City Toasts Gay Marriage Milestone

As Robyn Ochs looks ahead to her one-year wedding anniversary tomorrow, she says her marriage to Peg Preble has left her day-to-day life largely unchanged.

“I got married, went home, and fed the cats,” says Ochs, who works in Harvard’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

But last May 17, Ochs and Preble found themselves at the center of history in the making in Cambridge, joining hundreds of couples at City Hall to apply for marriage licenses on the first day that same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts.

Cambridge will mark the one-year anniversary tomorrow with a celebration at City Hall from 4 to 6 p.m., featuring a cake, speeches, and video footage from last year’s midnight celebration.

City councillors voted unanimously in November 2003 to begin issuing the licenses at the earliest possible moment when a state court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage took effect.

Over the past year, more than 6,000 same-sex couples have wed in Massachusetts, with more than 500 in Cambridge alone, according to state records. The average age of those same-sex couples was much higher than that of heterosexual marriages during the same period.

“It was the summer of middle-aged marriages,” jokes Lowell House Co-Master Diana L. Eck.

Eck and her spouse Dorothy A. Austin attended five same-sex weddings over the past year, and Austin, who is an ordained Episcopal minister, officiated at two. Ochs and Preble attended 12 same-sex weddings last year.

After filing for a license in Cambridge on May 17, Ochs and Preble, who have been together for eight years, obtained a waiver of the three-day waiting period and became the first same-sex couple married in Brookline.

Austin and Eck, who have been together for 29 years, were married last July 4 in front of hundreds of friends in Memorial Church, where Austin is an associate minister.

“By that time, we were on our fourth mortgage,” Eck says.

LOOKING AHEAD

But even as Cambridge prepares to celebrate the anniversary, the future of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and across the nation is far from clear, say both supporters and opponents.

Same-sex marriage has come and gone in California, Oregon, and New York, with thousands of licenses issued before being voided by state judges. And voters in 11 states approved measures to ban same-sex marriage last November.

A nationwide poll published yesterday by the Boston Globe found that 50 percent of respondents were against recognizing Massachusetts same-sex marriages in other states, while 46 percent supported it.

In Massachusetts, a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage but establishing civil unions has already passed in the state legislature. If it is passed again in the next legislative session, it will go before voters in a referendum.

But in a show of support for same-sex marriage, more than 2,500 delegates to the Democratic state convention in Lowell voted on Saturday to endorse same-sex marriage in its official platform. Previously, the party had supported domestic partnerships.

Kris Mineau, the president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, says his group will continue to lobby against same-sex marriage and civil unions.

“The very fundamental building block of any culture is marriage and family,” he says. “Anything that’s detrimental to that, we need to do everything to make it right.”

He adds that opponents of same-sex marriage face a greater challenge in Massachusetts than in more conservative states. But at the same time, Mineau says, “we’re not that different than Oregon,” referring to that state’s approval last year of a same-sex marriage ban.

THE VIEW ON CAMPUS

At Harvard, members of the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters Alliance will travel to City Hall tomorrow for the anniversary celebration, according to Public Relations Chair Mischa A. Feldstein ’07.

According to a December 2003 Crimson poll, 77 percent of students supported the state court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.

The Harvard Republican Club (HRC), which endorses the agenda of the national party, has joined the party and President Bush in supporting the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA), a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as the union between a man and a woman.

The proposed amendment died last summer in the Senate by a vote of 50-48 but is expected to come up again in the future.

Some HRC members called on the club last year to drop support of the FMA, but Joshua A. Barro ’05 says the debate within the club has largely died down since then.

“It’s not an issue that unites us, and I don’t think it’s been talked about that much,” says Barro, who led an unofficial band of supporters to City Hall last May to celebrate the first same-sex marriages.

“But 50 years down the road, you’re going to see that the calamity people predicted isn’t happening,” Barro adds. “Civil unions have not been splitting up heterosexual families.”

The sense that future generations will find same-sex marriage less controversial—which polls have tended to support—hovers in the background among supporters, while they also predict short-term fluctuations.

Students for Marriage Equality, a group affiliated with the Harvard College Democrats, has canvassed for state legislative candidates who support same-sex marriage over the last year.

One member, Joshua D. Smith ’08, says he believes support for same-sex marriage will “eventually be one of the national platform issues....Eventually—I’m not saying when—it will be adopted.”

“In a way, it’s a very selfish thing for me to do,” Smith says of his canvassing. “I want it when I get married; I want to be able to marry anyone I want.”

—Staff writer Brendan R. Linn can be reached at blinn@fas.harvard.edu.