Clay County Histories

A crowd toasts the couples who celebrated their 10th Anniversary at the opening of the exhibit “At Last: 10th Anniversary of Marriage Equality in Minnesota.”

Markus Krueger | Program Director  HCSCC

In 1996, the Gallup polling group first asked people if they thought same-sex marriages should be recognized by law. Only 27% of Americans answered yes. In 2022, 71% of Americans answered yes to that question. Perhaps no major issue in history has seen so many Americans change their minds in so little time.

Last month, our museum at the Hjemkomst Center, in collaboration with Red River Rainbow Seniors, opened an exhibit about how Minnesota came to legally recognize same sex marriages ten years ago. In one of the many local interviews conducted for this exhibit, Eric Espinoza identifies a cohort of people joined by circumstances that had never existed before and will likely never exist again: Gay and Lesbian couples with three wedding anniversaries. 

These couples began their relationship in a time of persecution that required their relationships to be secret. They lived to see a thawing of public opinion, allowing them to have a public second celebration with family and friends. And when their government finally offered legal recognition to their marriages (and all the rights and benefits that come along with it), they had a third wedding. 

Mr. Espinoza explains it better than I do. The rest of the words in this article are his. 

“I think there’s this niche of not even a generation, a small number of years, of people [who] have three wedding anniversaries.

“We have the anniversary when Chris and I moved in together and we made vows to each other. There were no witnesses. There was no one else around. We couldn’t have done it legally. We didn’t feel like we could count on the full support of our friends and families, and we didn’t want to go through the hurt of finding out if that was the case. So, we had our ceremony. And that’s the date that we think of as our anniversary.

“Before we moved to North Dakota, about four years after that first date, we did have a ceremony in a church surrounded by much of our family and many of our friends. And we called that “renewing our vows.” And that’s when we exchanged rings. And a lot of our family think of that as the time when we got married, but for us it was four years before that.

“Then…on August 2nd, [2013] we had a ceremony, very small with just friends from up here to make our marriage legal. We have these three dates. So, I think those three weddings are something that [for] a small point in history will be a common thing for people.

“That third date for us was meaningful. Our friends who gathered with us, it was a celebration, but it wasn’t those other two. It wasn’t the commitment we made to ourselves. We had done that years before. It wasn’t the first time that our family surrounded us and supported us. We had had that. It was the first time we could say, legally, that we had rights, that we could file our taxes together. So, that’s meaningful. But, as far as our relationship, I don’t know that that date is as meaningful as the others for us.”