Cindi & Rainie
New York, NY
Cindi, 42, Director of Communications & Marketing at the LGBT Community Center
Rainie, 61, community activist/volunteer
Slightly more than ten years passed between the night Cindi and Rainie met and the day they were legally married—a decade in which they both fought hard for marriage equality personally and professionally. Cindi, who had just moved to New York to get her master’s degree at Columbia, heard that a certain piano bar in Greenwich Village was a good place to meet new friends. It’s not surprising that she encountered Rainie, a cabaret singer and the creator/star of the award-winning show Always, Patsy Cline, there. The two soon started dating, culminating in an engagement at Grano Trattoria, their favorite Italian restaurant, in October 2008. A small wedding in Litchfield, Conn. at the Tollgate Hill Inn followed that December, where the couple wed less than a month after Connecticut legalized same-sex marriage. “Cindi and I have a tremendous bond and great love between us,” Rainie told the Daily News at the time. “It was wonderful to have it publicly and legally recognized in a ceremony before friends and to realize that we finally have some legal protections.”
