When Aimee Wilson asked about adding her gay partner to her corporate health insurance plan earlier this year, her employer told her it would be easy. All she had to do was get a government body to sanction the relationship.
But for Wilson, a resident of Frisco, Texas, that was going to require some fancy bureaucratic two-stepping, because the Lone Star State doesn't officially recognize same-sex partners.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday December 03, 2004 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 37 words Type of Material: Correction
West Hollywood officials -- A photo caption in Wednesday's Section A with an article about the West Hollywood domestic partner registry called Jeffrey Prang the city's mayor. Prang is a city councilman; the mayor is John Duran.
Wilson found her solution 1,400 miles away at West Hollywood's City Hall, where, for a $25 fee, the clerk placed Wilson and her then-pregnant partner, Margaret Richmond, on the city's domestic partnership registry in March. The couple dropped their check and a notarized application in the mail. Richmond made the company's health insurance rolls in time to deliver twins.
"It really felt weird, especially having to go all the way across the country to get it," Wilson said in a phone interview recently. "But it was kind of neat. We even got a certificate."
As the new gay rights battles rage across the American landscape, creating a conflicting, state-by-state patchwork of rules on marriages and domestic partnerships, West Hollywood is among a handful of state and local governments that have been quietly reaching out to gay couples beyond their borders. The city offers to officially sanction unconventional relationships and, just as important, to do it by mail, saving out-of-state partners the cost of a plane ticket.
The policies are by no means as dramatic as those in San Francisco, where Mayor Gavin Newsom allowed gay couples to marry this year, until the actions were blocked by the California Supreme Court. Despite its cachet with insurance programs, the registration has no legal status outside the city boundaries.
But the registrations exemplify the peculiar jurisdiction-shopping gay couples are employing to maximize their rights in a deeply divided country.
Other governments that allow nonresident couples to register by mail include the city of Seattle and the states of Hawaii and California. The Golden State enacted its domestic partners law in 1999. A California secretary of state spokeswoman said the out-of-state provisions were necessary to extend pension benefits to former state employees who had moved elsewhere -- and also to help non-Californians sign up for corporate health insurance benefits.
