Legal Status Brings Security to Some Same-Sex Marriages in NY

Legal Status Brings Security to Some Same-Sex Marriages

By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: May 22, 2007
Officially speaking, same-sex couples who live in New York State cannot be married. Nancy Goldstein and Joan Hilty, a Brooklyn couple who celebrated their third wedding anniversary on Saturday, are an unusual exception.

The two women have a pleasant Park Slope apartment, an excitable dog named Juno and a marriage certificate signed by the town clerk of Provincetown, Mass. Ms. Goldstein, 45, and Ms. Hilty, 40, were two of the gay and lesbian New Yorkers who rushed to cities and towns in Massachusetts to get married in May 2004, after it became the first state in the country to legalize same-sex marriages.

In the three years since then, the validity of their marriage certificate has been something of a question mark. But Ms. Goldstein and Ms. Hilty learned last week that a judge had ruled that same-sex couples from New York who married in Massachusetts from May 2004 to July 2006 have a legally recognized marriage.

“I got married,” said Ms. Goldstein, a director of an advocacy group for pregnant women. “I did not get civil-unioned. I got married.”

The judge’s ruling, issued on May 10 in Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston, stemmed from a lawsuit filed on behalf of seven same-sex couples from outside Massachusetts. (Tanya Wexler and Amy Zimmerman, who were married in May 2004, were the only plaintiffs from New York City.) The court decision was a little-noticed development in one of the most contentious issues in politics, raising the population ever so slightly of New York’s legally married same-sex couples.

“It really is a cloud that’s been removed from these marriages,” said Michele Granda, a lawyer with Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, the Boston group that represented the plaintiffs. “There shouldn’t be any question that those marriage licenses are worth the paper they’re printed on, and that Massachusetts fully backs the currency.”

The ruling affects only a limited number of New York’s same-sex couples: those who married in Massachusetts between May 17, 2004, when that state authorized same-sex marriages, and July 6, 2006, when New York’s highest court rejected an effort to allow gay marriage. Ms. Granda said the group knows of nearly 200 affected couples in New York, though she said the number is likely to be higher.

The lawsuit challenged a decision by Mitt Romney, then the governor, that only those gay couples who lived or intended to live in Massachusetts, or those couples whose home state did not forbid same-sex marriage, could get married in Massachusetts. Last year, a judge ruled that only Rhode Island did not prohibit same-sex marriage, noting that New York’s highest court ruled on July 6 that it was not permitted.

But lawyers for the out-of-state couples argued that those who had married in Massachusetts before the New York ruling had valid marriages.

Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, has not said whether he would challenge the ruling, but he was not expected to do so. Jeffrey Lerner, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said New York law requires the state to recognize marriages validly performed in other states.

Scores of other same-sex couples in New York have been married in Canada since 2003, when the Ontario Court of Appeal extended marriage rights to same-sex couples. Brendan Fay, a Queens man who runs a group called the Civil Marriage Trail Project, has helped coordinate marriages in Canada for dozens of gay and lesbian New Yorkers. He helped organize a wedding scheduled for tonight at a Toronto hotel between two Manhattan women: Edie Windsor, 75, and Thea Spyer, 77, who have been together for four decades.

For those New York couples married in Massachusetts, the recent ruling represented a symbolic victory, but also a kind of delayed confirmation. Some said they already considered themselves married after receiving their marriage licenses in Massachusetts three years ago. They have since exchanged rings and vows, celebrated anniversaries and grown accustomed to referring to their partners as their spouses.

“We had held ourselves out as a married couple anyway,” said Vincent Maniscalco, 45, who married Edward DeBonis, 54, at the city hall in Somerville, Mass., in 2004. The couple, who co-own a legal search firm, live in Averill Park, N.Y. “This was sort of a reaffirmation and a clarification,” Mr. Maniscalco said.

Michael Adams, 45, remembers driving 200 miles with his partner one night in late May three years ago, from Queens to North Attleborough, Mass. They checked into a Holiday Inn, went the next morning to the town hall, asked a judge to waive the three-day waiting period for marriage license applications and then drove across the state, license in hand, to the home of the minister who married them at a park where two streams join together.

“The whole day was unbelievable,” said Mr. Adams, who now lives with his husband, Fred Davie, 51, in Brooklyn. “It was really having to work hard to make this happen. As far as we were concerned, we were married.”

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has proposed a bill that would make New York the second state to allow gay marriage; a handful of others, including Connecticut and New Jersey, have civil unions. But he faces opposition in the Republican-led Senate.

Even for the New York couples who married in Massachusetts, questions remain about the extent of the benefits and protections — like health insurance, pensions and property — their new status gives them. New York’s same-sex couples who married out of state frequently find themselves navigating often-murky legal terrain.

Mr. Adams said he and his husband mark themselves as single when filling out their state income tax returns, but they each attach a statement explaining that they were married in Massachusetts. Now they will mark themselves as married and send in a joint return. However, they will not be able to do so on federal tax forms: the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

Ms. Goldstein and Ms. Hilty keep their original marriage certificate close at hand rather than framed at home. “We had to bring this and flash it to the car rental people in Puerto Rico to get the married couple’s rate,” Ms. Goldstein explained, holding the certificate.

After their marriage, Ms. Goldstein went to a legal clinic for gays and lesbians to get assistance in filling out several legal forms. One was a notarized statement from Ms. Hilty giving Ms. Goldstein first preference to visit her at a hospital; another named Ms. Goldstein as Ms. Hilty’s health care proxy.

The ruling gave their Provincetown certificate more of a legal sheen, but as a practical matter it did not have an immediate impact on their marriage. Their anniversary — a low-key dinner at the Grocery in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn — felt just as real as before.

Ms. Goldstein and members of some of the other couples said they now felt less vulnerable about their legal status. “These are some of the things that I hope will be less necessary in New York with this recent ruling,” Ms. Goldstein said of the six legal forms she keeps with her marriage certificate.