Twenty years ago, MA became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. This is the story of a Lexington couple that was married that week.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, Cecilia D’Oliveira and Meg Soens, then 50 and 48, went to Lexington’s Town Hall to apply for a marriage license. Although they had been a couple for nearly two decades, it was their first opportunity: On May 17, 2004 Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriages. 

This is the story of a Lexington couple that was married that week — with two ministers, their four children, many friends, and lots of balloons. 

In Part 1, we hear about the early years of their relationship, the obstacles they faced in having children together, and what happened when their kids were old enough to start school. 

In Part 2, coming next week, we’ll hear about what happened when Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage, and about the continuing challenges they faced, even here in Lexington.  

Meg Soens and Celia D’Oliveira were both born in Massachusetts, children of fathers who worked in white collar jobs and mothers who stayed at home with the kids. 

In 1969, when she was a high school junior, Celia’s part Portuguese, part Irish Catholic family, consisting of her father, stepmother and six kids, moved from Boston’s South Shore to Hawesville, Kentucky. 

“Our family integrated well into the rural and conservative, largely farming Kentucky community,” Celia recalls. “Dad was a visible, highly respected local senior executive. I played softball on a girls team, made many good friends, did well academically, was president of my class, went to parties, had a boyfriend,” she says. “I had absolutely no thoughts of my sexual orientation at that time — it just was not in my consciousness in 1970.”

Meg grew up mostly in New Orleans, in an academic, Episcopalian family with five siblings. Her father taught English Lit at Notre Dame and her stepfather taught English History at Tulane. 

“Academics and sports were my great comforts, because, although my parents were liberal for their time — my mother co-led the first integrated Girl Scout troop in New Orleans — she was very prejudiced against LGBT people,” Meg says. “My stepsister Susan was a lesbian, and when I was 8 or so and she came home from college, my mother had me follow my little sister around to make sure Susan didn’t molest her,” Meg recalls. “I was a junior in high school when I had my first real crush and it was on another girl. So I struggled, because if I was a lesbian, I might be a child molester and, at the least, a really bad person. So I couldn’t be a lesbian. It took me until grad school before I accepted it.”

Both women returned to Massachusetts to go to college: Meg to Mount Holyoke; Celia to MIT. When they met in Cambridge in 1987, Celia was an MBA, implementing computer networking and related software to support MIT’s educational and research activities. Meg had been working towards a PhD in Chinese History at Harvard but changed careers and was analyzing junk bonds. 

MIT, says Celia, was gay-friendly and it was relatively easy to be “out.” Meg was working at Fidelity. “My closet was tightly shut,” she says. “My father and step-father were pretty good about my being gay though that didn’t include talking about it,” Meg says. “After a couple of years my mother came around.” 

The two eventually bought a house together in Arlington and focused on building their relationship and careers. 

“But we both were from large, close families,” Celia says. “My younger siblings had started to get married and have kids, so I started to want that too.”

Meg hadn’t given any thought to having kids. “There was no map for the land I had finally stumbled into,” she says. “I couldn’t imagine being married, let alone being a mother. But it was kind of like a switch turned on when my body got to 32-33, really surprising me. I started to yearn deeply for children.”

“The path to that was totally unclear in the late 1980s,” Celia says. There were many issues to sort through. How to actually do it? Whose sperm? The DIY “turkey baster method” or in vitro fertilization? 

Before 1993, there was no way for same-sex parents to both be legal parents to their children. The non-genetic parent did not appear on the birth certificate and had no recourse if the genetic parent denied them parental status. The two parents-to-be had to trust each other, as well as the sperm donor, who could, after the fact, still be recognized as the legal father in court. Even if he was trustworthy and the legal agreement was agreeable to all parties, a court might not recognize it. AIDS contagion was still a danger. Many lesbians chose to use sperm banks, because the donor was screened and gave up his legal rights. Couples spent hundreds of dollars on lawyers without any guarantee that their agreements would be recognized in court.

Though Massachusetts was home to the gay hubs of Provincetown and Northampton and would eventually become the first state in the U.S. to legalize gay marriage, at the time, the Catholic Church, other conservative institutions, and many voters continued to make LGBTQ+ parenting issues difficult. Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts might have been the first Congressman to come out publicly in 1987, and local gay organizations, publications, and arts groups like the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus could grow, but Governor Michael Dukakis — eyeing the presidency — was hostile to the idea of LGBTQ+ couples raising children.

Boston’s Fenway Community Health Center, a research, educational and advocacy organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender health care — known at the time primarily for its clinical expertise in treating HIV/AIDS — became a major resource, specifically its Alternative Insemination Program.  

“Very few lesbians we had heard of had kids then,” recalls Meg, “but once we were sure we wanted to do it, we joined the Fenway group and got educated. We ended up deciding not to have a male friend donate the sperm, given all the legal tangles that could produce.” 

Celia was the oldest so she tried first. Her gynecologist at Brigham helped by diagnosing both women with male factor infertility (in other words, no sperm) so that insurance would cover the cost of IVF. That was highly unusual and a big help, because IVF was very costly. 

Celia’s attempts to get pregnant were unsuccessful, so Meg tried.

“We knew there was a very good chance of twins or triplets, because at that point, to increase the odds of a successful pregnancy, they harvested and fertilized many eggs.” she explains. In Meg’s case, they harvested 25 eggs, froze some and implanted five embryos. By mid-1993, Meg was pregnant. 

On September 10, 1993, the Massachusetts Supreme Court facilitated most of the legal issues by ruling on a case involving two lesbian moms, both on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. 

News services announced in the language of the time: “Prominent breast cancer surgeon Dr. Susan Love and her lesbian lover (sic) Dr. Helen Cooksey, also a surgeon,” had become the first homosexual couple in Massachusetts to legally adopt the 5-year-old girl they had raised since birth. “The girl was conceived by Love through artificial insemination from Cooksey’s biological cousin” so that both would be blood relations.

Three months later, Meg gave birth to the first set of Oliveira-Soens twins — Alice and Richard — and both were able to become legal parents. 

A friend who lived in Lexington talked up the town as neighborly and open. On Mother’s Day of 1994, the couple bought a house on North Hancock Street and later joined the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church, where Helen Cohen was then minister, and where they were welcomed. Even Meg’s mother underwent what she calls, “a really wonderful transformation, and taught me a lot about the possibilities for redemption.” A more gay-friendly Governor Weld succeeded Dukakis and gave Meg “some hope that we wouldn’t always be punished and thought of as morally dangerous.” 

The new mothers barely noticed that the Supreme Court of Hawaii had just ruled that preventing same-sex couples from obtaining marriage licenses was discriminatory, prompting nationwide conservative concern that a redefinition of marriage rights in Hawaii could be imitated by other states and make gay couples eligible for a whole range of federal rights and benefits. 

One of the many political reactions to that decision, the Defense of Marriage Act, passed both houses of Congress by veto-proof majorities in 1996 and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on September 21, 1996. It defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and relieved a state of its obligation to honor the laws of other states as required by the Constitution. DOMA also codified non-recognition of same-sex marriages for insurance benefits for government employees, social security survivors’ benefits, immigration, bankruptcy, and the filing of joint tax returns.

Meg and Celia –- still unmarried after nearly a decade together — were not paying as much attention as they might have been because on October 16, 1996, Meg delivered a second set of twins, Peter and Oscar. Day-to-day life was busy but, as Celia recalls, “by then, we knew how to do it.” They had part-time help. The older twins attended the Lexington Playcare Center on Meriam Street and spent Sundays and holidays at First Parish Church. Slowly, they met the handful of other gay families in town, including the interfaith Sackton Coolidges, who lived on Outlook Drive near the Bridge School and were members of the welcoming congregation Kerem Shalom in Concord. Statewide and nationwide, public opinion continued to move in favor of same-sex marriage, and it eventually became legal in 36 of the 50 states, though DOMA was still in effect nationally. 

Celia, who did the taxes, was particularly incensed by the financial penalties incurred by gay families. “Between 1993 and 2004, we had to file separate tax returns for both state and federal,” she recalls. “One of us would file Single and the other Head of Household (with the dependents) depending on who was the major breadwinner. When our marriage was legally recognized, we began to file our tax return jointly for Massachusetts but still had to file two returns for federal. During that time, I always wrote a cover letter, complaining about it. Only in 2015 [when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage] did we begin filing one joint return as a married couple.”

Year-round, there were the worries about travel to see relatives who now lived in several southern states. “Over the years we traveled to Louisiana, Kentucky, Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, to visit and to attend family reunions,” Celia says. “We wanted to be sure our rights would be respected across state lines.” 

Like Jews and African-Americans who traveled with a book listing friendly hotels, inns and restaurants, and advice from friends, they carefully chose ahead of time where they would eat and stay. But what if they had a car accident, or got sick and had to go to an ER and needed to answer questions like what is your legal relation to the patient? They carried legal documents with them whenever they traveled. 

“To tell you the truth, it’s still true,” says Celia “There’s the legal side and then the cultural side. While being gay is now less of an issue in most of the U.S., anyone who is transgender is a target the way gay people were 30 years ago. And there’s travel in the rest of the world. We’re planning a trip to Africa and still have to think about a country’s culture and how things will be.” 

With foresight, they could usually avoid travel problems. At home, however, they started to feel like things were “out of our control” when their older twins started kindergarten at Estabrook in 1999. They consulted with the Sackton Coolidges, whom they had met through Lexington’s tiny gay community. Their son had started elementary school at Bridge a year earlier, and seemed to be the only child of gay parents there. 

“We wanted him to be able to talk about us with his friends like other children talked about their parents,” recalls Sackton, who is a psychotherapist and social worker. “Once, at school, he was teased for making two Mother’s Day cards and I consulted with his teacher. It was not uncommon then for teachers to tell me that they didn’t have language to address what came up. Liz and I offered resources and suggested solutions such as deliberately using “Parents” instead of “Mom” and “Dad.” The teachers were very receptive: they were already thinking about language regarding race because of the METCO program that had been providing voluntary suburban public school education for African-American, Hispanic and Asian students from Boston since the Sixties.” 

But they told Meg and Celia that the twins would probably hear put-downs, such as “that’s so gay,” and like many parents sending their kids off to kindergarten for the first time, they felt protective and worried. At Playcare there had never been any problem. “Once your kids go into the school system, there are so many more people involved, there’s a lot less opportunity as a parent to go in and see what’s going on,” Meg says. “And, in 1999, it was so much harder.”

While Celia continued working at MIT, Meg — who had minimal experience as an activist at the time — began to talk with Estabrook Principal Joni Jay and the twins’ teachers to ensure that they would feel as welcome as any other kid and not ashamed to have two moms. The principal suggested Meg work with the Anti-Bias Committee, a group composed of parents and educators that had been formed to address racial issues. Except for one African-American member, the committee was all white and heterosexual. “I literally had a panic attack trying to explain why I was there,” says Meg. 

Joanne Benton, who would later become School Superintendent, but was then head of Estabrooks’s curriculum development, told her she needed to build community support. Meg, who had no experience in community organizing at the time, set about talking to other parents, people in her neighborhood and in the churches. She discovered that six years earlier a small initiative called The Safe Schools Program for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Questioning (LGBTQ) Students had been founded by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) and the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth in response to concerns about LGBTQ+ youth suicides and other risk factors. The Anti-Defamation League, founded by a national Jewish organization, had a program called No Place for Hate that Lexington’s School Committee had endorsed to address anti-semitism and racial bias. Some elementary schools were already using a “diversity book bag” that kids could take home and have their parents read with them. But books about gay-headed families were not in the bag. 

Meg turned to the Boston chapter of the national organization PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and, with the sponsorship of Lexington’s education department, Lexington High School, and seven churches and synagogues, organized a town-wide seminar called “Respecting Differences.” The program of panel discussions, guest speakers and films aiming to foster acceptance of and respect for LGBTQ+ families ran for three days in October 2000 at the First Parish Church and the Museum of our National Heritage. 

^{The program for the “Respecting Differences” event in 2000}

Immediately, the Tupelo, Mississippi-based American Family Association, acting on behalf of five Lexington residents, filed a restraining order to prevent the seminar from taking place, then sued members of the School Committee, the School Superintendent and LHS Principal in US District Court, asserting that they had violated separation of church and state by “entanglement” with the public schools.The case was thrown out, but put Lexington and its schools in the national political headlights. 

Meg had her hands full with the kids and community organizing; Celia had left MIT and was working at a start-up company with colleagues, thinking that she had to be crazy to be doing this with four young children. They were absorbed in the day-to-day of a growing family. They weren’t thinking about getting legally married. 

“Bottom line,” says Celia, “I thought that day would never happen.” 

Read Part 2: From classrooms to courtrooms, how a trailblazing family paved the way for same-sex couples in Lexington