Our Family
by Michael Bauer and Roger Simon (Chicago, Ill.)
We are Michael Bauer and Roger Simon, residents of Chicago, and we had our first date on March 13, 1982. A month later, we moved in together and have been life partners ever since. Mike graduated from Senn High School in Chicago and has a B. A. and a Juris Doctor from Northwestern University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management. Roger is a graduate of New Trier West High School and has an undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois and a degree from the University of Illinois Dental School.
Through the years, we have been active in a number of gay and lesbian, Jewish and AIDS-oriented organizations. Sadly, as a result of the AIDS epidemic, we spent a good number of years in the late '80s and early '90s caring for and then burying most of our old friends from the time we first met.
One of the interesting things about our social life these days is most of our close friends are other Jewish couples — the difference between all of them and us is that they are all opposite-sex couples who are legally married and we are a couple of the same gender. From a social perspective, we are treated very much the same as a couple. Unfortunately, from a legal perspective we lack many important rights.
Our strong desire to be able to be married was given a significant boost when the courts in Ontario, Canada, ruled in June that same-sex couples were entitled to be married legally. So on Aug. 18, 2003, we celebrated our relationship by getting legally married in Toronto, even though that act of marriage in Canada has uncertain recognition in Illinois and the United States. In that wedding ceremony, we restated our firm and long-standing commitment, devotion and love for each other.
When Roger's employer, American Airlines, decided to offer its employees domestic partnership benefits for those who had life partners whom they were unable to legally marry, we took advantage of the opportunity to cover Mike under Roger's health insurance. However, as a same-sex couple whose relationship is not recognized by the Internal Revenue Service, Roger is taxed on Mike's benefits. Married couples incur no such tax penalties for their spouses. This is just one of the many ways our relationship is treated differently because same-sex marriages are not legal in the United States. We have so much love for one another, but we lack any rights. We're strangers under the law and that hardly seems fair.