The improbable, 200-year-old story of one of America’s first same-sex ‘marriages’

Last edited Sat Mar 21, 2015, 02:54 PM - Edit history (1)

Print edition title: "The surprising tale of one of America's first same-sex 'marriages'"

The quotation marks were put there by the WaPo, not me.

The improbable, 200-year-old story of one of America’s first same-sex ‘marriages’

Morning Mix

By Sarah Kaplan March 20 at 5:10 AM
@sarahkaplan48

Charity Bryant only intended to stay a few days in Weybridge, Vt., a tiny rural town with little to hold her attention. But then she met Sylvia Drake. ... Drake was 22 — a talented, literary-minded woman in search of a kindred spirit. Bryant, seven years her senior, was brilliant, charismatic and exactly the kind of partner Drake had been looking for. The two fell swiftly, madly in love. Within months, Bryant rented a one-room apartment and asked Drake to become her roommate and wife. ... It may sound like something from a 21st century vows column, but this romance predates most newspapers’ style sections — by about two centuries.

“Our popular narrative of same-sex marriage says it’s this brand new thing,” said Rachel Hope Cleves, an associate professor of history at the University of Victoria and the author of a new study in the latest issue of the Journal of American History chronicling 500 years of same-sex unions in the United States. “But the reality is that it came over with human migration” — contrary, for example, to Justice Samuel Alito’s comment during oral arguments on California’s Proposition 8 case that it’s an “institution which is newer than cellphones or the Internet.”

Long before United States vs. Windsor — before the Defense of Marriage Act, even before the Stonewall Riots — gays and lesbians in North America found ways to live as married couples, in practice if not in law, according to Cleves’s research. In the mid-16th century, Spanish conquistador Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca wrote about a custom of “one man married to another,” which he saw in several Gulf Coast communities. Newspaper accounts from the 18th and 19th centuries tell sensationalized stories of “female husbands,” women who passed as men and married other women for love or money. California miners Jason Chamberlain and John Chaffee lived together for more than 50 years, and were thought of as “wedded bachelors” by those who knew them.

But Bryant and Drake’s 44-year marriage is by far the best and most explicitly documented example of an early same-sex union, said Cleves, who has also written a book about the relationship.