With celebration across the country during the month of June, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community showed their Pride in spite of the horror that struck when 49 people were killed in Orlando by a man with an anti-gay agenda.
To celebrate love, the Mirror reached out to three Federal Way couples who were gracious enough to share their love stories.
The ‘Gaydy Bunch’
Joy Pothan, 45, and Donna Candiliere, 40, have eight children. Eight.
“Our friends call us the Gaydy Bunch, but our [ex-]spouses aren’t dead,” Pothan laughed.
“We went on one of those Rosie O’Donnell tours, and when we went to book, somebody called us that and it just kind of stuck,” Candiliere said of her two girls and two boys and Pothan’s two boys and two girls.
Candiliere works at Perlage Systems while Pothan works at Calidad Autos. The two met in 1997 after Candiliere moved to the area and became neighbors with Pothan. She was pregnant with her second child while Pothan was pregnant with her third. The two developed a deep friendship, and in 2002 they realized there was something more.
“We were just super, super close,” Candiliere said. “Like, best friends. We did everything together, raised our kids together, did everything together. I always knew I was attracted to her and that she felt the same way, we just never spoke of it.”
Both women met their ex-husbands while they were teenagers and got pregnant early on.
“I knew at probably 16 or 17 that there were girls that I was attracted to but didn’t really know what that meant,” Pothan said. “I met my now-ex-husband at 15 and knew that my plan in my head of what I wanted in life, I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom having babies and, as a 15-year-old, the only way you think that’s going to happen is to marry a man and do that. So that’s what I did.”
But deciding to be together was not a decision either made lightly.
Marriage counseling and praying to God that their feelings would go away or that they could want what they had, their husbands, was a regular occurrence.
“It was making a huge, huge life change if we did this,” Candiliere said. “We knew we would be ousted from so many different things: Family, everything, hurting our husbands, hurting our children.”
When they finally announced their love for each other, it was hard for both families. Candiliere received letters from her grandparents and her mother, who tried to have her “committed.”
“They thought she had post-partum depression and was losing her mind,” Pothan said.
“They thought I was crazy,” Candiliere added. “They called it ‘female hysteria’ because they were of that generation.”
Pothan’s mother questioned how they were going to support eight children since both were stay-at-home mothers with no education or job experience.
After the initial chaos that divorces and redefining your identities can bring, Pothan and Candiliere blended their families and fell into the normalcy of a long-term relationship.
“Our struggles are like anybody else’s,” Candiliere said. “When financial strains happen, it gets stressful.”
And they no longer have the church community they once had because it’s hard to find a place where they feel 100 percent comfortable.
“The open and accepting churches were weird, or at least not like what we were used to, because we always went to the mainstream, bigger churches and we didn’t fit in there. So we just kind of took a step back from that, and at that time was still when my family was saying, ‘You’re going to hell,'” Candiliere said. “This is what the Scripture says, so I just didn’t feel comfortable in church. And I felt like Christians, the ones that were [coming] at me, were not emanating a very Godly attitude, and it just put a bad taste in my mouth for what Christians are like.”
The two held a wedding ceremony on Lummi Island in 2010, before same-sex marriage was legal in Washington, and then got their legal certificate from the state on Dec. 6, 2012, having been actively involved in the marriage equality movement years prior.
“Things work out; it’s not as scary as things look or seem,” Pothan said, adding that their relationship has grown over time and has “so much depth” to it now.
“I don’t question holding her hand in public,” Candiliere said. “It’s just second nature.”
Barden and Kelly
Having been out since he was 21 years old, Ricardo Kelly, now 45, didn’t picture himself being married or even in a long-term relationship – until he met Steve Barden, now 60.
Kelly was playing third wheel to a date his best friend was on with Barden.
“Steve worked for an architecture firm my best friend’s sister worked at and was like, ‘I have this wonderful co-worker, he just came out, and I want him to meet good people,” Kelly recalled. “‘I figured you and your friends are good people…'”
Barden, a Mormon who had been in a heterosexual marriage and had five children, came out in 2007 during his senior year in college.
“We had a really good marriage, except that I was gay and could not accept that fact,” Barden said.
Barden also had other plans.
“My intent was to date a lot of guys for three years and then figure it out,” he said. “But it just happened. I can’t imagine life without him.”
He said their relationship has developed in “such an effortless manner.”
After one year of dating, Barden was laid off and it made sense for him to move in with Kelly, who now works for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This winter they’ll have been together for nine years; they’ve been Federal Way residents for more than two years.
“One thing we’re most proud of is, in all of those years, we’ve never had one single fight,” Kelly said. “We’ve gotten on each other’s nerves and we’ve had disagreements, but I think it’s a testament to how we were raised – in two completely different ways – to respect people, and yelling and screaming at somebody isn’t respecting them and I respect and love him too much to do that.”
When Barden began to have health issues, Kelly figured they could get a domestic partnership certificate so he could be on his health insurance. Once same-sex marriage was legalized, those certificates turned into marriage licenses.
“Yet one thing we haven’t done is actually have a wedding or a ceremony,” Kelly said.
If they ever end up deciding on the details – elegant or masculine – both agree that having close friends and family together in celebration is the most important element.
“He makes me laugh every day,” Barden said. “Not a day goes by he doesn’t make me laugh, and he takes care of me and makes sure that I have what I need and that I’m taking care of myself.”
Barden said he came close to committing suicide before he accepted he was gay.
“I was so conflicted and torn between who I was and what I believed, spiritually, that I just… every time I would drive across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, I would think to myself, ‘Gee, all I need to do is just throw the wheel and I’d go into the narrows and there wouldn’t be a problem for anybody,'” Barden said.
Kelly said it was hard to watch Barden resolve his conflicts with his marriage and church, but he says their relationship has made him a better person.
“Unexpected, yet absolutely fulfilling,” he said of marriage to Barden.
The McAnalloys
Three boys, pets, schedules, jobs at CenturyLink, community obligations and two dads to juggle it all.
Geoffery and Devin McAnalloy, both 52, are at the stage in their life where their children are their world. But creating their family – twin 12-year-olds and an 11-year-old – had significant challenges.
Before the McAnalloys adopted their children, they were foster parents.
“There was still a lot of stigma at the time in 2005,” said Geoffery McAnalloy, who is the president of the Federal Way Public Schools Board. “There was still a lot of agencies we worked with … we ended up changing. We could really feel the stigma. ‘You were gay parents and you weren’t going to get healthy children, you were only going to get children that are drug affected or will have issues…'”
However, the two were “aggressive” and cultivated relationships within the system.
They took in their twins and then the twins’ little (biological) brother, but they “had to battle it” with a judge.
“We just knew they needed to be together,” Geoffery McAnalloy said. “Didn’t know how we were going to do it but just knew.”
Devin McAnalloy said the day they went to pick up the now-11-year-old from the hospital was surreal.
“One of the weirdest moments for me was bringing Zeth home as a baby because, as a gay person, that was not anything that I would even thought would ever be possible,” Devin McAnalloy said. “It was one of those things that, once you accept the fact that you’re gay and you come out and stuff, that’s just something that at that point you never even fathom. ‘Oh, I’ll have a baby.'”
Devin McAnalloy came out when he was 30 years old after growing up with a pastor as a father.
“Up to that point, I was very involved in church, very involved in all that kind of stuff,” he said. “I always thought that I would meet the right woman and I wouldn’t be gay.”
Although his family didn’t disown him, their relationship has changed. Devin McAnalloy is the only one of his siblings who has children, but his parents aren’t very involved in their lives.
“They send cards and stuff, but they really don’t have any kind of desire to have a real relationship with the kids,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s the gay issue or the adoption issue or both.”
The McAnalloys met in Oklahoma City in 1999 shortly after Devin McAnalloy’s previous partner passed away from complications with AIDS. In January of that year, the found each other in an AOL chatroom and met up at a bowling alley. Geoffery McAnalloy was moved in by April, but that, too, wasn’t easy.
“I stayed in his house and then it was like, he decided it wasn’t meant to be,” Geoffery McAnalloy said. “He was going to tell me he didn’t want to see me anymore, but he finally just couldn’t come home and say that.”
A year after Devin McAnalloy’s previous partner’s death, the tables turned and the two were making plans to move to the Seattle area.
The McAnalloys were married in Portland in March 2004, one of the 3,600 couples who flocked to the area for that reason, but the marriage was later annulled.
“It did solidify [something] for us, because then in September, we decided at that point we wanted children in our lives,” Geofferey McAnalloy said.
The two married again when Washington state legalized same-sex marriage in 2012.
“It’s kind of funny – the first time we got married it was on ABC News, and this was on the front of the Seattle Times, and we didn’t ever… neither time did we try,” Devin McAnalloy said, remembering then that there was also a photo montage of them with their family on MSNBC for Father’s Day a few years ago. “We’re an anomaly: Gay fathers raising three kids. People find it interesting. But it doesn’t feel interesting.”
Like any couple they fight, but they consider each other family.
Still, they would like the rest of the world to see them as husbands, as they have to come out regularly.
Whether people misinterpret them as giving their “wives” a “break” by going on a “fathers’ outing” with their boys or having to explain they want a king-sized bed when they travel, experiencing those challenges is exactly what keeps them together.
But even talking to a newspaper about their love story is something they still had to consider carefully.
“I always have to take a step forward,” Geoffery McAnalloy said. “It has to be forward to show I’m not any different, and look at the work that I’m doing in this community and what I’m doing for all of our scholars. I can’t let fear stop that piece, because if I allow it, then it just continues to perpetuate the problem.
“We have to continue to lead the way, to make it so we can… hopefully someday I’ll be accepted at face value without any prejudice or fear. I really believe it’s all fear-based, but we can’t let the stigma of fear control us either.”
