Saturday, March 27, 2004

Lee Coggins took a red-eye flight to San Francisco, waited in the rain with a jubilant crowd and married her girlfriend Suzanne Robinson. Then, three hours after marrying, the couple turned around and traveled home to Durham, N.C., braced for indifference or perhaps hostility.

But instead, the couple -- one of the few gay couples from North Carolina to make the wedding pilgrimage -- became instant media stars.

After their Feb. 16 wedding, they were interviewed by NBC's "Today Show," the Herald-Sun in Durham and a statewide public radio program. Coggins wrote a first-person story about their nuptial adventures that appeared on the cover of the local alternative paper, the Independent Weekly.

And much to their surprise, people were nice. Really, really nice.

"I really had no idea," Coggins said. "People are coming up to us randomly, saying 'Are you the girls who got married?' "

At first, when people approached in the grocery store, the mall, the movies and at basketball games, they would flinch, Coggins said. But they got over that when strangers started sending gifts and asking, "Oh, my God, can we hug you?"

4:18 PM |