In Arkansas, gay and still waiting to get hitched

Their romance began the old-fashioned way: over the Internet, on the dating site “Plenty of Fish.”

Meyers, who now works at a nonprofit in Little Rock, had spent a few years going through what she calls “an evolution” about her own sexuality, after ending her 15-year marriage with Justin and Alli’s father. When her brother had come out as gay a few years earlier, she had fallen back on the axiom “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”

“I was a Catholic, and I wanted to do the right thing,” Meyers said. “Then I met some people online that I ended up being good friends with who were gay, and being exposed to that and getting to know them helped me know that it wasn’t bad or wrong.”

Shelby and Meyers exchanged telephone calls and messages before meeting for the first time at a campsite, where Meyers insisted on bringing her sister to allay that perennial online dating mood-killer — what if my date is an ax murderer?

Luckily, Shelby was who she said she was: a warm, funny registered nurse from Fort Smith, three hours away. Sparks flew, and soon Shelby was making the drive to see Meyers almost every weekend.

Shelby told a much abbreviated version of the story: “She saw me online and couldn’t resist.”

But there was still the small matter of telling Meyers’ children that their mom was in a serious relationship for the first time after her divorce, and with a woman, no less. One night, the couple was video chatting when Meyers decided there was no time like the present.

“She said, ‘I think I’m going to tell the kids.’ And I said, ‘Are you sure?’” Shelby remembered. “And then the next thing I know, she’s gone.”

Justin had only one question for Shelby, and a tongue-in-cheek one at that: Can I call you Mom now?

Far from the disaster that may have been expected, both of the kids’ reactions were little more than a shrug, perhaps befitting a generation whose views are even more tolerant than those of their parents.

“I was surprised, but I really didn’t have trouble adjusting,” Alli said. “I was OK with it.”

In 2011, the day after Easter, when a deadly tornado ripped the roof off Meyers’ house at the time, Shelby came down to help with the cleanup and never left.

The next year, the couple decided they wanted to make their relationship as official as they possibly could, trekking three hours north to Eureka Springs, a kind of hippie enclave in Arkansas, to get a domestic partnership.

Registering with the only city in Arkansas that recognizes same-sex couples as domestic partners does little more than signify their commitment to one another, and confers no specific legal benefits.

It was a start, but for Meyers and Shelby it still doesn't feel real enough.  

“What I’ve realized is that being married gives it a kind of affirmation and a legitimacy — that the state and everybody else recognizes your marriage,” Shelby says. “That would feel good.”

Despite the perception of deep-rooted social and cultural conservatism in the state, Meyers and Shelby are content in Arkansas. They are out to their friends and most of their co-workers. They have a community of other LGBT couples they socialize with in Little Rock. They attend services at a Methodist church every Sunday in Vilonia, where they feel welcome and accepted, and neither woman can recall an instance in which they’ve been the target of anything particularly hateful.

Moreover, they have the kind of family life and home environment they have both always longed for.

“We get along, we show love, we’re happier,” Meyers said. “Things are just more stable, and happier than they were.”

That doesn’t mean there’s not a lingering uneasiness about who they are in the context of where they are. The women both admit to doing quick internal calculations about what to share and with whom. They don’t hold hands or show other signs of affection in public. Meyers has an “equality” T-shirt that she never wears when out and about in Vilonia, and both are far more careful when traveling in rural parts of the state.

“I don’t like conflict, and I’m not going to go looking for it,” Meyers said.

There are other bumps in the road, too, tied to their lack of legal status in the state.

When Meyers lost her previous job at a museum, Shelby, with no discernible legal relationship to the children, could not put them on her health insurance. Eventually, Meyers moved to enroll them in Medicaid, prompting another round of frustrating conversations about the specifics of her relationship status and living situation.

“(A state employee) asked on the phone, ‘Well, who do you live with? And how do the bills get paid?’” Meyers said. “And I started explaining it and she said, ‘Never mind, don’t tell me about the other person living with you. Pretend like they don’t exist.’”

The slights sting doubly when they don’t originate from a faceless bureaucracy but from family members and acquaintances. Shelby contended with those hurts for decades, as she struggled to deny her attractions and stay in the closet in her native Fort Smith, in the rural northwest of the state.

“After 10 to 13 years of being alone and I didn’t change, I thought, you know, God’s OK with me and I’m OK,” she said.

The church that Shelby was attending at the time did not feel the same way. When she told members about her decision to come out, they promptly asked her to step down from her leadership role, after 10 years of being part of the congregation.

“I take it all very personally,” Shelby said. “All my life, I’ve taken it very personally when people talk bad about gays … I’m done hearing those things.”

Justin and Alli, too, have gotten remarkably good at letting the occasional snide remark about their two moms slide off them.