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.’ ”