Given the most recent developments on the marriage equality front, I think it's time for all of us who are, or have been, married to our same-sex partners, to make the Kososphere aware of that. We were discussing this in Top Comments last night; as commonmass said,
An interesting diary would be to ask how many people at Daily Kos are legally married to their same-sex partners. I know for a fact there are some of us. But I don't know how many.
I was nominated to write it, maybe because the K4ME group is my own creation, and maybe because June 19, 2008 was the earliest among us (if it's not, I'll be VERY delighted). My story actually starts on May 15, 2008, when the California Supreme Court ruled in a 4–3 decision that laws directed at gays and lesbians are subject to strict scrutiny and same-sex couples' access to marriage is a fundamental right under Article 1, Section 7 of the California Constitution.
MUCH more below the Great Orange Wedding Bouquet.
I guess I'll start way back at the beginning. You probably know that Jim and I met in June 1971 (early in the morning of the 19th), and it was clear within a couple of months that we would be spending our lives together. We registered as domestic partners in California in 2001, and we watched with increasing interest as courts in Hawaii and Massachusetts handed down decisions that said why have something that does all the things that marriage does that isn't called marriage. Jim wasn't really on the marriage bandwagon - "words have meanings," he was fond of saying - but we would have gone up to San Francisco for the Gavin Newson marriage-fest in February 2004 if we had had the funds. So we watched the progress of the in re Marriage Cases suit with some interest.
I was in my office at the community college where I do most of my teaching in May 2008 when the California Supreme Court removed the barriers to same-sex marriage. It was around 10:30 AM and I had a Twentieth-Century United States class to teach at 11:15. I was surprised at how giddy the news that we COULD get married made me, and so, when I walked into the classroom (I didn't make the fact that I'm gay a big deal in my teaching at that point) and announced "I can get married now" it surprised me. The class applauded when I explained what that meant. Jim was fine with that too, but since there was a month delay, we decided not to do anything until I got back from the AP US History reading in Louisville early in June.
When I DID get back, there was something that might have been an issue. The first day marriage licences would be available would be June 17, and we REALLY wanted to get married on June 19, the day we had been celebrating as our anniversary at that point for thirty-six years. None of the local governments had their stuff together enough to set up an appointment by June 10, so we went to the city and county of San Francisco website. Yes, they were set up. So we reserved a time for a wedding in the City Hall rotunda at 11:00 AM on the 19th and we made our train reservations.
We got up REAL early on June 17 and headed off to the Beverly Hills courthouse. I think we were 11th or 12th online at 7:30 AM. We saw ourselves on the KNBC-TV News that night, in fact. Here's an interesting interactive map from the Los Angeles Times about the spike in marriage licenses in June 2008. The next day we took the train to San Francisco. We checked into our cheap hotel and had dinner at Grubstake, which had been our habit.
On Wednesday, we met a couple of Jim's friends at City Hall. We went for our appointment, met the judge-advocate who was going to perform the ceremony, and proceeded to her favorite spot in the rotunda:
Here we are. Jim just didn't like to be photographed, ever. This is us during the ceremony:
There are more from the day but they're all that blurry. We had lunch at
Absinthe afterward with our witnesses. Kir Royales. I don't remember what we did in the afternoon, except that we didn't spend it in any bars drinking. For dinner, we went to
Firefly in the Noe Valley, which I liked a lot better than Jim did. The next day, we took the train back to Los Angeles.
Married life? It wasn't any different from our life before we were married, but it was. It was ESPECIALLY different when Proposition 8 put us in a special class of 18,000 couples who were married while other LGBT couples couldn't get married (as some of you also know, Prop 8 turned me into a student of LGBT history). Jim died before he could see all the gains that marriage equality has made, but my experiences with Social Security after his death have showed me that we are indeed on an equal footing with every other married couple in these United States.
So that's my story. How many more of us are there here? I'd love to hear from other members of married same-sex couples in the comments. If you'd like to tell your story in a diary, that's what Kossacks for Marriage Equality is for.
Fri May 23, 2014 at 5:49 AM PT: WOW! I just woke up and it's still going on. Thank you all SO much for sharing your stories. You're providing an excellent record of life as it is today, and that's why I republished it in Remembering LGBT History.
I'm not sure what the next steps for what we're learning are, but I figure I'll summarize what we learned from this (in a way that doesn't become seriously meta) within the next week.