By the time Heidi Norton married Gina Smith on May 17, 2004, their two sons had already been born with the name—Nortonsmith—they adopted after tying the knot. It was the first day same-sex couples could be legally wed in Massachusetts, thanks to the success of their hard-won lawsuit. “You came out as Nortonsmith,” Gina told the boys that day. “We had to earn it.”
Their case, (named for one of the six other co-plaintiff couples) was monumental. “No state in the nation had done this before,” says Mary Bonauto, the GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) attorney behind But the Nov. 18, 2003, decision of the state’s Supreme Judicial Court sparked new challenges. Within hours, Governor Mitt Romney called for changes to the settled just three days before May 17. It wasn’t until 2015, through the Supreme Court case that same-sex marriage became legal across the U.S.
