Lorre and Gayle Family commitment began long before marriage

May 18--LAWRENCE -- It's an afternoon off from his Little League team, but sports are in his blood, so 8-year-old Camden Green is tossing a baseball into the air on the sweep of lawn outside his South Street home.

After a few minutes, he drops his mitt and begins dribbling a soccer ball, then kicking it at the picnic table where his parents sit, hoping they'll get up and join him.

"He likes to be moving," Lorre Fritchy said as she watched her son spin across the yard on one of spring's first warm afternoons. "Moving, moving, moving."

Beyond the solid white fence surrounding the 1850s farmhouse that has been in Fritchy's family since 1944, an American culture war still rages over the rights of gay men and women like Fritchy and her wife, Gayle Green, to marry and raise children.

But that question was settled in Massachusetts 10 years ago this weekend, when municipal clerks issued the first-in-the-nation marriage licenses to same-sex couples following the Supreme Judicial Court ruling that denying them the right to marry violated the guarantees of individual liberty and equal protection in the state constitution and served no valid state purpose.

When May 17, 2004, dawned, Green and Fritchy were first in line to pick up a marriage license at Lawrence City Hall.

They married a month later in Gloucester, even as another drama was quietly unfolding in their small family. After a Reading laboratory had been unable for two years to successfully impregnate Fritchy using her own eggs, Green agreed to be implanted with Fritchy's eggs.

On Aug. 27, 2005, Camden was born to committed, married parents but also into a world less certain about the value and validity of his family.

For Camden, that's another settled issue when classmates at the private elementary school he attends ask about his family.

"The first time they hear it, they're like, 'You have two moms?' You don't have a dad?'?" he said.

He keeps his response simple. "So? What's the big deal?"

The love between Camden's parents developed after they met as undergraduates at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1987. But they kept it hidden from each other as it grew over two years.

Their secrets ended late on Nov. 11, 1989.

"Listen, I'm scared to tell you, but I have to tell you," Fritchy said, beginning a conversation that lasted all night in the dorm room they shared.

"We talked for hours and hours," she said. "We felt it was the right thing and that it was for life. We made that decision then and there."

"That night," added Green, who was then 21 and is now 46.

"We made that vow to each other," said Fritchy, then 20 and now 44.

After finishing their degrees, they moved to Newburyport and relaunched their careers. Fritchy owns MasterPeace Productions, a film and video production company. Green is a manager at SilverRail Technologies, a Woburn company that produces reservations software for Amtrak and other rail companies.

They moved again in 2001, to the old South Street farmhouse to care for two of Fritchy's aging and financially strapped aunts.

Aunt Gertrude Ouellette died in 2003. Aunt Germaine Ouellette lived long enough to attend her niece's wedding -- in a wheelchair -- and take a leading part in "That Gay Marriage Thing," a 47-minute documentary Fritchy produced about the uneasy run-up to the wedding ceremony after the high court ruling.

The documentary depicts the battle at the Statehouse to wipe out the court ruling with a constitutional amendment, told against the backdrop of family life at the farmhouse, where Fritchy and Green were planning their wedding amid the fear their marriage would be blocked.

Through the documentary, Aunt Germaine, then 82 years old, struggles to understand the complexities of the issue. But her support for her niece and her partner never wavers and she speaks plainly.

"He's a rat," she says, leaning her stooped and shrunken body over a cup of tea at the kitchen table, after Fritchy explains that Mitt Romney, then the governor, was leading the effort to stop gay marriages.

"How is Gayle taking it?" she asks.

"She's having a tough time," Fritchy responds. "She's trying to hang in there. She says we have to believe."

"You're not doing anything wrong, you and Gayle," Aunt Germaine says.

"We'll be all right because we're stronger than this," Fritchy tells her aunt, even as she tries without success to hold back tears. "It's part of why we deserve to be able to be married. It's because we have to endure these things, together."

The Legislature rejected the effort to roll back same-sex marriage. Fritchy and Green were married at picturesque Hammond Castle in Gloucester, on June 18, 2004. Eighty people attended.

Fifteen years after committing themselves to each other, the couple got the rights and protections the state bestows on married couples.

The cost of living a union without those rights had been great. Among them, the couple spent at least $50,000 for Fritchy's fertility treatments, most of which they paid out-of-pocket because Green's employee health insurance policy at the time did not recognize the civil union the couple had entered into in Vermont in 2000.

Uncertainties remain today. To comply with Massachusetts' convoluted family laws, Green and Fritchy needed a Family Court ruling recognizing both as Camden's parents. The court document is especially important when the family travels out of state, where their marriage may not be recognized.

Fritchy and Green said they celebrate two anniversaries: Nov. 11, 1989, when they vowed in their undergraduate dorm room to spend their lives as a couple, and May 17, 2004.

"Every May 17, we've said, 'Wow, this many years ago we were at Lawrence City Hall, scared of what we would encounter,' " Fritchy said. "We acknowledge it when the date comes around because it's a milestone in the gay community. ... But for us, we were solid before. We're still solid."

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