The last time Jean lived in a small town, she was still in the closet, and this has made her wary of Auburn. As a little girl, Jean was raised in the town of Boulder Creek, Calif., population 7,000. There she was brought up to be a Christian like her parents and as feminine as possible. "Growing up in a small town, I was really judgmental about myself," she says. "When I was a kid, I was a tomboy, but when puberty set in ... I just sort of dressed and acted the way I thought people wanted me to dress and act -- stereotypical girly-girl. I had long, dyed-blond hair. I wore a lot of makeup." Raised by a stepfather who was deeply homophobic and a mother who tolerated his views, "I internalized homophobia to the max." It wasn't until she was engaged to a man -- her high school sweetheart -- that she began admitting to herself that she'd had same-sex feelings and attractions since she was 12. "It took me six months after that to work up the courage to go to a bisexual support group," she said. The group, half an hour's drive from San Jose, is where she met Toby. Soon after joining the group, Jean cut off the engagement, along with all her hair, and came out to her family as a bisexual. She became a pagan and an activist, trying to help parents whose children had recently come out understand what it meant. Her self-described "dyke" appearance evolved gradually, but today she is protective of her look. "Even if I stand out in Auburn," she says, "I can't go back to the Stepford look. That's not who I am anymore."

For Toby, the route to bisexuality was less circuitous. "I never had a coming-out process," she says, "because I was never in. I had my first crushes on a girl and a boy when I was 10, and most of my life I didn't have a word for it." She acknowledges that in Auburn, she gets fewer stares than Jean. Generally speaking, with her dark blond hair usually pulled back in a ponytail and her practical khakis and stain-resistant T-shirts, she looks exactly like the suburban mom she is. Raised by a liberal, atheist family in East Coast cities, her larger revelation was a faith in God. "'Godspell' and 'Jesus Christ Superstar' are how I got religion," she says. She started going to church in college, decided she liked the Episcopal Church because it was "more stained glass and incense with less of the bullshit" of Catholicism, and has been going ever since.

For five years they lived separately in the suburbs of Silicon Valley, not far from San Jose. In 1999, Toby decided to have a baby with the help of a close friend who agreed to act as her sperm donor. Toby and Jean, who had had an on-again, off-again relationship, were just friends at the time. But in the fourth month of Toby's pregnancy, something changed: "I got food poisoning while I was pregnant, and she [Jean] took me to the hospital, and I knew that things that hurt that bad hurt less when she was holding my hand ... I told Jean, 'Listen, I don't know if this will work out forever as I hope it will, but I want you to be my Lamaze partner, I want you to be there for the birth.'" In September 2000, Kalen was born. The women moved in together the next year. But although Toby considers Jean to be Kalen's "dad," legally Jean has no rights as Kalen's parent.

"People tend to think legalizing same-sex marriage is an abstract issue, but it's not," says Toby. "If we were allowed to legally get married, it would put a whole different spin on everything -- on finances, on parenting, on how she's treated as the dad. When you're married as a heterosexual couple, a lot of things just click into place, but we just finished the wedding and now we have to spend thousands of dollars to draw up contracts to get what we would normally get. For example, I have to pay taxes on her health insurance benefits as though it were income. The guy who sits next to me, his wife gets health insurance, he doesn't pay taxes on it." Even more important, the sperm donor is still considered Kalen's father at the moment, although California law allows Jean to adopt Kalen under 'stepparent adoption.' And though one of Gray Davis' last acts as governor of California was to sign into law a bill granting many more rights to same-sex couples, it won't take effect until 2005. In the meantime, if something happens to Toby before the adoption goes through, "it's a crapshoot in the family courts," she says.

Paradoxically, the biggest obstacle to legalizing same-sex marriage, say Toby and Jean, is put up by advocates who frame it as a gay-rights issue -- because that turns it into a fight between the Christian right and gay-rights promoters, rather than an issue of sexual equality. "It's not a gay issue," Toby insists. "We're not gay! We're bisexual." She explains the legal-marriage difference through a puzzle of four couples. "Let's say my friends Bryan and Kathleen are bisexual, my friends Thomas and Mary are bisexual, my friends Chris and Ted are bisexual, we're bisexual." she says. "Chris and Ted get married, they get no rights, Jean and I get married, we get no rights. Thomas and Mary get married, they get all the rights; Bryan and Kathleen get married, they get all the rights. But we're all queer, we're all equally as queer! It's a plain and simple issue of human rights."

Legal rights aside, soon after moving to Auburn in 2002, Toby asked Jean to marry her -- and slipped an engagement ring on her finger when she said yes.

That's when the trouble with the Episcopal Church began. As an Episcopalian, Toby wanted a religious ceremony to mark the occasion, but while some Episcopal churches are currently providing ceremonies to bless same-sex unions, St. Luke's is not one of them. Nor would the Episcopal priest recommended by a friend proceed in the end, bailing on them three weeks before the wedding over the pronoun changes -- too many wives -- in the vows. Finally, an ordained friend of a friend agreed to perform the service. On a sunny afternoon in July, on a Santa Cruz bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, they said their vows under the shade of redwoods. Kalen, then 2-and-a-half, was the flower girl and threw rose petals happily into the wind. The service the officiant performed was mainly Episcopalian, but the brides also wore matching patterned belts of a pagan ritual, and instead of veils, both had wreaths of blue and white flowers in their hair. In photographs, they are beaming at each other, Toby in a white dress, Jean in a dress of midnight blue. And although the celebrant who officiated signed a domestic partnership certificate rather than a marriage license, in their hearts Toby and Jean -- who now share Toby's last name -- consider themselves married for life.

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