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.”