Then Comes Marriage

by Roberta Kaplan

  Despite having to remain closeted to most of the world, Edie and Thea had a thriving social life in Manhattan and in the Hamptons, where Edie bought a small cottage on the wrong side of the tracks for Thea’s birthday in 1968. The couple threw rollicking dinner parties, with Thea, a gifted cook, preparing homard à l’Américaine from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking for dozens of guests. They went to parties and dances, twirling around dance floors all over New York doing the merengue, the lindy hop, the hully gully. Later, they enjoyed making up lyrics to the latest unintelligible seventies disco hits.

  In 1974, after sixteen years at IBM, Edie decided to retire. The company was closing its Manhattan office, and the only remaining positions available in New York City were in sales, which did not interest her. Now in her mid-forties, Edie was burned out from the job and wanted to travel more for pleasure. As a private therapist, Thea could set her own schedule, and if Edie quit, the couple would be able to take trips wherever and whenever they wanted. “I did not see the point of going on,” said Edie. “I was exhausted from sixteen years of really working my ass off.” It was time for her and Thea to enjoy the fruits of their labors—which they did for three joyous years, touring Europe and reveling in their hard-earned, newfound freedom.

  Then, one day in 1977, as they were preparing for a trip to Japan, they realized that Thea had started to drag one foot when she walked. That began a whole new chapter in their lives.

  AT FIRST, IT was just a small issue, the kind of thing that happens to hundreds of people every day. Edie made a joke of it, noting that Thea must need a pair of new shoes. Neither woman thought much about it until later, when Thea began stumbling more often. Then Thea couldn’t swing a golf club correctly anymore; her foot seemed stuck. Concerned, she made an appointment with a doctor to find out what was wrong.

  After examining Thea and giving her a spinal tap, the doctors told her they weren’t sure what the problem was. At the time, multiple sclerosis was not as well understood as it is now. But as Thea’s condition continued to worsen over the years, they realized that it was something far more debilitating: Thea had progressive multiple sclerosis, which meant that over time she would gradually become quadriplegic, losing motor control over her limbs.

  Edie leapt into action, doing research about MS, going to lectures, and even taking a three-month nursing course. Both she and Thea were determined that their lives would change as little as possible, despite the disease. They put up a sign on their refrigerator that said “Don’t Postpone Joy” and they meant it.

  Thea began using a cane, but within a couple of years, as her legs continued to weaken, she switched to Canadian crutches. What Thea dreaded, though, was the inevitable move to a wheelchair. Then in her late forties, Thea could not get accepted to clinical trials in the United States. The couple hoped that they might be able to get Thea a particular drug that was being tested in the United States but administered in Israel; it had shown promise in treating MS patients at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem.

  As her motor control continued to deteriorate, Thea and Edie booked their tickets and flew to Tel Aviv in 1980, planning to stay a month. Yet as soon as they arrived, they learned that this new drug was no longer being administered in Israel because patients had experienced serious complications. Edie and Thea were tremendously disappointed, of course, but true to form, they decided to make the most of the situation. They had a month in Israel ahead of them, so they made arrangements to go sightseeing. Although both Edie and Thea were Jewish, they had never had much interest in Judaism until this visit. But from the moment they got off the El Al plane, they both felt a deep connection to Israel and an increased interest in their heritage. They soon realized that there was so much to see in a country that was then still very young, yet also very ancient, and they took full advantage of it.

  One day in Jerusalem, while Edie was recovering from a bout of flu in their room at the King David Hotel, Thea made her way down a long flight of steps in the Old City with a taxi driver. When she got to the bottom, Thea realized that there was no way she could get back up the steps. The taxi driver turned to her and said, “Wait—I will go get the army.” He returned shortly with three young female soldiers from the Israeli army who had been walking nearby. The women cheerfully strode over, picked Thea up in their interlocked arms like Queen Esther, and started carrying her up the flight of steps. “Stop!” Thea suddenly commanded like an Israeli general. “Please give the driver my camera to take a picture, because nobody will believe this!” That photograph, of a beaming Thea in the arms of those soldiers, still hangs on the wall in Edie’s bedroom.

  Not long after the Israel trip, Thea was forced to acknowledge that she needed to use a wheelchair. Edie walked into a surgical supply store and bought what she now calls a “goofy blue wheelchair.” She had never bought one before, so she did not realize that they could—and should—be tailored to the user’s individual needs. “I had no idea that you do all kinds of dimensioning,” she explained. “It’s like buying a special car.” There was a steep learning curve in dealing with Thea’s MS as its toll on her body increased.

  Over the next twenty-five years, as Thea lost the use of almost all of her limbs, Edie was right by her side. She installed a system of lifts to raise and lower Thea in and out of bed. She swam with Thea in the pool in their Hamptons backyard, working with Thea to keep her joints and muscles as limber as possible. The couple modified their Manhattan apartment, removing a closet to create more space in the hall, widening the doorways, even installing angled mirrors in the kitchen so that Thea could see what was bubbling on the stove. They bought a customized van with a ramp and automatic lockdowns for Thea’s wheelchair. Edie often told me that “the MS happened to both of us”:

  We always had an aide from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and then it was my shift. And the doctors kept saying to me, “You can’t go on doing this. You need 24-hour help.” And I would say, “That’s my time with her.” And I would throw my arms around her. Eight p.m. on was ours.

  Through it all, Thea continued to see patients as a practicing psychologist—including me, for those two sessions in 1991. Although Thea had been using a wheelchair for years by then, in therapy sessions, she projected nothing but strength. She was always impeccably dressed, never a hair out of place, and instead of sitting in her wheelchair, she would transfer herself into an office chair before patients arrived. You would never look at Thea and think she was disabled, because whatever physical limitations she had were more than made up for by the power of her presence.

  A friend of mine who saw Thea as a patient for years describes going to her sessions:

  Thea was always perfectly pulled together. She was very cocky. Very definite, no hesitation. And she was usually right about everything. She never stopped being Thea, no matter how diminished her body was.

  For me, Thea was a comforting presence, even from afar. Each summer when the New York Gay Pride Parade rolled through town at the end of June, I would walk down lower Fifth Avenue, watching the floats and marchers, and I would inevitably find myself looking for Thea. Occasionally, I would see her on the sidewalk outside their apartment building, sitting in her wheelchair. It somehow gave me a sense of assurance just to see her there, even though we never spoke again after those two sessions in the summer of 1991. I had never met Edie, had no idea what she looked like, and only knew her (from Thea’s vivid description) to be a genius mathematician, so I wouldn’t have been able to look for her at the parade in any event.

  Edie and Thea spent most of their summers in the Hamptons, where Thea could exercise daily in their swimming pool. Always devoted to her patients, Thea offered them a creative way to get their therapy sessions in, even when she was out of the city. As my friend who was Thea’s patient explains:

  She started what she called “iced coffee sessions” when she was in the Hamptons. You’d drive all the way there, have a session with her, then have an hour off with iced coffee, thinking about wh
at you said. Then you’d have another session. She developed this because of her illness—she couldn’t abandon her patients for that long.

  Edie and Thea kept doing everything they had always done—traveling, going out to dinner, having parties with friends. But the one thing they could no longer do, to their great regret, was dance. Much later, Thea would say that this was the one loss that could make her cry. Dancing had been such a huge part of their courtship, and one of their great joys as a couple—which is why Edie finally decided they were going to keep dancing, no matter how they did it. One night at a party, she perched herself on the armrest of Thea’s wheelchair, and the two of them zipped around the dance floor, spinning and zooming and laughing like a couple of teenagers.

  No matter how dire Thea’s physical situation became, neither woman dared to show either sadness or weakness in the face of it. They were afraid to, afraid that if one of them fell apart, they both would fall apart. In fact, as Edie tells it, in all the years they were together, they never cried in front of each other, except for once:

  We did not talk about it. Neither of us ever cried in front of the other. It was always separate. I mean, I knew she cried. I knew she cried when I was sick, and she knew I cried, but never in front of each other. We did not want to risk falling apart. I can remember walking along the street, you know, crying, and saying to myself, “Look what they done to my song, Ma.”

  We did cry in front of each other once, but not on the subject of MS, on the subject of hiding, of being in the closet.

  We were having some kind of terrific success at something—Thea had been honored and was in the papers, and I said, “Can you imagine what we could have been if we hadn’t spent half our effort just hiding who we were?”

  At first, Thea said, “Oh, I don’t think so at all.” But then we talked about it, and by the time we were done with this conversation, we were both crying our heads off. This was the first time that we had ever cried in front of each other.

  IN 1993, WHEN New York City began offering domestic partnership to same-sex couples, Edie was ecstatic. It was not marriage, but at long last the couple would finally have some kind of legal recognition for their relationship. “I want us to be one of the first couples to register,” Edie told Thea.

  “Well, it’s going to have to wait,” Thea told her. “Because I have appointments with patients all day long.”

  Edie rarely put her foot down with Thea, but this time she most certainly did. “I have waited almost twenty-seven and three quarter years for this day,” she told Thea, “and I am not waiting a single day longer.” (It’s fair to note that Rachel and I experienced similar tensions on our way to obtaining our own domestic partnership, and for arguably the exact same reason. It was not marriage, so what was the big deal?) Upon seeing the light, Thea cleared her schedule for the day, bought Edie a bouquet of flowers, and they went down to City Hall to register. They were the eightieth same-sex couple to register in New York City.

  But as happy as they were to be officially recognized as a couple, domestic partnership still was not marriage. Neither Edie nor Thea ever gave up their 1967 dream of getting legally married one day, ideally in their home state. But after our loss in the New York marriage case, when it was clear that New York would not be a realistic option for the foreseeable future, they made plans to fly to Toronto. Fortunately for Edie, for me, and for gay couples across America, her friend Brendan Fay had made arrangements with some friends of his who were filmmakers for the ceremony to be filmed. It seemed like a small detail, but would end up making an enormous difference.

  6

  THE REST WAS

  JUST DANCING

  The footage is a little shaky, the sound quality isn’t great, but there they are: Thea, dressed in a black suit and white turtleneck, a corsage of two red roses pinned to her lapel, and Edie, perched on the armrest of Thea’s wheelchair, wearing a cream-colored suit and a string of pearls. It is May 22, 2007, and after more than forty years together, seventy-seven-year-old Edie Windsor and seventy-five-year-old Thea Spyer are finally getting married.

  After hearing Thea’s grim prognosis, the couple had turned to their friend Brendan Fay for help in arranging their wedding. Brendan, who is a very kind man with a lovely, lilting Irish accent, had started the Civil Marriage Trail Project in 2003, a program to help gay and lesbian Americans make the trip to Canada to marry. By 2007, he had helped dozens of couples already, obtaining wedding licenses, arranging officiants, assisting with any and all details so that the couples could be legally wed.

  Everyone knew that this would be a difficult trip for Thea physically. There were so many obstacles: getting through security; transferring Thea out of her wheelchair and into an airplane seat; finding ground transportation that could accommodate her wheelchair. Six friends eagerly volunteered to accompany them to Toronto. And Brendan Fay arranged for Justice Harvey Brownstone, Canada’s first openly gay judge, to officiate.

  The ceremony took place at the Sheraton Gateway, a business hotel in Terminal 3 of the Toronto airport. In order to make the setting more appropriate, Edie made exhaustive arrangements to have the conference room decorated as appropriately as possible because Thea had wanted it that way, ensuring that there were flowers, palm trees, champagne flutes, and a cake, not to mention rose petals sprinkled on the floor. Edie had brought a photo of her and Thea at their fifteenth anniversary, which she propped on the icing in lieu of the traditional bride and groom cake topper.

  With their friends seated nearby and the filmmakers capturing everything on video, Edie leaned close to Thea as she sat on the armrest of Thea’s wheelchair, and Justice Brownstone began:

  Dear friends and family of Edie and Thea, we are gathered together today to witness a very happy and long-awaited event. Edie and Thea, you are here to obtain legal and societal recognition of your decision to accept each other totally and permanently.

  Over the past 41 years, you have been dancing. You have come to know and love each other, you have found joy and meaning together, and you have chosen to live your lives together. Now you seek to unite in marriage, and to this moment you have brought the fullness of your hearts, the dreams that bind you together, and that particular personality and spirit which is uniquely your own.

  Edie and Thea had long dreamed of the moment that came next: the chance to say to each other, “With this ring, I thee wed . . . from this day forward as in all days past.” Because of the MS, Thea could not move her hands, so one of their friends had to help when the couple exchanged rings, but Thea’s voice was firm when she said, with tears streaming down her face, “I, Thea Spyer, choose you, Edie Windsor, to be my lawful wedded spouse.” Edie spoke her vows in a quiet voice, slipping the ring onto Thea’s finger, and then it was time for Justice Brownstone to speak the words they both had been waiting decades to hear.

  Now, therefore, I, Harvey Brownstone, Judge of the Ontario Court of Justice, by virtue of the power invested in me under the Marriage Act of Ontario, do hereby pronounce you, Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer, to be legally married spouses and partners for life.

  The look on Thea’s face at this moment in the film is both beautiful and heartrending. I have watched it dozens of times by now, but it never fails to make me cry. As Justice Brownstone begins speaking the words “I hereby pronounce you,” Thea dissolves into tears, her face flooded with emotion and relief. Edie embraces her, then dabs at Thea’s eyes with a tissue. It is a moment that encapsulates so much about their relationship, from the ease and love with which Edie moves to care for Thea, to Thea’s look of gratitude and understanding, to the deep and abiding love they so obviously share.

  Later, after champagne and the toasts of their friends, Edie says incredulously, “I mean, we’re married.” Then she laughs. “I don’t know about all that other stuff for the last forty-two years. The rest was just dancing.”

  FIVE DAYS LATER, on May 27, 2007, the New York Times ran their wedding announcement, complete with a photograph of Edie a
nd Thea. After a lifetime spent in various stages of hiding who they were, the couple was now, officially and totally, out of the closet. The response to their official “coming out” stunned them.

  They received hundreds of letters from all over the country from people they had known in all facets of their lives—from playmates with whom they had grown up to schoolmates to work colleagues. What surprised Edie the most, though, was hearing from dozens of her former colleagues at IBM, the same colleagues she had been so afraid to come out to for all those years. “Almost every single person on my floor wrote to me, thrilled and excited,” she said. Some of them asked her why she had lied to them for so many years, and all she could say was, “I had to because I was queer.” Edie never could have imagined, in the years when she worked at IBM, that there would come a time when she and Thea could openly, proudly, and joyfully announce their marriage on the wedding page of the New York Times of all places.

  Here’s how Edie described the difference:

  Being married is so different that it’s impossible to describe. I ask every single person who has been with someone for any length of time and then gets married, “Was it different the next day?” And every single person says, “Oh my God, yes.” There is something profound—it’s something that the whole world knows what it means.

  For Thea, getting married also meant something else. “I feel like I can die now,” she told Edie. “Everything is complete.”

  Before Edie and Thea left for Toronto, Brendan Fay had asked the filmmakers Greta Olafsdottir and Susan Muska to interview Thea and Edie for him. After the interview, the filmmakers called Edie and Thea with a proposal: they wanted to make a full-length feature documentary about the couple. Could they look for photos from the four decades of their relationship? Edie and Thea agreed. Over the course of the next two years, the filmmakers came and shot footage of the couple looking through old photographs together, doing Thea’s exercises in the pool at their Hamptons home, spinning around a dance floor in Thea’s wheelchair, and talking, sometimes tenderly, sometimes humorously or passionately, about what it meant to be a lesbian couple whose love had survived nearly half a century.