Sue and Danielle

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.’

“It would have been a devastating LGBT ruling,” Sue explains, that would have made “all kinds of things” illegal: “No federal or state organizations could receive state funding unless they were actively teachingt hat LGBT activity was wrong … it was one of the bigger measures to make it to a statewide vote … So, the background of that party was that [this vote] was going to be going down in just a few days.”

Danielle pipes up: “But Sue and I found ten to fifteen minutes to flirt with one another, and then I invited her out dancing a couple weeks later.”

“No, you arranged an elaborate situation where our mutual friend invited me out dancing, and you happened to be there!,” Sue replies.

Measure 9 was ultimately rejected in Oregon during the same year in which the No Protected Status for Sexual Orientation amendment passed in Colorado. During the interview, Sue and Danielle are asked: “Did you ever think it would go from that to marriage equality?”

“Absolutely not.”

"Sue and I found ten to fifteen minutes to flirt with one another, and then I invited her out dancing a couple weeks later.” —Danielle

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.