First of Gay Couples to Get Married in New York Now Getting a Gay Divorce

(Atlantic Wire) Soon after New York passed the Marriage Equality Act on June 24 last year, Katie Marks and Dese’Rae Stage began planning their wedding day. A licensed masseuse and a photographer, both 28, the couple had been dating since 2008 and were already planning to get married — in Boston over the Memorial Day weekend of 2012 — but the euphoria of the moment moved everything forward. “It was kind of one of those things, to be a part of history,” Des says. On July 30, the first Saturday that gay marriages could be performed in New York City, Katie in a magenta dress and Des in skinny jeans and pink Chuck Taylors joined 23 other couples at the Pop Up Chapel, a one-day wedding event in Central Park, as part of New York City’s first wave of legally married gay couples. By January, though, things had started to come apart. Des and Katie have since separated and moved out of their Washington Heights apartment. They’re now one of the first married gay couples — if not the very first — in New York to divorce. “I feel like I’m the president of the loneliest club in the world,” Des says. “I was the first gay person in my group of friends to marry, and now I’m the only gay divorcée I know.”

“Of course, the news made us sad,” says Bex Schwartz, one of the Pop Up Chapel’s organizers, “but as ministers who perform weddings, marriage equality means marriage is marriage. Unfortunately, the other side is divorce is divorce.”

For all the best intentions, nearly half of U.S. marriages end in divorce. In a Williams Institute study by M.V. Lee Badgett and Jody L. Herman from November 2011, the authors chronicled data to provide a picture of the need for legal recognition of same-sex marriage and divorce. “In the U.S., over 140,000 same-sex couples have formalized their relationship under state law and nearly 50,000 have married,” they write. “The data show that same-sex couples marry at much higher rates than they enter civil unions or other legal statuses…. When a state allows marriage for same-sex couples, over 60 percent of those who marry come from other states.” Their research found that on average the divorce rate for same-sex couples is similar to, though slightly lower than, the rate for different-sex couples. About 1.1 percent of same-sex couples in legal unions end their relationship, they found, while about 2 percent of married different-sex couples divorce.

Few couples go into a marriage expecting to end up on the wrong side of these statistics. State by state, bit by bit, advocates of marriage equality have celebrated victories — like New York becoming the sixth state to allow gay marriages, Obama’s long-awaited personal support, or the court reversal of California’s Prop. 8 — and have mourned setbacks — like North Carolina voters adopting a same-sex marriage ban. But the d-word almost never comes up. It’s certainly not a pleasant topic. And, indeed, there’s even a bit of fear: If we acknowledge that gay marriages can (and, based on the statistics for heterosexual couples, many of them will) fall apart, does it weaken the case for those marriages having existed in the first place? Of course not: Everyone should have a right to marry as well as to divorce. But we need to acknowledge that the rights of marriage are as much about moments of crisis as they are about the moments of happiness: when a spouse loses a job, the law continues health care benefits under COBRA; when a spouse is injured, the law grants hospital visitation rights; or when a spouse dies, the law provides Social Security benefits and inheritance. So, too, are divorce rights — all the mechanisms jurisdictions have devised to divide a love broken, property, finances, and child custody — most needed when a wedding day’s joy has long faded.

In the six states that allow same-sex marriage—Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Vermont—plus the District of Columbia—heterosexual and gay marriage and heterosexual and gay divorce are still not quite the same things, largely because of the federal benefits gay couples don’t receive by marrying and federal protections they don’t have while divorcing. That gap is greater in states that only legally recognize civil unions, state-registered domestic partnerships, and limited rights statuses of same-sex couples, and even greater still in states that don’t recognize the relationships at all. Gay divorce is still largely “uncharted territory,” says Elizabeth Schwartz, a lawyer practicing in Florida.

In New York, gay divorce is recognized because gay marriage is recognized, but that’s not the case everywhere. In Florida, for example, where gay marriage is not legal, same-sex couples who have married in another state are reliant on the discretion of judges. “What I’ve been seeing,” says Schwartz, “are people who’ve said, ‘Wow, is it possible for me to divorce without having to move to that state [where they were married] and get residency?’ And when there’s fighting over kids and assets—if you’re not in a state that recognizes same-sex marriage, there’s no alimony. You have to count on the generosity of your ex.”

The Pop Up Chapel website still bears the engagement photo in which Katie’s lips are pressed to Des’ cheek. “They’ve accumulated quite the furry family, but also look forward to meeting the children they’ve named and have yet to conceive. All in all, they complete each other, and they think that’s pretty awesome,” reads the accompanying text. Des is quoted, “I know we’ve already started a life together, but I can’t wait to be able to call her my wife.”

They’d gone to middle school and high school together, but went their separate ways before reconnecting on MySpace in 2008. On July 24, the first day that New York clerks issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Des and Katie picked theirs up at the City Clerk’s Office in downtown Manhattan. “Couples were getting married and coming out of the courthouse, and there were musicians playing. I got chills every time a couple came out,” Des told me when I met with her at a bar in SoHo, her mood more somber than the festive events she remembered, or, for that matter, as I remember. At the time, I was covering New York’s first same-sex marriages for the Village Voice. I’d spoken to Des about how excited she was to be married. You could hear it in her voice. The New York wedding would be the “no-stress” one, Des told me then, to be followed by the bigger formal ceremony in Boston. There would be cupcakes. The couple seemed giddy, thrilled, and very publicly in love.

That Saturday, July 30, their wedding day, Des says now, was the kind of whirlwind any bride speaks of. “It went by so fast. We got our hair done, we got our makeup done. We changed, we went to Central Park. We forgot to eat, so we went to Whole Foods, and we’re like, We’re eating at Whole Foods and we’re about to get married. It was surreal. I was so excited.”

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