It wasn't much — just a bubble on a census form. But filling it in meant a great deal to Elliott Cherry.
It meant that Cherry and his partner of 10 years, Chris Chenard, were telling the federal government that they are not roommates, but people who share their lives.
In Maine, there are, officially, 3,394 couples like Cherry and Chenard — same-sex couples who live together. According to figures to be released by the U.S. Census Bureau today, 1,493 of the state's 518,200 households are male couples and 1,901 are female couples.
Portland had the highest number of households with same-sex partners — 376, or 1.27 percent of the city's 29,714 households.
Maine's largest city adopted the state's first equal-rights ordinance for gay and lesbian residents and workers, and last month started the state's first domestic partnership registry recognizing gay and heterosexual unmarried couples.
City Councilor Karen Geraghty, who co-sponsored the registry ordinance, said the numbers prove that there are many nontraditional families in Portland and in Maine.
"It's great that people actually had the courage to mark it down on a piece of paper that the government collected," she said. "I suspect that the number is higher than that."
Cherry was happy to make the mark while filling out the 2000 census form.
"We saw that as an opportunity to indicate that we were a same-gender couple in the same household," Cherry said.
"A tremendous amount of difficulties, as gay people, stem from the fact that we are invisible, and people can continue to carry around stereotypes that are completely false because they don't see us — don't see we are their neighbors, their doctors, their lawyers, their teachers," he said.
Now that the census shows that gay couples live in every county in Maine, perhaps that image will begin to change, said Cherry, a 44-year-old musician who lives in Portland.
"Being able to be counted and being able to be taken out of our invisible status is something that is extremely important," he said.
David Smith, the senior strategist and spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that works for gay and lesbian rights, said the numbers are important.
"It's something that we are seeing in every state," he said. "Gay people are living in every corner of every county in every state. Our view is hopefully it will be an eye-opener to state lawmakers who might not realize that they have a large number of gay families living in their districts, and it's their responsibility to take care of those families, too."
He said there have always been same-sex couples living in Maine, but that people are more willing to state their status on census forms.
David Elliot, the communications director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, read things the same way. He said his organization was part of an effort to educate same-sex couples that the 1990s "was the decade of the gay and lesbian family."
"Our issues were discussed during the '90s in a way in which they had never been discussed before," Elliot said. "We feel very confident that a lot more people were comfortable filling out the form correctly than in 1990."
Still, he and Smith said gay and lesbian people remain undercounted. Both said they'd like the census, which is anonymous, to ask respondents their sexual orientation.
"They ask how many bathrooms are in your house, at least on the long form," Elliot said. "If they can ask all of those questions, they can ask sexual orientation."
To determine the number of same-sex partners living in a household, the census form asked the heads of households to mark whether they were male or female. Then, the form asked who else lived in the household and to explain their relationship to the head of the household. "Unmarried partner" was one of the choices.
Same-sex couples who marked the "married" bubble were counted as unmarried partners.
Staff Writer Joshua Weinstein can be contacted at 791-6380 or at: jweinstein@pressherald.com
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