DOMESTICALLY PARTNERED Jason McCann, left, and Rob Colosi got hitched in California, but don’t enjoy any benefits in Chicago (other than their adorable dog, Graham).

Jason McCann and Rob Colosi are like lots of recently married couples. The Ukrainian Village residents have joint car insurance, share dog-walking duties and bicker over clothes that don’t make it into the hamper. But they can’t tell you when their anniversary is.

Should they celebrate the day they met, six years ago? Or September 19—the day last month when, led by a local pastor, they exchanged vows in front of friends and family? Or should they commemorate the date two months earlier (July 20), when they tied the knot in Palm Springs, California, and signed a marriage license?

The crux of the problem: That official piece of California paper means nothing here in Illinois, where they remain, as far as the law is concerned, housemates. Still, McCann and Colosi consider themselves married. So, when’s their anniversary, again?

“We have three of them!” McCann chuckles, then shrugs slightly. “It hasn’t come up yet. I don’t know.”

That conundrum symbolizes the complex issues facing same-sex couples in Illinois (and in most of the country). But as 35-year-old gay men who aren’t legally recognized as spouses, they’ve got more crucial problems than which anniversary to celebrate.

“God forbid one of us ends up in the hospital,” Colosi says. “Immediate family is admitted,” he points out—but the pair are not recognized as each other’s next of kin, and McCann’s family lives in Washington. So, would Colosi get to visit if McCann were in an accident? Because hospital policies vary, would staff allow him to make time-sensitive decisions about emergency care? “Those are things that we worry about that [straight] couples don’t have to,” he says.

This issue is at the heart of the countrywide debate over same-sex marriage. Although it’s roiled since the ’90s, it took on greater life after the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that, for equality’s sake, same-sex couples must be allowed to marry; the debate flared anew in May, when the California Supreme Court followed suit. While preachers and pundits argue over the meaning of marriage and the morality of homosexuality, lesbian and gay couples in Chicago and elsewhere face an uncertain future. Without legal guarantees regarding health-care choices, inheritance rights and other financial issues, they’re consigned to second-class status.

WEDDED BLISS Marilyn Hebda, left, and Linda Marquis made honest women of each other when they married last August.

Linda Marquis and Marilyn Hebda, who have been committed to each other for 19 years, have a keen understanding of the peril. “I had an aunt who wasn’t out,” recalls 60-year-old Marquis. “When her partner died, her partner’s family came in and took everything. My aunt suddenly had no place to live, no furniture, no anything. I don’t think that would happen with most straight couples.”

That’s one reason Marquis and Hebda decided to get married. Originally from the Chicago area, the pair met in Sacramento, California, where Hebda, 56, was a public-school teacher. In 2005, they moved back to Chicago, but they returned to the Golden State in August to obtain that license and enjoy a full-fledged, legally recognized wedding ceremony in a friend’s backyard.

Although there was a romantic component to that decision, they were thinking mostly about securing Marquis’s rights to Hebda’s pension from California, should Hebda die first. But as their August 31 ceremony unfolded—with loved ones attending and Marquis’s four-year-old granddaughter playing flower girl—something unexpected happened: To Marquis and Hebda, their relationship felt different.

“It’s about equality. That’s what felt different,” Marquis says. “At that brief point in time, I was equal to every other couple and my love was just as valid. It has always felt that way to me—but I haven’t felt it from society.”

Because legal gay marriage isn’t politically feasible in Illinois today, several groups are working to allow civil unions instead. Civil unions would ensure the state treats all couples identically, regardless of anyone’s religious or cultural definition of marriage. To that end, in February 2007, Rep. Greg Harris (D-13th) introduced the Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act. Harris and other supporters predict it will become law in 2009, thus bestowing “all the rights and obligations that the state can confer to couples. It just does not call it ‘marriage,’ ” Harris says.

Jim Madigan, staff attorney for Lambda Legal, a legal-advocacy group devoted to the rights of LGBT people, helped draft the bill and enumerates some of its major rights: the ability to transfer property to one another without paying taxes; recognition as next of kin in hospitals; and the ability to make funeral and burial decisions. But there are some things the legislation would not do—take, for example, health-care benefits controlled by the private sector. “Most health-care plans today by private employers are written in such a way as to automatically qualify spouses,” Madigan explains, “and not all of those would be automatically triggered by a civil union.” Also, the legislation reaffirms the separation of church and state, making explicit that no house of religion be required to bless or perform any civil union.

Meanwhile, Harris notes, a number of marriage benefits—many of them economic—are conferred solely by the federal government. “Regarding taxes and Social Security, those remain foreign to same-sex couples no matter what the states do,” he says. (That includes Massachusetts and California, where legal gay marriage still cannot mandate federal benefits.)

If the bill becomes law, the out-of-state weddings of pairs like McCann and Colosi and Marquis and Hebda will be recognized here as civil unions. “In many respects, I think it’s an enormous leap forward for same-sex couples,” Madigan says. Still, it’s not quite marriage, which “carries a lot of cultural and social significance,” he admits.

So why are gay-marriage advocates settling for something less? It’s an issue of practicality. Shortly before introducing the civil-unions bill, Harris brought forth gay-marriage legislation; with just three cosponsors, it went nowhere. In contrast, the civil-unions bill has 12 cosponsors and, Harris believes, is poised for passage after the November elections—especially if Democrats gain a few House or Senate seats in Springfield. The problem with the earlier legislation? “It had the ‘M’ word in it,” Harris notes, “and that was troublesome for a lot of my colleagues.”

Ultimately it comes down to this: Is marriage a civil right or a religious rite? For many, the two concepts are inextricably entwined. But increasingly, heterosexual Americans agree gay and lesbian couples should get the same rights they’ve taken for granted.

“There’s an argument that it is semantics,” says Rick Garcia, director of public policy for Equality Illinois. “If you use the ‘M’ word, people freak out and get very uncomfortable. But if you say, ‘Should gay people be able to visit their partner in the emergency room?,’ 70 percent of folks say yes. Only Attila the Hun and his family say no.”

“You can call it whatever you want,” Colosi says. “I don’t think we’re looking for the title. It’s the rights—the same rights that every other married couple has.”

There’s another angle to the debate that doesn’t get discussed as much: If you can’t get gay-married in Illinois, you can’t get gay-divorced here, either. That can create a legal limbo, which is where 38-year-old Robin Czar of Lakeview finds himself.

Equal-marriage rights are a passion of Czar’s. In 1997, a Detroit hospital didn’t allow him to be at the side of his dying partner. Years later, he sought out whatever recognition he could find with the man he considers his second husband. In 2005, they traveled from Chicago to Canada to avail themselves of our northerly neighbor’s liberal marriage policy.

Recently, however, they broke up. Although they’ve remained amicable, undoing the ties that bind them has proven challenging. First, they’ll have to travel back to Toronto (probably more than once). Beyond that, Czar and his ex had established legal acknowledgments of their relationship, including documents that gave Czar and his ex the ability to make health-care decisions on each other’s behalf in emergency situations—an automatic right for straight spouses. Undoing those documents was an extra step that, “if we were legally married, we’d be able to [dissolve] with just a divorce [decree].” (The proposed civil-union bill provides for the dissolution of partnerships.)

The inequitable marriage situation in this country “is very misguided discrimination that couldn’t occur with any other group of people,” Marquis says. “I think people aren’t aware of how much it dehumanizes somebody to be told you can’t marry the person you love…. There’s a real sorrow in that. And that’s why there was real joy in getting married.”

Harris sums it up differently. “The lawyers and the scholars can argue about the esoteric nature of marriage. But two or three years from now, people are going to look back and say, Why were we so worked up about this? Plagues of frogs have not descended.”

NEXT>>