For weeks, Dey and Antoinette Rose got nothing but busy signals calling San Francisco’s City Hall. With the tidal wave of same-sex marriages taking place beneath the grand rotunda, the Palo Alto Jewish couple wanted to be part of history, and both women were feeling a bit frustrated.
Finally, a friend helped them get an appointment. The big date: 12:30 p.m, March 11. Little did they know when they showed up in their wedding finery that they would be among the very last same-sex couples to wed there.
Less than 90 minutes after the Roses were pronounced spouses for life, the California Supreme Court ordered a halt to same-sex weddings. Because the court did not invalidate the 2,000 gay and lesbian marriages already on the books — at least not yet — the couple have what they believe to be a valid marriage license.
“I felt completely shocked,” said Antoinette Rose. “We went out to lunch after the wedding, and on the way back to our car, a reporter stopped us and asked if we’d heard the news.”
The Roses count themselves lucky to have wedded under the wire. Though the overflow crowds of a month ago had died down, the mood at City Hall that final hour was no less joyous. Under the rotunda of love, couples staked out positions on the landings, the marble stairway and side vestibules lit with slanted sunlight.
Rabbi Sydney Mintz of Congregation Emanu-El, who herself had married her partner at City Hall a few weeks before, performed the ceremony. She had met the Roses at Camp Keshet, the summer weekend for gay and lesbian families at Camp Tawonga. Though Mintz had flown home from India a day before, the adrenaline of the moment dissipated any jet lag.
“It was meaningful to have Sydney, who knows us,” says Antoinette. “That made it a real wedding. And to have her start out by saying she was authorized by God!”
After saying the Shehechiyanu, the two exchanged Hebrew vows. “I felt really focused on Dey,” recalls Antoinette. “I heard every word she said, but standing in a pool of sunlight, everything else was a blur. Every once in a while I heard a burst of applause from another wedding.”
Adds Dey: “We have this great life, but the reason for doing this legally was to protect my family. The first time we got married, we had family and friends around us. But we all need all the help we can get, and that’s what the wedding was.”
The Roses have been together 11 years. Seven years ago they held a commitment ceremony officiated by a rabbi. Today they have two children, ages 9 and 6. Dey is a drama teacher at a Palo Alto middle school, Antoinette a doctor at Camino Medical Group. The family belongs to Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills.
Jewish by birth, Dey grew up in Mexico City and Beverly Hills. Antoinette converted to Judaism soon after the couple wed. “Her conversion has been an opening for us into Judaism,” says Dey. “Even though I’m the one who said we would have a Jewish household, I was secular before. We have a much stronger spiritual connection now.”
Dey chuckles at the memory of the couple’s early days planning their initial wedding. “We were interviewing rabbis,” she recalls, “and one said he wouldn’t marry us because Antoinette was not Jewish. I said to him, ‘So you would marry us as lesbians but not as an interfaith couple?'”
The Supreme Court said it will rule on the legality of the same-sex weddings sometime in June. Meanwhile, already wedded couples remain in legal limbo, and the countless others hoping to say “I do” will just have to wait.
“I felt terribly sad that so many others didn’t,” says Dey. “We had friends who had an appointment for 3 [p.m.] and who were on the news crying.”
Adds Antoinette: “It was so mean.”