THEY'RE NOT WED, BUT THEY'VE MADE IT OFFICIAL: From the Los Angeles Times

When Aimee Wilson asked about adding her gay partner to her corporate health insurance plan earlier this year, her employer told her it would be easy. All she had to do was get a government body to sanction the relationship.But for Wilson, a resident of Frisco, Texas, that was going to require some fancy bureaucratic two-stepping, because the Lone Star State doesn't officially recognize same-sex partners.

Wilson found her solution 1,400 miles away at West Hollywood's City Hall, where, for a $25 fee, the clerk placed Wilson and her then-pregnant partner, Margaret Richmond, on the city's domestic partnership registry in March. The couple dropped their check and a notarized application in the mail. Richmond made the company's health insurance rolls in time to deliver twins. ...

But it is West Hollywood's pioneering domestic partner registry, created in 1985, that remains one of the country's best known, with its mail-in procedures listed on a number of gay rights websites. This year, the city's loose registration rules have enticed 193 out-of-state couples to register -- accounting for about 60% of West Hollywood's total domestic partnership rolls for 2004.

They are gay couples who are not allowed to marry and straight couples who choose not to. Many of their hometowns -- such as Grain Valley, Mo., and Waveland, Miss. -- are cultural galaxies from the raucous boys' town bars of Santa Monica Boulevard.

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posted by Eve at 8:12 PM VOTE

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