Jack Evans and George Harris were at their United Methodist church on Jan. 19, the 53rd anniversary of their relationship, when Rev. Bill McElvaney made an announcement they never expected to hear in their home city of Dallas.
The congregation stood and applauded as McElvaney told them he would now be performing same-sex weddings. Though the United Methodist Church doesn't officially sanction such unions, he said it was on the wrong side of the gospel and that he would perform the unions off-site.
Evans, 84, and Harris, 80, looked at each other, thought about their anniversary, and couldn't believe the coincidence. They met with McElvaney a week later and on March 1 they will be married at the nearby Midway Hills Christian Church, in Dallas' first public wedding conducted by a United Methodist minister.
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"Five years ago this was unheard of," Evans told Mashable. "This was not even something you could envision."
Most weddings are planned over months-long periods, but Evans and Harris only had February. They called a friend in printing to get the invitations, envelopes and stamps, another friend paid for their buttercream and chocolate layer cake, and soon they had a whole community behind them, so many people that Midway Hills is planning for more than 500 wedding guests — about 200 more than they would normally have chairs to seat.
"We tried to send out invitations, but it got so that people we didn't know were wanting to come," Harris said. "So we just said anybody who wants to come can come. I don't mind. We're doing this not only for ourselves but for the community. We've been in this community for so long."
The couple is proceeding with the ceremony even though the union won't technically be legal. On Feb. 26, a Texas federal judge dismissed the state's ban on same-sex marriages, but that decision is up for review in appellate courts, a process that is certain to last beyond March 1.
That doesn't matter to Evans and Harris, though. Their wedding was already planned to be solely a religious ceremony, and Evans said they've hardly had time to consider the legal implications of the recent ruling or what it would mean to be married in the eyes of the state.
"It's not even anything we've ever discussed before because it's not been a possibility," Evans said.
But they are thankful for the progress. They started dating in 1961 and, for more than half a century, they've witnessed a transformation of the state's attitude toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, and it's not hard for them to recall earlier struggles.
Harris and Evans remember police raiding parties they attended decades ago just because everyone there was gay. Their friends leapt through windows or ran out of back doors, but some were arrested and had their names published in a local paper. It was hard for them to get jobs in Dallas after that.
"All those guys had to leave Dallas," Evans said. "They couldn't stay here because they had been determined to be homosexuals."
Then the late 1970s and early 80s brought on the AIDS epidemic that swept through gay communities across the United States. The couple attended several funerals for their friends back then, and yet, both of them believe that crisis bonded the gay community in Dallas.
"It was all very private, private parties," Harris said. "Little by little we started coming out of the underground."
The couple has worked in real estate together since 1976 — Harris retired in 2008, but Evans still "scrambles around" — and they also began working together to give a voice to Dallas' gay population as it stepped into public view.
In 1992, they founded the North Texas GLBT Chamber of Commerce, which advocates for business diversity in the region. Then, in 2011, they started thedallasway.org, a website that records the history of the city's LGBT community, as told by its members. Forty people came to the first meeting. At the second, the University of North Texas sent four representatives down so they could start talking about how the stories would be archived. Now they're in the process of digitizing all the anecdotes.
Their own anecdote is something of a 53-year roller coaster, now with another peak they never expected. Though they'd thought about marriage, they had decided to do it only if they could wed in Texas.
"We never, ever envisioned that it would be in our lifetime," Evans said.
On Saturday, the couple will add to the list of advancements they've made in the Dallas LGBT community.
"This marriage is our finale," Evans said. "It may be the last thing that we'll take on."
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