Timbre of a TimeFree Mind

Last year, she put it on for good when she married the woman whom relatives had assumed was her roommate, cracking open the secret life the two had hidden for 46 years.

A total of 2,968 couples wed in Oregon when the state's most populous county began issuing same-sex marriage licenses a year ago Thursday. Every one of those marriages is now in legal limbo - but gay couples say their legally hazy unions are nonetheless a giant leap forward.

"It was like an out-of-slavery experience. I know it sounds crazy, but we were so closeted," said Mary Beth Brindley, 65, who ran away from home to be with Hall, now 66, when she was 19. "It's a total relief not to have to lie anymore."

Gay weddings swept the country from coast to coast starting in San Francisco on Feb. 12, 2004, when Mayor Gavin Newsom flung open the city's wedding registry to gay couples.

The movement jumped to Oregon in March, then New Mexico and New Paltz, N.Y. By May, thousands of gay couples were on their way to tying the knot in Massachusetts following a ruling by the state's highest court.

Then the backlash set in.

Last November, voters in Oregon and 10 other states passed ballot measures banning gay marriage. Voters in two other states, Missouri and Louisiana, banned gay marriages earlier in 2004.

In Oregon and in California, lawsuits are wending their way through the state's legal machinery to determine the legal status of some 7,000 certificates issued to gay couples in the two states.

And while an effort to pass a federal ban on gay marriage failed in the Senate last year, supporters say they will try again in the new Congress.

Opponents of gay marriage point to these and other successes to say they are winning the battle over the definition of marriage. They say gay couples are living in a fantasy world, pretending to be married when neither state nor federal law has sanctioned their unions.

"They're basically lying to themselves," said Tim Nashif, political director of the Oregon-based Defense of Marriage Coalition, which backed the ballot measure here banning gay measure.

Gay advocates contend time is on their side.

"It's a case of two steps forward for every one step back, which means we're still one step ahead," said Rebekah Kassell, spokeswoman for Basic Rights Oregon, the state's leading gay rights group.

While the marriages are obscured by legal and legislative challenges, gay couples who married say they discovered a feeling of validation, a sense of equality that made it all worthwhile.

"You don't have to keep proving that you're a family," said Kelly Burke, 35, who married Dolores Doyle, 39, her college sweetheart last March 3.

Soon after, Burke - a stay-at-home mom who has been caring for the couple's 3 1/2-year-old son - stopped paying out-of-pocket health insurance after Doyle's employer agreed to add her to Doyle's health plan as a "spouse."

And her relationship with relatives subtly shifted. One day last summer, Doyle's 19-year-old niece called Burke to ask for help with a project for her women's studies class. She had been instructed to interview a woman who was "not a family member" - and Burke had to tell her that she no longer fit the bill.

"How do you describe your aunt's life partner?" asked Burke. "Because we had become married she suddenly had the language to identify this person who had been in her life for so long. And it changed for me as well. I began to introduce her as 'my niece,'" said Burke.

Like other gay married couples, Brindley and Hall cherish their marriage certificate.

They ended a half-century of being in the closet by publicly marrying, and later appearing in a TV ad urging voters to vote "no" on last November's ballot measure.

They met in 1959 in Memphis, Tenn., Elvis Presley's hometown, where Hall had attended high school with the entertainment icon. When family became suspicious, they ran off to Texas where they lived for 37 years as "roommates," hiding their rings.

"I don't care what 'pending' box they put our marriage in," Brindley said. The marriage certificate, she said, "means our relationship has a validation that it didn't have before."

posted by jikido  # 1:53 PM