The following apepared as the first item in the
"Talk of the Town" section of _The New Yorker_ of
20 December, 1993; it was accompanied by a whimsical
drawing of a wedding-cake decoration of two men in
tuxedos.  [Reproduced in its entirety without
permission.]

--jns

"Tom and Walter Got Married"

Tom Stoddard and Walter Rieman went shopping at
Tiffany's last month.  The salesman was polite but
distant.  After asking him dozens of questions,
after trying on this one and then that, they decided
to buy what Tom had wanted from the start: two plain
gold bands.  Tom and Walter took the rings home to
their apartment, on the Wast Side, put them in a
drawer, and did not take them out until December
4th, which is the day Tom and Walter got married.

One morning a week or so before the ceremony, we
rang the bell of Tom and Walter;'s apartment.  When
the door opened, both Tom and Walter were there,
looking flushed and concerned.  "Walter's lost the
seating chart," Tom said.  "He's going off to work
to search his desk."

"All right," Walter said, grabbing his coat.  "I'm
going." Walter, a thirty-eight-year-old trial lawyer,
was recently elected to partnership at Paul, Weiss,
Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the first openly gay
person to achieve this.  His manner is solemn and
intense, and he has a prodigious memory: he can
retrieve childhood anecdotes, slights suffered long
ago, the minutiae of legal decisions concerning
people generations dead.  Losing the seating chart
for his wedding was not something that Walter took
lightly.

After Walter left, Tom dropped onto an overstuffed
couch and sighed.  Tom met Walter at a fund-raiser
on Fire Island five years ago, and they moved in
together six months later, but the last few days,
Tom told us, had been a whole new relationship.  "A
gay man getting married has so many things to worry
about," he said, folding his arms.  "Even the small
things assume hidden meanings and are riddled with
symbolism."  Tom, who is forty-five years old, is
a lawyer, too, but may be better known as an activist
in behalf of gay rights.  Last spring, before the
big gay march on Wasthinton, he met Bill Clinton at
the White House to discuss, among other things, the
Administration's position on gays in the military.
For six years, Tom was the executive director of
the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, but he
resigned the post in January of 1992, in part because
he had recently been found to have AIDS.  "Now I
reserve strength for choice battles," he said.

The next big battle, Tom said, is gay marriage.
"It's just so emotion-laden, so tangled with
convention, that it is bound to test straight people
more profoundly than any other gay issue," he said.
So far, no state government has legally recognized
same-sex marriages--Tom and Walter will be classified
as domestic partners by New York City--but around
the country a growing number of gay couples are
demanding legal recognition.  The fight for such
recognition has progressed furthest in Hawaii, where
the state Supreme Court recently found the law
barring same-sex marriage to be a form of gender
discrimination and in violation of the state's
constitution.  Along with the issue of fairness--if
a man can marry a woman, why can't a woman marry a
woman or a man marry a man?--activists stress various
rights and privileges that are denied to gays because
they cannot obtain a marriage license: the ability
to extend American citizenship to a spouse; the
opportunity to file a joint tax return; the chance
to qualify for a partner's health plan.  "If Walter
and I were legal, I could go on his firm's medical,"
Tom said.  "And, considering my illness, that's no
small thing."

Though the Hawaiian case has been returned to trial
court, a nuber of legal scholars have predicted that
the state will soon recognize gay marriage.  If it
happens, Tom thinks, Honolulu may well become a kind
of Reno for gays--a city of all-night altars and
neon chapels.  And if *that* happens--if thousands
of gay men and women flock to Hawaii and get
married--other states may well be forced to recognize
the marriages, nationwide recognition being the
general rule with regard to straight marriages,
regardless of where the license was obtained.

The phone rang.  "Can that be Walter?"  Tom said.
he let the machine pick up, and soon the voice of
Walter said, "The chart's not here.  Call before I
start turning over the desks."

"I'll show you what really got me thinking about
marriage," Tom said, and stood up.  He took us to
the bedroom, and there we saw an elegant photograph
of Tom and Watlter locked in a mild embrace.  "Several
months ago, Annie Leibovitz, as a present for our
fifth anniversary, shot me and Walter," Tom said.
"The picture got me thinking about appearances--the
importance of declaring our commitment before people
we love."  Then he remarked that, whereas the subtext
of so many straight weddings is about expanding
possibility, for gay men with AIDS it has more to
do with closure.  "The relationship has that precious
quality of something that's going away," he said.
We left not long afterward, with the seating chart
sill missing.

When we next spoke with Tom and Walter, a couple of
days before the wedding, Walter had come down with
a traditional case of the screaming meemies.  He
had found the seating chart by then, but he had
begun to wonder if some hidden voice wasn't saying,
"Don't commit."  "For lesbians and gay men, marriage
is scary," Tom told us.  (Walter wasn't talking.)
"After all, gay rights is about challenging tradition,
and what's more traditional than a wedding?"

The wedding was held on a rainy Saturday afternoon
at Chanterelle, in Tribeca.  Walter's jitters were
gone.  He wore a gray suit and a red tie.  Tom, too,
was dressind in gray.  During the cocktail hour,
more than seventy people, including Walter's brother
and two sisters, Tom's brother, and a New York
Supreme Court justice, drank champagne and filled
the room with stories about Tom and Walter.  The
two men then appeared in a clearing between tables.
Facing each other, they exchanged vows ("I commit
to you my life and my love for the rest of our
days"), put on their gold rings, and were married.

When Tom and Walter kissed, the crowd cheered and
guests began toasting everything in sight: Tom
toasted Walter's family; Walter toasted Tom's brother;
Tom and Walter toasted Karen and David Waltuck,
who own Chanterelle; Karen thanked them and ran from
the room teary-eyed.  Then, after rapping on a glass
(half empty, half full), which quieted the room,
Tom's brother John said, "Tom and Walter have done
something that gay people have dreamed of for
thousands of years.  Let's raise our glasses to Tom
and Walter: May you continue your life together in
a more perfect union, in good health, and always
with adventure and purpose and love."

--end of article