Gay Couples Tie the Knot in Massachusetts

WORCESTER, Mass. — Massachusetts on Monday became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, ending a centuries-old tradition in this country that limited matrimony to one man and one woman.

Although gays and lesbians held wedding ceremonies earlier this year in San Francisco, Oregon, New York and New Mexico, the unions were not legally sanctioned. Vermont four years ago legalized civil unions, granting same-sex couples the same rights as married people within the state, but without using the word "marriage."

In legalizing same-sex marriage, Massachusetts joined Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Canada's three most populous provinces as the only places in the world where gays and lesbians can marry.

A November ruling by the state's highest court made Monday the official launch date for gay marriage. After Cambridge got the jump on every other community in the commonwealth by issuing licenses at 12:01 a.m., hundreds of same-sex couples flocked to city and town clerks from Barnstable on Cape Cod to Boston to Great Barrington in the western part of the state.

In Provincetown, a seaside resort where half of the full-time residents are gay and lesbian, couples seeking marriage licenses began arriving at Town Hall at 4:30 a.m. -- four hours before the big wooden building was scheduled to open. After the couples got their licenses, they stepped outside to applause from a crowd that grew larger and more jubilant as the day wore on.

"I guess the word I would have to use today is 'surreal,' " said Peter Bez, a Provincetown innkeeper who took out a marriage license with his partner of 27 years, artist Chuck Anzalone.

Just after noon on Monday, Bez and Anzalone became the 100th couple to get their license in Provincetown. Last year, 19 marriage licenses were issued there.

"It doesn't seem like it is happening," Bez said. "But I guess it is, right here in my own backyard."

Among the dozens of couples obtaining licenses in Provincetown, said attorney Bennett Klein, many were from out of town -- defying an order from Gov. Mitt Romney that only residents of Massachusetts could marry here. Klein's organization, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, argued the case that generated the Supreme Judicial Court's landmark decision.

In Boston, a spokesman for the Coalition for Marriage, a group opposed to same-sex marriage, pledged to keep fighting for a constitutional amendment banning such unions -- at both the state and federal level.