Today is Ed and my “Half-Anniversary”, AKA our “Legal Anniversary”. As I have already detailed in a 2015 blog post when Marriage Equality finally went national, Ed and I got married April 25, 1998, the fifth anniversary of our meeting. We didn’t receive our legal marriage rights until 2011, when New York State legalized same-sex marriage. For those papers we got married again at City Hall on October 25, our half-year anniversary date, only a few months after the new law went into effect, rather than wait until April, 2012 to do so on our actual anniversary.
This summer, photographer Michael R. Dekker invited us to pose for him in his studio. Rather than wait until our “real” anniversary next year, I thought I’d share images from that session today, on our “other” anniversary. Ed and I are generally very firm that April 25 is our proper anniversary: we met that date in 1993, got married that date in 1998, and it just took 13 / 15 / 17 years for the government to catch up to reality. Unlike April 25, Ed and I usually let October 25 pass by uncommented upon, even if our aunts on Ed’s side of the family invariably send us cards/emails. (I just joked to Aunt Louise that “it’s all part of a dastardly plan to force aunts to send two cards a year! Mua ha ha!”) But perhaps October 25 does deserve a little more recognition as an anniversary in our household – so sharing these photos will be my way to honor the date on my blog this time.
And the photos also touch upon a little story about our wedding rings that hadn’t made it into the earlier blog post…
Michael was very intrigued by our rings, as illustrated by how prominently they show up in many of his photos. They are one-of-a-kind rings we designed ourselves and had a specialist make for us.
This zoom into the above photo may assist the following description. The rings are gold, from a wax mold. The jeweler we worked with was unique in that he could both carve into wax and build up on wax to create the mold. Originally the plan was to sculpt two male figures embracing each other in a ying/yang position, cradling each other’s heads, the lower bodies radiating away from the center image on either side of the ring. I thought the male figures would be stylized like art deco statues. But as you can see below, each head looks naturalistic and distinct. In fact, one is my head, and the other is Ed’s. We wear our rings in such a manner that when we look at our own hands Ed is “up” on my finger, and I am “up” on his.
How did we go from stylized art deco to depictions of Ed and me? Well, the jeweler asked me for art work and photos as models for the figures. I found some lovely 18th century French erotica for the bodies, but I also had photos a friend of ours, Rick Pantaleoni, took of Ed and me in our garden in 1997, a year before our wedding. We had told Rick of our ying/yang plans for the wedding rings and he asked us to pose in the envisioned position. That’s how these next two pictures were taken:
Later that year I gave our jeweler those pictures to help illustrate the position we wanted for the sculpted figures on our rings. He looked at them and suggested he could make the figures’ heads look like us if we wanted. We took him up on it and ended up with rings that far surpassed our initial design and expectations.
Above is how the photos Rick took hang on our wall. But it is a choice we made in 1997 when we framed and hung them. We could just as well have hung them the other away around, as shown below. Or vertically – which provides two more options each, with Ed up and me down or me up and Ed down.
Finally, here are three more photos from our session with Michael, with the rings and/or hands remaining prominent.
