‘At Last’ was song played at wedding
easy rhythm.
“Throw an apron on. Put something in the oven,” Hubbard prods Parker, who had just settled on the sofa. “Maybe you can harvest some crops.”
Hubbard smiles. Parker acquiesces.
As Parker heads into the kitchen, Hubbard shows off pictures from the family vacation: The kids kayaking on sun-flecked water. A 39th birthday celebration for son Jovon Tyler. A comical shot of the three girls, Daniela, 24, Marquitta, 20, and Sherry Allen, 20, leaning out of a hot tub to check their cell phones.
Parker catches a glimpse of the image. “This is the best picture in the whole trip.”
She chuckles. Hubbard smiles.
The unspoken language of a couple traveling through life together. Joined for 25 years; married 18 months ago in California.
In conversation, they slide in and out of each other’s sentences, finishing thoughts, mingling words.
Their lives, they say, are ordinary, mundane, even boring. Clothes always in the washer. Pets constantly underfoot. Tomatoes withering from too much rain. Chicken pot pies for supper.
“It’s marriage. Not gay marriage. Not straight marriage,” says Hubbard, in the middle of a week that would make history. “Marriage is marriage.”
For Parker and Hubbard, who protected their vows and their family against the Texas ban on same-sex marriage with legal safeguards, Friday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling would change none of that.
Yet, it would change everything.
At a pre-City Council staff meeting in her office earlier that day, Parker sipped from a mint green cup decorated with an I Heart Mom design and signed at the bottom by Marquitta. A small family portrait sits by her computer. Behind her, a display holds “the three tools a CEO needs to deal with any problem”: sword, peace pipe and magic wand.
Parker, who had just spent several days at the U.S. Conference of Mayors and on that family vacation, is no-nonsense. “Let’s go,” she says, moving updates along quickly.
A self-professed introvert who has had to fight her innate shyness, Parker began her public trajectory as a gay activist in the 1970s. She became Houston’s first openly gay elected official in 1997, when she won the first of three terms on City Council. Her 2009 election as mayor of Houston — the largest city in the country with an openly gay mayor — made international headlines.
But Parker is quick to point out, she didn’t run for the office to promote a LGBT agenda.
Her goal was to be a “bricks and mortar” mayor, an advocate for the entire city, focused primarily on infrastructure and practicalities.
During her tenure, she has mostly steered clear of advocating for gay issues. There were two times — when she joined a national committee of mayors for marriage equality and when she pressed for passage of a citywide equal rights ordinance — that she felt she had to. Her stands provoked an avalanche of hate mail.
In her third and final term as mayor, Parker seems to be savoring her remaining time in office.
At a City Hall farmers market, after the City Council meeting, she circled the stalls for lunchtime offerings, browsing for fresh vegetables and bantering with merchants.
“Something smells good over here,” she marveled at Blackbird Foods. “Oh no, everything’s sold out.”
“We have sausage rolls. How about a chicken pot pie? They’re the best.”
“I’m trying to buy you out,” Parker joked. “You should give me a discount.”
Her purchase: One sausage roll for lunch. Two pot pies to take home.
BBB In the early days of gay activism, in the early days of Parker and Hubbard’s relationship, neither woman thought same-sex marriage would ever be a reality. Not in their lifetimes. Not even in their children’s.
Back then, said Parker, the LGBT “leadership would say ...”
“... One thing at a time,” Hubbard jumped in, completing the thought.
“... One thing at a time,” repeated Parker.
First, non-discrimination ordinances. Then, domestic partner benefits. Then, maybe, some day, civil marriage.
Still, that didn’t stop life – and love – from unfurling.
In 1990, Parker and Hubbard, an accountant, met in Inklings bookstore in Montrose, which Parker co-owned. Ayear later, they were living together when Parker’s elderly grandparents moved in. Two years after that, Tyler became part of the family.
The story is well-known. He was 16 years old, rejected by his family and living on the streets because he was gay. After seeing the teen several times, Parker offered him a place to stay and gave him a key to their house — without first checking with Hubbard.
But that didn’t matter. The key cemented the deal.
“That was only something a mother would do,” said Tyler, who is now a funeral director. “I chose them. I arrived at their home, was embraced by them and I declared, ‘these are my mothers.’ ”
In 2003, Hubbard and Parker adopted Daniela and Marquitta, then 8 and 12, sisters who had spent several years in foster care. It was not an easy process.
The girls’ foster parents warned them they would burn in hell if they went to live with a gay couple. It took therapy to erase those fears.
Soon after, for one month in 2004, San Francisco issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The marriages were quickly invalidated, but the mere promise of a legal union drew hundreds of couples to the city.
“People were selling cars and mortgaging houses to go to San Francisco,” Parker said. “It changed the entire activist agenda because it wasn’t an agenda. It was people demanding that their rights be fully recognized.”
Suddenly, marriage equality became the focus.
That same year, Massachusetts became the first state to allow same-sex marriage.
In 2011, when New York became the sixth state to legalize gay marriage, Parker posted a wistful tweet: “Watched NY marriage debate. Felt melancholy rather than elated. Moral arc of the universe will bend toward justice, but the wait is hard.”
She remembers feeling horrified and frustrated as she watched legislators in another state debate whether she had rights.
As the dominoes fell, one state after another, Parker and Hubbard swore not to marry until Texas lifted its ban on same-sex marriage. That changed when the Supreme Court struck down the federal Defense of Mar- riage Act in 2013.
The first call Parker received after that ruling was from Marquitta. “Does this mean you are going to get married?” she asked her mother.
Parker paused and considered the question. There was no reason not to. The marriage would no longer be just symbolic. It would be federally recognized.
I guess we could, she thought. We should.
So they did. After 24 years together.
In Hubbard’s vows, she promised to take Parker’s family as her family. In Parker’s vows, she described Hubbard “not as someone who makes me complete, but someone who fills the spaces I didn’t know were empty.”
Their first dance as a married couple was to the Etta James song “At Last.”
“I just thought that they were, at that moment, the luckiest people I knew,” Tyler said. “Not everyone meets their soulmate.”
BBB On Friday morning, about an hour after the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage, Parker posted a trio of messages on Twitter.
A tweet from Hubbard: “Affirmed! We the people are people too.”
A text from Marquitta: “It is an AMAZING DAY!!!! Freaking hugggeeee historical day!!!! Hoooorrraaaayyyyy”
And her own thought: “At last! ‘And the greatest of these is love’...”