N.Y. gay couples plan to dash to altar by way of Calif.*

By Andrea Stone, USA TODAY

Jeff Friedman and Andrew Zwerin were high school sweethearts on Long
Island. After college and graduate school, they returned to New York to
Rockville Centre. When they adopted Joshua, now 4, Friedman quit his job
as a lawyer to be a stay-at-home dad.

Despite deep roots in New York, they will fly to Los Angeles this month
to plan what Friedman, 40, says will be "a traditional Jewish wedding"
under a chuppa, or canopy, at a cousin's home on Oct. 11.

"We've waited 23 years," says Zwerin, 39. "We're not about to shortcut
the pomp and circumstances."

More than 12,000 same-sex couples from New York are expected to marry in
California within the next three years, says a report today by UCLA's
Williams Institute, which studies sexual orientation issues.

ECONOMIC BOOM: Same-sex nuptials seen as money maker for Calif. economy

Unlike a projected 55,000 gay couples from other states whose marriages
will be mostly symbolic, New Yorkers expect to have legal standing on
matters such as inheritance and taxes.

That's because after California's Supreme Court last month overturned a
ban on same-sex marriage, New York Gov. David Paterson instructed state
agencies to recognize all marriages, including those of gay couples,
legally performed in other jurisdictions.

Those include Canada, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, South Africa and
nearby Massachusetts, the first state to legalize same-sex marriage —
but only for residents and those from states where it isn't illegal.

Gay rights advocates are unsure whether New York's unique situation will
allow residents to marry in Massachusetts, but California looks clear —
at least until November, when Californians will vote on whether to amend
the state constitution to outlaw same-sex marriage.

"If it sounds weird, it is weird. That's the limbo people are living
in," says Alan Van Capelle, executive director of Empire State Pride
Agenda, a New York gay rights group. "This is an important remedy but
not a permanent solution to the lack of marriage equality."

County clerks in California will begin issuing same-sex marriage
licenses to residents and non-residents at 5 p.m. next Monday.

Inga Sarda-Sorensen says she and her partner, Jennie Talley, 54, were so
"absolutely thrilled" by the California decision that they asked their
Episcopal minister to officiate at a September wedding near Thousand
Oaks, where Talley's family lives. The couple, who in 2004 were rejected
for a marriage license in Manhattan, said they would have married
without their home state's recognition but now that they have it, "that
even further solidified our decision," said Sarda-Sorensen, 43, a
spokeswoman for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Friedman says he and Zwerin "always considered ourselves married." They
thought about moving to Massachusetts when its top court decided in 2004
that gays have a right to marry but decided to stay near their aging
parents. They might have gone to Canada like thousands of other New York
couples since gay marriage became legal there in 2003, "but it felt kind
of strange to have to leave the country to secure our rights," says
Zwerin, an information-technology manager.

Unless the governor's directive falls to a legal challenge filed last
week by the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative
Christian group, more than 1,300 New York statutes and regulations will
soon treat partners in gay unions the same as heterosexual spouses.

For Steve Foster, the change means he can add his partner of seven
years, Russell Saray, as a co-owner of his Manhattan apartment without
paying huge fees to his mortgage company. "If something happens to me,
there will be no question about … inheritance rights," says Foster, 60,
a foundation executive. The couple plan to wed at the Marin County
Courthouse on June 18.

Others are waiting until June 30, when New York state agencies report to
Paterson on how they will implement the changes, Van Capelle says. "A
lot of New Yorkers want to hear what exactly they're getting before they
book their trips," he says.

Some wonder what their marriage license will be worth if Californians
vote down same-sex unions.

"If something happens that the legality is changed later on, then we'll
deal with that later," says William Walker, a Brooklyn legal assistant
considering San Francisco's Golden Gate Park for an August wedding to
Jeffrey Dreiblatt.

Richard Burns, executive director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual &
Transgender Community Center in New York's Greenwich Village, notes that
Paterson's order applies only to executive agencies under his authority,
not the courts. Among the unresolved legal questions: If a couple
decides to divorce, could they do it in a New York court? Or would they
have to split in California, which requires couples to live in the state
for six months before filing for divorce?

For Dan Whitman, 35, and Robert Bartley, 45, of Manhattan, a California
marriage license isn't about commitment. They vowed that to one another
in a ceremony in Florida nearly a decade ago. It's not about romance.
Whitman says nothing will match when he proposed to Bartley on a Hudson
River pier at sunset.

"This is about rights, about having legal protection," says Whitman, who
will wed in a quick ceremony in Los Angeles later this month during a
business trip. "We don't need another anniversary to celebrate."