A story that begins in Colombia and continues in the United States, and a courthouse wedding that starts small and becomes smaller due to COVID-19.
Maggie + Jacque // Boston, Massachusetts
“Mi Amor!” As the jubilant, propulsive sound of salsa played from a portable speaker, Jacque (short for Jacqueline) lit up in delight at the sight of her soon-to-be wife. Maggie had just returned from the salon, and proudly struck a few poses with her newly ironed curls.
Today was Jacque and Maggie’s wedding day, and both were determined to keep things stress-free. “I’ve told my parents for years that I’d elope, so they’re just glad we’re having a wedding they can attend,” Maggie commented to me on one of our first phone calls. “We’re both really simple people,” Jacque added.
They had decided to do a courthouse wedding at Boston City Hall followed by a reception with a few dozen friends at Maggie’s childhood home in Somerville, a few miles north of Boston. When Maggie’s mom asked if she and Jacque wanted flowers, Maggie paused, realizing the thought hadn’t even crossed her mind. “Yeah, sure,” she replied. “What color?” her mom asked. Maggie gave it some thought. “I honestly don’t really care, anything is fine.”
But despite their best efforts to keep everything simple, Maggie and Jacque were still frantically changing plans the night before the wedding. The first coronavirus case in Boston was confirmed on February 4th, 2020. By mid-March, New York, Boston’s east coast metropolitan sibling, was frantically imposing lockdown measures, their first case having only been reported on March 1st. It was a wonder Boston wasn’t already under the same restrictions.
“We’ll have to cut the guest list,” Jacque noted, as the two anguished over what friends they’d be able to invite to their much smaller space. “I’m sure they’ll understand,” I offered, as Maggie and Jacque nodded in assent despite the pained looks on their faces.
Maggie sent a message out to the group soon after: “Congratulations! You’re on the COVID-19 list.” Hosting the reception at Maggie’s home in Somerville was out of the question; her father, a pediatrician, was more sensitive to the medical severity of the pandemic, and her mother didn’t want to risk catching the virus and passing it along to her own parents, who lived down the street and whom she visited daily. Maggie and Jacque decided to host the get together in their own apartment instead.
Maggie and Jacque in their apartment the night before the wedding discussing backup plans
Last-minute changes aside, Maggie and Jacque were in high spirits the morning of their wedding. They moved quickly through doing their hair and makeup before changing into their outfits: a white jumpsuit for Maggie (“I made sure it had pockets” she showed me, pulling them out like a party trick) and a slim white blazer with matching pants for Jacque.
Jacque and Maggie getting their hair + makeup done, and dressed for the courthouse ceremony
At 1:30pm, we —Maggie and Jacque, their roommate Laura, Jacque’s best friend Alejandro, and myself— all piled into a Lyft to head over to City Hall to catch their 1:45pm appointment with the City Clerk. Jacque sat in a non-seat on myself and Maggie while Laura texted away in the front seat, coordinating logistics for later that evening. The rest of us looked out the windows at the damp, reflective sheen of the city, hazy evidence that it had just rained.
Something I’ve learned while photographing weddings is that the work is less an exercise in finding great lighting or backgrounds and more in reading the mood and acting appropriately so that the couple, who cycles through any number of emotions over the course of the day, feels comfortable. To try and remain the archetypal “energetic, jokester” photographer is to cause more discomfort for everyone, and many moments are better experienced in silence than in conversation.
Save for one selfie, we stayed quiet on the car ride over.
Selfie on the Lyft ride over to Boston City Hall
Jacque and Maggie met in Barranquilla, a Colombian seaside city famous for its temperate climate, relaxed energy, and massively popular take on Carnival. It’s also where Jacque calls home. “We’re known for being very friendly, and having much less stress than people here in the United States,” Jacque told me.
Maggie was in the city to teach English. She’d fallen in love with the Spanish language during college and her sense of adventure led her to spend much of her 20’s abroad in Mexico and Brazil. While in Brazil, Maggie began taking lessons in capoeira, a Brazilian martial art originally practiced by African slaves brought to the country in the 1500’s as a means for combat and survival. It has since evolved into a physical exercise that incorporates culture, dance, music, and acrobatics.
Watching capoeira is nothing like watching other martial arts; its movements are hypnotic, not jolting. Kicks, punches, and cartwheels flow with circular ease, and while capoeiristas move with intensely precise physicality, they also exude a deep sense of joviality. The verbiage for sparring, in fact, is that of a game. “You play capoeira,” Alejandro, Jacque’s best friend of 15 years and a fellow capoeirista, told me. “It’s kind of like a dance. Not only that, you also have to learn how to sing and to play the instruments.”
A demonstration of capoeira
Hoping to continue to take lessons while in Barranquilla, Maggie searched among the dozens of capoeira studios in the city for a female instructor. She found only one, and that instructor was Jacque.
The two were fast friends. They shared not just a love for capoeira, but also a deep pull towards adventure and surprise in life. A few days before Maggie flew back to the United States, Jacque arranged a going-away party for her, hosting a dinner at home before going out to dance. Under the blanket of a warm Colombian night, they shared their first kiss.
Jacque playing capoeira
“I didn’t even know she liked me for the longest time,” Jacque recalled. “She often wouldn’t look directly at me when we talked!” “That’s because you made me nervous!” Maggie replied, with an embarrassed but doting smile.
There wasn’t much time to reconcile their feelings before Maggie had to leave. “I was trying to figure out whether I should try to stay in Colombia, or look for a job in the US. Almost immediately though, a great teaching job fell into my lap back in Boston.” Both emphasized that they weren’t sure what to make of the relationship at the time. It wouldn’t work; it couldn’t work, they each thought to themselves.
An early selfie
But neither let go of their feelings. Maggie made the first serious move. She had a break in February from work, and offered to visit Jacque. “I’m not sure if you were serious when you said ‘Sure, come visit!’ or if you were just being Colombian,” Maggie said, turning to Jacque, who replied, “I was like, ‘Wait, so you’re actually coming? Really?’”
Maggie visited again in April, and the two traveled together to Mexico that summer. Despite an uncertain first few months, they settled into a natural back and forth. Jacque visited the US to see Maggie and some family members in Florida, while Maggie visited Jacque and her other friends in Colombia. Between those trips, the two traveled together to other countries in Latin America.
Jacque and Maggie traveling in Mexico together
Eventually, in 2019, Maggie asked Jacque if she’d want to come to the US. Permanently. The two moved in together to Maggie’s apartment in East Boston.
Boston city hall is a massive brutalist fever-dream of a building. Surrounded by a wide, open plaza, the building overlooks the center of Boston like a stoic guardian, and hardly matches the traditional setting one might imagine for a wedding. But Maggie and Jacque were hardly concerned with that “tradition”; the two were more interested in the ceremony inside than the pictures outside.
For better or for worse, Boston City Hall is a structure that stands out in a very in-your-face way
After we entered the building and passed through security, we were joined by Maggie’s father. Her mother decided last minute to join via FaceTime instead of in-person because of COVID. “She’s being overly-cautious,” Maggie commented, her tone understanding but with an obvious twinge of disappointment.
We made our way up to the City Clerk’s office on the second floor. Maggie pulled out her credit card to finalize the remaining cost for the wedding: $75 for the ceremony, and about the same amount for the application and marriage certificate.
There was something about paying for your wedding with a credit card a few minutes before said wedding that was fascinating to me. I can’t quite pinpoint why
Some of the staff looked up at us from their desks as we walked down the hallway to the City Clerk’s office, where the ceremony would be held. It was heartwarming that, as many couples as the staff saw each day, they still smiled and whispered enthusiastic congratulations.
The City Clerk began by asking Maggie and Jacque a question. “First question, and an important one: are the two of you going to be spouses, partners, or wives?” Maggie and Jacque looked at each other. “Wives,” they said in unison.
The city clerk going over the paperwork before conducting the wedding ceremony
Courthouse weddings tend to be very simple, undramatic events. There is a beauty in the simplicity of having only the bare necessities and nothing more, in the presence of those who matter most. There are no dances, no decorations, no speeches, no egos, no stage fright; there is nothing complicated to worry about. But there are still all the emotions; the tears, nervous laughs, and hints of awkwardness that even this amount of staging feels somehow unnecessary. The whole ceremony took about 10 minutes.
Photos from the ceremony
After the ceremony, the City Clerk commented, “I wish I could hug you to pieces, but I promised my staff and family that I wouldn’t because of this.” She swirled her hand in the air, an obvious reference to the coronavirus. “You’re lucky you’re here today; by next week we may be closed for who knows how long.”
Maggie and Jacque were one of the last couples to be married in City Hall before it locked down due to covid
Maggie had never “liked” a woman before meeting Jacqueline. “I don’t really have a big coming-out story, like others in the LGBTQ community,” Maggie told. A few weeks after the two met through capoeira classes, Jacque invited Maggie and some other friends over to her family’s house to hang out. “I was actually on a tinder date with a guy that night,” Maggie recalled. She noticed my surprise. “I know. I was figuring things out, too.”
Maggie’s own perception of her sexuality has been a straightforward process. When her friends first found out she had a crush on Jacque, they asked, “So… are you gay now? Or bi? And, have you always been?” To Maggie, the labels felt unnecessary. Identifying as “bi" or “gay” assumed she was attracted to an entire group of people. But Maggie was only truly attracted to Jacque. What did the idea of sexual orientation mean when she’d only been attracted to one person?
When I asked her to clarify, she conceded that it was possible this was always part of her identity. “I think the way I used to address these feelings was by thinking, ‘Wow, I really admire this woman.’” She paused. “The first time I remember something more is seeing Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman, and thinking, with complete certainty, ‘Holy shit. She’s HOT.’”
“HOT” - Maggie
When Maggie came out to her family at age 30, they had no trouble accepting her. The same was true among most of her friends. “I’m unbelievably lucky to have had such supportive friends and family,” Maggie said to me. “But I do feel guilty that I never went through the struggles that others in the LGBTQ community have gone through.” I could sense some unease in her voice, as if she was unsure how to present her positive experience coming out to her family and friends without diminishing weight of the negative experiences more common in her community.
Jacque’s own experiences with being lesbian —she used the term to describe herself— came with little of the ease that Maggie experienced. She came out to her parents at the age of 15, and since then her family has generally avoided addressing the subject directly. “At the time, they called my action ‘my decision’, as if I had a choice in the matter,” Jacque told me.
Colombia is culturally catholic, and though same-sex marriage was legalized a few years ago in 2016, legal comfort is not the same as social comfort. “It’s not easy to be gay there,” Jacque said. “People still stare at you if you hold hands, as two women, down the street. When I was younger, I had to work to carve out my own space and to gain the respect of the people around me.”
Although she still struggles to communicate fully with her family, Jacque misses them dearly, and says they’ve mostly come around. “They love Maggie, and have accepted that this is my life,” she said.
Jacque with her siblings and parents in Colombia
Jacque and Maggie emphasized to me that they preferred to be grateful for the present and to think towards the future than to dwell on the past. “I didn’t care that she’s been attracted to men before; the point is that we each love each other now,” Jacque said with clarity and force.
After the ceremony, we walked around Boston to do a small photoshoot. If you’ve ever been on a photoshoot with me, you’ll know that I try not to rush through things, and use the time to not only take photos but have a conversation too. This was no different; having Laura and Alejandro there as well only helped.
Photos from our little photoshoot around downtown Boston after the wedding ceremony
That evening, Maggie and Jacque worked to transform their apartment, moving their couch into the bedroom, setting up a folding table for their wedding cakes, hanging up some string lights and fake vines that, to everyone’s genuine surprise, made the living room feel properly like a wedding venue.
Jacque and Maggie dancing in their apartment before their guests arrived
As Colombian music played through the apartment, and people glided between conversations and languages—almost everyone spoke Spanish and English—I wondered to myself if this would be the last social gathering we’d all be at for a while. I confirmed with others that they thought the same way.
For a brief moment, there was an overlap between our understanding of the gravity of the pandemic and our ability to repress that understanding and live normally. None of us, at the time, knew yet what was to come; masks, social distancing, months of isolation and a radical change to how we all live.
Photos from Maggie and Jacque’s reception
But alongside that change are certain emotions that remain stubborn in their strength. There’s a Greek myth, written by Plato in The Symposium, that tells the story of the origins of love (paraphrased for brevity):
The shape of each human being was completely round, with back and sides in a circle; they had four hands each, as many legs as hands, and two faces, exactly alike, on a rounded neck.
In strength and power, therefore, they were terrible, and they had great ambitions. They made an attempt on the gods. ‘I think I have a plan,’ Zeus said, ‘that would allow human beings to exist and stop their misbehaving: they will give up being wicked when they lose their strength. So I shall now cut each of them in two. They shall walk upright on two legs.
Now, since their natural form had been cut in two, each one longed for its own other half, and so they would throw their arms about each other, weaving themselves together, wanting to grow together. In that condition they would die from hunger and general idleness, because they would not do anything apart from each other. Whenever one of the halves died and one was left, the one that was left still sought another and wove itself together with that.
Each of us, then, is a ‘matching half’ of a human whole, because each was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him.
And so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.
We used to be complete wholes in our original nature, and now ‘love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.
A well-known Spanish idiom comes from this story: Tu eres mi media naranja. “You are my half-orange,” an orange used as a stand-in for these round, original humans.
Towards the end of the night, Jacque began a toast: “Maggie, you are my…. half… orange?” The words stumbled out as she realized how strange the phrase sounded when translated to English. But everyone understood what she meant, and as we smiled and laughed, we raised our red solo cups, giving a toast to this love in the time of corona.
