San Francisco: Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin fell in love at a time when lesbians risked being arrested, fired from their jobs and sent to electroshock treatment.

Today, more than a half-century after they became a couple, Lyon and Martin plan to become one of the first same-sex couples to legally exchange marriage vows in California.

“It was something you wanted to know, ‘Is it really going to happen?’ And now it’s happened, and maybe it can continue to happen,” Lyon says.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom plans to officiate at the private ceremony in his City Hall office before 50 invited guests. He picked Martin, 87, and Lyon, 84, for the front of the line in recognition of their long relationship and their status as pioneers of the gay rights movement.

Along with six other women, they founded a San Francisco social club for lesbians in 1955 called the Daughters of Bilitis. Under their leadership, it evolved into the nation’s first lesbian advocacy organisation. They have the FBI files to prove it.

Their ceremony on Monday will, in fact, be a marriage doover.

In February 2004, San Francisco’s new mayor decided to challenge California’s marriage laws by issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

His advisers and gay rights activists knew right away which couple would put the most compelling human face on the issue: Martin and Lyon.

Back then, the couple planned to celebrate their 51st anniversary as live-in lovers on Valentine’s Day. Because of their work with the Daughters, they also were icons in the gay community.

Lyon and Martin vividly recall the excitement of being secretly swept into the clerk’s office, saying “I do” in front of a tiny group of city staff members and friends, and then being rushed out of the building, four years ago. There were no corsages, no bottles of champagne. The privacy was short-lived.

Their wedding portrait, showing the couple cradling each other in pastel-coloured pantsuits with their foreheads tenderly touching, drew worldwide attention. Same-sex marriage would become legal in Massachusetts in another three months, but San Francisco’s calculated act of civil disobedience drove the debate.

In the month that followed, more than 4,000 other couples followed Martin and Lyon down the aisle before a judge acting on petitions brought by gay marriage opponents halted it.

The state Supreme Court ultimately voided the unions, but the women were among the two dozen couples who served as plaintiffs in the lawsuits that led the same court last month to overturn California’s ban on gay marriage

Source : DNA