First day for the summer of love

“It’s like we’re part of humanity, we’re not in the back of the bus,” Dee Press said, sitting with her partner Maryanne Slaughter as the pair looked forward to their July 19 wedding.

Slaughter and Press joined dozens of couples at the Ventura County Government Center lining up for marriage licenses on the first day they were made available to same-sex couples after a landmark state Supreme Court ruling dismissed a constitutional amendment barring their unions.

Best friends for 21 years, the pair fell in love as Slaughter grieved the death of a former partner. The two have been domestic partners, but the opportunity to wed brought long-awaited joy to their relationship, joy the pair put off out of fear of disappointment.

“All these years I thought we wouldn’t see it in our lifetimes,” Slaughter said. “It’s different [from the domestic partnership] in the sense of how people react and the sense of celebration.”

The celebration was a continuation from the day Press heard news of the Supreme Court decision, called Slaughter while she was out and passed on the news by proposing.

“I went out and I got a bouquet of flowers, some roses, and I got down on me knee as soon as I saw her and I gave a rose to her,” Press said. “We were going to have lunch right away. We got together with our best friends, most of them are straight married people that we dearly love, so I got the bouquet and we announced it to all of our friends right then. It was a total surprise.”

Joining Press and Slaughter in their celebration at the courthouse were Michael Quick and Harris Berger of Oxnard. Shortly after 8 a.m. on June 17 the two emerged from the clerk’s window to cheers from a crowd of well-wishers, other couples and broadly smiling county officials and residents going about everyday business.

“Mike and I are just a little bitty part of history,” Berger said. “We’re the first same-sex couple to get our marriage license in Ventura County, and that’s an honor.”

A couple committed to each other for more than two decades, Berger and Quick were nonetheless pleasantly surprised this day had arrived.

“We were talking about that this morning,” Quick said. “We really thought that we would not see this in our lifetime.”

Berger, smiling broadly and interrupted often for embraces from friends and toasts of apple cider, said the change happened as gay and lesbians began to get the message across they aren’t the threat to society some politicians and activists have cast them as.

“I think that as mainstream gay and lesbians become more visible, more mainstream if you will, that people will get to see us and get to know us — as more and more of us come out of the closets to our brothers, fathers, mothers, sisters, sons, aunts — we are just part of the family and people realize that we are deserving of respect and dignity just like any other couple,” Berger said. “I think that as that continues and as more and more states turn against the enshrining of bigotry into their state constitutions — as some people want to do in California this November —I think we will become more accepted. I really do believe that one day — maybe not in our lifetime — all the laws against same-gendered marriage will come down.”

On this morning, though, the political strife was far out of mind. If there were opponents of same-sex marriage present at the government center, they kept silent. Officials at the clerk’s office smiled at the chance to issue licenses after state law for years banned them from permitting gay and lesbian couples to marry.

“The clerks were great in there,” Quick said. “We’ve been coming here on Valentine’s Day for the last three years and being turned down to get our licenses, and today we informed them … that we wouldn’t have to come back on Valentine’s Day, and they all started to laugh.”

Indeed, unlike Quick and Berger and many of the other couples, who planned private ceremonies and traditional weddings later in the summer, some couldn’t wait any longer to get married.

Robin Duffield and Tammy Worley woke up at 4:30 a.m., according to Robin’s father, who was present for the event, along with other family and friends.

“I think it’s a wonderful day. These two people are in love,” he said of his daughter and new daughter-in-law, the first couple to be legally married in Ventura County. “I’m a very proud father.”

Both dressed in white, the pair were married in a downstairs meeting room shortly after receiving their licenses.

“It’s a caring, loving relationship they were looking for,” Robin’s father said. “They made each other a better person.”
Worley and Duffield may have been the first, but they’re not the last to get married.

“It’s a day of celebration,” Berger said. “This is the first day of the summer of love.”

For Cheryl Dunlap and Dori Herrick, for example, their Aug. 17 wedding will be the culmination of a 14-year relationship and a summer that has already brought good news.

“It was always a dream and we hoped it would happen in our lifetime, and lo and behold here it is, the dream is real,” Dunlap said.

“We were laughing, saying, ‘Of course, this and Obama, too.’ We’re really happy,” Herrick said. “There really isn’t any better legal protection than marriage. I think we feel married. We laugh about it. We’ve been together for 14 years. You can’t exactly go to the altar and have someone give you away when you’ve been together for 14 years. We’re just going to walk in there together because that’s where we are. So it’s a little bit different. We’re kinda planning along the way.”