After 25 years, Doug Bauder and Marty Siegel have had a lot of anniversaries.
“It’s hard to keep them all straight,” Siegel said. “But that’s what happens in a gay relationship.”
Siegel, 68, is an informatics professor. Bauder, 66 and a former pastor, is the director of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Student Support Services office.
Siegel is Jewish. He grew up in Chicago and went to a Big Ten school. Bauder is a Protestant from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who went to a small Christian college. They both had married women and had children.
When they met through a gay phone service in the early 1990s, Bauder had been divorced from his wife for about a decade. Siegel was separated from his wife after coming out to her a year before. They developed a relationship over the phone — “like having a pen pal” — before meeting about six months later.
“Was it love at first sight?” Bauder asks. “I don’t know. It was strong ‘like’ at first sight.”
On their first weekend together, Siegel spent some time counseling his college-bound son over the phone.
“I really loved the way he used his skills and his insights to care for his son,” Bauder said.
Siegel was less sure. “I think he fell harder for me than I fell for him,” he said.
He’d only been out of the closet for a year and was hesitant to jump into another long relationship.
Siegel was working at a startup in Minnesota. Bauder was a pastor and hospital chaplain in the Madison, Wisconsin, area. When Siegel joined IU’s School of Education in 1991, he drove from Indiana to Wisconsin every other Friday for a year. He said he wouldn’t make this drive again.
Bauder moved down to Bloomington in 1993, around Valentine’s Day. He remembers packing his apartment with the TV on as Maya Angelou read “On the Pulse of the Morning” at President Clinton’s first inauguration.
As they started living together, a friend of theirs blessed their relationship in an informal ceremony. That was enough.
They lived in a house near campus. Bauder became the director of the new GLBT office, and Siegel moved to the School of Informatics.
At the time, Siegel saw marriage as an institution for straight people and didn’t feel entitled to it.
“A gay person is no different from anybody else in terms of being influenced by society,” Siegel said.
Both were grateful for their earlier marriages. “We had been married,” Bauder said. “We had done that.”
The day same-sex marriage was legalized in Indiana in 2014, Bauder officiated ceremonies at the Monroe County Courthouse. He said people would ask him, “When are you and Marty going to come down and do this?”
When people asked Siegel, he would say, “Well, Doug hasn’t asked me yet.”
“We began to think, if this is gonna happen,” Bauder said, “it’s got to be OK everywhere in the nation.”
So on the day of the Obergefell v. Hodges decision last June, Bauder decided, “I want to be a part of this.”
Bauder got down on one knee in Siegel’s bookcase-lined home office and asked, “Will you marry me?”
Because of Bauder’s lower back pain, Siegel helped him stand up.
“Well, I want to think about it,” Siegel answered.
They were married legally Nov. 25. They will have a ceremony in June with a pastor and a rabbi, their four children and their four siblings. For their grandchildren, it will end with “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” from “Toy Story.”
The ceremony will take place in their home in south Bloomington, where a New Yorker magazine cover with a rainbow White House from June hangs on the wall, across the living room from the Steinway piano Siegel won in his divorce.
“In some ways, nothing’s really changed,” Marty said. “Except we now have more forms to fill out.”
This Valentine’s Day, their first as a legally married couple, Bauder and Siegel made plans to watch “Downton Abbey.”
“We’ve been together a long time, so Valentine’s doesn’t take on that gooey romance that it did when you’re 25 years old,” Siegel said.
Not much has changed in what they do, but there is a difference.
“When you’re not married, the thought is, ‘Well, do you want to stay together another year? Should we keep this going?’” Siegel said. “And now it’s, ‘This is it. This is a commitment.’”
While their marriage is new, Valentine’s Day has always been in their lives.
“It’s not just a day for straight couples,” Bauder says. “Just like marriage.”
A previous version of this story had a photo of Bauder attached that was misleading. This photo has since been removed. The IDS regrets this error.
