Paradise Lost

"I like them," Barbara says. "They make the world look amber-colored."

Then they head up Hanover Street, to the track at the University of Mary Washington, which they circle, Barbara with her hands in her pockets, Tibby, bouncy and gesturing enthusiastically. They make their way past Mrs. Campbell, their 94-year-old neighbor, who is outside gardening and waves cheerily. They stop at Picker's Supply guitar store, where they take lessons and know the guys at the counter. And at Goolrick's pharmacy, where they know the pharmacist and like him, even though they've heard he is a staunch conservative.

Walking is a good activity for two people who have such different personalities and habits. Tibby likes to travel, fund-raise, socialize; Barbara remains more of an introvert. She often climbs to her little art studio in the attic and cranks up the music. Sometimes she paints to Beethoven concertos, other times ("When I am pissed off," she says) to manic, hard rock from Nine Inch Nails. Barbara has filled the space with some 200 paintings, from realistic landscapes of the afternoon light on the trees outside the house to abstract pieces that look like rocks floating in a cosmic realm, falling apart and trying to come back together.

In the spring of 2001, Barbara noticed a heartbeat in her ear. Worried that she had inherited her mother's deafness, she went to a doctor. Dye shot into the arteries around her brain showed that her problem wasn't in her ear, it was a 6mm aneurysm deep in her brain that could rupture at any time.

Tibby was in the kitchen when Barbara's doctor called one day. "I'm very sorry," he told Tibby, a condolence that shook her into the realization that Barbara could die of a stroke. Neurosurgeons in Richmond and Baltimore recommended surgery, which would involve removing a part of Barbara's skull, cutting into her brain to reach the aneurysm and putting a clip on it to seal it off. Such surgeries carry risks, including paralysis, memory problems and confusion. Barbara was afraid of the possibility of brain damage and decided not to have the surgery. For a while afterward, she felt panicky. Will I die tonight? What will Tib do if she finds me? But eventually different thoughts took hold. I better live every minute, she decided. She had played guitar before -- bluegrass and gospel, mostly -- but now she played every night. She brought more color into her art, her clothes. And because stress can cause an aneurysm to break, Barbara realized that it was medically necessary not to let her blood boil over things like people "tolerating me" (one of her pet peeves: the word "tolerance").

She and Tibby started to lose patience with discrimination, with paying two sets of health care bills, with being denied spousal discounts when they rented a car. But they said and did nothing. They are uncomfortable with being singled out as "a minority" or being associated with in-your-face groups such as Dykes on Bikes or ACT UP. The gay rights movement of the 1970s and 1980s mostly passed them by. It took the AIDS epidemic to get them to their first public gay rights event, the huge 1993 gay pride march in Washington. Walking through streets filled with thousands of gays and lesbians, they felt moved but very afraid: of being attacked, of being cursed at, of winding up in a television frame that could affect their jobs and friendships. That was the last gay pride event they went to.

A decade later, when images of gay couples getting married in California and Massachusetts started appearing on television, Barbara and Tibby say they felt pride but not envy; they had no desire to get married. When other gay people in Fredericksburg started applying for marriage licenses on Valentine's Day as a protest, Barbara and Tibby didn't join them. They view marriage as primarily a religiously sanctioned institution and harbor painful memories about their experiences with what they call a theocracy in Utah. It's unlikely they would have paid much attention to Virginia's Affirmation of Marriage Act if they hadn't been so worried that it could keep them apart during a medical emergency. The law infuriated them. "The way Virginia is treating us, what they are saying to us, I feel like it's being in an abusive house," Tibby says.

"I'm saying, let's get out of this house."

From the basement office of her home in Sterling, Patricia Phillips will spend the next few months pushing for the very law that Tibby and Barbara find so offensive. Only this time, she and other supporters of the Affirmation of Marriage Act want to amend the Virginia constitution with wording similar to the law, so that it can't be struck down.

Phillips, a 48-year-old consultant to the food industry, is part of a burgeoning national movement to protect the traditional institution of marriage. She volunteers on behalf of Concerned Women for America, a conservative Christian advocacy group at the forefront of efforts to limit marriage and its legal benefits to heterosexual couples. As the group's state director, Phillips will send letters and make calls to state legislators when the General Assembly convenes next month. The constitutional amendment passed the legislature last year, but it must be approved a second time before being put to a statewide referendum, probably next fall. Phillips

doesn't think it will be difficult to persuade other Virginians to join the lobbying effort. "When you talk about marriage between a man and a woman, it's just really, really basic, and it's not a hard sell," says Phillips, who grew up in McLean and has been married to her high school sweetheart for 25 years. "It just resonates with people that this is right."

It was the birth of her daughter 17 years ago that transformed Phillips from dinner-table social critic into an activist, she says. She focused for years on issues such as sexually explicit materials in school libraries and suggestive dancing at school events. It was only with the advancement of gay marriage in Massachusetts that she started thinking hard about the institution, and what she sees as a growing societal "disrespect" for marriage and sexual fidelity.

She knows how important stable marriages are. Her own parents divorced when she was 2, though she pauses when asked how her untraditional childhood affected her. She visited her father, who lived a few hours away, every month and says she has a good relationship with him. "I actually felt, I guess, not negatively impacted as I was growing up," she says after a long silence.

In recent years, Phillips has been working to promote state- and church-sponsored marital counseling and a new concept meant to counter "no fault" divorce called "mutual consent" divorce, which means both parties would have to agree to separate, except in cases such as abuse. She says she considered the Affirmation of Marriage Act so uncontroversial that she didn't even focus on lobbying for it last year. Its logic seems obvious to her: Virginia was simply affirming that it does not recognize same-sex marriage, whether that takes the form of a "civil union" or some contract purporting to mirror that.

The Affirmation of Marriage Act isn't a hate law, she says, and it isn't meant to invalidate documents such as wills and medical directives. Phillips doesn't know Barbara and Tibby, and says she's not trying to deny the depth and success of their relationship, any more than she is denying the success of her own mother, who raised two daughters on her own. But those situations, she argues, are the exception, and you can't make public policy on the basis of isolated success stories.

"People can say, 'I've been married 25 years and my marriage is fine, what do I care if John and Joe get married across the street?'" Phillips says. "But it does have an impact."

Gay marriage, she argues, separates the institution from its original purpose: having children. And in doing so, it further weakens the traditional family unit, which she believes is so fundamental to the country's social and economic fabric.

"Women are economically disadvantaged when they are single mothers," Phillips says. "Men don't live as long when they are divorced. There are tremendous repercussions. Marriage isn't just a recognition of personal affection, it's a lot more than that . . . it impacts the whole social structure."

In September, Tibby and Barbara started telling friends they were moving to Maryland. Fredericksburg artist Suzanne Moe learned they were leaving when she opened an e-mail addressed to her and her partner, blues musician Gaye Adegbalola. Moe knew Barbara from the downtown art scene. It was Tibby who had persuaded Moe to start going to church.

The new law, Barbara wrote, "has driven us to leave the state of Virginia. Our emotions are all over the place. We know we'll never be able to replace the community in Md. that we have here, and that is a great sadness."

Moe was so jarred by the e-mail that she printed it out and carried it in her pocket for three days. "We're losing friends and neighbors because of this law," she says, "and I realized a lot of people had no idea." The tearing apart of a community is something that should be documented, Moe decided. She asked Tibby and Barbara if she could interview them for an hour while a camera rolled. In the 38-minute documentary, Barbara and Tibby sit side by side in their rocking chairs, telling their story.

Moe decided to show the film at the Unitarian church just before last Christmas. She invited some friends, but didn't advertise it. Two hundred people turned up, sitting on radiators, standing on tables in the back. Barbara and Tibby say they were barely able to find a seat. As the film rolled, they could hear the audience laughing and sniffling. And when the screen went blank, everyone in the room stood up, turned toward Barbara and Tibby, and applauded.

The film prompted a small-scale revolt in Fredericksburg. A group of Barbara and Tibby's friends caravanned to Richmond to lobby legislators against passing the constitutional amendment. Others wrote letters of protest to the local newspaper, the Free Lance-Star, after it published a story about the women's decision to leave.

"My hope is that Virginia will eventually recover from the abyss into which it seems to have fallen," wrote one woman.

"Our lives will be diminished by the loss of this loving, generous and caring couple," wrote another.

But not everyone in town rallied to the defense of two lesbians. State Sen. R. Edward Houck, a Democrat who has represented the Fredericksburg area for 21 years, says he felt conflicted about the votes he'd cast for the law and the constitutional amendment, but felt obliged to represent his 175,000 constituents. Most of them, he believes, support restrictions on gay marriage and gay rights. "I can't always just vote my conscience and my convictions," he says. Houck also insists that Barbara and Tibby, whom he doesn't know, don't have to leave Fredericksburg, that the law refers not to wills and medical directives, but "the rights and responsibilities of marriage." But what are those? "I can't answer that," he says. "I don't know all these things."

Fran Farmer lives in that gray area, too. She's Barbara and Tibby's favorite clerk at Union Bank & Trust. Farmer hugged them when she heard they were moving and urged them to keep an apartment here. The women are a part of her daily life, she says, and she felt "very, very sorry it's come to this." But she wasn't sure she opposed the new law.

"I can't get into the rules and regulations, and I'd rather not comment on that. It's very complex," says Farmer, 58, who grew up in Fredericksburg. Asked how she balances her affection for the women with her feelings about gay marriage, she says: "I don't know how to answer that. I just know I didn't want them to move. I don't like change much."

Tibby and Barbara decided to move to Maryland primarily because Holly, now 42 and a technical services manager, lives in Germantown with Tibby's 5-year-old granddaughter. The women had already consulted with a Maryland lawyer about their legal documents, which they'd spent thousands of dollars on over the years. While Maryland law defines marriage as between a man and a woman, Tibby and Barbara thought the state wasn't likely to write discrimination against gay couples into its laws the way Virginia had.

They looked at dozens of homes in the Frederick area before settling on the gray colonial. They like Frederick because it reminds them of Fredericksburg. It has a college, a Unitarian church and a charming, walkable old downtown. They didn't look at places with more established gay communities, such as Bethesda or Baltimore, because those weren't the places they necessarily felt at home. "Most of our friends are straight," Barbara says. "We never get on some Web site and figure out where the gays are and go there; maybe we should, but we're just not like that."

Initially, Holly and James worried that their mother and Barbara were making too drastic a move, giving up too much. Despite her outrage over the new Virginia law, Holly says she thinks it's unlikely a hospital would keep the women apart in a medical emergency. But she also knows how much bigotry and cruelty Tibby and Barbara have endured, and she understands their fears. "They know that this Big Brother element does exist," Holly says. "They have been through it enough to know that bad things do happen."

One Tuesday at sunset, Tibby hustles into the Falmouth Volunteer Firehouse in Fredericksburg, where she's been calling Friday night bingo games for the past three years. After retiring from teaching in 1993, she plunged into volunteerism and especially fundraising, "one of my real loves," she says. She came up with the idea of holding bingo games to raise money to build a new church. Now she's training her replacement, Gary Barnes, who will be calling the bingo games once she and Barbara move.

She tells Barnes to be at the firehouse by 4 p.m. on Fridays so he can set up the tables, equipment and refreshments.

Otherwise, it will be hard to get started on time at 6:45 p.m. "People take bingo very seriously," she explains. "So when people talk, other people get upset, and you have to shush them."

"How do you do that?" Barnes asks.

"You find ways to do it so you keep the good feeling going. Something like, 'Oh folks, I know it's been an exciting night, but some people are having trouble hearing.'" She smiles sweetly to show how it's done.

While Barnes practices using the machine that whips up the numbered balls, Tibby talks about how much she will miss spending Friday nights here, her voice resigned in the empty firehall. She recently had what she describes as an "amazing" experience at bingo. She was scheduled to call the game just after the article in the local paper had come out, and she was nervous about what people would say. After all, she says, it is a pretty conservative crowd.

She walked through the rows before the game, as usual, and even announced over the loudspeaker at the end that she would be leaving, and said how much she had enjoyed calling bingo. A few of the 100 people clapped, and a few came up afterward and said they were sorry she was moving. Most said and did nothing. Basically, the crowd treated her the way it usually did, which is just what she had hoped for. She was so excited by the lack of overt disapproval that she ran out to her car in the parking lot and called Barbara from her cell phone. "People were just wonderful," she beams.

Tibby's most painful farewell is at her last National Organization for Women chapter meeting, where she is surrounded by women she's known for two decades. They take turns bemoaning her departure.

"Tib, your leaving puts such a damper on all of this," says Judith McMoran, the group's treasurer. The room is oddly quiet.

"Virginia must be the most backward state in the union," Becky Reed practically whispers. Reed, a Stafford County lawyer and longtime friend, had written the women's first attempt to create a legal relationship -- a deed in the late 1970s that put their home in both their names.

The next day, Tibby's voice has a hollow sound to it. "It just hit me now in a way it hadn't before, that these things, this place is going to go on without me. People are talking about events and the future, and it isn't going to include us," Tibby says, sitting on the couch with Barbara, surrounded by moving boxes.

"This is like waiting to die. We need to be out of here," adds Barbara, who had her last haircut at Creative Clippers, where her hairdresser never blinked at her idiosyncrasies. Barbara always brought her own smock and asked to have her hair cut dry instead of wet. "Make me look like Martha Stewart," Barbara told her stylist that final day, and they laughed.

But Barbara is just as distraught as Tibby is about leaving Fredericksburg. She's agonized over how to tell her clients. She's tried to remain all-business, creating detailed plans that lay out how each might move forward without the therapist he or she has seen for years. But the barrage comes, as she knew it would: "Who will be in my corner now?" "Mom died, and now I'm losing you." "How dare you?" Many clients cry, but Barbara doesn't.

One day in March, Barbara pours out all her pain in her journal, mourning the loss of everything from her neighbors to the evening shadows on the Rappahannock. "Goodbye to our beloved church family," she writes. "Goodbye to friends of 30 years . . . Goodbye to all that is familiar and known and fits so well."

Barbara and Tibby pull into the parking lot of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, a white lofty building that sits on a country road with a view of the Catoctin Mountains. With its cathedral ceilings, the new church is more majestic than their old one in Fredericksburg, but it's filled with strangers. The women head to a small chapel in the back, where church members are gathering to discuss whether they should become a "welcoming congregation," as Tibby and Barbara's Fredericksburg congregation was. For Unitarians, this involves a step-by-step process, including a series of educational workshops and a church-wide vote, to affirm that non-heterosexuals are fully welcome. Barbara isn't all that eager to be here on a glorious Saturday morning in September. "Joining isn't my style, and I hate meetings," she says. But she recognizes the importance of the label "welcoming." And Tibby had sort of dragged her.

"Let's have everyone go around and say why you are here," the Rev. Roberta Finkelstein says, once the 17 people set their chairs in a circle.

Tibby and Barbara speak first. "We just came up from Virginia because of Virginia's hate laws, and we are so thankful you are here," Tibby says, smiling and gesturing to Barbara. "I'm her other person for almost 40 years," Barbara says, using vague wording, even in this gay-friendly environment.

Next is a woman with silver hair and a son who died of AIDS. Then a lesbian couple in their forties who just moved to Maryland from Michigan. The first woman says the church needs to visibly welcome gay people because otherwise doubts can linger, which feels all wrong for a place of worship. A man in his sixties with a tattoo on his face speaks about wrestling with questions about his sexuality. A male couple, together 21 years and new to the area, hold their infant son as they introduce themselves. A woman with a little girl on her lap announces that she is celebrating her 22nd anniversary this day with her lesbian partner.

Finkelstein lays out what the congregation will have to do to label itself welcoming. She urges everyone in the circle to bring at least one other person to the first workshop in a few weeks.

"We don't know anyone," Barbara whispers to Tibby.

They've been living in Maryland for five months now, long enough to unpack all their boxes, map out several walking routes, get library cards and find a doctor. They've been back to Fredericksburg only once. It's too depressing and too difficult to make the 100-mile drive. Besides, they live in Frederick now, though they still get lost when they try to find their way around the city, still depend on sleeping pills to get a decent night's rest in their unfamiliar house and still haven't made any real friends. They did meet a woman in line at Costco not long ago who seems like she could be a potential pal. Tibby sounds like a giddy teenager as she recounts this development.

Now the women listen as people around the circle talk about potential issues that could come up. Some worry the church could get vandalized, or fear hearing that fellow congregants won't accept them when push comes to shove. "There are people here who are uncomfortable with gay people holding hands," warns one of the women from Michigan.

But Finkelstein wants to push forward anyway. "Now is the time," for gay people in Maryland to demand recognition and basic protections, she says. She notes that Maryland's 1973 ban on gay marriage is being challenged in court by a group of gays and lesbians, who argue that it violates the state constitution.

Barbara and Tibby aren't holding their breath for the ban to be overturned. Maryland isn't Massachusetts. After they moved to Frederick, Gov. Robert Ehrlich vetoed a health care bill of rights for gay partners that had been approved just weeks earlier by the General Assembly. Even so, Tibby and Barbara think Maryland feels much more open to gay people than Virginia does.

Finkelstein closes the meeting by asking everyone to say something they feel positive about and something they are hopeful for.

"I'm so happy just to have some faces I'll now know," Tibby says with a soft smile.

People in the circle smile back at her. Then she explains what she is hopeful for: acceptance and support from the entire congregation. "It always just breaks my heart," she adds, "when straight people stand up and say, 'No, this [discrimination] isn't right.'" Her voice breaks a tiny bit.

Soon everyone is folding up their chairs and stacking them in the corner. Barbara and Tibby thank Finkelstein. Tibby touches the minister's arm as she says goodbye; Barbara smiles and nods. They head out into the autumn sunshine.

Michelle Boorstein is a reporter in The Post's Fredericksburg bureau. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.