HUFFINGTON
05.19.13
LOVE AND HATE
Reaves and Garland have been
together for 13 years. They moved
to Bisbee from Asheville, N.C.,
in 2011 after hearing the band
Calexico rave about the place.
(The band’s song “Bisbee Blue”
is about a variety of turquoise
named for the town, a byproduct
of the area’s copper mines.) If Bisbee’s city council passes a resolution to recognize civil unions, as
it’s expected to do this month, it
will be the first city in Arizona to
do so. And Reaves and Garland
will be the first gay couple in the
state to be “civilly unioned.”
“It isn’t something we ever expected after moving here,” says
Garland, who paints and works as
a server at a local restaurant. “We
were just tickled when we heard it
might happen,” Reaves chimes in.
This all began in March, when
recently elected Councilman
Gene Conners was talking to a gay
friend at a hardware store. “She
said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if Bisbee could find a way to welcome
gay couples to town to get civil
unions?’ I had the mayor’s ear a
couple weeks later, and we started
trying to figure out if there was a
way we could do it,” Conners says.
At first blush, Conners seems
like an unlikely champion of the
gay-rights movement. When he
isn’t doing city business, he’s a
painting contractor. He showed up
for his interview for this article
in paint-splotched work duds.
Conners was born in Tucson, but
spent nearly a decade in Chicago,
where he seemed to pick up some
of the bluster the Windy City is
known for. “I cannot claim to love
Bisbee more than anybody else,”
he writes on his official website,
“but I would go toe to toe with
someone claiming they did.”
“Both Councilman Conners and
I live in the ward with the high-
“The gay marriage debate is
hotter than Arizona asphalt, and
Bisbee is in the thick of all of it.”
est LGBT population,” says Bisbee
Mayor Adriana Badal. “And proportionally, Bisbee itself has one
of the highest gay and lesbian populations in the state. We decided
we wanted to do something real.
Not a resolution, but something
that carries the force of law.”
The problem is that in the U.S.,
most legal protections for marriage are codified at the state level. Conners and Badal knew they
couldn’t grant rights to same-sex
couples that the state wouldn’t
recognize, but they did come up