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I DO: Levinson, left, wed the first day licenses were given.
Courtesy Kathy Levinson |
Around noon on February 13,
Kathy Levinson got a call on her cell phone. At that
moment, the caller said, the city and county of San
Francisco was issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian
couples.
Levinson, ’77, and her partner made
apologies and abruptly left the Jewish leadership class
they were attending. They phoned her partner's hairdresser
from the car to cancel an afternoon appointment, called
their financial adviser to quickly discuss merging households
and raced to City Hall.
Later that afternoon, on the top tier of the marble
rotunda, Couple No. 120 joined
hands, exchanged vows and were pronounced “spouses
for life.”
During the next several weeks, while courts considered
the legality of the procedures and debate swirled about
the definition of marriage, several Stanford alums and
University staff participated in the sanctioned weddings
of gay and lesbian couples in San Francisco. (At least
one all-Stanford couple, Elly Matsumura, ’01,
and Janelle Ishida, ’03, tied the knot.)
On February 21, Carolyn Laub, ’95, and her partner
Jude Koski showed up at 6 a.m. to find the City Hall
queue already stretched into the hundreds. Nearly 10
hours later, with less than 15 minutes to spare before
the office closed, they were given an appointment to
return the following Monday. They did, accompanied by
Laub’s mother. “Who knew that the words
‘by the power vested in me by the State of California’
would bring tears to our eyes,” Laub told friends
in an e-mail announcing the marriage.
Laub, executive director of the Gay-Straight Alliance
Network in San Francisco, says her decision to marry
was both a personal commitment and an act of civil disobedience.
“We are incredibly proud to be part of this movement.”
Rick Yuen, assistant dean and director of the Asian-American
Activities Center, found the emotional outpouring he
witnessed at City Hall moving and inspirational. Yuen,
whose wife Mabel Teng is city and county recorder in
San Francisco, was deputized as a justice of the peace
and officiated at “about 100” ceremonies,
including that of his friend Ben Davidson, director
of Stanford’s LGBT center. “It’s a
job I wouldn’t mind having all the time,”
Yuen says. “It was an honor.”
| This article was modified from the print version of the magazine. |
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