When “I do” has strings attached
Same-sex couples face the same issues as everybody else getting married—and a host of others
By Jessica Keltz; photos by kc kratt

Doreen Peever; Parker and Paul Gevirtzman

Whether a couple gets married in a church in front of 300 well-wishers, on a Caribbean cruise, or in a City Hall office, once the cake is eaten and thank-you notes are sent, it all means the same thing, right? Honor and cherish, ’til death do us part, one set of tax forms, automatic inheritance rights, and societal recognition that your chosen spouse is your one and only.

But for some couples, the proposal and the ceremony are only the beginning of figuring out exactly what their union means—legally, anyway.

Since same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts, Ontario, and other relatively close locales, countless same-sex couples in WNY have decided to tie the knot. Each approached the vows and ceremony a little bit differently. And each exists in a certain amount of legal limbo, waiting for same-sex marriage to become the law in New York, and, someday, in the United States.

Saying their vows
The couples who have chosen not to wait until New York institutes same-sex marriage are pioneers sailing through uncharted waters. Decisions to make include: Should we write our own vows? Should we get married in Canada? Drive to Massachusetts for the weekend? What about our family and friends here at home? Do we have more than one ceremony? What does a wedding between two women or two men look like?

For Heather Youngman and Annabeth Hayes, the personal was political. The couple, now both thirty, had been together for about a year and were living together when, on Hayes’s twenty-fifth birthday, they saw then-president George W. Bush on television, giving a major address on same-sex marriage. They decided it was time to get engaged, but didn’t make wedding plans right away.

“After several months of being a political punching bag, we decided to speed up the process, since we were going to Canada anyway for vacation,” Youngman recalls. And so, after a year and a half as a couple, they married in Stratford, Ontario in August of 2004. They settled on making the wedding part of the vacation about a week before they tied the knot. In retrospect, sometimes they think it would have been a better idea to wait—until they had been together longer, to take the time to plan a wedding so that more friends and family could attend. But they also found that getting married meant they were taken more seriously as a couple by conservative relatives.

Youngman, a student at the University at Buffalo Law School, says her “Fox-watching Republican” father made it clear at the time that he did not approve of same-sex marriage. “But now I think they like Annabeth more than they like me,” she says of her parents.

For Hayes, a librarian, the wedding pushed her to come out to her extended family. “It made it like, this is a long-term thing. It made it more stable than ‘I’m dating this person.’ It makes things very concrete,” she says.

Doreen Peever, a lay Unitarian minister in St. Catherines, Ontario, who has married many same-sex couples from abroad, says the reasons couples seek her out vary. “Some of them want to make a political statement out of it when they get home,” she notes. But as far as Peever is concerned, same-sex couples are the same as any other. She sits down with each couple she marries, gay or straight, and asks them a series of questions—Why are they getting married? What “deal-breaker” factors would end the marriage? How do they make decisions? Do they have a will? “These questions are true for any couple,” she says. “They don’t change because a couple is gay or straight.”

Paul and Parker Gevirtzman, a counselor and a soon-to-be stay-at-home dad, could be considered a good example. They say that although they are a same-sex couple, they embrace many traditional values, living a quiet lifestyle, keeping a kosher home, and planning for a family-centered future.

Paul Gevirtzman, a former Buffalo Spree “eligible,” met the man then known as Brian Parker online, when Parker was planning a move back home to upstate New York from San Francisco, where he worked as a realtor. They married in August 2008 after two years together with a civil ceremony in Canada and a larger, religious service in Churchville, N.Y.

They chose the Canadian ceremony because they were confident it would remain legal going forward, and the Jewish service so their friends and family could celebrate with them. Paul says it was important to them to be married so they could move on to establishing themselves as a family much like any other: “We want our children to see us as a married couple, not just two guys living together.”

Now Parker and Paul Gevirtzman—Parker was more often called “Parker” than “Brian” before the marriage—are looking into adopting children and either expanding their North Buffalo home or trading up to something larger. Paul plans to continue working as a counselor while Parker will be a full-time dad. “We didn’t get married to make a statement,” Parker says. “It was for our family—the two of us and our future children.”

Zoe Hollomon, thirty, and Erin Sharkey, twenty-nine, both of whom work for Buffalo’s Massachusetts Avenue Project, married in 2007. Like the Gevirtzmans, they had two ceremonies, one in Canada to make it as legal as they could, and one in New York so they could invite friends and family. Both come from large, blended biracial families, so they knew they wanted their ceremony to include a lot of different traditions—and a lot of people.

After the civil ceremony in Niagara Falls, Ontario, they married in a candlelight ceremony in front of 150 people at Trinity Episcopal Church in downtown Buffalo. The service included a blend of traditional and handwritten vows, a tasting ceremony from the Yoruba tradition, and a poetry reading. The combination of the dark room, candles, and the church’s stained glass made for a unique evening. “The most beautiful part was how many people were there to celebrate with us and affirm our commitment. It really was incredible, the mixture of people—our family, our friends from here, our friends from a long time ago,” Sharkey recalls.

Like Hayes, they also found that the wedding pushed them to be out to everyone in their lives. They discussed biblical arguments against homosexuality with some relatives, finding that the 2007 documentary For the Bible Tells Me So helped them answer a lot of questions and concerns.

The next step, they say, is being able to save money by getting on the same health insurance plan and filing their taxes together. For now, though, despite Governor David Patterson’s declaration that New York should recognize their Canadian marriage, those things are not possible.

Erin Sharkey and Zoe Hollomon; and Kitty Lambert and Cheryl Rudd.

What comes next?
For same-sex couples legally married elsewhere but living in New York, what does the future hold?

In May of 2008, Governor Paterson directed New York state agencies to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions. But as many marriage rights are federal (filing joint tax returns chief among them), it still isn’t clear to many couples where they stand. At the same time, lawmakers continue to push for legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage here, meaning couples wouldn’t have to leave the state or the country to say their vows and get that piece of paper.

Some New Yorkers say they will be more likely to marry when they know it’s legal. “We talk about it, we think about it,” says Paul Morgan of himself and his partner of twelve years, Mark Nowak.

Nowak adds, “We would be married so we could protect each other’s rights. For hospital visits, for insurance, for our wills.” Otherwise, “I’m comfortable living together. We don’t need a piece of paper that tells us we’re committed to each other.”

Because of the legal status, both say they would be more likely to get married if New York passed same-sex marriage legislation. And yet, they still think about doing it anyway, for the reason that so many other couples of all orientations marry—to celebrate with family and friends. “It will have to be as big a party as our budget will allow,” Morgan says.

Some couples outright refuse to leave their communities to get married, saying that doing so would make them feel even more like second-class citizens.

Kitty Lambert, president of the activist group OUTspoken for Equality, says she and her partner have made a point not to marry outside their community.

“I can’t stand up and tell the senate you have to give New Yorkers gay marriage when I have already gotten it somewhere else,” she says. “I’m an eleventh-generation American. My great grandfather fought in World War I. My father fought in World War II. My brothers fought in Vietnam. My family has a proud heritage of fighting for our country. Why would I go to another country and ask them to respect me and my equality?”

As for marrying in Massachusetts, Lambert says, “I am a New Yorker. I live here, I own a home here, I volunteer in this community, I pay my taxes. This is our home. Why am I expected to go anywhere else to get married?”

If Assemblyman Sam Hoyt (D-Buffalo, Grand Island) has his way, Lambert will say her vows sooner rather than later. Hoyt notes that while legislation he cosponsored passed in the state assembly more than once and Governor Patterson is “fully committed to signing a bill,” the state senate, controlled by a narrow Democratic majority, continues to be a holdout. A handful of Democrats, including William Stachowski of Lake View, have not supported the legislation. “We’re closer than we’ve ever been, but not quite there yet,” Hoyt says.

In the meantime, Peever, the lay minister, says that a couple is a couple—that the gay and lesbian couples from abroad she has married since Ontario’s law changed are more or less like any other. “I just treat them like any other couple,” she says.

The question remains—when will New York do the same?

[The New York State Senate rejected a bill to legalize same-sex marriage days before we went to press.—Editor]

Jessica Keltz is an attorney and freelance writer. She thanks Heather, Annabeth, Paul, Parker, Zoe, Erin, Paul, Mark, and Kitty for sharing their lives and experiences for this story.


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