1,138.
That is the number of statutory provisions that were denied to gay couples because they were not “married” according to the United States Government Accountability Office prior to 2015. From visitation rights in hospitals, tax deductions on filing jointly as a married couple, health care benefits, insurance, and pension to medical decisions, these were benefits available only to heterosexual married couples but not to my partner and me because we are lesbians.
I met my wife Megan in 2010. I was getting my PhD. She was a high school Math teacher. We both loved reading, current affairs, travelling and cooking. I loved Bollywood, she loved gardening. I still remember our first date, we had an interesting discussion on whether Barack Obama would have become the president if he had married a white woman. Oh yeah, we discussed race and politics and all things taboo for a first date. That evening I realised that in all relationships before this one, I had been a square peg in a round hole.
A few months later we met each other’s families and a year later we were engaged. Two years later, we decided to get married. But where? Marriage was not legal in North Carolina at the time. We had friends in Massachusetts (where it was legal) and we decided we could stay there while we applied for a marriage licence. Massachusetts was the first state in the United States to allow same-sex marriages starting in May 2004. In 2005, they had done away with the requirement for a medical test or a blood sample. Starting in July 2008, out-of-state couples could also get married in Massachusetts.
On August 1, 2013, my partner and I got married in a small ceremony. I chose Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 to read to her, and she chose On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer by John Keats to read to me. The Justice of the Peace read us our vows and suddenly, we were legally married!
However, coming back to North Carolina (NC) was a reality check. The state we lived in, the state that Megan grew up in, didn’t recognise her marriage. The year before, in 2012, NC voters had approved a constitutional amendment defining marriage solely as a union between a man and a woman. It was called Amendment One, and this made North Carolina the 30th state to enshrine a ban on same-sex marriage in its state constitution, as the Guardian reported at the time. Coming home made us feel like second-class citizens in a state we loved. We knew we had to move.
A few days later I went to the American Marketing Association for job interviews, having almost finished my PhD. Megan wanted us to move to a place where same-sex marriage was legal. She was worried about how our relationship — also inter-faith and inter-racial — would be accepted in conservative states like Alabama or Mississippi or for that matter, North Carolina. We had talked about starting a family, and we didn’t want our child to be bullied or harassed. At that point in time, marriage was legal in 11 states in the United States, so I applied only to jobs in those states. I got three job interviews and three job offers and we chose a nationally ranked liberal arts college in Upstate NY.
Apart from not recognizing our marriage, I was also aware that in NC I could be fired for being gay. Or even appearing gay. And there was nothing I could have done. In New York (NY), there were laws that protected my employment with regard to sexual orientation or gender expression. It was only in October 2014, a whole year after we moved, that a US district court judge struck down the 2012 ban in NC. By contrast, in New York same-sex marriages had been legal since 2011.
The absence of similar laws across the land for LGBTIQ persons was felt keenly by all who wished to live as married partners. Having lived in a state where marriage was illegal, and in another, where it was legal, we experienced this first-hand.
But it wasn’t easy just moving to another state. In the United States, we file two sets of taxes — to the state and the Federal governments. That year, as we sat to file our taxes we realized, we could file as a married couple for federal taxes, but had to file our NC taxes as single people. However, as we had moved to NY during the year, our NY taxes were to be filed as a married couple. We had to hire a chartered accountant.
Around that time, Megan and I also decided to try for a baby. When we moved to Upstate NY in August, Megan was six months pregnant. Unlike in NC, where we would take our Massachusetts marriage certificate on each trip to the doctor, in New York, we were told we didn’t need to bring proof of our marriage. The relief that Megan and I felt in that moment was palpable. We knew then we’d made the right decision. Our son was born in December and his birth certificate had both our names on it. It was the best feeling in the world.
We were aware of what a privilege this was. In many other states in the country, we would not have had this simple right of having both our names on the birth certificate. A simple tweak in a form makes a world of a difference in a person’s life. Each decision big or small such as, giving each other medical power of attorney, filing taxes as a couple, adding our spouse’s name to our insurance policy, or buying a house together, all of this would have required a lot more paper-work, and invited a greater degree of scrutiny, as well as more expenditure on account of legal fees, not to mention a lot more headache, had we stayed back in North Carolina.
In 2015, the United States Supreme Court, in a 5-4 majority verdict referred to as Obergefell v. Hodges, granted same-sex couples a constitutional right to marry. It also struck down a section of the Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA) that had permitted states to refuse recognition of same-sex marriages in other jurisdictions.
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling, 1,138 rights available to heterosexual couples became ours too, no matter where we chose to live. Now, we don’t have to fight just to exist every single day. Suddenly we went from riding a bullock cart to driving a Tesla on the highway of life.
I knew I was different at a young age. When I grew up, I wasn’t sure if my parents would prefer a gay child or a dead child. I took a leap of faith and came out to them in 2002. That’s right, 21 years ago. It was a different landscape for gay people back then. Many considered us deviants or perverts. We were shunned, marginalised and oppressed. But my parents stood by me. Maybe they didn’t understand it all but they loved me. And that helped us navigate the storm.
They realised, all I wanted was the same things in life others did. I wanted to fall in love, get married, buy a house, have a family, a minivan and maybe a pet. Thanks to Obergefell, I could now do that with my partner.
What did Megan and I do with all that free time, energy and money these past 8 years after the Supreme Court ruling? Well, I learned gardening and she learned Hindi. I got tenure and promotion at my job and she is getting a PhD in Bio-statistics. We go to baseball, soccer and basketball practices with our son. I ran for city council and became the first queer Hindu elected in all of the United States. And I wrote a novel, Happy Endings, one of India’s first lesbian romance novels.
The safety and security of having basic human rights, the time and energy not spent fighting every single day for decisions big and small lets us live a fuller version of our lives. It allows us to grow and give back in meaningful ways. Everyone deserves that.
Dr Minita Sanghvi is an associate professor at Skidmore College and the first LGBTQ Hindu elected official in the United States. Her novel, Happy Endings, was published by Harper-Collins India in 2022.
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