“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.”
