BOSTON - Like fans anxious for concert tickets, same-sex couples waited for line for hours Sunday outside Cambridge's City Hall for an event they once thought they'd never get to experience: marriage.
Marcia Hams, 56, and her partner, Susan Shepherd, 52, of Cambridge, showed up at midnight Saturday — a full 24 hours ahead of time — to stake out the first spot in line where the city clerk was to hand out the nation's first state-sanctioned gay marriage applications.
"People do this for Red Sox tickets, concert tickets," said Hams, a health care advocate who has been with Shepherd, a graduate student, for 27 years. "Certainly we can do it for this."
The couple, one of five stationed outside city hall by mid-afternoon, sat in lawn chairs, donned rain jackets to protect themselves from a light drizzle and drank plenty of coffee. Sunday morning, a young man approached them and gave them a large red flower, saying, "I wish you a long and happy marriage."
Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston and home to Harvard University, decided to seize the earliest moment to begin the process of granting same-sex couples the historic right that gay-rights advocates are seeking in dozens of states. Mayor Michael Sullivan planned to help cut a three-tiered wedding cake to mark the occasion, and people around the state also held celebrations.
Alex Fennel, 27, and her partner, Sasha Hartman, 29, were in line at Cambridge, happy they didn't have to wait until later Monday morning to begin the marriage process.
"We came here because I've been waiting seven years and I don't want to wait another day, another second," said Fennel, a lawyer from Boston. "For me, it's excitement and gratitude. It's nothing I ever thought we would be able to do."
Massachusetts was thrust into the center of the nationwide debate on gay marriage when the state's Supreme Judicial Court issued its 4-3 ruling in November that gays and lesbians had a right under the state constitution to wed.
In the days leading up to Monday's deadline for same-sex weddings to begin, opponents looked to the federal courts for help in overturning the ruling. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene.
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Full Version: Crowds Gather for Gay Weddings in Mass.
Aww thats a nice article, everyone has the right to be happy! 
| QUOTE (Lottie @ May 17 2004, 08:24 AM) |
| Aww thats a nice article, everyone has the right to be happy! |
they do, but it's a pity that alot of people don't even have basic rights.
It's sad to think that gay men and women don't have the rights to get married legally in a church or others like non gay couples.
We work with them, talk to them, are friends with them, they are our brother, sister, mothers, fathers and yet to most people, they are freaks.
We need to see that they are the same as us, not matter what their sexual prefferences are and most of all, we need to get the claws of the church out of politics, so things like this can be fixed for all gay people around the world
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