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.
