Twenty years ago, Massachusetts became the first state in the U.S. to legally recognize same-sex marriage. Some of the couples who were the first to wed in the state spoke to TIME and shared their stories.
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00:00 We did envision something like a marriage, but probably more like a second-class citizen
00:08 because we just couldn't imagine that our relationship would ever be acknowledged by the state or by government.
00:15 Tonight, gay couples throughout Massachusetts are celebrating a day many thought might never come.
00:21 After a three-year fight, they're now legally getting married.
00:24 [Music]
00:34 My name is Michelle Coleman. We live in Boston, Massachusetts in the neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, and I'm 63.
00:43 And I am Pam Waterman. Live with her, obviously. I am 58, so the hot young thing.
00:51 I'm 78. I'm 83. And we've been together 53 years.
00:57 We started 20 years ago with the, you know, kind of starting this whole journey together in a married couple,
01:03 and now we're entering retirement together, so it's kind of exciting.
01:08 We met at work. We were at the NYU School of Medicine, and I was the administrator for the neurology department,
01:15 and Pam came in as a scientist, and that's where we met. But I think, you know, just a little bit about our story.
01:24 I was laughing because she was really mean to me that very first day, and it cracks me up 27 years later still.
01:34 We were working—well, you were working there first at Children's Mental Health Agency in Connecticut.
01:40 And I came in, and I heard there were ping pong games going on at lunchtime, and I loved to play ping pong.
01:46 And Gloria was the ping pong champ of the agency, and all the time they tried to find somebody who could beat her.
01:53 And they'd bring people in, and nobody beat her. Well, I thought, well, yeah, I think I can probably play against this woman.
02:01 So I did play, and I dethroned her. And I'm surprised she continued seeing me, but she did.
02:11 And what we did is we hooked up and played doubles, and we beat everybody else, didn't we?
02:17 We did for a lot of years.
02:19 And then we just gradually started to get to know each other.
02:23 I taught you to play tennis.
02:26 I taught you to play golf.
02:27 You taught me to play golf.
02:28 And then finally we came out to each other, which back in those days was a scary thought,
02:33 because I was barely out to myself, and to come out to each other was very, very frightening.
02:41 But we did, and—
02:44 We couldn't—we just couldn't help ourselves.
02:46 We fell so much in love that over a whole year's period of time,
02:53 it took us that long to really settle into the possibility that we could really be together.
03:00 And we wanted to live together.
03:02 We met at a Christmas party.
03:04 At the end of the night, we were like, "Okay, so how about, if you haven't done Christmas shopping,
03:08 why don't we get together and do Christmas shopping?"
03:11 So that was like our first date.
03:13 It was December 1994.
03:15 I mean, I wanted to marry Michelle. I had no—there was no conflict there.
03:20 It was—in fact, we don't even remember who asked who to get married.
03:27 I mean, I think once it was a thing, we were just like, "Okay, so when?"
03:32 And we'd been together 33 years, so it was kind of a long engagement.
03:37 Gloria would not say that she would marry me.
03:40 All that whole—two and a half years, three years, I kept asking.
03:44 She said, "Don't ask me until it's legal."
03:47 It was the day that they announced the case, because we knew that the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts
03:53 was about to announce their decision about the case in November of 2003.
03:58 At that time, you would go to your computer and bring up a browser and keep hitting refresh every morning
04:05 to see if the Supreme Judicial Court had decided.
04:08 And when they did, you know, we didn't really know what to do at that point.
04:14 We got dressed, put our suits on, we went down—we headed downtown on the street.
04:20 We were jumping up and down, doing high fives.
04:23 On the day we were riding up to Boston to hear the decision, it came out over the radio that we had won the case.
04:32 And Gloria just burst into tears. She's not a big crier.
04:35 And I have to say, you have to stop crying. I want to ask you, "Will you marry me?"
04:40 Okay, turn around.
04:41 Together 10 years, but still the pre-wedding jitters for Ed Balmeli and Mike Horgan.
04:47 Sheer panic at first, trying to think of everything that we needed to do.
04:50 There were three couples in Boston that got married that first day, the plaintiff couples.
04:56 We had all these news cameras and media and talking to us and whatnot,
05:01 and I think they thought that maybe one of us was going to show up in a dress or something,
05:07 because when they saw it all happening and they saw our parents there and we were dancing and our siblings were there
05:14 and the minister was there, they were kind of like almost bored.
05:19 It's like, "Why is this news? It's just a wedding."
05:23 We needed then to go to town hall to apply for our marriage license when we won the right to marry.
05:30 And I was so excited and proud to go to town hall that day.
05:36 There was a whole group of people we didn't know they were going to be there, and somebody had an accordion.
05:40 They were playing "Going to the Chapel," and everybody in town hall was singing along.
05:45 October 10, 2004.
05:47 Fall is your favorite season.
05:49 Fall is my favorite season.
05:50 And so I know that was significant.
05:52 We liked the idea of 10/10.
05:54 We thought, "There's no way in heck we're going to forget those dates."
05:59 The funny thing was, I think, leading up to it, which I was pretty calm because I knew I wanted to get married,
06:05 but for some reason, I don't know, I became hysterical before the wedding.
06:10 And when I knew it was time to get ready to go out, I was just feeling like I was laughing, I was crying, I was screaming.
06:17 I was really hysterical.
06:19 I was hysterical.
06:20 We have a top five days in our relationship, and that is one of the top five days in our relationship.
06:27 Absolutely.
06:29 I mean, people say, "Well, you've been together all those years. Did it change?"
06:33 It changed for me, unbelievably, because I felt like we were finally able to hold our heads up high
06:41 and be in the world and be just like everybody else.
06:46 Every interview, you kept saying, "Why do you want to get married? Why do you want to get married?"
06:50 So we would constantly say, "Because we love each other, and we want to be with each other."
06:56 It was kind of nice to hear from each other day by day kind of thing.
07:02 And then getting married, people say, "Well, what's the difference?"
07:06 It's like, "Well, the difference is you're now a team."
07:10 We get to be integrated into each other's families seamlessly now because we're not a friend.
07:20 That's Ed's friend Mike and Mike's friend Ed.
07:24 Even the society now has words for us.
07:28 I say "husband." All the language of marriage and family suddenly applies.
07:35 And we started getting cards and letters and all kinds of things from people who were just thrilled
07:44 that we were willing to do this because they wanted to get married.
07:48 And here we are now saying, "We're hoping that we can make this possible for all of us."
07:55 [Music]
08:10 [MUSIC]