Gay couples’ refrain: ‘We are just a family’
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — It started with a pair of women who had been partners in life, love and lesbian politics for more than half a century. It crescendoed when a world-famous celebrity dashed in and out of town for her own skip-the-frills wedding.
But in the two weeks between the quietly arranged marriage of Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, and the high-profile nuptials of Rosie O’Donnell and Kelli Carpenter, more than 3,400 other same-sex couples jumped at the chance to get their unions officially sanctioned in San Francisco.
The brides and grooms have been young and old, white-collar and blue, Californians and residents of at least 22 other states. Each couple came to City Hall with their own story of how they fell in love and decided to take part in a historic, though legally uncertain, social experiment.
These are the stories of two of them.
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Before they were pronounced “spouses for life” on Feb. 13, Doug Okun, 38, and Eric Ethington, 37, already considered themselves as married as two men could be. The San Francisco couple had been together eight years since they met one day over lunch.
Four years ago, they had an elaborate outdoor commitment ceremony with 100 guests in Napa, exchanging vows they’d written themselves under a canopy decorated with symbols from Okun’s Jewish upbringing and Ethington’s Mormon background.
It was, Ethington said, “probably the most beautiful, wonderful day of my life.”
Still, reminders that they were less than husbands in the eyes of society were everywhere — niggling indignities like being denied family discounts on car rentals and entrance fees at national parks, and real worries, such as knowing that if one died, the other wouldn’t get survivor benefits.
The couple’s resentment deepened when, after a two-year, bicoastal odyssey of fertility clinics and egg donors, a surrogate mother from West Virginia gave birth on Nov. 7 to their twins, Elizabeth and Sophia.
Shrugging off their rights they could stomach — but not the rights of their children.
“I’d be foolish not to get married with my girls. There are so many legal rights and responsibilities that come with it,” Ethington explained as he cradled a sleeping Sophia at their home in the city’s family-friendly Noe Valley neighborhood.
With their daughters strapped to their chests, the men went to City Hall the day after news broke of the first gay marriages. They brought along as witnesses two friends who also planned to wed — and found themselves in the middle of a joyful crowd outside the clerk’s office.
“It was so amazing to be there with so many people, people we knew and new people who were so lovely. The spirit of it and the intent was so positive,” said Okun, dancing with Elizabeth while she fussed in their living room. “This was very much an affirmation of us as a family.”
The image of such clean-cut, proud fathers proved irresistible to the media, and soon Ethington, who does marketing for Wells Fargo, and Okun, a financial services consultant, became the unofficial poster boys for the national debate over marriage rights for same-sex couples. After seeing their picture, people from as far as Ireland sent congratulatory letters and e-mail.
“I would have loved to have seen a picture like that growing up gay in Idaho,” mused Ethington, whose conservative family struggled with his sexuality. “It would have let me know that hey, I can have a happy, fulfilled life like I always wanted — with a twist.”
Evidence of their conventional life — and its twists — is everywhere in their renovated flat. With meatloaf in the oven, they carry the twins into their home office-turned-nursery, where a photograph of the woman who carried the girls through pregnancy stands on a dresser. It was the second time she served as a surrogate for a gay couple — generosity so profound that it almost compensates for all those who object to the life they now have, Okun said.
“I just don’t get why people care, why people feel so strongly against gay marriage and recognition of us a couple,” said Okun. “We are just a family. We are just living our lives, raising our kids, living in our community, making our contribution to society, paying our taxes. We are just a family like lots of other families.”
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Rebekah and Sandra Alcala got married in pajamas and matching Texas A & M sweat shirts. After driving 28 1/2 hours to San Francisco from their home in El Paso, Texas and spending all day at the end of a line of 170 couples, that was all they could muster in the way of bridal wear.
Neither one minded. They see their romance as a fairy tale featuring two princesses who get to live happily ever after. They met four years ago in a gay and lesbian bar — “rare for me, because I don’t like going out,” Rebekah Alcala said — and have been inseparable since. They live with her two sons, ages 8 and 12, in a cozy house with a whirlpool bath tub and eight pet turtles roaming a backyard illuminated by tiki torches and party lights.
“We got married as who we are, and that’s what marriage is,” she said. “You come as you are, you take that other person as they are.”
There are things about their wedding they would change, if they could. San Francisco was lovely, the people they met lovelier still. And while the 12-year-old “gave away” both brides, they had to leave his brother behind because they didn’t know if the situation would be volatile.
“Thank God for this mayor, thank God for him. It wouldn’t have happened without him,” said Rebekah Alcala. “It was just sad that I couldn’t do it with my family there, that I had to travel across the United States to do something that I could have done in my own home if I was straight.”
Other family members also missed the occasion.
“I called my mother after the ceremony, and she didn’t take it very well,” Sandra Alcala recalled, choking back tears. “I said, ‘Mom, you know what? It’s done. I love Rebekah, and there is nothing you can do.'”
As lesbians in a Republican state, the women are acutely aware of their minority status, but try not to let that inhibit them. They have begun to share Sandra’s surname, and they hold hands and kiss in public. They’ve never been threatened, although they took the older boy out of public school after he was teased about his two moms and administrators didn’t intervene.
Like other couples with children, Sandra, 34, and Rebekah, 28, say their lives would be less crazy if they were granted the benefits of marriage. An example: To get health insurance for her sons when she went back to school to train as a paramedic, Rebekah Alcala went on Medicaid because her partner, who earns a good living as a hospital pharmacist, couldn’t add them to her policy.
They also live with the knowledge that if something happened to the boys’ birth mother, Sandra Alcala would have to fight to keep them, since Texas denies gay couples those rights.
“When I was growing up, what was normal for me was having two parents who loved me, and supported me and would do anything for my best interests,” she said. “And that’s what I want to give my boys. They just happen to have two moms.”
Listening to the Lone Star state’s favorite son, President Bush, call for changing the Constitution to ban gay marriage, the women almost had to laugh.
“We are just a family,” Rebekah Alcala said. “What is the harm in that?”
What could be more traditional, they wonder, than their home, where two boys do their homework and play computer games, and two parents paint and garden and shop at Wal-Mart?
“People ask me, what if it gets denied? It doesn’t matter. I was married for a week. I was equal. I had the same rights as everybody else had and it felt so good,” she said. “No one can take that away from me.”