http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/14/here-come-the-brides-kristen-henderson-sarah-ellis_n_1091355.html
Rocker Kristen Henderson and magazine executive Sarah Ellis had started to think marriage just wasn’t in their future. That’s because the couple, who met in Manhattan in 2005, live in a state where same sex marriage wasn’t legal. Or at least it wasn’t until last June.
The two women watched in frustration in 2009 as the state senate voted down a bill that would give LGBT citizens the right to marry.
By the time the senate had another opportunity to legalize gay marriage, in June 2011, Sarah and Kristen had two more reasons to hope the bill passed: their two-year-old children, Thomas and Kate. In a June 15th blog post on The Huffington Post, Sarah wrote that the thought of the Marriage Equality Act not passing left her “heartbroken, for my children. With all of the countless precautions I take to nurture and protect my children, I cannot guard them against the deep ramifications the non-passage of this bill would have on them.”
Then on June 24th, 2011 the bill passed.
Sarah and Kristen, who now live in Seacliff, New York with their kids, told the story of their road to motherhood in their memoir “Times Two: Two Women in Love and the Happy Family They Made” published in April 2011, but we wanted to tell the story of their road to marriage.
In the video above, the first of three chronicling that journey, you’ll catch Kristen and Sarah as they recall how they met and begin, at last, to plan the wedding they’ve always wanted.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/15/here-come-the-brides-kristen-henderson-sarah-ellis-part-2_n_1093580.html
On Nov. 14, we brought you Part 1 of “Here Come The Brides”–a three-part original video series telling the story of lesbian couple’s difficult journey to the wedding they looked forward to for so long.
In Part 2 (above), Kristen and Sarah recall two of the major milestones on their path to the altar — domestic partnership, the value of which they question, and motherhood, which brought them as close as possible to the family they envisioned for themselves. Sarah and Kristen first chronicled how they became parents — — in vitro for Sarah, artificial insemination for Kristen, same donor — in their book “Times Two: Two Women in Love and the Happy Family They Made,” but here they talk about how their dreams of motherhood actually delayed their pursuit of marriage.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/16/here-come-the-brides-kristen-henderson-sarah-ellis-part-3_n_1095996.html?ref=weddings
Today we bring you Part 3 (above) of “Here Come the Brides,” our original video series following New York couple Sarah Ellis, a magazine marketing executive, and Kristen Henderson, a founding member of the band Antigone Rising, as they finally plan the wedding they dreamed of for years. (Watch Part 1 to hear how they met and Part 2 to see how motherhood played into their desire to marry).
As Sarah and Kristen mention in the video above, they were devastated in 2009 when the New York Senate voted down a bill that would allow LGBT individuals to marry. But at that point they had two wonderful distractions: simultaneous pregnancies and then all of the joys and sleepless nights involved in raising two infants.
By the time their babies, Kate and Thomas, were 2 years old, and Kristen and Sarah were able to refocus on their desire to wed, the New York State legislature was once again considering a bill that would legalize gay marriage. In this third and final part of their story, we hear how the historic New York senate vote on June 24, 2011 changed their lives and watch as they finally say their vows.