’t ready for people’s reactions.”

Christian’s work surprised him with a champagne toast and a gift, and Jim’s work had a toast with sparkling cider. “It was very touching that both places wanted to do something for us even though we had had the commitment ceremony 4 years earlier and had been together for just over six years at that point.”
Photo by Patrick Roddie

They never registered as domestic partners. They might, but so much is unclear. “What to do with our taxes? I use Turbo tax, and it doesn’t let you file one status for state and another status for federal. But we are so blessed in where we live and with our families that we know we don’t need the protections some couples do. During my recent illness, Jim has been at every doctor’s appointment and no one has ever questioned it. But we have to keep our eyes on it because it does affect us.”

Has anything changed since getting married? Christian says, “Between us, no, not at all. We don’t feel more or less connected. Our commitment to each other has remained completely unchanged. What has evolved and is still evolving is where we fit in society. I think Jim and I have been blessed in that we live in the city we do and have the families we have and the employers we have and in our world, everyone recognizes us as a married couple. We don’t really experience in our daily lives that that is no longer true, or maybe is no longer true, or whatever it is. But especially with Proposition 8, it was hard that next day, you couldn’t help but look at people and wonder, ‘how did you vote? What’s in your mind? What’s in your heart?’ I’d walk into a Starbucks and think, ‘okay, 1 in 2 of you really piss me off.’ Well, okay, it’s San Francisco, so 1 in 4 but that still really sucks.” Jim observes, “That’s why civil rights should never be on the ballot. No one should never be exposed to that. It’s like being punched in the gut by the bigotry and ignorance of your fellow voters.”

Jim says, “After we got married we continued to refer to each other in introductions as partners, because we had been using ‘partners’ for so long.” Christian explains, “I didn’t like the connotations of ‘husband.’ What does that mean?” Jim continues, “There is an assumption that ‘husband’ goes with ‘wife’ and I think that in terms of language we don’t have a good equivalent. I would never refer to Christian as my ‘spouse.’ That just doesn’t seem right. So I was calling Christian my partner. Until Proposition 8 started looking like it was doing well. And then we decided that we needed to get past our own issues with this and start using husband to put it out there that our relationship needed to be recognized in language terms as equal. Since we didn’t have an alternative, we just had to borrow husband to put ourselves on equal footing.”

Christian chimes in, “I was advocating for a while for ‘Yeah husband, yeah that’s right, husband, I hope that isn’t a problem, oh good I didn’t think so,” as Jim’s title. Jim says, “We don’t want to politicize our relationship or anything about the love we have for each other. But names are important and labels are important and calling him ‘husband’ means something different than calling him ‘partner.’ ” They still use husband because, as Jim explains, “It is important to me that people know that we are married, and partner does not have that connotation.”

Christian observes, “We are so buffered here in San Francisco. The day after the election we were quiet and somber. My office is very liberal but mostly heterosexual. I thought it was going to be hard to experience the elation I was expecting about Barack Obama. I knew people were going to be bouncing off the walls and it would be a little hard to deal with that. But when I walked into my office everyone was walking around like a zombie. The tone of the office was, ‘Well, it was great that Barack Obama was elected, but that was bullshit about Prop 8.’ It was incredibly moving. It was first and foremost in people’s experience and not just gay people. Of everything I could have experienced the next day, that was very affirming.”

Jim’s experience was very much the same. When he first came in his boss asked how he was doing. “I said, ‘you know, I feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach.’ The first 45 minutes after Obama was elected I was jumping up and down with everyone else. But then the early returns started coming in on Prop 8 and it completely took me by surprise. I had disbelief going into this election that people would have voted this way. And maybe that was naïve. Even through that night I held out hope. I was so willing to believe that people at the core of themselves were not going to strip someone’s civil rights. I was so generous in that hope. It was really hard. It’s still hard. Even talking about it gives my stomach a turn. I’m happy the election went the way it did on a national level but it still hurts.”

Jim continues, “My aunt and uncle are still very religious. But I think everyone in our families was taken aback by the results. Even my uber-conservative stepsister wrote me a message on Facebook saying ‘I can’t believe this is how this went down.’ She also wrote that she thought it was an abomination that Obama was elected, so she is not someone you would expect to support same sex marriage.”

Christian says, “Even if Prop 8 had been narrowly defeated it still would have been pretty awful just knowing that 1 in 2 people don’t feel that your relationship is legitimate.”

Jim adds, “Everyone you talk to says to your face, ‘Oh yeah, I voted no,’ but not everyone who you talk to can have voted no. And I still kind of struggle with this, like when I’m in large crowds. I’ve gotten more isolated because I just don’t know who to trust. It hit me on such a core level. It’s been hard.”

Meg and Lauren

"We were celebrating something that already happened and not just the hope."



Meg is an ergonomist from upstate New York. Lauren, from Massachusetts, works in finance in the biotech industry. Meg and Lauren have lived in California for 25 years. They met in 1993 when Lauren interviewed Meg for a position in the research lab where Lauren worked.

Meg has always said that she could never be attracted to straight women since attraction is based on mutual chemistry, so when she met Lauren at the interview she thought, “Never say never because that woman really turned your head!” assuming Lauren was straight. After Meg was hired, Lauren knew she would be leaving the company in about 2 weeks and wanted to be sure Meg knew she was gay before she went. Both had lived in Boston for a time so Lauren made many references to gay bars there, but Meg was not out of the closet when she lived in Boston, so she missed them all.

They started dating when Meg invited Lauren to come have lunch at the lab in Berkeley where Meg was working. Meg says she was worried about having something Lauren would like to eat. “What if she likes yogurt? So I packed yogurt. Then I thought, I’ll make tuna sandwiches. But what if she’s vegetarian? So I made egg salad, too. And crudite. Like a lunatic! I had an entire cooler full of food.” They had a great lunch and “the energy started happening.” Meg missed all of Lauren’s hints again. After lunch they took a walk and in response to some question both have forgotten, Lauren said, “Well, as a gay person . . .” and Meg’s world began to spin. Her jaw dropped, and “everything changed. And everything made sense. But I remember thinking ‘oh my god, what are you going to do about it.’ And I remember Lauren saying, ‘But I’m leaving this job,’ and I said, ‘Oh! That’s great!’ ”

A few days later they met for a drink after work, “and it was one of these crazy things. We just couldn’t help it. After a bit our legs were touching. And then our two little arms were touching. And we talked and talked and talked like two little kids. At that point it was clear that it wasn’t about work.” Before their next date the following Saturday, Meg started trying on outfits for her friend JP. She came out in the first outfit and asked JP what she thought. Then she came out in the next outfit and said, “what do you think of this one?” JP asked what was different. “Well,” explained Meg, “that was a mock turtleneck and this is a real turtleneck.” Lauren breaks in, “But she wore the turtleneck and she was so cute!” Then adds, “I wore Chukka boots because that was the most lesbian thing I owned.” Meg adds, “and your white shirt, remember? You looked so cute.”

They had a commitment ceremony 5 years later. Lauren loves bicycle riding and hot tubs, and Meg hates both. So for Lauren’s birthday every year they go for a bike ride and then a soak. The year that Meg proposed, they were in the hot tub. Meg had thought about whether this was something she wanted to do. She says, “you know you’re compatible, but you wonder if that compatibility is a forever thing. Do you want to settle down? Do you want to spend the rest of your life with one person? Is this the right person? Are your differences advantages or issues?” She thought of her father and mother’s relationship, which she admired greatly. Her father had told her once that he thought a lot about whether he wanted to ask Meg’s mother to marry him, but that once he asked he never questioned it again. When Meg asked, in the hot tub, “Will you marry me?” Lauren said, “What?” She explains with a smile, “because I wanted to make her say it again.” Then she asked Meg, “Can we? Can we get married? I mean, yes, but how do we do this?” Meg said, “We can do whatever we choose to do.” She explains that at the time, in 1998, they had no role models. They knew no one who had had a commitment ceremony and neither of them had been to a commitment ceremony.

When they got out of the hot tub they went to their friends JP and Josh, a straight couple who they were staying with. JP and Josh, “treated it as if it were real. It was so validating.” JP asked all the questions: who will perform the wedding? Where will it be? Who will you invite? What will you use for vows? Both felt validated by having their friends take their decision to commit so seriously even though it would not be legally recognized.

The ceremony took place on October 25, 1998 in a sequoia grove at JP and Josh’s house. Lauren describes it as “one of the most serene, sacred places I have ever been.” Because the grove was small the ceremony had to be small. They each invited 3 friends and their partners. They decided not to invite their parents. Meg was not comfortable inviting her Irish Catholic parents because they “really struggled when I came out. They couldn’t have celebrated this. They were nice to Lauren, but they did not embrace it when I came out.” Lauren adds, “We knew that the ritual had to be for us. We didn’t want anyone there who was fundamentally uncomfortable with the concept. And so unfortunately that did mean that Meg’s parents were out of it. To keep things on a level field, I didn’t tell my parents, either, even though they had been very accepting and would have come. It has been unfortunate that I had to hide it from them. They noticed my ring immediately the next time they saw me. I told them, ‘oh, that’s something Meg gave me,’ and they didn’t ask any more questions.”

They wrote their own vows. A friend of theirs who had been studying Native American religions performed the ceremony. Given the location under the sequoias, they knew she was the right person for the role. There was no one from their own religious backgrounds to officiate. Meg says “I grew up in the Catholic Church, and I would have been perfectly willing to work for change in the church. I would have been an active Catholic. But that had to change because of the church’s attitude towards homosexuality. If the church had been nicer to me I would have stayed.” Lauren is Jewish, though not religiously much anymore. It is more about community for her, but she knew no rabbis at the time who would have blessed their union.

Meg and Lauren are godparents to JP and Josh’s daughter Zoe, who was the ring bearer at the ceremony. She was in 1st grade, and told some of her classmates. One of the boys told her, “you can’t be a ring bearer. Only boys are ring bearers. You have to be a flower girl.” Zoe talked to her father who told her that it was her decision and that Meg and Lauren would understand if she decided not to. She told him, “You know dad, I’m going to do it. Because I don’t think only boys can be ring bearers. I think a girl can be a ring bearer.” The thing Meg and Lauren love best about this story is that Zoe “didn’t blink about the fact that the ceremony was for two women.”


In 2004, they got married at City Hall in San Francisco. There was a sense of celebration and new beginning. They stood in line, and Meg says, “it was really a great time. There was this spirit of officialness. That someone was going to let you do this thing that you had never entertained a notion you could do. I had never, ever even thought about the concept of getting married officially. It just never occurred to me. And I found that time at City Hall so moving.”

At their commitment ceremony 9 years earlier, they said:

Today's ceremony has no legal meaning, yet, Meg and Lauren
view this fact as a passing moment in time. Future generations
will be given the privilege that is not theirs today. When gay
marriage becomes legally acknowledged, Meg and Lauren will
quietly pursue this, and will view that moment as a welcome
extension of today's marriage. We view this commitment.
ceremony with all of the significance and celebration intended,
while two people make the biggest commitment that they can
ever make to one another.


When they heard that Gavin Newsome had ordered City Hall to start issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples, they “quietly pursued this” without much discussion. “Our relationship had been perfectly intact through that time. So when we heard we knew we had to do it because we said we would do it.” Because both worked full time, they had to juggle work and standing in line for 2 or 3 days. They each took a turn standing in line while the other went to work. When they finally reached the front of the line, Meg called Lauren and told her she had a half hour to get there, so Lauren brought a coworker to join them as a witness.

At City Hall in 2004


When the 2004 marriages were invalidated they were heartbroken. “I felt like someone had ripped something out of my heart,” says Lauren. “I was in disbelief. We had gotten married at City Hall. How could someone just take it away? And it just happened. We just got a letter in the mail asking if we wanted to donate the money we had paid for our marriage license, or if we wanted the money back. We had gotten new wedding bands for that event, and when the marriages were invalidated we both took those rings off and put them away and are now wearing our old rings. We have a certain amount of anger towards those rings. We felt violated. And we had to go back to work the next day and not talk about it because people can’t understand what that felt like. One day you’re married and celebrating that commitment, and nothing had happened in our relationship but at the end of the day, we were no longer married.”

They visited an attorney who helped them draft the documents they needed to ensure that each would be protected if one got sick or died. So when the California legislature passed the law giving domestic partners the same rights and responsibilities as married couples, nothing really changed for them.

In 2008, though, “that was real. It was clear to me that times had changed. This is so real. It’s very different from before, where you invite 2 or 3 people and don’t tell your family. Times had changed. I told all the important people at my work including my coworkers and my boss.” Lauren says, “In a way it was funny because we were excited about our friends’ weddings and Meg and I couldn’t quite complete a conversation about our own plans, even though we knew we were going to do it. It felt like ‘here we go again. Let’s get out the old vows.’ ” They were married on October 24, since they wanted to stay close to their original anniversary date and the 25th was a Saturday. They did not want a big party, so they just invited a few friends.

This time, though, Meg's father had passed away and they decided to tell Meg's mother. She was very happy for them and sent a beautiful crystal candle holder with a heart painted on it. The next time she visited and saw the candle holder sitting on a bookcase she gently scolded, "But I wanted you to put it next to a picture of the two of you!"

I ask if anything has changed for them since getting married, and what that means to them. Lauren says, “I was very excited about being able to go to work, go to HR and change all of my paperwork to ‘married.’ It meant being validated. I have been married since the day of our commitment ceremony in my heart and how I conduct myself and how I live my life. And to have that validated in the way our straight counterparts are validated felt so exciting. To be able to say in a conversation, ‘my spouse and I . . . .’ and have it not be a big deal that the spouse is another woman. The recent election was a real slap in the face about how far away we still are from that. The inner core is very strong; I know exactly what my commitment is.”

Meg adds, “I wish I had been more active in meeting people who don’t know us. Because our relationship is very special, but it’s so not radical. It’s just not whatever it is people are worried about.” Lauren continues, “We are responsible mature adults who stand up in the community and pay our taxes, you know? I don’t understand why people who gain nothing by taking the right to marriage away from us feel they gain something by that. On a romantic level, the 2008 marriage didn’t change anything. But I felt it was a responsibility for gay couples who had a commitment, who were ‘married,’ to go get married. It didn’t occur to me that people would push so hard when they gain nothing by taking it away from us.”

I ask what defines their marriage. “Joy, love, partnership, happiness, seeing each other through life’s struggles.” Lauren says, “When I come home from work I celebrate that I’m going to see Meg at the end of the day. Having dinner with her is the high point of every day. It’s simple stuff. We are just regular people. There is nothing special or different about our relationship in the joy it brings us. We have built what other people aspire to. The most profound thing about the gay weddings is that straight people when they get married, they are starting on a journey and hoping something will come true; that they will stay in love and build a life together. And in 2004 and 2008, we went to City Hall and stood with people who had already done that. They were celebrating something that had already happened and not just the hope.”