Paradise Lost

Barbara and Tibby never had those rights and never made a fuss about it. Having been raised in what they describe as the patriarchal, deeply conservative climate of Salt Lake City in the 1940s and '50s, they expected little as women and even less as lesbians. But now there was no room to be silent, to not make a fuss. An aneurysm in Barbara's brain, first detected in 2001, had changed all that. As the Affirmation of Marriage Act made its way through the Virginia General Assembly, Barbara became gripped day and night by images of herself unconscious, on a respirator, with someone other than Tibby beside her, making decisions for her.

"If this goes through," she warned Tibby, "we're outta here."

No, no, no, Tibby replied. This is where we live, this is our community. Tibby began researching the law, and asked Barbara not to tell anyone in Fredericksburg that they might move. "I thought the minute we say something, it's like a train that starts to leave," she says.

But there was no changing Barbara's mind. And, eventually, there was no changing Tibby's, either. Supporters of the law insist that it isn't intended to take away anyone's rights, but to affirm traditional values and an existing law that already banned gay marriage. But no one Tibby consulted -- legislators, lawyers, activists -- could tell her what judges might do with medical directive documents and wills under the new law. The legislation would have to be challenged in court before anyone could know for sure.

"I would eschew the word 'safe' for the moment," says Edward D. Barnes, founder of Virginia's largest family law practice and former head of the Virginia Bar Association's family law section. Contracts such as wills and medical directives aren't really marital documents, he says, and, therefore, the law doesn't appear to be aimed at them. But because the law hasn't been tested in court, he is advising his gay clients to craft paperwork that plays down any romantic connection to their partners -- the opposite of what he told them before the new law passed. For now, he says, gays and lesbians need to seek out expert legal help and pray that their documents can withstand any potential legal challenge. "Since there's been no interpretation of this law, no one could give an ironclad" guarantee that wills and medical directives won't be affected, he says.

At this stage of their lives, Barbara and Tibby can't afford to be a test case. All that matters to them is being able to know, 100 percent for sure, that they will be together until the very end. They already know what it is like to be kept apart. Tibby still reflexively puts her right hand on her heart when she describes being barred from Barbara's recovery room at Alexandria's now-closed Circle Terrace Hospital, where Barbara had a hysterectomy in 1984. "Family only," the nurses said, quoting hospital policy. Then, as now, the law did not entitle Tibby to be with Barbara.

"I could see her being wheeled in there, and it just pulled at my heart, to have her alone in there," Tibby says. She stalked the waiting room until shifts changed and returned to the nurse's station with a new identity -- Barbara's sister.

Now the Affirmation of Marriage Act had stripped away their confidence that their medical directives, which left each in charge of health care decisions for the other, would trump Virginia's refusal to recognize their relationship. How could they stay in a state that was treating them this way?

"I'm saying, 'I'm not a victim, and you're not going to treat me like this anymore! I'm taking my retirement money somewhere else,'" Tibby says, banging her fist on the dining room table one afternoon. But the women know there is another side to their decision to leave Virginia, a skittering away, a cautiousness that has clung all these years. And the story of where that caution comes from explains why they believe they need to go.

Growing up in utah, Barbara Kenny knew something was very wrong with her feelings for other girls. She knew it from her mother, an advertising executive who made the teenager promise never to tell anyone in their family or in their meticulously Mormon home town that she was gay. She knew it from her best friend's father, who bitterly called the 15-year-old Barbara a "lesbian" and said she'd better stay away from his daughter. Barbara says she had no idea what a lesbian was or what she'd done to prompt his tirade. She says she tried to end her life, gulping down a handful of sleeping pills during last period at school. She went home and slept for so long her parents figured out something was wrong and called for the family doctor. She remembers being half out of it as the doctor talked to her about libido and how sometimes "we get attached to the wrong people." There were more suicide attempts throughout her teens, involving razor blades and trips to the emergency room. She tried to run away, she says, but her father brought her home to Salt Lake City, a place where right and wrong were crystal clear.

Barbara knew Tibby Middleton from their sophomore world history class at East High. Petite and pretty with short blond hair, Tibby was active in the Mormon church and married right out of college in 1959. Even then, Tibby says, she knew she was physically and emotionally attracted to women, but she desperately wanted to live up to what was expected of her. She taught English for a couple of years before having two children, James and Holly, and staying home to care for them.

By then, Barbara was wandering in search of herself. She became a carhop in Los Angeles, a grocery checker in Denver, a taxi driver in Baltimore. A black-and-white photo of that period shows her in her twenties, wearing a moody, James Dean-like expression and an Army shirt on which she had written "Pilgrim," after a Kurt Vonnegut character who lives in two worlds, lonely in each.