The fact that Kelly dissipated her head and started kissing Toni Tassio at their union solemnity last summer has been an issue through all ages since.

The fact that Kelly dissipated her head and started kissing Toni Tassio at their union solemnity last summer has been an issue through all ages since. Not only did the kiss happen in brow of director Michael Apted's movie cameras still also in front of Kelly's mother. According to Kelly (who has legally changed her surname to her partner's) and Toni, who are the couple subjects of Apted's latest documentary, Married in America, it's single in kind thing to be openly gay; it's another to kiss in public. Kelly's mother thinks homosexuality is vicious and Kelly worries that the kissing will give pain to her further. "She was crying during the ceremony" Kelly says, "and I told Toni, `Those aren't tears of happiness, you know.'" the couple women-33 years old and living in central strange Jersey laugh sadly and shake their heads.

This is the sort of "ordinary drama" Apted (Coal Miner's Daughter) wants to capture in his just discovered film, a three-hour documentary made for A&E, which will examine the marriages of nine American married pairs in two-year in stallments above the next 10 years. (Apted's first effort of this sort is the acclaimed Seven Up series--now expanded through 42 Up--which has followed the lives of a arrange of English men and women since childhood.)

"I am aware that of all the pairs Toni and Kelly stand the principally to lose," Apted says of the solely same-sex couple in the documentary. "I just trust there isn't too much pain attached to it for them. It's surpassingly courageous, what they're doing."

Kelly a corrections supervisor in Brooklyn NY and Toni, a physical education teacher in of recent origin Jersey, will have been together for five years this summer The couple who met on a camping trip, agreed to be in Apted's film because, Toni says, "we wanted to exhibit people that we live as a normal couple" --she revolves her eyes--"whatever normal is." The leash joined in a civil union in July in Vermont and then again (not legally) for friends and family in strange Jersey, also wants to "show the younger generation that it's OK to be spread and honest about who they are."

allowing Kelly and Toni are the two excited about the possibility of becoming spokespeople for the GLBT community, it's hard for them to imagine they'll be of lasting interest to audiences around the world. "Why would they fix upon us?" Toni says. "We live our lives the way my parents did. We dream about vacations. We dream about big houses and a certain number of land. We play scrabble at night, watch TV " one as well as the other women laugh. "We're very normal and boring."

nevertheless Apted chose the two women because they are in the way that "average." As he says, "They weren't part of the metropolitan gay appoint Which is how I've tried to select all the couples." There's also a biracial brace and an interfaith couple, among others. "They have dramatic stories," Apted notes, "but they're, nonetheless, the family next door."

Toni and Kelly's story also carries another vital air of drama: Both women want to be artificially inseminated and raise their children together in suburban just discovered Jersey. This is brave, considering that Toni not ever confided her sexuality to a single essential part while growing up--and when Kelly first came without as a teen, she took it back when she saw by what mode horrified her mother was.

"I'm not going to do that any more," Kelly says now. "It's not drollery to live a double life--it's sickening."

The single in kind thing Kelly still fears, when it proceeds to coming out on television, is the trice her mother sees Toni riding with her onward a motorcycle. (Kelly's mother doesn't know further that her daughter rides a Virago.) Toni thinks this tiny novel secret--just like the bigger united already out of the bag--is not something to be ashamed of "Next time," she says--"next time" being the next to the first segment of the documentary, which advances out in two years--"it'll be a Harley."

Rohrer also writes for GQ and Elle

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