Five minutes gave them 1,136 new rights.
When the City and County of San Francisco decided to change the
words “bride” and “husband” to
“applicant 1″ and “applicant 2,” they drew
a flood of same-sex couples from all over the nation hoping to
obtain marriage licenses.
UCLA was no exception. Faculty, staff and alumni traveled to San
Francisco to take advantage of the reworded documents.
Grant Tyler Peterson, who graduated from UCLA with a
bachelor’s degree in 2002 and then returned to earn his
master’s degree in 2003, married his boyfriend of over six
years, Eric “Gumby” Anderson, a UC Irvine sociology
lecturer and doctorate candidate who also briefly attended
UCLA.
“When we saw this window of opportunity open, we jumped on
it,” Peterson said.
The two were originally planning to hold a ceremony over the
summer to celebrate their “domestic partner” rights,
but will now use the same ceremony to celebrate their marriage.
Peterson and Anderson drove to San Francisco on Sunday night
where they camped out in the rain and wind until City Hall opened
the next morning. The following Monday was President’s Day, a
national holiday, but City Hall was alive and running at 8 a.m. due
to a staff of volunteers.
“There was an amazing output of community support,”
Peterson said. “It was an ideal utopia of people coming
together.”
Besides staffing City Hall, volunteers helped hundreds of
couples waiting in line by passing out everything from coffee,
donuts and camping equipment to free taxi rides for newlyweds.
As Peterson and Anderson ascended the courthouse stairs they
sang a revised version of “Chapel of Love,” the Dixie
Cups 1964 smash hit. In Peterson and Anderson’s version,
“chapel” was replaced with
“courthouse.”
While Peterson and Anderson were being married by a justice of
the peace, another UCLA affiliate was waiting in line with her
partner.
Mary Margaret Smith, the student affairs officer for the
Women’s Studies Program and Center for the Study of Women,
drove up with her partner Eileen Cusimano, a UCLA alumnus.
The two left Los Angeles at 11 p.m. on Saturday night and did
not arrive in San Francisco until Sunday, where they also waited in
line all day.
The line was so long that the couple still had not made it
inside by day’s end. They returned Monday and were married
that afternoon.
Richard Yuen, one of several volunteer deputy commissioners and
the associate dean of students at Stanford University, married the
couple in a ceremony lasting about five minutes, which was
surrounded by similar short weddings taking place concurrently.
“In City Hall there were alcoves of couples all over
getting married,” Cusimano said.
“There were deputy commissioners in various places on the
ground floor, the stairs and the mezzanine,” she added.
The “assembly-line” marriage ceremonies, as Anderson
called them, occurred because the participants were trying to marry
as many people as possible before an injunction was put in
place.
When the licenses are sent to the state of California to be
recorded it is unknown how the state will react.
However, heterosexual marriages have also occurred using the new
form, so if the state rejects the form, it will reject a minimal
amount of heterosexual marriages as well as the homosexual
ones.
“I’m really eager to see what happens ““ if it
comes to having to file class action suits to get our legal rights,
I’m up for it,” Cusimano said.
“We just want the privileges that come with being a
married couple,” she added.
Smith said she thinks her marriage will be seen as part of a
historic civil rights struggle for the equality of homosexuals.
“I heard people waiting in line saying “˜This is my
seat at the lunch counter,’ and that’s how we felt.
This was an act asserting our civil rights,” Smith said.
Married couples are given more than 1,000 new rights, including
the right of inheritance and the right to claim the other’s
deceased body.
There are also many perks to being married that people do not
usually think of.
“The first thing I did was put the certificate in a frame
that my husband denounced as ugly. The next thing I did was call
AAA and got a $100 discount for being married,” Anderson
said.
Anderson said that upon walking into his classroom the week
following his marriage, he was greeted with applause and a standing
ovation.