Life

The improbable, 200-year-old story of one of America’s first same-sex ‘marriages’

The improbable, 200-year-old story of one of America’s first same-sex ‘marriages’
The shared tombstone of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, a 19th-century lesbian couple.
The shared tombstone of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, a 19th-century lesbian couple. Rachel Hope Cleves, The Washington Post

Via The Washington Post:

Charity Bryant only intended to stay a few days in Weybridge, Vt., a tiny rural town with little to hold her attention. But then she met Sylvia Drake.

Drake was 22 — a talented, literary-minded woman in search of a kindred spirit. Bryant, seven years her senior, was brilliant, charismatic and exactly the kind of partner Drake had been looking for. The two fell swiftly, madly in love. Within months, Bryant rented a one-room apartment and asked Drake to become her roommate and wife.

It may sound like something from a 21st-century vows column, but this romance predates most newspapers’ style sections — by about two centuries.

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