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On this episode of BloomingOUT, we are so happy to welcome back Jennifer from the Just Married podcast with two guests Danielle and Sue.
Sue and Danielle met at a Halloween party in 1992 in Portland, Oregon, two days before the state was due to vote on Measure Nine—which would have added a constitutional amendment that required the state to discourage ‘homosexuality.’
For over ten years, marriage was not on their radar. “The whole heteronormative ‘get married, live in the same house, have children’ thing seemed very far from anything I was looking for at all,” says Danielle. “Marriage, given its patriarchal, property ownership sort of past was never a model we were looking for in our relationship.”
However, the practical legal benefits of marriage equality proved too substantial to ignore: “[Marriage] didn’t have the symbolic weight, at least for me,” says Sue, “that it carries for a lot of people. For us, the appeal was in social security benefits and access to visitation rights in the hospital. My family is a little unpredictable with regards to our relationship … [so] to have Danielle be my next of kin, legally, was important because it wouldn’t have been a guarantee, necessarily, that my family would see Danielle as my next of kin, despite knowing what my preferences would have been.”
The two still reside in Bloomington, Indiana. Danielle is Executive Director of the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, and Susan is an independent consultant for LGBTQ histories.
You can read more about their story here.
Credits
Hosted by Melanie Davis, Justin Robertson, Ireland Meacham, and Lucas Fisher
Lucas Fisher is our engineer
Produced by Melanie Davis and WFHB News Director Kade Young
