SF: It wasn’t that we could have gotten married in Chicago, Massachusetts, or some other location that allowed gay marriage, but if you got married in one of those places and then you moved from that place to another state, they may not have the same technical definition of a gay marriage, and you would have to get divorced in the first state and then remarried in the second. This is all pre-DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, being revoked.

Although we got married in Montreal, we essentially became incorporated when we moved to Chicago. We became this very complicated legal entity, which established many but not all of the equivalencies of marriage through legal contract.

AB: There are a lot of challenges that I don’t think that most people recognize. Those were some of the hoops that we needed to jump through to make sure that we were fully recognized as a married couple. We flew back to Chicago after Montreal and then eventually we moved to DC. Marriage equality hadn’t passed, and so our marriage was valid in the District, however, as soon as we crossed the Potomac River into Virginia, the marriage wasn’t valid.

In 2015 when the Defense of Marriage Act was overturned by the Supreme Court, that was a big day for us.

KK: In some conversations with you, Adam, I’ve gained some understanding of the complexities of being a gay man in health care. What challenges and obstacles have you encountered?

AB: I think one of the biggest challenges is the implicit bias, or the assumptions that are made, if someone doesn’t know that I’m gay. Something that actually happened recently was I was doing a promo video for our company. I was sitting at a desk, and the assumption by the people that were doing the video was that I would have a wife and kids. They had a picture on the desk of my face superimposed on the picture that was what they envisioned my family would look like. I was with a wife, two kids, and a white fluffy dog. I questioned them, “Where did you get this picture because my face is superimposed over the male picture, and secondly, I don’t have a white dog. My dog is gray, and of course, I don’t have kids either.”

Dr. Farmer (left) and Dr. Brown.

Dr. Brown and Dr. Farmer on a recent vacation in Barcelona.
Adam Brown and Steve Farmer