NYT 's Big Gay Celebration

On September 1, 2002,
The New York Times

began a quiet revolution when it reported that Daniel Andrew
Gross and Steven Goldstein had entered into a
civil union in Vermont, before traveling to the Musée des Beaux-Arts of
Montreal to exchange Jewish vows in front of Rabbi David M.
Steinberg.

This was the first
same-sex wedding announcement in
The New York Times.

What seemed like
something stunningly new back then has now become utterly
routine. Just two years after that first announcement, the Gay
and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation counted 504 newspapers
around the country that had followed the example of the
Times,

including six in Alabama and 31 in Texas that had started to
print stories about same-sex marriages.

The
Times

itself has printed more than 300 same-sex wedding or commitment
announcements in the last seven years. To celebrate this
achievement as New York celebrates the 40th anniversary of the
Stonewall uprising, Tom Kulaga, executive creative director of
marketing at the
Times,

decided to track down as many of those couples as he could to
invite them to a cocktail party that will take place Tuesday
evening at the newspaper's headquarters on Eighth
Avenue in Manhattan.

"It was a real
detective effort to locate these couples," Kulaga tells
The Advocate

. "Social networking played a huge role [Facebook, Twitter,
and Six Degrees of GLBT Separation], and a volunteer team of
about a dozen members of our GLBT employee group pitched in to
try and locate individuals and invite them personally. So, all
told, we feel very proud that we received acceptances from 75
couples."

Leslie Miller and
Alicia Salzer -- both medical doctors -- were the first two
women to
announce their marriage in the
Times

... and that led them to the fathers of their first child.

Anthony Brown and Gary
Spino (who also got
a story about their wedding

in the
Times

) are involved in an organization called
The Wedding Party, which holds mass commitment ceremonies every year on the day
of the gay pride parade in Manhattan. When they saw the story
about Miller and Salzer in the
Times

, they contacted the women to ask them to speak at one of their
events.