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.”

Opening doors, changing minds

In May 2008 the California Supreme Court held that it violated the Equal Protection clause of the California constitution to deny same sex couples the right to marry. On November 4, 2008, 51% of the voters in California amended our constitution to limit marriage to those between a man and a woman.

I keep hearing the same story repeated. Gay people who talked about their relationships with their friends, families and coworkers in the run-up to the election changed the way people voted on Proposition 8. I heard a couple, two women who walked from Los Angeles to San Francisco after the election to talk to people about same sex marriage, say that over and over again after talking to straight voters they were told, “If I had met you before the election I wouldn’t have voted for Proposition 8.”

The proponents of Proposition 8 focused on sowing fear: telling voters that without Proposition 8 schools would have to teach children about homosexuality and churches would be forced to marry gay couples. Neither is true, but the real predicter of how people voted seems to be whether they know anyone who is gay or lesbian. When straight voters know gay and lesbian people they realize that our relationships are just like theirs and just as deserving of recognition and respect.

In the movie Milk, Harvey Milk tells his staff, “When they know who we are, they vote for us 2 to 1.” It is in that spirit that I began The Doors Opening Project. I want to open the doors of understanding and respect between straight and gay people, to open the door to full equality for gays and lesbians. I want the people who visit this blog to meet the couples who got married in California between June and November 2008, the real people whose lives are affected by Proposition 8.