Out in the Mountains

Couples of the Heart: Creating Lesbian Unions

Ed. Becky Butler, Seal Press

Moira

Couples of the Heart: Creating Lesbian
Unions; is a collection of beautiful and
moving love stories edited by Becky
Butler. The book is a composite of twen-
ty-seven couples’ true accounts of their
own wedding ceremonies and all the
preparations they took in making their
unions meaningful. The women tell their
own stories, in their own voices. Their
visions show us anything is possible.

 

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187 St. Paul St. Burlington VT

802.853.1884

Even more they relay a positive message
that these marriages are strong even
without a legal document backing them
up. To the women in this book their
weddings were the fulfillment of very
strong commitments to each other.

The first part of the book is devoted to a
history of Lesbian partnerships. Butler
traces our past from Sappho’s time to
present day. She describes a Native
American ceremony uniting two lesbians
in a Lakota dance. The two women do a
dance with a rope twined between them
forming a symbolic rope baby. In this
way the union was validated. Butler
brings us real lives, with details of the
variety of lesbian relationships recorded
in literature.

All the stories share a common feeling:
that of wanting to declare their love to
each other and express that within their
community. One couple, Kilby and Janet
said, “I wanted a statement that we were
a couple and that we were committed to
staying together forever. It was a way of
saying, ‘Together, we are one.’ It was
also a statement that ‘Yes, I am a wom-
an, and I am marrying a woman.’” An-
other couple described it this way, “Get-
ting mariied to each other was a way of
validating that this was it: this was our
lifestyle, and this was our commitment
to each other.”

In many cases the women followed stan-
dard legal procedures—as far as was al-
lowed. Wills were drawn up, power of
attorney stated, whatever legal pro-
visions that could be made, about prop-
erty, children or each other, was attended
to before the ceremonies along with all
the other preparations.

 

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I particularly enjoyed reading all the dif-
ferent ways these women went about
creating their weddings, drawing from
their varied heritages. The book seems to
cover just about every form, from those
involved in the Wicca tradition, to Bud-
dhist rituals, to a couple speaking their
own vows alone in a Nantucket chapel.

There was Anna and Deborah’s story,
which was a traditional church wedding,
Deborah in a white wedding gown and
Anna in a tux. They shared some won-
derful insights about dealing with the
country club, the tux rental shop and the
florists—all of whom accepted them. “If
gays and lesbians would just try things,
there are a lot more options open than
you think.”

Rosanne and Judy had similar reactions.
When planning their wedding (which
they called a Brit Ahavah, meaning liter-
ally in Hebrew, a covenant of love) they
had this to say, “We met and dealt with
people who had never thought of gays
and lesbians as human beings with the
same needs and wants as other people.
Most of them began to relate to us as a
couple in love, lesbians in love. People
who had never before recognized their
encounters with gay people began to see
gays as living, breathing human beings.”

There are also stories of women who saw
their weddings as a political statement.
For Eleanor and Yvonne it became just
that. “Having a same—sex wedding is a
political move; people can somehow ig-
nore your relationship with another
woman, but when you really say that you
want to make this commitment, it zings a
lot of people’s reality recorders. They
just can’t deal with it. It was another lev-
el of coming out for me.”

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Lesbian and
Gay Law
Association

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ROBERT W. ZEUNER

Member National

 

ATTORNEY AT LAW

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