S.F. same-sex couple ready to be first again

S.F. same-sex couple ready to be first again


Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, June 10, 2008


(06-09) 19:32 PDT -- When same-sex marriages start at 5 p.m. June 16, San Francisco will stage a repeat of the ceremony that started the 2004 Winter of Love, when thousands of gay and lesbian couples married at City Hall.

This time, though, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon's wedding will be legal.

Mayor Gavin Newsom said Monday that the ceremony, which he will officiate, will be the only one held in City Hall that day. Martin and Lyon have been together more than five decades, and they were the first couple to marry four years ago.

Marriages will begin en masse the next morning. So far, 128 same-sex couples have made appointments to obtain marriage license on Tuesday, June 17.

"What we want, the narrative coming out of it, is about them and what they represent - their story, their history. This is really where it all started," Newsom said of the couple.

After the private ceremony, a reception will be held at City Hall for the couple's friends and family, and members of the media.

The couple's first wedding ceremony was very much a below-the-radar affair. City officials rushed to marry them - and eventually, thousands of other same-sex couples - before the courts could order the city to stop.

The photograph of Lyon and Martin's wedding, at which Newsom officiated at City Hall, has been credited by some as being an iconic image that has influenced how people across the country perceive same-sex marriage. The two also were plaintiffs in the recent case in which the state Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage legal.

Officials have amassed a host of volunteers and city workers from other departments to enable the county clerk to issue 250 licenses per day and conduct up to 500 wedding ceremonies, according to a spokeswoman for the mayor. The office will have expanded hours, opening at 8 a.m. and closing at 8 p.m.

City Hall also will be open for marriages on June 28, the Saturday of the San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Parade and Celebration.

Lyon, 83, said it was "heartwarming" that the city wants her and Martin, 87, to be the first couple to marry, but she said they are just a small part of what will happen as same-sex marriage begins in California.

"Hundreds of thousands of couples will be getting married this time, and that's the important thing," Lyon said. "It's something that has been due for a long time, and thank god, it's here."

Lyon and Martin first met in Seattle in 1950 and moved in together in a Castro Street apartment on Valentine's Day 1953. Two years later, Lyon and Martin, and three other lesbian couples founded the Daughters of Bilitis, which historians call the first lesbian organization in the United States. Lyon and Martin have been leaders of the lesbian community ever since.

Their organization's monthly magazine, the Ladder, was an influential publication in the LGBT rights movement and began publication in 1956. Both women were inducted into the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Hall of Fame.

A San Francisco medical organization founded in 1979 as a clinic for lesbians - Lyon Martin Health Services - was named for them.

Lyon said she and Martin "hoped we would see this day" of equal recognition of marriages for same-sex couples.

"It means a great deal that we can get (a license) like anyone else," Lyon said.

Newsom said the couple provided him with much of the inspiration to order the county clerk to issue licenses to same-sex couples in 2004.

"This is why I did it four years ago. It's personal as much as anything else," Newsom said.

After Lyon and Martin were married Feb. 12, 2004, more than 4,000 same-sex couples flocked to San Francisco to marry before a court order ended the ceremonies on March 11, 2004.

Those marriages were subsequently invalidated by the California Supreme Court. City Attorney Dennis Herrera then filed a lawsuit against the state, along with several civil rights organizations, that won marriage rights for same-sex couples.

Kate Kendell, executive director of one of those organizations - the National Center for Lesbian Rights - credited Lyon and Martin's lifetimes of activism with bringing the LGBT rights movement to this point.

"At a time when being openly gay cost you everything you cared about, they were. And they took risks and spoke out from the 1950s on in a way that I certainly do not believe I would have nor would most of us," Kendell said.

She said the couple being the first to marry "is the absolute least we can do to acknowledge how critical their legacy is to the lives of all of us."

E-mail Wyatt Buchanan at wbuchanan@sfchronicle.com.