When Tori Jameson, who has spent years serving the trans community as a pastor in St. Louis, heard about President Donald Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, they felt hopeless. “She is notoriously anti-LGBTQ,” Jameson tells them. “She has made statements against Roe, against immigration. I worry about our rights being rolled back if she gets in. But I don’t have a lot of political power. I’m just a community pastor.”
Jameson’s fears are not unfounded. Coney Barrett’s confirmation would tilt the Supreme Court toward a 6-3 conservative majority, and some members of the bench, such as Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, have already suggested that they would like to use it as an opportunity to roll back marriage equality. Barrett is likely to be a key vote in that effort, having signed on to a letter declaring marriage as the “indissoluble commitment of a man and a woman” in 2017 and referring to LGBTQ+ identity as a “sexual preference” during questioning in the Senate last week, a comment she later apologized for. Meanwhile, the secretive faith group she has belonged to since birth, People of Praise, kicks out members for engaging in same-sex relations.
With Coney Barrett’s appointment likely headed to a vote in the coming days, Pastor Jameson decided they needed to help LGBTQ+ couples get married “while we still have the chance.” Advertised in local LGBTQ+ Facebook groups as “Pop-Up Elopements,” the pastor held four days of free wedding ceremonies at St. Louis City Hall between October 11 and 15 for anyone who wished to wed. The setup was fairly simple: a couple of rainbow banners festooning the outside of the City Hall building, with streamers, balloons, and celebratory cupcakes provided to the masked guests.
Jameson initially thought the event would only draw “a couple of folks” but suddenly “a bunch of volunteers just showed up,” they said. Several photographers offered their services, along with teams of videographers and bakers. A St. Louis group called “Free Mom Hugs” volunteered to make posters, and a few members got ordained online through the Universal Life Church, in case the ceremony needed more officiants. On each of the four wedding days, couples were married by several different officiants, all under the rainbow flag tied to the wrought-iron City Hall gates. Most were officiated not by Jameson but by Free Mom Huggers and other enthusiastic volunteers.
By the end of the week, 16 couples were married. Some took their wedding photos with their fists raised high in the air as an act of protest. “It’s very beautiful to marry folks,” Jameson said. “It’s the best feeling in the world.”
Witnessed by a small crowd of friends and volunteers, Jameson personally married Macklan and Silas King, a pair of local activists and drag performers, last Thursday as 600 friends and family members watched on Facebook Live. The couple exchanged a complicated secret handshake, followed by their vows. “I promise to be your partner in adventure and to explore the world with you while it’s still here and we’re still here,” Macklan said to Silas. “I promise to help you put on and take off your binder when you get stuck.”
Silas responded that although the pair has “been to hell and back together,” they have always come out stronger. “I promise to be by your side and fight for a better world,” Silas said.
Cars rolled past on the street in front of City Hall as they placed rings on each other’s fingers. “We are going to take care of our own,” Jameson added in an interview with them. after the ceremony concluded. “You can be hateful, but there is an opportunity here to celebrate love and be joyful.”
Silas and Macklan’s initial plans to celebrate their relationship “went out the window,” as Macklan said, after they each lost their jobs in the past year. But when they learned about the opportunity to be part of a wedding ceremony that was also an act of protest, the idea began to look more appealing. Like many other members of the St. Louis LGBTQ+ community, much of the couple’s identity has formed around activism.
“Anyone who knows us well will know that it’s very on brand for us to be getting married at a protest,” King said. Even better, their marriage license cost would be covered by an anonymous local trans couple who wanted to help other members of their community wed. “All while symbolically raising a giant rainbow middle finger at hatred and bigotry,” as Macklan put it in a blog post.
The two have been together for three years — excluding a brief breakup that lasted, according to Silas, “about 48 hours” — and in that time have accompanied each other to multiple protests and other political actions. “Social justice has always been part of our lives as individuals, and a part of our relationship,” Macklan added.
While the two put an upbeat spin on it, many LGBTQ+ Missourans have had little choice but to be politically active. In 2004, Missouri passed a constitutional ban on marriage equality, with the support of 71% of Missouri voters. Until 2006, intercourse between individuals of the same sex was legally defined in Missouri as “sexual misconduct in the first degree,” although the law was functionally overturned following the 2003 Supreme Court ruling Lawrence v. Texas. The state refused to even recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states until it was forced to do so by a 2014 lawsuit.
Since the Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015, LGBTQ+ Missourians have finally had the same rights with regards to marriage as anyone else in the state. That put an end to the creative and often elaborate solutions they once had to create in order to wed, such as the 2013 “Marriage Equality Buses,” in which groups of same-sex couples chartered buses from Missouri to nearby Iowa, where marriage equality was legal.
But advocates fear that the progress made over the past decade will be erased if Coney Barrett is confirmed to the Supreme Court, and Missouri is particularly vulnerable to that backslide. In 2020, 23 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced in the Missouri legislature, more than in any other state in the country — and more than have been introduced in any previous year of the state’s history. Bills include proposals to prohibit gender-affirming treatments for trans youth, ban gender-neutral bathrooms, and allow faith-based adoption agencies to refuse to place children in same-sex households.
Amanda Leone and Mack Williams hope to raise a family together, and they chose to marry this week to make sure those rights aren’t taken away. Though the two have been together since 2017 — they met playing for the same roller derby team two years earlier — they weren’t sure they were going to get married “until very recently.” Williams, who is a nurse, says that some of the things they have seen at the hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic have hammered home the idea that getting married might be the only thing allowing them to be at each other’s bedsides if they or one of their future children were to fall ill.
“I’ve had a couple situations at work I’ve seen due to COVID, where not being legally bound has made some hard situations,” Williams told them. “For example, there’s a kid whose dad can’t come see them” due to not being legally married to the child’s mother, who was medically unable to name him as the father.
Leone and Williams were married on Thursday afternoon in color-coordinated casual outfits a few hours after closing on their first house together at 8:30 that same morning. “I don’t know what the next four years are going to look like yet,” Leone said. “So why delay joy for the sake of things that are happening in the world? Why delay the joy of celebrating our love?”
Although none of the participants pictured themselves tying the knot during a time of so much uncertainty — with the 2020 election just over two weeks away — many admitted that the occasion felt strangely fitting. “There’s something inherent about being queer that is a protest,” Williams said. “It’s like, ‘Hi, this is maybe outside of your societal norm, but this is who we are.’”
Check out more portraits from the ceremony from photographer Alecia Hoyt below.
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