Valentines Day, 2004

I woke up on Saturday, February 14, 2004, feeling down on myself. Feeling like I'd missed out on one of the most important political and personal statements available to me to that point in my life. On Thursday of that week, Gavin Newsom, the Mayor of San Francisco (just across the Bay from us in Berkeley) had started marrying people like me and Iris. It was a shock and a stunner. It sent earthquakes of joy all across the LGBT community, and I had been too stuck in my daily grind to take a day off of work and go get hitched.

And, by Saturday, I was pretty sure the whole thing had been called off. Every hour on Friday, there had been threats of various legal actions, and besides, we all knew these pieces of paper weren't really going to hold up in court.

So, that was the scene as I started my regular Saturday morning on 2/14/04. It was my turn to do the grocery shopping and I had the radio on in the car. To my great surprise, KQED was reporting that, not only was San Francisco still performing weddings, but City Hall itself remained open for business on Saturday, using an all volunteer staff to handle the expected crowd.

I tore home and woke Iris up with a marriage proposal. Lucky for me, she said "yes!" We called our son Nathan, who had spent the night at a friend's, to see if he wanted to go with us. He was a high school senior then, and we hoped he would join us. We did warn him that there would probably be a lot of waiting involved (which turned out to be quite accurate). Happily, he was excited to go.

So we hopped on BART and headed into the City. When we arrived at San Francisco City Hall, at about 10:30 am, it was apparent that the line for the same-sex weddings was being handled in a non-standard way, through an entrance to the rear of the building, and the line of couples already snaked all the way from the back, along one entire side, and then was beginning to turn along the front of the building as well. Heterosexual couples who had booked a Valentines Day wedding date were being allowed into the building from the front entrance.

So, for the next six hours or so, we stood in line, along with many hundreds of other couples, and their friends and family members. The couple in front of us had been together 8 years. The couple behind us had been together 18 years. At the time, we had been together 13 years. We exchanges stories, took pictures of one another, traded back rubs, getting food, and so forth. It was a very festive event, and all of us were acutely aware that we were making history.

At long last, we made the turn into the building, and then truly amazing things began to happen. You became aware of the fact that every single civil servant you encountered was volunteering his or her time that day (remember, it was a Saturday!). From the security guard at the door to the clerk at the desk, these people would look up at you and say, "I am so glad to be here today doing this for you!" Honestly, you could not keep your eyes dry from one bureaucratic step to the next.

After one of these form completion tasks, we went into an anti-room for a moment, and here was a young woman handing out cupcakes. She said that she had been there with friends the day before and felt that there really ought to be cake for the brides and grooms, so she just decided to make it happen!

At last we had our license and we stood in a waiting area just off the balcony over the Rotunda. This is a dark, but dramatic space. We were standing there with at least 10 other couples, all waiting for a Deputy Commissioner to come and get us. We could also see that there were weddings going on all over the balcony just next to us. It was a wedding madhouse. In one regard, I was operating under a sensory overload at this point, but in another, I think I've never felt more alive, more inside of a moment.

I looked up, and there standing in front of me was an old friend I had known 15 years before. She was there to be a witness for another couple who had not shown up. She knew both Iris and I, and we did not have a witness, because Nathan was not yet 18. So, she became our witness. With Nathan standing by, we got married right then.

This photo shows Iris on the left, me on the right, and Nathan above us. We have just come out of City Hall, so we are newly married. The people on the far right are still in the line waiting to get in.

I have in my hand our copy of the license, which, it turned out, never got certified by the State of California. In the end, our 2004 marriage was never valid. In November 2004, We got a letter from the County Clerk offering us our money back, or we had the option of donating it to a fund to fight for marriage equality. We donated the money. Until 2008, when for another brief window of time, it was an option for same-sex couples to wed in California, we hung our 2004 marriage license on the wall in our house.

Now we have the 2008 license hanging on the wall. It has a little more strength behind it, in that it actually got certified by the State, and so we are legally married in California. But now we are a token couple, one of 18,000 (up from the 3200 in 2004!). Right now the rule is that nobody else coming after us can have what we have. They'll have to be satisfied with separate but unequal.


Here's what's true:
Until it is possible for my marriage to Iris to be recognized by the United States government and across all 50 states, my marriage to Iris is not equal to any one of those heterosexual couples' who walked in the front door of City Hall on 2/14/04, even though I have married Iris over and over again.

I am glad we married on 2/14/04, and I thank Gavin Newsom for his courageous step. But this is a far way from being a done deal.