Marriage Is Paramount, Gays Agree

BOSTON —  On the appointed day -- March 21, 2001 -- seven carefully selected couples fanned out across Massachusetts to apply for marriage licenses.

At Boston’s city hall, Ed Balmelli remembered, the clerk looked up and asked: “Where is the bride?” Balmelli smiled at his partner, Mike Horgan, and replied: “There is no bride.”

After all seven same-sex couples were denied licenses, they filed a lawsuit, and two years later won the right to marry. The couples were overjoyed when the state’s highest court ruled that Massachusetts must begin issuing same-sex marriage licenses in May. This decision, making Massachusetts the first state to legalize gay and lesbian marriage, touched off an impassioned debate that has polarized the nation.

The concept of men marrying men and women marrying women has infuriated many religious groups and prompted President Bush to call for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages.

Marriage in America is far from a perfect institution. The average first marriage lasts only seven years, and close to half of all marriages end in divorce. Of those who remarry within five years, at least 60% will end up divorced again.

Despite that picture, Horgan and Balmelli have always wanted to wed.

Balmelli said he and Horgan come from big families made even larger by in-laws. “We want to be the same as our brothers and sisters, our nieces, our nephews, our parents,” said Balmelli, 43. “We want to be married.”

The couple wear wedding rings, and three years ago traveled to Vermont for a civil union ceremony -- the closest thing to legal recognition they could hope for at the time. Both men say it is not enough.

“It has always been our premise that we are in this thing until we have marriage and full equality,” said Horgan, 44.

They said their need for marriage became apparent several years ago when their friend Mark died at home and his partner, Ken, was barred by law from claiming the body. Determined to safeguard their partnership, Horgan and Balmelli had their lawyer draw up yet another document -- this one with the gloomy title “Declaration as to Remains.” But despite their efforts to anticipate every possible threat to their partnership, Balmelli said, they worried “that there would always be one more document that we needed -- or worse, that the ones we had would not be recognized.”

They concluded that marriage was the only thing that could protect them as a couple, all the way to the grave. In 2001 they went to the Boston office of GLAD, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, to seek advice. Soon they found themselves talking to Mary Bonauto, an attorney in GLAD’s Boston office.

When she began work at the GLAD office in 1990, Bonauto, 42, recalled, the first case waiting on her desk was a request from a lesbian couple in western Massachusetts who wanted to get married. Bonauto said no -- the time was not right

But as she monitored thousands of calls to GLAD’s legal hotline over the next 10 years, it became clear to Bonauto that “for about half of the people who call, their legal problems would go away if they could marry.”

Beginning in 1993, when Hawaii’s highest court ruled that laws denying same-sex couples the right to marry violated the state constitution, Bonauto kept careful tabs on how courts and legislatures around the country were viewing same-sex marriage. Along with two Vermont lawyers, she argued the case that in 2000 generated the nation’s only civil union law.

In choosing Massachusetts as the next legal battleground, Bonauto looked at factors “as disparate as what the culture is like.” In Massachusetts, she said, “it is hard to go anywhere without running into gay and lesbian families.”

In the 2000 census, 100% of Massachusetts counties reported gay and lesbian households among their population -- slightly above the 99.3% of U.S. counties that said they had same-sex couples.

Bonauto interviewed more than 100 same-sex couples from across Massachusetts in order to find a mix of potential plaintiffs. Four of the seven couples who jointly filed the lawsuit -- now known as Goodridge vs. Department of Public Health -- were female, and three were male. Some had children and at least one of the plaintiffs was previously married to a member of the opposite sex. Their ages ranged from early 30s to late 60s. They were racially and professionally diverse.

Most of all, Bonauto said she relied on “my own gut check” as she sought plaintiffs with the fortitude to withstand media scrutiny and the flexibility to participate in a protracted court fight.

Horgan and Balmelli said they thought for “maybe about 40 seconds” before joining the lawsuit. Like their fellow plaintiffs, the pair wanted to obtain more than 1,000 rights and benefits associated with marriage.

The benefits unavailable to these same-sex couples involved healthcare, insurance, property, inheritance and parental rights -- legal issues that married men and women take for granted. End-of-life decisions were another common theme. “Marriage,” Horgan noted dryly, “always protects in the worst-case scenarios.”

Portability was another concern. Marriage is universally recognized, but no other state acknowledges Vermont’s civil unions.

Federal marriage benefits -- including tax breaks, Social Security and workers’ compensation -- also do not extend to civil unions.

“If you want to know the truth, I think civil union is the radical departure, not same-sex marriage,” Horgan said. “Creating something separate from marriage is unprecedented.”

The pair met almost 10 years ago at a Christmas party given by a group of gay and lesbian computer engineers -- gay geeks, as Horgan and Balmelli like to call themselves. For their first date, they went Christmas shopping. Their first meal together was in a food court, on plastic plates.

They discovered that both came from small towns. They learned they were both raised Catholic, and had gone to college at night. After dating for a year or so, they bought a house in Jamaica Plain, a Boston neighborhood that purports to be “the gayest ZIP code in Massachusetts.”

They painted their living room deep scarlet and their bedroom cobalt blue. They hooked up their five computers and arranged their collection of ceramic pitchers. They got a cat from the Humane Society and named her Kitty.

Soon they settled into a steady pattern of comfortable routines. Friday night is always date night. No matter how crazy the work week has been, they go to the same Chinese restaurant. They order the same meal: sesame chicken, orange-flavored beef and Peking ravioli. Then they walk to the same movie theater.

“We’re so predictable,” Horgan said.

From the outset, they knew a court victory in Massachusetts would have huge national implications. But they could not foresee that San Francisco would upstage their home state, granting marriage licenses to thousands of gay and lesbian couples since Mayor Gavin Newsom approved same-sex weddings on Feb. 12. California’s high court is reviewing the legality of these marriages.

Portland, Ore., a county in New Mexico, briefly, and New Paltz, N.Y., have followed San Francisco’s lead.

The Massachusetts Legislature is scheduled to resume deliberations Thursday on a possible constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. The process could take more than two years. And unless Gov. Mitt Romney intervenes in some way, city and town clerks in Massachusetts will begin issuing marriages licenses to gay and lesbian couples on May 17.

Horgan and Balmelli have not set a wedding date. They are busy trying to coordinate the church, the hotel banquet hall, the band, the florist, the bakery and their work schedules -- all the same problems that heterosexual couples face in planning their marriages. But soon enough, they said, they hope to be able to use the word “husband.”