No Wedding Bell Blues for Gay Couples

OKLAHOMA CITY —  On the day that the U.S. Senate publicly spurned gay and lesbian activists, Helen and Tina Stiefmiller straggled home from their jobs, exchanged embraces and office news and began the usual litany of domestic chores and pastimes.

Over a dinner of takeout chicken, they discussed an unexpected plumbing problem and its impact on the household budget. They agreed to spend the weekend fishing with Tina’s mother and stepfather at a nearby lake. They watched a television documentary about one of Helen’s personal and professional passions: Native Americans. As Helen patiently sewed beading onto a Native American doll outfit, Tina mused happily about the prospect of the two raising children together.

Only hours before, the Senate had narrowly defeated a bill that would have made it illegal for most employers to discriminate against gay men and lesbians. And in an even more resounding message to homosexuals, the upper chamber overwhelmingly approved the Defense of Marriage Act. The legislation, which President Clinton signed into law early Saturday morning, would allow states to disregard gay and lesbian marriages performed in other states. It defines marriage, for federal purposes, as a union between a man and a woman.

*

On the floor of the Senate, lawmakers had brandished Bibles, invoked historians, cited legal scholars and thundered about the sanctity of heterosexual marriage, the preconditions of the nation’s greatness and the responsibilities of lawmakers to preserve and protect the traditional family.

But for Tina and Helen, the Senate’s rhetoric, the subsequent votes and Clinton’s signature are strangely irrelevant. Three years ago this November, the Stiefmillers legally merged their names (from Tina Stief and Helen Miller), exchanged matching rings and recited vows of commitment in a ceremony attended by 300 guests. Today, the couple look forward to the possibility that Helen could be pregnant as a result of a donor-insemination procedure that she underwent only days before the Sept. 10 Senate vote on the marriage measure.

“In many ways it hasn’t changed anything,” Tina said of the measure. “I didn’t lose the right to legally marry because I didn’t have it before. We’ve known all along that if we waited for some type of societal or governmental recognition of our marriage, we might never be married. For us, regardless of what the Senate does, we’ve made those vows; we’re married.”

In places such as Oklahoma City, where homosexuals are a quiet presence rather than a political force, gay and lesbian couples took the news with a measure of both resignation and equanimity. For now, about the best they can hope for is that the Defense of Marriage Act is but a temporary setback in the gradual assimilation of same-sex couples into mainstream culture.

Judging from the experiences of same-sex partners here in America’s heartland, that process is proceeding with or without the nation’s political consent.

“History is very helpful to me in this: I don’t know of any social-change movement that hasn’t had some losses,” Tina said after the vote. “People keep trying--they get knocked back, and they get up and keep going. I can look at the struggles of lots of groups and know that nobody ever had immediate success.

“I want to be a happy person, have a fulfilling relationship, have children,” she continued. “So I’m going to go ahead and do those things regardless.”

Helen and Tina are products of the heartland, and they want all of the heartland stuff--the marriage, the kids, the white picket fence. Long after the years of car-pooling and soccer games and PTA are over, the Stiefmillers envision their lives together in retirement: an RV and a fishing boat, a garden and kids--lots of grandkids--to complete and carry on their family.

“In 30 years, when we’re still together, maybe we’ll be role models for straight and gay couples,” said Helen, 33, a museum curator and historian in Guthrie, Okla. By then, she added hopefully, “we’ll be obsolete as activists.”

Enactment of the Defense of Marriage Act ensures that, for the foreseeable future, Tina will get no health insurance through Helen’s state-funded job. It means that there will be no implicit understanding about inheritance and no legal certainty that each woman could make medical decisions for the other in an emergency. If the law stands, it mandates that neither will have a right to survivor benefits accrued by her mate during a lifetime of work.

As the nation’s tolerance of gays and lesbians has increased over time, activists had hoped, at least, for these things. More subtly, they have longed for the acceptance into mainstream American life that they believe legal recognition would bring.

That is something that even the defeat of the Defense of Marriage Act could not have given them. But its approval is a stark reminder of how far from that goal they are.

“Some people are very frightened by us, and I’ve yet to figure it out,” said Jack Wozniak, a 44-year-old Oklahoma City resident. He and partner Don Hanks, who have been together for 13 years, celebrated their relationship six years ago in a garden ceremony that brought family and friends together.

“I forget,” Wozniak said. “I’m so fortunate in my life, my work situation, my circle of friends.

“I forget that it’s an issue with people, that there are people who hate me or are frightened by me,” he said. “And when something like this happens, it’s like I’m looking at it all over again for the first time.”

Wozniak, managing editor of the Gayly Oklahoman, a weekly newspaper for gays and lesbians, sees the gay-marriage issue as a simple matter of civil rights.

“We should be able to use the same terms for our relationships that everybody else uses for theirs,” he said. “If we accept another term for the same thing, we’re separating ourselves. And we all know that separate-but-equal doesn’t work.”

*

Since the introduction of the Defense of Marriage Act four months ago, gay and lesbian activists have watched, disheartened, as it moved steadily toward becoming law. In July, the measure won approval in the House on a 342-67 vote, with almost two-thirds of Democrats voting in favor. It was approved by the Senate on an equally lopsided 85-14 vote. As he signed the bill at 12:50 a.m. EDT Saturday, Clinton noted that he has always opposed legal recognition of same-sex unions.

The legislative success of the Defense of Marriage Act owes much to the American public’s deep discomfort with same-sex marriage. In a poll conducted for Newsweek magazine in May, 58% of respondents said they opposed extending legal recognition to such unions, while just 33% approved of such state recognition. About 44% agreed with the argument made by the bill’s authors that legal recognition of gay marriage would undermine traditional marriage between heterosexuals.

Supporters of the legislation said it is needed because a Hawaii Supreme Court case threatens to redefine marriage throughout the nation. Still awaiting final resolution, the Hawaii ruling tentatively concluded that to deny gay and lesbian couples marital rights would be discriminatory and contrary to the state’s constitution. If the court ultimately holds that same-sex marriages are allowable, other states might have been obliged to honor such unions performed in Hawaii. The Defense of Marriage Act states that no state is required to recognize homosexual marriages performed outside their borders.

*

In places such as Oklahoma City, where gay men and lesbians live and work and form couples against a backdrop of conservative values, the Hawaii case has encouraged longings that many had never dared entertain before.

“I never considered marriage a possibility in my life--it was never going to happen,” Wozniak said. “All of the discussion about marriage now has made me excited about it, and I’ve really become adamant about it. I not only want it, I damn well want it. Because now there’s a glimmer of hope. Now we might be able to be accepted.”

Some gay and lesbian activists have argued that the Defense of Marriage Act is not an issue on which the homosexual community should make its stand, but others say it is a fight from which they cannot walk away.

The right to marry--and to have one’s commitment recognized by the state--is a right too fundamental, they say, to be subject to further compromise. And the respect they hope that right would bring is a hope too cherished now to give up.

“You have to do it,” said John Doneti, a 33-year-old Oklahoma City social worker who considers himself married to 36-year-old Terry Dennison. “You have to wake up and yell and scream and fight and fight. You may get set a of couple steps back in the process, but you have to do it.”

Doneti and Dennison send each other red roses on the anniversary of their first date. They have been together since that date 12 years ago. While the two have made no public commitments to each other, they are so much a couple that they have outlasted many straight friends’ unions. They often cannot agree on where to go out to dinner when neither wants to cook, but they have an agreed tiebreaker-- a friendly neighborhood restaurant--when the bickering threatens to become too intense. They have an uneasy truce over who mows the lawn (John) and who does the laundry and cleans the kitchen and bathroom (Terry).

In their quiet, tree-lined neighborhood, straight neighbors lounge with them on the hood of their car on languid summer weekends, sharing neighborhood gossip. An elderly neighbor gratefully accepts Doneti’s offer to mow her lawn and clear the ravenous bagworms, sending over a pot-roast dinner in appreciation.

In the Stiefmillers’ neighborhood, 79-year-old retiree Dale Webster used to amble off his front porch every now and then and, in a grandfatherly way, ask Tina and Helen when they were going to go off and get married. He did not, of course, mean to each other.

*

As the women’s relationship became more evident, Webster halted the misguided inquiries. But he and his wife, Wanda, have remained friendly. Wanda, who is 69, declines to comment on the Stiefmillers’ lifestyle. But she volunteers that she and her husband “get a kick out of them” as the two “buddies” come and go on their camping trips, play with their dogs and tend the garden between their houses. Helen regularly mows the Websters’ lawn, Wanda noted. “They’re very good neighbors,” she said.

Doneti sees such acceptance as a measure of progress. But the overwhelming popularity of the Defense of Marriage Act bears witness to the difficulties still facing gays and lesbians in their battle for acceptance.

“You’ll know we have arrived,” Doneti said, “when gay people can live in suburbia and just be people--not the two fags, but the couple down the street.”