Richard and Ryan

Ryan Kubota, 43, and Richard Beckman, 25, met in line at the Salvation Army in Lodi, CA. in 2012. Kubota’s marriage was failing, and Beckman was discovering girls just weren’t right for him. He was trying to get his life together, leaving behind a street life of rebelliousness and drinking. He sought refuge and change at the Salvation Army. He found Kubota, who asked him out.

When Beckman finally said yes, they had their first date at a Starbuck’s where Beckman bought Kubota his favorite frappuchino: “Double chocolatey chocolate chip with extra chocolate chips,” the two of them recited together. “We’ve been together ever since.”

It took Beckman about two weeks to propose. And just this month they tied the knot in San Diego at the First Lutheran Church downtown before a regular meal for the homeless. The grooms decided on the menu and Kubota, an out-of-work prep cook, helped prepare the meal.

“How many grooms prepare the food for their own wedding?” asked pastor Darryl Kozak, of the congregation that evening. The meal had a Hawaiian theme: pulled pork, a macaroni salad with chunks of spam, bread and butter and coffee. Another regular at the church made them a homemade cake complete with a cake topper sporting two grooms.

Neither one expected much out of life. Kubota’s mother left when he was five and he was raised by his father until a step-mother and step-sister arrived. Realizing at age 18 he was gay, he went ahead and got married and had children anyway to comply with what he thought his father would want him to do. Beckman’s parents were both homeless on the streets of New York and handed him from one relative to another till at age five his grandmother gave him to Child Protective Services to be adopted out. He got along mildly well with his adoptive parents, though his police officer father had strange ways of de-stressing after work. Like the time he put his bulletproof vest on the son and had him stand away in a field so he could shoot him in the chest, to let him know what it felt like to be shot. He didn’t ask his father about his work any more after that. His father threw him out when he was 18. Beckman took up a life on the street.

Walking home from an AA meeting late one night, he was attacked by someone wielding a hammer and an axe. Left in a pool of blood, he was pronounced dead. Kubota went to see him in the morgue and cried over the body, left to call Beckman’s parents. He came back a second day, and was saying his final goodbyes, pushing his fiancé back into the wall when he saw movement in the body bag. He alerted the nurses and coroner, who sure enough got Beckman out of the bag and did a battery of tests on him.
Kubota said he heard a voice telling him it wasn’t time to die, and “Welcome back.”

To the husbands, being married won’t change their lives much. Most of Kubota’s check goes to child support, they survive on food stamps and church give aways of hygiene products and clothing. Following the wedding, Kubota plans to volunteer in the kitchen at the church.

Unable to afford a traditional honeymoon, or even a night indoors, the couple spent that evening in their usual camp in Little Italy. They stay clean by not sleeping on the ground, but sleeping sitting up with heads laying down on a picnic bench. They know where all the hand washing stations and the porta-potties are located. Despite being watchful, they’ve been robbed many times. Many of the day shelters downtown aren’t friendly places because some of the staff there have expressed anti-gay sentiments, taunting them or spitting on them, even threatening them with beatings. So they stay out of downtown, except to visit the library.

They want to find work, and are planning to possibly move to Chicago where someone has promised to give them a place to stay while they look for permanent employment and housing. “Even though we’re on the street, we have each other,” Kubota said.