coming soon
The Mrs. Club
A Memoir of Finding Love and the Birth of Marriage Equality
Introduction by Ariel Penn
In June 2013, I stood in my Pasadena living room and watched the Supreme Court vote in favor of marriage equality in California. I sank onto my couch, elated that we did it-me and a handful of people I worked with started it all. We fought for decades as the struggle for equality grew and caught fire. THE MRS. CLUB: A Memoir of Finding Love and the Birth of Marriage Equality is my story of those decades: a search for love braided into a civil rights story.
I arrived in Los Angeles in 1980 hungry for a life I couldn’t name. I found it in West Hollywood, a gay enclave just as it was incorporating with openly gay leadership—and as AIDS was emptying that same community of its young men. Hired by the City Council, I was one of its earliest employees, during a conservative, Christian renaissance in America. West Hollywood, going against prevailing anti-LGBT sentiment, created the first domestic partnership registry and planted the seeds for the marriage equality movement in America.
Within the walls of City Hall, I joined with a circle of women staffers and formed an unofficial society called the Mrs. Club. We showed up with flowers and song whenever a couple signed a domestic partnership while still believing we’d never see marriage equality in our lifetimes. Meanwhile, my life unfolded in a messier, funnier, more human way while I searched for a partner of my own.
My memoir, The Mrs. Club, moves between these two threads: the public history of a movement built by ordinary people who wouldn’t give up and the private history of one woman learning, very slowly, how to let herself be found. It ends in 2016 at Vasquez Rocks, where I married my wife, Wennie, in a ceremony that took a lifetime to actualize, both politically and personally.
ABOUT ME
Love bravely. Build community. And tell the truth.
Ariel Penn is a writer, producer, and content creator who loves stories about regular people finding the courage to do something that matters. She served as an assistant to the West Hollywood City Council and was Filming Manager for the City of Pasadena.
Ariel received a Los Angeles Area Emmy Award (Creative Technical Crafts 1993) and two additional nominations (Public, Municipal Programming 1993, 2015). The City of Santa Clarita selected her as a sidewalk poet in 2023. She is the editor of an online magazine robotopia.life and has over 42,000 instagram followers @robotopia.life. She also completed UCLA’s Nonfiction Writing Program with Distinction, and founded Stonewall Writers, a Facebook community that spotlights LGBTQ+ writers. Her political writing has been featured by the editors at Medium.com, and her work was included in The Best Advice in Six Words.
available now!
The Best Advice in Six Words
A poignant collection of universal wisdom, life lessons, and caution thrown to the wind. Ariel’s wisdom is included in here along with Julianne Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, and Shonda Rhimes. In addition to celebrities, it features everyday people who’ve learned a thing or two about a thing or two during their time on the planet.
Other Writings
