“I want to marry you the minute I can.”
Sasha and Keri first met at science camp in the sixth grade, though they did not realize this until much later. Both attended Presentation, an all-girls Catholic high school. “Sasha was the first person I met at Presentation High School, at Hi There Day.” They were friends, though not close, but Sasha “knew Keri to be a good person and someone who I liked.”
“We lost touch after graduation and Keri got it in her head to do a search on the internet for me.” “Sasha was always really nice to me. I was very shy and anyone who was nice to me always stuck out in my mind. I had thought about her over the years, and thought about her when I heard that her daddy died.” This was in 1998.
Keri wrote Sasha a note asking if she had attended Presentation. Sasha says, “When I got the note, I thought ‘oh no, someone from high school.’ But she was so nice I thought she deserved at least some response. But I was thinking that this girl is Mormon, so she is probably married to a Mormon husband and has a half a dozen children. So I thought, well, if we are going to have any conversation I am just putting it out there that I am a big dyke. I said it more politely than that, but I wanted to be really up front about who I am so that if there was any weirdness about the religion thing it was out there. She wrote me back, and in the footer of her email was an Indigo Girls lyric. I thought, ‘hmm, that’s interesting, and you say you’re not married.
Well . . . !’ ”
Keri had not come out, even to herself, at this point. “I was raised very Mormon. My folks had a bankruptcy and I quit school to help my family. I still lived with them. I had gone on a few dates with men but not many and at the end of them I would let them hug me but that was it. I had never kissed anybody. So Sasha and I were emailing and then talking on the phone. And one of the first conversations we had I asked her, ‘How do you know if you’re gay?’ She wrote me this beautiful letter, several pages long, and told me that I was beautiful. I thought, ‘you don’t know that I’m beautiful. You haven’t even seen me for 15 years!’ But she told me, ‘I remember who you were.’
“We started having these marathon phone conversations. Which was really funny, because I had dated these guys before and always told them, ‘Listen, I talk on the phone all day at work so if you call and I don’t want to talk, it’s nothing personal.’ But I would get on the phone with her, and she was living in San Diego, and we were having three hour phone conversations.”
Sasha says that one of the things she really noticed about Keri “was that you were kind. I had ended a relationship a couple of months earlier and I thought, ‘forget it. I’m not doing this again. This is too painful and too difficult so no way.’ But there you were. And you were so nice. And I just couldn’t stop thinking about you. I was thinking about you all the time. And it was crazy, because at 31 or 32 . . .” Keri finishes the thought, “I was a Mormon girl living at home with her folks!” They both laugh.
Sasha continues, “I thought, I do not want the responsibility of being The One who possibly screws her up! But it was one of those things. I was irresistibly drawn. I had to write her. I had to call her. And I had to see her. So six or eight weeks later I was in San Jose for a friend’s bridal shower and I arranged to have coffee with her. But after getting some encouragement from friends, I arranged to have dinner instead.”
Keri was still in “friend mode.” She had no idea that Sasha was interested in her. But when Sasha came to pick her up for dinner, Keri says, “My mother knew.” Sasha observes with a laugh, “She gave me the stank eye.” Keri continues, “My mother had told me ‘she’s interested.’ And I said, ‘no she’s not. We’re friends. We’re just going out to dinner.’ I had talked to my mother before that and asked her, ‘What if I was gay?’ She said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t be thrilled because it’s easier if you’re not. But I will always love you and there’s nothing you could do that would change that.’ ”
Before they went to dinner, Sasha says, “Keri came downstairs. And to me she looked like she was dressed for a date. I admit that I was probably seeing a lot of what I wanted to see. So she took me up to her bedroom to have a little conversation,” Keri adds, “Because my mother was planted in the living room and was not leaving.”
“So we got out of the eyes of the watchful chaperone and Keri said, ‘I have a present for you,’ and she pulled out an envelope. In the envelope was a handwritten story—and Keri has beautiful penmanship—and an Eisenhower silver dollar. The story was about a man who always rode the bus. And he was very crufty and grumpy and negative. And one day this negative old guy gets on the bus and he says, ‘I don’t even have quarters to get on the bus. All I have is this worthless old Ike dollar. Can someone give me change?’ A man on the bus changed the dollar into quarters. A few days later the same man gets on the bus but the crufty old man isn’t there. He asks the bus driver where the old man is and the driver says, ‘didn’t you hear? He died.’ So the man decided to keep the dollar to remind him that every day is a good day. Keri had written in her note that she was giving me that dollar to remind me that every day is a good day.” Sasha smiles, “Can you believe that? And to me, this was cementing the deal. She was still in friend mode, but to me . . . .”
Sasha still has the silver dollar and carries it with her in a bag that Keri sewed for her.
They drove to the coast for dinner. On the drive, Sasha told Keri, “You know, I’m kind of sweet on you.” Keri replied, “Oh, I like you too,” completely missing Sasha’s meaning. “Sasha has a very intense gaze. At dinner I was looking down a lot because she was really paying close attention, and I’m shy. I was more shy back then. And it kind of threw me.”
After dinner Sasha suggested they walk down to a little landing down a narrow path. “And I don’t like heights,” says Keri, “But I walked down. And when we were down there, she went to kiss me and I gave her my cheek. I was shocked. I wasn’t expecting it.” She turns to Sasha. “Then you kissed me again and I let you. And it was my first kiss. I’m not really one for public displays of affection. And there was the restaurant with all the windows looking straight at us! Then we went back to the car, and I held your hand. I sat and was thinking the whole way to Santa Cruz. We kissed over the water there. And I liked it. We went to coffee and we started talking. When we got back to the house, I asked you to kiss me again.” They both smile and laugh.
There was a misunderstanding because when Sasha dropped Keri off at home, she said, “I’ll see you the next time.” Keri thought she was saying, “that was nice and maybe I’ll see you when I’m back in San Jose.” But, Keri remembers, “she had told me she missed having someone say hello to her when she got home. So when I got home I left a message on her answering machine so she would have a message saying ‘welcome home’ when she got there.”
Sasha says, “I had no idea I had committed this faux pas. I was elated. I was on Cloud Nine. I woke up happy the next day and I wrote you a poem,” Keri adds, “which I slept with under my pillow for a very long time.”
When Keri got home, her mother asked, “Did you have a good time?” Keri said, “Yes, I had a wonderful time.” Her mother asked, “Did she kiss you?” and Keri answered, “Yes, and I liked it very much.” “I could tell my mother anything. And she was afraid that Sasha was a total dog who was doing a rebound thing. She was very afraid of me being hurt because I was very naïve. So I didn’t tell my sister or my dad because my mom asked me not to.”
“My mom loved Sasha. And we really took it slow.” She told her mother, “I really wish I could tell dad” about her relationship with Sasha. She came home one night “and my mother said, ‘okay I told your father.’ I thought, ‘what part of “I wish I could” didn’t you get?’ When her father got home, he acted as if nothing had happened. Keri asked, “Are we okay?” He said, “About what? Oh, that.” And then he “repeated what my mom said about how it would be harder, but he still loved me.”
After they had been together for about a year, Keri and her family learned that her mother had cancer. Keri was visiting Sasha in San Diego for Christmas. It was 1999, and they were getting ready to go to a New Year’s Eve party when Keri learned that her mother had a grapefruit-sized tumor in her lung.
Shortly after that, Sasha moved back to San Jose because her mother was losing her eyesight. Keri’s mother was in the hospital for several months and while she was there, Sasha would visit and bring her rosemary “so she would have a scent of outside. When she died in August, Sasha put a bouquet of rosemary in the grave along with a pouch with a crystal that she had given her months before for comfort during her illness.
Keri’s father asked that Sasha’s name be presented with the names of the rest of the family at the Mormon temple even though Keri “wasn’t out to any of my church members.”
Around this same time, they had been in the process of looking for a house. After her mother died, she threw herself into looking for a house. “That’s how I dealt. My mother was my best friend. That’s what I did so I didn’t have to go home and face the memories. I channeled all of my energy into that. That way I was moving forward and not dwelling.” Sasha was a little overwhelmed because she had been very close to Keri’s mother, too. “My mother called her ‘puppy Sasha’ because she said she was so eager to please and be loved.”
When they bought the house, Keri’s church members offered to help her move. Keri “wanted to be up front and frank. So I said to the wife of the bishop, ‘You know, Sasha and I aren’t just friends. We’re partners.’ And she said, ‘Oh honey, we’ve known that for a long time.’ And they helped us move. It was wonderful. But that’s why it was extra hurtful with Prop 8, because some of those people who helped us move made donations to the campaign. That same bishop, their family made a donation. It was so painful. I haven’t talked to my mother’s best friend since I found out that she donated.”
Keri tells me about a coworker with whom she considered a friend. This woman approached Keri the day after the election and said, “I want you to know that I still love you but I voted yes.” Keri wonders why she felt the need to share this. She was flabbergasted. The woman continued, “You should have known that I voted this way because I am very conservative.” Later Keri said to her, “You know, it hurt me, and it hurt my family, and it hurts people who have gay family members. You say that it isn’t a personal thing and that you still love me, but it is very personal to me.” Another coworker told Keri that her church was very strongly supporting Proposition 8 but that she voted no because she knew and loved Keri.
She received much more support from her coworkers than not but is “amazed by how all of that support can be colored by this one person who felt the need to assuage her guilt by saying ‘oh I still love you, but I voted yes.’ She could have just said nothing. I continued to be civil, but it took me a while to forgive her. I’m there now where I think I’ve forgiven her. But I don’t look at her the same way. Which is very sad to me.”
Keri says “Sasha was a little hesitant to get married because she had had all of these relationships, but she was my first. I had all this focus and all this love to give her. I was ready to get married.” Sasha says, “I had never had a commitment ceremony with my other two partners. And I thought getting married was a very serious thing to do. I had seen friends who had commitment ceremonies and I’d seen them split. I’d seen them buy property and then seen them split. And I didn’t want this to be one of those things. So even though we’d been together for 4 years at that point I wanted to be sure that even if it was a symbolic wedding—I had no illusions that Gavin’s experiment was real—even just standing up and saying it was a very real gesture. I talked to a close friend about it. Ultimately, I said, ‘I’m just going to do this and trust that this will work out.’ ”
They had an appointment to get married, but before the date arrived the court ordered the city to stop performing marriages. Sasha says, “And when they called us and told us that all the weddings had been cancelled, my heart was broken. And I knew that it was real.” After that, Keri says, “We decided we weren’t going to get married until it was real. We weren’t going to have a commitment ceremony.” But they registered as domestic partners “the first day we could.”
In 2008, “All of a sudden the news started buzzing that the California Supreme Court was going to rule on whether same-sex couples had the right to marry. And lo and behold, we did! When that ruling came out, the minute I heard it I called Keri up and I said, ‘Shall we go shop for a wedding dress? I remember crying on the phone, too. I wanted to do this as soon as I could. After the 2004 thing I told Keri, ‘I want to marry you the minute I can. As soon as this becomes legal, let’s get married.’ We got our marriage license on the first day it was available. We were seventh in line. But we planned to have the ceremony a month later because we wanted it to be nice and we wanted to prepare for it.”
Sasha wanted to be married in a civil ceremony at City Hall by a commissioner or a justice of the peace because that is how her parents were married and they were married for a long time. Keri wanted to be married someplace pretty. The San Jose city chapel is “unlovely.” So they agreed they would be married at San Francisco City Hall. Sasha says, “It doesn’t matter how big the ceremony is, or how much stuff is around it, or if there is a minister or a thousand people watching you. The act of having that document, that binding contract, that’s really it.”
Keri says, “My very Mormon father came down from Utah in his Sunday suit. And my sister and her fiancé came. Sasha’s sister and brother were there.”
I ask what being married means to them. Sasha says, “I would give Keri my kidney. I show up to help take care of her dad. Keri shows up to help me with my mother. Marriage means to be there completely and unconditionally for each other.” Keri adds, “And to have it be recognized. It’s a subtle difference, to have this acknowledged as real. That nobody is going to come in between us.” Sasha says, “Nobody is going to say, ‘you’re not family.’ That still happens. People get run out of the emergency room. We don’t have to explain ourselves to anybody as a married couple. It’s ‘of course.’ It’s dignifying. It’s real.” Keri says, “It almost made me love her even more, just knowing—this is my wife.”
They refer to each other in different ways. They always called each other “partner,” or “girlfriend” before getting married. Sasha says, “I don’t really gravitate to saying wife because of all that old feminist training I have about ‘wife’ and property and subservience and all that. It feels weird to call her my wife because then I wonder, ‘am I the husband?’ So since it doesn’t flow for me, it’s easier to say that she’s my partner or my girlfriend.” Keri says, “I say ‘This is my wife.’ And I like that. I did not call her my wife before we got married, even though I considered myself married because I had made a commitment. And I knew about myself even before I got together with Sasha or discovered that I was gay that I was monogamous. And I knew that once I gave my heart it was going to be forever. And that’s what I have. I can’t look into my future 5 years, 10 years, 50 years without seeing Sasha in it. I just can’t.”
Sasha says, “When we started going out, I knew with Keri that I had to be all in. Which was different from my original strategy post-breakup of not getting tied down. I knew she was a special person. I did not want to do anything unless I felt it. And I felt it after one date. I knew I had to decide right then what I wanted to do with this. I knew she was real. I went with the intention of going all in.”
Keri adds, “I told her that we had to build a strong foundation. That we would go slow and easy and build it up so that leaning on each other there was nothing that would crumble underneath us. I’m really glad that we moved slowly the way we did. We had our first date in 1999 and moved in together in 2002. I look at her sometimes and I think ‘My god, I’m married to the girl I met across the hall at Presentation!’ My dad calls Sasha his other daughter and signs cards to her ‘Love, Dad.’ We’ve been through a lot together. Marriage is supporting each other through good times and bad.”
