As one of
TV’s most successful producer-directors, Paris
Barclay knows all about opening minds through
entertainment. That’s one reason for the lavish
wedding he threw with Christopher Mason, his partner of 10
years.
Photography by
Susan Goldman of BigGayWeddings.com
Married:
September 14, 2008
Together: 10 years
As one of
TV’s most successful producer-directors, Paris
Barclay knows all about opening minds through
entertainment. That’s one reason for the lavish
wedding he threw with Christopher Mason, his partner of 10
years. “We wanted to fight the ballot
initiative,” Barclay explains, sitting with
Mason in the couple’s airy living room, “and
we thought, What’s the best statement that we
can make? We should get married. Most of the people
coming to this wedding will never have seen a gay wedding. I
seriously doubt that anyone is going to come away unmoved.
We’ll give them the words, and then hopefully
they’ll go out and talk to their friends about
it.”
For the grooms,
it was not their first brush with history. Mason recounts
the day in 2001 when, after staying a month in Boston, they
decided to change their tickets and fly back early.
“We thought, Why hang around another
day?” That’s how they came to be home on
September 11, when their originally scheduled flight
crashed into the World Trade Center.
“After
that Paris and I came to the conclusion that we needed to
make a difference in the world,” says Mason, a
food-industry executive. “For us it came to
adopting some kids.” African-American boys, to be
specific. As the couple researched the foster care
system in Los Angeles County, they learned that
dark-skinned boys are the last to be adopted.
“I’m pretty chocolate myself,”
points out Barclay, who attended an exclusive boys’
school in Chicago before going on to Harvard. “I
thought, What if I had been born into different
circumstances?”
On Sunday,
September 14, with their sons William and Cyrus as ring
bearers, the couple said “I do.” The ceremony
began with ousting the paparazzi -- trying to catch
the likes of guests Helen Mirren and Taylor Hackford,
Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks, virtually the entire cast of
Cold Case, and Jerry O’Connell with a
pregnant Rebecca Romijn -- from the doorstep. It ended
with West Hollywood city councilman John Duran saying,
“I now pronounce you legally married.”
Barclay says, “I began to smile so wide I thought my
face would break. It didn’t, but we were pelted
by real rice (which hurts a little, by the way). The
flowers that adorned our little waterfall in the backyard
are now planted in the ground. Symbolism? Uh,
yeah.”
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